Linked List: September 2024

Wednesday, 18 September 2024

Apple Intelligence Will Come to More Languages, Including German and Italian, Next Year (But Don’t Hold Your Breath for iPhones and iPads) ★

Allison Johnson, The Verge:

Apple Intelligence’s list of forthcoming supported languages just got a little longer. After an October launch in US English, Apple says its AI feature set will be available in German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Vietnamese, “and others” in the coming year. The company drops this news just days before the iPhone 16’s arrival — the phone built for AI that won’t have any AI features at launch.

Apple’s AI feature set will expand to include localized English in the UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand in December, with India and Singapore joining the mix next year. The company already announced plans to support Chinese, French, Japanese, and Spanish next year as well.

Apple shared this news with me last night too, and my first thought was, “German and Italian? Does that mean they’ve gotten the OK that Apple Intelligence is, in fact, compliant with the DMA?” But that’s not what they’re announcing. This is just for Apple Intelligence on the Mac — which already offers Apple Intelligence in the EU in MacOS 15.1 Sequoia betas, because the Mac is not a designated “gatekeeping” platform. The standoff over Apple Intelligence on iOS and iPadOS remains.

Voyager 1 Just Fired Up Thrusters It Hasn’t Used in Decades ★

Ashley Strickland, reporting for CNN:

Engineers at NASA have successfully fired up a set of thrusters Voyager 1 hasn’t used in decades to solve an issue that could keep the 47-year-old spacecraft from communicating with Earth from billions of miles away. [...]

As a result of its exceptionally long-lived mission, Voyager 1 experiences issues as its parts age in the frigid outer reaches beyond our solar system. When an issue crops up, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have to get creative while still being careful of how the spacecraft will react to any changes.

Currently the farthest spacecraft from Earth, Voyager 1 is about 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away. The probe operates beyond the heliosphere — the sun’s bubble of magnetic fields and particles that extends well beyond Pluto’s orbit — where its instruments directly sample interstellar space.

Michael Chabon, on Threads:

I find the continuing mission of Voyager 1 so moving, for the way its name alone evokes a time of promise, for the thought of that tiny contraption way out there in the vastness at the edge of the heliosphere — perhaps the farthest any human-made thing may ever travel — a bit battered, swiftly aging, still doing the work it was purposed to do.

An amazing feat of engineering five decades ago, kept going by amazing feats of engineering today.

Tuesday, 17 September 2024

Israel Planted Explosives in Pagers Sold to Hezbollah, Officials Say ★

Sheera Frenkel and Ronen Bergman, reporting for The New York Times:

Israel carried out its operation against Hezbollah on Tuesday by hiding explosive material within a new batch of Taiwanese-made pagers imported into Lebanon, according to American and other officials briefed on the operation.

The pagers, which Hezbollah had ordered from Gold Apollo in Taiwan, had been tampered with before they reached Lebanon, according to some of the officials. Most were the company’s AP924 model, though three other Gold Apollo models were also included in the shipment.

The explosive material, as little as one to two ounces, was implanted next to the battery in each pager, two of the officials said. A switch was also embedded that could be triggered remotely to detonate the explosives.

At 3:30 p.m. in Lebanon, the pagers received a message that appeared as though it was coming from Hezbollah’s leadership, two of the officials said. Instead, the message activated the explosives. Lebanon’s health minister told state media at least nine people were killed and more than 2,800 injured.

The devices were programmed to beep for several seconds before exploding, according to three of the officials.

Hezbollah leadership had ordered its members to forgo modern phones for security reasons, convinced (probably correctly) that Israeli intelligence was able to track them. So they switched to decades-old pagers. But Israel seemingly infiltrated the supply chain of Gold Apollo and boobytrapped the pagers.

In the initial pandemonium after the attack was triggered, there was speculation that, somehow, it was simply the batteries that exploded. But batteries — especially the AAA batteries these pagers use — don’t explode with that much force:

Independent cybersecurity experts who have studied footage of the attacks said it was clear that the strength and speed of the explosions were caused by a type of explosive material.

“These pagers were likely modified in some way to cause these types of explosions — the size and strength of the explosion indicates it was not just the battery,” said Mikko Hypponen, a research specialist at the software company WithSecure and a cybercrime adviser to Europol.

This whole operation sounds like it would make for a great movie.

(Hypponen, whom I believe I met, at least once, at a long-ago Macworld Expo or WWDC, was previously referenced on DF in 2012 regarding a widespread Mac Trojan horse.)

Monday, 16 September 2024

Ten Years of Six Colors ★

Jason Snell:

Ten years sure seems like a long time.

Ten years ago the iPhone got physically big for the first time. (In the ensuing decade, iPhone revenue has doubled.) Ten years ago Apple announced the Apple Watch.

Ten years ago I found myself without a job for the first time.

