Linked List: December 7, 2023

Thursday, 7 December 2023

Tip of the Day: You Can Select Multiple Tabs, Then Drag Them, in Safari, Chrome, and Firefox 

Jack Wellborn:

I just recently discovered that you can select and drag multiple Safari tabs by holding Shift or Command, just as you would to select and drag multiple items in Finder.

I had no idea you could do this with tabs. Just like making multiple selections in a list view, Shift-click will select an entire range at once, and Command-clicking lets you select (and deselect) noncontiguous tabs. If I’d known you could do this, I probably never would have written the AppleScript I posted the other day — but if I hadn’t written and posted that script, I don’t think I would have learned this trick. Once you have multiple tabs selected, you can drag them together to create a new window, or do things like close them all at once.

This same trick works in Firefox and Chrome (and Chrome-derived browsers like Brave), too. This trick does not work in Safari on iPadOS, because iPads are baby computers where you can’t select more than one thing at a time.

Update: In a reply on Threads, Jay Robinson points out (and includes a nice screencast) that you can select multiple Safari tabs on iPad with multitouch. Drag one tab out of the tab bar, then, while keeping the drag active with one finger, use another finger to tap additional tabs to add them to the collection of tabs being dragged. But: all you can seemingly do with such a collection of dragged tabs is move them to another area in the current Safari window, or drop them as URLs into another app, like a message in Mail or Apple Notes. You can drag a single tab in iPad Safari to the edge of the screen to move it to a new split screen window, but if you have more than one tab in the drag collection, you can’t do that. Nor can you take group actions on the collection of tabs, like closing them all at once, or closing all tabs in the window other than the selected ones, like you can with the multiple-tab-selection feature in the big-boy Safari on MacOS. You can drag a collection of tabs on iPadOS into a tab group, if you have the sidebar open. That’s useful in combination with tab search, to filter the list of visible tabs — search, select the tabs that match the search term, and drag them together to a new or existing tab group. (You can create a drag collection of multiple tabs in iPhone Safari the same way.)

Apple Quietly Releases MLX, an Open Source Array Framework for Machine Learning on Apple Silicon 

“Quietly” is a much-abused adverb in headlines, but I think apt for this. Apple’s machine learning research team has simply released this new framework on GitHub, with no fanfare:

The MLX examples repo has a variety of examples, including:

Seems quite useful already today, and expands the groundwork for on-device AI features in the future.

Idiot Cops Are Spreading Misinformation FUD About NameDrop 

Jason Snell:

This is so bizarre. NameDrop is a feature that lets you AirDrop your contact information to someone else. For the feature to work, both phones need to be unlocked and one has to be placed directly over the other. The entire new tap-to-connect system is built to use physical proximity to confirm consent to sending or receiving data, replacing the old system in which you could leave your device open to AirDrop from all users — and receive all sorts of nasty unwanted stuff from nearby randos.

Once the physical act of tapping is done — it takes a few seconds, there’s a prominent animation, it’s nothing that is going to happen accidentally — you are given the option to share your contact information with the other person, and get to choose which information is shared! If you only want to share a phone number and not your home address, you can do that! It’s entirely in the user’s control. (If someone nefarious approached you and wanted to steal your information, they’d be better off just grabbing your unlocked phone and running away with it.)

Gemini: Google’s New AI Model 

Google:

Gemini is also our most flexible model yet — able to efficiently run on everything from data centers to mobile devices. Its state-of-the-art capabilities will significantly enhance the way developers and enterprise customers build and scale with AI.

We’ve optimized Gemini 1.0, our first version, for three different sizes:

  • Gemini Ultra — our largest and most capable model for highly complex tasks.
  • Gemini Pro — our best model for scaling across a wide range of tasks.
  • Gemini Nano — our most efficient model for on-device tasks.

Loosely speaking, Gemini Ultra is competing with GPT 4, and Gemini Pro with GPT 3.5. Nano, the on-device model, will first appear on Pixel 8 Pro phones. It’s unclear to me whether that’s because Gemini Nano is tuned to specifically take advantage of the Pixel 8 Pro’s Tensor G3 chip, or if it will expand to additional Android phones with other silicon.

Google has a 6-minute demo of Gemini in action, and it’s rather incredible. But it also comes with this disclaimer: “For the purposes of this demo, latency has been reduced and Gemini outputs have been shortened for brevity.” Why not show it in real time, even if it’s slow? It seems like the whole demo ought be considered fraudulent — a fake. What’s wrong with Google as a company that they repeatedly try to pass off concept videos as legitimate demos of actual products?

iOS 17.2 Adds NameDrop-Like Feature for Sharing Boarding Passes, Movie Tickets, and Other Wallet Items 

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Starting with the upcoming iOS 17.2 software update, there is a new NameDrop-like feature that allows an iPhone user to quickly share boarding passes, movie tickets, and other Wallet app passes with another iPhone user.

To use the feature, open the Wallet app and tap on the pass that you want to share. Then, hold your iPhone near the top of another iPhone, and a “Share” button will appear below the pass on your iPhone. Finally, tap on the “Share” button to send the pass to the other iPhone via AirDrop. Both iPhones must be updated to iOS 17.2.

