WHO DID THIS!
You deserve a medal! š
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
Iāve been informally working with a co-worker answering questions about building out hybrid native applications and itās been wonderful. I also had opportunity to work on more React Native to iOS code with another developer. Total blast. It hit all my happy buttons.
All that happiness was destroyed later Friday afternoon, but thatās a story for another day. Donāt worry, Iām fine, my family is fine, everythingās fine.
Without going into details (that’s what the technote is for), Acorn’s file format is a SQLite database, with a simple three-table schema, containing TIFF or PNG bitmaps to represent bitmap layers, and a plist to represent shape layers. Acorn has kept this simple format since version 2.0 back in 2009.
At some point Iād opened an Acorn file in Base, my database editing app of choice, and realized it was actually a SQLite database. Nifty!
Given Gus is the creator and maintainer of FMDB it kind of makes sense. š (I use FMDB in Stream.)
Warning that even the slightest dent, knick, or scratchĀ would henceforth be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,Ā Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Tuesday that Raymond Pratt, a 54-year-old resident of Chula Vista, CA who bumped a Tesla while parallel parking, had been sentenced to death.
The Onionās articles, like this one, put a smile on my face.
Google lays off hundreds of employees in Android, Pixel group
Iām afraid weāre going to see more and more of this over the next handful of years.
Iām sure Iām living on borrowed time. Who knows, I may end up working at Starbucks?
I love being a software developer but the new world order is ready to trade craft for expediency. I hate that. I hope I can continue to be a software craftsman.
If I could retire today, I would. That would allow me to focus on Stream and [top secret project] all the time. š
Kate McCusker ā¢ The Guardian
Protective helmets were donned and sledgehammers wielded as
Elon MuskSpace Karen critics vented their frustration at the Tesla boss and billionaire by smashing up a disused Tesla bound for the scrapheap.
Oh, how much would you love to do this? I know I would.
Have you heard of the abandoned mall parking lots being used to store Tesla cars and trucks, weird, right? It would be a shame if a pack of drones flew over them and bombed them into oblivion, wouldnāt it?
[Ruben Cagnie ā¢ Toast Technology Blog]
At Toast, we believe that GraphQL is the right technology to build efficient web and mobile applications. This did not happen overnight. In this blogpost, we will cover the adoption of GraphQL at Toast, from its early days to the recent paradigm shift towards GraphQL Federation.
I love the Toast app! ā¤ļø Itās one of my favorite apps on my phone because itās darned handy! There are four restaurants we love to eat at but sometimes weād like to get takeout. Thatās where Toast comes in. Their idea to build a generic ordering app was super smart. Love it! ā¤ļø
Itās nice to see how folks build their infrastructure out. Reading articles like this is like reading about a motor rebuild. Thereās always something new to learn.
Iāve always wanted to try GraphQL. Maybe one of these days Iāll get a chance at the day job? š
Former Substack creators say theyāre earning more on new platforms that offer larger shares of subscription revenue
Good! Nazistack needs a mass exodus of great writers.
I need to write a piece with a list of the wonderful writers I follow there, via RSS of course, so anyone who reads this can go encourage them to leave Substack. š¤¬
This weekend, U.S. secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick went on CBSās Face the Nation and pitched a fantasy world where iPhones are manufactured in the United States:
Iām sure Tim Cook would love to have a factory complete with worker accommodations that drives folks into the ground for pennies a day.
Maybe our new Administration plans to do away with the minimum wage too?
Itās downright strange how little we know about the hacker or hackers who exposed the identities of over 30 million Ashley Madison users in 2015.
I watched a documentary on Netflix called [Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies, & Scandal(https://time.com/6977627/netflix-ashley-madison-documentary-true-story) a couple nights back and it was absolutely fascinating.
As far as I know the person or persons behind the hack have never been found! That is just amazing to me. Their saving grace is they did it for cultural reasons, not for money. After making their demand for the company to shut down they simply delivered on their threat to release the data theyād stolen. No money demand.
Itās worth a watch.šæ
Mitchellaneous: Excellent protest signs
I threw this in here because I love seeing the interesting signs folks come up with for protests. There have been a lot of good ones since Marmalade Messiah took office.
Tapestry, a new app designed to organize the open social web, is adding a valuable feature to help people who are keeping up with multiple social networks: It will now remove duplicate posts from your feed. That means if you follow the same person across social networking services like Bluesky and Mastodon, you wonāt have to see their post appear twice in your feed if theyāve shared it in multiple places.
I remember Craig Hockenberry being asked if Twitterrific ā long live Ollie! ā was coming to Mastodon. He said that The Iconfactory was exploring something different. Something more for the open web.
Well, Tapestry is that app and it was brilliantly executed.
Iām looking forward to what they do with the Mac version. š
Oh, one more thing! Hire The Iconfactory to do your design work, I did, and the results were brilliant!
The Iconfactory is one of those wonderful companies in my list of small companies Iād work for in a heartbeat! š„°
I have met a lot of developers in my life. Lately, I asked myself: āWhat does it take to be one of the best? What do they all have in common?ā
Great piece. Iāve met my share of absolutely incredible developers in my time. From so many developers at Visio, too many to name, to the many excellent developers at WillowTree, hi Nish!
I like Matthiasā take on the matter.
David Eaves, Hillary Hartley ā¢ Lawfare
In March, the U.S. government shut down 18F, the digital services team tasked with modernizing government technology and services. 18F was perhaps best known for helping the IRS create a free direct-file tax website that makes it fast and free for Americans to file taxes.
This group was full of kind, caring, compassionate, designers, developers, and project managers with the goal of making world class websites for the government.
Folks like Ethan Marcotte went to work there. Yes, that Ethan Marcotte, the guy who created Responsive Web Design. Now think of an entire engineering team like that!
Cory’s right, using an RSS reader will make your digital life better. I’m wasting less time scrolling past stuff I don’t care about and more time reading things I enjoy. That’s a win.
Yep, yep, yep! There are plenty of excellent RSS readers on the market, but I think you should use Stream! š
C is the lingua franca of programming. We must all speak C, and therefore C is not just a programming language anymore ā itās a protocol that every general-purpose programming language needs to speak.
This piece will take a little time to read but I really appreciated the technical detail and the authors take on so many things C. Nicely done! šš¼
Last week we explored some Threads compatibility updates, how to find and follow people across the Fediverse, and the progress of the social web beta launch. This week, we’ve got more fixes and updates to share, as well as a painful and embarrassing story that we wish had never happened.
This is Ghosts place to talk about how theyāre building ActivityPub support into Ghost. Itās nice to see other blogging tools support open standards.
To my knowledge, Micro.blog, WordPress, and Ghost support ActivityPub. Iām looking forward to seeing more!š»
All of Apple’s services are abysmal
Iāve heard this from so many people over the years. Creating web services is hard. Especially when youāre servicing millions and millions of people, but shops like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook manage to pull it off. Why canāt Apple?
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
Val Kilmer, who played Bruce Wayne in āBatman Forever,ā channeled Jim Morrison in Oliver Stoneās āThe Doorsā and starred as a tubercular Doc Holliday in āTombstone,ā died Tuesday in Los Angeles.
We lost a good one. Iāve always enjoyed Val Kilmer in his roles. My favorite is his portrayal of Doc Holiday in Tombstone but I also liked him in Real Genius, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and The Saint.
If you were a fan or are curious about Mr Kilmer give the documentary Val a viewing. Itās really well done.
Oh, I also liked his Madmartigan in Willow.
RIP šŖ¦
Last Tuesday at 1 AM, I was debugging a critical production issue in my AI dev tool. As I dug through layers of functions, I suddenly realized ā unlike the new generation of developers, I was grateful that I could actually understand my codebase. Thatās when I started thinking more about Karpathyās recent statements on vibe coding.
Iāve noted here frequently how slow I am to pick up new languages and frameworks. Largely itās because I have to dig in, get to the bottom of things, and really develop an understanding of how things actually work. The more abstract ā or magic ā the language or framework the harder I have to work and the longer it takes for me to grok it. That takes time. For me it usually takes two times longer than most people. Iām a dumb redneck who likes computers, I aināt that smart, so I learn via a lot of head banging and frustration, oh, and persistence and hard work.
All that to say, I love the craft of software development and I have a really hard time with the notion of using an LLM to develop and entire application for me. I can see using an LLM to get past things Iām not great at. Like my current huge struggle with auto layout in AppKit, but not for everything. š§
You say ācity,ā and Iām going to piss myself, and thereās no way Iām going to hide that wet spot just to make you libs more comfortable. Iām going to tell it like it isāfor instance, Iām a man, and Iām scared of my own desires, and I donāt care who knows it!
When I think of Conservatives I think of folks who believe theyāre patriots, self reliant, tough, and religious.
Often I think theyāre none of those things. Being a patriot doesnāt mean wearing a flag shirt or having the Constitution tattooed on your arm or the American flag waving in your front yard.
A patriot is someone who loves their country and would do anything to protect it. That also means being critical of it and standing up for what you believe.
Many Conservatives Iāve met tend to be hateful of others and angry about what others have.
The Onion has a nice way of capturing that. š
Iāve been using the recently revamped Reeder on iOS, and after just a few weeks it feels pretty darned close to my ideal way of reading feeds.
Ashur has written a nice piece on his experience with Reeder. It is a very fine piece of software for iOS and Mac and Silvio Rizzi is an extremely talented designer/developer.
Heās taken a new direction with his beloved feed reader. Itās now more broad and can subscribe to more than RSS feeds, which is something Iāve wanted to do with Stream, and The Icon Factory have done with Tapestry.
Itās a new dawn for feed readers. Theyāre more general purpose viewers now. Expect to see more of this from other readers in future releases.
Also, thank you for the mention Ashur. Iām very grateful for your support over the years! ā¤ļø
Tom Warren and Jay Peters ā¢ The Verge
A Microsoft employee disrupted the companyās 50th anniversary event to protest its use of AI.
The world is in such a strange place at this point in history and I hope we learn from it, otherwise we are doomed to complete failure. War, division, and climate change are all huge threats to humanity.
I donāt blame Israel for defending itself against Hamas. Who would? They were attacked by a terrorist organization who wants to exterminate them. We did the same thing after 9/11.
However, I do take issue with Israel attempting to obliterate Gaza and all her people.
Israel of all countries should know better. Jews were hunted by Hitlerās Nazi Germany who wanted to exterminate them. How can they turn around and do the same? šš¼
Elon Muskās polygonal pickup is a polarizing sales flop that’s missed the billionaireās volume goal by a staggering 84%. And thereās no sign that things are improving.
Yeah, the Cyber Truck. š¤£
Vojtech Novak, Shubham Gupta, Fabrizio Cucci, Riccardo Cipolleschi ā¢ React Native Developer Blog
This release ships React 19 in React Native and some other relevant features like native support for Android Vector drawables and better brownfield integration for iOS.
I hope we get an opportunity at adopt this on the project Iām on at WillowTree. It sounds like a nice step forward for hybrid apps like the one Iām working on.
Last week I bought a 13" MacBook Air in Midnight (24GB memory, 512GB SSD).
After reading this Iām tempted to go with a new Air as a personal Mac. Iāve been one of those die hard must own a MacBook Pro people but seeing a developer I have a lot of respect for say it works beautifully for an app like Acorn gives me confidence it would be a great choice for my less substantial projects, like Stream. šš¼
Warner Bros. dropped a new sneak-peek teaser for James Gunnās Superman on Thursday out of CinemaCon, and itās mostly just the same trailer we saw back in December, with the same quick-cut looks at Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi), Guy āworst haircut in the āverseā Gardner (Nathan Fillion), Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan), a giant kaiju that might be Jimmy Olsen, and more. The difference is, thereās an extra two minutes of footage that might just be the full theatrical cut of the sequence that follows after Superman crashlands in the snow near the Fortress of Solitude ā and itās a long, agonizing two minutes.
Based on the trailers Iāve seen I donāt think Iām gonna like this Superman.
Henry Cavil is still the best Superman. š¦øš»āāļø
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, and a range of other online services, is reducing its workforce. The layoffs will impact 16% of staff across divisions, an Automattic blog post published Wednesday reveals.
I feel really bad for Automatticians. Theyāve been through a real rough patch over the last year. First all the hubbub with WPEngine, the mass resignations, and now a layoff.
I hope they all land on their feet and Automattic survives and continues to lead the progression of WordPress far into the future.
Iād also like to see Matt Mullenweg loosen his grip on the open source organization so it can lead future efforts. ā¤ļø
Back in 2019 I moved my blog off of WordPress and over to Ghost. In short, I wasn’t happy with WordPress and wanted a blogging engine that felt more like it was made for blogging than a full CMS where I didn’t use 99% of the features on offer. Ghost seemed to align with my values as a writer and a general user of technology, and over the past 6 years, that’s only become more clear that was the right choice for me.
Paying an organization to take care of the servers and infrastructure for your blog is very freeing.
I switched to Micro.blog a few years back and donāt regret it. The team makes sure weāre always up and running and the service and user experience are dirt simple for blogging. Just as they should be. ā¤ļø
I’ve used most Google’s products since the day they were introduced, so it was a great opportunity to see what these products are like for first time users, since the first time I used them long ago, they usually looked much different.
An interesting read on Googleās widely used products and services. Understanding how the Enterprise versions work is challenging. Iāve had a number of odd experiences with sharing documents over the years. Go read it. You may find yourself nodding your head in agreement.
Franceās competition watchdog (AutoritĆ© de la concurrence) ordered Apple to pay ā¬150 million (~$162.4 million) after finding that its App Tracking Transparency system allows the company to abuse its dominance in the mobile app market. In its decision, the authority says the initiative ā which Apple pitches as a way to give users more control of their privacy ā harms small publishers and āis neither necessary for nor proportionate withā Appleās goal of protecting personal data.
