Rob Fahrni

KVPR

For more than a decade, Bitwise co-founders Jake Soberal and Irma Olguin Jr. managed to sustain a vision they had for Fresno.

“It’s not at all a mystery,” said Olguin Jr. in a Ted Talk recorded last year. “But we do have to do three very specific and deliberate things. Invite the underdog in the front door. Pay them to learn like it’s their job. And then build them castles in their hometowns.”

In Olguin Jr.’s vision, the underdog city was Fresno. The job was at Bitwise Industries. And the “castles” would eventually rise everywhere – until they started to fall.

I know Irma and Jake personally. They’re pretty regular folks with big dreams just like many of us. I remember well the day I sat down with Irma to discuss what her vision for Bitwise was and how it would help what I once called a Technology Black Hole.

She shared her vision and listened intently to what I had to say. Not that I was giving advice or anything. I was sharing what I’d like to see in Fresno. At the time Bitwise was tiny and Irma and I met in the Tower District of Fresno at the original Hashtag location — I liked this facility a lot.

I’m grateful for everything Irma and Jake did for Fresno and me personally. When I was trying to go out on my own as a freelance iOS developer Shift-3, a Bitwise Industries company, hired me to do some work. They took care of me and I’ll never forget it.

They had this enormous presence in downtown Fresno. Something I adore about Irma and Jake. They wanted to help revitalize the ghost town Downtown Fresno had become. It’s not at all a bad downtown. It suffered the same fate as many downtowns around the country. Urban sprawl. Instead of investing in downtown folks would go off and build office parks and companies flocked to them. I find them horrible for any sort of community building and are often traps to keep employees in the building. In great cities you can walk out of your downtown building and find great places to eat, get a coffee or drink, and go shopping. They’re amazing.

I digress.

When Bitwise collapsed and scandal followed I was heartbroken. All those people busting their butts to make Fresno a better place and make a living to support their families while doing it all gone in an instant.

Fresno is still trying to recover from it and will be for years to come. Not to mention all the lives affected by it.

I wish everyone caught up in the mess all the best for their future. I also wish Irma and Jake well. They had the best of intentions and made huge mistakes along the way.

It’s heartbreaking.

P.S. - KVPR has a nice index of their Bitwise coverage.

Got a picture of this Eastern Tiger Swallowtail yesterday while doing some yard work. We had bumblebees zipping all over the place but I couldn’t manage to get close enough to get a shot of one.

Want

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Ms. Gracie didn’t boop me until 5:30 this morning. I’m grateful she allowed me to sleep in. If I could get her to let me sleep until 6AM that would be amazing.

The Hybrid React Native/Native app I’m working on is really starting to gain steam. We’ve shipped some new features and have a couple more big ones coming at the end of next month.

I’ve learned a lot about integrating React Native with native code and my learning continues. I mentioned before I hope I can work on this app through, at least, the end of the year. I know we can also improve on native performance, app UI spit-n-polish, and improve the network API to do more with fewer calls. It’s been an amazing project!

Hope you enjoy the links.

Keith Allen and Alisha Ebrahimji • CNN

Louis Gossett Jr., who won an Academy Award for his performance in “An Officer and a Gentleman” and an Emmy for the groundbreaking miniseries “Roots,” has died at age 87, according to a statement from his family.

RIP

Justin Fenton and Giacomo Bologna • The Baltimore Banner

The Francis Scott Key bridge collapsed early Tuesday after being struck by a ship, and rescue teams were searching for multiple people believed to have fallen into the Patapsco River, a Baltimore Fire department spokesman confirmed.

A horrible tragedy for the city of Baltimore and the families of the six men who lost their lives. ❤️

I hope they’re able to learn from the collapse and build in additional safety measures to help avert an accident like this in the future.

Also, why don’t tug boats escort these big ships into the harbor? I’d venture to guess it’s about the money?

Louie Mantia

A lot of people want to make a website but don’t know where to start or they get stuck. That’s in part because our perception of what websites should be has changed so dramatically over the last 20 years.

I’ve had a blog since February of 2001 — that’s 23 years! — and I’ve never been this inspired to build my own blog completely by hand.

🎙️Decoder with Nilay Patel

Nilay talks to Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky. It’s a really good conversation about tech and community. Recommended

Sara Stewart • CNN Opinion

I don’t want to state the ass-numbingly obvious, but nobody wants to sit through more than half an hour of “content” before the nearly three-hour film they paid too much to see. It defies all logic to expect people to fork over more to be bombarded with ads and trailers they can’t mute or forward through the way they’d be able to do at home — where they can also sit on a comfier couch and eat better food.

YES! I don’t remember where and when this happened to us last but it was so frustrating.

Movie theaters, please, don’t do this.

Juli Clover • MacRumors

Apple’s Phil Schiller Works 80 Hours a Week Overseeing App Store

Major control freak vibe. Who knows if it’s even true but Mr. Schiller should be enjoying some of that wealth and let Apple evolve.

Of course this is why I’m not rich. I don’t have that kind of drive anymore. I did my 80 hour weeks in the early 90’s and 2000’s. I’m over it. I don’t mind putting in extra hours here and there but when it’s the norm to work 60 hours a week, well, that’s just stupid.

Joe Kukura • sfist.com

The winning bid for the up-for-auction Anchor Brewing Company was supposed to be announced at the end of January, but things appear to be delayed, and a company rep tells us “a winner most likely will be announced in late April.”

This still saddens me. Anchor was an iconic San Francisco brewer who made good beer. As with everything else I suppose you have to change with the times or fold. 🍺

Ryan Goodman and Andrew Weissmann • The Atlantic

Donald Trump is determined to avoid accountability before the general election, and, so far, the U.S. Supreme Court is helping him.

The best way to save our democracy and our republic is to vote for Joe Biden, even if you are a Republican. Just hold your nose and vote for him.

