Rob Fahrni

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

It’s been a pretty normal week, thankfully. Work has been great. I’ve had the opportunity to have a lot of heads down time on the project which always makes me happy, and my family is good.

Now, go get that nice hot cup of coffee or tea and I hope you enjoy the links!

Platformer

After much consideration, we have decided to move Platformer off of Substack. Over the next few days, the publication will migrate to a new website powered by the nonprofit, open-source publishing platform Ghost.

It’s good to know Casey took this Nazi stuff very seriously and is removing Platformer from Substack.

Once the dust settles I hope he’s able to pull all of his existing subscribers over and a whole lot more.

Thank you, Casey.

The Iconfactory

The new Iconfactory has a singular focus. We’ve been leaders in the design industry for decades and the new site puts our attention to detail, our award-winning apps, and our extensive development services at center stage. In short, we want to help you build the best apps you can, and whether you’re a Fortune 500 company, or an indie developer like us, we’re here for you. The new site explains why we’re the ones you should call on, and it does it with plain language and gorgeous examples.

Being a huge fan of The Iconfactory’s work I was excited to see the new site and it certainly delivered. It’s absolutely gorgeous and really does put what they do front and center. I hope it pays huge dividends for them!

I also noticed they featured the artwork they did for Stream’s feature in the App Store! I’m honored! ❤️

Sarah Perez • TechCrunch

RIP? Third-party podcast app Castro appears to be dead, company goes quiet

So this outage was worse than the last one. It took down not only the service but the website as well. I really thought they’d disappeared but a couple days later they were back.

It still surprises me companies with services like this don’t have a fallback position that would allow them to spin up an environment on a different provider and point the app to it instead, without rebuilding the app of course. I dunno, maybe that’s weird or overthinking the problem, but it makes sense to me.

Better yet, Castro would be better served by eliminating the need for their own service and use existing podcast directories combined with iCloud to sync user settings and subscription lists. That would also offload checking for updated podcast episodes to the client side, but that’s not a big deal.

Sean Hollister • The Verge

Google just confirmed to The Verge that it’s eliminated “a few hundred” roles in each of these divisions, meaning Google has confirmed layoffs of around a thousand employees on Wednesday alone if we use a reasonable definition of “few”.

More layoffs. Hopefully this doesn’t ripple out to smaller companies like WillowTree. Last May, for the first time in company history, we had a layoff. It’s felt strange being there ever since and I feel terribly guilty and extremely grateful I survived it. I really don’t want to see another one.

Chance Miller, Ben Lovejoy, Michael Potuck, and Arin Waichulis • 9to5Mac

iPhone from onboard Alaska Airlines incident found; survives 16,000-foot drop

Now that’s a real drop test! It amazes me I have broken two iPhones by dropping both while getting out of a car and having them fall out of my pocket. That’s like two feet off the ground.

It would’ve been cooler to find it shattered on a sidewalk or parking lot. 😂

Sarah Perez • TechCrunch

It looks like X, the company formerly known as Twitter, has a Verified bot problem. Although X owner Elon Musk suggested that forcing users to pay for verification would help to weed out the bots (aka automated accounts) on the platform, that does not appear to be the case.

I really need to do another Space Karen post, A.K.A. The Musk Files. This dude has really screwed the pooch but it’s all his to do whatever he wants with it.

If you’re smart you’ll backup your tweets, delete them all, and abandon the platform. There are other great choices today like Mastodon or Threads. Your best bet is Mastodon + a blog so you can get free of the whims of corporations and their silos.

Lisa Boone • Los Angeles Times

Curious about building an accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, in your backyard? Whether for extra income or much-needed housing for family, perhaps it’s time to investigate one of the hottest housing options in California.

An ADU is an Accessory Dwelling Unit.

It’s a label used to describe an additional place folks can live on the same property. Those garage or shed conversions you hear about can be considered ADU’s.

We had a really great detached garage at our home in California we converted into a really great living space. Our daughter and her family lived there for about a year so they could save money. We intended to use it as a She Shed for Kim but we moved to Virginia and never realized her dream.

Francesco Mazzoli

Let’s say you’re writing a long running multi-threaded application, on Linux. Maybe it’s a database or a server of some sort. Let’s also imagine that you’re not running on some managed runtime (maybe the JVM, Go, or BEAM), but rather managing threads spawned using the clone syscall. Think of threads created in C with pthread_create, or using C++’s std::thread.

I was part of a team who wrote our own internal C++ framework — it was dubbed XSDK — for all of our teams. We had really wonderful thread support but I can’t remember how we handled interrupting them to stop them. I believe we had a Stop() method that would set a flag the threads Run() method was responsible for checking and clean itself up. After setting the flag the Stop() method would join the thread and wait for it to terminate. Anyway, our implementation used pthreads for Linux and native Windows API thread support for Windows. They both worked really well.

Tori Otten • The New Republic

Explosive new audio of Roger Stone reveals the longtime Trump ally was trying to plot the assassinations of two outspoken Democratic congressmen.

I’m sorry I’m so obsessed with the orange man and the folks in his orbit. They’re all deranged bullies and must be defeated again.

Daniel Golson • Jalopnik

VinFast Will Try And Sell Its Tiny VF3 SUV In The U.S. With 125-Mile Range For Under $20,000

I believe we need more EVs like this. Limited range and less expensive. This price is something I’m willing to pay for a new vehicle.

While I still believe we need to fund better public transportation over cars at a federal, state, and local level, the idea of an inexpensive, limited range, EV is a good start.

Isaac Arnsdorf • The Washington Post

Speaking to reporters after an appeals court hearing in which Trump’s lawyers said he should be immune from prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election, Trump claimed without evidence that he was being prosecuted because of polls showing him leading President Biden. He warned that if the charges succeed in damaging his candidacy, the result would be “bedlam.”

Our courts need to start coming down on this asshole. He’s such an authoritarian he uses his outsized influence to foment violence from his supporters.

If our court system treats him differently because he may cause violence we’ve lost our nation.

You combat a bully by punching him in the nose, hard. Let him cool his jets in prison for a while and see how it suits him.

At a minimum he should be suspended from running for President given a Colorado court rules he engaged in insurrection.

I really hope the Supreme Court interpret Section 3 or the 14 Amendment to include the President. 🤞🏼

Anna Tong • Reuters

Videogame software provider Unity Software (U.N) will target laying off approximately 25% of its workforce, or 1,800 jobs, the company said in a regulatory filing and internal company memo on Monday.

Ahhh, Unity is back in the news. I wonder if this had anything to do with the decisions made in September of last year or it’s just “market forces”, whatever that means, that caused the need to let go of so many people.

Molly Jong-Fast • Vanity Fair

It never occurred to me that these facts could somehow be perverted by partisanship. But three years later, we are seeing just that, as Republicans cling to the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” by Joe Biden and are poised to make Trump their 2024 nominee. And perhaps even more dangerous than the GOP ditching reality is the news media’s inability to cover Trumpism as the threat to democracy that it very much is.

The march to an authoritarian America continues, unabated. I need to step up and do what I can to stop the orange menace from winning and destroying the country as we know it.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

So ends my week of relaxation. In the past I’d start becoming angry about how quickly my time off flew by. Not this week. I made the most of each day with some lazing about thrown in.

I managed to get some time to work on Stream for Mac and do a bunch of things around the house I’d put off for far too long. Today I plan on cleaning up Kim’s car and working on my dumpster bike. But I’m open to change.

Anywho, my coffee is ready. I hope you enjoy the links.

PZ Myers • Free Thoughts Blog

Nikki Haley got asked a straightforward question: “What was the cause of the United States’ Civil War?” She staggers back, stalls for time, and finally coughs up, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run.

This is one of the most pathetic things I’ve ever seen. Everyone, and I mean everyone, knows the Civil War was fought over slavery. So, either Nikki Haley is a racist piece of crap or extremely stupid. I don’t think she’s stupid.

This was the easiest of softball questions you could give a Presidential candidate and she failed miserably, that alone should disqualify her from holding office in any federal, state, or local government.

Of course she’s competing with the biggest asshole of all for the GOP nomination. Good luck with that, Ms. Haley.

