Rob Fahrni

Scripting News

Today is the 30th anniversary of this blog. Hola!

When I started my blog in February 2001 there were three folks who inspired me; Dave Winer, Ev Williams , and Jeffrey Zeldman.

All these years later Dave is still digging, tweaking what it means to publish for the web, making new software, and writing on his blog every day.

I’ve always enjoyed Dave’s writing and hope that maybe someday I’ll be as good at it as he is.

Happy Birthday, Scripting News and congratulations on 30 years of blogging, Dave. 🥳

It’s even worse than it appears.

Jennifer Palmer, Paul Monies, Heather Warlick • USA Today

Bids opened Monday for a contract to supply the state Department of Education with 55,000 Bibles. According to the bid documents, vendors must meet certain specifications: Bibles must be the King James Version; must contain the Old and New Testaments; must include copies of the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and must be bound in leather or leather-like material.

Oklahoma is on the front line of the war to make Christian Nationalism the norm in America. How they can manage this with a First Amendment clearly stating:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Granted, Republicans are so good at skipping the parts they don’t like, like the Second Amendments inclusion of the need for a well regulated militia being necessary as part of the right to own and carry weapons, maybe they just skipped the part about the separation of church and state?

Hopefully the Supreme Court will strike this abomination of a law down and let folks choose their own religion and how they learn about it.

The Religious Right — Christian Nationalists — have done so much harm to Christianity and the person in Jesus.

They love Trump and all of his hate. Can y’all see Jesus standing at the border to the United States of America with an M-16 turning people away? Maybe you can. I can’t. I picture someone welcoming the tired and sick with open arms, providing them water, food, and a place to stay.

The GOP view of Christianity is a brutal idol in the form of Donald J. Trump and his ilk.

Yeah, your vote really matters to the future of this country. Get out and vote. Let’s stop this evil man and his sycophants dead in their tracks and keep this country great.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

My coffee is nice and hot and I’ve collected a lot of material to share this week. There’s no way I can share it all. A lot of it centers around American Politics and the rift between WordPress and WP Engine.

I hope you enjoy the links I’ve selected for you. 😁

The Carter Center

ATLANTA — Today, The Carter Center and the world celebrate the 100th birthday of former President Jimmy Carter. As the longest-living U.S. president in history, he stands as a beacon of leadership and compassion, inspiring people around the globe.

I remember as a kid folks being very critical of Jimmy Carter, especially around the Iran hostage crisis. But, there’s no denying he is a wonderful man whose real legacy started after he was President. He’s an American Hero and a great example of human kindness and compassion. He walks the walk.

Happy 100th Birthday Mr. President! 🎂

Hafsa Khalil • BBC

Kris Kristofferson, the award-winning country singer and actor who worked with Johnny Cash and Martin Scorsese, has died aged 88.

Kris Kristofferson was a Renaissance Man. He earned a Masters degree at Oxford University, served in the US Army, was an actor, and he’s probably best know as a musician. He was also a badass. I tend to look up to folks like that.

A part me me hopes the dust-up between Toby Keith and Kris Kristofferson, as penned by Ethan Hawke for Rolling Stone, actually happened. 😄

RIP 🪦

The Cincinnati Enquirer • Mark Wert and Jason Hoffman

Pete Rose, MLB all-time hits leader, dies at 83

As a boy I was a Reds fan and vividly remember the 1976 World Series. I was a Johnny Bench fan as a boy and became a catcher because of him. The fact that they hammered the Yankees by sweeping them in the series was icing on the cake. My MLB team allegiance changed over the years but I’ll always be a fan of The Big Red Machine and The Great Eight, Rose among them.

It’s high time Major League Baseball allows Rose to be inducted into the Hall of Fame.

RIP Charlie Hustle. 🪦

Jeffrey Zeldman

My insight into corporate legal disputes is as meaningful as my opinion on Quantum Mechanics. What I do know is that, when given the chance this week to leave my job with half a year’s salary paid in advance, I chose to stay at Automattic.

The WordPress community is in complete turmoil at the moment. I would not be shocked to see this completely fracture the community into competing factions, forking WordPress, and building how they see fit.

I’m a big fan of WordPress, even though I complain about it not being able to make static sites. It is a very nice plug-n-play system for everything from a simple one person blog, to a small business, to a huge corporation managing a very large, heavily trafficked site.

I’ve tried to get a job there I like it so much. I’d still love the opportunity to work on their iOS client or Tumblr iOS client apps.

They’ve done a lot for the open source community and Matt has always come across as one of the good guys.

I really hope this gets resolved without blowing up the community.

John Stoehr • Raw Story

Former GOP official Michael Steele unfurled an epic rant bashing voters who would consider sending “incompetent” Donald Trump back to the White House.

Michael Steele is the former Chair of the RNC and lieutenant governor of Maryland. The man is a politician and life long Republican. He’s the type of person I usually disagree with politically but I respect him. He’s nothing like the modern GOP turned MAGA cult.

Anywho. So many real Republicans have come out against the Orange Man, yet the polls are still tight? I don’t get it and I’m still terrified we might get Orangey for a second term.

Bradley Brownell • Jalopnik

NASCAR is running an unlawful monopoly on the sport of stock car racing, alleges a suit filed on Wednesday by stock car teams 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports against the sanctioning body and its CEO Jim France. 23XI is, of course, the team co-owned by NBA legend Michael Jordan and racer Denny Hamlin.

My popcorn is ready! I hope 23XI — pronounced 23 11 — and Front Row Motorsports make some headway for NASCAR teams. I know I’m new to NASCAR but if you read what the two teams claim it’s shocking what NASCAR gets away with. How teams manage to exist is beyond me. It’s a terrible business, if that’s what you’re after. It seems you need deep pockets or sponsors with deep pockets just to keep a team afloat, much less be competitive.

Christian Selig

Juno for YouTube has been removed from the App Store

This can’t be a surprise to anyone given how fiercely YouTube protects its product. Of course I wish they’d left Christian alone because he makes beautiful software.