It’s also the only way we’ll see Justice applied to TFG. He’s terrified he’ll be tossed in prison without access to his social network, rallies, hair care products, well done stake with ketchup, and orange makeup. 👮🏿

Chris Trottier

If you want to know why Truth Social looks like so much other Fediverse software, it’s because it runs Mastodon with a Soapbox front-end.

I remember the hubbub around Truth Social using Mastodon. It’s nice we’ve defederated it. He wanted a captive audience of wing nut MAGAs anyway.

How fast will the newly minted public company come tumbling down? I’d call it meme stock of the year.

Molly White • Citation Needed

Sam Bankman-Fried maintains that his crimes were victimless and resulted in zero losses, and therefore warrant only six years of imprisonment. Prosecutors argue that 40–50 years are justified.

I heard Scott Galloway on Pivot say Bankman-Fried didn’t deserve the 25 years he got. Why not? Rich people never want their kind held accountable.

Bankman-Fried is young. Don’t worry, he will be young enough when he gets out to commit fraud again.

By Michael M. Grynbaum and John Koblin • New York Times

Facing an extraordinary on-air revolt by its leading stars, NBC’s top news executive said on Tuesday that he had decided to cut ties with Ms. McDaniel, the former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, who was hired last week as an on-air political commentator.

Rachel Maddow was on fire Monday night. She always has the best lead in to her stories. If you missed it, go watch on YouTube . It was really great.

John Gruber • Daring Fireball

A few readers have asked about my speculation that Apple, along with the other DMA-designated gatekeepers (none of which are European companies of course), might reasonably pull out of the relatively small EU market rather than risk facing disproportionately large fines from the European Commission.

Gruber has an interesting take but I think it would be so much better if Apple just did the right thing and opened things up for developers to “side load”, create their own stores, and allow different payment methods.

Keep on providing awesome hardware and the platform developers love and let us help you grow the platform even more.

Look, I’m a nobody who doesn’t make much on the store. If I’ve made $2,000.00 on the store since 2009 I’d be shocked. I’ll continue to use the App Store and abide by the stricter rules because it doesn’t affect me directly but a lot of Indie Devs could benefit by paying way less than Apple’s 15-30%.

That opinion and $10 can get you a mighty fine drink at Starbucks.

Kate Yoder • Grist

But the same politicians don’t seem ready to acknowledge the root cause of these problems. A bill awaiting signature from Governor Ron DeSantis, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race in January, would ban offshore wind energy, relax regulations on natural gas pipelines, and delete the majority of mentions of climate change from existing state laws.

Florida continues to prove it’s the state with the biggest number of wack jobs in the union. Once that waterfront property starts disappearing folks can just sell their homes and move, right Ben? 🤣

Stephen Hackett • 512 Pixels

With Threads starting to federate, there has been push back in corners of Mastodon, with some server admins blocking users from @threads.net entirely. I think just about everyone has complicated feelings about Meta, but I think this kind of move only harms users of the Fediverse.

I’m going to follow a few few folks on Threads because I enjoyed following them on Twitter and they don’t have, and seemingly won’t have, Mastodon accounts.

If it turns into a shit show I don’t have to follow Threads accounts. Easy peasy.

Gabby Del Valle

For months, Elon Musk has been dropping decidedly unsubtle hints that he believes in the great replacement, a conspiracy theory that liberal elites are “importing” immigrants into the United States, Europe, and Australia to wage political and biological warfare against white people.

Musk is a full on disgusting human being. He proves it more and more with each passing day.

How he’s still the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is beyond comprehension. ☣️

W. Evan Sheehan

First and foremost let me state that this post is not about excluding people from the IndieWeb community. I am not here to be a gatekeeper. Rather, I am trying to call attention to a disconnect I see in how I’ve seen the IndieWeb movement promoted and how the IndieWeb community presents itself.

I agree with a lot of this piece. The IndieWeb is still very immature as a product platform but everything is there to create great experiences. It’s up to us to do it and do it in a way that’s easy for the masses to use.

Well, the Zags fell to Purdue. Not shocking or surprising. They had a good run.

Gonzaga is still alive in my bracket. Getting past Purdue is gonna be extremely difficult.

I haven’t had Chipotle in a very long time.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Kim let me sleep in this morning. I must say it was pretty glorious.

Not too much to report on my work week. Busy, but in a good way. I really love this project. The people and the technical aspects have been amazing. Fingers crossed we get to continue on after delivering everything we had to do in this initial round of work. 🤞🏼

JoBlo

Very sad news today as it’s been reported that M. Emmet Walsh has died at the age of 88. No matter the size of the role, the prolific character actor always made a unique impression throughout his long career, which spanned six decades.

He was great in Blade Runner and I loved his character in Christmas with the Kranks.

R.I.P. 🪦

Peter Bergen • CNN

Kushner’s newly disclosed musings last month that Gaza has a lot of “very valuable” waterfront property reminds one of Marie Antoinette’s purported observation, “Let them eat cake.”

Kushner is a perfect fit for the Trump crime organization. He’s a sociopath just like his father-in-law.

My gut reaction earlier sums it up.

Casey Newton • Platformer

Today let’s talk about one of the most significant antitrust lawsuits ever filed in the tech industry: this 88-page complaint against Apple, filed by the Department of Justice and joined by 16 states, accusing the iPhone maker of illegally maintaining its monopoly over high-end smartphones and artificially inflating prices for consumers.

I personally see some similarities between this case and the case the DOJ brought against Microsoft in 1998.

I wrote about it earlier in the week if you’re interested and pointed out the piece from a Jason Snell article that really caught my attention.

Emma Roth • The Verge

Threads is coming to the fediverse — and we just got our first official look at how that might work from Meta itself. During the FediForum conference on Tuesday, Meta’s Peter Cottle showed off a brief demo of how users will eventually be able to connect their accounts and posts to the fediverse.

