Linked List: May 2, 2023

Tuesday, 2 May 2023

‘Nice Twitter Handle You Have There. Would Be a Real Shame if Something Happened to It.’ ★

Bobby Allyn, reporting for NPR:

In an unprompted Tuesday email, Musk wrote: “So is NPR going to start posting on Twitter again, or should we reassign @NPR to another company?”

Under Twitter’s terms of service, an account’s inactivity is based on logging in, not tweeting. Those rules state that an account must be logged into at least every 30 days, and that “prolonged inactivity” can result in it being permanently removed.

Musk did not answer when asked whether he planned to change the platform’s definition of inactivity and he declined to say what prompted his new questions about NPR’s lack of participation on Twitter.

“Our policy is to recycle handles that are definitively dormant,” Musk wrote in another email. “Same policy applies to all accounts. No special treatment for NPR.”

This is a shakedown, pure and simple. What a message to big brands and celebrities: stop posting to Twitter and they’ll reassign your longstanding username.

It’s bizarre that Musk thinks this might prompt NPR to start posting to Twitter again, when the only rational reaction is to feel assured that walking away from Twitter was the right move.

The Onion: ‘Netflix Condemns WGA Strike for Putting Future Show Cancellations Behind Schedule’ ★

The Onion:

Emphasizing the negative effects the recent union action would have on the company, Netflix officials condemned the Writers Guild of America strike Tuesday for putting future show cancellations behind schedule. “We have dozens of shows already stuck in the early stages of the preproduction process, but this strike will cause significant delays in our eventual scrapping of those projects,” said Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, who added that preventing work that writers had committed over a year of their lives to from becoming fully realized creations that the streaming platform could kill before they ever saw the light of day was unconscionable.

Nailed it.

The Browser Company Is Building a Swift Development Toolchain for Windows ★

Hursh Agrawal, cofounder of The Browser Company (makers of the upstart browser Arc, which for now is Mac-only):

We’re sprinting hard to get Arc onto Windows in 2023 — exact timing still 🤐!

His tweet has a two-minute video that outlines a tremendously ambitious plan:

Swift on Windows (compiler, debugger)
VSCode integration, Swift bindings for WinAppSDK
Porting Arc to Windows

If they pull it off, they’ll ship a toolchain to develop cross-platform Mac/Windows apps, programmed in Swift using VSCode. I have my doubts about whether this is possible from a small team, and I have different doubts about whether this would be a good way to write good Mac apps. So I’d ignore this for now — but for the fact that Arc itself is very interesting, and very much real.

It’s not for me, but it really has a bunch of innovative, original ideas for a web browser. They’ve proven that they can ship. So I say godspeed.

You Can Register Domain Names in iOS’s iCloud Settings ★

I knew that iOS 16 introduced support for custom domain names for iCloud+ Mail — bring your own domain name but use iCloud as your email provider and web interface. Here’s a thing I only learned today though: you can register new domain names right in iOS 16’s Settings app: iCloud Account → iCloud → iCloud Mail → Custom Email Domain.

In their support document, Apple states:

A third-party registrar handles the sale of each domain. For billing or refund issues, contact them for support.

For me (screenshot) that’s Cloudflare (whose caching and SSL services I use for Daring Fireball — fantastic company). Not sure if that’s true worldwide, or if Apple has other registrar partners in other countries.