I ran into Snell before (and again after) Apple’s event last week, and he mentioned that it marked Six Colors’s 10th anniversary. My reaction: I somehow simultaneously think of Six Colors as still kinda new and a bedrock, irreplaceable part of the Apple media firmament.

On days like today, it’s the first site I visit, because of pieces like these:

Dan Moren: “iOS 18 Review: Your iPhone, Your Way”
Snell: “iPadOS 18 Review (ish): Math Notes, Calculator, and Weird Tab Bars”

And, nearest and dearest to my heart, Snell’s review of MacOS 15 Sequoia. All of that, just today.

Apple Watch’s Sleep Apnea Detection Feature Now Available in More Than 150 Countries ★

Joe Rossignol, reporting for MacRumors:

Apple released watchOS 11 today following months of beta testing. A key new health-related feature included in the software update is sleep apnea detection, which is available starting today on the Apple Watch Series 10, Apple Watch Series 9, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 in more than 150 countries and regions, according to Apple.

The list of countries includes the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and many others, with a full list available on Apple’s website. A few English-speaking countries where the feature is not yet available are Australia and Canada, as Apple is still seeking regulatory clearance for the feature in some regions.

Apple has also published the clinical validation summary for the sleep apnea notification feature.

Thierry Breton Resigns, Forced Out by the European Commission President ★

Thierry Breton, in a letter to Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission:

On 24 July, you wrote to Member States asking them to nominate candidates for the 2024-2029 College of Commissioner, specifying that Member States that intend to suggest the incumbent Member of the Commission were not required to suggest two candidates. On 25 July, President Emmanuel Macron designated me as France’s official candidate for a second mandate in the College of Commissioners — as he had already publicly announced on the margins of the European Council on 28 June. A few days ago, in the very final stretch of negotiations on the composition of the future College, you asked France to withdraw my name — for personal reasons that in no instance you have discussed directly with me — and offered, as a political trade-off, an allegedly more influential portfolio for France in the future College. You will now be proposed a different candidate.

Over the past five years, I have relentlessly striven to uphold and advance the common European good, above national and party interests. It has been an honour.

However, in light of these latest developments — further testimony to questionable governance — I have to conclude that I can no longer exercise my duties in the College.

I am therefore resigning from my position as European Commissioner, effective immediately.

Translation from bureaucratese to English: “Faced with being fired for being a jackass or resigning, I resign.”

I’m starting to get the feeling that the EC’s regulatory arm is not, in fact, politically popular in the EU.

Sunday, 15 September 2024

Tiptop ★

My thanks to Tiptop for sponsoring DF last week. Tiptop is a completely new way to pay that makes everything you buy more affordable with trade-in at checkout. It’s incredibly easy. At checkout, you simply select any item you own that you want to trade in from Tiptop’s catalog of over 50,000 choices, and you’ll receive instant credit towards your purchase.

If you’re a merchant, you can easily enable Tiptop with no up front costs, Shopify checkout support, and great APIs for integration with any store. Plus, they are currently offering $10,000 in Tiptop Promotional Credit that you can use to help your customers learn about Tiptop without discounting.

Get started now as a merchant, or experience Tiptop as a shopper at partners like Nothing Tech, Daylight, Cradlewise, and King of Christmas. (And if you’re thinking Tiptop rings a bell, you may recall that after leaving TechCrunch last year, Matthew Panzarino joined Tiptop, and we chatted about it when last he was on The Talk Show earlier this year.)

Saturday, 14 September 2024

Dithering, and This Week’s Apple Event ★

I’m still collecting my thoughts on this week’s “It’s Glowtime” Apple event, and where Apple stands in general. But this episode of Dithering that dropped Friday morning captures my high-level thoughts well. We haven’t done this in a while, but we’re making it free for everyone to listen to. Give it a listen, while I continue to write and think. (We also have a feed of our occasional free episodes; search your podcast player for “Dithering” and it should show up.)

Dithering as a standalone subscription costs just $7/month or $70/year. You get two episodes per week, each exactly 15 minutes long, with yours truly and Ben Thompson. I just love having an outlet like Dithering for weeks like this one. People who try Dithering seem to love it, too — we have remarkably little churn.

(You can also get Dithering by subscribing to Stratechery, a bundle that includes all of Ben’s writing, his interviews, plus the Sharp Tech, Sharp China, and Greatest Of All Talk podcasts — all of that, including Dithering, for just $15/month or $150/year.)

Thursday, 12 September 2024

OpenAI Releases New o1 Reasoning Model ★

Kylie Robison, reporting for The Verge:

OpenAI is releasing a new model called o1, the first in a planned series of “reasoning” models that have been trained to answer more complex questions, faster than a human can. It’s being released alongside o1-mini, a smaller, cheaper version. And yes, if you’re steeped in AI rumors: this is, in fact, the extremely hyped Strawberry model.