I know nobody from YouTube will see this but I wish they’d offer to give Christian some cash for it and hire him to continue working on it.

Jamie Zawinski

Mozilla’s CEO doubles down on them being an advertising company now

With all the kerfuffle between WordPress and WP Engine it’s hard to watch Mozilla head down this road. They’re one of those organizations we could look up to as an open source advocate and maintainer of one of the most used pieces of software in the world.

Hopefully they’re able to find their way back to their roots and continue to maintain Firefox.

Michael Moore

Right now, if you know how to really read the polls, or if you have access to the various private and internal polling being conducted by and shared only amongst the elites, Wall Street, and Members of Congress, then you already know that this election was over weeks ago. Trump simply refused to believe that “Sleepy Joe” was no longer his opponent and that there was instead “some woman” claiming she was “Black” who was now going to pummel him on Election Day. He soon became unhinged, ranted for hours about Hannibal Lecter, Haitians cannibalizing your pets, and a nonstop drone of oral diarrhea spewing misogyny, racism and essentially claiming that if he loses “it will be the Jews’ fault.”

I’m steeling myself for the possibility of a Trump Presidency. Seeing articles like this give me some hope for a Harris Waltz win. If they do win I expect a lot more violence this time around. I hope that can all be suppressed before it can happen but it won’t surprise me if it does.

All news outlets and social media sites need to agree to not give the Orange Man any airtime for speeches after the election or at least be ready to cut away at an instant.

JOSEPH SHAVIT • The Brighter Side

In a groundbreaking development poised to reshape the energy landscape of Saskatchewan, Canada, a compact nuclear reactor with the capacity to operate for eight years without water is set to come online by 2029.

I hope this works out. It could provide us with clean energy for years and years to come.

Sylvain Kerkour

Rust developers are stuck in an endless hamster wheel where every month / week there is a new best way to do something, and the previous way is now deprecated, kind of like in the fronntend development world with the weekly hottest JavaScript framework.

I know Rust and other languages rely on the community to make the language better but I am surprised the actual framework support for the platform often comes from outside sources.

Rust should have runtime library support just like the C and C++. Basic stuff plus heavily used things like networking and other frameworks layered on top of those. All using common framework patterns and maintained by the main Rust development team.

Something that makes developing in Apple platforms are the shared frameworks that work the same on Mac, iPhone, iPad, etc. Sure, the UI bits are different, but a lot of other code is the same. I’d say 80% of Stream code is shared between Mac and iOS and it’s maintained by Apple and ready for each new release of their OSes.

Blair Vanderhoof, , Jesse Watts-Russell, Fernando Gorodscy, Matt Galloway, and Eli White • engineering.fb.com

At Meta, React and React Native are more than just tools; they are integral to our product development and innovation. With over five thousand people at Meta building products and experiences with React every month, these technologies are fundamental to our engineering culture and our ability to quickly build and ship high quality products.

I’ve been working in React Native off and on since June of this year. It’s a fine framework and definitely allows developers to move quickly. Especially web devs with React experience. They can come to a project and be instantly productive.

This Facebook Engineering piece reads like marketing material at times but giving developers the means to develop for everything from iOS to Android to Windows to XBox to PlayStation is real and that’s powerful.

It doesn’t mean all the UI looks exactly the same just like Mac and iOS apps can share a bunch of code and have a different UI, but that ability to share a large portion of code is extremely powerful to a development team.

I still love writing native apps in their native frameworks and expect to keep Stream 100% native. I still love using C++ for cross platform work even though I haven’t had the need for it in years. Then you have Rust gaining ground. We have good choices for cross platform work, including Swift.

Something I really dislike about using React Native and TypeScript is the lack of real tooling for debugging in a full IDE. I’d love to be able to debug between Swift and TypeScript right inside Xcode but TypeScript/JavaScript tooling is arcane. Hopefully someone way smarter than me will make that happen.

Anyone know if Rust fully integrates into Xcode and Microsoft’s Visual Studio?

Please forgive my crude “artistry” but this is what I wish Mastodon would do for folks coming to sign up for the first time at joinmastodon.org.

Don’t present them with a “Join mastodon.social” button and a “Pick another server” button. Just give them a single choice “Join Mastodon” so they get a mastodon.social account. Once they figure out how it works they can switch to another instance or just keep using the one they have.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I know this is very late today. We have our grandson today and we’ve been go, go, go, go, go since he arrived. I’m already pooped but he is such a great kid and a joy to be around. 😁

Carmel Dagan, Alex Ritman • Variety

Maggie Smith, Star of ‘Downton Abbey,’ ‘Harry Potter,’ Dies at 89

Goodbye Professor McGonagall.😔🪦

Vitaly Bragilevsky • JETBRAINS Blog

So, you’re thinking about choosing Rust as your next programming language to learn. You already know what it means to write code and have some experience with at least one programming language, probably Python or JavaScript. You’ve heard about Rust here and there. People say it’s a modern systems programming language that brings safety and performance and solves problems that are hard to avoid in other programming languages (such as C or C++).

Yes, I’m interested, but I have too much on my plate to venture into Rusty waters at this time. 🦀

Emma Roth • The Verge

Marques Brownlee, the YouTuber known as MKBHD, has responded to backlash over the launch of his new wallpaper app, called Panels. In a post on Tuesday, Brownlee says he’s going to address users’ concerns about pricing and “excessive data disclosures.”

It’s wild to see Marques, who makes super high quality video, to make something less than amazing.

Look, if you want a very high quality application full of high quality, consistently updated, you should consider Wallaroo from The Iconfactory.

Jake Trotter • ESPN

Who is Brownie the Elf? Inside the rise, fall, and revival of the Browns' mascot

I am a fan of Brownie the Elf and glad to see they’ve kept it.

Lauren Goode • WIRED

Meta has dominated online social connections for the past 20 years, but it missed out on making the smartphones that primarily delivered those connections. Now, in a multiyear, multibillion-dollar effort to position itself at the forefront of connected hardware, Meta is going all in on computers for your face.