Heh, App Tracking Transparency is something I really appreciate as a user but I can see how some App Developers would not like the idea.
At WillowTree we create a lot of what I refer to as āMarketing Apps.ā Most large corporations who have something to sell you really need to have these beautifully designed and implemented applications that not only advertise their products but often need an ordering workflow. We do that and we do that really well.
Every one of the apps Iāve worked on is chock full of analytics measuring all sorts of things. The great companies take the user experience data they collect very seriously and make improvements accordingly.
The app Iām working on now has improved dramatically over the last year because the company weāve done work for studies their analytics. It really can work.
Politics
Johnathan V. Last ā¢ The Bulwark
Fittingly, it was the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, who declared the official time of death.
The United States of America is now a world wide embarrassment that cannot be trusted and has become a laughing stock.
Postpone any trip to the US youāve had booked. Itās a real mess here.
If you had told me a decade ago that a former president would waltz back into the White House, torch the global economy, slap double-digit tariffs on damn near everything, spook the markets into evaporating over three trillion dollars in a single day, and call it a “booming economy” with a straight faceāI would’ve thought it a particularly cruel and poorly conceived joke.
Again. See my first comment above.
Trump and his administration are burning everything down. Morons all.
Of note, Joan Westenberg has become one of my favorite writers. She delivers facts and opinions with a dry wit I really appreciate.
Now as the owner of The Atlantic, she is the quiet superhero behind the current Signalgate scandal. Editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who in full disclosure I know well enough to have his email, has rightfully been taking a heroās tour on media everywhere since he broke the story of having been āaccidentallyā included in a Signal chat group of the top national security officials talking about an imminent attack on the Houthis, in violation of every imaginable security protocol not to mention common sense.
It took one brave woman to put all the billionaire bros to shame.
Now if we could convince Bezos to sell the Washington Post to Kara Swisher that would be incredible.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
PS5 owners really want to playĀ XboxĀ games, asĀ MicrosoftĀ tops Sonyās preorder charts
From an outsiders perspective this makes sense given Microsoftās move to purchase extremely popular game studios. They should absolutely make sure everything they create is playable on PlayStation. Itās kind of been Microsoftās M.O. all along. Write software that runs anywhere. šØš»āš»
The other day, I was reading an interesting article about moving away from social media siloes and getting back to basics with a domain and a web page. (Neocities is also a nice place to learn HTML markup and put up a home page.) I liked the article and was looking forward to leaving a comment, BUT when I got to the bottom of the post, I was confronted with a prompt to sign up for a membership. Really? To leave a comment? Especially on an article about the small web?
Of course this is about Substack. It is, along with X, an internet Nazi bar and itās full of amazing writers supporting it.
Money talks, I guess. š
A major Tesla investor has called on Elon Musk to step down as head of the company as a nationwide boycott causes stock prices to plunge.
Ross Gerber, who owns an estimated $105 million in shares of Tesla stock, called on Elon Musk to step down as head of the company, saying that he “destroyed” the company’s reputation
Does anyone know what Tesla is up to anymore? Itās just sitting there, not making progress. It was once a bright shining star. Now itās a losing afterthought. Wonder why?
Tesla board, fire Musk.š„
Red Bull only has itself to blame for its driver mess
Itās really incredible to see Red Bull panicking over two races with, in essence, a rookie driver. They fire Danny Ricardo and Sergio Perez in favor of Liam Lawson ā over Yuki Tsunoda ā and expect the man to be top 10, or better, on day one. Absurd.
Red Bull has competition, thatās it. McLaren has caught up and Mercedes is show some of their old spark. Not to mention Alex Albon keeping Williams in a good spot.
Iād expect Ferrari to show some teeth soon. Itās gonna get really interesting! šļø
Fiona Jackson ā¢ TechRepublic
Once upon a time, landing a job at the likes of Amazon, Google, or Microsoft was seen as the golden ticket ā offering generous salaries, four-day work weeks, and nap pods. Over the last few years, though, that image has been transformed into one that is far less idyllic, marked with mass layoffs and employees sleeping on the office floor.
Basically the BigCoās are returning to the way they used to be. When I was at Microsoft everyone worked long hours moving as fast as we could to meet deadlines. My nap pod was the floor under my desk where Iād grab some shuteye as I worked overnight. Iād imagine I worked an average of 60 hours a week for months on end.
Itās not a good way to live. Itās hard on you physically and mentally and if you have a family it punishes them.
I do not recommend doing it.
Rebuilding Prime Video UI with Rust and WebAssembly
This link is to a video and slides for the presentation. I didnāt watch it but I thought Iād share it because I do find this interesting.
The browser as operating system feels more than a bit odd. Folks like Apple, Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft really need to put way more effort into tooling to make it better for developers. As a developer I want a full IDE with real debugging support, no matter the language I choose. Perhaps theyāre already there and Iām just naive?
Iām still a bit bitter WebAssembly was chosen over a CLI implementation ā ECMA-335 ā that runs in the browser. But, at least we have something common for browsers and languages to target.
It is strange to take this low level language and spit out WebAssembly. āļø
Researchers have found that ChatGPT “power users,” or those who use it the most and at the longest durations, are becoming dependent upon ā or even addicted to ā the chatbot.
It was inevitable, right?
Each new version of macOS has increased the complexity of launching apps, from the basics of launchd, the addition of LaunchServices, to security checks on notarization and XProtect.
If youād like to see a really nice overview of how macOS launches apps, this is for you! š
Itās not crazy technical, an intentional choice by the author, and will give you an understanding of how things work when you start up your favorite application.
In this post, I assume that vibe coding will grow up and people will use it for real engineering, with the “turn your brain off” version of it sticking around just for prototyping and fun projects. For me, vibe coding just means letting the AI do the work. How closely you choose to pay attention to the AI’s work depends solely on the problem at hand. For production, you pay attention; for prototypes, you chill. Either way, itās vibe coding if you didnāt write it by hand.
Vibe coding is the new way I guess.
As someone who has spent over 30-years struggling to become better each and every day I find this depressing. I know Iām an ok developer. Not the worst and certainly not the best, not even close. But to spend a lifetime at something only to see folks produce more output without even trying is extremely discouraging.
Craftsmanship goes out the window in favor of expediency. It is the new way and weāre all going to have to get used to it or be left behind.
Iāve finally become a dinosaur. š¦
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
“Big” George Foreman, one of the most influential and recognizable boxers of all time, died Friday, his family announced on his social media account.
RIP, Big George. šŖ¦
Apple is reportedly losing more than $1 billion annually on its streaming service, Apple TV+, according to The Information on Thursday ā providing a rare glimpse into the tech giantās content operation.
Thatās a huge number. Apple has some really good original programming. The production value is always top notch. Iād imagine thatās why it costs so much to keep going. Take a look at Netflix. They pump out content that, overall, has a much lower production value. Those in turn fund the production of high quality content. šø
There’s been a lot flying around the social web the past couple of days about Apple completely botching their AI push, and I haven’t seen a whole lot of solutions (I fully admit I could completely be missing it). But off the top of my head, here’s one idea that I think could really help and reap benefits for both Apple and developers.
Iād imagine a lot of developers are going to want access to an AI API.
Put AI in all the things! Iām not sure how Iād use it in my apps, yet, but I could see doing some local machine learning to help pick feeds for the user to check out. š
RSS and ATOM feeds are problematic (for our use-cases) for two reasons; 1) lack of history, 2) contain limited post content. We built some open-source software to fix that.
I like this, a lot! This would be a great way to make a complete backup of your blog. Just generate a gigantic RSS feed of everything and push it to GitHub and other places.
One of the things I want to do for Stream is get full content for a particular feed. For now Stream only gets what the feed includes. Iāll have to change that so it grabs the HTML and pulls the body out.
Brian Whitwam ā¢ Ars Technica
The European Commission is not backing down from efforts to rein in Big Tech. In a series of press releases today, the European Union’s executive arm has announced actions against both Apple and Google. Regulators have announced that Apple will be required to open up support for non-Apple accessories on the iPhone, but it may be too late for Google to make changes. The commission says the search giant has violated the Digital Markets Act, which could lead to a hefty fine.
Itās time to get the popcorn out to see how much these two juggernauts push the rules. šæ
Apple has already done the very least it could do to comply with opening up the ability to have third party app stores.
What I have trouble understanding is how she continued working with sociopaths after the first few years, when it was obvious that they wouldnāt change. As she rose in the company, and spent time with āMarkā and āSheryl,ā it was clear that these two people, as well as others, donāt care about the consequences of their platform.
Facebook is a nasty, evil, company. I jettisoned my account in 2011 but thought recently about making a new one. What an idiot! Iām glad I didnāt do it.
A month of anti-Tesla dissent escalated this week with two reports of Teslas catching fire in Las Vegas and Kansas City.
I still say these Tesla cars and trucks are spontaneously combusting.
It would a real shame if the stock price sunk so low Space Karen got a margin call.
Itās too bad Teslaās board is in Space Karenās pocket. Tesla could use new leadership at CEO and the board.
Theyāre clearly not innovating or even doing the least bit to update the models they have. When was the last time the body shape changed?
Also, Musk isnāt running the company. Why should he continue to drag them down?
Fire the man already, before one of those giant lots of Teslaās spontaneously combusts and cause a lot more damage.
After a year, the top 5 percent of apps in most categories, including gaming, photo and video, health and fitness, and social and lifestyle, make more than $5,000/month. The 25th percentile makes $5 to $20 per month, depending on the category, save for photo and video apps, whereas the bottom quartile makes $32 per month.
Iād take $32 per month! I could use it to support my coffee habit. š
On the flip side Iām really happy for the companies who make enough to survive on and even thrive. Good for them! ā¤ļø
Word is spreading that Sauer Brands Inc. ā owner of Greenville’s beloved mayonnaise brand ā has been sold to none other than a northern company.
Iād never had Dukes Mayo until we moved to Virginia. In California all I remembered was Craft Mayo as a choice. Dukes became an instant hit for me the first time I had it. I hope these new owners donāt mess it up. š«
Robert Rodriguez ā¢ The Fresno Bee
On Tuesday, the two defendants in one of Fresnoās biggest business scandals are expected to report to federal prison to serve their sentences for wire fraud and conspiring to commit wire fraud.
I know Jake and Irma personally and I hope nothing but the best for them. I have to believe this was a huge mistake on their part. An ignorant mistake. I donāt know enough about it to know if it was or not. They did so much good for the Central Valley and other places. ā¤ļø
Chinese automaker BYD unveiled a new range of electric vehicles that it said can charge in five minutes, ramping up its competition with Tesla in the burgeoning Chinese market.
It would be nice to see these cars here in the States. Especially if theyāre in the 10-20k range. Thatās the range Iād consider purchasing a new car.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
Its been a week. My back is really messing with me. Iāve had this problem for years and years and I absolutely hate when Iāve injured it. The meds Iām on leave me really sleepy so I wouldnāt be surprised if this set of links is short.
Anywho, thereās my week in a nutshell.
I hope you enjoy the links.
Brazilian Court Gives Apple 90 Days to Allow Sideloading on iOS
I hope Apple is starting to build out their infrastructure to allow for more stores but what I think most developers would rather see is Apple dropping their 27% fee for using the platform. Something more like 5% or even 10%.
Never gonna happen.
Apple on Tuesday patched a critical zero-day vulnerability in virtually all iPhones and iPad models it supports and said it may have been exploited in āan extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individualsā using older versions of iOS.
Even the best software engineers in the world make mistakes.
A 10x faster TypeScript
This video is worth a watch. It was interesting to hear their reason for using Go for the port.
Microsoft is replacing Remote Desktop with its new Windows app
So now they have a Windows app for running Windows apps?
Talk about confusing. This is weird. š¤£
Aditi Bharade ā¢ Business Insider
Kentucky’s bourbon makers are up in arms about Canada yanking their bottles off shelves
Consequences. This is a consequence of tariffs. You definitely cannot blame Canada for pulling American products off of their shelves.
A week ago, ByteDance announced the release of Lynx, a technology for building mobile apps using Web technologies. ByteDance had been using it to power many of their apps, and they decided to package it up and open-source it. Having Lynx enter the space with a new approach is great news for the community.
Yet another framework for building mobile applications.
A lot of companies are looking for ways to have a single set of code to run across mobile platforms.
Itās hard to argue against the idea of it.
The future of America isnāt being written in Washingtonāitās being coded, traded, and hoarded by tech billionaires who see democracy as a bug, not a feature.
Billionaire Tech Bros need to be placed on a rocket and launched to Mars. Let them have it. š
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
Its a bit late morning thanks to Daylight Saving. Weāve sprung ahead an hour.
Yesterday, Saturday, Kim and I had some errands to run and we were out of the house pretty much all day. So, you get a Special Sunday Edition of Saturday Morning Coffee. š
I hope you enjoy the links and have juiced up your brain with your favorite coffee or tea.
Automattic-owned blogging site and social platform Tumblr has financially backed Tapestry, the newly launched app designed to organize feeds from across the open web, including RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, and others.
Itās really nice to see my favorite software company succeed with a new product. Tapestry is like a feed reader bulked up to do other things and allows folks to extend it using a bit of JavaScript and their own imagination. In a slight way itās a dashboard construction kit. I enjoy using it and itās gonna be fun to see what others build with it.
We live in an age where everything has to have a trajectory. Every hobby needs a corresponding side hustle. Every interest must be optimized, packaged, and presented for maximum reach. Paint beautiful landscapes? Better start an Etsy shop. Love baking sourdough? Time to launch a baking YouTube channel. Write poetry? Get on Medium and build your brand.
There was a time in the late 90ās, early 2000ās, where most blogs were just personal sites. Not monetized at all.
I started this blog in 2001 in the hopes Iād become a better writer. Iām still trying to do that and I really enjoy having a blog where I can write whatever I want, when I want to.