For OpenAI, o1 represents a step toward its broader goal of human-like artificial intelligence. More practically, it does a better job at writing code and solving multistep problems than previous models. But it’s also more expensive and slower to use than GPT-4o. OpenAI is calling this release of o1 a “preview” to emphasize how nascent it is. [...]

“The model is definitely better at solving the AP math test than I am, and I was a math minor in college,” OpenAI’s chief research officer, Bob McGrew, tells me. He says OpenAI also tested o1 against a qualifying exam for the International Mathematics Olympiad, and while GPT-4o only correctly solved only 13 percent of problems, o1 scored 83 percent.

Putting aside the politics and other legitimate social and legal concerns around AI, scoring that well in a difficult math exam is just incredible.

Update: Robison wrote:

I wasn’t able to demo o1 myself, but McGrew and Tworek showed it to me over a video call this week. They asked it to solve this puzzle:

“A princess is as old as the prince will be when the princess is twice as old as the prince was when the princess’s age was half the sum of their present age. What is the age of prince and princess? Provide all solutions to that question.”

The model buffered for 30 seconds and then delivered a correct answer.

I found this puzzle pretty damn tricky, personally. I pasted it, verbatim, into ChatGPT-4o and it solved it, correctly, the first time. I pasted it into the new o1-Preview model, and it both took longer and gave me the incorrect answer. I replied to o1-Preview, “Are you sure about that answer? Can you try it again?” and this time it gave me the correct answer. Still impressive, but kind of weird that this was OpenAI’s own example puzzle intended to show off the new o1-Preview model.

Spoilers follow. Avert your eyes from the remainder of the post if you want to solve this one your own. Here’s how I solved the puzzle, with pen and paper, before pasting the puzzle into any LLMs:

Let y = the princess’s age now and x = the prince’s. Let d = the delta between princess and prince’s ages. By definition, at any given year in time, d = y - x and therefore y = x + d. (To be pedantic, d equals the absolute value of y - x but somehow it’s obvious to me, from phrase “as the prince will be”, that the princess is older than the prince.)

We care about three years:

Now.
When the princess is half the sum of their combined ages from year (1).
When the princess is twice the prince’s age from year (2).

For (1), we know by definition that this is always true now matter what year it is: y = x + d — that is to say the princess is d years older than the prince.

For (2) we can express the princess’s age as:

(y + x) / 2

And we from (1) we know that no matter what year it is, the prince is d years younger than the princess. So during year of (2), the prince’s age can be expressed as:

((y + x) / 2) - d

and year (3) is defined as when the princess (y) is twice the above (the prince’s age from year (2)), so the princess age in year (3) can be expressed as:

2((y + x) / 2) - 2d

And in any given year, the prince’s age is the princess’s minus d, which can thus be expressed, for year (3), by subtracting one more d from the line above:

2((y + x) / 2) - 3d

Cancelling out those 2’s:

y + x - 3d

That is the prince’s age for year (3). The puzzle’s definition is that princess’s age now (y) is the same as prince’s in year (3), the line above. So we can form an equation:

y = y + x - 3d

Those y’s cancel out, so we are left with:

x = 3d

And by definition y is always x + d (the prince’s age plus their age difference), so:

y = 4d

So for any given difference (d) in their ages, the prince must be 3 times d and the princess 4 times d:

Difference	Princess = 4d	Prince = 3d
1	4	3
2	8	6
3	12	9
4	16	12
…

So a generalized solution are any ages where the princess is 4/3 the age of the prince. I double-checked this mentally by applying all the clauses of the puzzle to the princess and prince’s ages in each line of the table above.

That’s my answer and my thinking. Here’s a link to my ChatGPT transcript. It’s all one chat, with my first pasting of the puzzle sent to GPT-4o, and all my subsequent comments (including the second pasting of the puzzle) being sent to o1-Preview.

FDA Grants Approval to AirPods Pro 2 for Use as Hearing Aids ★

Brian Heater, reporting for TechCrunch:

The iPhone 16 took center stage at Apple’s “It’s Glowtime” event, but the most interesting tidbit came from a different line entirely. Indeed, among a sea of new hardware came an intriguing software update to one already on the market: the AirPods Pro 2.

Apple announced that its most premium earbuds would double as an over-the-counter hearing aid, courtesy of a software update, pending approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA on Thursday announced that it has granted what it calls “the first over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aid software device, Hearing Aid Feature.” Specifically, it has approved the software update that enables that functionality.

In briefings on Monday, Apple employees expressed what I can only describe as confidence that FDA approval for this would be imminent, but like sports fans, it was almost as though they didn’t want to jinx it. Asked if FDA approval might come before the iOS 18.0 and MacOS 15.0 updates scheduled for this coming Monday, they wouldn’t really answer, but had looks on their faces that said that’s what we’re hoping.

What a great feature this seems to be.

