Linked List: April 23, 2024

Tuesday, 23 April 2024

Senate Passes Bill to Force Sale of TikTok 

Cristiano Lima-Strong, reporting for The Washington Post:

Congress late Tuesday passed legislation to ban or force a sale of TikTok, delivering a historic rebuke of the video-sharing platform’s Chinese ownership after years of failed attempts to tackle the app’s alleged national security risks.

The Senate approved the measure 79 to 18 as part of a sprawling package offering aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, sending the proposal to President Biden’s desk — with the House having passed it Saturday. Biden issued a statement minutes after the Senate vote saying he plans to sign the bill into law on Wednesday.

Once signed, the provision will give TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, roughly nine months to sell the wildly popular app or face a national ban, a deadline the president could extend by 90 days.

Finally.

Apple Renews ‘For All Mankind’ and Announces New Spinoff Series ‘Star City’ 

Apple Newsroom:

Following its critically acclaimed fourth season, which has been praised as “the best-written show on all of television” and “superior sci-fi,” Apple TV+’s hit, award-winning space drama series “For All Mankind” has landed a renewal for season five. Additionally, Apple TV+ and “For All Mankind” creators Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi will expand the “For All Mankind” universe with a brand-new spinoff series, “Star City,” which will be showrun by Nedivi and Wolpert. [...]

A robust expansion of the “For All Mankind” universe, “Star City” is a propulsive, paranoid thriller that takes us back to the key moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race — when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. But this time, we explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humanity forward.

I can’t think of another show quite like For All Mankind. For one thing, there just aren’t many “alternate history” shows or movies, even though I tend to think it’s a great genre — a way to ground fantastic inventions with familiar elements. But the biggest distinction is the way For All Mankind has decade-long gaps in the timeline between seasons. We’ve seen some characters age 30+ years over just four seasons.

Bertrand Serlet: ‘Why LLMs Work’ 

Bertrand Serlet — who was Apple’s SVP of software engineering from 2003–2011 and a staple during WWDC keynotes during that era — is now a YouTuber. Great 30-minute lecture explaining how LLMs and AI in general actually work.

FTC Announces Rule Banning Noncompetes 

The FTC:

Today, the Federal Trade Commission issued a final rule to promote competition by banning noncompetes nationwide, protecting the fundamental freedom of workers to change jobs, increasing innovation, and fostering new business formation.

“Noncompete clauses keep wages low, suppress new ideas, and rob the American economy of dynamism, including from the more than 8,500 new startups that would be created a year once noncompetes are banned,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “The FTC’s final rule to ban noncompetes will ensure Americans have the freedom to pursue a new job, start a new business, or bring a new idea to market.”

As I wrote a year ago, I used to think that noncompete agreements (“agreements”?) were mainly a thing in the tech industry. But their use became so rampant that even sandwich shop chains were requiring them.

NASA Engineers Successfully Debugged Voyager 1 From a Light-Day Away 

Happy ending to this saga. Remarkable engineering.

Charles Edge Dies 

Adam Engst, writing at TidBITS:

This one is way too close to home. News started to spread this morning on the MacAdmins Slack, Rich Trouton’s Der Flounder blog, and Tom Bridge’s site about how our friend and Take Control author Charles Edge died suddenly and unexpectedly on 19 April 2024. He was in his late 40s, and yes, his standard bio picture below gives you a feel for his sense of humor and irreverence.

Tom Bridge:

I don’t know what we’ll do without him.

But I can tell you how I’ll remember him, always. Charles always had a kind word for people. He always would take your call. He was the kind of friend who’d drop everything to help you, or to see if he could connect you to someone that could if he couldn’t.

I will miss his levity, his wisdom, his inescapable drive for knowledge, his passion for his friends and family, and his humbleness.

The MacAdmins Podcast has a nice In Memorium page, collecting a slew of other remembrances. Nothing but good thoughts to all of his friends and family.