I have most of the features I asked for in textcasting (!) and I am typing in a respectable editing window, where I retain copies of my writing, and there’s no freaking tiny little text box. And because I’m hooking in through a protocol (here’s the punchline) this writing can go anywhere. Anywhere. Let me say that again. Any. Where.
Dave has continued on his adventure to have a single writing location that publishes everywhere. Heās been using WordPress as a single source for publishing to a blog and to Mastodon. Really, the WordPress blog is the Mastodon Server. Iām really interested to see where this goes.
Iāve been using Micro.blog in much the same way. I publish to my blog and the Micro.blog timeline and Micro.blog handles publishing to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Tumblr. Itās proven to be the exact solution Iāve always wanted. šš¼
Anthropic, the company that made one of the most popular AI writing assistants in the world, requires job applicants to agree that they wonāt use an AI assistant to help write their application.
Is AI that good or that bad? š¤£
The top of the line new Mac Studio M3 Ultra (32-core CPU, 80-core GPU) with 512G RAM (!) and a 4TB SSD is an impressive and tempting machine, but ~$11K (!!). Is that āridiculously expensiveā? š¤
That is a crazy amount of money for a computer, even for a Mac.
It is a rocket ship of a configuration.
āI cheated the program,ā Jones said, via Brent Schrotenboer of USA Today. “Like, I was really good. People donāt know how smart I am, but like, I can say it now. I donāt play no more. But like, Iāve never used my [urine] for a [urine] test. Not one time. Not one time.” (Folks, it’s OK to use the word “piss,” if that’s the word he used. You won’t go to hell for it.)
Folks will always find a way to beat the system. I am surprised heās admitting it.
It would be nice for the players to be able to smoke weed. Iāve heard it helps a lot with post game pain.
In the span of 17 years, the USA has shifted from the hopeful progression of electing a Black president to sad self-loathing with the ascent of a dictator. There are several factors that played into this countryās demise. In my opinion, social media has had the largest impact.
Social media certainly hasnāt helped things. Itās definitely made piling on a lot easier.
The world is full of people who, in this, the Year of Our Basilisk, 2025, are willing to loudly admit, “Yeah, I knew Musk was – [pick one or all] – 1) a homophobe, 2) a racist, 3) a con man, 4) a eugenicist, 5) a natalist, 6) a nepo baby, 7) full of shit about Mars, 8) full of shit about self-driving, 9) wants to destroy public transit, 10) was never actually an engineer at all but just someone who buys companies and puts his name on them, 11) has an entire team at every company he bought whose job was just to stop him from breaking things, 12) is just absolutely fucking cringe – but I was willing to give all that a pass, for years, because He Does Good Work.”
Space Karen is just a terrible human being.
He should be deported back to South Africa.
Live Fast Motorsports is thrilled to announce that pioneering motorsport driver Katherine Legge has entered the Shriners Childrenās 500 NASCAR Cup Series race at Phoenix Raceway on March 9, 2025, racing the No. 78 DROPLiGHT Chevy Camaro. This marks Leggeās debut in the NASCAR Cup Series, underscoring her determination and versatility in professional racing.
Iāve always liked Katherine Legge. When sheās run the Indianapolis 500 Iām always hopeful sheās gonna win it all.
I hope her Cup run goes really well today.
Joseph Howlett ā¢ Quanta Magazine
A new proof extends the work of the late Maryam Mirzakhani, cementing her legacy as a pioneer of alien mathematical realms.
Itās incredible to me how our scientists and mathematics continue to move us forward.
Itās also a real shame to loose someone so passionate about her work. ā¤ļø
With the season-opening Australian Grand Prix (March 14-16) rapidly approaching, last week we asked you to pick your favourite helmet design from all our 2025 F1 drivers.
I dig articles like. Itās just about showing pictures of helmets. Simple, but fun and interesting.
Metallicaās ā¦And Justice For All pushed bassists into the background during the 1990s, a famed thrash metal player says.
I hear folks talking about And Justice for All and the way they treated Jason Newstead from time to time.
It is a real shame to hide the bass like that.
Mexican sculptor Chavis MĆ”rmol dropped a nine-ton replica of an ancient Indigenous Olmec head onto the roof of a Tesla Model 3 in Mexico City as a brilliant commentary on modern societyās obsession with materialism, excess, and capitalism
Now thatās exactly how you treat Tesla. Destroy them, trade them in, and stop buying them.
Hopefully the market continues to hammer Teslas stock price and drive it down, down, down so the board will grow a pair and fire Musk once and for all.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
Weāve had a pretty great week here in our part of Virginia. Itās been sunny with temperatures in the 60ās! š
Other than that itās been one of those regular weeks. Nothing overly exciting going on except for the disaster that is our country leadership at the moment. But letās not get into that here.
Please enjoy the links! ā¤ļø
Carmel Dagan, J. Kim Murphy ā¢ Variety
Gene Hackman and Wife Betsy Arakawa Found Dead in Santa Fe Home; Oscar-Winning Star of āFrench Connectionā and āUnforgivenā Was 95
This one hit me. Gene Hackman is my favorite actor of all time. There was just something about him. It didnāt hurt that he reminded me of my grandfather who was an extremely kind man but tough as nails. Thatās how Hackman always came across to me.
There are my favorite Gene Hackman films.
- The French Connection
- Target
- Mississippi Burning
- The Replacements
- Unforgiven
There are many more excellent Gene Hackman films to choose from.
In the end he lived a long life and managed to live out his final years peacefully with his wife in New Mexico. šŖ¦
Why Personal Websites Matter More Than Ever
I love reading Joanās work. Whether it be on her personal blog or on The Index. Sheās just a darned good writer.
Anywho, I agree with her 100%. A weblog is the best social media site you can have because itās yours. If your host shuts down you can freely move it and your content to a new home.
Start free with a WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, or Micro.Blog account and see where it takes you. There are, of course, others to choose from.
The next step in your journey, perhaps it should be the first, is to acquire a custom domain name to host your blog. Theyāre also quite easy to get and all of the blog hosting providers I mention above will let you set your own domain name. Easy least!
Nico Grant ā¢ The New York Times
āI recommend being in the office at least every weekday,ā he wrote in a memo posted internally on Wednesday evening that was viewed by The New York Times. He added that ā60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivityā in the message to employees who work on Gemini, Googleās lineup of A.I. models and apps.
I emphasized the 60 hours comment. Thatās a bunch of BS. Trust me, I should know. I put in those kind of hours in the 90ās and early 2000ās. In the end they get a bunch of free work out of you and, if you have a family, your family suffers. Itās just not worth it. Ok, ok, so do a few years of it, say five, and get out.
If youāre single and donāt have any friends this may be the only way you socialize. I could see doing 60 hours a week, but at some point your mind and body pay the price for it.
Iām approaching 60 and Iād rather spend my time with my wife, children, and grand children.
Be wise. Donāt be me.
Skype, the pioneering and once ubiquitous free video calling service, will be history come May. It was so popular that people used it as a verb: “I’ll Skype you in the morning.”
I guess all good things must come to an end, right? Skype was equally loved and hated. I know folks who used it to do international calls and itās been a huge part of the podcasting world for over a decade, probably two? Folks tried other services but Skype just worked better. It wouldnāt drop connections which is its primary job. The UI sucked but it did the job.
What are folks using today for recording podcasts? Iād love to know.
Jonathan M. Gitlan ā¢ Ars Technica
Yes, it turns out you can make a Tesla Cybertruck even uglier
I donāt know if this is uglier or just as ugly in a different way. Lipstick on a pig indeed! š·
Itās a garbage ātruckā made by a garbage company ārunā by a garbage human.
I put quotes around ārunā because there is zero chance *Space Karen is performing his duties as CEO for Tesla, SpaceX, or X at the moment.
(* Yes, I pointed to Nazistack. I wish these damned good writers would get off that platform.)
Apple has offered a reason why the iPhone 16e doesn’t include MagSafe, one of the more notable omissions from its latest entry-level smartphone.
Iāve said it a few times now. This may be the perfect phone for me. Lower priced and is good enough. Iād still get iOS and an incredible piece of hardware with good battery life. Oh, and a small camera on the back. š
āDaredevil: Born Againā Draws Glowing First Reactions, With Some Praising the Opener as the āBest Pilot of Any MCU Series Thus Farā
Iām happy to see this back! I havenāt started watching yet, but I most certainly will at some point. Apparently weāre gonna see The Punisher show up at some point. I was a fan of that series as well. ā¤ļø
Carson Hocevar earned a NASCAR Cup Series career-best finish Sunday at Atlanta Motor Speedway but was left having to explain himself afterward.
Last seasons Rookie of the Year really pisses people off. Heās been doing it since he was part of the Truck Series. Wrecking Corey Heim in the wall during the Championship Race in 2023 was a disgusting display of selfishness.
These Cup drivers wonāt put up with his overly aggressive style. Heās stepped over the line from aggressive to reckless. The veteran drivers will straighten him out. It may take a few punches in the face, but theyāll fix it. š¤¬
Tom Cruise who? Hulking action star Alan Ritchson has now played beloved antihero and skull-knocking machine Jack Reacher in more adaptations of Lee Child’s bestselling book series than the Reacher before him (who’s currently busy risking life and limb as a different beloved action hero), and judging by the reviews for “Reacher” season 3, it’s a role Ritchson was meant to play.
Hereās another series I need to get back to. We really enjoyed season one but havenāt watched since.
Alan Ritchson is a really great actor and he fits the physical description of Reacher much better than Tom Cruise.
The SystemV file-system that implements Xenix FS, SystemV/386 FS, and Coherent FS is set to be removed from the Linux kernel. The SystemV file-system was orphaned back in 2023 while now is set to be removed entirely after developers realized the code was fundamentally broken.
Ahhh, SystemV. Seeing the word Xenix in there takes me back. Do yāall remember Microsoft Xenix? Probably not many. How about SCO? Yeah, probably not. š¤£
I installed a lot of SCO Xenix at one point in my career. I want to say by then it was SCO UNIX? My memory isnāt that clear on the matter. š
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
Forty years ago today the doors opened for the very first MacWorld Expoin the Brooks Hall basement in San Francisco. For most of you this event probably seems like ancient history, somewhere back in the mists of time. But for me this was a very real and exciting event that I participated in as an exhibitor, the start of my amazing journey with the Mac community, a journey that continues on today.
Holy cow! Congratulations, Jim!
What a huge milestone in your career. Iām sure you have plenty of amazing stories to share from your journey.
Check out Jimās software at ProVUE!
Apple is taking the unprecedented step of removing its highest level data security tool from customers in the UK, after the government demanded access to user data.
If I were living in the UK Iād be contacting my representatives and ask them to reconsider their request for a backdoor into iCloud. Apple indirectly did what they were asked for. They made it easy for the UK government to extract data from Appleās infrastructure with a simple court order and they didnāt compromise the rest of iCloud users around the world.
Like Houdini making an unlikely escape from a straitjacket, William Byron trusted his instincts and emerged from a smoky, last-lap wreck on the backstretch at Daytona International Speedway to win the Daytona 500 for the second straight time.
Hereās the Daytona 500 script. Start the race, jockey for position, get in line, at 190+ MPH, and drive around not doing too much for 199 laps. Oh, and watching a little racing between a crapload of commercials.
Then, on the last couple laps, start racing, and have a big crash taking out half the field. Itās call The Big One.
But, I still love super speedway racing. There is definitely a lot of skill to running close to 200MPH a foot or two away from each other. Iām surprised they donāt wreck more often.
There were some good story lines out of Daytona this year, like Corey LaJoie running an open car because he couldnāt land a seat or Jr. Motorsports running a Cup car! Iām very excited for both and hope to see them in a few more races this year.
Smokey Goretooth ā¢ Metal Sucks
Tool stay up to mysterious shit. Sometimes they let us know whatās going on, but they do love to be elusive about some shit. They spend years in between albums just diddling around or doing whatever they do, but their bassist Justin Chancellor gave us a lil update on what theyāve been up to musically. Itās definitely good news for the Tool aficionado.
Tool waited 13-years to release Fear Inoculum, in August 2019. Itās been five-and-a-half years since the release and Iām excited by the thought of getting something earlier. But donāt hurry, fellas. Take the time to make another amazing album.
When we set out to found Parakeet, we were certain that we wanted nothing more than to hone our craft together in perpetuity. The early days were full of experimentation and inquiry as we sought to balance our strengths and develop a unified perspective. A decade later, our creative partnership has solidified into something inextricable from either of us, totally complementary, and greater than the sum.
Congratulations to Luka and Louie! Hereās to many more years of success! š„³
I want to state up front: Iām not leaving under a ādeferred resignationā. I also wasnāt laid off. (Though itās possible I almost was; more on that later.) Instead, I resigned from my position as a product designer, submitting two weeksā noticeā¦well, two weeks ago.
A sad day for Ethan, 18F , and the country. Heās a well known champion of the web and by all accounts a really great person.
As a country we need more people like Ethan working in Government, not fewer.
Itās a real loss for all of us and especially Ethan.
I released version 1 of my table seating planning software, PerfectTablePlan, in February 2005. 20 years ago this month. It was a different world. A world of Windows, shareware and CDs. A lot has changed since then, but PerfectTablePlan is now at version 7 and still going strong.
Congratulations, Andy! This is a huge milestone and Iām extremely happy for you.
Iād love to do this! And Iād better get started because I think I only have a good 20 years remaining in my life, if I donāt do something stupid. To spend those 20 working on something I love would be amazing! ā¤ļø
Peter Dockrill ā¢ ScienceAlert
The Cause of Alzheimer’s Might Be Coming From Inside Your Mouth
This is fascinating! My father-in-law died of complications due to Alzheimerās. He had dental problems the entire time I knew him. Maybe theyāre on to something here!