Wednesday, 11 September 2024

Taylor Swift Endorses Kamala Harris, Encourages Followers to Register to Vote ★

Taylor Swift, in a post late last night on Instagram:

I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make. I also want to say, especially to first time voters: Remember that in order to vote, you have to be registered! I also find it’s much easier to vote early. I’ll link where to register and find early voting dates and info in my story.

With love and hope,

Taylor Swift
Childless Cat Lady

Given her almost unfathomable popularity, any endorsement is a big deal, period. But this was a really well-written statement. The emphasis on doing your own research about both candidates and making up your own mind is persuasive. For one, it appeals to anyone young who’s leaning Trump but feeling squishy about it, and fancies themself an independent thinker. And it deflates any notion that she’s telling her fans to vote for Kamala Harris just because she is.

Timing this endorsement for after the end of last night’s debate seems strategic too. If Harris had done poorly, it would have presented a course-correcting narrative. Or, as actually happened, if Harris handed Trump his dumb red hat, it would run up the score.

And signing off that way? Chef’s kiss.

Social media nerd note: Swift posted this to Instagram, and Instagram only. In 2020, when endorsing Joe Biden, she posted both to Instagram and Twitter. She has a Threads account but has only posted there three times, all back in April, upon the release of her album The Tortured Poets Department.

Tuesday, 10 September 2024

Apple Told to Pay Ireland €13 Billion in Tax by EU ★

BBC News:

Apple has been ordered to pay Ireland €13bn (£11bn; $14bn) in unpaid taxes by Europe’s top court, putting an end to an eight-year row.

The European Commission accused Ireland of giving Apple illegal tax advantages in 2016, but Ireland has consistently argued against the need for the tax to be paid.

The Irish government said it would respect the ruling.

Apple said it was disappointed with the decision and accused the European Commission of “trying to retroactively change the rules”.

Ireland doesn’t want the money:

The Irish government has argued that Apple should not have to repay the back taxes, deeming that its loss was worth it to make the country an attractive home for large companies.

What a great win for Margrethe Vestager, making clear to the world that the EU is hostile to successful companies. Good job.

Good Riddance to Apple’s FineWoven Cases ★

Juli Clover, reporting for MacRumors:

Apple today discontinued its ill-received FineWoven material, introducing no new cases that use the leather replacement. The company has also removed existing FineWoven iPhone cases for older devices from its website, though FineWoven versions of the MagSafe Wallet and AirTag Key Ring continue to be available.

You know what’s a great material for phone cases? Leather. Apple is so damn good at material engineering — I truly expect them to, sooner rather than later, come up with a leather-like non-leather that’s as good or better than actual leather. But FineWoven sure as shit wasn’t it.

Update: Also, Apple is still using FineWoven for watch bands, with, of course, updated colors. It really was just the FineWoven iPhone cases that people complained about — the material seems fine (sorry) for these other products.

New Building at Apple Park: The Observatory ★

My iPhones 16 briefing yesterday was at this new building. It is very nice. A little cozy — it’s not that big. Great light, and from the main room, a splendid view of the main building. Restroom doors are like bank vault doors.

Monday, 9 September 2024

1Password ★

My thanks to 1Password — which, earlier this year, acquired longtime DF sponsor Kolide — for sponsoring last week at DF. When the EU enacted GDPR in 2018, executives and security professionals waited anxiously to see how the law would be enforced. And then they kept waiting ... and waiting ... but the Great European Privacy Crackdown never came.

But the days of betting that you’re too big or too small to be noticed by GDPR are over. Recently, EU member nations (plus the UK) have started taking action against data controllers of all sizes–from the big (Amazon), to the medium (a trucking company), to the truly minuscule (a Spanish citizen whose home security cameras bothered their neighbors).

If you’re an IT or security professional, you may be wondering what to do. Unfortunately, GDPR compliance isn’t the kind of thing you can solve by buying a tool or scheduling a training session. The best place to start is to adopt a policy of data minimization: collect only the data you truly need to function, on both customers and employees. After that, your second priority should be securing the data you have — keeping it only as long as you absolutely need to, and then destroying it.

1Password can help with all aspects of GDPR compliance. To learn more about GDPR compliance, check out this post at 1Password’s blog.

Friday, 6 September 2024

More on Spotify Connect and iPhone Volume Buttons ★

Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge last week:

Spotify users on iPhone will no longer be able to control the volume on connected devices using their physical volume buttons. In an update to its support page, Spotify said Apple “discontinued” this technology, forcing iPhone owners to use an annoying workaround. [...]

“We’ve made requests to Apple to introduce a similar solution to what they offer users on HomePod and Apple TV for app developers who control non-Apple media devices,” Spotify says in its update. “Apple has told us that they require apps to integrate into Home Pod in order to access the technology that controls volume on iPhones.”

