Linked List: February 28, 2025

Friday, 28 February 2025

Meta Apologizes for Error That Flooded Instagram With a Bit of the Old Ultra-Violence 

Meghan Bobrowsky and Jeff Horwitz, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

Meta apologized Wednesday night for what it said was an “error” that led to graphic and violent videos flooding the feeds of a vast number of Instagram users, including minors. The videos, which were recommended on some users’ Reels tab, included people who appeared to have been shot to death and run over by vehicles. Some of the recommended videos had “sensitive content” warnings on them while others didn’t.

A Wall Street Journal reporter’s account featured scores of videos of people being shot, mangled by machinery, and ejected from theme park rides, often back to back. The videos originated on pages that the reporter didn’t follow with names such as “BlackPeopleBeingHurt,” “ShockingTragedies” and “PeopleDyingHub.”

“We accidentally started showing people the absolute worst stuff available on our platform” is one hell of a glitch.

Microsoft to Retire Skype in May 

Jeff Teper, president of collaborative apps and platforms at Microsoft:

In order to streamline our free consumer communications offerings so we can more easily adapt to customer needs, we will be retiring Skype in May 2025 to focus on Microsoft Teams (free), our modern communications and collaboration hub.

NPR:

Microsoft, which acquired Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion, announced in a post on X on Friday that the iconic voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) service would soon go dark. It encouraged Skype users to instead migrate to a free version of Microsoft Teams — a communication app that helps users work together in real time.

In the more than two decades since it was founded, Skype has been largely overtaken by a bevy of competitors, such as FaceTime, WhatsApp, Zoom, and Slack.

The writing has been on the wall for a long time that Skype was no longer strategic for Microsoft. Really, even right after the acquisition, it never seemed Microsoft had any sort of plan for what to do with Skype — even though, at the time, it was their largest-ever acquisition.

But man, for a long while, Skype was singularly amazing, offering high-quality / low-latency audio calls at a time when everything else seemed low-quality / high-latency. I continued using Skype to record The Talk Show until a few years ago, and I can’t say I miss it. But I used Skype to record at least around 400 episodes — which means I’ve spent somewhere around 1,000 hours talking to people over Skype. I can close my eyes and just hear Skype’s kinda clunky but distinctive ringtone. In the early days of podcasting, seemingly every show used Skype because it was so much better than anything else. And it was free! It felt like the future. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that if not for Skype, podcasting would’ve been set back several years.

Meta Fired ‘Roughly 20’ Employees for Leaking 

Alex Heath, reporting for The Verge:

Meta has fired “roughly 20” employees who leaked “confidential information outside the company,” according to a spokesperson.

“We tell employees when they join the company, and we offer periodic reminders, that it is against our policies to leak internal information, no matter the intent,” Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold tells The Verge exclusively. “We recently conducted an investigation that resulted in roughly 20 employees being terminated for sharing confidential information outside the company, and we expect there will be more. We take this seriously, and will continue to take action when we identify leaks.”

These firings, of course, are the follow-up to one of my favorite headlines so far this year: “Meta Warns That It Will Fire Leakers in Leaked Memo”. As I wrote in that post a month ago:

It’s not fear of getting fired that keeps employees at most companies from leaking. It’s that they find themselves aligned with the company’s mission. They feel like part of a team that they want to see succeed, and they naturally adopt an attitude of being a team player. Team players don’t leak the playbook because they don’t like the coach’s play-calling or how much playing time they’re getting. I’ve never gotten the sense that that sort of attitude exists at Meta.

I’m not sure this public crackdown will help. Meta seems to be leaning into fear to keep employees in line, rather than team spirit. Their war on leakers might prove about as effective as America’s decades-long “war on drugs”, that saw illegal drug use rise, not fall, even while our prisons filled up with non-violent drug-law offenders. What’s the Princess Leia line? “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.” One longtime reader, who works at Netflix, contacted me after my month ago post and observed:

That is such a great take on Meta’s leaks. Netflix stuff almost never leaks, because Netflix is a place full of people who don’t want to leak things. There are virtually no barriers, just a culture and collection of people who don’t do that.

Penalties are a deterrence. But the reason most people don’t commit crimes — whether it be shoplifting or murder — isn’t fear of the potential penalties. It’s that they’re good honest people who don’t want to steal (and definitely don’t want to kill anyone).

Framework Introduces New Laptops and First Desktop 

Founder Nirav Patel, writing this week on Framework’s company blog:

We went live this morning at the Framework (2nd Gen) Event with our biggest set of announcements yet: Framework Desktop, Framework Laptop 12, and the new Ryzen AI 300 Series Framework Laptop 13. You can watch a recording of the livestream on our YouTube channel.

Sean Hollister has a good roundup of the announcements at The Verge. Back in 2021 when Framework debuted with their first laptop, I expressed pithy skepticism regarding their modular approach. I’m still skeptical, but it’s hard not to root for them and cheer for their success. In principle, Framework’s “everything is a swappable, replaceable module” approach to system design is a fun nerdy throwback to the days when it was expected that you could get inside any computer and replace or upgrade its components yourself. And Framework’s style of modularity is designed with ease-of-use in mind, like snapping Lego blocks together. But as Hollister points out, Framework still hasn’t shipped a promised GPU upgrade component for its now two-year-old Framework 16 laptop.