The Linux kernel mailing list drama around the Rust programming language use within the kernel continues… Linus Torvalds has largely refrained from the ongoing LKML discussions around a Rust policy for the Linux kernel and in-fighting between kernel developers and maintainers with differing views over Rust. This evening though Linus Torvalds did decide to chime in on the conversation.
Iām pleasantly surprised Torvalds is this open to the inclusion of Rust in the Linux Kernel. Itās a big deal and could lead to a much more stable operating system ā not that itās unstable today. But having a memory safe language is great for the future of operating systems as a whole.
I keep hoping weāll find out Apple has included some Swift in Darwin.
Large corporations are shopping for underground bunkers that can survive a nuclear blast to protect their data centers and C-suite employees as geopolitical tensions rise. The first adopters are primarily cryptocurrency firms, companies that build the facilities told Semafor.
This made me lol. š¤£
I can see a room full of executives in a large underground datacenter. The nuke hits. Power fails. Brownout. UPSāes kick in. Backup generators start. Everything is beeping and blooping like mad. Some machines have gone down and slowly start coming back online. Network connections have been broken. The place is basically on fire. š„
The camera pans to the executives who have stepped out of their beautifully furnished offices in their cave. They all look around. The CEO steps out into the middle of the group and says āNow what?ā š¤£
Fade to black.
Charles Pulliam-Moore ā¢ The Verge
Today, Amazon MGM, Broccoli, and fellow Bond producer Michael G. Wilson announced the formation of a new joint venture that will give the studio full creative control over the Bond movie franchise.
A lot of Bond fans are up in arms over this move. Iām not a huge Bond fan but I really enjoyed the Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig eras, Craigās has been particularly great in my opinion.
Hereās hoping they do the franchise justice and keep making extremely great, entertaining, films! š„
Giles Richards ā¢ The Guardian
The world champion, Max Verstappen was booed, as was his Red Bull team principal, Christian Horner, while Lewis Hamilton was cheered, as was the tyre manufacturer Pirelli, so pumped up was this audience. It was the first time, surely, that mechanical grip enjoyed its fist-in-the-air moment.
F1 season is quickly approaching and Iām hoping the grid really shakes up due to all the driver movement over the off season. Iām hoping to see the legend Lewis Hamilton on the podium more often, hopefully in first place, and I expect Williams picking up Carlos Sainz will result in them becoming a fairly solid mid-pack team. Iād really love to see him podium this year but I donāt expect it.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
We got another 10in of snow this week promptly followed by warmer temperatures and rain that almost eliminated it over night. Thereās still patches of snow on the ground.
This week weāre expected to get a foot of snow from Wednesday to Thursday. Itās been a stranger that usual weather year this year.
Enjoy the links and the ravings of a mad man. š
The doge.gov website that was spun up to track Elon Muskās cuts to the federal government is insecure and pulls from a database that can be edited by anyone, according to two separate people who found the vulnerability and shared it with 404 Media. One coder added at least two database entries that are visible on the live site and say āthis is a joke of a .gov siteā and āTHESE āEXPERTSā LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro.ā
Why isnāt this in a section called Politics? Because itās about a serious security flaw in a government computing center (maybe itās just a server setup in someoneās closet?)
The scary thing is the kids working for DOGE ā henceforth known as DODGY ā have access to all kinds of personal information about you. OpSec folks must be going bonkers right now? š¤”
Spire Motorsports has to win in the NASCAR Cup Series this year.
Spire started as a very small team. Just one driver, Corey LaJoie. They eventually added a second driver and a couple years back got a huge investment of cash. They now have three drivers and are all in to becoming a top tier team. They signed longtime Cup driver Michael McDowell, Justin Haley was brought in to replace Corey LaJoie and they have last yearās rookie of the year Carson Hocevar. In other words, theyāre stacked. I would expect each of them to have at least one win this year.
Just say no to JavaScript
This headline is, of course, there to get you to rage click it and go read the article. š
So, please, click the link and go read it. Nick is an excellent software engineer and has years and years of āin the trenchesā experience to share.
This article is mainly about the benefits of writing maintainable, easy to read and understand, code. Itās something I encourage everyone I work with to do. Itās smart.
The TL;DR is use a TypeScript instead of JavaScript so you get better type checking. Take advantage of it and make your code easier to maintain all at the same time. Smart. š
Jyoti Mann, Pranav Dixit, and Hugh Langley ā¢ Business Insider
Several Meta employees who said they received positive performance ratings in their mid-year reviews last year had their jobs cut Monday, as the company let go of nearly 4,000 workers in its latest round of job reductions.
Companies donāt need an excuse to let you go. California is an at will state (Iām not sure if folks in other states were let go) but that doesnāt help the poor folks who lost their jobs.
Look, Zuck is the CEO of a company created to make money and please shareholders. I hate to be so blunt but thatās Capitalism.
I know the CEO of TELUS would do the exact same thing to cut our bottom line if needed.
Do I want to lose my job? HELL NO! Do I realize itās possible? Yes, yes I do.
I hope each and every one of these folks scores much better jobs. After all, I still believe Zuck is a sociopath and Facebook is a terrible company.
Jay Peters and Alex Heath ā¢ The Verge
TikTok is back in the Google Play Store for Android users in the US, and soon it will be available on the iPhone, too.
This seems risky to me, but I guess if the folks tasked with enforcing the law say itās ok to break it, you should just break it? š³
I hope this doesnāt come back to bite them. Iād also like to see a better solution to this whole TikTok mess.
Recently Iāve found myself thinking about the state of pharmacy technology. Why? Simple, really. Iām bored and have been doing a little extracurricular reading. Not to mention that a few things have popped up here and there to pique my interest. Itās not one single piece of technology but rather a collection of technologies and interactions Iāve had over the past 18 months.
I love reading my brothers stuff but he hasnāt been very active since he went back to Pharmacy work full time, now as a Pharmacy Director. Heās one of the smartest folks I know and he has amazing ideas on how to improve pharmacy in the hospital.
Itās nice to see him writing again and I hope he keeps it up.
It’s frequently stated[by who?] that some core components of the AT-Protocol architecture are expensive to host and don’t scale down. So expensive that they are out of reach reach except for VC-funded commercial companies like Bluesky PBC, and expensive due to the structure of the protocol itself. Very non-decentralized.
I must confess, AT Protocol is a mystery to me. I cannot wrap my pea brain around exactly what it is and how to implement it.
This piece is about how Phil used a Raspberry Pi to do some AT Protocol stuff. Even though I donāt get it I find this encouraging. š
Some Apple TV 4K users in the US are being prompted to connect their Netflix accounts to the Apple TV app. This would appear to signal an end to the streaming serviceās longtime refusal to have its content aggregated into third-party platforms.
This prompted me to ask the CEO of our household if I could purchase a new Apple TV. My CEO was not impressed with my justification so weāll continue to use the Roku built into our TV. š¤£
I need to some reading on the current state of Roku technology. Iād like a box that aggregates all streaming service (like Apple TV) so I can search in one spot. If Roku does that we can stay with them. I just wish they didnāt collect so much data about us. š
Buried deep in a Welsh landfill, beneath layers of years-old garbage, there is a hard drive that holds the key to almost $800 million in bitcoin ā or so James Howells believes, after accidentally throwing the drive away in 2013.
That drive is dead my friend. Itās been underground for 12-years, buried under heaps of trash that were exposed to the elements until it was finally covered over. I canāt see how it would survive the damp even if placed in a hardened container much less a plastic bag.
Would I love to see a miracle of some sort? Yes, I would! The odds are long against him.
One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry’s vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable.
Speaking of hard drives. This is pretty sobering. Atoms and bits rot. Keep moving that data around if youād like to keep it. I have CD backups of stuff Iāve moved around. I wonder if those darned things are still readable? š¤
Square Enix has shut down the iOS version of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and removed it from the App Store following an unfixable bug that blocked people from accessing content they had paid for.
I donāt believe this. I canāt accept this is unfixable. The more likely story itās not worth fixing because the fix would require upgrading the software to current versions of frameworks or something like that and they donāt want to spend the money on the effort. That I would accept. š
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
This week has been a bit of a struggle. Iām still sick and feel exhausted and our country is being dismantled.
My thoughts are not so good. Iām so pissed off.
I hope you all had positive weeks and enjoy the links. ā¤ļø
IvĆ”n Carrillo ā¢ Knowable Magazine
North Americaās largest bird disappeared from the wild in the late 1980s. Reintroduction work in the United States and Mexico has brought this huge vulture back to the skies. This is the story of its comeback.
I remember these beautiful monsters as a kid and remember being really bummed out when they became extinct.
This gives me a bit of hope.
While the work was done with trapped ions, almost every type of qubit in development can be controlled with photons, so the general approach is hardware agnostic. And, given the sophistication of our optical hardware, it should be possible to link multiple chips at a variety of distances, all using hardware that doesn’t require the best vacuum or the lowest temperatures we can generate.
I find quantum computing to be way more fascinating than LLMs. When ā if? ā these machines become reality the world changes dramatically, again.
Iāll probably be dead before it reaches a state of usefulness, but I hope it does, and I hope the āAIsā of the world or climate change donāt kill us off as a species before then.
Sara Hashemi ā¢ Smithsonian Magazine
In Summerville, South Carolina, a mysterious light has been seen hovering over old railroad tracks. Legend has it, itās the glow of a lantern lighting the path of a ghost searching for her decapitated husband.
I love a good ghost story and a mystery. I also learned something new! I had no idea earthquakes could produce Earthquake lights!
Now, itās not nearly as exciting as a good ghost story but itās still fun nonetheless. š
A long dive into the features that make my ideal music app, and why nothing currently fulfils the brief.
If you have the time to read a longer post and understand how some folks prefer their music apps to work, this article is for you.
As a developer I want my music player to work a certain way and be beautiful to boot but designers can go to an entirely different level when it comes to the beauty of a thing.
Both perspectives are very necessary to make beloved software.
Itās being reported that the British government secretly ordered Apple to create a security backdoor into all content uploaded by iCloud users anywhere in the world.
This is really shameful of the British government if theyāve really asked for a back door.
Remember, once you make an exception for the āgood guysā the bad guys will exploit it for their own needs.
What we need now is for Apple to implement end-to-end encryption for messages and other systems. Tighten it up, donāt dumb it down.
Every awards season, movie fans and aspiring pundits across the country become obsessed with the ever-coveted Academy Awards. The longstanding awards show has long been considered the holy grail of the film industry and can often feel like an all-encompassing part of the discourse, particularly around the four acting categories. In the lead-up to Oscar Sunday, many of us debate who will win, and once the ceremony comes and goes, there are still debates over who should have won.
Some of these actors shocked me, like Samuel L. Jackson. Heās extremely good in everything he does. Two roles that come to mind are Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction and Major Marquis Warren in The Hateful Eight. Oh, I also loved him in The Red Violin. Iām 100% certain Iām missing a critically acclaimed film in this mix. The man has done so much over his lifetime.
Generation X is the last cohort to have one foot firmly planted in the pre-digital world while seamlessly adapting to the rapid technological changes that followed. We were raised on mixtapes, handwritten letters, and Saturday morning cartoons, yet we were also the first to embrace personal computers, email, and the internet. This unique position grants us a rare perspectiveāone that values both the patience and craftsmanship of an analog world and the speed and efficiency of the digital revolution. We understand progress because we lived through it, adapting with each new wave of innovation while maintaining the ability to unplug and appreciate the world beyond the screen.
I know not everyone enjoyed their childhood but I did. We were kids of two worlds. One side middle class the other poor. But, rarely did we ever want for the basics and we always had a tremendous amount of love surrounding us thanks to an amazing mother and grandparents.
As a kid my brothers and I lived outside. During the summer weād get up, get on our bike, and disappear for long periods of time. If not that weād be at the trailer park swimming pool or out in the street playing football or baseball. There was always the brick yard to occupy us ā the brick yard was a deep and wide hole in the ground weād play in, swimming in the pond or jumping our bikes into it. We had lots of fun tied together with the occasional mischief.
Jerry, the middle brother, got a Commodore 64 when he was around 10 and it was great for games and the die rolling program he wrote, we played a lot of D & D as teens. I never really used his computer, he is the brains of the family, but I was fascinated by it. I also knew I wanted to be a computer programmer at some point in my life. In high school I had the chance to write some BASIC programs and I sucked at it. I was always a horrible student but at some point I figured it out.
All that to say I agree with the article. Generation X is the perfect mix of analog and digital life. We touched grass a lot and as a generation helped build some of the greatest technology on the planet.
Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath are reuniting for one last time, to play a fund-raising concert in Birmingham on 5 July.
This show is going to be amazing. Not just because of Ozzy and Sabbath. This is one for the ages and whoever gets to attend will probably have some great stories to tell. šļø
I didn’t think that my former (extremely former) friend and coworker could be more of an unmitigated piece of shit, but “We hired this completely inexperienced guy solely because he murdered a black man” really takes it up a level.
Mark Andressen has turned out to be a real piece of crap human being. Why anyone would work with him is beyond me. Especially now. Garbage.
Politics
Hereās the section many of you may want to avoid. Cursing may ensue, hostile opinions for sure, and general disgust lie ahead.
Youāve been warned.
We are in the early days of the destruction of our democracy. No, thatās not hyperbole. If we manage to go back to being a democracy after the next four years it will be a miracle. Thereās a better than average chance the Marmalade Messiah and his boss, Space Karen, donāt leave the White House and install themselves as dictator of this new nation.
In the last three weeks Space Karen has been dismantling our Federal Government through our computer systems. He is in control, illegally.
USAID and other agencies are being ripped out, root and all, by Space Karen and his merry band of pimple faced teenagers.
When is someone with any authority going to walk into whatever building theyāre occupying and arrest the entire team, Musk included?
