Linked List: October 27, 2023

Friday, 27 October 2023

The Talk Show: ‘Are There Ever Too Many Love Songs?’ ★

Special guests Sebastiaan de With and Ben Sandofsky, co-founders of Lux, join the show to talk about their apps (Halide, Spectre, and Orion) and speculate about next week’s “Scary Fast” Apple event.

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Elon Musk Predicts X Will Replace Banks Next Year ★

Jacob Kastrenakes and Alex Heath, reporting for The Verge:

Elon Musk wants X to be the center of your financial world, handling anything in your life that deals with money. He expects those features to launch by the end of 2024, he told X employees during an all-hands call on Thursday, saying that people will be surprised with “just how powerful it is.”

“When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life,” Musk said, according to audio of the meeting obtained by The Verge. “If it involves money. It’ll be on our platform. Money or securities or whatever. So, it’s not just like send $20 to my friend. I’m talking about, like, you won’t need a bank account.”

X CEO Linda Yaccarino said the company sees this becoming a “full opportunity” in 2024. “It would blow my mind if we don’t have that rolled out by the end of next year,” Musk said.

Not a day goes by that I don’t hear from someone who wishes that the entirety of their personal finances were handled by a company with the reputation for reliability of X.

It’s so obvious, and banking systems are so easy, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if X launches this by April 20, even.

iOS 17.2 (Beta) Sticker Reactions Stink ★

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors on the new “use an emoji as a sticker reaction in Messages” feature in iOS 17.2, which just came out today as a public beta:

Instead, to send a sticker response you have to tap and hold on a message and then choose Add Sticker from the resulting contextual menu, then choose a sticker or emoji. It’s an extra step that really shouldn’t be necessary and makes stickers feel like an afterthought, which they apparently are.

It gets worse. When you add a sticker reaction, it’s placed on top of the message you’re reacting to, obscuring part of the text! Why in the world would Apple choose a placement that makes it impossible to read the text being responded to? The right placement for these reactions is … wait for it … the same place that Tapbacks appear, in a little bubble snuggled up against the message that’s being reacted to.

This design feels more than a bit spiteful to me. I suspect there are two contingents inside Apple: the “Tapbacks are perfect just as they are” side (who prefer there are only six of them — heart, thumbs-up, thumbs-down, ha-ha, “!!”, and “?” — and who insist that they’re monochrome), and the “Jesus H. Christ, every single other popular messaging platform in the world lets users react with any emoji they want, in full color” side. This new emoji-as-stickers feature is a small win for the latter contingent, but the Tapbacks-are-perfect side is calling the shots, and keeping Tapbacks as the only reactions that (a) are super-easy to apply, and (b) don’t obscure the text of the message.

I’ve been playing with the feature, and the one emoji I’ve found that only barely obscures the text of the message it’s applied to just happens to be the perfect emoji to express my feelings about how this feature currently works: 🖕.

Google Spends $26 Billion Annually to Be the Default Search Engine Almost Everywhere (and Most of It Goes to You Know Who) ★

David Pierce, writing for The Verge:

The U.S. v. Google antitrust trial is about many things, but more than anything, it’s about the power of defaults. Even if it’s easy to switch browsers or platforms or search engines, the one that appears when you turn it on matters a lot. Google obviously agrees and has paid a staggering amount to make sure it is the default: testimony in the trial revealed that Google spent a total of $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine in multiple browsers, phones, and platforms. [...]

Just to put that $26.3 billion in context: Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced in its recent earnings report that Google Search ad business brought in about $44 billion over the last three months and about $165 billion in the last year. Its entire ad business — which also includes YouTube ads — made a bit under $90 billion in profit. This is all back-of-the-napkin math, but essentially, Google is giving up about 16 percent of its search revenue and about 29 percent of its profit to those distribution deals.

Most of that money, of course, goes to Apple. The New York Times recently reported that Google’s deal to be the default search engine in Safari across Google products cost the company about $18 billion in 2021.

Goldman Sachs analysts have been estimating this number for years, and $18 billion in 2021 is pretty much in line with their estimates. (Goldman conservatively estimates about $17 billion in TAC payments from Google to Apple for this year, 2023. That would be the low end — Apple gets at least that much from Google for their partnership on this.)

Apple reports this revenue under Services, which has just grown past $20 billion per quarter for Apple. So somewhere between 20-25 percent of Apple’s Services revenue comes from these payments from Google alone. You can see why Apple is rooting for Google in this lawsuit.

This whole partnership with Google is the weakest link in Apple’s overall privacy stance. Google generates so much money from search through user tracking that Apple would consider contrary to its own internal values. If Apple were to run its own search engine, it would be far more private than Google Search. But instead they partner with Google, set Google as the default for Safari on all platforms, and share in Google’s profit to the tune of around $20 billion/year.

More like RipoffOS, Am I Right? ★

Gizchina:

Xiaomi is about to embark on a new journey in its software department with the anticipated HyperOS. This operating system is primed to make its debut on the Xiaomi 14 series. The Xiaomi community is excited as some lucky Weibo users have been granted an early peek at HyperOS. They’ve generously shared screenshots of the new user interface, giving us a glimpse of what’s to come.

Just blatant utter copies of iOS. Utterly shameless.

The Aftermath of a Massacre Is Always the Time to Push for Gun Legislation ★

Axios:

New House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told Fox News’ Sean Hannity in his first interview as speaker that now is not the time to discuss legislation to address the scourge of mass shootings, adding: “The problem is the human heart, not guns.”

Since no other civilized country on the planet has massacres like this, Johnson is implicitly arguing that the problem isn’t the human heart, but the American heart.

Or, maybe the problem is the fact that America is the only country where military-grade assault rifles are not just legal, but legally obtainable by mentally ill angry men like this lunatic in Maine.

Either we are the worst people on the planet, or we have the worst gun laws.

Why it matters: President Biden and Democrats in Congress are urging action in the wake of the shooting in Lewiston, Maine that left 18 people dead. Johnson argued that it was inappropriate to discuss gun control “in the middle of the crisis,” and that he believes, “it’s not the weapon, it’s the underlying problem.”

This “now is not the time” argument gets trotted out by Republicans after each and every gun massacre. Right after their tweets offering “thoughts and prayers”. Bullshit. The aftermath of a massacre is the time to demand sane gun control measures. That’s when the issue is clarified. Would Republicans argue that October 8 was “not the right time” for Israel to discuss Hamas terrorism? Was September 12, 2001 “not the right time” to discuss Al-Qaeda? Should FDR have delivered an address to the nation on December 8, 1941, advising that we relax, let cooler heads prevail, because the aftermath of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor “was not the time” to consider retaliating?

Imagine a Venezuelan refugee illegally crosses the U.S.-Mexico border next week and kills 18 U.S. citizens with a bomb he carried across. Would Hannity have a guest on Fox News — say, Mike Johnson — arguing that “now is not the time, in the middle of the crisis, to talk about border security”?

Our emotional responses to these massacres are valid. Strike while the iron, and our blood, is running hot. Let our emotions fuel the urgency of our attempts to respond with overwhelmingly popular gun control legislation, and let Republicans head into elections in two weeks opposing them.