Being the administrator of a Mastodon instance I’m actually excited for this! There are certain famous people I’d love to follow again and my hope is I’ll find them on Threads.

Tim Bray

When I’m away from home, I still want to listen to the music we have at home (well, I can live without the LPs). We had well over a thousand CDs so that’s a lot of music, 12,286 tracks ripped into Apple Lossless. Except for a few MP3s from, well, never mind. This instalment of the De-Google Project is about ways to do that with less Big-Tech involvement.

I really like the idea of this. I have an old Mac Mini I’d like to turn into a media server, most likely using Plex. I’ve started buying Blu-ray’s again for fear of losing parts of my video library at the whim of the corporation I purchased the license from.

Devlin Barrett and Perry Stein • The Washington Post

Lawyers and former judges said they are baffled by an order issued this week by the federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s pending trial on charges that he mishandled classified documents — and believe her instructions suggest the case will not go to trial anytime soon.

The sway the Orange Turd has over parts of our government is shocking. I hope she’s replaced and soon.

Ryan Hockensmith • ESPN

How one fan picked the greatest March Madness bracket ever built

This is a fun story. I’ve picked Final Four winners and won tournaments among friends with better brackets, but there’s usually a surprise early on that can make or break your bracket.

Just look at the South this year. It’s a mess and I’m here for it.

Jason Karaian • The New York Times

Unilever, the consumer goods giant, said on Tuesday that it would cut 7,500 jobs and spin off its ice cream unit, which includes Ben & Jerry’s, to reduce costs and simplify its portfolio of brands.

Big corporations continue to make huge profits for shareholders at the expense of the working class. I don’t know if that’s exactly what’s happening here but it feels like it.

HomeGrown

As part of creating the Grow Your Own Services site, I set up my own Mastodon server through a managed hosting service. I thought I’d write an article about this topic, in order to help others considering doing the same thing. I’ve tried to break down the process into ten main steps.

If you have the gumption to run and maintain your own Mastodon instances this article is for you.

Me? I just use Masto.Host.

Aurelio Garcia-Ribeyro • Oracle

Java users on macOS 14 running on Apple silicon systems should consider delaying the macOS 14.4 update

This is a pretty big thing to break and I’m sure the DOJ will not look kindly on it.

Louie Mantia

We’ve truly lost sight of how to make good apps. There’s a serious lack of vision and taste in the industry. Everyone’s given in to the lowest common denominator in the design of apps, simply mimicking what others do without understanding if it’s even the right choice.

I’ve been reading Louie more and more lately. I’m glad he’s started blogging because I’ve loved his pieces on his work history, from The Icon Factory to Apple.

Not to mention his blog is fully hand built. That is very tempting to me.

Joab Jackson • The New Stack

After 20 years of development, the open source GnuCOBOL “has reached an industrial maturity and can compete with proprietary offers in all environments,” said OCamlPro founder and GnuCOBOL contributor Fabrice Le Fessant, in a FOSDEM talk about the technology.

What a journey! 20 years in the making. And yes, COBOL is still a thing.

[Erika Morphy • TechSpot](www.techspot.com/news/1022…]

The big picture: Job cuts in the tech industry last year were attributed to the need to economize, driven by inflation and a hiring spree during the pandemic. So, what’s the explanation this year, especially when many of these firms have accumulated a significant amount of cash?

It’s been a rough couple years for tech. 😔

KIRSTEN GRIESHABER • The Associated Press

In Germany, the far right is on the rise again. How did it happen?

The extreme right is growing around the world. Both of my grandfathers would roll in their graves if they were around to see this. They both fought to help free us from fascism.

Derrick Bryson Taylor • The New York Times

The former television anchor Don Lemon’s wide-ranging, testy interview with Elon Musk was released online on Monday morning, touching upon topics including politics, particularly the billionaire’s recent meeting with former President Donald J. Trump; Mr. Musk’s reported drug use; hate speech on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which he now owns; and more.

I watched this and thought Lemon asked some really great, pointed, questions and Musk revealed his authoritarian, racist, self.

Lawrence Hodge • Jalopnik

Lincoln dealers have a big problem. Aside from having just four models to sell, dealers have a bunch of cars from one and two model years ago that they haven’t been able to move.

I admit it. If I could get my hands on a brand new Lincoln Navigator for a super crazy sub 30,000 price tag, I’d consider it. They’re nice.

Six Colors

Imagine trying to sell regular people on the idea that they’d be better off with a bunch of different banking apps implementing NFC payments in random ways, rather than using the Wallet system Apple built.

The bit above really grabbed my attention because if you replace different banking apps with browser apps you have one of the reason the Government sued Microsoft in 1998.

How does this grab you?

Imagine trying to sell regular people on the idea that they’d be better off with a bunch of different banking apps software companies implementing NFC payments browsers in random ways, rather than using the Wallet system browser Apple built.

One of the big reasons for the suit was Microsoft’s dominance in the browser market. They gave Internet Explorer away, as part of the OS, and Netscape couldn’t compete with that.

From a piece on Investopedia from October 2021:

The suit was brought following the browser wars that led to the collapse of Microsoft’s top competitor, Netscape, which occurred when Microsoft began giving away its browser software for free.

Now, if you’re being pedantic Apple never allowed anyone to create NFC payments on their system then decided to make their own. They had one to start with, but hopefully you see the point? Apple does compete directly with the likes of Spotify and definitely has an advantage over them because they own the OS.

I personally don’t care about Apple opening up parts of their OS, like NFC, but I do care about how the App Store works and some of the rules surrounding it. If I were a developer who made his living as an Indie developer I’d want to make as much as I could off of each sell of my apps on the store. As it stands today Apple take a 15-30% cut for each sale of your app or in-app purchases of digital goods. I’d love to see a breakdown of Apple’s expenses related to the App Store vs. income. It has become a big profit center for them so losing any of that revenue would hit their bottom line hard. I’m sure that’s why they’re doing things the way they are in the European Union for compliance with the DMA. Their current plan certainly discourages, and flat out denies small companies, to create their own App Stores.