These look more like something you could wear everyday. Much closer than Apple is today.

F1

After days of speculation, Daniel Ricciardo’s exit from RB was confirmed on Thursday, with the team announcing that the Australian will be replaced by reserve driver Liam Lawson for the final six races of the season. With this seemingly bringing the 35-year-old’s extensive F1 career to an end, the news was met with plenty of reaction on social media, including some emotional tributes from his fellow drivers…

I suppose we could all see the writing on the wall. For as much as Christian Horner loves Daniel, he couldn’t save him.

iA Writer

In order to allow our users to access their Google Drive on their phones we had to rewrite privacy statements, update documents, and pass a series of security checks, all while facing a barrage of new, ever-shifting requirements.

This is a wild story from the iA Writer folks and I thought being an iOS developer was fraught with peril. Come on Google, work with these folks.

iMore

Dig out your old iPod and fire up your ‘Songs to cry to’ playlist, I come bearing sad news. After more than 15 years covering everything Apple, it’s with a heavy heart I announce that we will no longer be publishing new content on iMore.

Another publisher, gone. It’s been a rough year for tech blogs and magazines.

Matt Mullenweg • WordPress

It has to be said and repeated: WP Engine is not WordPress. My own mother was confused and thought WP Engine was an official thing. Their branding, marketing, advertising, and entire promise to customers is that they’re giving you WordPress, but they’re not. And they’re profiting off of the confusion.

This is some kind of weird fight that I’m sure has way more to it than we’re privy to.

Matt Mullenweg • WordPress

WP Engine wants to control your WordPress experience, they need to run their own user login system, update servers, plugin directory, theme directory, pattern directory, block directory, translations, photo directory, job board, meetups, conferences, bug tracker, forums, Slack, Ping-o-matic, and showcase. Their servers can no longer access our servers for free.

So, Mullenweg has gone completely nuclear on WP Engine. Thing is, WP Engine can take a cut of the code and do whatever they want with it, right?

It’s probably not that easy but I thought that was one of the benefits of open source software?

Google took a cut of Safari who took a cut of KHTML. It’s the way open source works.

It’s all a confusing mess to me so I don’t have a real opinion on the matter except to say I hope this doesn’t end badly for Matt and WordPress.

Maggie Boccella • Fangoria

The Crossing Over Express garnered over 500,000 views on the service that shall remain nameless in its first seventy-two hours — not too shabby for an eleven-minute short. Even more so, it must be cathartic for its creators, as it was inspired by a moment in Barnett’s young adulthood, where he had a chance to reflect on his own grief after losing his mother at seventeen, as he tells it

I still haven’t seen this but I plan on finding it later. I just won’t watch it on Space Karen’s platform.

The emphasis in the quoted bit from the article is by me. I replaced the name of the service with “the service that shall remain nameless.”

Rachel by the Bay

Late yesterday, I put up a post about how to get into colocation in about the crappiest way possible. I skipped a bunch of details just to get it out there. The inspiration was based on finding out just how many people have no idea that this business model even exists.

Just a little history less for those too young to know about these things. I once had a Windows 2000’server running in a co-located rack at a friends ISP. It ran my blog for at least a year.

Casey Newton • Platformer

Ever since Platformer left Substack in January, readers have been asking us how it’s been going. Today, in keeping with our annual tradition of anniversary posts (here are one, two, and three), I’ll answer that question — and share some other observations on the state of independent media over the past year.

Just a Platformer update. Go check it out and see what it’s like out there for indie publishers like Platformer.

FractalFir

Instead of using LLVM to generate native code, my project turns the internal Rust representation called MIR, into .NET Common Intermediate Language. CIL is then stored inside .NET assemblies, which allows the .NET runtime to load, and execute the compiled Rust code easily.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this project.

John Sculley • apple.fandom.com

The Copland Project was an effort by Apple Computer to create an updated version of their Mac OS operating system. Begun in earnest in March 1994 and named after American composer Aaron Copland, it was abandoned in August 1996.

The best thing that ever happened to Apple was purchasing NeXT and Steve Jobs returning to the helm.

Kim’s mini roses are extremely happy.

Tinted with large icons. It’s interesting. I’ll definitely keep the large icons. The tinting is most likely going away.

I did this to see what Stream’s icon looked like tinted. It’s not good.

And, yes, I like orange. 🍊🎃🧡🍑

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Raw Story

US guitarist and singer Tito Jackson, an original member of the legendary Jackson 5 group and older brother of pop superstars Michael and Janet, has died at the age of 70, his sons said late Sunday.

🪦

Evan Martin

The “Windows emulator” half of retrowin32 is an implementation of the Windows API, which means it provides implementations of functions exposed by Windows. I’ve recently changed how calls from emulated code into these native implementations works and this post gives background on how and why.

Pretty nifty exploration of parts of a Rust based implementation of the Windows API.

Clyde Hughes • UPI

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told corporate staffers in a memo on Monday that they needed to return to the office five days a week by Jan. 2.

COVID changed so much and many folks made big life changes as part of it. I know a number of folks who moved out of Virginia back to their home states or tried a new state altogether. I know of one person who decided to get an RV and travel. He’s still working, just not at the office or a permanent home. That’s the dream.

Anywho, I digress. It makes me wonder how many folks will decide to leave Amazon because of this?

It also makes me wonder if WillowTree will follow suit? Folks who work in the office currently go in three days a week, I believe Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Will we follow suit? Will we cancel all remote work and go back to five days in the office? I kind of doubt it but the thought has crept into my head from time to time.

The Guardian

According to a Guardian analysis, from 2020 to 2022 the real emissions from the “in-house” or company-owned data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple are likely about 662% – or 7.62 times – higher than officially reported.

If these number are accurate regulation is needed to force these companies to build their own power plants using green sources. Wind, sun, and yes, nuclear.

That leads us to the next link.

