Saturday Morning Coffee
Saturday, August 27, 2022
This is my favorite part of the morning. It’s quiet. Our puppers, Kolby, and our kitties have been fed and Kolby has been let out to do his business. I have my coffee — on the couch with an ice pack on my knee — composing this post.
Sweet silence.
Ars Technica: “Brian Kernighan said hello, asked how their US visit was going, and dropped off hundreds of lines of code that could add Unicode support for AWK, the text-parsing tool he helped create for Unix at Bell Labs in 1977.”
It’s so encouraging to see a legend of computing going strong.
Steven Beschloss: “I didn’t intend to return to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis so soon, but the combination of his latest nastiness combined with the emerging approach of his newly decided Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, made it clear that the Florida race for governor represents more than the question of who will lead Florida into the future. This is shaping up to be a battle between leadership driven by anger and cruelty and leadership that believes kindness and compassion must define our fate.”
I can’t for the life of me understand why people vote for someone so cruel. He has every trait that made Trump such a disaster and he’s a lot smarter than Trump, which makes him even more dangerous.
Democrats are winning because they are the party of freedom. The freedom to choose. The freedom to make a living wage. The freedom to love. The freedom to vote. The freedom to live on a sustainable planet.
— Bradley Whitford (@BradleyWhitford) August 24, 2022
Republicans are losing because they are a cult that worships a moron.
Platformer: “Zatko maintained his public silence for eight months — and then showed up on Tuesday throwing bombs.”
My initial reaction to this news was it would help Musk get out of the Twitter deal. Now I don’t think it’ll help him.
He’s still gonna need his $54.20 per share.
There’s also the ever popular musk.social sitting out there for a $1MM donation to Planned Parenthood. Quite a deal!
Puck News: “‘It’s not been a fun morning,’ Stacy Spikes told me today from New York, where he’s been prepping the new and (hopefully!) improved MoviePass.”
I totally took advantage of MoviePass in 2017. I saw a few movies and it was so worth the price.
This new and improved version could be a boon to movie theaters looking to put butts in seats in our endemic COVID world.
Macworld: “The problem is that, with a month or so to go before macOS Ventura goes final, the System Settings app in the beta is a bit of a disaster. Unless things change in a hurry, Apple is in danger of replacing one of the worst system apps in macOS with a new app that’s just as bad or worse.”
I would love to know why this new OS app is so klunky. I haven’t experienced it myself but from all accounts it’s a real mess.
Now, it could be the app is waiting on some changes from the SwiftUI team to fix some nasty bugs or, perhaps, we’re seeing learning pains from the developer responsible for the app? It happens to the most seasoned developer when you have to make that brain shift to a new paradigm.
If it manages to ship in a buggy state with a terrible user experience it doesn’t bode well for SwiftUI. Who wants to invest their time in a technology that’s not ready for prime time?
Of course SwiftUI is the future of app development for all Apple Platform based applications, it’s just really ugly at the moment.
SwiftUI is amazing until you're totally blocked on something dumb like a custom back button.
— Craig Hockenberry (@chockenberry) August 26, 2022
(Yes, you can hide default and add your own. Yes, that breaks back swipe. Yes, you can override the pan gestures. No, you can't prevent it from fucking up a NavigationPath.)
Fresnoland: “In 2021, the Fresno area experienced 69 days over 100 degrees – a record-breaking number of days, according to data from the National Weather Service. There have already been more than 50 days over 100 this year.”
I was born and raised in the great San Joaquin Valley of California. Yes, it’s hot, no way around it, but these increasing days over 100 degrees isn’t good in so many ways. Climate change is real and we’ve screwed ourselves. The human toll is just getting started.
Jalopnik: “Tesla CEO Elon Musk is none too pleased with Tesla drivers who are pointing out major issues with the company’s Full Self-Driving software, according to Insider.“
Have you seen some of the very damning videos of Tesla’s running over child sized mannequins? It’s really disturbing and Musk isn’t happy about it. He wants them pulled. So much for open feedback.
Fully Self Driving vehicles is a pipe dream at the moment and Tesla is experimenting right out in the open. Tesla’s are dangerous cars when used in FSD mode and it should be banned from general use until Tesla can consistently demonstrate it works.
The UC system was free for Californians until the late 60s when Reagan, then Governor, cut state funding.https://t.co/E5Mf2NPN1c
— Derek Powazek (@fraying) August 24, 2022
Yes, believe it or not, University of California schools were once free to attend. As a nation we need this to come back. Make all State Colleges and Universities free. If you want to go to Harvard that’s fine, you can pay for your education. It gives folks choice and will make America a better place.