I believe Spotify has subsequently edited their support page, because the above text no longer appear here, where it now reads:

Apple has discontinued the technology that enables Spotify to control volume for connected devices using the volume buttons on the device. While we work with them on a solution, you can use the Spotify app to easily adjust the volume on your connected device.

It remains unclear to me exactly what is going on here. I think what happened is that what Spotify was doing to enable users to use the hardware volume buttons on their iPhones to control the volume of playback on other devices via Spotify Connect was making use of private or undocumented APIs, and Apple shut those APIs down in iOS 17.6. In short, that it was a hack that stopped working or just stopped working reliably.

But I was wrong yesterday to say — in the headline of the post, of all places — that Spotify could solve the problem by adopting AirPlay 2. Spotify Connect is, and needs to be, its own separate thing. Spotify users who use Connect love it. Here’s what one DF reader wrote to me: “AirPlay is a per-device feature, while Spotify Connect synchronizes Spotify sessions across devices. I can initiate playing on my iPhone, then control it from my iPad, Mac, or Watch. I can change the destination speaker from any device. It’s so good that I’m forever wedded to Spotify until Apple or someone else comes up with an equivalent experience. I think if AirPlay offered equivalent functionality, but Spotify refused to adopt it, Spotify would be open to more criticism, but from the perspective of a Spotify user, it’s lost functionality and even supporting AirPlay 2 would not fix what is now a diminished experience. So I think Spotify is doing the only thing they can, which is complain.”

The basic gist is that Apple has always controlled the hardware buttons and switches on iOS devices. Games can’t use the volume buttons as, say, left/right or up/down buttons. In the very early years of the App Store third-party camera apps started using the volume buttons as camera shutter buttons, but Apple then forbade it — and then started using those buttons as shutter buttons in the system Camera app, and then, like 15 years later, finally added an API for this use case in iOS 17.2.

But note that new API is only for using these buttons for capture:

Important You can only use this API for capture use cases. The system sends capture events only to apps that actively use the camera. Backgrounded capture apps, and apps not performing capture, don’t receive events.

Spotify (and Sonos) were clearly using the hardware volume buttons in ways unapproved. It’s fair to argue that Apple should provide APIs they can use, especially if it’s for controlling audio volume, even if on another device. But they don’t.

Also worth noting: when using Apple’s own Remote app to control an Apple TV, the iPhone hardware volume buttons adjust the volume on the Apple TV. According to Apple this also works when using the Remote app to control an AirPlay-compatible smart TV. That’s the ability Spotify and Sonos seek for themselves.

See also: Michael Tsai.

Update: I think Marco Arment nailed it:

My guess is this API, which has been deprecated for a decade:
developer.apple.com/documentation/[...]/mpmusicplayercontroller/

It’s the only way we’ve ever been able to programmatically set the iPhone volume, so it’s how apps would intercept volume buttons: observe it for changes, and upon a change, immediately set it back, then perform the custom action.

The only other known method is subview-diving on the MPVolumeView, but I don’t think that was ever reliable enough to actually write changes to the volume.

In other words, it wasn’t just a hack that stopped working, it was a pretty filthy hack that stopped working. There has never been an API for third-party apps to use the hardware volume buttons to do what Spotify Connect and Sonos were doing. There should be. But there never was, and still isn’t.

Thursday, 5 September 2024

Spotify Wants to Use iPhone Volume Buttons to Control Connected Devices, But Refuses to Support AirPlay, Which Would Solve the Problem ★

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

Spotify claims Apple may again be in violation of European regulation, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which requires interoperability from big technology companies dubbed “gatekeepers.” This time, the issue isn’t about in-app purchases, links or pricing information, but rather how Apple has discontinued the technology that allows Spotify users to control the volume on their connected devices.

When streaming to connected devices via Spotify Connect on iOS, users were previously able to use the physical buttons on the side of their iPhone to adjust the volume. As a result of the change, this will no longer work. To work around the issue, Spotify iOS users will instead be directed to use the volume slider in the Spotify Connect menu in the app to control the volume on connected devices.

The company notes that this issue doesn’t affect users controlling the volume on iOS Bluetooth or AirPlay sessions, nor users on Android. It only applies to those listening via Spotify Connect on iOS.

Who should get to decide the rules for how the hardware volume buttons work on iPhones and iPads? Apple, or the European Commission?

Wednesday, 4 September 2024

Liz Cheney: ‘Not Only Am I Not Voting for Donald Trump, but I Will Be Voting for Kamala Harris’ ★

Annie Karni, reporting for The New York Times:

During an event at Duke University, Ms. Cheney told students that it was not enough for her to simply oppose the former president, if she intended to do whatever was necessary to prevent Mr. Trump from winning the White House again, as she has long said she would.

“I don’t believe we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states,” Ms. Cheney said, speaking to students in the hotly contested state of North Carolina. “As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris.”

The room erupted in cheers after she made her unexpected announcement.

