Rob Fahrni

Follow @fahrni on Micro.blog.

Saturday Morning Coffee

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Spicy Mexican CoffeeWell, 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. 😃

Apple Core'mally

Tiny Apple Core