Rob Fahrni

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Welcome to a Sunday morning edition of Saturday Morning Coffee. 😃 My youngest daughter and I went to breakfast — TipTop Restaurant — and did a bit of Christmas shopping yesterday. It’s something we do every year. You might say it’s tradition. 🎅🏼

Todays forecast calls for a little snow. ❄️ I hope it happens.

My coffee is nice and hot. Let’s get started.

Enjoy!

Pauli Poisuo • /Film

Horror legend Stephen King has written a fair few books over the years. Ever since he burst on the scene with “Carrie” in 1974, he’s given fans at least one book nearly every year. Since most of his work has been extremely popular, he’s also established himself as a bit of an authority on the horror front — and isn’t shy about commenting about either the genre or his craft as a writer.

Who doesn’t love Stephen King? I’ve only read a few of his books but my wife Kim has read everything he’s ever written, including his first attempt at self publishing a digital book called The Plant.

I enjoyed following him when Twitter was around and I’m thrilled he’s joined Threads so I can follow him once again.

Now, can we please get his account connected to Mastodon?

Ev Williams

Mozi is a social app — not in the sense of “social media.” But in the sense of interacting with other people and building relationships.

It’s nice to see an actual social app. I was working with a small group back in 2015-2016 building this exact application. It was called Jaunty but execution is what matters and Mozi is beautiful.

Abid Rahman • The Hollywood Reporter

Bluesky Hits 25M Users As Exodus From X Continues

I still prefer Mastodon but it’s really nice to see Bluesky growing and Space Karen’s social network shrinking.

I’d encourage folks to checkout Mastodon and use their mobile app to sign up and use mastodon.social as your instance, it’s the default. Once you learn how an instance works and what it means to be on a different instance you can move your account. And, no, you don’t have to move, ever. 😃

Matthew Christopher • Atlas Obscura

Even looking down from a rooftop onto the overgrown ruins of Lenin Square, it’s difficult to comprehend the scale of loss in Prypiat, Ukraine. Perhaps, like me, you’ve been fascinated by the tragedy of Chornobyl, as it is known in Ukrainian*, for decades.

I’m fascinated by Chernobyl. I remember when the meltdown was reported and the confusion and concern that followed. Things could’ve been much, much, worse.

Jayski’s Silly Season Site

From Brazil to Mexico and beyond, NASCAR continues emphasis on global expansion

The thing about this expansion is it’s all about having a local league. What I’d like to see is the NASCAR Cup Series go to different countries. In 2025 NASCAR will visit Mexico City and that’s a great start but I’d like to see them go to Europe and run some of the most famous tracks in the world.

[Christine Lemmer-Webber] (https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/)

A few weeks ago I wrote How decentralized is Bluesky really?, a blogpost which received far more attention than I expected on the fediverse and Bluesky both. Thankfully, the blogpost was received well generally, including by Bluesky’s team. Bryan Newbold, core Bluesky engineer, wrote a thoughtful response article: Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization, which I consider worth reading.

The two pieces from Christine and the response from Bryan Newbold are really good reads. If you’d like to understand a bit more about how ActivityPub/Mastodon work vs. ATProto.

Emily Hemphill • The Daily Progress

Standing on the corner of Water and Second streets off Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall this past September, two men tilted their heads back to fully take in the towering husk of a building that has sat derelict for roughly 16 years.

When I started at WillowTree I was in the building diagonally across from it and it’s a complete wreck and an eyesore. It should be torn down to make way for something beautiful.

I miss working on the mall. I wish the company was still down there.

The picture above was taken in December 2019, looking down on the Downtown Mall. It was the first snow of the season.

Alex Harrington • Newsweek

NASCAR Shocks FRM and 23XI by Withdrawing Charter Offer Amid Legal Dispute

This isn’t a surprise to me. Front Row and 23XI filed a lawsuit against NASCAR. They followed up by asking the court to not allow their current charters to expire and it sounds like NASCAR won that battle.

I hope 23XI and Front Row survive.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

It was nice having a short week to ease back into work, and a slow week at that as we headed into a four day weekend.

Yesterday I hit 57, the big 60 is hiding just around the corner and the walk to retirement age is just around the corner from that. It’s strange. I don’t feel that old mentally. My body is broken but my spirit and mind are doing fine.

On with the linkage! Enjoy. 😀

Eleanor Beardsley and Chandelis Duster • NPR

French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron, took a tour of the cathedral early on Friday. Macron marveled at the soaring light stone ceilings — now cleansed of soot and centuries of grime — as he toured the more than 800 year old restored cathedral.

With all the bad news in the world I thought I’d share some hope. It was so depressing to see Notre Dame burn. But it’s back! That’s something to celebrate.

Benjamin Sandofsky

I’ve been thinking a lot about how social networks die, these past two years. It’s an unusually personal topic. In 2009, I picked up my life to move to San Francisco and work for Twitter. I joined a startup you could fit around a giant lunch table, and left a corporation with thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of users.

Watching Twitter disappear was a real loss for the web. It was mostly a great place, at least for me, and it opened us all up to a new form of communication and breaking news. We could follow our favorite news organizations and movie stars and on occasion even interact with them. It was great. Now it’s just one big dumpster fire.

Seeing ActivityPub and AT Proto come along has been a breath of fresh air. Could you imagine if Twitter was still Twitter and embraced AT Proto? That would’ve been something.

Ashish Bhatia

While Javascript is unavoidable, here’s how I think one should try to limit its spread.

JavaScript is eating the world, just like C did in the 80’s and early 90’s.

I’d call WillowTree a premier native iOS and Android shop, amongst other things, and now we’re doing a lot more React Native and TypeScript. I know of native iOS Apps that use JavaScript internally for business logic. It’s handy. It’s an ugly language but useful.

By  The Associated Press

Formula 1 on Monday at last said it will expand its grid in 2026 to make room for an American team that is partnered with General Motors.

I’m very excited for this! I’ve wanted to see an American manufacturer back in F1 for quite a while. I know Redbull is working with Ford on a new power unit but it’s nice to see Cadillac dedicated to the entire sport. They will become my new team on the grid. I’ve low key supported Haas for a number of years and always wanted them to switch to an American power unit manufacturer. Maybe they will at some point. Haas runs Ford motors in NASCAR why not move to them for F1 if they can get Ford behind them.

Michelle Del Ray • The Independent

Amazon workers are planning to strike from Black Friday through Cyber Monday to hold the company accountable for “labor abuses, environmental degradation and threats to democracy,” organizers say.

I didn’t pay attention to this yesterday so I wonder how things went?

Hestia

I had never done anything even vaguely approaching web development before I made this site. I probably couldn’t have even told you what it meant. I did have a bit of coding experience (I used a lot of python for my degree), but this was very different. I could not have done it without the help of the people who came before me and were generous enough to create guides for the rest of us. These are the resources I used the most

Neat! I love seeing folks who’ve never done this kind of work pull something beautiful together. Great work!

Mia Sato • The Verge

In her lawsuit, Gifford alleges that Sheil copied her, down to specific frames in videos. She claims that repeated pattern and Sheil’s uncannily similar content ultimately cut into Gifford’s own earnings. The similarities extend, in Gifford’s telling, beyond just video content to eerie real-life aspects like her manner of speaking, appearance, and even tattoos.

This is kind of weird. Was it intentional or did it just happen? It seems that’s the lynchpin to the case.

Rob Knight

I’ve been helping getting MacStories setup on Bluesky this weekend and I came across a few handy sites.

I’ve been using Bluesky a bit more now that I can follow more folks I know and those famous people I like. More tools, please.

Will this be a big enough thing for folks like Iconfactory and Tapbots to enter the market?

Luna Razzaghipour

Most people writing code that ends up running on macOS machines aren’t super familiar with the operating system, its unique features or its rough edges. That’s okay! If you’re a programmer using macOS and your code will actually end up running on a Mac rather than a server somewhere or whatever – even if your software isn’t a user-facing graphical application – then this post is for you.

I know concurrency support in Swift 6.0 is a big topic of conversation but I gotta be honest, I find it terribly confusing. Old school threading and rules around it are so much easier to grasp.

Of course I need to dive into the Swift 6.0 version of concurrency. But I think it’s good to learn it at a lower level.

Manton Reece

Comparing ActivityPub and AT Proto is a useful exercise. It’s tempting but ultimately too simple to say that one is decentralized and one is centralized.

AT Proto is something I’d like to know more about. It’s so different but it does seem quite powerful and I wonder if parts of AT Proto could be used under ActivityPub? It seems to me like it could, unfortunately I can’t remember the name of the part I’m referring to.

Mond

I don’t know about you, but if I were to look at all of this as an outsider, it sure would look as if C++ is basically falling apart, and as if a vast amount of people lost faith in the ability of C++’s committee to somehow stay on top of this.

I can only imagine how difficult it must be to maintain backward compatibility for a language as old as C++ and continue to advance it.

I hope it doesn’t splinter and make a mess out of a tried and true low level programming language. There’s so much code out there that needs to continue working and advancing the language without breaking things is crazy challenging.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I made it back home yesterday after a delayed flight and an unplanned overnight stay in Dallas and I’m happy to be here. I was able to kiss my amazing wife and sleep in my own bed. It’s amazing how uncomfortable someone else’s bed can be, especially as I’ve g in otten older. 😀

I hope you enjoy these hand picked, artisanal, links. 😃

Geoff Perlman • Xojo Blog

On November 12th Thomas Kurtz, the co-inventor (along with John Kemeny who passed in 1992) of the BASIC programming language died at the age of 96.

BASIC was the first language I learned and I’d say I owe my career to it.

RIP Mr. Kurtz. 🪦

Dan Milmo • The Guardian

In a post on X on Thursday, the author of The Shining and Shawshank Redemption wrote: “I’m leaving Twitter. Tried to stay, but the atmosphere has just become too toxic.” Referring to the rival platform launched by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, he added: “Follow me on Threads, if you like.”

I’m glad he finally made it somewhere else! Now all he needs to do is turn on Mastodon support for his Threads account so I can interact with him from the Fediverse. 😃

Federico Viticci • MacStories

Today marks the return of a very MacStories-y feature in one of my longtime favorite apps, which – thanks to this new functionality – is gaining a permanent spot on my Home Screen. Namely, the RSS client Unread now lets you create custom article actions powered by the Shortcuts app.

Unread is just killing it! John is on a tear adding new features and fixing bugs.

Manton Reece

I’m @manton on most networks, @manton.org on Bluesky, and @manton@manton.org on the fediverse. These are all managed by Micro.blog.

Yep. You can run everything through Micro.blog if you’d like to see Mastodon and Bluesky accounts natively. Oh, yeah, and there’s that whole blogging thing you get with it. 😃

Jason McFadden

Well, for some reason, last week I got the notion to re-try my RSS reader. Let me tell you, it was insta-awesome! It feels SO GOOD to be back on RSS. It lets me just read articles from the web — crazy, I know. RSS makes websites legible, stripping out all the distracting garbage.

I think RSS is pretty swell myself. I’m so fond of it I built my own feed reader.

Tom Bowman, Juana Summers, Scott Detrow, Greg Dixon, and Charles Maynes • NPR

Ukraine is granted permission from the Biden administration to fire U.S.-made long range missiles into Russian territory.

I’m happy we’ve done this. Poor Ukraine is going to need every tactical advantage it can get NOW. Pretty soon the Orange Turd will takeover and Ukraine is gonna be in trouble.

Tim Hardwick • MacRumors

Apple is facing an almost £3 billion ($3.78 billion) lawsuit after British consumer group Which? on Thursday alleged that the company breached competition law by locking millions of its customers out of its iCloud service and charging them “rip-off prices.”

I have a lot of thoughts around this and it would be nice to see Apple open the users choice of storage up in a way that makes it transparent to the user. We’ll see what terrible solution they come up with to make it so unattractive to the user no one will choose to use it.

The Guardian

The 40-year-old Minnesota native, who retired in 2019 citing the physical toll from a series of major injuries over the course of her 18-year career, told the New York Times that she had “retired with no intention of coming back”, but was startled to discover that she was pain-free after undergoing a partial right-knee replacement surgery in April.

Having a knee replacement was a freeing experience. Free from pain and free to move about without thinking about where I’m putting my foot. But, I cannot imagine putting on skis and going down a hill at breakneck speeds.

Pro athletes have a different gear than us normals.

Good luck Lindsey! 🍀

Emily Liu

On Bluesky, you can set your website as your username. This is one form of verification on Bluesky, and it’s our version of a “blue check.” We highly recommend that official organizations and high-profile individuals do this.

I thought I’d drop a link in here for this older post since Bluesky will let you set your own domain name. Mine is set to @fahrni.me. I love it!

Good morning from Fresno, California! ☕️

I’m in California for the next week for my fathers funeral and to settle his affairs. ❤️

I will catch y’all next weekend.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

It’s a sad week and what promises to be an extremely dark time in our nations history. Unless you’ve had your head buried in the sand — and who’d blame you — I’m talking about the Orange Nightmare winning the Presidential election. It’s so depressing to see that 70+ million Americans decided to choose cruelty over compassion. If, like me, you have a sense of complete sadness and dread you’re not alone. Plenty of us feel this way. I’ve been through the sadness and disappointment period and I’m ready to push back against tyranny any way I can. Black and brown people, LGBTQ+, and women will need our support and help. I stand ready.

Hillel Italie • Associated Press

Quincy Jones, the multitalented music titan whose vast legacy ranged from producing Michael Jackson’s historic “Thriller” album to writing prize-winning film and television scores and collaborating with Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and hundreds of other recording artists, has died at 91.

RIP 🪦

Jim Wright

You personally? Sure, you might have cared enough, but it turns out a lot of those we thought were on our side, those we thought would stand up for their own rights, just … didn’t. Not only didn’t, but they appear to have thrown their lot in with Trump and are willing to let Elon Musk, Laura Loomer, RFK Jr, and the local Preacher Man run their lives. A lot of those women I saw in line yesterday?

Such a well written piece. It’s long but captures the rage, sadness, and confusion many of us feel post election of a complete moron, rapist, criminal to the highest office in the land.

Nish Tahir

What is a Staff Engineer? I get this question quite frequently. Sometimes from engineers looking to elevate their roles. At other times, team members reach out looking to learn how they could get the most value from Staff Engineers on the teams. It is a complicated question because a lot of ambiguity exists in the role. Different engineers have distinct interpretations, so you may get a significantly different answer depending on who you ask.

Excellent piece by Nish. If you’re a software developer give it a read. Staff Engineer is a weird job. They are the glue that binds us together. The player who can fill any position on a team. They’ve usually experienced a lot and have deep skills in a subject but are adaptable.

When I was an Engineering Director I kind of hated my job, I can admit that now. Moving to a Staff Engineer position was one of the best career moves I’ve ever made.

I feel like a hype man sometimes — it’s my personality — and I love doing odd jobs as often as I can. I do it so younger developers can do the fun work. The work that will stretch them and teach them how the platform they’re working on works in real world applications. Then I get to be there when they struggle to help them over the hump. I find it extremely rewarding. Nish’s experience may be completely opposite of mine — he’s a Principal Engineer (I think?), that’s the highest level in our Engineering organization. Regardless, Nish is the complete package. He’s good at everything. ❤️

Alex Henderson, AlterNet • RawStory

“On November 5,” Dalton writes, “the American people did the unthinkable — they elected a convicted felon president. Judge Juan Merchan should now do what was once unthinkable — force a president-elect to take the oath of office in a jail cell.

Boy-o-boy would I love to see that (yeah, it’s petty of me, so what?) I’m hoping there is another option. Can they postpone his sentence until he’s left office, if he leaves office? That way they can nail him properly.

Of course the risk of waiting means the addled old man may die in office and we get no Justice except for the fact he’d be out of office.

John Braydon • Golden Hill Software

While the best websites provide RSS feeds with full article content, some feeds contain only summaries or previews of article content. Without the webpage text feature an article from such a feed would look something like this in Unread

Mr. John Brayton is an excellent developer and his work shows it. He’s Unread’s only developer. That means he toils over iOS, Mac, and server code to make Unread the amazing product it is.

Yes, at one level John and I are competitors, but John’s work is undeniably so much more advanced than mine and that’s ok. I admire him and his work. Yes software developers can also be fans of other developers and their software.

John and I chat on occasion and he’s an amazing human being.

Go support him by taking Unread for iOS and Mac for a spin. You may fall in love with it.

Susie Madrak • Crooks and Liars

David Frum left the Republican Party following Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election. “De-registered as a Republican today,” Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, wrote on the social platform X on Wednesday.