Maybe this was part of her audition for the Vice Presidency? Gotta show the Orange Man how racist she really is to get the job. 🤬

Jessica Wildfire • OK Doomer

Meanwhile, a world-class trail runner named Emilia kills herself after a Covid infection leaves her with an unstable heart. Around the world, smart talented young men and women are losing their careers after Covid ravages their organs, their brains, their immune systems.

COVID is still around and still wreaking havoc on folks.

I still need to get my booster, you should too. 💉

Mike Hanley • GitHub

Over 15 years ago, GitHub started as a Ruby on Rails application with a single MySQL database. Since then, GitHub has evolved its MySQL architecture to meet the scaling and resiliency needs of the platform—including building for high availability, implementing testing automation, and partitioning the data.

It’s wild to see how big services can become. GitHub — the company that centralized a decentralized version control system — has over 1,200 MySQL databases. That’s a metric crap ton.

It also seems strange given Microsoft has their own SQL Server offering continues to use MySQL, owned by Oracle. 🥴

Joan Westenberg

Michael Cohen, the former personal lawyer and fixer for Donald Trump, used an artificial intelligence program to generate bogus legal citations in his motion for early termination of his supervised release.

The moral of the story is don’t believe everything a LLM gives you. You still need to verify the answer.

Laura Paddison • CNN

Scientists in California shooting nearly 200 lasers at a cylinder holding a fuel capsule the size of a peppercorn have taken another step in the quest for fusion energy, which, if mastered, could provide the world with a near-limitless source of clean power.

Will this pan out? If we’ve ever needed it now is the time. At the rate the climate is changing a team of scientists will emerge from their labs to announce to the world they’ve done it only to find the world on fire.

Raymond Wong • Inverse

Inside Apple’s Massive Push to Transform the Mac Into a Gaming Paradise

But will AAA games come around and make the commitment to the platform? Without developers it’s an instant failure.

Diane Duane

Can you add artificial intelligence to the hydraulics?

This is a link to a comment on a post — at least I think it is? Regardless it’s a funny read. If you only follow one link make it this one. AI is taking over all the things even if it can’t.

Alex Castro • The Verge

Earlier this year, Amazon announced plans to start incorporating ads into movies and TV shows streamed from its Prime Video service, and now the company has revealed a specific date when you’ll start seeing them: it’s January 29th.

I’m kind of surprised they don’t just bake this into Amazon Prime pricing.

Brandon Paul • Flo Racing

With over 1,600 total entries on hand for the Tulsa Shootout this week, there is bound to be some NASCAR connections to the biggest Micro Sprint event in the country.

I’m not sure how many folks not into NASCAR would know that drivers often compete in multiple different types of races throughout the year.

Sprint Cars seem to be a real favorite and winning a Golden Driller is still a highly sought after prize. Even for highly talented NASCAR drivers.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Another week, gone. We’re picking up the grandkids this morning so I’ll have to get this put together quickly this morning. Sorry, grandpa duty calls! 👴🏼

I’m finishing this off in the car as we go to get them. 🤣

Hope you enjoy the links.

Max Boot • The Washington Post

The GOP’s abandonment of Ukraine makes me ashamed to be an American

This is gut wrenching. Ukraine is standing between Russia and Europe. That nutter in Russia isn’t going to stop at Ukraine. He’ll go until someone can stop him.

Come on G.O.P., get your crap together and defend democracy. Oh, right, you no longer care about that.

Ananya Bhattacharya • Quartz

Spotify is ending 2023 with its third and biggest layoffs of the year

Man, 2023 has been a crummy year for tech workers. Here’s hoping 2024 is much, much, better.

James Verniere • Boston Herald

“Leave the World Behind,” which is based on a 2020 novel by American author Rumaan Alam and produced by among others Barrack and Michelle Obama, is nothing less than a modern-day version of Alfred Hitchcock’s unforgettable 1963 hit “The Birds.”

I watched this last night and I really liked it. If you have Netflix check it out.

Ashur Cabrera

Once upon a time — way back in, like, 2004 or something — I used to turn my nose up at sites that served an RSS feed with only an excerpt. It felt, I think I would have said, like a sleazy way to drive clicks. (“Information wants to be free!” etc. 🙄) Twenty years on I still read a ton from RSS feeds, but I found recently that I’m starting to thaw on that position quite a bit.

Ashur, what happened to the curmudgeon in you? 😃

As a developer of a feed reader I get request to display the full article and it’s what I prefer so I don’t have to visit the website. That’s a feature on the feature list for Stream. One of these days.

Bart Decrem • Mammoth Blog

Introducing Mammoth 2: The easiest way quit Twitter/X for good and join Mastodon

It’s nice to see developers strive to make Mastodon work for old Twitter, non techie, users to get started with Mastodon. That’s been the biggest barrier to entry. Folks can’t figure out how to join and they also tend to like recommendations.

Jacob Kastrenakes • The Verge

Earlier this year, a developer slid into Eric Migicovsky’s DMs with a spectacular claim: that he had reverse engineered Apple’s iMessage, allowing any device — Android, Windows, whatever — to send messages as a blue bubble. Migicovsky didn’t believe what he was reading.

This is an interesting read. Bravo to the 16-year old who figured it out!

Daring Fireball

But Overcast does exist, and it’s the app where most people with exquisite taste in UI are listening to podcasts.

Poor Castro has languished and definitely doesn’t have the geek recognition Overcast does. I’d imagine that’s why it’s the number one podcast player in John’s stats.

As far as UI preferences and paradigm go, Castro fits me better.

I’d love to be able to buy it from Tiny and keep working on it. I’ve already shared my opinion on the matter.

Aldous J Pennyfarthing • Daily Kos

House Speaker Mike Johnson, whose grand vision for America includes transforming every uterus in the country into a Pez dispenser, is convinced he’s the North American Moses who will lead his people to the Promised Land.

Yeah, this guy wants a theocracy. No thank you.

Sure, the Christians might agree with you but what about Jews, Muslims, Buddhists? Name your religion. It’s not right. Our First Amendment was setup to protect us from a theocracy, but we all know the G.O.P. doesn’t really care about the Constitution.

Susana Polo • Polygon

The Comixology app, the mobile incarnation of the digital comics platform owned by Amazon since 2014, has finally shuffled off this mortal coil.

I’ve had ComiXology for a number of years but I never went for the subscription. I just don’t read enough. I don’t see this as a bad move. Comics are just another type of book and the Kindle App is fine for reading.

ESPN

While four teams are celebrating the opportunity to play for a national title on the field, undefeated ACC champion Florida State is on the outside, becoming the first unbeaten Power 5 conference winner to ever miss out on the College Football Playoff.

This broke a lot of hearts and it’s a real shame the 12 team — why not 16 — playoff wasn’t in place this year.

Of course I say that and my own thoughts on the matter didn’t include Florida State.

I also thought Georgia should have been in. Off by one error. We got Alabama from the SEC instead.

Apple

Apple TV+ today shared the first images from “Constellation,” a new eight-part, conspiracy-based psychological thriller drama starring Noomi Rapace (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” “You Won’t Be Alone”) and Emmy Award nominee Jonathan Banks (“Breaking Bad,” “Better Call Saul”).

So, yeah, I’m looking forward to this! Anything with Noomi Rapace in it is good in my book.

Danijela Vrzan

Let’s implement a custom dark mode color in our app - dark blue.

Really nice SwiftUI article on how to change the colors used for Light and Dark mode for your app. Well done.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

All the Thanksgiving leftovers are long gone and I celebrated my 56th birthday this week. I got my free birthday coffee at Starbucks, had BBQ for dinner, and chocolate cake for dessert. Luckily the cake didn’t have 56 candles on it. That would’ve been bad. 😃

I hope you had a great week and enjoy the links.

Robert Kagan • Washington Post

Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination. In the RealClearPolitics poll average (for the period from Nov. 9 to 20), Trump leads his nearest competitor by 47 points and leads the rest of the field combined by 27 points. The idea that he is unelectable in the general election is nonsense — he is tied or ahead of President Biden in all the latest polls — stripping other Republican challengers of their own stated reasons for existence.

I can’t see how trials and even convictions can stop Trump from becoming our next President.

Only we, the people, can stop it. If we don’t stop him we’ve lost our nation.