That’s neither here nor there I suppose. I’m gonna get out some popcorn and keep an eye on how this goes. If the Microsoft case is any indicator of how things will go it’s gonna be a wild ride.

It’s sunny and 70 out, might as well have a good beer, right?

I think Lucky is failing at the whole hiding thing. 😃

Enjoying a Firestone Walker Whistle Monkee tonight. 🤤

I’m a big fan of Stikee Monkee so this beer is a natural fit.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Had a rough night last night and we have our grandkids for the weekend so this post will be brief.

Enjoy!

Herb Sutter

tl;dr: I don’t want C++ to limit what I can express efficiently. I just want C++ to let me enforce our already-well-known safety rules and best practices by default, and make me opt out explicitly if that’s what I want. Then I can still use fully modern C++… just nicer.

C++ continues to improve and grow as a language and it’s nice to see folks talking about safety. 👍🏼

BBC

A former Boeing employee known for raising concerns about the firm’s production standards has been found dead in the US.

Apparently he told a friend “if I die it’s not suicide.” Yikes!

This is how conspiracy theories get started

Manton Reese

Today we’re introducing a new feature: blog recommendations. This was inspired by recent interest in bringing back blogrolls, including posts from Dave Winer, his service FeedLand, the recommendations feature in Ghost, and feedback from Micro.blog users asking for new ways to discover people to follow. It’s a way to curate a list of favorite sites to link to from your blog.

There’s a new — old — trend coming to your blogging system: Blog Rolls. The first iteration of this site had a blog roll back in 2001.

What’s old is new again!

Iconfactory

iPulse for iOS/iPadOS literally creates a movie of what’s going on inside your device and updates it every second. You can resize the display to fit well on your screen, or slide it out of the way completely. We were careful to use minimal system resources, such as CPU (3% usage) and memory (only 1 MB in size), while making the video.

I haven’t picked iPulse and I don’t know if I will, but it looks really interesting.

NASCAR

NASCAR Cup Series drivers eager for return to concrete at Bristol

I watched the Bristol race last year at this time and it’s what got me excited about NASCAR.

I wish they’d stay on dirt for the event. It was really fun to watch.

Daring Fireball

App Store WTF of the Week: DealMachine for Real Estate

How in the world did this get by App Review? Heck, I’ve had my app rejected for using the word BETA as an alternate icon name. 🤣

Drew Magary • defector

Derrick Henry Is Here To Remind The Ravens To Run The F*cking Ball

I’ve always liked hard nosed running backs and Derrick Henry fits the bill. I hope he has a great season as a Baltimore Raven.

Ms. Gracie living her best life.

Mmmmmmm beer

Flynn has a rough life.

Federico Viticci • MacStories

MacPad: How I Created the Hybrid Mac-iPad Laptop and Tablet That Apple Won’t Make

I may call it a monster in the title but this is a fantastic idea for a device in my opinion. I love that it has both iPad and macOS operating systems and both chipsets. It is after all just an iPad bolted onto a MacBook Pro bottom.

I can see a little cottage industry springing from this. I envision a top cover that fits the laptop perfectly and includes an intelligent dock, or tray, for the iPad to slide into. That intelligent dock would also provide a way to plug directly into the back of the MacBook complete with a hinge so you could close it and it would look just like a laptop from another manufacturer.

The dock would also need a way to provide power and a USB-C connection so Sidecar wouldn’t require a network connection to operate. When docked the docking system would autodetect it and fire up a session into the Mac and display it. I’m not sure how that would work, but it would be amazing.

When detached you could close the lid and use it in clamshell mode, hooking up a full size display, keyboard, and mouse.

This is the perfect device. ❤️

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Feeling a little groggy this morning. I basically passed out sitting on the couch watching TV at around 7PM last night. I woke up a few minutes later and don’t remember closing my eyes. 🤣

Please, send all the coffee.

It looks like I’ll get an opportunity to work on Stream for Mac today, which is very exciting!

Anywho, enough of that, I hope you enjoy the links.

Kate Wagner • Internet Archive

Most of us have the distinct pleasure of going throughout our lives bereft of the physical presence of those who rule over us. Were we peasants instead of spreadsheet jockeys, warehouse workers, and baristas, we would toil in our fields in the shadow of some overbearing castle from which the lord or his steward would ride down on his thunderous charger demanding our fealty and our tithes. Now, though, the real high end of the income inequality curve—the 0.01 percenters—remains elusive. To their great advantage, they can buy their way out of public life. However, if you want to catch a glimpse of them, all you need to do is attend a single day of Formula 1 racing.

This piece by Kate Wagner originally appeared in Car and Driver last week but was taken down the same day it went up. Luckily we have The Internet Archive.

This is a really scathing look at F1. It is most certainly a sport for the rich and famous. A playboys paradise. 🏎️

The Iconfactory

What an amazing ride this past month has been! We appreciate the support of everyone who backed our Project Tapestry Kickstarter as well as those who helped us spread the word far and wide. We couldn’t have reached our goals without your help and we’re so very excited to have an opportunity to bring Project Tapestry to life.

I’m really excited to see what our awesome friends create for us! It’s also gonna be fun to see what others create to extend it! 😍

Ian Millhiser • Vox

The courts were never going to save America from Donald Trump

Trump got exactly what he needed to avoid a trial that could possibly convict him. Sure, it may start before the election but will it have time to complete?

We all know he did it. We all know his strategy is to run out the clock, get elected, and make it all magically go away. Justice is supposed to be blind, but not in this way.