I may not agree with a lot of David Frum’s views on policy as a “normal” Republican but I’ve always respected him and I love reading his writing.

Well, the man has finally had enough and left the GOP. Trump and Trumpism has really formed a new party. I wished they’d just give it an official name — perhaps MAGA — and let the GOP have their party back.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

So when the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI announced they were doubling down on their efforts to persuade software manufacturers to abandon “memory-unsafe” programming languages such as C and C++, it came as no surprise.

Yes, it’s going to be extremely difficult to replace existing C and C++ software with a memory safe language, but folks should start now. Rust seems to be gaining real ground as a cross platform development language, even being used in Windows and Linux development. Microsoft’s Mark Russinovich has declared all new system level code should be written in Rust. That’s a big darned deal.

Of course you won’t see Apple do that but guess what! Apple has Swift! Swift was written to be highly performant and the syntax would be more familiar to C and C++ developers than is Rust. Yeah, yeah, I’m most likely a bit biased. 😃

Stephen Goin • KHOU

Houston residents report receiving text messages telling them they’ve been selected to ‘pick cotton’

And so it begins. One day after the election the hate monger racists emerge from their pits to start their campaign against people who don’t look exactly like them. A lot of young white men voted us into this mess. It’s shameful.

Again, we must fight this tooth and nail to save the rotting soul of this great nation.

Sarah Perez • TechCrunch

An effort to bring a broader news ecosystem to the open social web, also known as the fediverse, is now in the hands of the social magazine app Flipboard. Press.coop, a service that created mirrored accounts of top news publishers (including Reuters, AP, WSJ, NYT, BBC, CNN, and even yours truly), has transferred its collection of nearly 100 accounts to Flipboard, the companies announced Thursday.

Flipboard is a for profit company but I do like this move because I’m hoping it’ll get the big news outlets to finally abandon Space Karen’s social platform for Mastodon.

I know that’s asking a lot but folks have been fleeing his platform in greater numbers recently.

David Faris • Newsweek

In light of Trump winning the 2024 presidential election over Vice President Kamala Harris, calls for Sotomayor to retire so that President Joe Biden, with support from a Democrat-majority Senate, would have enough time to appoint a new justice have recirculated on social media.

I’m really not overly thrilled with this idea. Justice Sotomayor is only 70 and should be able to make it through the next four years, unless the Dems calling for her retirement know something we don’t?

I know Democrats are in charge of the Senate but after McConnell’s bullshit with Garland then applying a different set of rules for Amy Coney Barrett I’m a bit gun shy.

However, if they did decide to replace her how about Merrick Garland or Kamala Harris?

I know folks feel like Garland let us down with Trump. I’m pissed off about it too but I still believe Garland is an excellent candidate because he is so measured when it comes to the law, and dammit, the man deserves to be a Justice.

If not Garland how about Kamala Harris? She knows the law and has been in politics more than long enough to play any games she needs to play.

Another petty thing I’d love to see is Biden retiring so Kamala can become the 47th President of the United States and screw up Orange Man’s swag offerings. 😈

Yes, I’m that petty when it comes to that man.

Here’s hoping he leaves office in four years.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Were four days away from what is the most consequential Presidential vote in my lifetime, perhaps the country’s lifetime.

Voting is the most important thing you can do to save our democracy.

I’ll leave it at that. I hope you enjoy the links.

Pema Levy • Mother Jones

Donald Trump may be a known quantity. He’s been a public figure for decades, a television star, and president from 2017-2021. But a second Trump term would present something the United States has never experienced before. Not a would-be authoritarian in the White House—that was Trump’s first term—but a would-be authoritarian who could actually accomplish the task of transforming the federal government into a tool of political repression.

Don’t vote for this man. He’ll destroy our country as we know it and turn it into a hellscape.

Sascha Pare • Live Science

High school students who came up with ‘impossible’ proof of Pythagorean theorem discover 9 more solutions to the problem

I love that a couple of high school kids figured these proofs out. Good for them!

Dave Winer • Scripting News

I’m searching for some common ground between the twitter-like systems, a basis for interop, a common API even. We had that for the blogging layer of this onion, something called the MetaWeblog API. All the popular blogging software supported it. And that meant you could write once and publish to many places. And you could write the script that did that in an afternoon or two. We started out with simple systems and the best of intentions. There’s no technical barrier. And we could do it in a few weeks at most if there was a will to do it.

I have thoughts around this as well that are built around Dave’s desire to use RSS to populate the various services. It deserves a blog post all its own. Maybe I’ll have enough gumption to do that someday. 😃

Matt Carroll • Flock

Over the years, Flutter has attracted millions of developers who built user interfaces across every platform. Flutter began as a UI toolkit for mobile - iOS and Android, only. Then Flutter added support for web. Finally, Flutter expanded to Mac, Windows, and Linux. Across this massive expansion of scope and responsibility, the Flutter team has only marginally increased its size. To help expand Flutter’s available labor, and accelerate development, we’re creating a fork of Flutter, called Flock.

This feels extremely ambitious to me and I fear it’ll fail. Hopefully it doesn’t cause a mess in the community.

Sidney Blumenthal • The Guardian

Donald Trump keeps saying that if he is elected to a second term he will prosecute his political opponents, “the enemies within”. On 22 October he stated, once again, that as president he would use “extreme power … We can’t play games with these people. These are people that are dangerous people … an enemy from within.”

This man is a menace and must be defeated once and for all. Kick him to the curb so, hopefully, he’ll get the idea he’s not wanted and go play golf for the rest of his miserable life.

Iain Thomson • The Register

Drivers passing through San Francisco have a new roadside distraction to consider: billboards calling out businesses that don’t cough up for the open source code that they use.

Some open source projects thrive and some struggle. If more companies would dedicate some resources to these projects it would be better for everyone involved. We don’t need more incidents like the person who snuck a back door into an open source project or just see them abandoned and left to bit rot.

Ahmad Shadeed

Currently, the CSS Working Group (CSSWG) is discussing whether to include masonry as part of CSS grid, or as a new layout module?

I like this, especially if the author(s) of masonry agree with the idea.

Louie Mantia

I wish there were more browsers, and I wish they were more unique. I appreciate that Arc attempted to innovate, but their ego and hubris are a little frustrating. They believe their product is so great that everyone should use it, including their own family and friends. However, when they don’t, they are left feeling perplexed.

I know lots of folks at work using Arc and they love it! I’m skeptical of it. Not because it’s different but because it’s built on Chromium and I don’t trust Google.

Tim Anderson • Dev Class

A Google engineer presented a proposal to the official standardization committee that would split JavaScript into two languages, a core to be implemented by runtime engines and a more capable variant which depends on tools that compile it down to that core.

I thought the idea of a core was Web Assembly? Maybe that’s too broad? I’d like to know more about what this proposal implies and how would it affect developers.

Michael Miszczak • Just a Pack

A couple of weeks ago, in a moment of caffeinated inspiration/despair, I sat down and wrote a long Facebook post as to why we were ditching Google and switching to DuckDuckGo. Today I want to dive even deeper into this topic, and give you a first-hand account of how Google is killing hundreds of thousands of blogs and small publishers.

Blogs were never really meant to be monetized but enterprising folks have figured out a way to do it.

Unfortunately relying on an advertising company’s search engine to surface your blog to users is risky, as the article points out.

My blog is for me and the ten folks who read it. It’s an outlet. Thankfully I don’t have to make a living from it. I’d starve.

Emma Roth • The Verge

Though Dorsey’s message didn’t specify how many employees would be laid off, sources told Fortune that it could be around 100 employees — or about a quarter of Tidal’s remaining staff. Tidal cut 10 percent of its workers last December, and Dorsey reportedly considered a major reorganization at Block in July.

A few years back, during COVID summer, I tried Tidal, Spotify, and Apple Music. Tidal isn’t bad at all. It’s another competitor in the big music service scene. Granted, it’s the smaller of the three, but the user experience at the time was perfectly fine and the music sounded just fine.

I landed on Apple Music, which has the worst user experience, because it is bundled as part of Apple One. It’s fine.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

This weeks post is going to contain a lot about politics and the upcoming Presidential Election here in the good old USofA.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you skipped reading but I just feel the need to talk about it, not that it’s going to change anyone’s mind.

I’m still blown away by the response of half of voters. People actually want a nation run by a psychopath who wants to run the country into the ground. Who wants to punish his political enemies. Who is a fascist.

I voted yesterday and I was so happy to cast my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I hope you do the same.

Megan Lebowitz • NBC News

Thirteen former Trump White House officials signed an open letter backing up former Trump chief of staff John Kelly, who told the New York Times that Trump fits the definition of a fascist.

Not surprising, at all. There are not enough people screaming at the top of their lungs “TRUMP IS A FASCIST” on a daily basis.

We all should be.

Chris Walker • truthout.org

In response to the owner of the Los Angeles Times decreeing that the paper would not be endorsing a candidate in this year’s presidential race, Mariel Garza, the editor of editorials for the Times, has resigned from her position.

The LA Times owner is fearing for his papers and his existence in a potential fascist Trump government. This is, ultimately, a cowardly act and plays right into the fascist playbook.

Ross A. Lincoln

The Los Angeles Times has lost two more longtime editorial writers, the latest in a growing exodus to protest owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s interference with the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, TheWrap can exclusively report.

More fallout from cowardly publishers.

William Lewis • Washington Post

The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.

With moves like this Fascism takes root. Encourage folks to vote for Democracy you cowards! 🇺🇸

Dustin Bluck • Castro

The network request has gone from 49% of our time to 19%. But I’m pretty shocked to find out that with the improved networking speed, now 20% of worker time is spent in the active record connection pool. That can’t be right, what is happening? Taking more traces reveals this was actually an outlier on the lower side, most traces are spending 25-30% of all time waiting on an active record connection.

Great piece on some small changes that lead to big wins for a little Indie Developer.

I’m a longtime Castro user and the recent changes to the client app and the backend have been a welcome sight. It’s moving forward again! 👏🏼

Scripting News

Why hasn’t the NY Times run a story that takes Trump at face value and explains to voters what it would be like to live in that United States? It should have been updated and run every time Trump ups the ante.

Fear. This is why the papers are being chickens.

Om Malik

Why does every podcast have a six-minute lead of proverbial throat-clearing, self-promotion, and advertising?

Of my favorites a few just start with the hosts going right into it. I don’t need to be introduced to the hosts, I know who they are, I subscribed to the podcast to begin with. 😃

Juli Clover • MacRumors

Disney is no longer allowing its customers to sign up for and purchase subscriptions to Hulu or Disney+ through Apple’s App Store, cutting out any subscription fees that Disney would have needed to pay to Apple for using in-app purchase.

This is big news. Not giving Apple their cut is what every little developer would love to do, but it’s the Big Cos who can afford to try it.

This move fits into Apple’s current rules around streaming apps, like Netflix. You can’t mention how to sign up from the app — which is a dumb rule — and you can’t link out to a help page that describes how to do it. How’s that for a good user experience?

I’m really interested to see how this works out. 🍿

Manton Reece

It’s odd how many developers in the fediverse don’t know how Bluesky works.

I don’t really know how it works. I understand the TL;DR version and I think it definitely has legs, but will any other instances spin up to prove it out or will it just be a single silo, like old Twitter was?

Apple Security Engineering

Private Cloud Compute (PCC) fulfills computationally intensive requests for Apple Intelligence while providing groundbreaking privacy and security protections — by bringing our industry-leading device security model into the cloud.

More on Apple’s cloud infrastructure for their new AI platform. I still haven’t read the entire piece but thought I’d share it for the geeky readers since this is a politics heavy post.

Kelly Crandall • Racer

Hopefully, NASCAR, Netflix, and viewers are better prepared this year because Bell is on his way once again. Bell has smoothly advanced through the first two rounds of the postseason without much attention. Sunday, he started the Round of 8 from the pole and led 155 of 267 laps at Las Vegas Motor Speedway before finishing a disappointed second.

Christopher Bell is in my top four. I’m not sure if he’s the one, but he darned sure stands a chance to win it all. Unless tragedy strikes I’d expect him to lead laps in Phoenix for the Championship at the very least.

David Pierce • The Verge

For the last eight months, David Cogen has been living a double life. By day: a YouTuber and creator, the face of TheUnlockr, reviewing phones and testing ebikes and explaining how food smokers really work. By night and morning and every single other available moment in between: a coffee shop entrepreneur, working to get a Brooklyn spot called Coffee Check up and running.

Kim and I have often talked about opening a coffee shop but it’s really difficult to run your own business, I’ve tried and I’ve succeeded and failed at it. 🤣

But, there’s something about a coffee shop that feels right. It’s about the community as much as it’s about the coffee.

The coffee shop in Exeter we were regulars at was a place where everybody knows your name and the baristas were friends.

Ernie Smith • Tedium

Today in Tedium: Deciding on a content management system is a bit of a dance. You often have to deal with dozens, maybe hundreds, of pieces of existing content. You want it to be easy to manage, able to talk to other technology tools. Plus, you want to ensure you understand what you built, so you can actually fix it—or reach out to a friendly community. That has been a big reason why the mess with WordPress has been so frustrating.

If you’re thinking about driving your blog or website using a CMS you should give this piece a read. Ernie has gone through the paces so maybe you don’t have to. In the end he lists five options to consider, each with pros and cons.

Most bloggers don’t need much and a CMS can be overkill for us. Others moreso, so a CMS may be just what the doctor ordered.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I don’t know if allergies are trying to kill me or if I’ve picked up a cold somewhere. No matter, I’m so sleepy I can barely keep my eyes open. 😃

Ok, so, here we are, three hours later. 🤣 I passed out. Couldn’t keep my eyes open.

Hope you enjoy the links.

Dan Gillmor

I became a blogger because of Dave. Blogging changed — in a great way — the trajectory of my career.

A lot of us were influenced by Dave’s work.

Dan’s a really great writer and someone you should follow.

Pao Ramen

What follows is the talk that Ethan should have given to the team. Instead, he pedaled away on a stolen bicycle, developed a game that flopped commercially, and now roams the streets of San Francisco, high on fentanyl. Meanwhile, David and the rest of the team sold the company for peanuts but landed comfortable positions at the acquiring firm, earning twice as much while working half as hard. So, in the end, it probably didn’t matter. But if you’re interested in sync engines, read on.

This piece is about writing a sync engine for your application. The beginning of the article is a fun read but it does eventually get to the meat of the subject after the comedic intro. I really dig the diagrams.

Todd Vaziri

Near the end of David Fincher’s 1995 masterpiece “Seven”, John Doe takes Somerset and Mills to the middle of nowhere to reveal his final surprise. They drive to a desolate area surrounded by high tension power lines and towers. A combination of long lenses and wide lenses were used to alternate between images of long-lens compression of the space (the first image below), and scattered wider lenses to illustrate the desolation of the environment (the second image below).

What a great film! Todd’s breakdown of the scene and seeing how much a camera lens can completely transform an environment is amazing!

I know nothing about photography or filmmaking but I learned something new.

Mathew Ingram

I realize that many people may not know or care who or what Matt Mullenweg and WordPress are, or why some people are upset about them, but after giving it a lot of thought (okay, about 10 minutes of thought) I decided to write about it anyway.

The wild story that is the WordPress vs. WPEngine saga continues.

I really hope they can get this sorted out and it doesn’t destroy the WordPress community in the meantime.

Jessica Wakeman • The Guardian

Hurricane Helene destroyed Asheville’s flourishing arts community. Can they rebuild what was lost?

Kim and I were supposed to visit Asheville two years ago for an anniversary weekend. We didn’t go because I’d injured my back as was unable to stand for long periods of time. Now I really wish we’d gone. Those poor people were hit so hard. Here’s to a full recovery! ❤️

Saajan Jogia • Newsweek

Former Formula 1 driver Daniel Ricciardo, who remains without a seat after his ousting from Red Bull’s junior team VCARB, will be handed the “Keys to the City” honor.

I guess Danny Ricciardo is an Austin fan favorite.

Heck, now that he’s available I think a NASCAR team needs to convince him to run a road course NASCAR race next season! 😃

Gary Marcus

LLMs don’t do formal reasoning - and that is a HUGE problem

There’s nothing Intelligent about this software. They’re just really good at guessing the next thing.

Sure, they’re really great guessers, but can also be very wrong. Keep that in mind.

Oh, and can we stop the craze of stuffing “AI” into all the things? Thank you.