I have so much respect for Cheney. Her father too, but he’s retired. Liz Cheney took this principled stand while she was one of the most influential Republicans in the nation. I get being a conservative, politically. I get being opposed to the Democratic Party, politically. Liz Cheney is a conservative and — like her father — endorses very different policies than Kamala Harris. But (lowercase ‘d’) democratic politics ought to be viewed very much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are in psychology. Some things matter more than others. And nothing — not climate change or the environment, not reproductive rights, and certainly not fucking tax rates — nothing matters more than support for democracy itself and the rule of law. The only way we’re going to get those other things right — which are really, really important — is through democratic governance and the rule of law.

Trump is 100 percent anti-Democratic-Party but he’s no conservative. I don’t support or endorse a Reagan/Bush/Cheney political viewpoint, but that viewpoint is coherent. Trump espouses no coherent views at all. He literally tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. He’s a criminal. He’s mentally deranged, decrepitly old, and failing before our eyes. “I don’t like Democrats” is — with Trump on the ballot and polling within the margin of error of winning — not high enough on the political hierarchy of needs to cast one’s vote for anyone but Kamala Harris.

If the Democratic candidate were a Trump-like decrepit crooked lunatic, I wouldn’t hesitate, for a second, to vote for, say, Republican Liz Cheney for president. None of this namby-pamby bullshit about “writing in” a non-candidate’s name. No protest voting for a third-party candidate. The next president is either going to be Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, and only one of the two believes in anything at all — anything — that this great country stands for.

Trump Threatens Zuckerberg With ‘Life in Prison’ in New Book ★

Alex Isenstadt, writing for Politico:

“Save America,” a Trump-authored coffee table book being released Sept. 3, includes an undated photograph of Trump meeting with Zuckerberg in the White House. Under the photo, Trump writes that Zuckerberg “would come to the Oval Office to see me. He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT,” Trump added, referring to a $420 million contribution Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, made during the 2020 election to fund election infrastructure.

“He told me there was nobody like Trump on Facebook. But at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me,” Trump continues. “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.”

I was not aware that “steering” a social network against a presidential candidate was not only illegal, but subject to life in prison. Elon Musk better be careful with anti-Kamala-Harris posts like this one, because I’m sure Trump feels just as strongly about “steering” in either direction. The law’s the law, and Donald J. Trump is a stickler for the law — not some sort of vindictive thin-skinned crackpot megalomaniac who is obsessed with “life in prison” because it’s looking more and more like that’s his own fate.

The Secret Inside One Million Checkboxes ★

Last year Nolen Royalty made a website called One Million Checkboxes, which presented to the user exactly what it claimed on the tin. The gimmick was that the million checkboxes were shared globally. If I toggled checkbox 206,028 in my browser, you’d see checkbox 206,028 flip state in your browser. Totally pointless. Totally fun.

Here, Royalty tells the story of how the site was used by bot-writing teenage hackers:

Lots of people were mad about bots on OMCB. I’m not going to link to anything here — I don’t want to direct negative attention at anyone — but I got hundreds of messages about bots. The most popular tweet about OMCB complained about bots. People … did not like bots.

And I get it! The typical ways that folks — especially folks who don’t program — bump into bots are things like ticket scalping and restaurant reservation bots. Bots that feel selfish and unfair and antisocial.

And there certainly was botting that you could call antisocial. Folks wrote tiny javascript boxes to uncheck every box that they could — I know this because they excitedly told me. [...]

What this discord did was so cool — so surprising — so creative. It reminded me of me — except they were 10 times the developer I was then (and frankly, better developers than I am now). Getting to watch it live — getting to provide some encouragement, to see what they were doing and respond with praise and pride instead of anger — was deeply meaningful to me. I still tear up when I think about it.

Via Jason Kottke, who aptly observes that the way the hackers got in touch with Royalty “reminds me of the palimpsest (layered communication) that the aliens use to communicate with Earth in Carl Sagan’s Contact (and the 1997 movie).”

Oprah Winfrey Is Hosting a Prime-Time TV Special on AI ★

Benj Edwards:

On Thursday, ABC announced an upcoming TV special titled, “AI and the Future of Us: An Oprah Winfrey Special.” The one-hour show, set to air on September 12, aims to explore AI’s impact on daily life and will feature interviews with figures in the tech industry, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Bill Gates. Soon after the announcement, some AI critics began questioning the guest list and the framing of the show in general. [...]

In a nod to present-day content creation, YouTube creator Marques Brownlee will appear on the show and reportedly walk Winfrey through “mind-blowing demonstrations of AI’s capabilities.”

Brownlee’s involvement received special attention from some critics online. “Marques Brownlee should be absolutely ashamed of himself,” tweeted PR consultant and frequent AI critic Ed Zitron, who frequently heaps scorn on generative AI in his own newsletter. “What a disgraceful thing to be associated with.”