Inside TSMC’s Expansion Struggles in Arizona 

Viola Zhou, reporting for Rest of World on TSMC’s massive, but now much-delayed, chip fabrication campus outside Phoenix:

The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company; Taiwanese TSMC veterans described their American counterparts as lacking the kind of dedication and obedience they believe to be the foundation of their company’s world-leading success.

Some 2,200 employees now work at TSMC’s Arizona plant, with about half of them deployed from Taiwan. While tension at the plant simmers, TSMC has been ramping up its investments, recently securing billions of dollars in grants and loans from the U.S. government. Whether or not the plant succeeds in making cutting-edge chips with the same speed, efficiency, and profitability as facilities in Asia remains to be seen, with many skeptical about a U.S. workforce under TSMC’s army-like command system. “[The company] tried to make Arizona Taiwanese,” G. Dan Hutcheson, a semiconductor industry analyst at the research firm TechInsights, told Rest of World. “And it’s just not going to work.” [...]

TSMC’s work culture is notoriously rigorous, even by Taiwanese standards. Former executives have hailed the Confucian culture, which promotes diligence and respect for authority, as well as Taiwan’s strict work ethic as key to the company’s success. Chang, speaking last year about Taiwan’s competitiveness compared to the U.S., said that “if [a machine] breaks down at one in the morning, in the U.S. it will be fixed in the next morning. But in Taiwan, it will be fixed at 2 a.m.” And, he added, the wife of a Taiwanese engineer would “go back to sleep without saying another word.”

Even the use of wife rather than spouse speaks to the culture clash.

Sonar Is Now Taska 

Made by Windmill recently launched a fantastic Mac App for GitHub and GitLab issues. When it launched two months ago (and sponsored DF), it was named Sonar. They’ve changed the name to Taska, but it’s the same great app from the same great team. As I wrote when thanking them (now with the new name):

Taska combines the lightweight UI of a to-do app with the power of enterprise-level issue tracking, all in a native app built by long-time Mac nerds. The interface is deceptively simple, and very intuitive. Fast and fluid too. Everything that’s great about native Mac apps is exemplified by Taska. If you’ve ever thought, “Man, if only Apple made a native GitHub client...”, you should run, not walk, to download it.

Taska saves all your changes directly to GitHub/GitLab using their official APIs, so your data remains secure on GitHub’s servers — not Taska’s. Do you have team members not using Taska? No problem. Changes you make in Taska are 100% compatible with the web UI.

Free to try for 14 days — no subscriptions or purchases required. Taska remains my favorite new Mac app of the year. As stated above, Made by Windmill sponsored DF back in February, but this post today isn’t sponsored. I just like Taska so much that I want everyone to hear about the name change.

Apple Announces ‘Let Loose’ Event on May 7, Presumably to Announce New iPad Lineup 

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of “Let Loose” and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event.

Tim Cook, on Twitter/X:

Pencil us in for May 7! ✏️ #AppleEvent

The entirety of the iPad lineup is due for updates, and the rumor mill expects a new model, a 13-inch-ish iPad Air. It seems clear a new Apple Pencil is forthcoming. The Pencil 2 launched in 2018, alongside the 3rd-gen iPads Pro, which sport A12X chips that benchmark comparably to the then-fastest MacBook Pros available. Those were fantastic iPads that foretold the Apple silicon revolution. My personal iPad remains a 2018 11-inch iPad Pro.

Also rumored: a new Magic Keyboard, with a more MacBook-like (and hopefully more durable) aluminum body and a larger trackpad. The current Magic Keyboards are now four years old. Apple might be settling all iPad family business in two weeks.

What I hope to see:

  • New Pencil and new Magic Keyboards (11- and 13-inch) that work with all new iPads, Air and Pro alike. The Pencil compatibility situation has been a mess the last few years; now is the time to clean that up with a Pencil 3 that works across all new iPads.
  • All new iPads with the front-facing camera on the long side, optimized for use in landscape/laptop orientation.
  • Face ID replacing top-button Touch ID in the iPad Airs.

Why they’re showing the video at 7am PT / 10am ET, I don’t know. (Glad I’ll be on the East Coast though.)