Frank Schwab • Yahoo Sports

Aidan Hutchinson undergoes successful surgery after gruesome leg injury in win over Cowboys

Under Dan Campbells guidance the Lions have become real threats to win the Super Bowl. I hope losing Aidan doesn’t prevent them from staying in the hunt for a title.

All the best to you Aidan. I hope that leg heals perfectly and you’re back to sacking Quarterbacks next season.

Jan de Mooij • Spidermonkey

75x faster: optimizing the Ion compiler backend

I like working on stuff more under the hood of software. Network, data structures, and making data generally available. I also love making reusable frameworks so others can get their jobs done in less time and with higher quality.

This effort is nothing short of amazing. I love articles like this! 👍🏼

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

It’s finally getting a bit chilly overnight here in Charlottesville. Yesterday morning we managed to drop down to 39 degrees (Fahrenheit) overnight. It was 41 when I got up with the pups this morning.

Coffee is made, first cup poured, time to put together some links and horrible commentary! 😂

John Naughton • The Guardian

If you log into Dave Winer’s blog, Scripting News, you’ll find a constantly updated note telling you how many years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds the blog has been running. Sometime tomorrow morning the year field will switch to 30. Which will mean that every single day for three decades Dave’s blog will have been stirring things up.

Congratulations, Dave! As I mentioned earlier in the week, Dave was one of my inspirations for blogging.

It’s hard to believe he’s been doing it for 30 years.

Manton Reece

Shut it down. ByteDance has until January to divest the app and I have no sympathy for a delay. It needs new leadership.

These are strong words coming from Manton. He’s a proponent of the open web and to see him this upset is saying something.

EMILIE BLACK & CODY HAMMAN • JoBlo

The Goriest, Bloodiest Films Ever Made: some of our favorites

I’ve wanted to watch the Terrifier series for quite a while now and the recent release of Terrifier 3 I really want to see them.

The only film on that list I’ve seen is Evil Dead, and that was a remake.

The best of the original trilogy was Army of Darkness. It was super campy and Bruce Campbell was amazing. So many quotable one liners from that film.

If you haven’t seen Army of Darkness it’s worth a watch.

Emma Roth • The Verge

“WordPress.org just belongs to me personally,” Mullenweg said during an interview with The Verge. WordPress.org exists outside the commercial realm of Automattic, as a standalone publishing platform that offers free access to its open-source code that people can use to create their own websites. But it’s not a neutral, independent arbiter of the ecosystem. “In my role as owning WordPress.org, I don’t want to promote a company, which is A: legally threatening me and B: using the WordPress trademark. That’s part of why we cut off access from the servers.”

A lot of details have emerged about the ownership of various parts and pieces of WordPress the open source software vs. WordPress the hosting company vs. Automattic. Matt is, basically, all three.

Matt Mullenweg • WordPress

We’re very proud to announce that Vinny Green, a former WordPress community member, has started his fork, FreeWP. We strongly encourage anyone who disagrees with the direction WordPress is headed in to join up with Vinny and create an amazing fork of WordPress. Viva FreeWP!

With all the kerfuffle between WordPress and WP Engine Matt is still a staunch advocate for open source projects and is fine with folks forking WordPress. It is, after all, the way of open source.

It seems Matt’s biggest complaint is WP Engine taking and never giving back. If they’d fork WordPress into something new I’d imagine that would go a long way toward solving some of Matt’s issues with them.

Let WP Engine maintain their own copy and do with it what they will, even if that means doing nothing to improve it.

Alexander Martin • therecord.media

Meta fined $101 million for storing hundreds of millions of passwords in plaintext

Remember kids: Friends don’t let friends use Facebook. Meta is a horrible company run by a sociopath.

Eugen Rochko • Join Mastodon Blog

Mastodon 4.3 just landed! If you’re a mastodon.social user, you might have already seen some of this in action as we’ve been gradually rolling out these updates over the course of the last 11 months in nightly releases, but we’re finally making a new stable release available to the community.

I haven’t noticed any of the major changes because I’m shielded by using a native iOS and Mac client application for all my Mastodon needs.

Congratulations to Eugen and the entire Mastodon development team! 🥳

Leonardo Brito

I had an old Motorola G5 Cedric gathering dust, so I decided to do something with it – it is now running a Puma web server with a simple Sinatra webapp.

I’ve wanted to do this in the past with my old Handspring Visor. These days it would be fun to do it with an iPhone.

I recall someone talking about doing that within the last year or so using Iconfactory’s WorlWideWeb for iPhone, if memory serves.

Debopriyaa Dutta • /Film

If you’re a fan of slow-burn police procedurals that suddenly transform into a possession flick with stylish, ambitious choices, “Fallen” is worth checking out.

I saw Fallen in theaters with Kim and we both liked it. It is certainly a slow burn detective movie with a super natural twist of an ancient evil.

Worth checking out.

Jason Bahl • WPGraphQL

With that said, I’m excited to announce that after 3.5 wonderful years at WP Engine, I’ve accepted an offer with Automattic to continue my work on WPGraphQL as it transitions into becoming a canonical community plugin on WordPress.org.

With the community in tatters it’s nice to see someone share some good news. Although it may not be seen as good from the WP Engine side of the equation.

Jessamyn!

Happy 7th Birthday MLTSHP!

This tiny service came into being as MLKSHK many years back when Twitter didn’t have its own photo sharing. I’m sure you could find many an old Tweet in my archive using MLKSHK for photo posting.

I’m still a subscriber. Long live MLTSHP and a very happy birthday! 🎂

JanerationX

The Internet Archive got hacked. It takes a special kind of asshole to do something like this. While the world is currently full of assholes with too much time on their hands, this particular breach just rankles, and it makes you wonder: is anything sacred?

The short answer is, no. Nothing is sacred. Especially on the internet. 🤬

Megan Sauer • CNBC

Her Etsy store brought in $220,300 last year, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

This is the kind of “side hustle” I’d like to have. 😂

That would allow me to become an indie developer and realize my dreams for Stream and its yet untitled sister app.

Andrew J. Hawkins • The Verge

For almost as long as he’s been CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk has been bullshitting us about self-driving cars.

Folks are finally talking about Musk the way they should. He’s a bullshit artist. That’s his genius.

He’s managed to bullshit his way into Tesla. No, he’s not a founder. He’s not a Twitter founder.

Yes, he founded SpaceX and the Boring Company, but he doesn’t seem too involved with those. Choosing to let intelligent folks to run those was a good idea.

He’s a lying, white supremacist, homophobe, antisemitic, conspiracy theorist, bully with a lot of money.

Clearly I don’t think much of him. He’s a terrible human being.

All I think of when I see that picture is Igor saying “Master.”

Of course he was shaking Trump’s hand. Or should I say, master’s hand? 🤔

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

My coffee is nice and hot and I’ve collected a lot of material to share this week. There’s no way I can share it all. A lot of it centers around American Politics and the rift between WordPress and WP Engine.

I hope you enjoy the links I’ve selected for you. 😁

The Carter Center

ATLANTA — Today, The Carter Center and the world celebrate the 100th birthday of former President Jimmy Carter. As the longest-living U.S. president in history, he stands as a beacon of leadership and compassion, inspiring people around the globe.

I remember as a kid folks being very critical of Jimmy Carter, especially around the Iran hostage crisis. But, there’s no denying he is a wonderful man whose real legacy started after he was President. He’s an American Hero and a great example of human kindness and compassion. He walks the walk.

Happy 100th Birthday Mr. President! 🎂

Hafsa Khalil • BBC

Kris Kristofferson, the award-winning country singer and actor who worked with Johnny Cash and Martin Scorsese, has died aged 88.

Kris Kristofferson was a Renaissance Man. He earned a Masters degree at Oxford University, served in the US Army, was an actor, and he’s probably best know as a musician. He was also a badass. I tend to look up to folks like that.

A part me me hopes the dust-up between Toby Keith and Kris Kristofferson, as penned by Ethan Hawke for Rolling Stone, actually happened. 😄

RIP 🪦

The Cincinnati Enquirer • Mark Wert and Jason Hoffman

Pete Rose, MLB all-time hits leader, dies at 83

As a boy I was a Reds fan and vividly remember the 1976 World Series. I was a Johnny Bench fan as a boy and became a catcher because of him. The fact that they hammered the Yankees by sweeping them in the series was icing on the cake. My MLB team allegiance changed over the years but I’ll always be a fan of The Big Red Machine and The Great Eight, Rose among them.

It’s high time Major League Baseball allows Rose to be inducted into the Hall of Fame.

RIP Charlie Hustle. 🪦

Jeffrey Zeldman

My insight into corporate legal disputes is as meaningful as my opinion on Quantum Mechanics. What I do know is that, when given the chance this week to leave my job with half a year’s salary paid in advance, I chose to stay at Automattic.

The WordPress community is in complete turmoil at the moment. I would not be shocked to see this completely fracture the community into competing factions, forking WordPress, and building how they see fit.

I’m a big fan of WordPress, even though I complain about it not being able to make static sites. It is a very nice plug-n-play system for everything from a simple one person blog, to a small business, to a huge corporation managing a very large, heavily trafficked site.

I’ve tried to get a job there I like it so much. I’d still love the opportunity to work on their iOS client or Tumblr iOS client apps.

They’ve done a lot for the open source community and Matt has always come across as one of the good guys.

I really hope this gets resolved without blowing up the community.

John Stoehr • Raw Story

Former GOP official Michael Steele unfurled an epic rant bashing voters who would consider sending “incompetent” Donald Trump back to the White House.

Michael Steele is the former Chair of the RNC and lieutenant governor of Maryland. The man is a politician and life long Republican. He’s the type of person I usually disagree with politically but I respect him. He’s nothing like the modern GOP turned MAGA cult.

Anywho. So many real Republicans have come out against the Orange Man, yet the polls are still tight? I don’t get it and I’m still terrified we might get Orangey for a second term.

Bradley Brownell • Jalopnik

NASCAR is running an unlawful monopoly on the sport of stock car racing, alleges a suit filed on Wednesday by stock car teams 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports against the sanctioning body and its CEO Jim France. 23XI is, of course, the team co-owned by NBA legend Michael Jordan and racer Denny Hamlin.

My popcorn is ready! I hope 23XI — pronounced 23 11 — and Front Row Motorsports make some headway for NASCAR teams. I know I’m new to NASCAR but if you read what the two teams claim it’s shocking what NASCAR gets away with. How teams manage to exist is beyond me. It’s a terrible business, if that’s what you’re after. It seems you need deep pockets or sponsors with deep pockets just to keep a team afloat, much less be competitive.

Christian Selig

Juno for YouTube has been removed from the App Store

This can’t be a surprise to anyone given how fiercely YouTube protects its product. Of course I wish they’d left Christian alone because he makes beautiful software.

I know nobody from YouTube will see this but I wish they’d offer to give Christian some cash for it and hire him to continue working on it.

Jamie Zawinski

Mozilla’s CEO doubles down on them being an advertising company now

With all the kerfuffle between WordPress and WP Engine it’s hard to watch Mozilla head down this road. They’re one of those organizations we could look up to as an open source advocate and maintainer of one of the most used pieces of software in the world.

Hopefully they’re able to find their way back to their roots and continue to maintain Firefox.

Michael Moore

Right now, if you know how to really read the polls, or if you have access to the various private and internal polling being conducted by and shared only amongst the elites, Wall Street, and Members of Congress, then you already know that this election was over weeks ago. Trump simply refused to believe that “Sleepy Joe” was no longer his opponent and that there was instead “some woman” claiming she was “Black” who was now going to pummel him on Election Day. He soon became unhinged, ranted for hours about Hannibal Lecter, Haitians cannibalizing your pets, and a nonstop drone of oral diarrhea spewing misogyny, racism and essentially claiming that if he loses “it will be the Jews’ fault.”

I’m steeling myself for the possibility of a Trump Presidency. Seeing articles like this give me some hope for a Harris Waltz win. If they do win I expect a lot more violence this time around. I hope that can all be suppressed before it can happen but it won’t surprise me if it does.

All news outlets and social media sites need to agree to not give the Orange Man any airtime for speeches after the election or at least be ready to cut away at an instant.

JOSEPH SHAVIT • The Brighter Side

In a groundbreaking development poised to reshape the energy landscape of Saskatchewan, Canada, a compact nuclear reactor with the capacity to operate for eight years without water is set to come online by 2029.

I hope this works out. It could provide us with clean energy for years and years to come.

Sylvain Kerkour

Rust developers are stuck in an endless hamster wheel where every month / week there is a new best way to do something, and the previous way is now deprecated, kind of like in the fronntend development world with the weekly hottest JavaScript framework.

I know Rust and other languages rely on the community to make the language better but I am surprised the actual framework support for the platform often comes from outside sources.

Rust should have runtime library support just like the C and C++. Basic stuff plus heavily used things like networking and other frameworks layered on top of those. All using common framework patterns and maintained by the main Rust development team.

Something that makes developing in Apple platforms are the shared frameworks that work the same on Mac, iPhone, iPad, etc. Sure, the UI bits are different, but a lot of other code is the same. I’d say 80% of Stream code is shared between Mac and iOS and it’s maintained by Apple and ready for each new release of their OSes.

Blair Vanderhoof, , Jesse Watts-Russell, Fernando Gorodscy, Matt Galloway, and Eli White • engineering.fb.com

At Meta, React and React Native are more than just tools; they are integral to our product development and innovation. With over five thousand people at Meta building products and experiences with React every month, these technologies are fundamental to our engineering culture and our ability to quickly build and ship high quality products.

I’ve been working in React Native off and on since June of this year. It’s a fine framework and definitely allows developers to move quickly. Especially web devs with React experience. They can come to a project and be instantly productive.

This Facebook Engineering piece reads like marketing material at times but giving developers the means to develop for everything from iOS to Android to Windows to XBox to PlayStation is real and that’s powerful.

It doesn’t mean all the UI looks exactly the same just like Mac and iOS apps can share a bunch of code and have a different UI, but that ability to share a large portion of code is extremely powerful to a development team.

I still love writing native apps in their native frameworks and expect to keep Stream 100% native. I still love using C++ for cross platform work even though I haven’t had the need for it in years. Then you have Rust gaining ground. We have good choices for cross platform work, including Swift.

Something I really dislike about using React Native and TypeScript is the lack of real tooling for debugging in a full IDE. I’d love to be able to debug between Swift and TypeScript right inside Xcode but TypeScript/JavaScript tooling is arcane. Hopefully someone way smarter than me will make that happen.

Anyone know if Rust fully integrates into Xcode and Microsoft’s Visual Studio?

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I know this is very late today. We have our grandson today and we’ve been go, go, go, go, go since he arrived. I’m already pooped but he is such a great kid and a joy to be around. 😁

Carmel Dagan, Alex Ritman • Variety

Maggie Smith, Star of ‘Downton Abbey,’ ‘Harry Potter,’ Dies at 89

Goodbye Professor McGonagall.😔🪦

Vitaly Bragilevsky • JETBRAINS Blog

So, you’re thinking about choosing Rust as your next programming language to learn. You already know what it means to write code and have some experience with at least one programming language, probably Python or JavaScript. You’ve heard about Rust here and there. People say it’s a modern systems programming language that brings safety and performance and solves problems that are hard to avoid in other programming languages (such as C or C++).

Yes, I’m interested, but I have too much on my plate to venture into Rusty waters at this time. 🦀

Emma Roth • The Verge

Marques Brownlee, the YouTuber known as MKBHD, has responded to backlash over the launch of his new wallpaper app, called Panels. In a post on Tuesday, Brownlee says he’s going to address users’ concerns about pricing and “excessive data disclosures.”

It’s wild to see Marques, who makes super high quality video, to make something less than amazing.

Look, if you want a very high quality application full of high quality, consistently updated, you should consider Wallaroo from The Iconfactory.

Jake Trotter • ESPN

Who is Brownie the Elf? Inside the rise, fall, and revival of the Browns' mascot

I am a fan of Brownie the Elf and glad to see they’ve kept it.

Lauren Goode • WIRED

Meta has dominated online social connections for the past 20 years, but it missed out on making the smartphones that primarily delivered those connections. Now, in a multiyear, multibillion-dollar effort to position itself at the forefront of connected hardware, Meta is going all in on computers for your face.

These look more like something you could wear everyday. Much closer than Apple is today.