GeekWire

Microsoft signs deal to revive Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to help power data centers

This is a good move and I’m happy to see Microsoft taking the lead here. Something I don’t see in the article is how does Microsoft intend to transmit the power to their data centers? Do they really use it directly or is it all indirect usage and they’re replacing it on the grid using Three Mile Island?

An option would be to do like Amazon Web Services and build a data center near the power plant.

Perhaps these companies should form a consortium to work toward building out clean energy power plants to service their needs and the wider community? I know, too altruistic.

Chris Fallin

The Rust programming language is best-known for its memory-related type system features that encode ownership and borrowing: these ensure memory safety (no dangling pointers), and also enforce a kind of “mutual exclusion” discipline that allows for provably safe parallelism. It’s fantastic stuff; but it can also be utterly maddening when one attempts to twist the borrow checker in a direction it doesn’t want to go.

This entire piece is deep enough I need to read it again and again.

Something that made me laugh was the bit about using handles to provide indirect access to memory. Back in the pre-NT days Windows used handles to resources so it could be moved around or paged out as needed. Remember, Windows began life on resource constrained Intel boxes. My first Windows computer was a 286 with 1MB of RAM and a giant 40MB hard drive. You didn’t dare allocate fixed memory, of course some folks would.

You use GlobalAlloc to allocate memory and GlobalLock to access it so you could operate on it. The you’d do a GlobalUnlock when you were done accessing it and finally a GlobalFree to return it to the system.

Those API’s still work today but are largely unnecessary given modern architectures.

Here’s a link to read up on Global and Local Functions.

Rust interests me more and more everyday. Swift is, of course, also memory safe and it is now being used cross platform. That may be a better way for me to venture given I use Swift everyday. Yeah, yeah, I’m doing more React Native these days but I still do Swift dev daily. 😀

Federico Viticci • MacStories

Thankfully, there’s plenty to like in iOS 18 even without Apple Intelligence, especially if, like yours truly, you’re the kind of MacStories reader who cares about apps, minor system tweaks, and making your Home Screen look nice.

I’m pointing to Federico’s piece mainly because of the hand drawn illustrations he commissioned. They’re beautiful and completely hand drawn. No AI involved. That’s a beautiful thing.

Jeff Jarvis

You do not read history. For God’s sake, reread or read Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism(or at least listen to the podcast). You fail to cite history for your readers, explaining the context of what is occurring, because you insist on thinking you are writing your “first draft of history.” What hubris. 

We are at such a dangerous time in our nations history and the press shouldn’t be doing their both sides thing. The NY Times and Washington Post should be reporting on the threat Donal Trump poses. I don’t want an authoritarian in office. We’ve never had a King. We don’t need a King or benevolent dictator.

Our nation is about freedom, governed by laws of, by, and for the people.

LFG! 🇺🇸

Matt Birchler

Everyone says Chrome devastates Mac battery life, but does it? I tested for 36 hours to find out.

Love it. An independent study conducted by a regular person, not a corporation with interests in seeing it go a certain way.

If folks are curious how their browser use affects their computer go make a test that follows your patterns and get to work.

I’m too lazy to do something like that but maybe you’re not? 😂

Raul A. Reyes • Newsweek

Martin Truex Jr. has voiced his frustration over what he describes as “ridiculous” racing tactics following a chaotic conclusion to the race at Watkins Glen International on Sunday. After finishing P20, his best result in over two months, Truex was less than complimentary of 2021 champion Kyle Larson, especially during the late-race restarts.

The notion of racing etiquette has been talked about a lot recently, especially after Austin Dillion dumped Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin in Richmond. The right hook of Hamlin was especially egregious and his hit on the wall was over 40 G. Ouch! 🤕

These Next Generation cars are super tough and a set of younger drivers take full advantage of them by beating and banging competition harder than ever.

Truex retires at the end of the season and he’s just done with it.

appdb

Next up, possibly the most entertaining file of them all — App Store Click Activity.csv — 39 megabytes for every tap I’ve made inside the App Store since 2022. It’s simply mind-boggling; this file can’t even be opened in macOS preview!

That’s a shocking about of data collected for a tap of the screen. So much so it’s hard to believe anyone would do it, much less Apple. 😳

The leaves continue to change. 🍁

Before you know it all those trees will be gray sticks.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Erik Pedersen • Deadline

James Earl Jones, the revered actor who voiced Star Wars villain Darth Vader, starred in Field of Dreams and many other films and Broadway shows and is an EGOT winner, died this morning at his home in Dutchess County, NY. He was 93.

My favorite James Earl Jones film is Field of Dreams. When he gave his speech about Baseball I teared up. He as a great actor and by all accounts a kind man.

Julio Merino

Over the years, I’ve repeatedly heard that Windows NT is a very advanced operating system and, being a Unix person myself, it has bothered me to not know why. I’ve been meaning to answer this question for years and I can do so now, which means I want to present you my findings.

A great analysis of Windows NT. I’ve been a fan of the OS since it shipped and even got a chance to work on the Windows NT Stress Testing team during the development of Windows NT 3.51. The last time I used Windows as my daily driver was in early 2014. It’s been a minute.

I owe my career to Windows and my Visio mentors. All of those lovely people were exceedingly kind and taught me how to write Windows apps. It was a magical, golden, era of software development.

Anywho, NT is a great OS.

Lawrence Hodge • Jalopnik

Hoonigan Files For Bankruptcy With $1.2 Billion In Debt

This is a real shame. If you’ve never seen the Gymkhana series of videos you should they’re incredible. Ken Block was an amazing driver — yes, that Ken Block.

My favorite of all the Gymkhana videos is the first one I saw. It was GYMKHANA SEVEN, in LA.

Marta Biino • Semafor

The European Court of Justice took aim at both Apple and Google on Tuesday, ruling that the tech giants owe billions in taxes and fines in two key cases.

A lot of hot takes on this subject this week. When you get as big and powerful as Apple and Google you’re bound to attract the attention of regulators. Just ask Microsoft.

