Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
The grandkids are coming down the stairs! I’ve been rushing to finish this post since 6AM, it’s now 7AM and I’m mostly done!
Hope you enjoy the links! Hitting that publish button in 3… 2… 1…
Philz Coffee is reversing course and adding Pride flags back to all of its locations, a little over a week after it decided it would pull them from stores to create “an inclusive experience.”
I was puzzled the CEO thought pulling Pride flags down would create “an inclusive experience.” Pulling them down does the exact opposite. It tolks folks they weren’t as important and weren’t welcome back to Philz. Poor form. 🤬
This week, The Walt Disney Company initiated company-wide layoffs that affected departments across the entire organization, targeting everything from the home video team to ESPN. One division was hit hard according to reports: Marvel Studios, which lost nearly its entire visual development team. Over the last two decades, these artists shaped the look of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, from costume design to the films’ biggest moments, and won many awards along the way.
One particularly poignant post came from artist Wesley Burt, who lamented “the irony of having a one-on-one HR layoff meeting in the conference room with my Loki mural on it.”
That line “the irony of having a one-on-one HR layoff meeting in the conference room with my Loki mural on it.” kills me. I’ve been laid off and felt embarassed. I hope others don’t feel that way but being sat across from something you worked so hard to create is like rubbing salt in an already open wound.
The availability of higher-end models of Mac Studio and Mac mini continues to deplete, amid worsening supply constraints and the possibility of an M5 refresh just around the corner.
Several models are now showing as “currently unavailable” at the Apple Store, which means buyers aren’t even able to place an order for them. That includes the M4 Mac mini with 32 GB RAM, and two configurations of Mac Studio
Interesting times at Apple. They’re in the uncomfortable position of being extremely popular. 🤣
Steve Troughton-Smith via Mastodon
The story around the decline in software quality around macOS is the same as it’s been for years: Apple doesn’t have the bandwidth to maintain two copies of every app, one for macOS and one for iOS, and keep feature parity. That’s why they embarked down the road of Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI. The two paths out of this rut are either invest heavily in hiring and training up dwindling desktop/AppKit engineers, or align with the iOS versions and just have one codebase built with UIKit and/or SwiftUI
In a lot of ways this is extremely sad to me. I know a lot of companies are ok going the “least common denominator” route when it comes to shipping cross platform software, but we’re not used to seeing Apple do that. Apple has always been know for its design and engineering prowess. For making software highly functional, fully embracing everything their operating system has to offer, and make it all delightful.
The iOS’ification of macOS is hard on the old timers to accept. Their beautiful user interface has become less and less beautiful over time and less stable.
As for me, I’m rolling with the punches as they say. I’ve seen some things with Liquid Glass that make me say to myself “interesting choice” but mostly things are fine and on occasion I’ll run into something new that gives me joy.
Here’s hoping the Apple Engineering teams tighten things up and the design team does the same.
Along with launching the Micropub API, we are also happy to share that Pika now supports iA Writer and Drafts. Visit those links to find instructions for using these excellent writing tools to create draft posts on Pika. We anticipate adding a few more third-party apps to the mix soon!
This is pretty exciting news! Supporting Micropub is absolutely the way to go for third party clients. Of course I say this because Rooster — my top secret project — is going to support Micropub. So, yeah, I see it as a very good thing.
My first targeted blogging platform is Micro.blog but if all goes well that work should work directly with Pika as well.
Now, can we get WordPress to support Micropub? It would open the door to more writers and bloggers who are more interested in publishing words than managing a CMS.
Congratulations Pika folks! 🥳
Before allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home, the 20-year-old accused attacker wrote about his fear that the AI race would cause humans to go extinct, The San Francisco Chronicle found. Two days later, Altman’s home appeared to be targeted a second time, according to The San Francisco Standard. Only a week earlier, an Indianapolis councilman reported 13 shots fired at his door, with a note that read, “No Data Centers,” after he’d supported a rezoning petition for a data center developer.
This is extremely scary but it doesn’t surprise me. The way CEOs of our LLM companies talk these things will become sentient at some point and they’re already being used to replace people in the workplace, just look at all the layoffs with CEOs saying just that.
I’d imagine we’ll see a lot more of this. Hell, I am surprised someone hasn’t attacked an AI datacenter and burned it to the ground. It’ll happen.
Two supply chain attacks in two weeks. Both followed the same pattern. Buy a trusted plugin with an established install base, inherit the WordPress.org commit access, and inject malicious code. The Flippa listing for Essential Plugin was public. The buyer’s background in SEO and gambling marketing was public. And yet the acquisition sailed through without any review from WordPress.org.
WordPress.org has no mechanism to flag or review plugin ownership transfers. There is no “change of control” notification to users. No additional code review triggered by a new committer. The Plugins Team responded quickly once the attack was discovered. But 8 months passed between the backdoor being planted and being caught.
This is all too common. Back int 2010 I installed a theme to my WordPress site that injected some code into it and it took me a day to sort out what happened and fix it.
I still believe in WordPress and hope they’re able to put some rules in place to mitigate issues like this. Code review, diffs, and administrative rules may help curb some of these catastropic problems. Fingers crossed. 🤞🏼
The tech-bros are building slaves. They may not have consciousness yet, but it’s by no means certain that they won’t one day. And they’ll have access to all of human history, and they’ll understand what we’ve done and why.
I love reading Dave’s stuff, always have, and this is a sobering take on the state of LLMs and where the tech bros are taking us.
Snap is laying off roughly 16 percent of its global workforce in a cost-cutting effort to chase improved profitability with the help of AI. The cuts will impact around 1,000 full-time employees, according to a memo sent to staffers from Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. An additional 300 open roles are also being closed.
Here’s yet another example of a company dismissing folks in favor of replacing them with LLMs. It’s so frightening and depressing to see it.
On the flip side my company — TELUS Digital — sees it as a force multiplier for our developers. So far, so good.
Now the bad news: Since the MacBook Neo is powered by the A18 Pro chip from 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro, a product that’s been discontinued, there is likely a finite number of chips available for MacBook Neo production. Which is why, as reported by Tim Culpan, Apple faces a dilemma, namely: What happens when it runs out of chips to use in the MacBook Neo?
More success affecting Apple. 😂
Apparently the MacBook Neo is a raging success! Now, how do they deal with chip shortages cause by that success? I have no idea but it’ll be fun to watch. 🍿
Small Missouri town ousts half its city council after $6 billion AI data center approval — petition calls for mayor’s removal as frustration (and violence) over AI data centers mounts
This is a less violent way to deal with AI data centers than burning them to the ground. Bravo for choosing intelligence over violence.