F1

After days of speculation, Daniel Ricciardo’s exit from RB was confirmed on Thursday, with the team announcing that the Australian will be replaced by reserve driver Liam Lawson for the final six races of the season. With this seemingly bringing the 35-year-old’s extensive F1 career to an end, the news was met with plenty of reaction on social media, including some emotional tributes from his fellow drivers…

I suppose we could all see the writing on the wall. For as much as Christian Horner loves Daniel, he couldn’t save him.

iA Writer

In order to allow our users to access their Google Drive on their phones we had to rewrite privacy statements, update documents, and pass a series of security checks, all while facing a barrage of new, ever-shifting requirements.

This is a wild story from the iA Writer folks and I thought being an iOS developer was fraught with peril. Come on Google, work with these folks.

iMore

Dig out your old iPod and fire up your ‘Songs to cry to’ playlist, I come bearing sad news. After more than 15 years covering everything Apple, it’s with a heavy heart I announce that we will no longer be publishing new content on iMore.

Another publisher, gone. It’s been a rough year for tech blogs and magazines.

Matt Mullenweg • WordPress

It has to be said and repeated: WP Engine is not WordPress. My own mother was confused and thought WP Engine was an official thing. Their branding, marketing, advertising, and entire promise to customers is that they’re giving you WordPress, but they’re not. And they’re profiting off of the confusion.

This is some kind of weird fight that I’m sure has way more to it than we’re privy to.

Matt Mullenweg • WordPress

WP Engine wants to control your WordPress experience, they need to run their own user login system, update servers, plugin directory, theme directory, pattern directory, block directory, translations, photo directory, job board, meetups, conferences, bug tracker, forums, Slack, Ping-o-matic, and showcase. Their servers can no longer access our servers for free.

So, Mullenweg has gone completely nuclear on WP Engine. Thing is, WP Engine can take a cut of the code and do whatever they want with it, right?

It’s probably not that easy but I thought that was one of the benefits of open source software?

Google took a cut of Safari who took a cut of KHTML. It’s the way open source works.

It’s all a confusing mess to me so I don’t have a real opinion on the matter except to say I hope this doesn’t end badly for Matt and WordPress.

Maggie Boccella • Fangoria

The Crossing Over Express garnered over 500,000 views on the service that shall remain nameless in its first seventy-two hours — not too shabby for an eleven-minute short. Even more so, it must be cathartic for its creators, as it was inspired by a moment in Barnett’s young adulthood, where he had a chance to reflect on his own grief after losing his mother at seventeen, as he tells it

I still haven’t seen this but I plan on finding it later. I just won’t watch it on Space Karen’s platform.

The emphasis in the quoted bit from the article is by me. I replaced the name of the service with “the service that shall remain nameless.”

Rachel by the Bay

Late yesterday, I put up a post about how to get into colocation in about the crappiest way possible. I skipped a bunch of details just to get it out there. The inspiration was based on finding out just how many people have no idea that this business model even exists.

Just a little history less for those too young to know about these things. I once had a Windows 2000’server running in a co-located rack at a friends ISP. It ran my blog for at least a year.

Casey Newton • Platformer

Ever since Platformer left Substack in January, readers have been asking us how it’s been going. Today, in keeping with our annual tradition of anniversary posts (here are one, two, and three), I’ll answer that question — and share some other observations on the state of independent media over the past year.

Just a Platformer update. Go check it out and see what it’s like out there for indie publishers like Platformer.

FractalFir

Instead of using LLVM to generate native code, my project turns the internal Rust representation called MIR, into .NET Common Intermediate Language. CIL is then stored inside .NET assemblies, which allows the .NET runtime to load, and execute the compiled Rust code easily.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this project.

John Sculley • apple.fandom.com

The Copland Project was an effort by Apple Computer to create an updated version of their Mac OS operating system. Begun in earnest in March 1994 and named after American composer Aaron Copland, it was abandoned in August 1996.

The best thing that ever happened to Apple was purchasing NeXT and Steve Jobs returning to the helm.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I love me a four day work week, don’t you? And that’s all I have to say about that.

We’re going to see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice this morning at 10. I haven’t heard too much about it but I suspect it’ll be pretty fun. We’ll see.

I hope you enjoy the links.

Erik S Lesser • VICE

Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, about an hour east of Atlanta, is at the center of another school shooting in the United States on Wednesday morning.

Ban all assault weapons, now. They are weapons of war and regular folks don’t need to own weapons of war.

We need a better registration process and training for all weapons. Licensing that has to be renewed every year at a federal government run licensing agency.

Zero gun show sales or online sales. Purchases have to be in person, with initial licensing, and a waiting period of 30 days which requires proof of upcoming training and final licensing within 30 days of receiving the weapon.

Registration would include registration with a centralized ATF database of weapons accessible to local, state, and federal law enforcement.

Make it difficult and expensive so it’s taken very seriously.

Jonathan J. Cooper • The Associated Press

School shootings are a “fact of life,” so the U.S. needs to harden security to prevent more carnage like the shooting this week that left four dead in Georgia, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance said Thursday.

JD Vance is a garbage human. Zero empathy. Asshole.

Noor Al-Sabai • Futurism

OpenAI is begging the British Parliament to allow it to use copyrighted works because it’s supposedly “impossible” for the company to train its artificial intelligence models — and continue growing its multi-billion-dollar business — without them.

This shouldn’t be allowed if the owner of the site doesn’t want it crawled.

I can see using sites in the public domain who are ok with it.

Go ahead, scrape my site. It’ll assuredly drop the IQ of your AI a few points. 😃

Dave Winer • Scripting News

How podcasting got its name

This is a piece from 2013. I love blogs for the ability to go back in time and gain knowledge on just about any topic.

I recall the 2004 time period quite well. I remember reading on Dave’s blog how this new creation was going and not understanding it at all. Sure, I understood the technical aspects just fine. I didn’t understand why we needed it.

Well, now I think a lot of folks understand why even if they don’t about the mechanism.

Podcasting is amazing and I appreciate it.

Thanks, Dave and Adam, as well as anyone who participated in the process.

NASCAR

Another NASCAR Xfinity Series race that was seemingly in Sheldon Creed’s grasp wriggled free again Saturday at Darlington Raceway.

I felt so bad for Sheldon Creed on Saturday after the race. He’s a great driver and one of my Xfinity favorites but the poor guy can’t seem to win a race. He now holds the record for most second place finishes.

He also revealed a dark side to NASCAR Xfinity racing. He’s not making much to drive a car as a professional driver. In fact most drivers have to bring their own sponsorship to the team to even get a ride! That’s crazy!

Tim Hardwick • MacRumors

Apple is expected to launch a fourth-generation iPhone SE early next year with an OLED display for the first time, marking the completion of Apple’s adoption of OLED technology across all iPhone models.

I’m still using my iPhone 11 and it’s getting a little long in the tooth, especially the battery.

After reading the specs — I know, it’s just a rumor — I’m thinking an SE may be in my future. Why? Well mostly because of a reduced price.

Heck, this years iPhone will probably double in price so the new SE will end up being the price of todays iPhone. 🤣

Jake Kanter • Deadline

And it seems that Sir Ian McKellen could be coming back to his beloved role as J.R.R. Tolkien’s wizard after revealing that he had been approached about featuring in the new Lord of the Rings films.

The man is in his 80’s now and was recently injured after a fall. They’d better get started if they want him to participate.

Also. Why do we need a remake of the Lord of the Rings? I guess it has been over 20 years since Peter Jackson’s epic released. That’s crazy.

Gustaf Kilander • The Independent

Donald Trump and his allies are preparing to make claims of election and voter fraud if he loses in November - according to election experts and a number of old-school Republicans.

But of course they are. It’s a downright miracle we’ve gone over 200 years as a nation without some knucklehead like Trump doing crap like this to become President.

I hope the man loses by a wide margin.

Oh, no media should have the Orange man on their show until the election is complete. Don’t give him the opportunity to declare victory like he did last time.

John Scalzi

Starter Villain won this year’s Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

I like John Scalzi’s work a lot and I miss following him on social media. I wish he’d walk away from X and join Mastodon full time.

Hmmmm, I think he’s on Bluesky. 🤔

Louie Mantia

I’m proud to announce the all-new Parakeet website.

I want to start with a brief historical view of Parakeet’s online presence, then I’ll walk you though some of the key moments making the new website, and then lastly how it makes me feel having our work presented in this way.

I really dig Louie’s style. His blog is a piece of art in my book and he’s applied that same style to Parakeet’s site! Lovin it! 😍

Jowi Morales • Tom’s Hardware

Texas resident used Apple AirTags to discover plastics taken to Houston recycling centers aren’t being recycled

Why does this not surprise me, especially in Texas where they have drive thru Margaritas, free handguns with a purchase at a 7-11, and allow corporations to pollute at will.

Ok, ok, I admit the drive thru Margarita thing is kinda cool. 🍹

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Our grandkids are with us this weekend and for some reason that always throws off Ms. Gracie’s sleep cycle. Her usual 6:30 wake-up came at 5:30 this morning. I suppose that gives me more time to write before the kids wake up. 😁

It’s been a pretty average week this week. I did switch to a different team mid-week. Still on the same application just a different feature set and this time I’m embedded with a team from our client. It’s gonna be fun and I’m excited for it.

Weve had a giant wasp of some kind buzzing around the back door. We think it may be a Cicada Killer. Whatever it was, it was big. I say was because Kolby decided to swat it out of the air and was stung my it. The wasp didn’t last long after that. Kolby is now limping around the house. Poor guy. 😔

The kids are awake. This will be an abbreviated post. 😁

Stephanie K. Baer • The San Francisco Standard

Steve Silberman, writer on the Grateful Dead and autism, dies at 66

R.I.P.

Ryan Smith • AnandTech

It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I’ve ever needed to write here at AnandTech. After over 27 years of covering the wide – and wild – word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech’s final day of publication.

It’s sad to see tech magazines/blogs disappear. How many more will fall over the next year?

WordPress Blog

Since Automattic acquired Tumblr we’ve made it more efficient, grown its revenue, and worked to improve the platform. But there’s one part of the plan that we haven’t yet started, which is to run Tumblr on WordPress. I’m pleased to say we’re kicking off that project now!

[They’re hiring to help with this effort!(https://automattic.com/work-with-us/tumblr-migration/) If I were a backend type I think I’d throw my hat in the ring. What an amazing effort to be a part of!

Alex Kladov

People complain about Rust syntax. I think that most of the time when people think they have an issue with Rust’s syntax, they actually object to Rust’s semantics. In this slightly whimsical post, I’ll try to disentangle the two.

This is a pretty neat look at Rust syntax and why certain choices were made for the standard library.

Tim Hardwick • MacRumors

Apple Lays Off Around 100 Services Staff Across Apple Books and News

I wonder how big the Books and News organization is? Is this a big layoff? It seems like it know how lean Apple tends to run.

Asahi Lina

A subset of C kernel developers just seem determined to make the lives of the Rust maintainers as difficult as possible. They don’t see Rust as having value and would rather it just goes away.

You’d think the C kernel developers would embrace this effort in hopes of improving kernel memory safety. I’m down with the idea.

Toby Christie • Sports Illustrated

Kyle Busch Chose to Race the Right Way on Final Lap at Daytona

With all the attention Richard Childress Racing is getting from the number 3 wrecking Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin to secure a win at Richmond, Bush did the right thing.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Another week, gone. Life seems to be flying by at an accelerated pace and I’m not fond of it.

I continue my React Native and TypeScript work, at work. I’m refactoring a bit of UI code to be shared in the project. It’s been a good experience. I’m definitely a fish out of water but making progress.

We’ll see what next week brings.

Hope you enjoy the links.

Alex Butler • UPI

Katie Ledecky left swimming rival Ariarne Titmus in her wicked wake, revving through the La Defense Arena pool waters toward a record ninth Olympic gold medal with another 800-meter freestyle victory Saturday in Paris.

YAY KATIE! 🇺🇸

Jay Famiglietti • The New York Times

The Central Valley of California supplies a quarter of the food on the nation’s dinner tables. But beneath this image of plenty and abundance, a crisis is brewing — an invisible one, under our feet — and it is not limited to California.

One quarter of the food on the nations table. That’s a big deal.

The big challenge moving forward is how do we get enough water to the Central Valley to continue to raise all those fruits and vegetables to feed everyone?

Yet again, we ignore climate change at our own peril.

Herb Sutter

That’s a great question. Cppreference is correct, and for all class types the answer is simple: The object is initialized on line 1 by having its default constructor called.

But (and you knew a “but” was coming), for a local object of a fundamental built-in type like int, the answer is… more elaborate. And that’s why Sam is asking, because Sam knows that the language has kind of loose about initializing such local objects, for historical reasons that made sense at the time.

Of course Mr. Sutter goes into great depth to explain how the declaration int a; is handled by the C++ compiler (how it’s supposed to be handled according to the standard.)

Remember C is a subset of C++. That was intentionally part of the goal at the time. To get folks to adopt C++ all the C code that had been written needed to continue working.

So, what does that mean for int a; in the question?

It means that declaration doesn’t really initialize a. It just gets whatever value is at that address. Let’s say there was a string represented by the memory now assigned to that declaration and the string began with the letter the ASCII letter ‘a’. Any guess what the value of ‘a’ would be? It would be 97.

In other words, ‘a’ is random.

Mike Masnick • Techdirt

I am excited to announce that I am joining the board of Bluesky, where I will be providing advice and guidance to the company to help it achieve its vision of a more open, more competitive, more decentralized online world.

This is surprising in a good way but I wish we didn’t have two competing decentralized protocols for the social web. It’s fine, I suppose, but having Blusky and Mastodon work with each other would be amazing. Threads still hasn’t delivered full integration with Mastodon, but Micro.blog has, WordPress has achieved some integration points, and Ghost is working on theirs. Tumblr would also be a nice addition but it’s now in a “keep the lights on” mode.

More Fediverse integration, not less.

Bradley Brownell • Jalopnik

Michael Andretti’s denied attempt to join the Formula 1 grid has been granted a DOJ investigation. American firm Liberty Media, which owns Formula 1 Group, denied Andretti Global’s entry to F1 earlier this year. The denial by F1, following a six-month review of the team’s application, which included a commitment from General Motors, claimed that it didn’t believe Andretti could field a competitive car in the series.

This has been a bit frustrating to watch. I would love to see another American company on the grid and I’d really love to see Guenther Steiner in charge of it! 😃

It would also put an American manufactured power unit on the grid from Cadillac. 👍🏼

Nadine Yousif and Michelle Fleury • BBC News

A US judge has ruled that Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly on online searches and related advertising.

This is going to ripple throughout the industry. Does Apple lose their $20 billion fee from Google to be the preferred search engine? I guess we’ll find out.

Stephen Moore

Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro,1[1] you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”

They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it’s certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you’re an ant. But, for the sake of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad things? Awesome. Welcome to programming.

Programming is definitely part science part insanity. I spend my days agonizing over coding choices, bouncing between feeling kind of smart to feeling a complete idiot.

It’s just the way, at least for me. 😃

Hanaa' Tameez • Nieman Journalism Lab

MTV pulled down MTV News in June. After Deadspin was sold, many of its archives temporarily disappeared. This week, Flaming Hydra reported that The Awl’s archives are gone. And those examples are just from the past couple of months; in 2021, the authors of a Reynolds Journalism Institute report found that just 7 out of 24 newsrooms they interviewed were fully preserving their news content.

This is kind of sad, isn’t it? Journalists losing their work because a publication shuts down.

Then we had the recent kerfuffle with TUAW where someone purchased the site and content, ran it through and AI, and republished all the content under the original authors names with different profile pictures. That’s slimy.

It’s no wonder authors are backing up their own work. I certainly would and do. I have 23 years of blog posts.

Simon Willison

It’s amusing to see Apple using “please” in their prompts, and politely requesting of the model: “Do not hallucinate. Do not make up factual information.”

This is an interesting piece. Go read how Apple is approaching AI. I love their prompts including words like “please” and “do not hallucinate.” Classic! 🤣

Charlie Savage • The New York Times

A bipartisan American Bar Association task force is calling on lawyers across the country to do more to help protect democracy ahead of the 2024 election, warning in a statement to be delivered Friday at the group’s annual meeting in Chicago that the nation faces a serious threat in “rising authoritarianism.”

If Trump loses in November the country needs to be prepared for all kinds of slimy efforts to take the election for themselves.

I have no clue what they’re going to do, but it’s coming.

Nikita Shukla • earth.org

Generative AI has very quickly been adopted across various sectors. However, this has led to increased global electricity consumption that is only predicted to increase further as the technology expands, with many tech companies already at risk of defaulting on their net-zero commitments.