What a jackassed take from Zitron. I mean think about it. Imagine that Oprah’s producers get in touch with MKBHD to ask if he’d like to participate in a prime-time network TV special about AI, specifically to show cool AI use cases, and he was like, “Nah, I don’t think this special is going to sufficiently present the viewpoint of a wide enough array of AI critics.”

These galaxy-brain peanut gallerians haven’t even seen clips from the show, let alone the entire special itself. They’re judging it by the guest list. A guest list that in fact includes obvious critics and skeptics. Edwards:

Other guests include Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin from the Center for Humane Technology, who aim to highlight “emerging risks posed by powerful and superintelligent AI,” an existential risk topic that has its own critics. And FBI Director Christopher Wray will reveal “the terrifying ways criminals and foreign adversaries are using AI,” while author Marilynne Robinson will reflect on “AI’s threat to human values.”

It’s also quite likely that invited guests weren’t told who the other interview subjects were. That’s just not how these things work. Oprah’s production surely shot dozens of hours of interviews to cut into a one-hour special — some of the subjects were likely left on the cutting-room floor.

If you don’t think it’s anything short of fucking cool that Marques Brownlee is getting a spot to show off cool AI use cases to Oprah in a prime-time network TV special, you’re a jackass. And if you’re going to argue that there are no cool AI use cases, you’re a liar.

Tuesday, 3 September 2024

Apple Sports, Updated for Football Season, Will Soon Support Live Activities ★

Apple Newsroom:

With iOS 18 and watchOS 11, the Apple Sports app will offer Live Activities for all teams and leagues available in the app for the first time ever, delivering live scores and play-by-play at a quick glance to a user’s iPhone and Apple Watch Lock Screens.

Coming in an app update later this year, Apple Sports will also introduce a new drop-down navigation for the main scorecard views, making it even faster to switch between My Leagues, My Teams, and users’ feeds for favorited leagues. A new enhanced search makes it easier to view matches for leagues fans do not currently follow.

Does anyone understand why it requires iOS 18 for Live Activities? Perhaps it’s just a subtle nudge to get people to upgrade their device OS?

Also: Interesting but unsurprising to me that Apple Sports will support Live Activities on WatchOS, but won’t offer a WatchOS app. I think this is the way most — or at least many — apps should support WatchOS going forward. It’s just never been a great platform for “apps”. It’s a great platform for glanceable information, though.

Update: Via email, DF reader Deep Desai explains the iOS 18 requirement:

This is definitely because broadcast push notifications require iOS 18 — this lets you create a channel on APNS which devices can subscribe to. It’s pub/sub instead of collecting individual push tokens from devices and sending them each a notification.

Departure Mono ★

“Departure Mono is a monospaced pixel font inspired by the constraints of early command-line and graphical user interfaces, the tiny pixel fonts of the late 90s/early 00s, and sci-fi concepts from film and television.”

Both the font (by Helena Zhang) and website (by Tobias Fried) are fantastic. Freely available, too.

Brazil’s X Ban Is Sending Lots of People to Bluesky ★

Jay Peters, The Verge:

X is currently banned in Brazil following an order from a Supreme Court justice, and Brazilian users seem to be turning to Bluesky, an alternate social network, in droves.

“Brazil, you’re setting new all-time-highs for activity on Bluesky!” the official Bluesky account said in a post.

“There will almost certainly be some outages and performance issues,” Bluesky developer Paul Frazee said. “We’ve never seen traffic like this. Hang with us!”

Back in May 2023, I made a bold prediction that hasn’t panned out:

Bluesky is going to skyrocket to mainstream popularity and actually replace Twitter, and Mastodon cannot, because Bluesky is being designed to be simple, fun, and — most importantly — easy to understand.

That prediction might have proven wrong anyway, but the event I didn’t foresee at the time was Meta’s Threads (which launched last July). Threads is thriving, and by some measures, for some communities, has overtaken X as the preeminent Twitter-like social network. But, for better (in some ways) and worse (in others), Threads is quite different from the Twitter of yore.

What’s great about Bluesky is that of today’s four major Twitter-like platforms — X, Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky — it’s the one that’s closest in spirit to old Twitter. Yet, personally, it gets the least of my attention of the four. Still rooting for Bluesky, though, and I’m not surprised at all that, faced with a sudden shutdown of X, Bluesky is seeing a jolt of Brazilian signups.

‘Founder Mode’ ★

Paul Graham:

The theme of Brian’s talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as “hire good people and give them room to do their jobs.” He followed this advice and the results were disastrous. So he had to figure out a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple. So far it seems to be working. Airbnb’s free cash flow margin is now among the best in Silicon Valley.

The audience at this event included a lot of the most successful founders we’ve funded, and one after another said that the same thing had happened to them. They’d been given the same advice about how to run their companies as they grew, but instead of helping their companies, it had damaged them.

