I’ve had a head cold for the past week and my body is finally getting on top of it, finally. As a result I’m tired this morning and my brain is foggy and doesn’t want to do anything. Coffee to the rescue, I hope! ☕️
Hope you enjoy the links.
More than 23,000 people have been killed and tens of thousands injured after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Turkey and Syria on Monday, officials said.
It’s been a very sad week for the people of Turkey and Syria. So many dead and wounded. I haven’t kept up with it like I normally would for such a tragedy. Why is that?
Thankfully people are still being rescued from the rubble. America needs to send help.
According to The Register, Google and Mozilla have recently been spotted working on versions of Chromium and Firefox that use their normal Blink and Gecko rendering engines, respectively.
It doesn’t surprise me to hear Google and Mozilla have native browsers built for iOS. Why not, their code is very portable already, it makes sense.
Some competition on the platform would be good for Apple and consumers.
It’s hardly insightful to suggest that the last few years have substantially changed the day to day experience of a knowledge worker. Nearly overnight even the most remote skeptical leadership teams were forced to embrace flexible work practices like working from home.
At WillowTree our CEO, Tobias, is a huge proponent of working in the office full time. When COVID hit we were just getting ready to move into our newly renovated building at Woolen Mills, but that didn’t happen and everybody went remote.
Fast forward a year and a half later and WillowTree is making preparations to return to the office on a hybrid schedule. Then COVID spiked again so it was out on hold. Eventually a poll was taken, we do lots of polls at WillowTree, asking if folks preferred in office or work from home. Tobias himself was shocked to learn that over 20% of the company preferred it.
Things changed based on the poll and a team was created to that would allow anyone to work from anywhere. I’m part of that team and I love it. I’m grateful our leadership is open to big change. So far it’s been really amazing.
Facebook for iOS (FBiOS) is the oldest mobile codebase at Meta. Since the app was rewritten in 2012, it has been worked on by thousands of engineers and shipped to billions of users, and it can support hundreds of engineers iterating on it at a time.
If you’re a developer go read this piece. When folks think of mobile software they most likely think of toy sized apps like Stream, not a lot going on. Then you run into a beast of a codebase like Facebook and you realize mobile software is “real” bonafide software with real challenges.
In the past few decades, however, rather than building new protocols, the internet has grown up around controlled platforms that are privately owned.
This is a piece from 2019 and it holds up really well. He’s basically discussing what ActivityPub and Mastodon have become. A lot of the challenges around siloed social networks is around “free speech.” I put that in quotes because most folks think free speech is a free for all, anything goes, and you can’t ban me because I said something nasty or threatening to you. Of course a platform could ban you and it has nothing to do with free speech. Companies and individuals don’t have to take the abuse and can choose to ban you if they want. Mastodon has helped this in many ways. I run my own Mastodon server and it’s by invitation only so I know and trust the folks on it to maintain a certain decorum. I know they won’t be nasty or threatening and it’s self policing. We need more small instances with better community management.
Today we’re introducing Wildebeest, an open-source, easy-to-deploy ActivityPub and Mastodon-compatible server built entirely on top of Cloudflare’s Supercloud.
I read through this post and I think it’s really wonderful to see addition ActivityPub based services come online. It’s an exciting time!
About the tech experience on Mastodon. This is the last of three posts I have on Mastodon. I’ve been on the app for more than two months and have been content to ghost Twitter.
A nice series of posts about one persons experience with Mastodon. If you have friends fearful of joining they should go read this and see what someone else has experienced. Sure, it’s not Twitter, it’s even better, and it’s growing day by day.
Jack Dorsey believed Twitter should be open, not a silo. Mastodon and ActivityPub are delivering that vision. A central hub, controlled by a single corporation, is no longer in charge. The people are.
After 30 years of dominance, the industry has come to come view Intel as a giant who has fallen on hard times. We do not think this is the right way to view the company, and it creates mental blind spots which hinder our ability to assess what are the right next steps for the company.
It’s hard to believe Intel is having so much trouble. They coasted for so long on their x86 architecture and still make a ton of money from it but the times they are a changing. Apple creating their own, much better, silicon must scare the pants off of Intel internally. They’re lucky Apple doesn’t care to sell their tech to any computer manufacturer. Imagine a Windows PC running on Apple Silicon. That would be glorious. 😃
What is somewhat more puzzling to me is the nature or character of the people who are attracted to this type. The toadies and sycophants, the enablers and lickspittles who compete for proximity to someone in power, someone in control.
I love reading Dave’s stuff. He’s an extremely kind, compassionate, man and a great writer. Unfortunately he lives in Florida and that state is full of looney birds, especially at the government level. Their Governor is is King Looney, a complete nutter, with fantasies of making Florida a totalitarian government run by him. His desire to control everything is exactly the opposite of a free nation and against everything our nation was founded on. He needs to go.
Dave, like many of us, can’t understand why people want this sort of strongman creating horrible policy in charge. Why would you want your rights squashed? You’re American, don’t you believe in freedom for all?