This is a new type of arms race between the big players. They have to do it but they’re not going to make money from it for a long time and oh by the way they’re going to strain the crap out of our power grid. Why? Shareholder value. So while your power is out and you’re baking in the heat of summer or the cold of winter they’ll be happily churning out their next iteration of a fancy pachinko game that isn’t really intelligent, it’s just a super fancy decision tree being jammed into everything because AI.

Each and every AI company should be regulated and be required to generate two times the power they consume, at no cost to the consumer, to offset their consumption. Darned digital vampires.

Stephanie Apstein • Sports Illustrated

U.S. Athletes Are Taking Full Advantage of Free Healthcare in Olympic Village

It’s amazing what a country can do for their citizenry, isn’t it? Healthcare for all, I say! Some things need to be done for the good of society. Healthy, educated, people are an amazing thing. It will allow us to invent and solve big problems. It’s good all around, in my opinion.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Pretty typical week. Slow around the house and busy at work. I have yard work today and we’re gonna install a new ceiling fan later, most likely tomorrow. Kim let me sleep in, it was really nice. Stayed in bed until 10AM, so off to a really late start with morning coffee and writing. 😃

John Brayton • Golden Hill Software

Unread for Mac is now available from the Mac App Store. Unread for Mac incorporates every Unread capability that makes sense on Mac including:

I’m so happy for my friend! John really shows his chops as a Mac developer in this release of Unread for Mac. I’ve had the honor of being on the Beta for months and I’ve watched new features land with high quality and witnessed John polish the user interface to a beautiful sheen.

Unread is a prime example of a Mac-assed Mac App.

Congratulations, John! ❤️

ESPN

Simone Biles reclaimed her Olympic title in the women’s all-around at the Paris Olympics on Thursday.

This is so nice to see Ms. Biles rise to the top of her game once again.

Congratulations, Simone! You make us proud! 🇺🇸

Kylie Robison • The Verge

Mark Kalman, X’s engineering lead of media, and his second-in-command, Melissa Merencillo, resigned today. They announced their departures in a company Slack channel on the day stocks vest at X, which a source suggests might explain the timing.

X is such a cesspool. I’m surprised anyone has hung around to work with Space Karen.

He’s pushed so hard to make X into a Nazi, white supremacist, waste land, and by and large succeeded.

I really wish we could convince the likes of Stephen King and many, many others, with strong voices to leave that shit show.

Epic Games

We are fast approaching a quantum leap in Epic’s efforts to bring our games to players on mobile devices. Fortnite will be returning to iOS in the European Union soon, and the Epic Games Store will be coming to Android worldwide and iOS in the European Union bringing all developers great terms: a store fee of 12% for payments we process, and 0% on third party payments.

It’s interesting Epic chose to undercut Apple by only 3% on payment processing. That will, however, hit the bottom like of companies that pay 30% to the App Store once they cross the magic threshold (I can’t remember what it is, so it’s a magic threshold for this post.)

The 0% fee is absolutely amazing and it would be lovely to see Apple do this, but, it could cost them hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter if all the big players were allowed to do their own thing.

Andrew Harnik • AlterNet

AG Garland knocks Cannon’s classified docs ruling: ‘Do I look like someone who’d make that mistake?’

A little shade thrown by the AG! I love it!

Judge Aileen Cannon based her ruling on a passing comment made by Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas when writing about the Trump Immunity Case.

Yeah, it was done as a favor to Trump to delay the case yet again.

Once the Presidential Election is over, and TFG has lost, hopefully the good work of prosecuting him can get back on track.

NASCAR

Spire Motorsports confirmed on Thursday that Corey LaJoie, driver of the No. 7 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet, will not return to the team following the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season.

This news really bummed me out. Corey LaJoie is an extremely hard working journeyman of NASCAR. He’s never won at the Cup Series Level but throws his whole heart into everything he does.

I’m an avid listener of his podcast, Stacking Pennies, and I hope the man is considered for a Cup ride on another team. It seems unlikely but I’m pulling for him. ❤️

A seat in the Xfinity Series or the Truck Series would at least let him continue to race. 🤞🏼

Eirka Turlock • CNN

A Starbucks app outage on Tuesday left customers unable to place a mobile order, delaying caffeine fixes for millions of coffee lovers until the app returned to service later in the day.

This is completely unacceptable! 🤣

Coffee addicts all over the country were left with the shakes, sweating, and irritable because they couldn’t pickup their drinks easily. THEY HAD TO GET IN LINE OR WALK IN THE NERVE OF STARBUCKS!

I’ve always claimed Starbucks has one of the best mobile ordering experiences in all of food services. Outages, unfortunately, happen.

David Goodwin • AppleVis

It is with deep sadness and a heavy heart that after careful consideration I have made the difficult decision to step down from my responsibilities with AppleVis. As a direct result of my departure and following extensive deliberation, the editorial team has come to the painful conclusion that AppleVis will be closing.

It’s been a rough time for magazines for a very long time. 🪦

Game Informer

After 33 thrilling years of bringing you the latest news, reviews, and insights from the ever-evolving world of gaming, it is with a heavy heart that we announce the closure of Game Informer.

I’m not a gamer but this has to hit hard! It’s such a bummer to see long running sites fold like this. 🪦

Josh Marshall • Talking Points Memo

But yesterday FBI Director Christopher Wray said, ironically in response to a question from Rep. Jim Jordan, that it’s not clear whether Trump was hit by a bullet or debris kicked up by the gunfire. I think in context that’s likely a bureaucratic and gentle way of saying Trump probably wasn’t hit by a bullet. But let’s stick to the precise words. “There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.”

Congressional Republicans love to focus on the wrong thing and make a big deal out of it.

Let’s talk facts. Someone attempted to assassinate the Orange Man.

It doesn’t matter if it was the bullet or something else that touched his ear enough to make it bleed.

He’s just really lucky whatever hit his ear didn’t actually hit the meat of the ear. It most likely would’ve taken most of it off and done additional damage to him.

Luckily the man’s brain is already so damaged a little more wouldn’t hurt. 😆

Ryan Adamczeski • Advocate

Elon Musk’s trans daughter Vivian Wilson slams his anti-LGBTQ+ comments as ‘ketamine-fueled haze’

Ms. Vivian is super funny! Elon is really missing out on a great kid and proves once again he’s a terrible father. His poor kids are basically fatherless in this world and get to watch their “father” implode into a conspiracy theorist lunatic right before their eyes.

Pathetic man.

Lincoln Carpenter • PC Gamer

Fortnite players declare the Cybertruck public enemy number one: ‘You are now in a truce with everyone else in the lobby until they’re taken down’

I’ve never played Fortnite and I’m not much of a gamer but I feel like I should become a Fortnite player just to hunt these things down and blow them up. 🤣

Jordan Novet, Ari Levy • CNBC

Delta hires David Boies to seek damages from CrowdStrike, Microsoft after outage

Boise has already lead a successful prosecution of Microsoft of while with the U.S. federal government.

I actually feel really bad for Microsoft, not so much for CrowdStrike. After a deal with European Regulators they felt compelled to allow companies to run at the kernel level of NT.

I hope thy go back to the older model and lock things down.

Theo Burman • Newsweek

California Wildfire: Man Saves 100-Year-Old Ranch With Homemade Sprinkler Defense System

A little old fashioned ingenuity at work! I love this story and feel so bad for California at the same time.

The poor folks in Canada as well. 🇨🇦

It’s just tragic we have wildfires every summer in California and it’s just going to get worse.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I got my first React Native PR submitted and I’ve received some good feedback.

On the whole it’s fine. I still find the syntax extremely strange but I’ll figure it out.

I still very much prefer Swift and Xcode to TypeScript and VSCode. 😃

Barack Obama

Joe Biden has been one of America’s most consequential presidents, as well as a dear friend and partner to me. Today, we’ve also been reminded — again — that he’s a patriot of the highest order.

Thank you President Biden for serving your country. ❤️

Robert Reich

Let me add my words of gratitude to Joe Biden for doing something Donald Trump is incapable of doing — putting his country over ego, ambition, and pride.

Biden bowed out with grace and dignity.

Yes, yes he did. Now let’s all get behind Kamala Harris, make her the 47th President of this great nation, and save Democracy.

David Gilmour • Mediaite

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow flipped the question that has long chased Democrats of presidential candidate age and capability on Republicans Sunday night after President Joe Biden announced he would no longer run for re-election, calling out former President Donald Trump as now the “old man in the race.”

It’s time for the media to ask the Orange Man to withdrawal from the run for President because of his age and his lack of mental capacity to properly do the job.

Luke Deniston

This is the story of a process that died, and the tale of what we went through to track down the killer and bring it to justice. More accurately, it was a process that kept dying, but that hurts the analogy I’m trying to go for here so just bear with me.

I worked with Luke at Agrian. He’s super smart and kind and I love this story. Luke, if you read this, I hope you wrote that entire story yourself? It’s awesome.

Jess Weatherbed • The Verge

Despite Apple’s claims that most consumers will only consider purchasing vehicles that support CarPlay, Rivian says it still doesn’t have any plans to adopt the iPhone mirroring system. Talking to The Verge EIC Nilay Patel in today’s episode of Decoder, Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe likened Rivian adopting CarPlay to Apple choosing to use Microsoft’s Windows operating systems instead of developing its own in-house iOS and macOS alternatives.

I like this take and comparison. Apple has a desire to be the primary control center for the car and that seems wrong. They also want the car company to make sure Apple is called out as the provider of the in car system by not changing things like fonts on the in dash system. That would mean the cars branding wouldn’t match the companies. That’s not good.

Wouldn’t it be cool to work on an embedded in dash system? I think it would.

The Futon Critic

“HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET” ARRIVES ON PEACOCK AUG. 19

YES! I loved me some Homocide: Life on the Streets and I’m glad it’ll be available for streaming. Too bad I don’t have a Peacock subscription. Might have to convince the boss we need it for a while? 🤔

M.G. Siegler • Spyglass

Apple Should Buy HBO

I like this idea, especially if Apple would commit to funding HBO original content so we may get the next Sopranos, The Wire, or Game of Thrones.

Isabel van Brugen • Newsweek

Valentina Bondarenko, a top Russian economist, has died at the age of 82 after falling out of her apartment window in Moscow, Russian state-run media reported on Tuesday.

It’s so strange how many folks fall out of windows in Russia. It’s a downright epidemic.

I suspect if Orange Man wins the Presidency we’ll see this strange affliction migrate to America.

Jowi Morales • Tom’s Hardware

Windows 3.1 saves the day during CrowdStrike outage — Southwest Airlines scrapes by with archaic OS

I find this extremely difficult to believe. I actually liked Windows 3.1 and it’s the OS Visio was originally written on, so it’s pretty near and dear to my heart. Thing is, it’s a 16-bit OS, but it was quite capable. I’d love to know more about this setup and how in the world do they keep it secure? The network support in Windows 3.1 was mediocre at best. Did it even support HTTP? I don’t have the slightest clue.

Gil Duran • The New Republic

Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas

I’ve never heard of Curtis Yarvin but he sounds like a real piece of work. This dudes thoughts are as bad as Nazi Germany’s “useless eaters” program. Pathetic and disgusting.

He’s the one that needs to go away with thinking like that. 🤬

Elizabeth Lopatto • The Verge

The moral bankruptcy of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz

All the billionaire bros in the Silicon Valley need to get their act together. They’re ready to throw democracy away so they can become richer? How much money do you need? The answer must be all of it!

Again. Pathetic and selfish to allow an entire nation to be destroyed because you want to make a buck. Don’t be surprised if someone shows up at your place looking to beat your ass. No, that’s not a threat, but I can imagine someone feeling that strongly about it. I mean, hell, someone has already tried to take out the Orange Man. I don’t suspect it’ll be the last.

Stu Sjouwerman • KnowBe4

TLDR: KnowBe4 needed a software engineer for our internal IT AI team. We posted the job, received resumes, conducted interviews, performed background checks, verified references, and hired the person. We sent them their Mac workstation, and the moment it was received, it immediately started to load malware.

This story is fascinating. At WillowTree we’ve had a couple candidates try to get through by hiring someone to do the technical parts of the test for them. They’ve been caught and I’m not aware of any getting through. I suspect in our case they just wanted a job they didn’t have the skill for. In the end they’d have failed and been let go so I’m not sure why they went through the trouble.

Steven Vaughan-Nichols • ZDNet

Several European countries are betting on open-source software for their technology. In the United States, eh, not so much. In the latest news from across the Atlantic, Switzerland has taken a major step forward with its “Federal Law on the Use of Electronic Means for the Fulfillment of Governmental Tasks” (EMBAG). This groundbreaking legislation mandates using open-source software (OSS) in the public sector.

Here’s the thing about this. If someone finds an exploit in Linux they’re gonna leverage it until they’re caught. Something like the CrowdStrike disaster could happen just as easily in open source software. Companies just don’t have to pay to use it, don’t have to contribute their changes back to the community, or support the maintainers of the software.

It’s a good deal for corporations.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Another very quiet week at home and work.

I hope you enjoy the links.

Dan Heching and Zoe Sottile • CNN

Estey said Simmons died early on Saturday morning. He had celebrated his 76th birthday the day before. “We lost an Angel today - a true Angel,” Estey added.

I remember Richard Simmons from the 80’s. Always the showman, always enthusiastic, always fighting to teach folks how to lose weight and talking about his own struggles.

R.I.P.

Carmel Dagan • Variety

Bob Newhart, the genteel but sharply satirical comic whose TV series “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Newhart” were huge hits throughout the 1970s and ’80s, died Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 94.

I know he’s well know for his television series but I really liked him as Papa Elf in the movie Elf.

R.I.P.

David Nield • ScienceAlert

The probe was recorded traveling at 635,266 kilometers (394,736 miles) per hour on June 29, the second time it’s reached that speed since it launched in 2018. We’re talking around 500 times faster than the speed of sound here.

It’s impossible for me to wrap my brain around the idea of going 394,736 miles per hour. 😳

But, it’s pretty cool!

Lily Hay Newman, Matt Burgess, and Andy Greenberg • WIRED

Only a handful of times in history has a single piece of code managed to instantly wreck computer systems worldwide. The Slammer worm of 2003. Russia’s Ukraine-targeted NotPetya cyberattack. North Korea’s self-spreading ransomware WannaCry. But the ongoing digital catastrophe that rocked the internet and IT infrastructure around the globe over the past 12 hours appears to have been triggered not by malicious code released by hackers, but by the software designed to stop them.

What a day for our global network, Microsoft, and CrowdStrike.

I feel terrible for any shop using CrowdStrike and their DevOps or IT Administrators and Technicians. The only way to fix this issue is to be in the room, in front of the computer.

I once worked at a pistachio and almond processing plant that ran on Windows PC’s. At times I needed access to certain computers and had to get someone to unlock a door for me. Can you imagine having to fix thousands of computers with this issue? Sure, developers and the techies in the organization can fix it on their own and help others, but what a pain in the butt. ❤️

Hafiz Rashid • The New Republic

“I have stood up in rooms with all of these people and I have said, ‘Game out your actual plan for me.’ What are the risks of this going to the Supreme Court? And no one had an answer for me.… I’m talking about the lawyers. I’m talking about the legislators,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

What’s the plan? Seems Democrats don’t have one.

This entire kerfuffle couldn’t have come at a worse time. More than ever we need to be united to stop the GOP in their tracks. They are the political enemy and you defeat a political enemy by beating them at the polls.

Turn out, vote for the Democrat, save democracy.

It really is that simple.

Maya Posch • Hackaday

With performance optimizations seemingly having lost their relevance in an era of ever-increasing hardware performance, there are still many good reasons to spend some time optimizing code. In a recent preprint article by [Paul Bilokon] and [Burak Gunduz] of the Imperial College London the focus is specifically on low-latency patterns that are relevant for applications such as high-frequency trading (HFT). In HFT the small margins are compensated for by churning through absolutely massive volumes of trades, all of which relies on extremely low latency to gain every advantage. Although FPGA-based solutions are very common in HFT due their low-latency, high-parallelism, C++ is the main language being used beyond FPGAs.

A friend worked on one of these high speed trading systems. The pressure on him to write bug free, highly performant C++ code was immense. These trading folks are crazy serious about making money and these systems need to be super solid. Their drive to be filthy rich depends on it.

He didn’t stay for long. The stress wasn’t worth it.