VOTE!🇺🇸

Daniel Jalkut • Red Sweater

This is a substantial update to MarsEdit 5, featuring all new support for the Mastodon publishing system, which is used to host a large number of independently operated Twitter-like microblogging services.

I’ve been a MarsEdit user off and on for well over a decade. This classic Mac assed Mac App is fast, stable, is great at what it does, and has a developer who cares deeply about it and the Mac.

It’s well worth its $59.95 price tag.

It’s time for an opinion. I wish this were subscription based for Daniel’s sake. He depends heavily on major releases and upgrades to keep his business afloat. This is where I believe subscription pricing could help. Her could do something like $9.99/yr, or $0.99/mo, then he could get off the upgrade cycle train and just add features whenever they’re ready. He provides excellent support and fixes bugs on a regular basis.🚂

Of course I’m not a successful indie giving advice to a man with a long established company and app, so there you go.😃

Super Mega Ultra Groovy

Capo was not playing audio for some users on Intel Macs running Sonoma. After spending almost two weeks (and about $850) I discovered that macOS Sonoma had a rather nasty bug that was triggered by loading JPEG images.

I love a good debugging story. 🐞

Sophie McEvoy • gamesindustry.biz

Xbox is working with unknown partners to open a mobile storefront to rival the App Store and Google Play.

It will be very interesting to see if Microsoft can actually make a nice experience for mobile users. Beyond that will Apple no longer demand their 15-30% take, even if on another store? I very much doubt it.

Deepa Shivaram • NPR

It’s been more than six years since images of a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., shocked the world — hundreds of people with tiki torches chanted antisemitic slurs, and a counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was killed.

When this all went down I wasn’t at all familiar with Charlottesville. We were living in California and little did I know we’d move to the area in 2019.

When I started at WillowTree we were located in downtown Charlottesville and I had no idea Heather Heyer was murdered right by our office. It was pretty surreal the first time I walked by it and realized this was the place.

I took this photo five days after my start date with WillowTree.

Nish Tahir

This week OpenAI had a fantastic keynote at their Dev Day event. They announced new products and enhancements to ChatGPT[1]. Interestingly, some parts of the internet described the keynote as an “Extinction Event”[2] for many AI startups. Many of the startups reportedly facing extinction share the common trait of being thin wrappers over OpenAI’s APIs.

I don’t think Nish sleeps at all. He’s into everything and is well versed in every topic he talks about.

Always worth a read when he shows up in my feed.

Steve Benen • MSNBC

Rep. George Santos survived the first two attempts to expel him from Congress. The third vote, however, led to the New York Republican’s ouster.

Well, what do you know. Some folks actually do have an ethics line. Took long enough for them to find it. 🤬

Robb Knight

Earlier this week I had a need to manually find a bunch of people’s RSS feed links. It seemed simple enough: go to their website and look for an RSS/Subscribe link but I was surprised to find that a lot of people don’t have a link anywhere to their feed.

I see where Robb is coming from. He’s after a link of image with a link to your sites RSS file.

Most modern feed readers will auto discover feeds by looking in your sites head for a specific alt tag.

Sites should embrace the tag based method but it doesn’t hurt to include a link somewhere.

Debbie Truong • Los Angeles Times

Montiel, an environmental science major, and Butterfield, a journalism major, had lived in their vehicles for several years, the only way, they said, that they could afford to attend college. They usually found parking in campus lots or on nearby streets.

There was a time when we lived in California where I thought I’d have to get a job in the Bay Area because tech in the San Joaquin Valley is hard to find. I was thinking I’d drive in from Exeter on Monday morning, stay the week, and return home Friday afternoon. I was planning to put a shell on my truck and turn the bed of the truck into my home.

For my first year of employment at LEVEL Studios in 2009-10 I did something similar but I found a room to rent for $250/month.

I doubt you could find anything close to that in the Silicon Valley.

Vincent Ritter

There is another reason why I stopped developing Gluon, for now, and time will heal this. It’s personal. I never said this publicly, but here we are. Funny how one individual in a nice community can just blow everything up 💥 I had super strong feelings about this today, and I can’t get it out my head. Hence this post I guess.

Vincent’s app, Gluon, is an excellent app for Micro.blog. For the longest time it was much better than the first party app and it was my iOS App of choice for Micro.blog.

I wish you nothing but joy and happiness, Vincent. Thank you for all of your hard work making Micro.blog a better place.

Anita Chabria • Los Angeles Times

A unicorn costume, a hammer and a belief that pedophiles are using public schools to destroy democracy: The trial of David DePape for attacking Paul Pelosi was strange and disturbing.

This attack on Paul Pelosi was just about as weird as it gets. The dude who did it was so far down the conspiracy rabbit hole he was seeing pedophiles everywhere. These people are the GOP’s base. They’ll believe anything no matter how wild the story. Remember the lizard people who drink children’s blood for the adrenochrome? Yeah, that’s something these people believe.

They all need extreme therapy to repair their addled minds.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I haven’t reported on Ms. Gracie’s sleep schedule for a while. She’s finally — FINALLY — letting me sleep longer. It seems I can get to bed around 11:30 and she doesn’t need to do her business until 5:30 or so so. Sometimes 6:30! It’s been wonderful. Puppies really are like human babies in a lot of ways.

On with the links!

Justine Tunney

It’s called apelink.c and it’s a fine piece of poetry that weaves together the Portable Executable, ELF, Mach-O, and PKZIP file formats into shell scripts that run on most PCs and servers without needing to be installed.

This is kind of cool and, again, I like having an open solution folks could evolve.

I can’t figure out how to put together a good search query to find an article on it but macOS does this today with its application bundles. I suppose it’s not exactly the same but the idea certainly is.

Tim Carmody • kottke.org

The ideas Dave is talking about in this podcast are serious (even if he is laughing a lot), and he spells them out in text at a site called Textcasting.org.

I think I get what Dave is saying but I’d need to spend more time thinking about it. To get buy in from all the big platforms would mean either compromise or extensions to the format that only certain platforms would use. In other words, it’s a can of worms.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be done and that it’s not worth doing. It just means it’ll be difficult.

We already have blogs, links, and RSS. I publish posts to my blog to other sources automagically. But, that means my platform has to know how the API to that platform works. If there were a standard format for uploading RSS or some other structured document format I could see that being appealing.

Would the publisher push the changes to various other platforms or would each platform pull the post, like RSS works today? 🤔

Ivan Mehta • TechCrunch

Instagram head Adam Mosseri said today that a Threads API is in the works. This will give developers a chance to create different apps and experiences around Threads.

I like it when API’s are created to open up platforms but I have a feeling this one will be extremely limited. And what happened to using ActivityPub and Fediverse support? Why not do that? Oh, right, it would mean completely opening Threads to developers. They don’t want that because they need those eyeballs clearly focused on Threads.

Hey, how about starting with RSS? Let me subscribe to a users RSS feed for their posts. That would be really nice and allow me to follow some brands without cluttering my Threads timeline.

Also, give us Mastodon integration. 😀

Jon Schwarz • The Intercept

Former president Jimmy Carter said Tuesday on the nationally syndicated radio show the Thom Hartmann Program that the United States is now an “oligarchy” in which “unlimited political bribery” has created “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.” Both Democrats and Republicans, Carter said, “look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves.”

I know Jimmy Carter is seen as a Presidential failure by many, but there is no questioning his commitment to humanity and everything he’s given post Presidency. He’s a national treasure and someone we should listen to.

Of course nobody will. Nobody except we commoners not part of the political establishment.

I have no clue how to change this stuff but I’d like to see it happen. The unlimited money pouring into campaigns needs to be reined in.

Could a set of laws be created to give all campaigns an equal amount of money with equal amount of airtime and web presence to level the playing field?

Lucidity

I saved my company half a million dollars in about five minutes. This is more money than I’ve made for my employers over the course of my entire career because this industry is a sham. I clicked about five buttons.

This story made me chuckle a couple times. Corporations can get so bogged down in process and politics it’s amazing they can accomplish anything, much less a useful computing infrastructure.

David Corn • Mother Jones

Mike Johnson Hates America, But He Believes He Can Save It

It seems like Mr. Jones is quite the Christian Nationalist and hasn’t the slightest clue what our founding fathers intended for us.