Better yet. When will the violence begin? Musk and Trump have proven they do not respect the law and will continue to go about dismantling things until they are stopped.
Of the two Musk is certainly the bigger threat. I donāt believe heās the genius everyone thought he was but he is smart and a narcissistic sociopath. Heās not gonna stop. The law canāt or wonāt stop him. It going to take a citizen or group of citizens to end what heās doing.
Assholes. Theyāre all assholes and violence may be the only way to stop them.
In the past two weeks, Elon Musk ā a man no one elected to any office ā has gained unprecedented access to Social Security payment systems, fired thousands of federal workers, shuttered entire agencies, and installed his loyalists throughout the government. If this were happening in any other country, we’d call it what it is: a coup.
In truth, Musk is emerging as a government within the government, using the time-honored revolutionary tactic of developing dual power in order to seize control.
Vittoria Elliott and Leah Feiger ā¢ WIRED
A US Treasury Threat Intelligence Analysis Designates DOGE Staff as āInsider Threatā
Letās start here: In a sane world, Elon Musk and his merry band of marauding miscreants would have already been arrested. For crying out loud: They have taken control of government computer systems at the United States Treasury and invaded the databases containing the private records of nearly every American, including personal medical records and financial information from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, all under the pretext of rooting out waste and fraud.
Katherine Stewart ā¢ The New York Times
To be clear, ātheyā are not just Donald Trump and his billionaire co-pilot. Over the past half-century, an anti-democratic movement has coalesced in the United States. It draws on super-wealthy funders, ideologues of the new right, purveyors of disinformation and Christian nationalist activists. Though it pretends to revere the founders and the Constitution, it fundamentally rejects the idea of America as a modern pluralistic democracy.
The violence is coming. At some point people will break. Itās just a matter of time.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
Well, well, well, sick again, I see. Yes indeed I am. This time itās not a stomach virus, this time itās a common everyday cold. Stuffy head, runny nose, tired. Itās annoying. š¤§
Letās get to the links. Enjoy!
Evan Symon ā¢ California Globe
A new ballot effort aimed at asking Californians if the state should remain in the union was approved for signature gathering to appear on the 2028 ballot on Friday.
This is nothing more than performative as itās illegal to secede from the Union.
I mean, seeing California, Oregon, and Washington becoming their own country or joining Canada would be amazing. Iād certainly want to move back ASAP. š¤£
Lately I’ve been on the hunt for a personal database application that I could use to store, manipulate, and explore data important to me. I think I’m at least now able to articulate what it is I want, but I haven’t yet been able to find anything that perfectly matches the daydream.
This is really interesting. There are a number of database products available for the Mac, I personally use Base and love it, but something a bit more user friendly could make for an amazing product for someone. Iād personally love to see a forms creation product with a database behind it so I could make custom forms and put them on an iPad, iPhone, or Mac. It would be great for folks who do sidewalk questionnaires.
Something like this probably already exists. I just havenāt looked for it.
For the first time in nearly 20 years, WordPress no longer feels like a sure bet if you need to get a website online.
Ah, yes, the WordPress saga continues. I wonder what Matt is up to? It feels like heās partially giving up. I hate to see that as WordPress is critical infrastructure on the internet. It powers so many sites and I can see it doing so much more.
Roger Montyās ā¢ Search Engine Journal
Three unrelated things happened in the world of WordPress and Content Management Systems which may point the direction of how content is published on the web. Two of the developments are directly related to WordPress and has the feel of pieces falling into place.
This is a very interesting piece. If a community rises up out of WordPress and forks it I could see Matt losing out and losing control of the future of WordPress. It would be really nice to see him do something similar to what Eugen Rochko did for Mastodon.
Tesla is dying. The company’s fourth-quarter earnings read like a eulogy for the electric dream. Revenue crawled up just 2% to $25.71 billion, missing analyst estimates by over $1.5 billion. Automotive revenue - the heart of Tesla’s business - collapsed 8% to $19.8 billion. Operating income cratered 23% year-over-year to $1.6 billion. The operating margin withered to 6.2% from 8.2% a year earlier. These are the vital signs of a company in free fall.
I can only imagine itās gonna get worse. Who wants to buy a car from a company with a Nazi as CEO?
The Tesla Board needs to grow a collective pair and fire the man. Get someone who will turn Tesla around.
I wonder when weāre going to see a round of layoffs from Tesla?
Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer’s use. Worse: it is a near-monopolist, dominating the word processing field. Its pervasive near-monopoly status has brainwashed software developers to such an extent that few can imagine a word processing tool that exists as anything other than as a shallow imitation of the Redmond Behemoth. But what exactly is wrong with it?
Charlie is a professional writer and he has a monster hatred for Microsoft Word. That made me ask myself what do writers actually use for writing their novels and books?
I know John Scalzi uses Word, but does he strip it down or just use it out of the box?
George R. R. Martin uses 1980s era WordStar for DOS.
From the article.
But then he did one better. He told Conan that he has two computers, one thatās up-to-date and has Internet access, and one thatās ancient and runs DOS. He uses the newer machine for browsing the Web and checking emails, but he turns to the older one when itās time to write. And his late-ā80s software of choice is the classic word processor WordStar 4.0.
Iād love to see someone collect data on what famous authors use as their word processor or typewriter of choice.
Andrew Cunningham ā¢ Ars Technica
But regardless of geography, it feels an awful lot like OpenAI wants to benefit from unlimited access to others' work while also restricting similar access to its own work.
I LOLād when I read OpenAI isnāt happy about DeepSeek possibly using ChatGPT to train their model, given OpenAI crawled the web and trained their LLM with our work. Oh the irony.
āWhen I think about where Iāll raise a future family or how much to save for retirement, I canāt help but wonder: Will humanity even make it to that point?ā he asked.
I think itās healthy to have a bit of skepticism about LLMās and where the future of actual AI leads us. Doom is not such a bad answer. Letās be cautious and slow down the pace. Iād definitely hate to see someone create SkyNet. š¤
Corey LaJoie to run partial Cup schedule for RWR, joins Prime Video as analyst
Iām happy for Corey! Iām a fan. Heās been an underdog forever and may not have the skill of top drivers but the man doesnāt give up. Iām excited to see how his own team ā Stacking Pennies Performance ā does this year! Getting the 01 number was quite clever. Since heās not a chartered NASCAR member it means heās not guaranteed a spot on the grid. What does that mean? It means there are only so many spots available to racers and he will have to qualify his way in! He starts his new adventure at the Great American Race in Daytona this month. If he qualifies itās a victory given the number of racers qualifying Open cars.
If I were some super rich dude Iād definitely get behind this guy.
I struggled for a bit trying to decide what to write about in my next Substack. But as this - how should I put this - batsh*t crazy week came to a close, I came to the conclusion that this post needs to be about you.
Man! I wish I were enough of a somebody to get Mr. Acosta to listen to me. All of this attention focused on Substack is not good. They support Nazi and white supremacist content on their platform but so many writers and reporter, like Mr. Acosta, just ignore it.
Itās mind boggling how they can ignore the sins of Substack while covering the likes of Donald Trump and the hate and cruelty he foists on so many groups of people here in the United States.
Get off the platform.
Politics
Donald Trump has entered the White House again, an astonishing number of American voters seemingly unbothered by his authoritarian rhetoric, let alone the fact heās an adjudicated rapist and 34-time convicted felon. No wonder the āfā word is in use more than ever, especially due to the actions of Trumpās apparent right-hand man, the unelected Elon Musk.
Keep saying it. Donald J. Trump is an adjudicated rapist and 34 time felon. Oh, and heās a fascist to boot.
Piece of garbage human.
Iāve been getting reassuring emails from my university to let me know that they have assembled a team to respond to the federal government shut down of NIH and NSF funded research. In case you hadnāt heard, they canceled review panels at NSF and suspended research at NIH. They made the uncertainty that has always haunted research funding far more shaky. This is a warning shot ā theyāre going to make everyone conscious of the fact that the Trump team, a collection of idiots with no qualifications in science to throttle any and all science they donāt like.
Itās depressing to see the greatest nation on the planet shut down scientific research. The Marmalade Messiah is trying his best to turn the United States of America into an Idiocracy.
Levi Rickert ā¢ Native News Online
The Trump administrationās intensified deportation efforts have created unexpected challenges for Navajo citizens living in urban areas like Phoenix. As the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began widespread raids in major cities across the country following the start of President Donald Trumpās second term, concerns have surfaced about Native Americans being mistaken for undocumented immigrants.
I knew something like this would happen. It was bound to given how gung-ho ICE has been about ārounding upā brown skinned people.
What an absolute shit show. One that will affect so many lives. Itās terribly cruel and pathetic.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
What a week. We started the week celebrating a man of compassion, peace, and love, a great American!
At the same time swore in a new President. A convicted felon and rapist. A man who doesnāt have a compassionate bone in his body. A man who only loves himself. In other words, a garbage human.
Like I said, what a week.
I hope you enjoy the links.
Instrumenting Thread Stalling in Ruby Applications
Another nice post that peaks under the hood of Ruby. I wonāt spoil the mystery here. Go read the post. š
Zac Bowden ā¢ Windows Central
Microsoft is gearing up to ship two new versions of the Surface Laptop and Surface Pro that have smaller displays, designed to be lighter and more portable for people looking for a more travel-friendly PC. Both devices will be premium products, and feature display sizes roughly around 11- or 12-inches, my sources say.
Iāve wanted a Surface Pro since the original version shipped. I love the form factor and it runs a full blown operating system.
Hot on the heels of yesterdayās news that Nosferatu director Robert Eggers will follow his vampire movie with a 13-century werewolf thriller called Werwulf, and todayās news that Nosferatu is in the running for four Academy Awards, the Eggers news drops keeps landing: Deadline reports that Eggers has signed a deal to direct a sequel to Jim Hensonās 1986 fantasy Labyrinth.
How do you replace David Bowie? You donāt. Our youngest daughter loves this film and absolutely hates the idea of a sequel. Canāt say that I blame her.
Doom: The Dark Ages looks metal as hell and launches in May
We havenāt played a game on our XBox in ages. Weāve played some Mario Kart on the Switch but the XBox is basically a dust collector. But this game looks like it could be really interesting and anything called āmetal as hellā is good in my book.
Matt Mastracci and Michael J. Sullivan ā¢ EdgeDB Blog
Weāve been working on a new HTTP fetch feature for EdgeDB, using reqwest as our HTTP client library. Everything was going smoothly: the feature worked locally, passed tests on x86_64 CI runners, and seemed stable. But then we noticed something strange: the tests started failing intermittently on our ARM64 CI runners.
This particular bug wouldnāt have happened on Windows because you can build the CRT to be thread safe. Of course they may have other issues on a Windows box. š
The web platform moves slowly, and I understand that can be frustrating for developers who want to innovate, but over a decade of consultancy experience has taught me time and time again that the alternative is much more restrictive in the long term. Whatās brand new today starts to show its age much more quickly.
I figure a web developer type would understand this better than I. Doing work on native desktop or mobile computers could present the same issues but typically doesnāt. Our frameworks are provided by the platform vendor. Now, using them without an abstraction absolutely locks you into the platform and major changes are typically few and far between, but they absolutely do happen.š
Mary Ann Azevedo ā¢ TechCrunch
Stripe is laying off 300 people, but says it still plans to hire in 2025
Sigh. This is one of those companies Iād have applied to as an iOS developer if I were in the market for a job. Working on an SDK or component level would be a great deal of fun. To see them have layoffs is a real bummer and points to how fragile the tech sector remains.
Haas have restructured their race operations team with a series of changes that include appointing Laura Muller as the first female race engineer in Formula 1.
Iām still a bit miffed at Haas for firing Gunther Steiner but this move sounds like a good one.
So how hard could it be. As input we have something like in UTC, and weād like to turn this into 1737094027, the notional (but not actual) number of seconds that have passed since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC.
Donāt get me started on dates. We had to deal with all these issues when I was at Pelco. Just never, ever, convert the date from UTC in your system until you need to display it. Itās easy to convert it to local time then use it somewhere else like that.
Luckily we had a really great developer who understood these issues and built us a really great date class for handling all those sticky issues for us.
āItās the most spontaneous thing Iāve ever been involved inā : the story of Mad Season, the grunge supergroup that Mike McCready hoped would save Layne Staley
For some reason the story of Layne Staleyās death really bothers me. His friends knew he was an addict and it caused a lot of problems in the band. But try as they might they could never get him to get help. He spent his final days locked away in his apartment, frightfully skinny, alone. Mike Starr, Alice In Chains bassist, visited Staley and begged him to go to the hospital. Staley wouldnāt hear it so Starr left. Itās believed it was the last time anyone saw Staley alive. He was discovered approximately two weeks later, partially decomposed, full syringe next to him. Sad, sad, ending to a talented soul.
Charith Amarasinghe ā¢ Railway
Since the beginning, Railwayās compute has been built on top of Google Cloud Platform. The platform supported Railway’s initial journey, but it has caused a multitude of problems that have posed an existential risk to our business. More importantly, building on a hyperscaler prevents us from delivering the best possible platform to our customers.
Folks that run ābare metalā servers feel like race car mechanics to me and I love reading stories like this. There was a time when I wanted to be a Render Wrangler at Pixar. All that raw horsepower committed to making the greatest animated film on earth was attractive to me.
At the start of last summer, we announced that we would start working on ActivityPub support for Ghost to bring long-form publishing to the largest decentralised networking protocol on the web.
Itās been really nice to see more blogging platforms embrace ActivityPub and the Fediverse.
Iām a very happy user of Micro.blog and their integration with ActivityPub and the Fediverse is second to none. They also support cross posting to Tumblr and Bluesky, and of course Mastodon. You can even follow Micro.blog users from Mastodon. Itās really well done.
Entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban is ready to fund a TikTok alternative built on Blueskyās AT Protocol, he shared in a TikTok video posted on Wednesday.
This is really interesting but I wonder why heās thinking about using At Proto instead of ActivityPub and the Fediverse? Pixelfed and Loops have been picking up steam and itās extremely nice to be able to follow someone on Pixelfed right from my Mastodon client. You can do the same with Loops. Itās just an amazing way to integrate all social media.
Politics
Jason DeRose and Sarah Ventre ā¢ NPR
“Let me make one final plea, Mr. President,” Bishop Mariann Budde said in her 15-minute sermon. “Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” said Budde, as she appeared to look towards the president.
Bishop Budde has more guts than all those fat cat billionaires sitting behind his orangeness during his swearing in.
She is a real Christian. God is a god of love. Jesusā message was all about love and compassion. Canāt these MAGA supporters see that? A lot of American Christians need to wake up. Youāve missed the message. Trump and his administration are all about cruelty. If thatās what youāre after, fine. Just donāt say youāre a Christian who follows the teachings of Jesus.
There was a prayer service at the National Cathedral on Tuesday, and Trump and Melania attended (this time not dressed as the Babadook), along with JD and Usha Vance and members of the Trump crime family and all kinds of others. And one of Americaās greatest heroes, Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopalian bishop for Washington DC, decided to speak truth to power, softly and carrying a big stick, and that stick was J-E-S-U-S.
Elon Musk doesnāt deserve the benefit of the doubt
The man is a Nazi. Itās just that plain. When he put his hand over his chest and flung it out he couldāve left his palm facing inward, but he didnāt. He chose to turn it down.
Heās a Nazi. Heās a racist. He is trying to remake America into a white nation while he rapes, pillages, and plunders our resources for his own selfish goals. I have no idea what those are but heās definitely up to something.
The evidence is now undeniable. In front of thousands at Donald Trump’s inauguration rally, Elon Musk - the world’s richest man and owner of X - performed not one but two Nazi salutes.
David Gutman ā¢ The Seattle Times
Judge in Seattle blocks Trump order on birthright citizenship nationwide
Birthright citizenship is right there in black and white in the Constitution. Trump is a nasty human being who deserves to be smacked around as often as possible. Of course that wouldnāt snap him out of it. Heās a narcissist and a sociopath. He only cares about himself.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
A polar vortex is heading our way this weekend. Itās been chilly this morning but itās not bad. Weāve had lower temperatures over the last few week.
The forecast calls for snow tomorrow and single digit temperatures ā Fahrenheit ā next week. Guess weāll see how accurate they are in a few days.š„¶
We still have the tiniest bit of snow on the ground and expect a few inches tomorrow.āļø
On to the links!
Brian Tallerico ā¢ Roger Ebert
Lynch was one of those creative voices who found his own octave, doing for film what people like David Bowie or Prince did for music, shattering expectations of what a piece of art could be.
Dune, Twin Peaks, and Blue Velvet are the productions I remember the most. I know Dune is not universally liked but Iāve always liked it and Twin Peaks was spooky and creepy. I barely remember seeing Blue Velvet but now I need to watch it again.
RIP šŖ¦
The Milwaukee Brewers legend, Baseball Hall of Famer, iconic announcer, and beloved actor Bob Uecker passes away at 90.
I remember Bob Uecker being funny, especially in the movie Major League and his Miller Light commercials with his famous āMust be in the front row.ā
RIP šŖ¦
Honestly the story I want someone to break wide open is the drug epidemic among the tech elite
Iāve tried to get my doctor(s) to prescribe me testosterone or HGH, they wouldnāt do it. But, if youāre rich you can get folks to help you find someone willing to get things for you.
Decentralized social network organization Mastodon said Monday that it is planning to create a new non-profit organization in Europe and hand over ownership of entities responsible for key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components. This means one person wonāt have control over the entire project.
This is really great news for Mastodon and the Fediverse. With all the hubbub surrounding governance of WordPress itās nice to see this happening with Masstodon. I hope it works as expected.
Pixelfed, a decentralized and ad-free Instagram alternative, now has apps on iOS and Android, as reported by TechCrunch. The iOS app launched today, while the Android app launched on January 10th.
Folks walking away from Facebook and Instagram should absolutely consider using Pixelfed. Itās very similar to Instagram but itās based on Fediverse protocols so itās easy to follow folks from Mastodon if youād like. No Pixelfed account required.
Jen Rubin exits Washington Post, joins Norm Eisen to launch new outlet countering āauthoritarian threatā
This is a huge move. Iām a Democrat but Iāve always read and respected Jennifer Rubin. Sheās been a constant critic of Donald Trump and his ilk and Iām looking forward to reading The Contrarian everyday.
Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creatorĀ Matt Mullenweg has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members, some of whom have been spearheading a push to create a new fork of the open source WordPress project.
The infighting and lawsuit being fought by WordPress and Matt Mullenweg could destroy the entire organization. I hope theyāre able to keep things together and WordPress continues to be used worldwide.
Iāve had an idea for a blogging system based on WordPress for years. I blame my friend, Bill Lazar, for planting the idea in my brain. š
There are so many things around blogging Iād love to build. Time to do it is the thing Iām missing.
TikTok, creators face tough day at SCOTUS, with ban set to go into effect on Jan. 19
It sounds like there may be some last minute heroics by politicians or incoming President Orange Man to push this off for the next 90-days.
Ultimately finding a way to keep CCP propaganda out of American feeds would probably be the better solution, but I think that would take heavy government involvement and regulation. Perhaps an independent TikTok organization who share TikTok client code and service code but run them independently?
Newsom’s order aims to help Angelenos, but is rebuilding in the same areas a good idea?
So many folks lives have been turned upside down. Talking about rebuilding seems premature but if youāre living on the street or in your car youāre ready to get your new house built.
If you want to know when I pretty much drew a line though my friendship with Neil Gaiman, it was when Neil acknowledged that he made moves on his early-20s nanny on her first day of employment.
Itās so difficult to believe Neil Gaiman is such a creep.
Tractor maker John Deere faces a federal lawsuit that accuses the company of illegally forcing farmers to use only authorized dealers for critical repairs, boosting its multibillion-dollar profits.
When I was employed at Agrian weād talk about this from time to time. Forcing farmers into contracts that donāt give them the power to repair their own equipment is so costly. Most farmers I know are skilled at fixing their equipment. My grandfather made his living for well over 50-years repairing Cat equipment in fields all over California. Sure, he was an independent mechanic and welder, but he sure could turn a wrench and fix anything, and his services didnāt cost an arm and a leg.
Saquon Barkley looked to be off to the races, headed for a last-minute touchdown that would have had no impact on the outcome of the Philadelphia Eagles' 22-10 win over the Green Bay Packers on Sunday but would’ve cashed a lot of tickets for the betting public.
How many players, coaches, and team employees are gambling on teams? How long before they start making deals with the players to throw games for big money?
Iām glad Barkley slid. Your bet means nothing to the game.
Politics
Steve Beschloss ā¢ America, America
But as much as the Democrats stripped away Hegsethās arrogant, macho veneer to illustrate his lack of traditional qualificationsāand that particularly included questioning his documented record of drunkenness, sexual abuse and hostility toward women and female combat soldiersāit was painfully clear that the unqualified Hegsethās main purpose was to smile and nod as the Republicans waxed rhapsodic about him and to push back with aggression or sneer silently when Democrats dared to doubt Donald Trumpās insulting pick to run our military.
Hegseth is an unqualified buffoon, adulterer, and drunk. A perfect choice for the Marmalade Messiah.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
We got a little winter wonderland last Sunday night and into Monday. Overnight we got a tiny bit more. Not enough to cripple Charlottesville or the surrounding area, just enough to make it really dangerous to use the roads on Monday and Tuesday. āļø
The remainder of the week has remained below freezing and next week is expected to be the same. š„¶
My coffee is piping hot and Iām ready to share some links. I hope you enjoy them.
Oh, I almost forgot! I now have a store for Stream.
By Jessie Yeung and Rebekah Riess ā¢ CNN
Deadly Los Angeles wildfires: New evacuation orders as biggest blaze stretches east
Being a native Californian I understand what these poor folks are going through. This sort of thing has become all too familiar to people in Norther and Southern California. There is a Fire Season in California for heavens sake and each year brings some kind of fresh hell to the state.
Oh, and those poor people have more of this to look forward to due to climate change. Joy.
If you think the response to the fires was botched, think again. These fires spread quickly due to Santa Anna winds blowing up to 98MPH. Itās believed that caused the fire to spread quickly and now there are fire fighters working around the clock on four different fronts.
Hereās hoping they get them under control soon! ā¤ļø
Nick SchƤferhoff ā¢ WordPress.com
So, you are considering creating a personal website. Congratulations! In my opinion, thatās one of the smartest decisions you can make.
Now, more than ever, is a great time to create a weblog. Social media companies like Facebook and X have become more hateful than ever. Itās time to own your content and stop feeding the corporate marketing machines with your stories.
I recommend Micro.blog for blogging and Mastodon for your social timeline. Micro.blog also has a social timeline that is compatible with Mastodon and Bluesky. Itās well worth the $5/month. I havenāt used Micro.one but itās a less expensive version on Micro.blog at a super cheap $1/month.
This blog is hosted by Micro.blog so itās extremely easy for me to recommend.
In a remarkable two-year effort, the maintainers of the popular Fish Shell have officially released a beta of Fish 4.0āthis time written almost entirely in Rust instead of C++.
I find this fascinating. I always tell folks that rewrites are typically the death of a thing. This team may be an exception to that rule.
Iāll be keeping an eye on this project to see how folks feel about the new shell.
Automattic is cutting its weekly contributions to WordPress.org from 3,988 hours to 45 hours, escalating tensions with rival WP Engine amid their ongoing legal dispute. The dramatic reduction comes after a federal court granted WP Engine an injunction over Automattic’s handling of a disputed plugin.
This is a wild turn of events Iād imagine is designed to get WP Engine to contribute more to the WordPress project because theyāll need to if theyād like to see new features added.
I donāt want anything to do with the politics behind this. Wordpress is a great piece of software and I hope it continues to be. Not updating as frequently may be a good thing. Itāll allow the community to take a deep breath and not worry about future changes causing additional bugs. It will also allow folks to stabilize and fix whatever bugs theyāre aware of since that looks like a primary focus going forward. I hope it works. š¤š¼
With this post I will concentrate on the here and now: how to use Cās future lifesaving defer feature with existing tools and compilers.
Defer is one of those keywords/features I really appreciate about Swift. Itās really nice to have a compiler enforced way to guarantee your code can cleanup, even if something goes wonky. šš¼
AMD introduced a powerful new laptop chip today, the Ryzen AI Max. The company compared its new chip to Appleās M4 line in several benchmarks, but thereās a very important detail it left out.
Heh, I didnāt realize AMD didnāt compare their new chip to Appleās M4 Max. Hey, AMD still has a generally useful chip and Iām sure laptop makers are ready for it.
We maintain multiple Content Delivery Network (CDN) instances for delivering .NET builds. Some end in azureedge.net. These domains are hosted by edg.io, which will soon cease operations due to bankruptcy. We are required to migrate to a new CDN and will be using new domains going forward.
One would think Microsoft, with its deep pockets, would spend a little cash to keep this bankrupt company afloat while they properly transition their services to their own data center. Itās also odd to me that Microsoft would use a third-party for this service being its important infrastructure. Weird.
I wouldāve loved to have been a fly on the wall of those meetings.
Recently I diagnosed and fixed two frame pointer unwinding crashes in Go. The root causes were two flavors of the same problem: buggy assembly code clobbered a frame pointer. By “clobbered” I mean wrote over the value without saving & restoring it. One bug clobbered the frame pointer register. The other bug clobbered a frame pointer saved on the stack. This post explains the bugs, talks a bit about ABIs and calling conventions, and makes some recommendations for how to avoid the bugs.
Oh my goodness I love reading tech articles like this. Go is one of many new classes of memory safe languages. But the memory safety is only as good as the language teamās tooling.
This article explains how one person just made Go a bit more safe for all of us.
In 2017, Chris buggered off to mess around with AI. Tim Cookās MBA buddies began to wriggle their tendrils into Swift and guide it towards its next life stage.
Swift has 217 keywords? Good grief. I donāt use many of those, Iām certain of it. Iām not very bright and Iām very slow to learn new stuff. Iām champing at the bit to fully embrace SwiftUI and async/await support in Swift 6.0. Ive found async/await to be particularly difficult to grok. The current networking code in Stream is working just fine so I have plenty of time to adjust to async/await as long as Apple doesnāt deprecate their old support. Fingers crossed. š¤š¼
The Washington Post on Tuesday laid off roughly 100 employees across its business division, the latest indication of the newspaperās financial woes after subscribers and staffers revolted over owner Jeff Bezosās decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris.
Iām hoping Kara Swisher and a group of investors purchase WaPo from Bezos. I donāt. Think itās for sale but I believe Kara could turn it around and make it into the countries best source of investigative reporting, political or otherwise. I think it would also become a lot braver in its coverage of political corruption in DC.
Politics
Iām trying something a bit different this week. Iām grouping all my political links and opinions here at the bottom so folks can skip it altogether if theyāre sick of reading about it.
Iāve had some folks reach out to say they like Saturday Morning Coffee, except for the politics. I understand. Iām sick of it to, but I canāt ignore whatās happened and is about to happen in our country.
So, please feel free to skip this part. Itās about politics! ā¤ļø
As Big Tech scrambles to placate Donald Trump before he reassumes office, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his company would replace their fact-checkers with user-generated Community Notes, beginning in the United States and then rolling out globally.
Iāve said time and again that Zuck is a sociopath, maybe psychopath? At minimum heās a narcissist, right? (Iām not a psychologist, but I play one on Saturday mornings.)