Jillian Frankel • NBC News

Former President Donald Trump, who makes frequent false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen through rampant fraud, warned Saturday that he would attempt to imprison anyone who engages in “unscrupulous behavior” during the 2024 race results.

Unhinged, unfit, and mentally inept. A perfect combination for the Office of the President, right? 🤬

This dude can go straight to hell.

Louie Mantia

How much is enough for Apple? When will they have enough money? It seems to me there’s nothing they can’t have or build with the money they’ve accumulated.

I think a lot of us Apple fans think this way, Louie. Unfortunately Apple is beholden to good old capitalists. They want their quarterly profits. That means brining home the bacon! 🐷

Apple will eventually have their downturn. It happened to Microsoft after they got too big for their own good, but they adapted and turned things around.

Apple is entering their “all regulatory agencies have an eye on us” phase. I suspect it’ll get worse before it gets better.

Andy Kalmowitz • Jalopnik

Abandoned Tesla Cybertruck Becomes Tourist Destination In Seattle

I mean most people should abandon their Cybertrucks. They’re $100,000 Space Karen stan garbage.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft • Newsweek

Several NASCAR teams have come forward with accusations of coercion and threats during recent charter negotiations. This revelation has cast a shadow over the ongoing discussions, sparking controversy and raising serious concerns about the sport’s governance and financial stability.

The business side of NASCAR has become interesting. Teams have to re-up their charters every few years. That seems wrong to me. I’d love to see them change that system to a franchise system like the NFL. You buy it once and hopefully the value rises so if you sell it you can make a profit.

I fantasize about running NASCAR and all the changes I’d make. That would be the first change. Help the teams stay profitable.

23XI — pronounced “twenty-three eleven” — is one of the two teams who didn’t sign the agreement. Michael Jordan is a co-owner of that team.

Yahoo Sports

Tua Tagovailoa suffers another concussion from hard hit in 31-10 loss to Bills

Mr. Tagovailoa is very young and has a lot of football left in him, but if I were him, I’d retire. CTE is a real thing and it may result in a mush brain later in life.

Retire and enjoy your family.

Priss and Flynn living the good life.

Ms. Gracie living her best life. 🥰

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I love me a four day work week, don’t you? And that’s all I have to say about that.

We’re going to see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice this morning at 10. I haven’t heard too much about it but I suspect it’ll be pretty fun. We’ll see.

I hope you enjoy the links.

Erik S Lesser • VICE

Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, about an hour east of Atlanta, is at the center of another school shooting in the United States on Wednesday morning.

Ban all assault weapons, now. They are weapons of war and regular folks don’t need to own weapons of war.

We need a better registration process and training for all weapons. Licensing that has to be renewed every year at a federal government run licensing agency.

Zero gun show sales or online sales. Purchases have to be in person, with initial licensing, and a waiting period of 30 days which requires proof of upcoming training and final licensing within 30 days of receiving the weapon.

Registration would include registration with a centralized ATF database of weapons accessible to local, state, and federal law enforcement.

Make it difficult and expensive so it’s taken very seriously.

Jonathan J. Cooper • The Associated Press

School shootings are a “fact of life,” so the U.S. needs to harden security to prevent more carnage like the shooting this week that left four dead in Georgia, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance said Thursday.

JD Vance is a garbage human. Zero empathy. Asshole.

Noor Al-Sabai • Futurism

OpenAI is begging the British Parliament to allow it to use copyrighted works because it’s supposedly “impossible” for the company to train its artificial intelligence models — and continue growing its multi-billion-dollar business — without them.

This shouldn’t be allowed if the owner of the site doesn’t want it crawled.

I can see using sites in the public domain who are ok with it.

Go ahead, scrape my site. It’ll assuredly drop the IQ of your AI a few points. 😃

Dave Winer • Scripting News

How podcasting got its name

This is a piece from 2013. I love blogs for the ability to go back in time and gain knowledge on just about any topic.

I recall the 2004 time period quite well. I remember reading on Dave’s blog how this new creation was going and not understanding it at all. Sure, I understood the technical aspects just fine. I didn’t understand why we needed it.

Well, now I think a lot of folks understand why even if they don’t about the mechanism.

Podcasting is amazing and I appreciate it.

Thanks, Dave and Adam, as well as anyone who participated in the process.

NASCAR

Another NASCAR Xfinity Series race that was seemingly in Sheldon Creed’s grasp wriggled free again Saturday at Darlington Raceway.

I felt so bad for Sheldon Creed on Saturday after the race. He’s a great driver and one of my Xfinity favorites but the poor guy can’t seem to win a race. He now holds the record for most second place finishes.

He also revealed a dark side to NASCAR Xfinity racing. He’s not making much to drive a car as a professional driver. In fact most drivers have to bring their own sponsorship to the team to even get a ride! That’s crazy!

Tim Hardwick • MacRumors

Apple is expected to launch a fourth-generation iPhone SE early next year with an OLED display for the first time, marking the completion of Apple’s adoption of OLED technology across all iPhone models.

I’m still using my iPhone 11 and it’s getting a little long in the tooth, especially the battery.

After reading the specs — I know, it’s just a rumor — I’m thinking an SE may be in my future. Why? Well mostly because of a reduced price.

Heck, this years iPhone will probably double in price so the new SE will end up being the price of todays iPhone. 🤣

Jake Kanter • Deadline

And it seems that Sir Ian McKellen could be coming back to his beloved role as J.R.R. Tolkien’s wizard after revealing that he had been approached about featuring in the new Lord of the Rings films.

The man is in his 80’s now and was recently injured after a fall. They’d better get started if they want him to participate.

Also. Why do we need a remake of the Lord of the Rings? I guess it has been over 20 years since Peter Jackson’s epic released. That’s crazy.

Gustaf Kilander • The Independent

Donald Trump and his allies are preparing to make claims of election and voter fraud if he loses in November - according to election experts and a number of old-school Republicans.