Yet another way the rich and powerful have an advantage over the rest of us. Would you or I have been given the chance to take our argument to the highest court in the land? Probably not.

The man is a criminal and deserves to do a little jail time. It would be fine with me if he was confined to his “club” in the third-world shit hole of Florida. They deserve him. ⚖️

RevK

Unix, and many other systems from that, use a type for time that is seconds since the start of 1970. It is a simple system. Those seconds were stored in a signed 32 bit number, which allows -2147483648 to +2147483647 and hence dates from Fri 13 Dec 19:45:52 GMT 1901 to Tue 19 Jan 02:14:07 GMT 2038. This seemed a pretty good range. especially for adult engineers living in the early 70s. But 2038 is getting closer and closer. I may (hopefully) live to see it.

Time is hard. When I was at Pelco we had to deal with time issues around the world. A really bad choice was made in our UI products to use local time within the app and not just for display purposes. That was fun to fix.

Check out the post for some history and what we’ll need to keep an eye out for if you write date code at a lower level. I’d imagine most modern languages have really great support for dates built in. Question is how about old school services that remain online because they just work and nobody wants to work on them? 😃

Chance Miller, Ben Lovejoy, Zac Hall, and Filipe Espósito • 9to5Mac

Epic says Apple will reinstate developer account, clearing path for Epic Games Store on iPhone

It’s time to get out your popcorn. Apple and Epic are having a little pissing contest. The EU isn’t having it. It looks like Apple is being forced to play nice and they definitely don’t like it.

I haven’t really kept up with the nuanced bits but Apple really doesn’t want to open the platform up any more than they have to. 🍿

Alex Castro • The Verge

Apple hit with first ever EU fine following Spotify complaint

And a nice little follow on to the Epic post above. Spotify is also in the pissing contest with Apple and they’re not backing down.

Shuttering the App Store is not an option because Apple makes a ton of money off of developers. They certainly don’t host us out of the kindness of their hearts. It’s a business after all with shareholders — ALL HAIL THE SHAREHOLDERS!

I can see arguments from both sides. Apple built the platform and should be able to administer it as they see fit. It’s not the only mobile platform on the planet. If you’re a developer and really hate the 15-30% fee you can go elsewhere.

If you’re Spotify or Epic you’re also a business that needs to make a profit and, in Spotify’s case, the margins on music are so thin they can’t afford to give Apple that much money. Heck, I don’t understand how any company could make their own App Store work in the EU given the rules Apple setup to create and maintain one.

Susannah Cullinane, Sara Smart, Cindy Von Quednow and Mary Gilbert • CNN

California’s mountain towns and ski resorts are digging out after a blockbuster blizzard buried them and major roads under several feet of snow.

The last 10 or so years we lived in California’s San Joaquin Valley we were always in some kind of drought situation. Fast forward a few years and it’s been flooded the last two years with tremendous snowpack, which is very much needed.

I’ll bet the Sierra Nevada looks spectacular from the valley floor right now. Folks who live there will understand what I’m saying. Looking up from the great valley to see the Sierra Nevada is awe inspiring on a beautiful clear day. Especially when it’s covered in snow. 🏔️

Thor Benson • Common Dreams

Climate experts are warning that the Smokehouse Creek fire in the Texas panhandle—now the largest in the state’s history with over over 1 million acres burned and counting—provides a horrifying look into a future of runaway temperatures that result in extreme destruction.

And Texas is in the complete opposite situation of California. It’s on fire and not just a tiny fire. It’s a monster eating everything in its path. 🔥

Got Kim a new flag!

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Well, I’ve managed to put some time into Stream for Mac this week. I’d really messed it up trying to force the codebase into something I wanted, so I started over. Yeah, that sucks, but I think in the end it will have been the right choice.

Taylor — my movie going buddy and youngest daughter — and I saw Dune Part Two last night and we both really enjoyed it. I won’t give away any spoilers here but I wonder if it gave us some insight not given in the book. The problem is I can’t remember the book that well because it’s been 20-plus years since I read it. I enjoyed the ending but it most certainly leaves the door open for Dune: Messiah and Children of Dune. I hope they happen.

I’ve finished today’s post and I’m getting ready to publish. I’ve also come downstairs to my computer so I can work on Stream for Mac today. I’m not exactly sure what I’ll work on yet but I have Import and Export of OPML working as well as Refresh. In my little app that covers a huge swath of functionality because Stream is so darned simple. I’ll spend a whole lot of time on the UI to make it look as good as I’m capable of doing. I still have two important bits of UI to get in; Settings and Adding Feeds. Those will be brand new bits and I’ll get some exposure to more AppKit APIs while I’m at it, which is a big goal for me.

Something I’ve been considering is a triple-pane UI, which is the opposite of what Stream was written to be. I’m still thinking about that move while I work through the basics. The more I think about it the more I both like and hate the idea. In the meantime I have plenty of polish work to do on the app itself. Keyboard shortcuts and right mouse clicks will play an important role in the Mac version.

Anywho, I hope you enjoy the links.

Diana Dasrath • NBC News

Richard Lewis, revered comic and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ star, dies at 76

RIP 🪦

The White House

Today, the White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) released a report calling on the technical community to proactively reduce the attack surface in cyberspace. ONCD makes the case that technology manufacturers can prevent entire classes of vulnerabilities from entering the digital ecosystem by adopting memory safe programming languages

I instantly think of Rust when I read memory safe programming languages, but Swift falls into that category as well.

The biggest problem, if you want to call it that, is our entire infrastructure lives on top of systems built in C and C++ years, and years, and years ago.

Who will be the first to rewrite a major OS in Rust or Swift? Microsoft has done some work in Windows to rewrite a tiny portion in Rust but what about an entire OS?

Heck, even some very modern efforts, like Google’s Fuscia, are in C++.