This sudden capitulation to Trump is pure cowardice. Marmalade Messiah threatened Zuck and he folded like a cheap suit.
Facebook is now compliant with the destruction of Democracy. Shameful.
those are hurricane-force winds. itās a hurricane made out of fucking fire. one ember can travel miles, land somewhere else, and start a whole new fire ā and thatās exactly whatās happening right now all over the Los Angeles area.
Itās really pathetic that Orange Man and Space Karen have tried to turn an absolute tragedy into a political chess piece.
The fire is tragic whether started intentionally or not. Itās not because of DEI or some government conspiracy. Itās tragic. Plain and simple.
Tim Cook gives $1 million to Trumpās inauguration committee. I think this event will be a turning point in how we view the Apple CEO.
I didnāt expect Tim Cook to kiss Trumpās big ass. But here we are. Shameful.
$1M Knee Pads
That is a great summary of what tech CEOās have been doing. Buying $1M knee pads to kiss Trumpās ass.
I hope democracy can survive the next four years, Trump doesnāt declare himself benevolent dictator, and leaves office after his lame duck term. Hereās hoping.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
Iām back and feeling much better! This week was a mix of recovering from being sick and trying to ease back into work. Next week we kick off the next phase of the project Iām working on and Iām looking forward to seeing what weāre gonna do.
Coffee is in and links are linked. Enjoy! š
John Brayton ā¢ Golden Hill Software
2024 was a big year for Unread. The highlight of the year was the release of Unread for Mac. I first announced that I would be working on a Mac version at the start of 2023. I released the first public beta at the start of 2024. I released the final version in July 2024.
A big congratulations to my friend, John! I had the fortune to be a beta site for Unread and give John a little feedback over the course of it.
The Mac version of Unread is 100% a āMac assed Mac app.ā Itās beautifully designed, fast, and feature rich.
Unreadās biggest unlock is its syncing service. No need to purchase a third party service for sync, itās built right in.
Highly recommended.šš¼
Iāve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversationsāand some differencesāabout cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time Iāve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.
This is absolutely pathetic. I would really love to see Bezos sell the Washington Post. The billionaire class in America needs to be dismantled. Theyāre not helping the country, at all. Theyāre just as bad, if not worse, than Russian Oligarchs. I never thought Iād see our country come to this in my lifetime. Pathetic.
Apple CEO Tim Cook donates $1 million to Trump inauguration
Boy-oh-boy CEOās are lining up to kiss Marmalade Messiahās ass.
I really, really, hate this. Cook is an openly gay man and Orange dude wants the LGBTQ+ community to disappear. Heās supporting a man, and a movement, that hates him with everything in their being.
All these CEOās are playing right into the authoritarian playbook. Theyāre obeying in advance. Not good for our nation.
If someone signs up for Micro.one and they later need the extra advanced features and cross-posting, they can upgrade from the $1 Micro.one subscription to the standard $5 Micro.blog subscription. Itās a natural upgrade without gimmicks.
This is an amazing deal for a blogging/micro blogging service.
Congratulations Manton and team!
The more I learn about Lua’s design and implementation, the more impressed I am. It’s very rare to see software that does so much with so little code.
Lua is an extremely cool little language. You can run it standalone and you can embed it into your application. When I was at Pelco one of our developers wrote a test harness for our media pipeline that embedded Lua and he used it to drive integration tests. It was an excellent use of Lua. Iām a fan.
Corey LaJoie not expected to return to Rick Ware Racing
This is a real bummer but not unexpected. LaJoie had a rough year and was out performed by his Rookie of the Year teammate, Carson Hocevar.
I could tell there was something off with Corey on his podcast, Stacking Pennies. There were times when he came across angry or down.
I like Corey LaJoie and I hope he finds a seat for the 2025 Cup, Xfinity, or Truck Series. He certainly is an underdog whoās never been in good equipment until the 2024 season.
Remy Tumin ā¢ The New York Times
The end of the year may be associated with the holiday season for many, but Daniel Stern refers to it as something else: the āHome Aloneā time.
Daniel Sternās Marv in Home Alone is unforgettable. My favorite scene with him is the tarantula scene. That scream was surprising and way higher pitched than I expected.
Itās neat to see talented folks like him go off and explore other things. Iād love to have one of his sculptures!
Naoko Nishimoto vowed to give up driving when she reached the age of 80. That meant finding a new home for her treasured Mazda RX-7, which she ordered new 25 years ago.
Just look at that RX-7. Itās pristine. Itās also really cool of Mazda to buy it back.
Yesterday, the team at Lux announced that they are working on the next major release of their pro camera app, Halide, which will be dubbed Halide Mark III. The next iteration of Halide, which Lux hopes to release in 2025 will focus on three areas
This tiny team has done some incredible work over the years and done stuff with photos I had no idea was possible. Last I checked it was three folks doing all this incredible work! Talented Indie shops like this are so impressive and I hope theyāre able to operate for as long as they want.
Liz Pelly ā¢ Harper’s Magazine
Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musiciansāvariously called ghost or fake artistsāpresumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts.
This is kind of disgusting and deceiving. If Spotify wants to do this, fine, do it. But at least have the guts to tell your listeners it was created by Spotify and donāt play this dishonest game of making up artists.
Old cars with modern drivetrains are often terrible. People go too far in their restomods, turning classic muscle cars into the automotive equivalent of those LED-ridden black leather couches.
I love the idea of converting a traditional gas powered vehicle to all electric. I wish I had a bunch of money that would allow me to quit my job so I could experiment with all kinds of things. Something Iāve always wanted to do is get a beater car, rebuild the motor, transmission, and rear differential (the drive train) to create a mechanically sound, aesthetically unmodified car.
Why not make it an EV? š
The Delta gaming emulator is now providing a link to sign up for Patreon-exclusive membership perks directly within the iOS app in Appleās US App Store.
How in the world are they getting away with this?
I have to believe if all iOS Developer knew they could get away with this theyād choose to do their own payment system to avoid the 15-30% they have to give Apple. Seems a no brainer business decision. As it is the 15-30% is the cost of doing business with Apple.
Jonathan M. Gitlin ā¢ Ars Technica
Honda and Nissan to merge, Honda will take the lead
This was a big surprise when I read it. It will be very interesting to see their car lineup once theyāve settled down.
I hope they keep Nissan trucks, theyāre really nice.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
Iām running a bit behind again this week. Kim, Taylor, and I went out for breakfast this morning at TipTop and I had their excellent biscuits and gravy. Something else of not at TipTop is their coffee. Itās excellent! So, if youāre ever in Charlottesville head over to the Pantops area and visit TipTop Restaurant for breakfast. Hopefully you like it as much as I do.
This week was my last week of work until the new year. My brain has been checked out all week, thinking ahead to Christmas and time with our girls, grandkids, and son-in-law.
Oh, we also had a little snow flurry this morning. It was a single cloud overhead and once it passed no other cloud has dropped snow. We saw cars in Charlettesville with snow on them. Not much. Just the tiniest dusting. Iād love to have an inch or two for Christmas, but I we donāt have any in the forecast. Just cold, which is also fine.
I hope you enjoy the links!
Matt Mullenweg ā¢ WordPress.org
I hope to find the time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year. Right now much of the time I would spend making WordPress better is being taken up defending against WP Engineās legal attacks. Their attacks are against Automattic, but also me individually as the owner of WordPress.org, which means if they win I can be personally liable for millions of dollars of damages.
This feud is getting more and more dramatic by the day. Iām surprised it hasnāt been forked a bunch of times and taken in new directions.
What happens to WP Engine if the community fragments and different versions of WordPress evolve? Shouldnāt WP Engine fork it and do with it what they please? Yes, of course. Will they? I doubt it. Theyāre owned by a private equity firm, Silver Lake. All they want to do is bleed the company dry, sell it off for parts, and move on to the next company.
We, the WordPress community, need to decide if weāre ok being led by a single person who controls everything, and might do things we disagree with, or if we want something else. For a project whose tagline is āDemocratizing publishingā, weāve been very low on exactly that: democracy.
This is probably what the WP Engine folks should be doing and I hope more of the community gets behind this effort.
Some people think that wouldnāt go far enough, that WordPress would be better off with someone new taking over Mattās role across the project. Iām not convinced. WordPress and Automattic didnāt accidentally become successful. They are successful in large part because of Matt and the teams he built.
The reason Iām linking to Manton is because I think heās become a leading voice for the open web, blogging, and micro formats. Heās built a nice business on top of open web technologies and fully embraced micro blogging formats like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Nostr. Heās also opened up Micro.blog to post to Tumblr and WordPress blogs. Basically Micro.blog has become the center point of blogging for me. I write on Micro.blog and it gets published to these other locations automagically. Of course you, the blogger, have to configure Micro.blog to publish to these other places but thatās easy. Once youāve done it, it just magically happens when you post. Easy peasy.
So, if youāre looking for a pure blogging platform give Micro.blog a look. Itās well worth the $5 per month and you can start with a free account just to give it a try.
When a platform can hold the people you care about or rely upon hostage ā when it can credibly threaten you with disconnection and exile ā that platform can abuse you in lots of ways without losing your business. In other words, they can enshittify their service:
Once of the promises of Bluesky was that by creating the AT Proto protocol the service wouldnāt exist as a single entity, there would be many implementation that all tied together. So far everything is centralized under Bluesky.
I havenāt fully wrapped my brain around what AT Proto really means for the open web. Iād asked what it would take to spin up an instance on Bluesky and I learned there arenāt really other instances but you could host your own data anywhere as long as you did an implementation of a specific portion of the protocol. I have so much to learn.
Today, Iām launching Forked, a new approach to working with shared data in Swift. And it has actually worked out better than I expected. I wasnāt even sure it would be possible to build, but with the new Swift macros, I was able to come up with a minimal API that seems to work great. Iām really looking forward to dog fooding it.
This looks extremely interesting to me. Iāve had requests from folks to provide a mechanism to sync Stream feeds across multiple devices. Forked may provide that means. I will be putting some time aside to give Forked a try. Hopefully itāll do what I need to make syncing work across devices without the need to build a backend service, which could be terribly expensive and time consuming to operate.
McLeod and co-owner Matt Tifft sold the charter to Spire Motorsports. In doing so, the organization chose to go from a full-time operation to competing on a limited basis, primarily on superspeedways. McLeod made five starts in 2024 (plus two for Carl Longās team) in the Cup Series and four (plus one for Long) in the Xfinity Series.
Iāve written before about how much I like B.J. McLeod. Heās the little guy, not some giant team with backing from a major manufacturer like Chevy, Ford, or Toyota. Itās surprising a little team like his can put a fairly competitive car on the track. Heās especially good at what are considered Super Speedways like Daytona and Talledega.
He failed to qualify for the 2024 Daytona 500 so I hope he manages to make it in 2025. I would love to see him pull off a miracle win at one of these Super Speedways. Sure, itās not likely, but of all track types Super Speedways are very unpredictable because of pack racing. These cars are so equally configured they typically run within a few tenths of a second of each other.
Iām looking forward to the opening of the 2025 NASCAR season in February.
Reminder for anyone who doesn’t know: I’m writing almost every day on my Substack
I like reading Paul Krugman but heās decided to host his writing on Nazi loving Substack and that is a bummer. I have a large list of writers I wish would move to a better service (if they must have a service.)
It would be just as easy to host on WordPress.com or even Micro.blog. Iām not sure if Mr. Krugman plans on having a subscription plan but Substack is a terrible choice for it and his wonderful writing.
UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty wrote in a New York Times op-ed Friday that the for-profit U.S. healthcare system “does not work as well as it should” and that “no one would design a system like the one we have,” admissions that came as his industry faced a torrent of public anger following the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive.
Medicare for all with the United States Government as the single payor. Yeah, sure, weād need to pay taxes to make it work but medicine operated as a for profit business is a huge mistake, not to mention the disaster that is medical insurance.
Christopher Harper ā¢ Tomās Hardware
A recently posted photograph of old-school Commodore 64s, which debuted 42 years ago, in use as registers at a modern bakery has attracted a lot of attention. As further sleuthed by commenters, this bakery was identified as the Hilligoss Bakery in Brownsburg, Indiana, and the last publicly posted picture of the Commodore 64 register was in 2021. As such, we called the shop, and they verified that the registers are still in use. At the time of writing, the establishment in question has 488 Google reviews with an average 4.7-star rating and 202 Facebook reviews with an average 4.5-star ratingā and, if some reviews mentioning the C64 are any indication, it even seems to be busier than usual, likely encouraged by the spreading word of this retro tech curiosity.
How cool is this? My brother had a Commodore 64 and he had a ton of fun playing games on it. He also wrote a program to generate D & D characters, as one did in the early 80ās.
I think about old tech like this from time to time and wonder if it could be repurposed to very specific tasks. The answer is obviously a resounding YES!
I wonder how they keep the equipment from getting all sticky and covered in flour?
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
Welcome to a Sunday morning edition of Saturday Morning Coffee. š My youngest daughter and I went to breakfast ā TipTop Restaurant ā and did a bit of Christmas shopping yesterday. Itās something we do every year. You might say itās tradition. š
š¼
Todays forecast calls for a little snow. āļø I hope it happens.
My coffee is nice and hot. Letās get started.
Enjoy!
Horror legend Stephen King has written a fair few books over the years. Ever since he burst on the scene with “Carrie”Ā 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 ā and isn’t shy about commenting about either the genre or his craft as a writer.
Who doesnāt love Stephen King? Iāve only read a few of his books but my wife Kim has read everything heās ever written, including his first attempt at self publishing a digital book called The Plant.
I enjoyed following him when Twitter was around and Iām thrilled heās joined Threads so I can follow him once again.
Now, can we please get his account connected to Mastodon?
Mozi is a social app ā not in the sense of āsocial media.ā But in the sense of interacting with other people and building relationships.