Having a national religion is an abomination. The First Amendment to the Constitution is pretty clear on the matter.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It’s right there in black and white. We have the freedom to choose a religion. That can include Satanism. You don’t have to like it, you just have to live with it.

v8.dev

A new way to bring garbage collected programming languages efficiently to WebAssembly

Here’s a bit of light technical reading for you! It’s incredible what hoops we jump through to achieve amazing things in computing.

I still believe the CLI standard should’ve been the runtime of choice for the browser.

Indivisible

We’re stepping back from the increasingly dangerous and dysfunctional ‘X’, and we’re sorry it’s taken this long

I suppose we’ll continue to see this. The big question is where do they land? They’ll probably have to have a presence on Mastodon, Blue Sky, and Threads.

Liberty Dunworth • NME

Record labels and recording companies have been working to prevent artists from re-recording their albums like Taylor Swift, according to reports.

Can you blame artists for wanting to own the rights to their work? I certainly can’t.

The record labels should be ashamed. It’s kind of a scammy business and it’s too bad musical acts haven’t figured out a why to band together and move record labels out of the picture altogether.

I say that and of course I can’t do anything about my reliance on Apple to get my app in front of millions of people.

Jacquelyn Melinek • TechCrunch

Sam Bankman-Fried, the co-founder and former CEO of crypto exchange FTX and trading firm Alameda Research, has been found guilty on all seven counts related to fraud and money laundering.

I guess he effed around and found out!

For me this brings up all the Orange Man trials. Why did this one happen so quickly and his are dragging out?

Anywho. I’m sure SBF will be taking these charges to the next higher court, then the next, and so on. The rich and famous have such an advantage in the legal system.

Elizabeth Blackstock • Jalopnik

It’s getting tough out there for the poor folks who have never faced systemic inequality but desperately want to feel oppressed. That’s why America First Legal — a conservative legal group led by Stephen Miller, a former adviser to former President Trump — is claiming that NASCAR is actually racist against white American men. That’s a first!

This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Have you ever watched a NASCAR race? It’s probably 99% white faces in the stands.

They’re just pissed NASCAR finally came into the 20th century and banned Confederate flags from NASCAR races.

Poor racists and their “But ma heritage!” Yeah, a heritage of hate and enslaving people. Great heritage. 🤬

Jay Barmann • sfist.com

Downtown Tech Office Shuts Down Its Free Cocktail Bar For Employees, CEO Says ‘The Office Is Dead’

Not even free booze could bring employees back to the office.

If you’re interested in socializing you should go to the office. It’s fine. I know a lot of people who prefer it to working from home.

I’ve seriously considered going into the office one day a week to change things up and hang out around other people. I’ve been to our office less than 20 times since folks started returning. I got COVID last summer during a group on-site and more recently had an on-site to nail down some API design and someone had COVID and didn’t know it until they returned home at the end of the week. Thankfully I dodged that bullet.

Maybe they should open a pub. Might as well do something useful with that liquor license, right? 🤔

Ryan Erik King • Jalopnik

Bubba Wallace’s No. 23 Toyota Camry will be doing a special Star Wars paint scheme for the NASCAR Cup Series season finale this weekend at Phoenix Raceway. The livery is intended to promote 23XI Racing sponsor Columbia Sportswear’s upcoming Star Wars collection, but the design is far more than just a couple of logos and movie characters slapped onto some bodywork.

If you’re a Star Wars fan or a NASCAR fan you owe it to yourself to go watch the video. Not only is Bubba Wallace’s car sporting a Star Wars theme so is Tyler Reddick’s.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’m still having a great time at work integrating React Native into an existing iOS App. I still have a lot to learn about JavaScript and TypeScript but my interest is piqued. Don’t get me wrong, I still need to learn SwiftUI and I still love doing native work, but this is worth learning because we’re seeing more clients ask for it.

Just poured my first cup. I hope you enjoy the links.

Alan Herrera • Comic Sands

The United States Forest Service responded to a video filmed by a couple that went viral for allegedly showing Bigfoot walking in broad daylight.

I really do wish Bigfoot was a real thing. The skeptic in me says “Of course this is faked.” But how do we really know?

The truth is out there.🛸

Steven Lee Myers, Stuart A. Thompson and Tiffany Hsu • The New York Times

Now rebranded as X, the site has experienced a surge in racist, antisemitic and other hateful speech. Under Mr. Musk’s watch, millions of people have been exposed to misinformation about climate change. Foreign governments and operatives — from Russia to China to Hamas — have spread divisive propaganda with little or no interference.

Face it, Space Karen isn’t the genius everyone made him out to be. He’s a self serving narcissist with too much money and strange ideas.

I’ve been saying I won’t call X, X, because it’s still Twitter. I’m wrong. Twitter is gone. Now folks are left with X.

Please, please, please, sell the Twitter name and branding. Someone could make something amazing with it. 🐦

Swift Forums

When using this feature, the developer hand-writes Objective-C headers just as they normally would for an Objective-C class, but implements their declarations in Swift by using an extension marked with the new @implementation attribute.

This is an interesting idea but I’m not sure it’s any better than what we have today when using @objc notation.

I suppose it would mean the continued existence of the vaunted header file. 😄

Dave Winer

I have basically had it with JavaScript. It is a write-only language. More so than any other language I’ve used, including some pretty old and arcane systems. I asked ChatGPT to give DALL-E instructions based on this prompt.

Even if you don’t read Dave’s piece go check out the images generated by DALL-E. They’re beautiful works of art suitable for framing. Seriously.

Steven Beschloss

Twice now President Joe Biden made the decision to visit active war zones not under U.S. military command. These trips, to Kyiv in February and to Tel Aviv this week, are without precedent in modern American history. It’s easy to take these visits in stride: It’s the President of the United States! Surely, he has quite a circle of protection. But I think it’s worth reflecting on the vigor and guts—and principle—it took to meet American allies in person to demonstrate American support, despite genuine danger.

Joe Biden has been a great President. I don’t care if he’s “too old” to hold the office. He seems to be doing a pretty damned good job of it. 🇺🇸

Paul Thurrott

Crapware. PC makers have long installed crapware and other superfluous utilities in Windows, providing users with a compromised user experience that didn’t reflect what Microsoft intended. But with Windows 11, now Microsoft installs its own collection of crapware too, in the form of sponsored apps and shortcuts in the Start menu.

Seriously Microsoft? Some of your own software includes ads? That’s pathetic.

At least Apple’s annoying notifications for services are a little better, not by much, but slightly better. 🤬

Detroit Free Press

A politically connected Detroit synagogue president was found stabbed to death Saturday morning outside her home in the city’s Lafayette Park neighborhood, east of downtown.

If you think the war in Gaza and Israel don’t affect us at home, think again.

Hate crimes in the States will most likely continue to climb because of it. 😢

Chance Miller, Ben Lovejoy, Zac Hall, and Michael Potuck • 9 to 5 Mac

Is M. Night Shyamalan running Apple? The company just announced a Monday night keynote event on the eve of Halloween. The tagline? Scary Fast. Macs are rumored, but what Apple silicon will be inside?

How long have M2 Macs been a thing? I haven’t got a clue. Is the M3 a Halloween surprise just in time for the holiday season? 🤔

Joseph Heck

Over the summer, I started working with the Automerge team to bring its Rust-language core to Swift.

Joseph is a really nice guy and I’m excited to see him working on something he’s so passionate about. I’ll be keeping an eye on his progress. 🦀

Witney Seibold • /Film

Halloween’s Original Movie Poster Has A Creepy Hidden Detail - And It Happened By Accident

It took me a while to make out what they’re talking about. Go see for yourself.

Sindre Sorhus

Buffer will never be removed, and probably never even deprecated, but at least the community can slowly move away from it. My hope is that the Node.js team will at least start discouraging the use of Buffer.

I know nothing about JavaScript but it’s always nice to see someone advocate for making code safer.

Do you use Buffer in your code? Maybe it’s time to change that? 🦬

1Password Blog

How ethical hacker Jamie Woodruff used a pizza delivery to break into a server room

This made me think of the 1992 film, Sneakers. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it. It’s a great film. 👟

I’d be horrible security for a data center. Pizza? You have pizza? Sure, come on in! 🍕

Victor Tangermann • Futurism

AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard consume an astronomical amount of electricity and water — or, more precisely, the massive data centers that power them do.

