Linked List: October 8, 2024

Tuesday, 8 October 2024

Apple Hosted a ‘Cozy’ Mini WWDC for VisionOS ★

Todd Heberlein:

Cozy mysteries are a genre of crime fiction where the stories take place in small, socially intimate communities, and any violence is limited or happens offscreen. Yesterday, I experienced a “Cozy WWDC,” and it was wonderful!

The event took place in an intimate setting with about 170 developers. There were no highly produced skits, no jabs at the competition, no speculative non-existent products designed to make the media and influencers lose their shit, and no media. The event, titled “Envision the Future: Build Great Apps for visionOS,” was held at the Apple Developer Center in Cupertino on October 2nd.

It focused solely on visionOS and spanned just one day.

The presenters were live. Many wrote code and showed the results live. Sometimes demos didn’t work the first time.

I have heard from a few other attendees that this was an excellent and very productive little event.

Transmit Drops Support for Google Drive Because of Google’s Overbearing Annual Code Inspections ★

Panic:

Well, Google has a new set of policies that require apps that connect to Google Drive to go through expensive, time-consuming annual reviews, and this has made it extremely difficult for us to reasonably maintain Google Drive access. You may have seen iA Writer’s announcement that they are stopping development of their Android version for similar reasons. Our experience was different, but our circumstances are similar. [...]

Between the weeks of waiting, submitting the required documentation and the process of scanning the code, it took a significant amount of time from our engineers. For example, Google provided a Docker image for running the scanner, but it didn’t work. We had to spend more than a week debugging and fixing it. And because the scanner found no problems, it didn’t result in any improvements to Transmit. No one benefitted from this process. Not Google, not Panic, and not our users. [...]

But then… a couple of months later, Google completely removed the option for us to scan our own code. Instead, to keep access to Google Drive, we would now have to pay one of Google’s business partners to conduct the review. They promised a discounted minimum price, but no maximum price. We realized that either we’d most likely be paying someone else a chunk of cash to run the same scanner we were running, or our bill would end up much higher.

Never been gladder that I don’t use Google Drive for anything.

The New York Times, Finally: ‘Trump’s Rambling Speeches Reinforce Question of Age’ ★

Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman, reporting for The New York Times, with the conspicuous absence of Maggie Haberman from that shared byline:

Former President Donald J. Trump vividly recounted how the audience at his climactic debate with Vice President Kamala Harris was on his side. Except that there was no audience. The debate was held in an empty hall. No one “went crazy,” as Mr. Trump put it, because no one was there.

Anyone can misremember, of course. But the debate had been just a week earlier and a fairly memorable moment. And it was hardly the only time Mr. Trump has seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately. In fact, it happens so often these days that it no longer even generates much attention.

He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own “beautiful” body. He relishes “a great day in Louisiana” after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is “trying to kill me” when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.

Better late than never, but if it were Joe Biden who had rambled on about “the audience going crazy” at a debate that had no audience, the New York Times would have been all over it the next day, not a month later.

I don’t think Donald Trump was ever hooked up right. But he’s clearly losing the few marbles he ever had to dementia, just like his father did. The signs were clear during his 2017–2021 term in office:

John F. Kelly, his second White House chief of staff, was so convinced that Mr. Trump was psychologically unbalanced that he bought a book called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” written by 27 mental health professionals, to try to understand his boss better. As it was, Mr. Kelly came to refer to Mr. Trump’s White House as “Crazytown.”

Of course the Times had to both-sides this story, and this is who they found to do it:

Sam Nunberg, a former Trump political adviser, said he still talked with people who see him almost daily, and had not heard of any concerns expressed about the former president’s age. “I don’t really see any major difference,” he said. “I just don’t see it.”

Nunberg is the guy who showed up shitfaced drunk on half a dozen cables news appearances at the height of the Robert Mueller investigation. That’s the guy saying, sure Trump is OK in the head today.

If you haven’t watched Trump speak in a while — because you’re on team “fuck that guy”, like any sane voter — you should watch the video clips the Times culled for this piece. Like I said, I don’t think the guy was ever hooked up right, but it’s very clear he’s in serious decline today.

My suggestion to the Harris campaign is that they should repeatedly describe Trump as “an 80-year-old”, and force Trump surrogates to correct them that he’s “only” 78.

Two Russian YouTubers Post Videos Unboxing Purported M4 MacBook Pro Base Models ★

Joe Rossignol, writing for MacRumors:

The latest video of what could be a next-generation MacBook Pro was shared on YouTube Shorts today by Russian channel Romancev768, just one day after another Russian channel shared a similar video. The clip shows a box for a 14-inch MacBook Pro that is apparently configured with an M4 chip with a 10-core CPU and a 10-core GPU, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a Space Black finish. [...]

The source of these leaks is unclear. Last week, “ShrimpApplePro” claimed that at least one of the unannounced 14-inch MacBook Pro units was apparently being offered for sale in a private Facebook group. In a follow-up post on X on Sunday, the leaker claimed that he saw someone online who was apparently advertising 200 of the unannounced 14-inch MacBook Pro units for sale, leading him to believe this leak originates from a warehouse. It is unclear if these details are accurate, but this whole situation is clearly very sketchy.

It’s somewhat weird that the box art is identical to that of last year’s M3 MacBook Pros, but I lean toward thinking these are real. Best guess is that someone stole 200 of these from China and some or all of them wound up in Russia? No sympathy for Apple here if that’s what happened — if you assemble your products in a dictatorship, stuff like this is bound to happen. Kinda surprising it hasn’t happened with iPhones, which would garner far more attention and value a month ahead of launch. That it hasn’t happened with iPhones probably indicates that Apple puts more security around them than they do MacBook Pros.

Apple Tweaks Screen Recording App Permissions in MacOS 15.1 Beta ★

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

In the release notes for the sixth beta of the macOS Sequoia 15.1 update, Apple says that users aren’t going to see as many popups for apps they regularly use.

Applications using our deprecated content capture technologies now have enhanced user awareness policies. Users will see fewer dialogs if they regularly use apps in which they have already acknowledged and accepted the risks.

Why in the world didn’t Apple take regular use of a screen-recording app into account all along?