Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I know I did! It’s a time for family and wonderful food at the Fahrni household, especially the pies! Kim’s pumpkin and Haileigh’s Pecan pie are amazing and I always eat a little too much of each. 😋
Some have wondered why the Trump campaign is being so open about the repressive policies they intend to implement. This “transparency” is in line with authoritarian history: Autocrats often tell you who they are and what they intend to do to you before they take office. They do this as a challenge to norms, and they do this as a threat.
If TFG is elected again and destroys our Democracy we will deserve everything we get and I hate the thought of it happening.
Where will people immigrate to if our democracy comes to an end in favor of an autocracy? Canada? Germany? Some other European nation not caught up in this current authoritarian wave?
Anita Chabria • Los Angeles Times
A unicorn costume, a hammer and a belief that pedophiles are using public schools to destroy democracy: The trial of David DePape for attacking Paul Pelosi was strange and disturbing.
It’s frightening how folks can go down these rabbit holes so quickly and turn into complete, frothing at the mouth, lunatics. 😳
Music streaming service Spotify struck a seemingly unique and highly generous deal with Google for Android-based payments, according to new testimony in the Epic v. Google trial.
Well, well, well, good for Spotify. I’m sure any indie app maker would take a deal like that but it’s always the “big guys” that get preferable treatment.
It can’t hurt that Spotify is a direct competitor to Apple Music and puts a dent in Apple’s bottom line because of it. Not that it’s hurting Apple. 🤣
Monday was a day that crystallized on just how many levels our democracy and its promises stand on a precarious perch.
So a Colorado judge found that his Orangeness is in fact responsible for the insurrection. She also said he’s still eligible to run for President because the 14 Amendment doesn’t apply to the President because he was not “an officer of the United States” that could be disqualified under the amendment.
What?! That makes no sense. 😳
James Boyd and Dianna Russini • The Athletic
Former Colts LB Shaquille Leonard goes unclaimed on waivers: How injuries derailed his stellar run in Indy
Hearing this bummed me out. I like Shaq Leonard. He’s a true leader on and off the field and he has a motor that won’t stop.
Here’s hoping he finds a new team soon and is able to get fully healthy and back on the field.
Heck, even if things are over for him prematurely, due to injury, he’s had a great career.🏈
I do think the clock is ticking, though. The deterioration of Google’s culture will eventually become irreversible, because the kinds of people whom you need to act as moral compass are the same kinds of people who don’t join an organisation without a moral compass.
Interesting read from an 18-year employee of Google. Companies change as they grow. It’s just a fact. WillowTree has changed tremendously since I joined in 2019, especially after the Telus International acquisition. It happens as companies get bigger. ❤️
NFL denounces hate speech, says it has expressed concerns to Elon Musk’s X
Sure, like Space Karen is going to listen to the puny NFL.
Some advice for the NFL. Get off of X, start a Mastodon instance called nfl.social, and start doing whatever it is you use X for on your Mastodon instance. Problem solved. You’re welcome.
Adobe has been issued with a formal antitrust complaint by EU regulators regarding its $20 billion bid for cloud-based product design platform Figma.
I wonder what kind of deal Adobe will have to strike to make this work? It’s obvious Figma is winning the hearts and minds of designers. I feel really bad for the likes of Sketch who are a native Mac only shop. Their work is beautiful and extremely useful but can it survive? I hope so!
Also, please stop using Figma for EVERYTHING in the company. I’ve seen folks make presentations with it and make project plans with it and both of those uses really sucked.
You might as well hitch your wagon to Musk with Krazy Glue at this point, Linda, because despite what your deluded pals on Madison Avenue might think, there’s no going back now. Stacking the events of the past week on top of the mound of insanity that’s already piled high over the course of your short reign has seen to that.
Good luck, Linda. I hope the man is at the very least paying you crap tons of money to destroy your good name and reputation.
Maybe it’s all worth it to her for that CEO title? 🤔
First part of an in-depth guide into developing a native macOS application using Haskell with Swift and SwiftUI. This part covers the set-up required to call Haskell functions from Swift in an XCode project using SwiftUI.
I love seeing other languages integrated into applications! VBA on Windows apps was a huge benefit to app users and gave them the ability to create specialized scripts to help automate their workflows. Even with all of the security implications and exploits it is the best implementation of a scripting environment to date.
I’ve also seen folks integrate Lua with great success and look at how the integration of JavaScript into native iOS and Android apps — ala React Native — has changed the app landscape.
Following on from the previous memory leak I have demonstrated in the Finder in macOS 14.1.1, here’s a second, discovered by Kate, which might have a common root cause.
I have questions. Is this a leak or is it memory consumption? Those are two different things. One is not freeing resources because of a coding error, the other is not freeing resources intentionally. An intentional case would be caching things in memory to improve performance.
Also, if the system needs memory at some point and can’t find enough does the Finder relinquish this memory back to the OS?
Either way I suppose it can be seen as a leak. At the very least it could be a performance problem if system performance degrades because of it.
What I’m saying is that Apple sometimes takes its failures and learns important lessons that inform its future attempts… but sometimes, it seems to just give up.
Apple is a company of people and people make mistakes.
I feel like the Vision Pro could be a mistake. Maybe mistake is too harsh a word? Maybe it’s just a product that’s too immature at the moment? I’m sure they’ll sell a hojillion of them on day one but will there be a great app ecosystem to support it?
My guess is highly specialized applications will drive sales but what do I know? Not much. 😂
Harvey’s urgency, even 12 hours later, is a reflex: This is exactly what she did for 13 years as the head of Twitter’s trust and safety team.
It must have been almost impossible to squelch all the crazy and hate on Twitter. Now X just doesn’t care and allows all the crazy and hate to blossom.
Get out, now. ☢️
Last month, Google launched a new feature for Chrome called IP Protection that makes it easier for the company to spy on you. No surprise, since this is Google’s business model. But what’s concerning is that Google is marketing this as a privacy feature.
I don’t know much about this but it seems like something I need to better understand.
I’m a Safari user and I mix Firefox in there.
I had to install Chrome at work because a client has some Chrome friendly tools we need to use. 😮
Nilay Patel and Alex Heath • The Verge
After an attempted coup by OpenAI’s board that lasted five days, Altman is returning alongside co-founder Greg Brockman.
Dizzying. I hope Altman keeps a good set of ethicists around him to keep him in check.
We don’t want the robots to take over the world, do we. 🤖
It is this type of definition, however, that holds RSS back. Why does it just have to be updates to a website? RSS can be used to distribute all sorts of information. Once you start adding custom namespaces the possibilities are amazing.
I agree with Colin. RSS can be used for many things and why not? It’s extensible and there are gobs of tooling for it.
Just think of what it did for Podcasting.
I know at one someone maintained an RSS feed of hospitals with extra drugs other hospitals could ask for. You’d be surprised how many hospitals run out of certain drugs and how many have a surplus. It was a nice way to connect folks. Yet another niche served by RSS.
I’ve had the thought of just publishing my blog as RSS only. Sure, discovery would suck, but feed readers are just another type of web browser, only the web comes to the feed reader.😃
Happy Birthday President Biden! 🥳🎂🔥🚒