The crypto and AI data centers really need to get their act together and start building sources of clean energy to power these monstrosities.

Andy Greenberg • WIRED

They Cracked the Code to a Locked USB Drive Worth $235 Million in Bitcoin. Then It Got Weird

This is a cool story! Again, I think of Sneakers.

I hope this means folks who forgot their passwords are able to crack their keys open and sell off their bitcoin.

Especially the poor dude who has millions in bitcoin. He’s not using this tech, currently, but I hope he’s able to finally be able to cash out. 💸

Marc Elias • Democracy Docket

Republican lawyers are back in the news and are bringing disgrace to the party and profession. Even before the indictments in Georgia, it had been widely reported that at least five, and perhaps all six, of former President Donald Trump’s co-conspirators were Republican lawyers. Now in Georgia, we add several lawyers, some familiar and some new, to the list of Trump’s co-defendants.

At least some of these knuckleheads are pleading guilty and cooperating.

I still say his Orangness will get off scot-free. He’ll delay, delay, delay. Win the Presidency. Pardon everyone he can, destroy democracy, and not leave the White House until he’s dead.

If things get super bad I hope Canada and Mexico will accept American refugees.

Dave Rogers

Sea level rise is a game of inches. It doesn’t take many inches to create miles and miles and miles of problems. And it’s going to take decades to address those problems, so we might as well get started now.

Yay, climate change! 😡

If the Orangeman doesn’t destroy the nation, climate change might.

Dave, we won’t cleanup things on the shoreline. We’ll just let Mother Nature take it and leave a giant mess. Like we do. 😔

Christopher Nichols • Atlas Obscura

One of the reasons people can never be entirely sure about what is going on at Area 51 is that it is a highly classified secret military facility. It was not until 2013 that the United States government even acknowledged the existence and name “Area 51.”

I like this take on Area 51. We don’t need aliens to create crazy technology.

I do like the thought of aliens though. 👽

Daring Fireball

This “now is not the time” argument gets trotted out by Republicans after each and every gun massacre. Right after their tweets offering “thoughts and prayers”. Bullshit. The aftermath of a massacre is the time to demand sane gun control measures.

Yep. More pressure to pass great gun legislation. It’s time for a nationwide ban on assault weapons and other protections.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Where did the week go? I supposed getting to the weekend so quickly is a sign of how much I’m enjoying work.

My coffee is at the perfect temperature, time to have some. I hope you enjoy the links as much as I do putting them together.

Ibrahim Dahman, Hadas Gold, Lauren Iszo, Amir Tal, Abeer Salman, Kareem Khadder, Richard Allen Greene and Hande Atay Alam • CNN

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the country was “at war” on Saturday, after Palestinian militants in Gaza fired a deadly barrage of rockets and sent gunmen into Israeli territory in a major escalation of the long running conflict between the two sides.

Indiscriminate murder is a terrorists trait. Hamas did just that, killing innocent civilians as they attacked Israel.

I hate war. So many innocent people in Israel and the Gaza Strip will lose their lives over this. Yes, blame Hamas. They’re the assholes who caused this, but in the end innocent folks will die, and that is unacceptable.

I felt this way about invading Iraq and Afghanistan when we did it.

Nothing good will come of it. 😢

Kevin Purdy • Ars Technica

How a 23-year-old first-time Firefox coder fixed a 22-year-old bug

I love stories like this. It just took someone focusing on the problem to provide what turned out to be a fairly simple fix. 👍🏼

Gleb Tsipursky • Fortune

Unispace found that nearly half (42%) of companies with return-to-office mandates witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated. And almost a third (29%) of companies enforcing office returns are struggling with recruitment.

I love working from home but if WillowTree said I had to return to the office or lose my job I’d go in. We have a great facility, everything you could want right in the building! But I still prefer home. I have a quiet space, configured the way I like, and I can walk up stairs to have a coffee with my wife or do dishes during lunch. 😃

Dan Moren • Six Colors

But as anybody who’s ever tried to troubleshoot iCloud problems can tell you, when it goes wrong, trying to fix it is an exercise in frustration—as I learned recently, in a particularly spectacular fashion.

Thankfully I haven’t run into these issues. The only thing that goes wonky on me is Music. When I stop the stream after work it won’t start back up in the morning when I press play. This has been an issue for years. I’ve learned to just close Music and reopen it. Problem solved.

The iCloud syncing issues is something that’s held me back from adding that support to Stream. Even though I make a feed reader I’m a fan of other readers and I keep up with NetNewsWire. They get a lot of support questions about why their syncing doesn’t work the way folks expect.

I will eventually add this support because Stream for Mac and iOS will need to sync at some point. Of course I need to finish Stream for Mac. 🤔

Matt Wojciakowski • Microsoft Learn

Linux is an operating system, similar to Windows, but with many different versions due to the nature of being open source and fully customizable. To install Linux, you must choose an install method and choose a Linux distribution.

I linked to this because it’s a how-to for installing Linux, on a Microsoft site! 😳

Katie Robertson • The New York Times

The Washington Post is cutting about 240 jobs across the organization as it tries to offset challenges with digital subscriptions and advertising, according to a companywide email on Tuesday.

The jobs market is so scary right now. I hope everyone hit by the layoff is able to find work quickly.

Sean Hollister • The Verge

Unity, the company behind the game development engine of the same name, has just announced that its president, CEO, and chairman John Riccitiello “will retire” effective immediately.

And all the Unity developer community cheer!

Hopefully this will lead to a better situation for the company and developers who rely on Unity to build amazing games. 🤞🏼

Jason Snell • Macworld

Apple is destroying the Mac by trying to make it safer

As I said earlier about iCloud I haven’t been bitten by these sorts of issues, knock wood.

Tom Warren • The Verge

Microsoft has finalized its $68.7 billion deal to acquire Activision Blizzard, the publisher of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Diablo.

What a crazy deal! Microsoft has purchased franchise games before and I can’t imagine what they’re going to do with these absolute gems! Hopefully they don’t screw them up. That’s always the fear. 👾

Dave Rogers

I think that the whole world may be a lot like Israel in 50 years. Perhaps sooner. You can decide if that’s a good thing.

Dave and I share similar feelings about the state of the United States and the world.

I’ve expected civil war to break out here in the United States. We have radical white supremacist organizations and the like of the Proud Boys who could potentially cause big damage here if they could get organized. The only thing that stands between them and the rest of us is a functioning government, oh, and a citizenry not willing to watch the country descend into chaos.

Gabe Bullard • Nieman Reports

Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point

This is good news for NPR and hopefully more news organizations will take that lesson and leave X.

I still believe they should have their own Mastodon instances or band together to create on instance committed to all news organizations.

Now that WordPress have added ActivityPub support it may be easier than ever for news orgs to have a presence on Mastodon.

They should probably participate in Thread and Bluesky to see how things shake out.

Matthias Pfefferle • WordPress

Exciting times are here for all WordPress.com users! The revolutionary ActivityPub feature is now available across all WordPress.com plans, unlocking a world of engagement and interaction for your blog. Your blogs can now be part of the rapidly expanding fediverse, which enables you to connect with a broader audience and attract more followers.

Here we go! WordPress is a huge win for ActivityPub and the open web. Hopefully Tumblr and Thread will follow soon.

I will take this opportunity to point out an indie shop who have fully embraced ActivityPub and integration with Mastodon: Micro.blog. If you’re a blogger and also enjoy a social timeline check them out.

Nolen • eieio.games

I made a game. It’s called Flappy Dird. It’s Flappy Bird inside MacOS Finder.

I’ve seen my fellow Visio developers create games inside Visio using shapes and VBA. Two come to mind; Tetris and Asteroids, but I digress.

This game kind of takes the cake because it’s in an OS provided, very important, component.

Really clever. 🥳

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’ve been really busy at work lately but it’s felt really good overall. Sure I’m feeling a little pressure and I’m a bit stressed but that’s par for the course.

A random aside. There was a time when I did a Movie Line of the Week post on this here blog. It’s been seen from time to time but I thought I’d throw one in here this week.

When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like that: “Have ya paid your dues, Jack?” “Yessir, the check is in the mail.”

I love this film. It’s a great action comedy.