Will we see an effort to replace OS Kernels with Rust? Or perhaps the API layers on top of OSes because they provide a bigger attack surface? No matter, I’d be interested in watching something so daunting.

Roberto Baldwin • Ars Technica

The Electrify America flagship station is what charging should have been all along. It’s also what companies like the seven-automaker joint venture now called IONNA are promising. We should expect to see more of this sort of facility as EVs increase in market share; many new owners don’t want to compromise when it comes to keeping their vehicles on the road.

This gives me hope for a good electric vehicle future.

You know what would be even better? Better mass transportation systems powered by electricity.

Whizy Kim • Vox

Older Americans are working longer. Some want to; others have to.

Well, this will most certainly be me. I did a horrible job planning for retirement so the best I can hope for is to slow down a bit and do part time work (if I can!)

I figure I’ll be forced out of the tech space by an aging brain and the inability to keep up with the youngins coming into the workforce.

Maybe a part time gig at a place like Starbucks will work for me? Someday I suppose we’ll find out.

Joe Taraborrelli • Sony Interactive

We envision reducing our headcount by about 900 people, or about 8% of our current workforce

Ugh. More layoffs. This time it’s hitting the video games sector.

I hope everyone who lost their job was taken care of.

We had a layoff at WillowTree a couple weeks back that took out a whole bunch of VPs and Partners and another realignment of the company. It’s been a really weird year since the acquisition.

Neil Long • mobilegamer.biz

Inside Apple Arcade: axed games, declining payouts, disillusioned studios – and an uncertain future

I wonder if this will affect my friends at The Iconfactory? They have a really fun game called Frenzic: Overtime in Apple Arcade.

I hope not. ❤️

Nick Barclay • The Verge

Apple has halted its long-rumored “Project Titan” work on developing an electric car, according to Bloomberg. The company reportedly announced the news internally on Tuesday and said many people in the 2,000-person team behind the car will shift to generative AI efforts instead.

This always felt like a weird project to me. Why a car? Maybe the answer is: because. That’s a valid reason in my book.

Say, has anyone integrated CarPlay to the extent Apple demo’d at WWDC? You know, the one where the entire dashboard is a giant CarPlay screen?

Sameer Ajmani

In this article, I’ll talk about how we aligned Go with Google Cloud while preserving the core values that make Go great for everyone.

I’ve always seen Go as C for the internet. I’m not sure how many folks realize what an impact C had. 20 years ago almost everything was written in C, C++, or Objective-C. If you wanted speed and portability it was your only choice.

I spent 20+ years writing C/C++ code and I still love the language.

I wonder if Go has that kind of following? The web seems to be largely built on Java, Python, Ruby, and JavaScript, of course I could be 100% wrong about that. 😃

Samantha Cole • 404 Media

Tumblr and Wordpress are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI, according to a source with internal knowledge about the deals and internal documentation referring to the deals.

This doesn’t sound like something Matt Mullenweg would be into.

But, he’s been on sabbatical lately and made enemies with the Trans community. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Stacey Leasca • Food & Wine

Wendy’s Is Introducing Uber-Style ‘Surge Pricing’

How in the world do they think this is going to actually work?

It’s lunch time, the lobby of a Wendy’s is full. The menu updates, doubling prices.

The lobby empties out. 😁

Martin Fowler

Improvements in communications technology have led an increasing number of teams that work in a Remote-First style, a trend that was boosted by the forced isolation of Covid-19 pandemic. But a team that operates remotely still benefits from face-to-face gatherings, and should do them every few months.

I’m down with this idea. We tried having on sites for our remote group but it became cost prohibitive. We managed to have two before they were canceled as an activity.

As an aside, I’ve had COVID once. I got it at our first offsite. 😷

Hartley Charlton • MacRumors

Microsoft Begged Apple to Adopt Bing as Safari’s Default Search Engine

Apparently they didn’t beg hard enough. They must not have tried begging with a bag of cash much, much, larger than what Google paid.

Show me the money!💰

Stephen M. Curry • InfoWorld

The Java Ring is an extremely secure Java-powered electronic token with a continuously running, unalterable realtime clock and rugged packaging, suitable for many applications. The jewel of the Java Ring is the Java iButton – a one-million transistor, single-chip trusted microcomputer with a powerful Java virtual machine (JVM) housed in a rugged and secure stainless-steel case.

This is a pretty cool piece of hardware and I want one. I could see having a ring like this for unlocking doors and controlling various simple devices in some fashion.

If it doubled as a signet so I could press it into wax that would be even cooler. 😃

Guess this means I’m a super corporate employee now? 🤣

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

It’s been a fun week at work. I’ve been fixing bugs here and there. For some reason I enjoy this type of work. I spent a decent amount of time looking at memory graphs for object retentions problems and fixed a couple of good ones this week. That always feels great!

As for Stream for Mac, I started off the week in a bit of a funk but thanks to some amazing Mac devs I was put back on the right path. Stream for Mac development is moving forward once again. Fingers crossed I can keep up the momentum. 🤞🏼

Nikita Prokopov A.K.A. Tonsky

So all this time I was living under impression that, for example, if the average web page size is 3 MB, then JavaScript bundle should be around 1 MB. Surely content should still take the majority, no?

Some of the examples Nikita gives seem ridiculous. It makes me wonder if backend processing that spits out pure HTML will ever become a thing again?

Harry Cheadle • Eater, Seattle

But Tony Delivers doesn’t need to be anything bigger than it already is, which is one guy on a bike showing up to deliver food, probably smiling, probably asking how you’re doing, a bolt of disarming kindness in a city that even before we all got addicted to screens was known for being standoffish. That seems worth $5.

Tony has become a Seattle hero! I can’t believe he’s able to survive on $5 deliveries but bravo for making your own little niche!

Nish Tahir

I’ve been learning more about common attacks that appear in my Nginx logs to learn more about what happens beyond the log entries.