Heather Cox Richardson • Letters from an American

This morning, after a day of Republicans insisting that it is political polarization to suggest that Trump is a danger to our democracy, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed by Trump in the last days of his presidency, dismissed the classified documents case against the former president. She wrote that “Special Counsel Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution.”

It seems Judge Aileen Cannon is in the bag for Trump. She’s been delaying and dragging her feet for months on this matter. Either she’s incompetent or corrupt or maybe a little of both?

Regardless, we can also thank corrupt Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for planting the seed of this plan to dismiss the case. In the Trump Immunity decision he noted Jack Smith’s appointment may be unconstitutional. Of course the documents case has nothing to do with the immunity case. He just slipped it in there to sow doubt. It worked.

There is still a path to prosecution but it won’t happen before the election. If the Orange Clown wins it’ll never happen.

Dan Moren • Six Colors

Ultimately the reaction to 18’s initial public beta may be more about what’s not there than what is. When Apple first announced its latest annual update to the mobile software platform back in June, most of the attention went to a suite of features—the top-billed ones if you look at the company’s iOS 18 Preview Page—collected under the aegis of Apple Intelligence. These marked the company’s much anticipated foray into artificial intelligence and promise everything from image generation to a reinvigorated Siri.

TL;DR - if you’re expecting to see Apple Intelligence as part of the betas, don’t hold your breath. Those features will roll out over the next year and into the future.

Outside of the excitement surrounding Apple Intelligence there are plenty of nice features to explore and enjoy.

Nick Schager • The Daily Beast

Longlegs is the horror event of the summer—a serial killer thriller that plays like a nightmarish swirl of The Silence of the Lambs, Seven, Psycho and Zodiac, albeit with far less rationality and considerably more demonic derangement.

I’m excited to see this! I’d imagine this is one film I’ll be able to get Kim to see in theaters. 😃

Ploum

TL;DR: put your open source code under the AGPL license.

While I don’t agree with a lot of what’s said in this piece, it is worth a read to gain a different perspective on Open Source and the problems around maintaining it.

Jake Edge • lwn.net

At the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Wedson Almeida Filho and Kent Overstreet led a combined storage and filesystem session on using Rust for Linux filesystems.

I like how this was written. It’s basically meeting notes from the session.

The Rust developers will have to be the ones to absorb the pain of keeping up with changes to the filesystem. As a developer using a newer technology I wouldn’t expect anything less.

I’m looking forward to the day we see Swift showing up in filesystem components on the Mac. There is an effort underway to rewrite Foundation in Swift. That’s a great start.

Wes Davis • The Verge

Apple has approved UTM SE, an app for emulating a computer to run classic software and games, weeks after the company rejected it and barred it from being notarized for third-party app stores in the European Union. The app is now available for free for iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS.

I’d imagine European Regulators made this happen. Apple doesn’t need them crawling any further up their butts. They’re already in enough trouble.

Brett Berk • The Drive

This is the golden age of full-size pickup trucks. Because the market demands it, and because the market is enormous and extremely profitable, the latest breed of pickup trucks is comfortable, commodious, potent, and dare I say luxurious. The Ford F-150, Chevrolet Silverado, and Ram 1500 are, respectively, the top-selling vehicles in America. And with their Brobdingnagian scale, appliqué steer horns, remotely erecting towing hitches, and power-opening tailgates that drop like the rear flap on a cowpoke’s union suit, pickup trucks may be the greatest examples of overcompensation ever invented.

This is a piece from 2019 but it still holds up today. Trucks are definitely no longer the multipurpose towing and hauling vehicles they used to be. When I got one with power windows and AC I thought it was pretty luxurious, but modern pickups are like luxury automobiles.

I’d bet real farmers and workmen using trucks as trucks don’t buy the luxury models. 😁 I’ve seen the inside of real work trucks. They smell of dirt and oil and usually have mud all over the floorboards. Not to mention barebones interiors.

My grandfather was a mobile mechanic for his entire life. His trucks had flat beds with large generators, a boom, and tool chests and various tool compartments. When his motor or transmission wore out, no problem, he pulled them and replaced them, himself.

I’m sure those folks still exist today but luxury trucks weren’t made for them. 😃

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

This week was Apple Developer Christmas also known as WWDC. It’s a time of year we learn what Apple has in store for developers for the next year.

At WillowTree we had a watch party at our Durham, North Carolina office. It was really great to meet folks I’ve worked with on projects but haven’t met in person.

It was really nice. A mini vacation with friends.

The keynote and Developer State of the Union were great as always and we all knew AI would be at the center.

Christine Hall • TechCrunch

Here’s everything Apple announced at the WWDC 2024 keynote, including Apple Intelligence, Siri makeover

We all suspected Apple would have an AI story this year, but they did announce other things. One that caught my attention was SwiftData allowing developers to use their own backend as a data source. It’s something every app developer integrating with a custom web service has to do. I’m super curious about it.

I’m also way behind the Swift Strict Concurrency train. It’s as if we have an entirely new language to learn.

Mark Gurman • Bloomberg

Apple to ‘Pay’ OpenAI for ChatGPT Through Distribution, Not Cash

This is a classic mistake all developers and designers are warned not to do. The classic “My app is so popular it’ll get you attention for the free artwork you give me.” Uh, yeah, take cold hard cash.

The irony of this is Microsoft is in essence paying Apple to have ChatGPT integration in Apple OS’es.

Oh, most of the intelligence on device will be handled by Apple’s own models. But, when it does have to go off device it’ll make sure you know it’s ChatGPT so if it screws up you know who to blame. 🤣

Apple Security Engineering

Apple Intelligence is the personal intelligence system that brings powerful generative models to iPhone, iPad, and Mac. For advanced features that need to reason over complex data with larger foundation models, we created Private Cloud Compute (PCC), a groundbreaking cloud intelligence system designed specifically for private AI processing.

I want to know about the custom hardware Apple built. Sure, it’s running Apple Silicon and the OS is stripped down and buttoned up tighter than a drum to prevent accidentally introducing security holes, but I want to see how the hardware is assembled and see how it’s mounted in racks.

Daniel Jalkut • Bitsplitting

During the crescendo to announcing its name, the letters “A” and “I” will be on all of our lips, and then they’ll drop the proverbial mic: “We’re calling it Apple Intelligence.” Get it?

You may be asking why I included this post? I included it because Daniel called the “Apple Intelligence” name over a year ago. Did Apple take his idea? We’ll probably never know. 😃

Hartley Charlton • MacRumors

Elon Musk has threatened to ban Apple devices from his companies over Apple’s newly announced ChatGPT integration.

Space Karen really is a big baby man. He and the Orange Menace are cut from the same cloth. I get my way or I’m gonna throw myself down and have a tantrum.

Do it, ban Apple products at your companies, baby man. 👶🏼

Nathan Edwards • The Verge

If you’ve never tried to do work on an iPad, I am genuinely happy for you. I’m writing this story on a Bluetooth keyboard connected to an 11-inch iPad Air M2. It’s a very nice keyboard, and the Air is a very nice tablet, but this would have been so much faster and easier on a convertible Chromebook. And I could still have watched Andor on the plane.

Folks are going to continue to ask for hardware they may never get. Google and Microsoft both offer hardware more akin to what iPad — MacPad? — users want.

The Viticci Monster is still your best bet.

Reid Spencer • NASCAR

Martin Truex Jr. felt it was time to regain control over his own life and his own schedule.

“I’m obviously here to let y’all know that I won’t be back full-time next year,” Truex said Friday in a press conference with team owner Joe Gibbs, confirming the widely reported news that he will exit the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota at season’s end.

It’s the end of an era. Truex is a Cup Series Champion with 34 wins in his pocket and is always a threat to win on the track.

Here’s to retirement. I hope you enjoy every moment of it Mr. Truex.

Lydia Mee • Newsweek

A pivotal gathering is reportedly taking place in Montreal today, where Formula 1 team bosses are set to convene to deliberate on the sport’s upcoming 2026 rule changes with F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali. This meeting aims to tackle increasing apprehensions surrounding the profound modifications proposed for the 2026 Formula One season.

Hats off to Formula 1 for trying to do something bold with their racing designs. In particular the motors are meant to combine electric power with a traditional combustion motor.

Charlie Savage, Jonathan Swan, and Maggie Haberman • New York Times

Donald Trump and his closest allies are preparing a radical reshaping of American government if he regains the White House. Here are some of his plans for cracking down on immigration, directing the Justice Department to prosecute his adversaries, increasing presidential power, upending America’s trade policies, retreating militarily from Europe and unilaterally deploying troops to Democratic-run cities.

I’ll continue to beat the anti-Orange Man drum until he’s no longer a threat to Democracy. He must be defeated in November and our system of government must be hardened and prepared for an onslaught of attacks and violence if he is defeated.

Stephen Marz

The standard library contains a ton of code that we don’t want to write ourselves, including printf, scanf, math functions, and so forth. So, we need to make sure our operating system can link to this library and everything “just works”. This post will show you how I linked our operating system to a standard library, newlib, and the trials and tribulations encountered in doing so.

Wow. Stephen has a lot of stuff to consider while integrating the standard C runtime libraries into his Rust based OS. I really need to keep an eye on his work.

Oladimeji Sowole • The New Stack

Note that at this stage, only certain aspects of the Edge UI have undergone this change. In reply to a Mastodon user who asked about this, Russell confirmed that it is “an ongoing effort” and that the Edge team is “converting surface-by-surface, with ~15% fully done so far.”

At the day job I’m diving into React Native because we’re getting a lot of requests for React Native work.

On the flip side you have Microsoft rethinking their use of React in their browser. It makes sense to me. You want your browser to be as zippy and memory efficient as it can be.

James Bickerton • Newsweek

On Thursday 192 House Republicans voted for an amendment which would have required a controversial Confederate monument to be reinstated at Arlington National Cemetery, where it was removed in December 2023.

What an embarrassing time in America. The GOP is fully embracing every mean and cruel law they possibly can. Why do they have to control everyone?

It’s always been a bit of a puzzle to me how the Republican and Democrat party have morphed over the years. Remember it was the GOP led by Lincoln who abolished slavery. Here we are over 150 years later and the GOP wants to control every life in America and Democrats are against it.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

We had a lot of fun this week tracking down a bug in the project I’m working on. It was exposed by slow server response, which was because the service had grown. So the bug was icky. Once we tracked it down on the client side we were able to fix it up pretty quickly. I love doing stuff like this! Finding and fixing bugs is part of any developers job along with writing code.

I hope you enjoy the links.

Natalie Venegas • Newsweek

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns' rare warning during a commencement speech about former President Donald Trump, sparked outrage from supporters of Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement this weekend.

People are right to continue to warn us all of the dangers of electing Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump to the Presidency.

Anyone who reads this site — thanks to both of you — knows I’m a Liberal Democrat suffering from “The Woke Mind Virus.” 😃 So of course I think a man set on destroying Democracy as we know it is dangerous.

Noah Kirsch • The Daily Beast

Now, former board member Helen Toner is explaining her decision. In a new podcast interview, the artificial intelligence researcher blasted Altman’s lack of transparency and said the board was kept in the dark about key decisions. She accused Altman of “withholding information, misrepresenting things that were happening in the company, [and] in some cases outright lying to the board.”

AI will continue to be controversial and it looks like Sam Altman will be the poster boy for the controversy, at least in the short term.

Keeping a full commercial product rollout from the board seems like a bad idea, doesn’t it? No wonder they fired him.

Mark Tyson • Tom’s Hardware

Popular TechTuber Jeff Geerling has delivered an updated take on the old chestnut about the relative merits of pigeon-based vs internet data transfers.

TL;DR - Data delivery by pigeon is still faster than the internet. 🤣

Kelly Crandall • Racer

In a joint statement issued Tuesday, Tony Stewart and Gene Haas confirmed that Stewart-Haas Racing will cease NASCAR operations at season’s end.

This is a real bummer for NASCAR fans and the sport in general. Stewart Haas had a championship team not so long ago but it’s been a long time since they’ve seen victory lane.

They have four cars on the grid. Three teams field four drivers and it’s my understanding NASCAR is going to limit team size to three going forward.

In 2016 NASCAR switched to a Charter system. In that system teams purchase a charter from NASCAR to be part of the system. Those charters are expected to grow in value so a team would have more than physical goods to sale should they decide to close shop. They’re not cheap. Spire Motorsports bought one last year for $40mm. What will each Stewart Haas charter sell for? 😳

Tuomas Pirhonen - PDF

Writing an NVMe Driver in Rust

The link above is to a PDF for Thomas Pirhonen’s Bachelors Thesis. Rust has really made inroads into systems development and I’m happy to see it. Having memory safe code at the systems level seems like a smart thing to do, don’t you think? 😃

I’d be curious to see how much unsafe code exists in the various Rust OS level projects I’ve heard of. But, you gotta start somewhere!

When will Swift be used to build major parts of Apple’s OS level code? Or is it already being used?

Cocoanetics

I’ve long had a longing to have a Mac Mini as build server in my technics room. After Apple finally updated it to (now) fashionable space grey, it was a must purchase for my company.

I’ve had a hankering to do this very thing. I can see setting up the server much in the way we see here and trigger builds via GitHub Actions to start the process. Heck, I could use Xcode’s built in support for automating builds and kick it off right from within Xcode on my laptop. Yeah, Xcode has a decent enough build system to make it useful. Makes me wonder how much of it Apple is using for Xcode Cloud or is 100% of that custom code?

Anton Zhiyanov

If you work with sensitive data, and want to be 100% sure that there is no trace of the old data after it has been updated or deleted — SQLite has you covered. The secure_delete pragma (off by default) causes SQLite to overwrite deleted content with zeros.

TIL! I’ve used SQLite in quite a few projects, including Stream. I love it for local storage and still prefer it to CoreData, it’s just straightforward SQL. Anywho, I had no idea you could do this. Another nice tool to keep in the toolbox.

JanerationX

Doctor Who returned to TV recently as a “soft reboot” to attract a new generation of viewers. Yeah, okay, but the older generations didn’t exactly go away, and since I am a member of an older generation, I am qualified to say that the show sucks.

I think we’ve all been here when we see a big change to our favorite Television show.

Heck, I’m torn about continuing to watch The Witcher. Henry Cavil is The Witcher and to see him replaced just feels wrong.

Kim Zetter • WIRED

Two years ago when “Michael,” an owner of cryptocurrency, contacted Joe Grand to help recover access to about $2 million worth of bitcoin he stored in encrypted format on his computer, Grand turned him down.

You gotta love these hacker folks. At least he’s using his talent for good.

Viktor Petersson

My Home Server Journey - From Raspberry Pi to Ryzen

What’s up with two server based links today? Guess I’m just in a very hardware mood today.

This reminds me I need to setup my $99 Mac Mini I purchased months ago. It’s an x86 based Mini and fairly old but I want it for media streaming and another local backup system.

David Price • Macworld

Those who miss the days of full-time Apple/Microsoft beef will have been heartened last week by bold claims that the latest Surface devices are faster than the M3 MacBook Air. It’s fun to see Microsoft’s marketing department in a combative mood, but part of me wishes the company would stop trying so hard to show it’s better than Apple.

I don’t know that I’d go this far. Microsoft is just trying to lead the industry into an ARM focused world by attempting to create a new standard of PC.

I’ve been on the Mac, almost exclusively, since around 2006(?) and I love the experience from a user and developer point of view.

There’s still that part of me that loves my old development days on Windows. It was also a great platform to build on.

The new Microsoft Surface Pro looks absolutely amazing and I’ve lusted for one of these computers for years. Microsoft has proven for years and years a tablet/laptop can have excellent touch support and a full desktop class OS underpinning it.

It’s only a matter of time before Apple does it. When it happens all doubt around Apple creating a convertible will disappear and folks will think it’s the greatest thing ever.

Chelsea Troy

Each quarter at the University of Chicago includes nine weeks of instruction. In the eighth week, I ask students to submit questions that they would like our ninth and final session to cover. This quarter, a third of the students in the class submitted some version of the question: “How can I use ChatGPT to get ahead in my programming job?”

I know of a lot of developers at work using ChatGPT to their advantage. It’s not that it’s doing their job, no, it’s just another tool to get started with a thought.

Jordan Tigani

The intended takeaway from the “Big Data is coming” chart was that pretty soon, everyone will be inundated by their data. Ten years in, that future just hasn’t materialized. We can validate this several ways: looking at data (quantitatively), asking people if it is consistent with their experience (qualitatively), and thinking it through from first principles (inductively).

I’m not really into backend stuff like this. It seems kind of boring but it’s good to know some folks are really into it.

