Linked List: June 21, 2023

Wednesday, 21 June 2023

Simon B. Støvring:

It’s amazing how much the appearance of a Vision Pro app changes depending on whether it’s built “Designed for iPad” against the iPadOS SDK or it is built as a proper Vision Pro app against the visionOS SDK.

I think “Designed for iPad” apps stand very little chance of becoming successful at launch. Users will expect apps that make heavy use of frosted glass and all the transitions that come with the visionOS SDK.

James Thomson:

This is PCalc running as a native Apple Vision Pro app (rather than running the existing iPadOS app as before).

Paul Hudson:

Once you have the visionOS SDK installed you can really see how the idea of light and dark mode just doesn’t make sense with Vision Pro — click the mountain icon in the bottom-right corner to try different environments, and also different times of day.

Exciting times ahead.

Typography 2024: Matthew Butterick on the Campaign Websites Thus Far ★

Matthew Butterick:

Even more confusing is the quadrennial hand-wringing about so-called “spoiler candidates”, a pejoration that keeps slouching toward normalized use, sort of like “frivolous lawsuit”. Let’s keep the blame for “spoiling” any election where it be longs — with the people who voted.

Largely, however, I think these theories are promoted by political journalists as a means of protecting their own hoary narratives of presidential politics. Here’s mine: It’s chaotic. It’s weird. Nobody knows anything. Thus, evaluating the candidates through the design & typography of their campaign websites is as valid a method as any. If you think otherwise, you’re a typographic spoiler.

Nothing inspiring in the whole bunch.

The best campaign branding I’ve seen in a long time was PA Senator John Fetterman’s last year. A distinctive color scheme, and typography that matched his personal image.

Chargers and Ports Designed by Committees Generally Suck, EV Edition ★

Fred Lambert, writing for Electrek:

CharIn, the association behind the CCS EV charging standard, has issued a response to the Tesla and Ford partnership on the NACS charging standard. [...] Last month, Ford announced that it will integrate NACS, Tesla’s charge connector that it open-sourced last year in an attempt to make it the North American charging standard, into its future electric vehicles.

Obviously, CharIn is trying to defend itself and survive here, but I don’t think it is necessarily fighting fair.

When it comes to the charge connector itself, there’s no doubt that they lost the battle. It is almost comical how bad the design of the CCS connector is compared to Tesla’s.

The CCS charger is big fat and ugly, and has reliability problems. Tesla’s NACS charger is smaller, more reliable, and more elegant. The CCS charger is the EV equivalent of pre-USB-C USB ports. NACS is like Lightning. Rivian and GM are now on board with NACS too.

The best way to get a good standard port is to let proprietary designs fight it out in the market, and let the winner become the de facto standard.

David Pogue Had Suspicions Regarding Missing OceanGate Titanic Submarine ★

Jake Kanter, writing for Deadline:

A six-month-old CBS report on OceanGate’s Titanic tourism submarine is going viral on social media after reporter David Pogue raised safety concerns about the now-missing vessel.

Pogue visited OceanGate’s operations last year and was submerged in the $1M submarine, named Titan, which vanished off the coast of Canada on Sunday. It was carrying a pilot and four passengers, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush. [...]

“It seems like this submersible has some elements of MacGyvery jerry-rigged-ness. You are putting construction pipes as ballast,” Pogue said to Rush in an interview.

“I don’t know if I would use that description,” Rush replied. He added that the OceanGate worked with Boeing and Nasa on the pressure vessel. “Everything else can fail. Your thrusters can go, your lights can go, you’re still going to be safe.”

Pogue said he was nervous before boarding and revealed some of the contents of the waiver form he was required to sign. This described the submarine as an “experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma or death.”

Hindsight is 20-20, blah blah blah, but there’s no way you could have gotten me to go on this thing. So many red flags, not the least of which is that the vessel’s lone portal was only certified for a depth of 1,300 meters, but the Titanic wreck is 3,800 meters deep.