Nish is geekin’ out again. I wish I had his brain. The things I could accomplish! 🧠

Gunnar Anzinger

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

This piece is ridiculous in all the best ways. The paragraph I chose to feature really hit home. Yes, yes, take your time. We need it in two days. 🤣

Claire Elise Thompson • grist

If you like the idea of a perpetual three-day weekend, you might be one of a growing cadre that supports the concept of degrowth: a school of thought aimed at shrinking economies and moving away from GDP growth as a metric of success, while instead emphasizing universal basic services and social well-being.

With the rise of AI companies believe they can replace us with software for many types of work.

I think that’s cool! Let’s replace workers and figure out a way to allow folks to do whatever they want and still receive a paycheck. Like, perhaps, Universal Basic Income, Single Payer health care, and free university for everyone! Of course the rich people won’t like that idea.

Trust me when I say I could find plenty of things to work on.

Michael Szczepanik

It’s time for the NATIVE mobile development to end.

I don’t agree. I’ve been working on a project that involves React Native and I see the value in it, but that doesn’t mean native development should go away. Your mileage may vary. For me it’s native or bust for my personal projects.

Mike Elgan • Computerworld

More to the point: Most companies cannot show actual monetary benefits from RTO mandates. But most employees can show actual and significant monetary costs from RTO mandates.

This is an interesting take on the cost to employees to return to work. I’ve never thought about it in those terms. For me it’s always been about the flexibility working remotely gives me. I save between 40-60 minutes a day by not commuting, I can have afternoon coffee with my wife, and if I need to work late it’s so much easier to stomach because I’m already home.

If WillowTree asked us all to return to the office full time, I would. I just prefer working from home.

Jacob Phillips • Evening Standard

The Kremlin has said it will use its “entire strategic arsenal” and fire nuclear missiles at London, Washington, Berlin and Kyiv if it is made to give up the areas of Ukraine it has invaded.

We need to get our act together and get more aid to Ukraine. The GOP loves their orange American Dictator who, in turn, loves Putin so they’re keeping aid from Ukraine. What happened to all those Patriotic Republicans with their flags and love of all things military? They’re too cowardly to stand up to Trump. It’s really shameful.

Chris Evangelista • /Film

Stephen King Hates The Only Movie He Ever Directed

I liked Maximum Overdrive for what it was. It’s a popcorn movie. Get your popcorn, soda, find your seat, and sit back to watch the mayhem unfold. It delivered and I had no idea Stephen King directed it.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

This week has had its ups and downs. We managed to package up a build of the app I’m working on when we promised it.

It’s also Daytona 500 time! I watched the Duels on Thursday night and the Truck race last night. Today we have the Xfinity Series race and tomorrow the Cup teams race. It’s gonna be amazing.

The work week ended on a sour note. I won’t get into it here, just yet.

I had so many stories to share this week, this is about half of what I had.

Anywho, I hope you enjoy the links.

David K. Li and Rebecca Cohen • NBC News

The Chiefs defeated the 49ers 25-22, cementing head coach Andy Reid and Mahomes’ team as the new NFL dynasty to beat with their third title in last five seasons.

The Chiefs look like the Patriots or Cowboys or 9’ers dynasties before them. Four Super Bowl trips in five years, winning three. That’s incredible.

Congratulations Mr. Swift and the entire Chiefs Kingdom! 🥳

Philip Bump • The Washington Post

Remember the ‘Biden bribe’ allegation? DOJ now says it was made up.

Gee, imagine that, a Joe Biden hater lying to the FBI.

The only criminal running for President is The Orange Menace.

Sarah Perez • TechCrunch

Apple confirms it’s breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose

I’m totally unclear what is the real cause behind this decision. Is it really because it makes the OS less safe or is Apple doing another of its passive aggressive things?

I would think they could introduce a new framework for browser engines as well as strict rules and certificates that keep browsers in line, but I may be completely wrong.

As a result EU users of iOS get a much worse user experience. If it’s intentional, shame on Apple, if it’s not, shame on the EU.

NetNewsWire Blog

Thanks so so much to everybody who’s supported the app over the years!🎩🎉 Let’s do 21 more!

The granddaddy of Mac Feed Readers is old enough to have a beer!

Congratulations to Brent and the entire NetNewsWire team! 🍻

Steven Levy • WIRED

In her new memoir, Burn Book, Kara Swisher cites a 2014 profile that dubbed her “Silicon Valley’s Most Feared and Well-Liked Journalist.” She might prefer to downplay the first and emphasize the second. Some people would switch that around. But there is no dispute about Swisher’s impact: When it comes to tech punditry, she’s at the top of the heap.

I’m a Kara Swisher fan. She’s a great reporter and I think she can ask tough questions when it’s necessary.

I’m looking forward to getting the book.

By George Kelly, Julie Makinen, and Josh Koehn • The San Francisco Standard

Waymo robotaxi goes up in flames in Chinatown after crowd attacks vehicle

Note to self. Don’t drive your car into a crowd of folks enjoying their Chinese New Year celebration.

Why this robot thought that was a good idea is beyond me. 🤖

Kelby Vera • Huffington Post

Donald Trump: Taylor Swift Is A Traitor If She Endorses President Biden

Big baby Donnie Boy wants to be loved so badly. You can’t buy Taylor’s love Mr. Orange Menace.

Julia Lurie • Mother Jones

But many workers at Allegiant Stadium, in Las Vegas, make barely more than minimum wage. A San Francisco Chronicle article tells the story of one such employee, Chayasura Walker, who makes $14.25 an hour, without benefits, as she pours $18 beers

I don’t know what to say about this other than it’s tragic people have to work themselves to death just to survive.

My Mom had to do this. She busted her ass to keep food on our table. She’s the bravest, strongest, person I’ve ever known and she deserved better.

The least we as a nation can do is make sure folks have a livable wage.