Declaring something dead is a bit strange to me, because it was never a living thing, but I get the gist.

I’m sure your mileage will vary but this is a small piece worth a read just to understand his declaration.

BigData, it turns out, ain’t all that big.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I had to set aside my upgrade of some of the networking code changes I wanted to make on the project I’m on at work. That’s fine. I knew it would be a bit of a process to update this code and to be honest it may be a fools errand. But I still believe it would make the code more maintainable and eliminate two third party dependencies. But you have to be ready to sideline work like this when more pressing work shows up.

Here we go. I hope you enjoy the links this week.

Benj Edwards • Ars Technica

Gordon Bell, an architect of our digital age, dies at age 89

RIP 🪦

Tom Warren • The Verge

Microsoft has just announced a new Surface Pro, which is part of the new wave of Copilot Plus PCs. The new Pro, which is technically the “11th edition,” starts at $999, comes in four colors, and is powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X processors.

I don’t care about the AI stuff Microsoft announced and hopefully folks can turn it off because it sounds terrible but I do like seeing them ship new hardware with vastly improved performance. 👍🏼

Fingers crossed this one is a winner. 🤞🏼

Lance Ewing

There is nothing unusual about the outside of these disks, but there is something unique about the data that is stored on them, something that Sierra On-Line would have been totally unaware of and certainly wouldn’t have wanted them to include.

I love history stories like this! Back in my Visio days I was what we call a Configuration Engineer. I was in charge of our installer code and creating the final gold master disks — 720KB and 1.44MB — and CD, so I’m familiar with this process. I didn’t, however, have an imaging machine. We sent the masters out to a disk duplication service to mass produce them and put them in boxes with documentation.

Anywho, I never made a mistake like that, and this mistake was not the worst you could make. Hey, at least the code wasn’t there in plain text. You actually had to check space the OS has marked as free to find it. Remember kids, do a destructive format or a DoD wipe of space you’d like to be empty.

Kazuaki Nagata • The Japan Times

In a bid to break Apple and Google’s dominance of the smartphone app ecosystem, the Japanese government is looking to change rules on app markets and payments to stimulate competition.

Things are getting interesting for Apple and Google. At what point does Apple decide on a single strategy for managing the availability of third-party stores and installation of software outside of any store?

I can’t see Japan going for Apple’s “Core Technology Fee” but we’ll see as this moves forward.

John Gruber • Daring Fireball

Pixar Lays Off 175 Employees, 14 Percent of Staff, Shocking No One Who’s Tried Watching Their Recent Films

Harsh take from Gruber. The last Pixar Movie I saw was Onward and I liked it.

I don’t know if it’s that their movies are bad now. Maybe the magic has just worn off?

Jason Koebler • 404 Media

Google Is Paying Reddit $60 Million for F**ksmith to Tell Its Users to Eat Glue

This is a head scratcher. If LLMs are being trained on all of the Internet then we’re kind of screwed.

I’m not eating a pizza with glue in the sauce, ok. 🍕

Witney Seibold • /Film

Armitage didn’t even know his sword had been stolen until Peter Jackson brought it to his attention. He’d been equally surprised to have Orcrist join his possessions in the first place.

All I could think while reading this is how amazing it would be to have this sword hung above my fireplace. 🗡️

It’s a fun little story.

Chris Eidhof

This post is a look inside how (a small part of) SwiftUI works. I’m mainly writing this as part of my extended memory, so that I can go back to it and read about how it works.

This is the kind of post I need as a developer. Having experienced looks at part of the language you use daily is always helpful.

Swift continues to expand as a programming language and I wish the pace would slow a bit. I’m so far behind the curve it’s frightening. That’s what happens when you spend a year-and-a-half as a Director. Those dev skill wilt a bit and you get really far behind.

The good thing is nobody knows, or cares, if you’re using the latest and creates language features or frameworks. What they want is quality software.

I made note earlier this week that Tapbots beautifully designed and implemented Ivory app is written in Objective-C. Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

(I reached out to Tapbots to see if that was still true. I didn’t receive a reply.)

Rachel Treisman • NPR

Elvis Presley’s granddaughter is suing to stop the planned foreclosure sale of his compound Graceland, alleging that the company involved not only forged documents, but doesn’t actually exist.

I really hope they’re able to get this sorted out in favor of Elvis’ estate. It seems Lisa Marie may have gone around the estate to get a loan from a dodgy entity that doesn’t really exist. I’ll keep an eye on this one.

Rich Turner • Microsoft Command Line

We are excited to announce the open-sourcing of Microsoft GW-BASIC on GitHub!

I’ve share my love for BASIC and it’s nice to see Microsoft release this code to the general public.

Hey, can you release the grammar for Microsoft Professional Basic v6.x? I’d like to have that for reasons. 😃

Sean Hollister • The Verge

At Build, Microsoft now says it’s adding native version control to File Explorer by integrating systems like Git, letting you see new changes and comments directly from the app.

They’re basically Sherlocking some small plug-in developers with these features. It was inevitable. I used an extension to File Explorer in the mid-2000’s with Subversion that did this very thing. It now does it for git.

Jamelle Bouie • The New York Times

All of this brings us to the most recent controversy surrounding the Supreme Court justice Samuel A. Alito. Not long after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, my colleague Jodi Kantor reported last week, someone in the Alito household flew an inverted American flag in the front yard. The upside-down flag, a sign of naval distress, was one of the preferred symbols of the movement to “stop the steal” — a statement of solidarity with those who disbelieved the results of the 2020 presidential election and fought to return Trump to office against the rule of law and the verdict of the Constitution.

Now we know. Some of the Supreme Court justices are in bed with American Oligarchs and the MAGA movement. They need to be dismissed from the bench.

For a Supreme to openly show support for the overthrow of our country is pathetic and he needs to be held accountable.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Well, we’re in another of Virginia’s 12 seasons. Fake Spring is over, now it’s time for Winter Two or Three, I can’t remember the funny names given to them. 🤣 It’s been gray and rainy with thunderstorms all week. ⛈️ After a month of beautiful, mostly sunny days, it’s hard to go back to rain. Oh well, such is life in the Southeast.

Hey, good news! That project I loved so much is extended through the end of June. That makes me super happy. 😃

Gracie and Kolby are fired up this morning. Let’s see if they’ll let me get through this in a decent amount of time. Apparently it’s playtime. 🐶

Hope you enjoy the links.

Campbell Robertson • The New York Times

After a meeting that lasted for hours, the Shenandoah County school board voted early Friday morning to restore the names of three Confederate officers to schools in the district.

Good grief. Just when you think the South is finally making some progress stuff like this happens.

Racist bastards. 🤬

512Pixels

As nice as the new OLED display looks, and no matter how powerful the new M4 may be, the iPad’s problem in 2024 — or another year for that matter — is the software.

Power users continue to basically want macOS installed on their iPads.

I say Federico Viticci should find a way to make his FrankenPad easy to reproduce with a full line of accessories and how-to articles to guid you through the process.

He’d make tens of dollars.

Tim Murphy • Mother Jones

Musk is not a tech visionary with a side interest in politics these days, nor is he just another bored billionaire with a nativist streak; the political activism and the technological ambitions are inseparable. He believes his work is part of a civilizational struggle in which woke progressives pose an existential threat to humanity. And he spends most of his days inside a feedback loop that’s radicalizing him even more.

I think we all know good old Space Karen has been Red Pilled for a very long time. Folks like him and Jack Dorsey slide further and further down the rabbit hole with each passing day.

Good riddance I say. I hope they buy some island, move there, and never come back. 🤡

Diana Ionescu • Planetizen

Data centers in Northern Virginia are using “absurd amounts of water” to power cooling systems, writes Sachi Kitajima Mulkey in Grist, causing concern among local officials.

How is it I live in Virginia and didn’t know it was home to so many data centers?

You’d think all these smart people would figure out how to power everything with good clean energy and find alternative cooling methods. Like building underground or something. 💧

Joan Westenberg

It’s time to wake up, folks. When someone offers you “exposure” or says they want to “empower creators,” keep a firm hand on your wallet. They’re not your friend, and they don’t care about supporting the arts. They care about money, pure and simple, and they see creators as resources to be exploited.

I instantly thought of most YouTubers and Musicians. Sure, there are some who make a killing off their works but most make almost nothing.

I thought, very foolishly, I’d be able to make $200 a month with my Indie Apps. Boy was I ever dumb to think that way. At its high point in 2009 to 2011 I was making about $20 a month from RxCalc. It’s still my biggest money maker between it and Stream. That is, of course, my fault. Making my apps better may result in better income.

Do YouTubers and Musicians feel that way or do they feel ripped off by the platforms?

Karissa Bell • Engadget

Jack Dorsey claims Bluesky is ‘repeating all the mistakes’ he made at Twitter

Dorsey also seems to have been Red Pilled. I’m not really sure what he’s after. It sounds like he wants and no hold barred free for all. What he’s after would turn into a giant garbage fire. A flame war to end all flame wars. It would boil out into the streets. An ultimate chaos machine.

Countries have laws. Those laws are largely in place to protect people.

We don’t need a lawless social network but apparently Dorsey now thinks X is the bastion of free speech. It’s not. It’s become a right wing propaganda machine full of Nazis, white supremacist, and vile right wing extremists with your occasional famous actor or favorite personality. 🗑️

Jean MacDonald

I am leaving my position as Community Manager at Micro.blog at the end of this month.

I wish Jean all the best. She’s been ever present on Micro.blog since day one and she made it a better place.

Cheers, Jean, and all the best in your next adventure! ❤️

Kelly Crandall • Racer

Michael McDowell and Spire Motorsports have announced a multi-year agreement for McDowell to become the driver of the team’s No. 71 Chevrolet beginning in 2025.

This caught me off guard! Michael McDowell seems like one of those loyal to a fault type guys. He’s single handedly kept Front Row Motorsports afloat, in my opinion. He’s been very competitive this year at times and spent time leading races. He even came darned close to winning at Talladega. Apparently he told Dale Jr. he was willing to die to win that race. A bit too aggressive for my blood, but that’s the attitude he’ll bring with him to Spire Motorsports.

Here’s hoping he goes to that next level and wins more races.

Jon Brodkin • Ars Technica

Boeing says workers skipped required tests on 787 but recorded work as completed

I just can’t with this company. How can anyone get on a plane now?

I’m afraid of heights and flying in general. So, yeah, I already had issues with getting on a giant tube held in the air by some magical force. Ok, ok, you know what I mean.

Now I’m really leery of getting on one. 😰

Bill Doerrfeld • The New Stack

Open source software is having a midlife crisis. Open source contributors are struggling to keep pace. Popular open source projects are making restrictive licensing changes. Backdoor threats are placing the open source supply chain in jeopardy. And, no one seems to have a clear grasp on what “open” means in the context of artificial intelligence.

There’s a lot of open source software available for individuals and corporations to use without paying a dime for it. That can come at a price. We’ve seen developers remove their packages from node, breaking developers worldwide, we’ve seen plenty of repositories go dark and watch contributions waste away from but rot, and recently we’ve witnessed a long game infiltration into an extremely important piece of software by what appears to be a nation state.

I have no idea how to fix these problems. I suppose treating people with kindness and respect could help with certain issues but some are going to take vigilance one all of our parts to make sure the things we use continue to work and aren’t used for nefarious purposes.

Sarah Perez • TechCrunch

Meta’s move into the open social web, also known as the fediverse, is puzzling. Does the Facebook owner see open protocols as the future? Will it embrace the fediverse only to shut it down, shifting people back to its proprietary platforms and decimating startups building in the space? Will it bring its advertising empire to the fediverse, where today clients like Mastodon and others remain ad-free?

It’s hard for me to imagine what Meta can do to take over the Fediverse but I don’t have a devious mind.

The Fediverse feels like the place we commoners can make a place to flourish. To date I know we have Mastodon as a Twitter replacement and PixelFed as an Instagram replacement. What about YouTube and the likes of Spotify and Apple Music? Is there a brave enough musician or group of musicians willing to build a music streaming service based on open protocols and API’s?

Maybe Taylor Swift would like to back a small team to build streaming software that federates and gives indies a way to host their own music and their own stores. I don’t know if something like that is plausible? Anything is possible to build given enough will, inspiration, time, and resources.

Maybe we’ll see some new ventures spring out of the Fediverse related to video and music streaming.

Jason Graziadei • Nantucket Currenr

Cyber Stuck: First Tesla Cybertruck On Nantucket Has A Rough Day

Once again the Cyber Truck gets a lot of attention by being kind of a bad truck. To be fair it’s easy to get stuck on a beach but damn I kind of like seeing it fail. And that all stems from my dislike of Tesla’s public face in Space Karen.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Feeling under the weather today. I started getting sick in the middle of the week. I slept a lot yesterday and hope to have a quiet weekend.

I hope you enjoy the links.

Paul Lefebvre

Just a few days ago, BASIC turned 60! On May 1, 1964 BASIC was created by Dartmouth College professors John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz.

I really love BASIC. It was the first programming language I learned and used professionally. It was all MS-DOS based at the time and the language had changed over time to include functions and custom data types. It was a really great language.

I owe my career to Microsoft BASIC Professional Development System. ❤️

Joseph Heck

Designing a Swift library with data-race safety

Swift concurrency changes are going to be a lot of fun and take some effort to restructure existing code to make use of it.

And by fun I mean a lot hair pulling, teeth gnashing and head banging on the desk.

Jeremy Mathai • /Film

Marvel couldn’t have made a better choice if it had the Time Stone itself. Back when a “Doctor Strange” movie was far from a guaranteed hit, Scott Derrickson and Kevin Feige knew they simply couldn’t afford to get the casting wrong.

Can you imagine anyone other than Benedict Cumberbatch playing Dr. Strange? I can’t.

And to think Joaquin Phoenix was on their radar sounds strange to me. To be clear Joaquin Phoenix is an amazing actor and can play anything but after seeing Benedict Cumberbatch playing him I can’t imagine anyone else doing it.

Anton Zaides

I always knew that distractions in the workplace are harmful, but only after reading Deep Work by Cal Newport, did I understand how severe the problem is!

This is why I prefer an office to open office spaces. I don’t know how anyone thrives in an open space. Add multiple meetings a day to the mix and you’re not getting much done.

Since the pandemic I’ve been working from home and it’s wonderful. I can control my entire workspace. 🖥️

K. Denise Rucker Krepp • CNN

In some military circles and among many who consider themselves aficionados of Confederate history. The Ruckers have a history of military service going back generations. They’ve also had deep roots in America’s shameful Confederate past. That includes my distant cousin, Col. Edmund Rucker.

It’s really nice to see the Confedercy being dismantled. Now, if we could get rid of the white supremacists and bigots that would be amazing. One step at a time, I suppose.

Collin Woodard • Jalopnik

Tesla laid off at least 10 percent of its workforce earlier this month, and in typical Tesla fashion, the Texas-based automaker made sure the layoffs were done in an organized fashion with plenty of communication and a clearly defined strategy. Just kidding. The layoffs were so poorly executed that security was forced to scan employees’ badges at the door to figure out who had been laid off. And, apparently, that included a guy who had taken to sleeping in his car and showering at the factory so he could work longer hours.

Musk is such a nice, standup, fella, isn’t he? 🤬

Nothing sticks to this guy. I guess that’s what happens when you’re a narcissistic sociopath.

Richard Speed • The Register

Google’s latest round of layoffs have hit engineers working on its Flutter and Python teams.

And… more layoffs. Tech has had a rough couple years.

Howard Oakley

In my quest to implement a full app written for SwiftUI on macOS, my next tasks concern the app’s Settings, how to set those as User Defaults, how to implement some of their more common controls, and how to customise the About window. In these, SwiftUI starts to come into its own, in comparison with AppKit, although it does have a couple of surprising shortcomings.

I love it when folks share their code and experience! I’m not brave enough to do that! Thanks for the code! 👨🏽‍💻

David Merritt Johns • The Atlantic

Back in 2018, a Harvard doctoral student named Andres Ardisson Korat was presenting his research on the relationship between dairy foods and chronic disease to his thesis committee. One of his studies had led him to an unusual conclusion: Among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems.

This is weird to read. Ice Cream for diabetics? I mean, anything for ice cream. Amirite? 🍦

Chance Miller, Ben Lovejoy, and Filipe Espósito • 9to5Mac

A little over a year ago, General Motors made what may well turn out to be one of its biggest gambles in many years: dropping support for CarPlay for all future EVs.