VisionOS SDK Is Now Available ★

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced the availability of new software tools and technologies that enable developers to create groundbreaking app experiences for Apple Vision Pro — Apple’s first spatial computer. Featuring visionOS, the world’s first spatial operating system, Vision Pro lets users interact with digital content in their physical space using the most natural and intuitive inputs possible — their eyes, hands, and voice. [...] With the visionOS SDK, developers can utilize the powerful and unique capabilities of Vision Pro and visionOS to design brand-new app experiences across a variety of categories including productivity, design, gaming, and more.

Next month, Apple will open developer labs in Cupertino, London, Munich, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo to provide developers with hands-on experience to test their apps on Apple Vision Pro hardware and get support from Apple engineers. Development teams will also be able to apply for developer kits to help them quickly build, iterate, and test right on Apple Vision Pro.

Three thoughts:

This is the same SDK Apple itself is using to develop VisionOS apps. I mean, sure, Apple has access to private APIs, but that’s true on MacOS and iOS too. But this is not like the original WatchKit in 2015, where third-party developers were stuck with a severely limited SDK that was nothing like the APIs being used by Apple itself for the built-in WatchOS apps. This is real dogfooding, and I bet we see some very strong apps and games for VisionOS on day one.
These in-person labs will prove essential for many developers during this prelude period, where developers won’t have access to Vision Pro itself while working on apps.
I think Reality Composer Pro could be the sleeper hit of this SDK — a tool not (just) for programmers, but for creative artists. Like what Adobe Illustrator was to graphic design vs. writing Postscript code at the outset of the desktop publishing revolution a generation ago.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro: I-95 Will Re-Open This Weekend ★

Josh Shapiro on Twitter:

Based on the tremendous progress these crews made over the weekend, I can now say:

We will have I-95 back open this weekend.

We have worked around the clock to get this done, and we’ve completed each phase safely and ahead of schedule.

I would’ve bet a lot money on this taking more than two months. It’s not just inspiring to see a big government project succeed, it’s downright fun. A lesson in how to accomplish big things: figure out a plan, get to work, work hard, and keep working until it’s done.

Fosstodon’s Measured Take on Facebook and the Fediverse ★

Kev Quirk, co-founder of Fosstodon (a 60,000-user Mastodon instance):

Truth is, there isn’t that much info out there on how this thing will actually work, or what it will be capable of. Lots of people seem to be concerned about Facebook “getting their info”. Fact is, they can do that now if they really want to — it would be trivial for Facebook to stand something up that hoovers up all the public data that’s on the Fediverse, via API.

And that’s the clincher here — it’s all public data. So the best advice I can give if you’re concerned about your data, is lock down your account and don’t post publicly.

All that being said, here’s what we plan to do if this thing ever sees the light of day:

As a team, we will review what the service is capable of and what advantages/disadvantages such a service will bring to the Fediverse

We will then make a determination on whether we will defederate that service

We will NOT jump on the bandwagon, or partake in the rumour mill that seems to be plaguing the Fediverse at the moment

It’s important to say that neither myself or Mike like anything that Facebook stands for. Neither of us use it, and both of us go to great lengths to avoid it when browsing the web. So if this service introduces any issues that could negatively impact our users, we will defederate.

Bingo.

Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem: Content Moderation at Scale Is Impossible to Do Well ★

Mike Masnick, back in 2019:

I’ve argued for years that while many people like to say that content moderation is difficult, that’s misleading. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. Importantly, this is not an argument that we should throw up our hands and do nothing. Nor is it an argument that companies can’t do better jobs within their own content moderation efforts. But I do think there’s a huge problem in that many people — including many politicians and journalists — seem to expect that these companies not only can, but should, strive for a level of content moderation that is simply impossible to reach.

And thus, throwing humility to the wind, I’d like to propose Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem, as a sort of play on Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. More specifically, it will always end up frustrating very large segments of the population and will always fail to accurately represent the “proper” level of moderation of anyone. While I’m not going to go through the process of formalizing the theorem, a la Arrow’s, I’ll just note a few points on why the argument I’m making is inevitably true.