Mike Masnick • Techdirt

Bluesky is now open to anyone without an invite. And a bunch of other exciting things are coming soon.

Bluesky seems to be the alternative to Twitter for folks who think Mastodon is too difficult to use. It definitely captured a lot of the same early techie Twitter crowd.

I wish they’d federate with Mastodon servers but they have to do their own thing. It’s why they were founded.

Threads, however, still seems committed to Mastodon/ActivityPub integration.

Zoë Schiffer • Platformer

Founder Eugen Rochko on helping Threads federate, dodging venture capital, and why he hopes Bluesky abandons its protocol

I can’t see Bluesky abandoning their protocol. I can however see Mastodon adopting the Bluesky protocol.

I just want a single place to follow and interact with folks. Mastodon has been that place for me. I’ve had much better conversations and interactions on Masrodon than I ever had on Twitter. 🧡

Manton Reece

Today we’re launching a major new feature for Micro.blog Premium subscribers. Micro.blog notes are a new way to save content in Micro.blog when you don’t want to use a blog post or draft.

Congratulations Micro.blog team! 🥳

Frederic Lardinois • TechCrunch

Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber, which launched only a week ago. Mozilla will also shut down Hubs, the 3D virtual world it launched back in 2018, and scale back its investment in its mozilla.social Mastodon instance. The layoffs will affect roughly 60 employees. Bloomberg previously reported the layoffs.

It’s all about AI these days. Gotta hop on that wagon and ride it.

It’s not going away so we have to adapt our software to use it in some way or it will go away. E.G. I could add machine learning to Stream to make suggestions for feeds to follow. I could, if I had the time. All I can do now is try to finish the Mac version. 🤣

Emily Shapiro and Meredith Deliso

One person has died and at least 21 others were injured by gunfire when a shooting broke out in Kansas City, Missouri, following the parade and rally for the Chiefs' Super Bowl win, officials said Wednesday.

Yay, more deaths due to guns, said no one ever. 🤬

Unbelievable. We Murican’s love our guns and mass carnage.

Matt Massicotte

Recently, I’ve seen a lot of talk around enabling Swift’s complete concurrency checking. I think this is a really good discussion to have. I have opinions! But, I’d prefer to try to give you enough information to understand the trade-offs, because they are significant.

I haven’t checked into this at all but I should. Apparently the move to Swift 6 will require it? Better to figure out what’s wrong now and fix it before it becomes a problem.

John Newby • NBC Sports

Beard Motorsports will compete in Sunday’s Daytona 500 (2:30 p.m. ET on Fox), continuing a trend of the one-employee team taking on juggernauts with incalculable resources.

I’m very happy for Beard Motorsports. Hopefully he’s able to finish the race. That in itself would be a victory for an Indie shop. Let’s go! 🚙

Priss and Flynn doing what they do best. Chillin’.

Craig Hockenberry • Iconfactory

This post will explain the technology behind Project Tapestry and how we tested it as a prototype. We’ll keep this discussion at a fairly basic level: if you’re a web or app developer, you’ll have no problems following along.

And if you think I’m going to describe RSS feeds now, think again! We’ve come up with something completely new.

I’m excitedly looking forward to seeing the final product and I hope they make their stretch goal of bringing it to the Mac. 🤞🏼 Please, go read about Project Tapestry, and if you’re so inclined please support their effort. I backed them early, it was a no brainer for me.

I really wanted to talk about the choice the Iconfactory made to create a highly extensible platform for plugins. It’s a darned great idea! And I love their choice of pushing network requests through Project Tapestry itself as a way to guarantee plugins can’t phish out user data or credentials to exploit later. 👍🏼

As I was reading the post I came across Craig’s mention of the app having a sendRequest method used by the JavaScript code to make network requests. This grabbed my attention and made me realize this is a way better version of a React Native application.

What I mean by that is, React Native is hosted inside a native iOS application framework and uses native iOS controls on its view controllers or its version of a view controller. The JavaScript code drives everything from networking to user interface (it uses UIKit internally) to render content for the user to interact with. This allows developers to write their app using straight web technologies and run it on iOS and Android.

The project I’m currently involved in is an existing eight year old iOS application built with a mix of UIKit and SwiftUI. On the flip side the Android app of the same age is built using Java and Kotlin with a mix of the original XML based UI and modern Jetpack Compose. They’ve both taken very similar and not unexpected paths.

Enter React Native

Something our client wanted to do is integrate React Native into the existing applications. This has been done before by Airbnb and more recently by Shopify. Each with very different outcomes.

So all of that to say, ours has been successful, in my opinion. We’ve been able to fully integrate React Native and carve out a little set of API’s in the native application we expose to the React Native developers to do work the native application is already doing for them for free. Part of which is all the networking calls.

In the Tapestry blog post Craig points out sendRequest. It’s the call they use to handle requests to the internet for the JavaScript plugin. In our application we’ve exposed a makeRequest call that handles doing any type of network request; GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, or DELETE, and returns a Promise to the caller. Hey, sounds like the Tapestry code! 😄

I have it on my todo list to learn JavaScript. It’s been there for years and years because I knew I’d need it at some point. I really need it now. I can’t see React Native projects going away for the WillowTree team. They’re a very popular way for our clients to get cross platform code and get an iOS and Android app out the door simultaneously without having to spend time, money, and effort on two completely separate code bases.

Over the course of our integration work I’ve done a smidge of TypeScript code to allow other TypeScript devs on the team to make calls into the APIs we’ve exposed in the native application.

It’s been fun and I see a place for JavaScript/TypeScript in my native development world.

Project Tapestry is BETTER!

As for what Iconfactory is doing, I think it’s a much better version of what React Native does. It gives them the best of both worlds. A beautiful, hand crafted, fully native UI, that gives JavaScript developers the ability to extend the app. That’s a lovely thing. ❤️