Also of note is how much Framework is building around chips from AMD, not Intel. Is there a single category where anyone would say “Intel makes the best chips for this”? In an alternate universe where Apple had never moved the Mac to Apple Silicon, I’m not sure if it would be tenable for Apple to still be exclusively relying on Intel for x86 chips. Intel’s chips just aren’t competitive with AMD’s.

Trump Claims to Have Spoken With Starmer Regarding Apple Encryption Backdoor Demand 

Ben Domenech interviewed President Trump yesterday in the Oval Office, after Trump’s meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The Spectator has published the entire transcript, and I read it so you don’t have to, to get the part about Apple and the UK’s encryption backdoor demand:

BD: But the problem is he runs, your vice president obviously eloquently pointed this out in Munich, he runs a nation now that is removing the security helmets on Apple phones so that they can —

DJT: We told them you can’t do this.

BD: Yeah, Tulsi, I saw —

DJT: We actually told him… that’s incredible. That’s something, you know, that you hear about with China.

It feels quite odd to strongly agree with Trump on something, but he’s not wrong about everything.

(Most of the interview is just bananas stuff, ping-ponging all over the place. I swear Trump even goes back to Hannibal Lecter, and his mistaken belief that political asylum policies are somehow related to foreign countries emptying their asylums for the criminally insane.)

What If, Indeed 

Hamilton Nolan, in a 2021 piece for The Columbia Journalism Review, under the headline “Bezos Has Been Hands-Off. What if That Changes?”:

Bezos has given the paper the resources to be bigger and better, and, by most accounts, pretty much stayed out of the newsroom’s hair, besides appearing one day to present a bicycle to former editor Marty Baron. The Amazon boss has never been an overtly political man, except to the extent that he supports whatever helps him stay rich and take over the world with his robotic form of ultra-capitalism. But he is not inclined to spend his time on the phone haranguing Post editors about coverage decisions. When you are worth close to $200 billion, your time is too valuable for that.

There is no guarantee, however, that that will always be true. [...]

Discussing this question with nuance is not easy. The paper will always say that Bezos does not interfere. Bezos himself will always say that he does not interfere. Factions of the public on the right and the left will always hold that Bezos’s ownership inherently corrupts the paper’s coverage.

I do give Bezos credit for taking public ownership of his assertion of control over the paper’s opinion pages now. This is a major change, and he’s not trying to hide it or shy away from responsibility for it.

Jeff Bezos Takes Control of the Washington Post’s Opinion Pages; Asserts Exclusive Focus ‘In Support and Defense of Two Pillars: Personal Liberties and Free Markets’ 

Jeff Bezos, in a memo he shared publicly on X:

I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning:

I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.

We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. [...]

I offered David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t “hell yes,” then it had to be “no.” After careful consideration, David decided to step away. This is a significant shift, it won’t be easy, and it will require 100% commitment — I respect his decision. We’ll be searching for a new Opinion Editor to own this new direction.

He owns the paper, and the opinion pages are the traditional place for a newspaper’s owner to assert their beliefs. And while Bezos was famously hands-off for the first decade of his ownership (he bought the Post from the Graham family for $250 million in 2013), this latest dictum doesn’t feel out of the blue or surprising in the least. It feels like the natural culmination of his asserting control over the paper’s opinion pages that started with his blockbuster decision to nix the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris just a few weeks prior to the election, and reached a breaking point when the paper refused to run a cartoon by Pulitzer-winning Ann Telnaes that mocked Bezos (along with other billionaires) for paying into Trump’s inauguration committee racket — prompting Telnaes to resign in righteous protest.

How are remaining staffers at the Post taking this? Not happily. Reports Liam Reilly, media reporter at CNN:

Current staffers echoed those sentiments. Philip Bump, who writes the “How to Read This Chart” newsletter at the Post, asked Bluesky “what the actual fuck” five minutes after the announcement went out. Post tech reporter Drew Harwell on Bluesky shared a summary of comments on the story generated by the Post’s own AI tool that highlighted “significant discontent” from readers and “a strong sentiment of betrayal among long-time subscribers.” And, tellingly, David Maraniss, an editor at the paper, said on Bluesky that he would “never write for (the Post) again as long as (Bezos is) the owner.”

More tellingly, the Post’s own media critic, the excellent Erik Wemple, intended to write about the policy change but saw his own column spiked. It’s a good sign that things have gone off the rails when a publication’s own media critic is disallowed from writing about their own publication.

Gene Hackman Dies at 95 

Loved this remembrance by Manohla Dargis in The New York Times:

When Clint Eastwood needed a performer who could persuasively go boot-toe to boot-toe with him in his brutal 1992 western Unforgiven, he needed an actor who was his towering equal onscreen. Eastwood needed a performer with strange charisma, one who could at once effortlessly draw the audience to his character and repulse it without skipping a beat. This actor didn’t need the audience’s love, and would never ask for it. He instead needed to go deep and dark, playing a villain of such depravity that he inspired the viewer’s own blood lust. Eastwood needed a legend who could send shivers up spines. He needed Gene Hackman.

Just an unbelievable career, in such a wide variety of films. His roles in The Conversation, The French Connection, and Unforgiven are atop most people’s lists, and I do love each of those movies. But he was so good in everything. What a great Lex Luthor he was in 1978’s Superman. Mississippi Burning, The Royal Tenenbaums, Bonnie and Clyde, The Birdcage, Hoosiers. By chance, I just re-watched David Mamet’s Heist a few weeks ago. Like so many of Hackman’s movies, that’s another one that repays multiple viewings across decades.