I hope you enjoy the links.

ESPN

Dick Butkus, arguably the fiercest Monster of the Midway, has died at age 80, the Chicago Bears announced Thursday.

This man was an animal on the football field. I for one loved that style of play. I know it’s not great but I can’t help it. When I played football I always wanted to make folks remember I hit them. Problem was, I was a beanpole and was the one getting hammered! 🤣

RIP Mr. Butkus. 🪦

Matt Mullenweg

This month, Automattic had the privilege of working with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (BKC) to migrate their early 2000s blogging platform over to our Pressable infrastructure.

I’m really happy to see WordPress do this. There was a time when it seemed the Berkman content would just disappear.

Thank you Matt and WordPress! ❤️

Dr Katie Mack • BBC Science Focus

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured images of ancient galaxies that shouldn’t exist. A cosmologist explains what could be going on.

I love science. That about sums it up for me. We’ve now explored further than ever before and are finding new and interesting things to understand! 🔭

Sharon Adarlo • Futurism

Microsoft’s data centers in West Des Moines, Iowa guzzled massive amounts of water last year, the Associated Press reported earlier this month, to keep cool while training OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, the Microsoft-backed company’s most advanced publicly available large language model.

It’s time for someone to work on a new cooling system for these data centers or stop doing what they’re doing.

Just burn the world down in the name of shareholder value! 🔥

Joseph Foley • Creative Bloq

Bad news for anyone using Unreal Engine for VFX or animation. Epic Games has confirmed that it will begin charging industries outside gaming to use of the 3D graphics engine next year. Fees will be charged on a per-seat basis.

I wonder how Hollywood is going to react to this news?

Also, isn’t Unreal Engine amazing? 🎥

The Register

In a sane world, such massive, sustained incompetence coupled with warning signs a mole rat could see from Mars would have killed Twitter by now, with Musk’s rep as a hands-on CEO on a par with Uri Geller’s as a metalworker.

Yeah, a Space Karen appearance. I have so darned many pieces stashed in Pocket about the man I need to do another Musk Files post.

Can someone please convince the man to sell the twitter.com domain to them and fire up a Mastodon instance? 🐘

By Trisha Thadani,  Rachel Lerman,  Imogen Piper,  Faiz Siddiqui and  Irfan Uraizee • The Washington Post

Teslas guided by Autopilot have slammed on the brakes at high speeds without clear cause, accelerated or lurched from the road without warning and crashed into parked emergency vehicles displaying flashing lights, according to investigation and police reports obtained by The Post.

It’s time to remove “self-driving” and “assisted driving” technologies from cars until they’re proven to work.

Yeah, I’m a curmudgeon. 👴🏼

Jonathan Prynn • Evening Standard

First look inside Apple’s spectacular offices at Battersea Power Station

Now this is a cool looking office. It’s nice to see Apple renovate something instead of doing a new new build. More companies should do this. 👍🏼

John Yoon and Orlando Mayorquin • The New York Times

The authorities in Baltimore on Wednesday said they had not located any suspects or made any arrests after five people, including four students, were shot and injured on the Morgan State University campus on Tuesday night.

The fun epidemic in America continues. 😔

HILARY HOWARD and PATRICK McGEEHAN • The New York Times

The limit on the capacity of the city’s network of drains, pipes and water-treatment plants is the main reason New Yorkers across all five boroughs suffered through flooding. And this probably will not be the city’s last bout with heavy flooding as it plays catch-up with the pace of climate change, experts said.

Climate change is coming home to roost. I suppose it has been for a while now but it gets a lot of attention when a major American city gets hit.

I feel pretty gloomy about our future as a species. ⛈️

George Carden • The Argus

Shock as yew tree which ‘predates the Battle of Hastings’ felled

Two ancient trees felled in a weeks time. What is wrong with people?

Don’t they know we need more trees, not fewer? 🌳

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Another week in the books. It’s my favorite time of the year. Trees are changing color and dropping leaves. Temperatures are beginning to drop. We have Halloween and Thanksgiving coming up. What a wonderful season!🍁🎃🦃

Robert D. McFadden • New York Times

Dianne Feinstein, 90, Dies; Oldest Sitting Senator and Fixture of California Politics

A friend of mine worked for Dianne Feinstein when he was in college. He was a registered Republican but that didn’t matter to her. She still hired him.

RIP 🪦

Moira Warburton and David Morgan • Reuters

WASHINGTON, Sept 29 (Reuters) - Hardline Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday rejected a bill proposed by their leader to temporarily fund the government, making it all but certain that federal agencies will partially shut down beginning on Sunday.

And, here we go. All these knuckleheads want to do is tear down democracy. They don’t legislate and pass laws. You’re there to do the work of the people you represent back home.

Anyway, the modern GOP is full of idiots like Gaetz, Boebert, and Green. Why Republicans are so angry and hateful is beyond me. 🤬

Jacob Kastrenakes • The Verge

“Did he say we were moving to it specifically or is thinking about it?” Yaccarino asked.

That was Linda Yaccarino’s reply when asked if Twitter was going to start charging a fee for all users, a claim Space Karen made. She was caught off guard, she didn’t know that was the plan. She’s not the CEO of the company. She’s probably there just so Space Karen can say he lived up to his stupid poll.

I’m sure Linda Yaccarino is a more than competent executive but she’s made a deal with the devil. She should be nervous. Especially once he’s fired her. I originally said she be gone in six months. I’m sticking by that. She’s 100 days into her new role and already out of the loop.

Christian Tietze

SwiftUI.View is actually a view model – a model of the view. It’s a blueprint for what to display, but doesn’t contain any actual pixel drawing.

This is an interesting take and I think Christian is right. Once you think about it for a bit it starts to make sense. At least it did for me.

Now, I’ve done a bit of work on one of my apps — Arrgly — that has a few view models and they fit right into the new SwiftUI I’m writing. So, view models work as well, but is it an unneeded level of indirection? Maybe. 🤔

Jenny Gross • The New York Times

A 16-year-old boy was arrested Thursday on suspicion of criminal damage after one of Britain’s most famous trees, a sycamore that stood in a dip in Hadrian’s Wall, was cut down overnight in what the authorities described as “an act of vandalism.”

This is one of those head scratchers. Why in the world would someone just cut a down a random tree?

Hopefully we find out.

Craig Hockenberry

The only explanation I can find for the Timer’s design regressions is an unfamiliarity with some use cases. In the following critique, I’ll focus on how the watch is used in the kitchen and how older customers struggle with the new layout. Suggestions will be kept to a minimum: the effort here is to be descriptive, not prescriptive.

Wow! Craig does a deep dive into the Apple Watch Timer. I also used the built in timers when I’d grill.

Umar Shakir • The Verge

Google is offering its employees a new incentive to come into its Mountain View, California office: discounted hotel stays. The company is promoting $99 per night rates for its on-campus hotel to help remote employees transition into a hybrid working schedule, according to a report from CNBC.

Yeah, that’s not what I’d call good marketing. 🤣 you pay us $99 a night so you don’t have to commute to work! Brilliant! How ‘bout you just let folks work from home? 🧠

Gabriela Galindo • WIRED

The Fruit Union Suisse is 111 years old. For most of its history, it has had as its symbol a red apple with a white cross—the Swiss national flag superimposed on one of its most common fruits. But the group, the oldest and largest fruit farmer’s organization in Switzerland, worries it might have to change its logo, because Apple, the tech giant, is trying to gain intellectual property rights over depictions of apples, the fruit.

If Apple goes after a company over 100 years old because the have a logo with an apple on it they’re pathetic. 🤬

Believe it or not it’s part of what motivated me to change my little company’s name from Apple Core Labs to Hayseed.

Scott Jenson

Android and iOS share a common problem: they copied desktop text editing conventions, but without a menu bar or mouse. This forced them to overload the tap gesture with a wide range of actions: placing the cursor, moving it, selecting text, and invoking a pop-up menu. This results in an overly complicated and ambiguous mess-o-taps, leading to a variety of user errors.

I’ve mentioned I compose all my blog posts on my iPhone. I do it largely out of laziness. 😁

I’ve used Tot for a number of years and it has the best editing experience of any iPhone apps I’ve used.

Once I’m happy with my post I copy it to Micro.Blog and post it to my blog. Easy peasy.