But of course they are. It’s a downright miracle we’ve gone over 200 years as a nation without some knucklehead like Trump doing crap like this to become President.

I hope the man loses by a wide margin.

Oh, no media should have the Orange man on their show until the election is complete. Don’t give him the opportunity to declare victory like he did last time.

John Scalzi

Starter Villain won this year’s Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

I like John Scalzi’s work a lot and I miss following him on social media. I wish he’d walk away from X and join Mastodon full time.

Hmmmm, I think he’s on Bluesky. 🤔

Louie Mantia

I’m proud to announce the all-new Parakeet website.

I want to start with a brief historical view of Parakeet’s online presence, then I’ll walk you though some of the key moments making the new website, and then lastly how it makes me feel having our work presented in this way.

I really dig Louie’s style. His blog is a piece of art in my book and he’s applied that same style to Parakeet’s site! Lovin it! 😍

Jowi Morales • Tom’s Hardware

Texas resident used Apple AirTags to discover plastics taken to Houston recycling centers aren’t being recycled

Why does this not surprise me, especially in Texas where they have drive thru Margaritas, free handguns with a purchase at a 7-11, and allow corporations to pollute at will.

Ok, ok, I admit the drive thru Margarita thing is kinda cool. 🍹

Hello there Walking Stick.

This is the monster that got Kolby the other day. It was buzzing around the back door and he swatted it out of the air. It latched onto the underside of his paw and stung him. It didn’t last long after that.

Kolby hopped around for a while, licked his paw for an hour or so, and was all back to normal. He’s been himself ever since. Still snapping and swatting at bugs outside.

In the pictures I’ve included it’s missing the back part of its abdomen. The stinger was pretty darned long.

Fangora

After bringing in an estimated $11.5 million over the long Labor Day weekend, director Fede Alvarez’s Romulus has now earned $91 million domestically along with a huge $195 million overseas, bringing its running total to $296 million worldwide. That means it’s second only to director Ridley Scott’s ambitious 2012 prequel Prometheus, which took in $403 million globally in its day.

Emphasis is mine. Prometheus is the number one movie in the Alien franchise? 😳

That’s shocking to me. Prometheus was good, don’t get me wrong, but to be the top film is, well, shocking.

Here’s my list. I know you didn’t ask for it, but you’re gonna get it anyway. 😂

Worst to first

• Alien Resurrection
• Prometheus
• Alien 3
• Alien: Covenant Alien
• Aliens

Aliens was such a masterful piece of filmmaking.

I haven’t seen Alien: Romulus so my list isn’t complete yet, but I’m looking forward to seeing it.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Our grandkids are with us this weekend and for some reason that always throws off Ms. Gracie’s sleep cycle. Her usual 6:30 wake-up came at 5:30 this morning. I suppose that gives me more time to write before the kids wake up. 😁

It’s been a pretty average week this week. I did switch to a different team mid-week. Still on the same application just a different feature set and this time I’m embedded with a team from our client. It’s gonna be fun and I’m excited for it.

Weve had a giant wasp of some kind buzzing around the back door. We think it may be a Cicada Killer. Whatever it was, it was big. I say was because Kolby decided to swat it out of the air and was stung my it. The wasp didn’t last long after that. Kolby is now limping around the house. Poor guy. 😔

The kids are awake. This will be an abbreviated post. 😁

Stephanie K. Baer • The San Francisco Standard

Steve Silberman, writer on the Grateful Dead and autism, dies at 66

R.I.P.

Ryan Smith • AnandTech

It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I’ve ever needed to write here at AnandTech. After over 27 years of covering the wide – and wild – word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech’s final day of publication.

It’s sad to see tech magazines/blogs disappear. How many more will fall over the next year?

WordPress Blog

Since Automattic acquired Tumblr we’ve made it more efficient, grown its revenue, and worked to improve the platform. But there’s one part of the plan that we haven’t yet started, which is to run Tumblr on WordPress. I’m pleased to say we’re kicking off that project now!

[They’re hiring to help with this effort!(https://automattic.com/work-with-us/tumblr-migration/) If I were a backend type I think I’d throw my hat in the ring. What an amazing effort to be a part of!

Alex Kladov

People complain about Rust syntax. I think that most of the time when people think they have an issue with Rust’s syntax, they actually object to Rust’s semantics. In this slightly whimsical post, I’ll try to disentangle the two.

This is a pretty neat look at Rust syntax and why certain choices were made for the standard library.

Tim Hardwick • MacRumors

Apple Lays Off Around 100 Services Staff Across Apple Books and News

I wonder how big the Books and News organization is? Is this a big layoff? It seems like it know how lean Apple tends to run.

Asahi Lina

A subset of C kernel developers just seem determined to make the lives of the Rust maintainers as difficult as possible. They don’t see Rust as having value and would rather it just goes away.

You’d think the C kernel developers would embrace this effort in hopes of improving kernel memory safety. I’m down with the idea.

Toby Christie • Sports Illustrated

Kyle Busch Chose to Race the Right Way on Final Lap at Daytona

With all the attention Richard Childress Racing is getting from the number 3 wrecking Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin to secure a win at Richmond, Bush did the right thing.

You can’t make it out in these pictures but some trees around our home are starting to change color. It’s incredible how that just happens. Before you know it the ground is covered in multi-colored leaves. Perfect for making piles so grandkids can jump in them. 😃

Chillin’ for a bit.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’ve been a bit obsessed with the idea of creating a CAD package for the Mac recently. For the challenge of it is why, but it would only be doable in a decent amount of time with financial backing large enough to hire a few folks to pull it off.

There is a way to jumpstart the process. The Open Design Alliance has portable libraries for reading and writing DWG files as well as rendering and so much more. All in portable C++.

Imagine a beautiful CAD app created just for the Mac. And yes, I know many already exist. 😁

Oh, right, I have a Mac app I need to finish.

Well, let’s get to it! Enjoy the links.