The author thinks this was a mistake. I don’t.

I’m hoping this will turn out well for GM. Just don’t serve up a bunch of ads for new features and other products.

Brian Ramian • Los Angeles Times

Opinion: I once lived in my car and can’t fathom criminalizing homelessness

When I worked at LEVEL Studios in 2010 I had trouble finding a place I could stay fairly cheaply after my sub-lease ran out. I lived in my car for a week. It wasn’t horrible, but its wasn’t ideal.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Welcome to this Special Sunday Edition of Saturday Morning Coffee. What makes it special you ask? Nothing! 😆

Kim, my lovely bride, let me sleep in yesterday. It was glorious! And since we had plans to be out of the house by around 10AM, well, that meant I couldn’t put things together yesterday. Now you know why you’re seeing this on Sunday.

Grab some coffee and enjoy the links!

Adele Peters • Fast Company

Last Saturday, as 39 million Californians went about their daily lives—taking showers, doing laundry, or charging their electric cars—the whole state ran on 100% clean electricity for more than nine hours.

I find this very encouraging and I believe it’s only going to get better.

Down the hill from where we live one of our power providers is installing a large field of solar panels. I don’t know how large it is or how much power it’ll generate, but I’m here for it.

Naomi Hartono • blogs.nasa.gov

For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems.

Engineers this smart blow my mind.

“Oh, the thing I need to repair is millions of miles away? No problem.” 😳

Rick Perlstein • The American Prospect

And that’s when the man in the castle with the seven fireplaces said it.

“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”

Andreessen is another piece of Silicon Valley garbage. Even if he said he was joking there’s always a nugget of truth in there. I’d say he really believes what he said.

Jesse Wegman • New York Times 🎁

Trump’s Immunity Case Was Settled More Than 200 Years Ago

That seems about right. We’ve managed to have 240+ years of Presidencies without one committing crimes against the nation that I doubt our founding fathers expected it to happen like this.

Trump is a rapist and a mob boss looking to use the Presidency as his own personal piggy bank.

I hope the Supremes do the right thing and declare the President isn’t above the law.

Wojciech Kulik

In my previous post, I just scratched the surface of iOS development in Neovim. Since then I discovered many new things that allowed me to move my development almost completely to Neovim.

If you’re really good with keyboard commands this could be the editor for you. I’ll stick with Xcode and BBEdit. 😄

AJ Willingham

I just don’t get Taylor Swift. There, I said it. (DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT DISLIKE HER. I WISH HER ALL OF THE HAPPINESS AND SUCCESS IN THE WORLD. PLEASE, I HAVE A FAMILY.)

Better be careful! The Swifties won’t be happy!

Remember the hubbub caused by Tool releasing their first album in 13 years keeping Ms. Swift’s new album out of the top spot? I do. It was kind of funny.

She’s a cultural phenomenon and apparently a very kind, caring, human being. What’s not to like?

John Viega

A few weeks ago, I got a bit miffed reading yet another article that was too dismissive about memory safety, basically being mostly dismissive about the need for change. The following weekend, I started seeing flippant responses from security luminaries, saying essentially that you’re irresponsible and dangerous unless you drop C and C++ faster than I dropped my 8 am classes my first year in college.

I’m an old curmudgeon and I still love C++ as a development language, especially if you’re doing something that needs to be cross platform. But, I certainly understand the trend and the desire to move to memory safe languages. Swift and Rust are both great choices. Swift has made development on Apple OS’es easier and safer. I love it! Rust is on my to learn list but given my latest project is React Native it makes more sense for me to learn JavaScript. Rust will have to wait.

Jonathan M. Gitlin • Ars Technica

Honda announced today that it will spend $11 billion to expand its electric vehicle manufacturing presence in North America. The Japanese automaker already has a number of factories in the US, Mexico, and Canada, and it’s this last one that will benefit from the expansion, with four EV-related plants planned for Ontario.

That’s a lot of money and it’s interesting it’s happening in Canada instead of the US.

Here’s to Honda building better, more affordable, EV’s than Tesla.

Gary Bernhard • Destroy All Software

This science fiction / comedy / completely serious talk traces the history of JavaScript, and programming in general, from 1995 until 2035. It’s not pro- or anti-JavaScript; the language’s flaws are discussed frankly, but its ultimate impact on the industry is tremendously positive. For Gary’s more serious (and less futuristic) thoughts on programming, try some Destroy All Software screencasts.

It’s easy to poke fun a JavaScript but equally as important to understand how important it’s become to our industry.

Dick Uliano • wtop.com

Archeologists have made a remarkable find at George Washington’s Mount Vernon in the ground beneath the cellar — two sealed bottles containing plump cherries.

Very cool! Now what? Who wants to open a jar and eat one? I kind of do, but there’s no way that’s gonna happen. 🤣

Did you know that while George Washington was away fighting the American Revolutionary War he was also writing home to instruct his brother how he wanted his home renovation to proceed. Then he’d go off and fight some redcoats.

Alex Franchuk • Mozilla

Porting a cross-platform GUI application to Rust

This is something my cross platform loving brain could get behind. The Mozilla team rewrote — not something I recommend — their crash reporting tool in 100% Rust. Nifty!

That included writing four abstractions for different UI toolkits; Mac, Windows, Linux, and one for testing. So three plus. 😄 Love it!

Digiday

The possibility of a TikTok ban is inching closer to becoming a reality at this point. On Tuesday, the Senate passed the bill that would bar the social media platform from operating in the U.S. unless ByteDance, its Chinese parent company, sells its stake.

So this was earlier in the week. The President signed it. Now ByteDance has nine months to get the deal done or pull out of the United States.

I still feel like this could’ve been handled differently but I have no idea what that would entail.

Jordan Rose

So let me re-iterate: the three-and-a-half features listed at the top are the only forms of run-time polymorphism in Swift. Now when someone asks “how can I allow arbitrary different argument types to result in different behavior”, you know the answer: make a protocol.

You heard the man! Make a protocol! That will cause the compiler to enforce the contract between your implementation and the definition. You’re obliged to implement it.

If you only need to know an object “is-a” thing that protocol doesn’t actually need to define any properties or methods. Yes, it can be that simple.

Manton Reece

Ghost has announced they are working on ActivityPub support

Manton has been on the open standards software train for years and years. That’s why Micro.blog implements ActivityPub, BlueSky’s AT Protocol, and Micropub.

Micro.blog is a great blogging tool for $5/month. I use it to post here.

Seth Godin

Don’t ignore AI because it’s dumb. Figure out how to create patterns and processes where you can use it as the useful tool it’s becoming.

Keep in mind that AI is just another tool, created by humans, full of flaws. Yes, it’s extremely useful, yes it can get things wrong. But, it’s still growing and changing. Hopefully it’ll will get better over time.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Life is just flying by. Another week in the books.

I’ll be helping Kim paint the kitchen today. Should be an adventure. 👨‍🎨

Jeffrey Zeldman

Sure, watches that tell you when you’re walking unsteadily and pocket computer phones that show you the closest pizzeria are swell, but were you around for ResEdit?

Unfortunately I wasn’t a Mac user during the ResEdit days but I do know a lot of folks who had fun with it, does that count? 😃

David Ingram • NBC News

Elon Musk’s X is a thriving hub for Nazi support and propaganda, with paid subscribers sharing speeches by Adolf Hitler or content praising his genocidal regime.

Shocked! Surprised! Said no one hearing this. I really don’t know what else to say. He’s a garbage human.

Benjamin Sandofsky

An ex-Apple designer who went on to startup success once told me, “I wish I could give a workshop for Apple jumping into startups, to help them un-learn The Apple Way.” I think Apple makes some of the best products in the world, and I strive to build products with their level of craft and quality, so it pains me to admit that The Apple Way can destroy a lot of startups. Which brings us to Humane.

I have yet to read anything positive about the Humane Pin. It’s not such a bad idea to be able to talk to a device you’re wearing. I’ve had an Apple Watch for years and years, that’s the device to talk to. Siri could use some work but I have a feeling that’s already happening.

John S. Tobey • Forbes

Sell Trump Media Stock (DJT) Now - An Implosion Is Likely

I feel bad for all the folks who believe so much in Trump that they invested their entire life savings in a company poised to fail. There’s a sucker born every day and if Trump is good at anything it’s grifting.

Jimmy Cook

A React Native app is made up of two sides, the JavaScript side and the native side. The native side could be Objective-C/Swift for iOS or Java/Kotlin for Android (not to mention the other platforms for React Native like web and desktop). The React Native Bridge allows the native code and the javascript code to talk to each other. Without the bridge, there is no way for the native code to send any information to the JavaScript code and vise versa.

I’ve been working on a React Native project that integrates into an existing iOS and Android app. We’ve created ways for our React Native developers to use the native iOS and Android code to do work for them and allow them to navigate between React Native views and Native views. There’s definitely more work we could do to improve on what we’ve started but it’s in a decent position.

We’ve already released some React Native based work and will be rolling out more soon.

I’m having a blast!

Devin Meenan • /Film

Jaws' Most Famous Improvised Line Was A Not-So-Sneaky Dig At Studio Producers

This is a fun little read. Make sure you take the time to visit. It’ll only take a minute of your life.

Ellis Karran,Richard Madden • BBC

When they removed the wooden panel, it revealed a large slab of stone featuring a carving of the Lincoln Imp.

How cool is that!

I hope they find more interesting relics around their home. Let’s hope they’re not cursed. 😆

Alexandra Sternlicht • Fortune via News+

But with the House voting in March to force ByteDance to sell its stake in TikTok, 11 former employees interviewed by Fortune tell a vastly different story. Many of those ex-workers, four of whom were employed as recently as last year, say at least some of TikTok’s operations were intertwined with its parent during their tenures, and that the company’s independence from China was largely cosmetic.

This gets more and more interesting by the day. I was against forcing them to sell and I still think it’s a bit heavy handed.

Is there a way to regulate them to make sure American citizens data remains on servers here in the States?

We know Apple had to hand over the keys to iCloud in China. Could that be done here?

It’s above my pay grade and I’m sure someone much smarter than me could give me the lowdown. In the meantime I’ll keep watching from the cheap seats. 🍿

Haela Huntress • Metal Sucks

Maynard James Keenan may be a 60-year-old man ranting against cell phones, but he actually might have a point on this one, at least somewhat.

I like that he does this. When I went to Aftershock in 2019, and Tool closed out the festival, there didn’t seem to be any rules around cell phones. As soon as their set opened it was cell phones up from front to back. I was so tempted to take one away from the dude in front of me blocking my view. Yeah, I was pissed off but managed to keep my cool. It sucked looking around that thing all evening but in the end I got to hear some amazing music.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Kim let me sleep in this morning. I must say it was pretty glorious.

Not too much to report on my work week. Busy, but in a good way. I really love this project. The people and the technical aspects have been amazing. Fingers crossed we get to continue on after delivering everything we had to do in this initial round of work. 🤞🏼

JoBlo

Very sad news today as it’s been reported that M. Emmet Walsh has died at the age of 88. No matter the size of the role, the prolific character actor always made a unique impression throughout his long career, which spanned six decades.

He was great in Blade Runner and I loved his character in Christmas with the Kranks.

R.I.P. 🪦

Peter Bergen • CNN

Kushner’s newly disclosed musings last month that Gaza has a lot of “very valuable” waterfront property reminds one of Marie Antoinette’s purported observation, “Let them eat cake.”

Kushner is a perfect fit for the Trump crime organization. He’s a sociopath just like his father-in-law.

My gut reaction earlier sums it up.

Casey Newton • Platformer

Today let’s talk about one of the most significant antitrust lawsuits ever filed in the tech industry: this 88-page complaint against Apple, filed by the Department of Justice and joined by 16 states, accusing the iPhone maker of illegally maintaining its monopoly over high-end smartphones and artificially inflating prices for consumers.

I personally see some similarities between this case and the case the DOJ brought against Microsoft in 1998.

I wrote about it earlier in the week if you’re interested and pointed out the piece from a Jason Snell article that really caught my attention.

Emma Roth • The Verge

Threads is coming to the fediverse — and we just got our first official look at how that might work from Meta itself. During the FediForum conference on Tuesday, Meta’s Peter Cottle showed off a brief demo of how users will eventually be able to connect their accounts and posts to the fediverse.

Being the administrator of a Mastodon instance I’m actually excited for this! There are certain famous people I’d love to follow again and my hope is I’ll find them on Threads.

Tim Bray

When I’m away from home, I still want to listen to the music we have at home (well, I can live without the LPs). We had well over a thousand CDs so that’s a lot of music, 12,286 tracks ripped into Apple Lossless. Except for a few MP3s from, well, never mind. This instalment of the De-Google Project is about ways to do that with less Big-Tech involvement.

I really like the idea of this. I have an old Mac Mini I’d like to turn into a media server, most likely using Plex. I’ve started buying Blu-ray’s again for fear of losing parts of my video library at the whim of the corporation I purchased the license from.

Devlin Barrett and Perry Stein • The Washington Post

Lawyers and former judges said they are baffled by an order issued this week by the federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s pending trial on charges that he mishandled classified documents — and believe her instructions suggest the case will not go to trial anytime soon.

The sway the Orange Turd has over parts of our government is shocking. I hope she’s replaced and soon.

Ryan Hockensmith • ESPN

How one fan picked the greatest March Madness bracket ever built

This is a fun story. I’ve picked Final Four winners and won tournaments among friends with better brackets, but there’s usually a surprise early on that can make or break your bracket.

Just look at the South this year. It’s a mess and I’m here for it.

Jason Karaian • The New York Times

Unilever, the consumer goods giant, said on Tuesday that it would cut 7,500 jobs and spin off its ice cream unit, which includes Ben & Jerry’s, to reduce costs and simplify its portfolio of brands.

Big corporations continue to make huge profits for shareholders at the expense of the working class. I don’t know if that’s exactly what’s happening here but it feels like it.

HomeGrown

As part of creating the Grow Your Own Services site, I set up my own Mastodon server through a managed hosting service. I thought I’d write an article about this topic, in order to help others considering doing the same thing. I’ve tried to break down the process into ten main steps.

If you have the gumption to run and maintain your own Mastodon instances this article is for you.

Me? I just use Masto.Host.

Aurelio Garcia-Ribeyro • Oracle

Java users on macOS 14 running on Apple silicon systems should consider delaying the macOS 14.4 update

This is a pretty big thing to break and I’m sure the DOJ will not look kindly on it.

Louie Mantia

We’ve truly lost sight of how to make good apps. There’s a serious lack of vision and taste in the industry. Everyone’s given in to the lowest common denominator in the design of apps, simply mimicking what others do without understanding if it’s even the right choice.

I’ve been reading Louie more and more lately. I’m glad he’s started blogging because I’ve loved his pieces on his work history, from The Icon Factory to Apple.

Not to mention his blog is fully hand built. That is very tempting to me.

Joab Jackson • The New Stack

After 20 years of development, the open source GnuCOBOL “has reached an industrial maturity and can compete with proprietary offers in all environments,” said OCamlPro founder and GnuCOBOL contributor Fabrice Le Fessant, in a FOSDEM talk about the technology.

What a journey! 20 years in the making. And yes, COBOL is still a thing.

[Erika Morphy • TechSpot](www.techspot.com/news/1022…]

The big picture: Job cuts in the tech industry last year were attributed to the need to economize, driven by inflation and a hiring spree during the pandemic. So, what’s the explanation this year, especially when many of these firms have accumulated a significant amount of cash?

It’s been a rough couple years for tech. 😔

KIRSTEN GRIESHABER • The Associated Press

In Germany, the far right is on the rise again. How did it happen?

The extreme right is growing around the world. Both of my grandfathers would roll in their graves if they were around to see this. They both fought to help free us from fascism.

Derrick Bryson Taylor • The New York Times

The former television anchor Don Lemon’s wide-ranging, testy interview with Elon Musk was released online on Monday morning, touching upon topics including politics, particularly the billionaire’s recent meeting with former President Donald J. Trump; Mr. Musk’s reported drug use; hate speech on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which he now owns; and more.

I watched this and thought Lemon asked some really great, pointed, questions and Musk revealed his authoritarian, racist, self.

Lawrence Hodge • Jalopnik

Lincoln dealers have a big problem. Aside from having just four models to sell, dealers have a bunch of cars from one and two model years ago that they haven’t been able to move.

I admit it. If I could get my hands on a brand new Lincoln Navigator for a super crazy sub 30,000 price tag, I’d consider it. They’re nice.