Jeff Seldin • Voice of America

White supremacists appear to have settled on a new strategy to grow their numbers and ready capable fighting forces across the United States, Canada and Europe while avoiding the scrutiny of law enforcement.

I’ve been waiting for a war to break out in our country. At the least a bunch of very targeted attacks. If these wannabe soldiers can actually get their act together folks may have to start worrying. If they’re as disorganized and dumbass as they were on January 6, we’ll be fine. Yes, people will die, and that’s a terrible price to pay for stupidity.

Rogers Cadenhead

I publish this blog and seven other sites with Wordzilla, a CMS I wrote for myself and have never released. I began it 20 years ago and the PHP codebase is best examined in small doses because to look upon its full extent would bring a descent into madness worthy of Yog-Shoggoth.

I’ve read Rogers blog for years and years and I had no idea it was a home rolled solution. Good for you, Rogers! I’ve always wanted to create my own publishing system but I don’t have the gumption any longer to do it. 🎩

Ross Dellenger • Yahoo Sports

About 20 minutes after the conclusion of, let’s call it, the Autzen Stadium Massacre — Oregon 42, Colorado 6 — Prime Time himself nicely summed up the sordid affair.

I knew they’d lose eventually. It’s just going to happen, especially with a program in rebuild mode. They’ve already doubled last years win total so I’d say this year has already been a success. I also suspect they’ll win quite a few games this season. More than they lose. 🏈

X Out Hate

We are a group of rabbis, leaders of Jewish organizations, artists, activists, and academics. We have diverse ideologies and beliefs, but we have come together to address the danger Elon Musk and X represent to Jews and others.

Space Karen strikes again. He’s a racist and antisemite and has no place running a social media sit with so much power. X has become a home for the worst of the worst and it all his fault.

Hopefully we get some regulation around trust and safety issues that force social media companies to police their platforms better. 🤞🏼

It’s beyond time to leave Twitter. You now have much better choices; Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. Very selfishly I’d recommend Mastodon. It’s not controlled by a corporate entity who’s interest is using your data as the product. It’s a rag tag, loosely federated, collection of misfits and absolutely beautiful people carrying on the best conversations. It’s a place to build your community with a site controlled by your community. You don’t answer to anyone but yourself.

Aaron Brooks • MakeUseOf

A critical vulnerability in the WebP Codec has been discovered, forcing major browsers to fast-track security updates. However, widespread use of the same WebP rendering code means countless apps are also affected, until they release security patches.

Yikes! Make sure you patch your browser ASAP.

Evan Low • The Mercury News

Contrary to how some have misrepresented the letter my colleagues and I sent to California Attorney General Rob Bonta, we are not asking to “unilaterally strike (Donald) Trump’s name” from the ballot.

I’d love to see Trumps name stricken from as many states as possible. Especially those where he encouraged election fraud.

As a nation we need to do everything legally possible to keep this dangerous man out of office.

David Jays • The Guardian

A star with incredible presence, Gambon – who has died at the age of 82 – brought heft and delicacy, mischief and feeling, to the stage and screen

Most folks will remember him as Dumbledore. I remember him best for his roles in Sleepy Hollow and Mary Reilly. He played a real nasty piece of work in Mary Reilly and that stuck with me. 🪦

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Kim and I had the grandkids overnight so they’re worn out and we’re worn out. Heck, even our pups are worn out. The house is really quiet, just how I like it. I’m sitting here in the dark, sipping coffee, composing today’s post.

This week work was mostly about onboarding a couple new iOS Devs who’ll be working with me on our project to add React Native support to existing native apps. I’m really enjoying it. 😀

Caitlin Harrington • WIRED

Last month, Grindr gave its all-remote staff two weeks to pledge to work from an office two days a week starting in October or lose their jobs come August 31. Many declined to return: 82 out of 178 employees—46 percent of the staff—were let go after rejecting the mandate, according to the Grindr union, which went public two weeks before the ultimatum.

Wow. That’s about all I had to say when I read this piece. I have a friend who took a job there — as a remote test engineer — only to have this mandate cross his desk two weeks later. Needless to say he didn’t move and is now looking for a new gig. It’s a real head scratcher.

Ron Amadeo • Ars Technica

The Federated Learning of Cohorts and now the Topics API are part of a plan to pitch an “alternative” tracking platform, and Google argues that there has to be a tracking alternative—you can’t just not be spied on.

Emphasis is mine. At least they admit what they’re doing and it’s pathetic. 😳

You know what’s worse? People won’t switch away from Chrome.

thehackernews.com

Apple on Thursday released emergency security updates for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS to address two zero-day flaws that have been exploited in the wild to deliver NSO Group’s Pegasus mercenary spyware.

Update your devices right away. The talent possessed to do this type of ferreting around an OS looking for holes is both impressive and terrifying all at the same time.

Branko Marcetic • jacobin.com

The inflation rate — that is, the pace at which prices are going up — might be slowing down, but that doesn’t mean prices are lower. In fact, they are much, much higher for all kinds of goods and services than they were three years ago.

I’ve definitely noticed this when we go to our favorite Mexican restaurant here in Charlottesville.

It’s really becoming apparent in the streaming business. I just received email saying our Hulu subscription is going up to $81.99/month. We currently pay $64/month. That’s close to a 25% increase. 🤬

Taegan Goddard • politicalwire.com

Pence Calls Trump’s Populism a ‘Road to Ruin’

Wow. Pence finally figured it out. Took long enough.

I know folks have praised him for what he did January 6 — myself included — but the truth is he could’ve done a lot more prior to the sixth to avert this, like call the FBI.

MSRC • msrc.microsoft.com

Upon identifying that the threat actor had acquired the consumer key, Microsoft performed a comprehensive technical investigation into the acquisition of the Microsoft account consumer signing key, including how it was used to access enterprise email. Our technical investigation has concluded. As part of our commitment to transparency and trust, we are releasing our investigation findings.

Reading these reports is fascinating. I love seeing them own up to mistakes and solve the problems that lead them there. I personally like to focus on the problem and not point fingers. These reports come across like that to me.

Greg Jones • enginebuildermag.com

As a kid, Dan Keenan loved fixing things, tearing things apart, and figuring out a way to build something new. But he never dreamed his skills would one day lead to being a key player in designing a brand-new race engine for NASCAR.

This is an older piece but is a great little read if you’re at all interested in engine building. I most definitely am and would love to see some deep dives of all the motors used in the NASCAR Cup Series. The teams use a new motor each week! It’s amazing to me how consistent the builds are from week to week.

They do see the occasional failure but those are rare. It would be amazing to see reports from engine builders outlining the failures and the steps taken to mitigate them, just like that Microsoft Security piece linked above.

Michael Meng • eng.lyft.com

Lyft runs hundreds of microservices to power the company’s offerings. Our team, the Developer Infrastructure team, aims to build the best tools to enable microservice owners (our “customers”) to reliably and quickly test changes in a local and/or end-to-end environment.

When we crossed that line from desktop focused computing on local networks to service based computing on the open web software development became infinitely more complicated. I know a lot of folks who’ll disagree with that assessment and that’s fine. It’s how it feels to me. I’m a simpleton and prefer my little self contained IDE and platform. 😃

GMS Racing • legacymotorclub.com

LEGACY MOTOR CLUB™ Signs John Hunter Nemechek to Drive the No. 42 in 2024

It’s fun to watch NASCAR teams make lineup changes for next season. How many more changes will we see between now and next season? Who knows.

It’ll also be nice to see where the Stewart Haas Racing rumors land. Do they run two or four cars next year? Do they have charters for sale? If so, who picks them up?

Oh, right, when is Dodge coming back! 🤣 Yes, I really do want to see it.

Lane Brown • Vulture

The Ophelia affair is a useful microcosm for understanding how Rotten Tomatoes, which turned 25 in August, has come to function. The site was conceived in the early days of the web as a Hot or Not for movies. Now, it can make or break them — with implications for how films are perceived, released, marketed, and possibly even green-lit. The Tomatometer may be the most important metric in entertainment, yet it’s also erratic, reductive, and easily hacked.