NBC News

DNC 2024 highlights: Kamala Harris accepts historic nomination in speech capping Democratic convention

We have our nominee! Now, let’s push her across the finish line and get our first Madame President!

Marc Palmer • Shareshot

Today we launched Shareshot! We’ve been working on this app for almost exactly a year, and we’re so pleased to be able to finally ship it. Here’s a little backstory and behind-the-scenes for those of you into app development.

Congratulations, Marc! Shareshot is a beautiful example of iOS craftsmanship. Go give it a try!

Alex Gaynor

I am an unrepentant advocate for migrating away from memory-unsafe languages (C and C++) to memory safe languages in security-relevant contexts. Many people reply that migrating large code bases to new languages is expensive, and we’d be better off making C++ safer. This is a reasonable response, after all there’s an enormous amount of C++ in the wild.

There is an enormous amount of C and C++ in the world. Too much to simply replace. I like Alex’s pragmatism on the matter. He has some proposals to improve the language without taking it too far down the path to incompatibility.

Just this week my interest in Rust began to grow. I’ve been using Swift daily since 2014, maybe 2015, and I really love the language and its ability to leverage the compiler to fix many of the memory issues seen in C and C++, like dangling pointers, forgotten allocations, and object lifetimes. We also have Rust to provide us with a solid memory protection model and the ability to be used for high performance code that is cross platform.

Rewriting software is costly and can also cost you your company. So taking that on should probably be avoided like the plague.

What if you picked your battles? How about writing new code in Rust or Swift? Perhaps improve public access to API’s by fronting it with Rust? How about picking some code known to cause a lot of crashes in your app and rewrite just that bit?

We can use tried and true methods in C++ to improve memory safety but it requires developers to be extremely disciplined.

Simple things like filling new memory allocations with known patterns. I prefer to fill the memory with zeros. You can also do the same when you delete it.

Reference counted pointers — AKA smart pointers — help.

Modern C++ has introduced mechanisms to transfer pointer ownership, always a tough problem to handle and the problem that lead to the creation of smart pointers.

Anywho, the piece is an easy read with good ideas. Go give it a gander.

Jess Weatherbed • The Verge

Many Procreate users can breathe a sigh of relief now that the popular iPad illustration app has taken a definitive stance against generative AI. “We’re not going to be introducing any generative AI into our products,” Procreate CEO James Cuda said in a video posted to X. “I don’t like what’s happening to the industry, and I don’t like what it’s doing to artists.”

I can really appreciate this stance. Artists often have a deep psychological attachment to their work and the creative process — hell — they go through to bring it to life. Taking that work, that style, and using it to train an AI to rip them off is just slimy.

Caleb Newton • Bipartisan Report

A dozen individuals who served as lawyers in Republican presidential administrations are bucking Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and endorsing Democratic presidential pick Kamala Harris in a new letter that was publicized first at Fox News. The list includes prominent former judge J. Michael Luttig, who also served in the Reagan Administration.

Even with all of this at least half the country will vote for the Orange Man. It’s shocking, really.

Joe Brockmeier • lwn.net

The FreeBSD Project is, for the second time this year, engaging in a long-running discussion about the possibility of including Rust in its base system. The sequel to the first discussion included some work by Alan Somers to show what it might look like to use Rust code in the base tree. Support for Rust code does not appear much closer to being included in FreeBSD’s base system, but the conversation has been enlightening.

Speaking of Rust! Apparently Rust has found its way into the Linux Kernel and Microsoft has used it for Windows API development. It’s time for FreeBSD to get on board!

I wonder if Apple with push some Swift into Darwin or XNU at some point? Swift was written so it could be used for system level programming.

Carole Cadwalladr • The Guardian

Inciting rioters in Britain was a test run for Elon Musk. Just see what he plans for America

Musk has gone deep down the MAGA rabbit hole. His ketamine addled brain lives in its own world of conspiracies and white supremacy.

He’s unraveling in real time. Dumping his, often wacko, thoughts on X. He behaves more like a two year old than a man in his 50s.

Why do people still believe this man is some kind of genius? He’s a man child who throws hissy fits until he gets what he wants.

Money can’t buy happiness but it can buy politicians.

Matt Birchler • Birchtree

Why does Apple feel it’s worth trashing their relationship with creators and developers so that they can take 30% of the money I pay an up-and-coming creator who is trying to make rent in time each month? This isn’t a hypothetical, I genuinely want to know. Is the goal to turn into Microsoft, because this is how you turn into Microsoft.

Hate to say it Matt but Apple is today what Microsoft was in the 90’s. They are the 800lb gorilla in the room throwing their weight around.

I really love Apple products and their development tools and can’t see switching away from them. I just wish they’d be a bit kinder to the development community, that’s all.

Kelly Dobkin • Los Angeles Times

chef and co-owner Eric Park serves a black sesame misugaru drink that combines espresso, oat milk, the multigrain powder and gets topped with black sesame cream. It’s nutty, sweet and frothy, but not too rich thanks to the bitterness of the espresso.

Ok, now I really want to try misugaru. The one described above sounds incredible. 🤤

Alex Henderson • Raw Story

Reading through the Ohio Revised Code, Case Western Reserve University Law Professor Atiba Ellis couldn’t help looking for an alternative interpretation. Was there an error? Shoddy drafting? Because why on earth, he wondered, would a person clear that third bar, and submit documentation proving they broke the law by registering to vote?

This is just another GOP scheme to kick people off voter rolls. 🤬

Foone

ahh, another startup that burnt out trying to build some silly AI project on crap hardware. I wonder what they did? I check their URL: ahh. healthcare. great, great.

This Mastodon thread is an interesting read and a cautionary tale. Before you sale off old hardware make sure you remove its storage or at the very least wipe the storage with a destructive reformat.

Zarar

Around 2AM this morning I had a realization that this was the most stressed I have ever been. On verge of a complete breakdown.

Ahhh, the life of a software developer. I’ve seen and experienced this stress on numerous occasions. I don’t recommend it.