Itās 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 ā¢ The Hollywood Reporter
Bluesky Hits 25M Users As Exodus From X Continues
I still prefer Mastodon but itās really nice to see Bluesky growing and Space Karenās social network shrinking.
Iād encourage folks to checkout Mastodon and use their mobile app to sign up and use mastodon.social as your instance, itās 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 donāt have to move, ever. š
Matthew Christopher ā¢ Atlas Obscura
Even looking down from a rooftop onto the overgrown ruins of Lenin Square, itās difficult to comprehend the scale of loss in Prypiat, Ukraine. Perhaps, like me, youāve been fascinated by the tragedy of Chornobyl, as it is known in Ukrainian*, for decades.
Iām fascinated by Chernobyl. I remember when the meltdown was reported and the confusion and concern that followed. Things couldāve been much, much, worse.
From Brazil to Mexico and beyond, NASCAR continues emphasis on global expansion
The thing about this expansion is itās all about having a local league. What Iād like to see is the NASCAR Cup Series go to different countries. In 2025 NASCAR will visit Mexico City and thatās a great start but Iād 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 youād like to understand a bit more about how ActivityPub/Mastodon work vs. ATProto.
Emily Hemphill ā¢ The Daily Progress
Standing on the corner of Water and Second streets off Charlottesvilleās 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 itās 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.
NASCAR Shocks FRM and 23XI by Withdrawing Charter Offer Amid Legal Dispute
This isnāt 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.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
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. Itās strange. I donāt feel that old mentally. My body is broken but my spirit and mind are doing fine.
On with the linkage! Enjoy. š
Eleanor Beardsley and Chandelis Duster ā¢ 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 ā now cleansed of soot and centuries of grime ā as he toured the more than 800 year old restored cathedral.
With all the bad news in the world I thought Iād share some hope. It was so depressing to see Notre Dame burn. But itās back! Thatās something to celebrate.
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 itās 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 wouldāve been something.
While Javascript is unavoidable, hereās how I think one should try to limit its spread.
JavaScript is eating the world, just like C did in the 80ās and early 90ās.
Iād call WillowTree a premier native iOS and Android shop, amongst other things, and now weāre doing a lot more React Native and TypeScript. I know of native iOS Apps that use JavaScript internally for business logic. Itās handy. Itās an ugly language but useful.
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.
Iām very excited for this! Iāve 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 itās nice to see Cadillac dedicated to the entire sport. They will become my new team on the grid. Iāve 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 ā¢ The Independent
Amazon workers are planning to strike from Black Friday through Cyber Monday to hold the company accountable for ālabor abuses,Ā environmental degradationĀ andĀ threats to democracy,ā organizers say.
I didnāt pay attention to this yesterday so I wonder how things went?
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 whoāve never done this kind of work pull something beautiful together. Great work!
In her lawsuit, Gifford alleges that Sheil copied her, down to specific frames in videos. She claims that repeated pattern and Sheilās uncannily similar content ultimately cut into Giffordās own earnings. The similarities extend, in Giffordās 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 thatās the lynchpin to the case.
I’ve been helping getting MacStories setup on Bluesky this weekend and I came across a few handy sites.
Iāve 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?
Most people writing code that ends up running on macOS machines arenāt super familiar with the operating system, its unique features or its rough edges. Thatās okay! If youāre a programmer using macOS and your code will actually end up running on a Mac rather than a server somewhere or whatever ā even if your software isnāt a user-facing graphical application ā 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 itās good to learn it at a lower level.
Comparing ActivityPub and AT Proto is a useful exercise. Itās tempting but ultimately too simple to say that one is decentralized and one is centralized.
AT Proto is something Iād like to know more about. Itās 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 canāt remember the name of the part Iām referring to.
I donāt 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++ās 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 doesnāt splinter and make a mess out of a tried and true low level programming language. Thereās so much code out there that needs to continue working and advancing the language without breaking things is crazy challenging.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
I made it back home yesterday after a delayed flight and an unplanned overnight stay in Dallas and Iām happy to be here. I was able to kiss my amazing wife and sleep in my own bed. Itās amazing how uncomfortable someone elseās bed can be, especially as Iāve g in otten older. š
I hope you enjoy these hand picked, artisanal, links. š
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 Iād say I owe my career to it.
RIP Mr. Kurtz. šŖ¦
In a post on X on Thursday, the author of The Shining and Shawshank Redemption wrote: āIām leaving Twitter. Tried to stay, but the atmosphere has just become too toxic.ā Referring to the rival platform launched by Mark Zuckerbergās Meta, he added: āFollow me on Threads, if you like.ā
Iām 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. š
Federico Viticci ā¢ MacStories
Today marks the return of a very MacStories-y feature in one of my longtime favorite apps, which ā thanks to this new functionality ā 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.
Iām @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 youād like to see Mastodon and Bluesky accounts natively. Oh, yeah, and thereās that whole blogging thing you get with it. š
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 ā crazy, I know. RSS makes websites legible, stripping out all the distracting garbage.
I think RSS is pretty swell myself. Iām so fond of it I built my own feed reader.
Tom Bowman, Juana Summers, Scott Detrow, Greg Dixon, and Charles Maynes ā¢ NPR
Ukraine is granted permission from the Biden administration to fire U.S.-made long range missiles into Russian territory.
Iām happy weāve 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.
Apple is facing an almost Ā£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. Weāll see what terrible solution they come up with to make it so unattractive to the user no one will choose to use it.
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 āretired with no intention of coming backā, 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 Iām 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! š
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 Iād 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!
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Fresno, California! āļø
Iām in California for the next week for my fathers funeral and to settle his affairs. ā¤ļø
I will catch yāall next weekend.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
Itās a sad week and what promises to be an extremely dark time in our nations history. Unless youāve had your head buried in the sand ā and whoād blame you ā Iām talking about the Orange Nightmare winning the Presidential election. Itās 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 youāre not alone. Plenty of us feel this way. Iāve been through the sadness and disappointment period and Iām 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 ā¢ Associated Press
Quincy Jones, the multitalented music titan whose vast legacy ranged from producing Michael Jacksonās historic āThrillerā 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 šŖ¦
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. Itās 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.
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 youāre 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. Theyāve 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 Iāve ever made.
I feel like a hype man sometimes ā itās my personality ā 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 theyāre 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. Nishās experience may be completely opposite of mine ā heās a Principal Engineer (I think?), thatās the highest level in our Engineering organization. Regardless, Nish is the complete package. Heās good at everything. ā¤ļø
Alex Henderson, AlterNet ā¢ RawStory
“On November 5,” Dalton writes, “the American people did the unthinkable ā they elected a convicted felon president. Judge Juan Merchan should now do what was once unthinkable ā force a president-elect to take the oath of office in a jail cell.
Boy-o-boy would I love to see that (yeah, itās petty of me, so what?) Iām hoping there is another option. Can they postpone his sentence until heās 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 heād be out of office.
John Braydon ā¢ 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. Heās Unreadās 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 Johnās work is undeniably so much more advanced than mine and thatās 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 heās 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 ā¢ Crooks and Liars
David Frum left the Republican Party following Trumpās victory in the 2024 presidential election. āDe-registered as a Republican today,ā Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, wrote on the social platform X on Wednesday.
I may not agree with a lot of David Frumās views on policy as a ānormalā Republican but Iāve 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 theyād just give it an official name ā perhaps MAGA ā and let the GOP have their party back.
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, itās 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. Microsoftās Mark Russinovich has declared all new system level code should be written in Rust. Thatās a big darned deal.
Of course you wonāt 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, Iām most likely a bit biased. š
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 donāt look exactly like them. A lot of young white men voted us into this mess. Itās shameful.
Again, we must fight this tooth and nail to save the rotting soul of this great nation.
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 Iām hoping itāll get the big news outlets to finally abandon Space Karenās social platform for Mastodon.
I know thatās asking a lot but folks have been fleeing his platform in greater numbers recently.
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.
Iām 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 donāt?
I know Democrats are in charge of the Senate but after McConnellās bullshit with Garland then applying a different set of rules for Amy Coney Barrett Iām 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. Iām 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 Iād love to see is Biden retiring so Kamala can become the 47th President of the United States and screw up Orange Manās swag offerings. š
Yes, Iām that petty when it comes to that man.
Hereās hoping he leaves office in four years.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
Were four days away from what is the most consequential Presidential vote in my lifetime, perhaps the countryās lifetime.
Voting is the most important thing you can do to save our democracy.
Iāll leave it at that. I hope you enjoy the links.
Donald Trump may be a known quantity. Heās 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 Houseāthat was Trumpās first termābut a would-be authoritarian who could actually accomplish the task of transforming the federal government into a tool of political repression.
Donāt vote for this man. Heāll destroy our country as we know it and turn it into a hellscape.
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!
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 Daveās desire to use RSS to populate the various services. It deserves a blog post all its own. Maybe Iāll have enough gumption to do that someday. š
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 itāll fail. Hopefully it doesnāt cause a mess in the community.
Sidney Blumenthal ā¢ The Guardian
Donald Trump keeps saying that if he is elected to a second term he will prosecute his political opponents, āthe enemies withinā. On 22 October he stated, once again, that as president he would use āextreme power ā¦ We canāt play games with these people. These are people that are dangerous people ā¦ an enemy from within.ā
This man is a menace and must be defeated once and for all. Kick him to the curb so, hopefully, heāll get the idea heās not wanted and go play golf for the rest of his miserable life.
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 donāt 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.
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.
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 donāt, they are left feeling perplexed.
I know lots of folks at work using Arc and they love it! Iām skeptical of it. Not because itās different but because itās built on Chromium and I donāt trust Google.
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 thatās too broad? Iād like to know more about what this proposal implies and how would it affect developers.
Michael Miszczak ā¢ 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 companyās 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. Itās an outlet. Thankfully I donāt have to make a living from it. Iād starve.
Though Dorseyās message didnāt specify how many employees would be laid off, sources told Fortune that it could be around 100 employees ā or about a quarter of Tidalās 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 isnāt bad at all. Itās another competitor in the big music service scene. Granted, itās 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. Itās fine.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
This weeks post is going to contain a lot about politics and the upcoming Presidential Election here in the good old USofA.
I wouldnāt be surprised if you skipped reading but I just feel the need to talk about it, not that itās going to change anyoneās mind.
Iām 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.
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 āTRUMP IS A FASCISTā on a daily basis.
We all should be.
In response to the owner of the Los Angeles Times decreeing that the paper would not be endorsing a candidate in this yearās 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.
The Los Angeles Times has lost two more longtime editorial writers, the latest in a growing exodus to protest owner Patrick Soon-Shiongās interference with the paperās planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, TheWrap can exclusively report.
More fallout from cowardly publishers.
William Lewis ā¢ 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! šŗšø
The network request has gone from 49% of our time to 19%. But Iām 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 canāt 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.
Iām a longtime Castro user and the recent changes to the client app and the backend have been a welcome sight. Itās moving forward again! šš¼
Why hasnāt 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.
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 donāt need to be introduced to the hosts, I know who they are, I subscribed to the podcast to begin with. š
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 itās the Big Cos who can afford to try it.
This move fits into Appleās current rules around streaming apps, like Netflix. You canāt mention how to sign up from the app ā which is a dumb rule ā and you canāt link out to a help page that describes how to do it. Howās that for a good user experience?
Iām really interested to see how this works out. šæ
Itās odd how many developers in the fediverse donāt know how Bluesky works.
I donāt 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?
Private Cloud Compute (PCC) fulfills computationally intensive requests for Apple Intelligence while providing groundbreaking privacy and security protections ā by bringing our industry-leading device security model into the cloud.
More on Appleās cloud infrastructure for their new AI platform. I still havenāt read the entire piece but thought Iād share it for the geeky readers since this is a politics heavy post.
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. Iām not sure if heās the one, but he darned sure stands a chance to win it all. Unless tragedy strikes Iād expect him to lead laps in Phoenix for the Championship at the very least.
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 itās really difficult to run your own business, Iāve tried and Iāve succeeded and failed at it. š¤£
But, thereās something about a coffee shop that feels right. Itās about the community as much as itās 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.
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 itāor reach out to a friendly community. That has been a big reason why the mess with WordPress has been so frustrating.
If youāre 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 donāt have to. In the end he lists five options to consider, each with pros and cons.
Most bloggers donāt need much and a CMS can be overkill for us. Others moreso, so a CMS may be just what the doctor ordered.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
I donāt know if allergies are trying to kill me or if Iāve picked up a cold somewhere. No matter, Iām so sleepy I can barely keep my eyes open. š
Ok, so, here we are, three hours later. š¤£ I passed out. Couldnāt keep my eyes open.
Hope you enjoy the links.
I became a blogger because of Dave. Blogging changed ā in a great way ā the trajectory of my career.
A lot of us were influenced by Daveās work.
Danās a really great writer and someone you should follow.
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 didnāt matter. But if youāre 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.
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! Toddās 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.
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 doesnāt destroy the WordPress community in the meantime.
Jessica Wakeman ā¢ The Guardian
Hurricane Helene destroyed Ashevilleās 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 didnāt go because Iād injured my back as was unable to stand for long periods of time. Now I really wish weād gone. Those poor people were hit so hard. Hereās to a full recovery! ā¤ļø
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 heās available I think a NASCAR team needs to convince him to run a road course NASCAR race next season! š
LLMs donāt do formal reasoning - and that is a HUGE problem
Thereās nothing Intelligent about this software. Theyāre just really good at guessing the next thing.
Sure, theyāre really great guessers, but can also be very wrong. Keep that in mind.
Oh, and can we stop the craze of stuffing āAIā into all the things? Thank you.
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 doesnāt prevent them from staying in the hunt for a title.
All the best to you Aidan. I hope that leg heals perfectly and youāre back to sacking Quarterbacks next season.
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! šš¼