Harvard, M.I.T., and Penn Presidents Under Fire After Dodging Questions About Antisemitism 

Stephanie Saul and Anemona Hartocollis, reporting for The New York Times:

Support for the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and M.I.T. eroded quickly on Wednesday, after they seemed to evade what seemed like a rather simple question during a contentious congressional hearing: Would they discipline students calling for the genocide of Jews?

Their lawyerly replies to that question and others during a four-hour hearing drew incredulous responses. “It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: Calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country,” said a White House spokesman, Andrew Bates. [...]

Much of the criticism landed heavily on Ms. Magill because of an extended back-and-forth with Representative Stefanik. Ms. Stefanik said that in campus protests, students had chanted support for intifada, an Arabic word that means uprising and that many Jews hear as a call for violence against them. Ms. Stefanik asked Ms. Magill, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct, yes or no?”

Ms. Magill replied, “If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.”

Ms. Stefanik pressed the issue: “I am asking, specifically: Calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?”

Ms. Magill, a lawyer who joined Penn last year with a pledge to promote campus free speech, replied, “If it is directed and severe, pervasive, it is harassment.”

Ms. Stefanik responded: “So the answer is yes.”

Ms. Magill said, “It is a context-dependent decision, congresswoman.”

Ms. Stefanik exclaimed: “That’s your testimony today? Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context?”

The reckoning has come for the bizarro-world political climate that’s taken hold at these universities in the last decade or two. This patently offensive equivocation — when the correct answer was obviously an unambiguous “Yes” — makes sense in the context of the insular far-left worldview where the oppressed are viewed as inherently just, but comes across as absurd to everyone living in the real world. All three of these elite university presidents are obviously utterly tone-deaf and detached from the real world.

You can only pretend to live in a bubble for so long. Then the bill comes due.

New Mexico Sues Meta Over CSAM Content on Facebook and Instagram 

Rohan Goswami, reporting for CNBC:

Facebook and Instagram created “prime locations” for sexual predators that enabled child sexual abuse, solicitation, and trafficking, New Mexico’s attorney general alleged in a civil suit filed Wednesday against Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The suit was brought after an “undercover investigation” allegedly revealed myriad instances of sexually explicit content being served to minors, child sexual coercion, or the sale of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, New Mexico attorney general Raúl Torrez said in a press release.

The suit alleges that “certain child exploitative content” is ten times “more prevalent” on Facebook and Instagram as compared to pornography site PornHub and adult content platform OnlyFans, according to the release.

This follows the recent and ongoing investigative reporting by The Wall Street Journal into child porn rings on Instagram, and the ways in which their content algorithms send these deviants further down their perverted rabbit holes.

Which in turn leads the Muskateers paying for Twitter/X to ask questions like “Why are advertisers still on Facebook and Instagram but have such a massive problem with X, which bans such content?”

No content is more electrifyingly objectionable than CSAM. No bones about it, Meta has both a content moderation problem and PR fiasco on its hands. They have got to stamp this out, or advertisers will start abandoning their platform. But there are huge differences between Meta and X. Meta does not want CSAM or even CSAM-adjacent content on its platforms. Their current content moderation infrastructure quashes a shocking amount of it already. They need to do better, and I think most people believe they want to. The objectionable material on Twitter/X, on the other hand — the racism, the antisemitism, the outright Nazism — is explicitly permitted in the name of “free speech”. And in terms of perception, which is what advertisers care most about, Twitter/X is defined now by its number-one user, Elon Musk. He is the star of the platform, like what Tucker Carlson was to Fox News.

Also, more cynically, ads on Instagram work — advertisers gain more in sales than they spend on the ads. That’s less true — and perhaps not true at all — on Twitter/X.

Meta’s big legal problem isn’t that they’ve looked the other way at CSAM, but that they’ve deliberately looked the other way at under-13 users signing up for Instagram accounts, and purposely optimized their algorithms to engage teens. It doesn’t pass the sniff test that they’d want CSAM on Instagram; it easily passes the sniff test that they’d want to hook kids on the platform as young as possible.

Norman Lear: The Mensch 

Dave Pell, writing at NextDraft about Norman Lear, who died at the ripe age of 101:

From his tours of duty during WWII to his sensational, culture changing television creations, to his political activism, to the good, decent, kind life he lived, Norman Lear represented the greatest of the greatest generation. I was lucky enough to spend some time with Norman. Yes, he was a comedic genius and maybe television’s most important creator, but he was also a deeply interested, open, curious, people person. He was great, and also good. He truly lived the lyrics of the theme for his show One Day at a Time. This is it. This is life, the one you get, so go and have a ball.

What a career. He didn’t just create some of the best sitcoms on TV during his prime, he created most of the best sitcoms: Sanford & Son (my dad’s favorite), One Day at a Time, Maude, Good Times, Mary Hartman Mary Hartman, The Jeffersons, and, of course, his masterpiece, All in the Family.

Over at BoingBoing, Mark Frauenfelder has a 50-year-old All in the Family clip that, aside from Rob Reiner’s hairstyle, could have been recorded today. Archie Bunker was a more coherent Trump than Trump.

(With Charlie Munger dying at 99, Henry Kissinger at 100, and now Lear at 101, I’d be nervous if I were a famous 102-year-old.)

Update: A delightful anecdote from Alex Edelman, about Lear pitching him an idea for a new show at age 100.