Daryl Baxter • iMore

This MacBook app generated $100,000 in seven days, now Stripe won’t pay up

This is a wild story and I hope the developer is able to get paid and save his company.

Kim has been making family photo albums and she ran across pictures of 40 year old Rob with dark hair! It’s wild to think my hair was dark brown at one time. 🤣

She sent me a picture of a couple of them and said I looked just like my brother.

I mean, we are brothers.

I’ve been meaning to register Hayseed as an LLC for eons.

Finally did it.

Had a little help mowing the lawn.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I still get a bit lost in my new gig — at WillowTree — as a React Native/TypeScript dev. The syntax is making more sense and getting easier to follow, but, I do have a difficult time understanding the errors produced by yarn ts:check. It’s the same each time I learn a new language.

I’m also developing an interest in Rust. That’ll have to be a part time interest for a long time I suppose. I have more important business to attend to. 😃

Onward!

Filipe Espósito • 9to5Mac

Shareshot is an iOS app that transforms how you share iPhone and iPad screenshots

A friend of mine, Marc Palmer, is part of the duo who created Shareshot! It is, as always, absolutely beautiful, full featured, and stable.

If I’m not too lazy moving forward I should use it to make screenshots for Stream blog posts and the like.

Congratulations, Marc! 🥳

Andrew Carter • WillowTree Blog

Mobile app interactivity, multimodal voice technology, and AI are all converging with Apple Intelligence — Apple’s new artificial intelligence feature set announced at this year’s WWDC, coming soon with iOS 18 (maybe in October). And the secret sauce powering those awesome interactions is something called App Intents.

Andrew is pretty legendary in the halls of WillowTree. So damned smart and witty, and he plays a mean fiddle and banjo.

Anywho, go give his piece on App Intents a gander, you might learn a thing or two.

Kelly Crandall • Racer

Austin Dillon has been stripped of the NASCAR Cup Series playoff eligibility that came with his victory at Richmond Raceway.

Austin Dillion looked great all night. I don’t recall how many laps he lead but it was a lot. He was two laps short of victory when a late caution came out.

On the restart he was beat off the line by Joey Lagano and fell into second place.

I wanted to see Mr. Dillion win so badly. He hasn’t had a win in a couple years and Richard Childress Racing needed one but the way he did it was not great.

He kept the win but was stripped of his points and playoff berth. They should’ve disqualified him and given the win to Legano, if I’m being honest about my feelings.

Scharon Harding • Ars Technica

Sonos is laying off about 100 people, the company confirmed on Wednesday. The news comes as Sonos is expecting to spend $20 to $30 million in the short term to repair the damage from its poorly received app update.

It’s incredible how much an app redesign can make or break an application or company.

Another critically acclaimed podcasting app called Overcast was also redesigned and released recently. It too has had a very difficult time with its subscribers. Lots of one star reviews and hate.

Rewrites can kill companies. Don’t do it. Evolve your code over time. Think of it as a Ship of Theseus.

Tasha Robinson • Polygon

Ryan Reynolds had very specific tech (and humor) requirements for Wolverine’s corpse

I still haven’t see the new Deadpool but I really want to. Deadpool’s obsession with Wolverine is funny as heck and I’m here for it. Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman are hysterical.

Juan José López Jaimez and Meador Inge • Google Bug Hunters

In a throwback to the past, this blog post takes us on a journey back to a time when eBPF was a focal point in the realm of kernel security research. In this update, we recount the discovery of CVE-2023-2163, a vulnerability within the eBPF verifier, what our root-cause analysis process looked like, and what we did to fix the issue.

Fresh off the heels of the Crowdstrike fiasco we get a story of how Google engineers found vulnerabilities in a Linux technology that allows for similar extensions to the OS. Similar in desired outcome, not in implementation.

Matthias Endler

Quite a few websites are unusable by now because they got “optimized for Chrome.” Microsoft Teams, for example, and the list is long. These websites fail for no good reason.

Chrome has definitely become the new Internet Explorer in a way. Devs have become lazy and don’t code for the open web, they’re coding against a specific browser. Not good. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Stan Alcorn • Rest of World

How Spotify started — and killed — Latin America’s podcast boom

What Spotify has done is not podcasting if it doesn’t allow any podcast player to subscribe to a feed. That’s part of what makes a podcast a podcast. What they’ve done is something that needs a new name.

Lately I’ve heard some podcasts announce ad free versions available on Apple Podcasts, which is also just as bad as Spotify’s locked up audio thing.

Please, don’t do this, keep your podcast a podcast and find a better way to create subscriptions. Others have done it. You can too.

Patreon

Apple is requiring that Patreon switch to their iOS in-app purchase system starting this November, or risk being removed from the App Store. Here’s what’s coming, and what you can do about it.

My opinion on this is simple.

If they really believe in creators Patreon should abandon their iOS App in favor of a really great mobile experience on their website.

Liam Proven • The Register

Before WordPerfect, the most popular work processor was WordStar. Now, the last ever DOS version has been bundled and set free by one of its biggest fans.

It’s not surprising how many fans of WordStar exist. Many of them are novelists and columnists. The best of the best writers in the world. Of course they’re most likely of a certain vintage, if you know what I mean? 😂

I started as a BASIC programmer and used WordStar as my editor until I discovered Brief. True story.

David Edwards • Raw Story

Judge Chutkan faces call to seize Trump’s passport after threat to flee to Venezuela

Can Judge Chutkan do the opposite and encourage Trump to move to Venezuela, now? That would solve a lot of problems with the upcoming election and help preserve democracy.

It would be a great service to the country. 🇺🇸

Rex Huppke • USA TODAY

Trump rambles, slurs his way through Elon Musk interview. It was an unmitigated disaster.

I listened to it for a few minutes and the Orange Man sounded like Sylvester the cat!

Sufferin’ Suckatash! 😋

Dunkin’s Bonfire S’mores Frozen Coffee is absolutely delicious.

It’s so good and bad for you I wish I’d never discovered it. 😃