Why was everyone telling these founders the wrong thing? That was the big mystery to me. And after mulling it over for a bit I figured out the answer: what they were being told was how to run a company you hadn’t founded — how to run a company if you’re merely a professional manager. But this m.o. is so much less effective that to founders it feels broken. There are things founders can do that managers can’t, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is.

More on the Clooney-Pitt Movie ‘Wolfs’ ★

Apple Original Films had originally promised writer-director Jon Watts and co-stars George Clooney and Brad Pitt a wide theatrical release for their upcoming (and seemingly well-reviewed) movie Wolfs. But, pretty much at the last minute, Apple canceled those plans, and instead will screen it in limited theaters for one week before streaming it on Apple TV+ at the end of this month.

David Canfield interviewed Watts for Vanity Fair, where Watts said he only found out about the change in plans a few days before it was announced:

Canfield: As somebody who’s worked in indies, who’s worked in the MCU, and has now made a standalone studio movie, how do you see the state of theatrical versus streaming, especially given the pivot with this movie? Does it concern you at all?

Watts: You want the movie to be seen, and if you maximize the way that people are able to actually see a movie, I think that is good — I watched so many movies that really influenced me on VHS because I grew up in a small town in Colorado, so we just didn’t have those movies in the theaters. But for me, the theatrical experience is still the number one. It’s up to the people that are able to make those decisions to put them in theaters for people to see, and just have the confidence that people will go see them. People want to go to the movies. People love the movies.

Canfield: If you had known then what you know now about the way this movie will be released, would you have gone in another direction, given that you were talking to a lot of studios?

Watts: [Laughs] I try to not think about hypothetical situations like that.

It doesn’t sound like Apple’s change of plans has resulted in bad blood, per se — merely disappointment. Watts has already agreed to write, produce, and direct a sequel. But it feels like Apple is still in the early stages of navigating its role as a Hollywood studio. I think there’s still a sense that Apple is a creator-friendly partner for big-budget movies, but a move like this, contradicting the obvious wishes of both the director and two of the biggest stars in the business, works against that reputation.

Also, a week-ago report in The New York Times by Nicole Sperling reported that Clooney and Pitt were paid “more than $35 million each”. But speaking at the Venice Film Festival premiere of Wolfs yesterday, Clooney said that number was bullshit:

“[It was] an interesting article and whatever her source was for our salary, it is millions and millions and millions of dollars less than what was reported. And I am only saying that because I think it’s bad for our industry if that’s what people think is the standard bearer for salaries,” Clooney said. “I think that’s terrible, it’ll make it impossible to make films.”

Monday, 2 September 2024

1Password and Charging for SSO ★

My thanks to 1Password — which, earlier this year, acquired frequent DF sponsor Kolide — for sponsoring last week at DF. Imagine if you went to the movies and they charged $8,000 for popcorn. Or, imagine you got on a plane and they told you that seatbelts were only available in first class. Your sense of outraged injustice would probably be something like what IT and security professionals feel when a software vendor hits them with the dreaded SSO tax — the practice of charging an outrageous premium for Single Sign-On, often by making it part of a product’s “enterprise tier”. The jump in price can be astonishing — one CRM charges over 5000% more for the tier with SSO. At those prices, only very large companies can afford to pay for SSO. But the problem is that companies of all sizes need it.

Until outraged customers can shame vendors into getting rid of the tax, many businesses have to figure out how to live without SSO. For them, the best route is likely to be a password manager, which also reduces weak and re-used credentials, and enables secure sharing across teams. And a password manager is likely a good investment anyway, for apps that aren’t integrated with SSO. To learn more about the past, present, and future of the SSO tax, read 1Password’s full blog post.

‘In the South of France With George and Brad’ ★

I really dug this interview by Zach Baron for GQ with George Clooney and Brad Pitt, who are co-stars in the upcoming Apple feature film Wolfs:

Clooney: We’re lucky too. We’re in a profession that doesn’t force you into retirement.

Baron: Well, there’s two sides of that coin, right? There is that cliché for actors of: All of a sudden the phone stops ringing.

Clooney: Okay, but there’s two ways of doing this, right? The phone stops ringing if your decision is that you want to continue to be the character that you were when you were 35, and you want a softer lens. But if you’re willing to, say, move down the call sheet a little bit and do interesting character work, then you can kind of — you have to make peace with the idea that you’re going to die! I will walk up to people and they’ll be like, “Oh, you’re older than I thought.” And I’m like, “I’m 63, you dumb shit!” It’s just: That’s life. And so as long as you can make peace with the idea of change, then it’s okay. The hard part is, and I know a lot of actors who do this — and you do too — who don’t let that go and try desperately to hold onto it.

Sunday, 1 September 2024

The Talk Show: ‘Good Enough to Be Pesky’ ★

Special guest Taegan Goddard, longtime writer and founder of Political Wire, joins the show to talk about the past, present, and future of independent media.