I’d not heard of folks gamifying Rotten Tomatoes scores but it makes sense it would happen. Gotta keep those scores fresh so folks will watch your movie and put money in your pocket. 🍅

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Boy oh boy did I make a mistake last night. I stayed up until after midnight, Gracie woke me up at 3:30 to go out, then again at 5:30.

So, yeah, I need all the coffee this morning.

I hope you enjoy the links!

Reuters

Photoshop maker Adobe’s (ADBE.O) co-founder John Warnock died on Saturday aged 82, the company said in a statement early on Sunday.

Another legend gone.

R.I.P. Mr. Warnock.

Akela Lacy • The Intercept

A little over a week after a prosecutor in Georgia indicted former President Donald Trump for trying to overturn the results of the state’s 2020 presidential election, Republicans said they will use a new law to remove her from office.

I don’t understand the GOP. It’s clear the Orange Man is a criminal and needs to be brought to justice but their need for power overrides all else.

I’d expect violence to escalate if any of his cases are dropped.

Pathetic.

Kevin Purdy • Ars Technica

Dominic Szablewski grabbed that code before it disappeared and set about creating a version that’s not just a port. He rewrote the game’s rendering, physics, sound, and generally “everything everywhere.” He documented the project, put his code on GitHub, and has some version of a justification.

I haven’t looked at the code and probably never will but it would be interesting to see the diffs.

Something I learned a long time ago. Don’t be quick to judge others code. Someone else is eventually going to look at your code. Be kind.

The Onion

Texas Cancels School Over Concerns Extreme Heat Not Safe Environment For Shootings

I know it’s The Onion but I can believe Texas would do something like this.

Ben Lovejoy, Michael Potuck, and Filipe Espósito • 9to5mac.com

But yesterday, we learned that it had happened. Apple not only made a U-turn, supporting a Californian right to repair law it had previously opposed, but even went as far as actively endorsing it.

The only reason I can see for Apple’s 180 is they’ve discovered a new way to make a profit by doing it.

Vjeran Pavic • The Verge

The computer on Keegan McNamara’s desk is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The machine sits on a light wood table, bathed in the sunlight coming into the second floor of McNamara’s Los Angeles house. McNamara, tall and blonde in jeans and a light khaki Carhartt jacket, walks over to the desk, sits down, and reaches over to hit the power button. Then he pauses. He forgot something. He digs into his pants pocket, pulls out his keys, picks a silver one, sticks it into a cylinder just to the right of the computer’s 8-inch screen, and turns.

I like this. A marriage of the warmth of wood and the cold of technology.

Annie Palmer • CNBC

Amazon is seeing some employees quit instead of moving to a new state as part of relocation mandate

I’m pretty sure we all knew there’d be a reckoning, even with return to office being unpopular.

Microsoft Excel • techcommunity.microsoft.com

Since its inception, Microsoft Excel has changed how people organize, analyze, and visualize their data, providing a basis for decision-making for the millions of people who use it each day. Today we’re announcing a significant evolution in the analytical capabilities available within Excel by releasing a Public Preview of Python in Excel.

This is a head scratcher. Excel has had a great language and IDE built in for years and years. It’s called Visual Basic for Applications and it’s truly great. In fact we had VBA integrated into Visio and you could do amazing things with it.

WillowTree Blog

Generative AI is transforming how we do business. But early adopters have discovered that large language models (LLMs) can occasionally provide responses that are out-of-left field, off-brand, heavily biased, or just plain wrong. The industry has termed these types of completions: hallucinations.

Developers, don’t let your LLM do drugs.

Strange Loop

Programming languages often prioritize either performance or ergonomics. Swift offers a unique modern type-safe low-ceremony approach taking the best of both worlds that scales from mobile apps to high-performance systems where previously memory-unsafe languages would be used. It also interoperates seamlessly with C and C++.

I’ve been waiting to hear about a high performance use of Swift. I expect we’ll see Swift make its way into an OS level component of macOS some day.

Dan Morrison • yardbarker.com

Hamlin went beyond picking a few crashes at the Coke Zero Sugar 400. In fact, he thinks NASCAR is going to have a crash fest on its hands, as he explained on the Actions Detrimental podcast.

This is the final weekend to make the playoffs and there are a few folks on the bubble. If the Xfinity race last night was any indicator of what’s to come tonight could be a real mess.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

What would we start off with this morning? The weather? Our power grid in the Charlottesville area? How about some links to articles I’ve collected through the week? Yes, let’s do that.

Ollie Williams • cabinradio.ca

A mercy flight taking Yellowknife hospital patients to safety was cancelled on Thursday, leaving nurses unsure how they’ll safely leave in the face of an oncoming wildfire.

Poor Canada. It’s been on fire for so, so, long. The human toll is so immense. 😔

Good thing Climate Change isn’t real. 🤬

Evan Selleck • AppleInsider

Apple TV+ has revealed the first details of “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,” a forthcoming 10-part series starring Kurt Russell, and coming as part of Legendary Entertainment’s Monsterverse.

I’m down for this series! I love me some Kurt Russell! 🦖

David Ljunggren • Reuters

OTTAWA, Aug 18 (Reuters) - The Canadian government on Friday demanded that Meta (META.O) lift a “reckless” ban on domestic news from its platforms to allow people to share information about wildfires in the west of the country.

I’m not a fan of Facebook but I do understand why Facebook chose to disallow links to news in Canada. It was a business decision for them based on new Canadian law.

Hopefully they’ll turn linking back on so folks can communicate about these devastating fires. ❤️

Grace Ebert • thisiscolossal.com

Artist Duke Riley is attuned to this history and its modern-day implications. He gathers laundry detergent jugs, flip-flops, and bottles that once held household products once they wash up near beaches and carves incisive allegories and ornamentation into their surfaces. Painted in a warm, grainy beige, the scavenged waste mimics the whale bones traditional to scrimshaw while the artist’s signature wit emerges through the contemporary narratives of oil barons or marine creatures carrying human trash.

It’s amazing what this man can do with trash.

The Globe and Mail

Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly says Canada has been considering a “game plan” for how it would respond if the United States takes a far-right, authoritarian shift after next year’s presidential elections.

This is really sad when your neighbor and ally feel the need to prepare for the possibility the United States of America could become and totalitarian nation.

All I keep thinking of is Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale.

Who knows, if the US goes full authoritarian/totalitarian Canada may become a refuge for Americans, just like it is in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Kevin Chisholm • Flutter Engineering Blog

Welcome back to our quarterly Flutter stable release, this time for Flutter 3.13! In just the three months since our last release, we have had 724 pull requests merged and 55 community members authoring their first commit to Flutter!

I’ve tossed around the idea of rewriting RxCalc in Flutter so I keep an eye on it. I find it interesting and I feel like it’s a better choice than React Native, but that’s just a feeling because I haven’t written code in either.

One thing I definitely dislike about it, they paint the UI themselves. They’re not using native controls. I understand the choice, but I don’t like it. I don’t think that would keep me from using it for an app like RxCalc since its UI is extremely simple and I’d most likely use its C++ Pharmacokinetics library.

Nick Gernert • WordPress VIP

Vox Media wanted its creative and development teams to focus on experiences instead of platforms, continuing to create industry-leading content for their audiences.

Big moves like this are always very interesting to me. Vox must need the best writing tools the industry can offer to put together stories and I wonder how they’re going to feel about the writing tools in WordPress. I’m personally not a fan of Gutenberg and wonder if writers will work in that editor or use something else for the writing part and someone else does the post? I’d love to know their workflow.

A little inside baseball. I handle putting together posts for the WillowTree Engineering Blog but the authors use Google Docs to write them.

Debopriyaa Dutta • /Film

In her Telegraph interview, Chalotra explained that she was not too well-versed with the source material (at least to the point that her co-star Henry Cavill was, who’s an ardent fan of the franchise) and the stress of showing up to such a big-budget production was stress-inducing for her. Chaltora talked about how she believed she “didn’t think [she] was going to get through the first day of filming

I love The Witcher and Chaltora’s Yennefer is one of the reasons why. Henry Cavill’s Geralt is also fantastic but the ongoing tension between the two adds another great element to the show.

Ash Furrow

I’m narrowing in on a few possibilities, and one of them will soon become my destination. This space is uncomfortable and I feel an urge to escape it. An urge to collapse the wave function of possible career moves into a definite next job. Any job. After a disquieting summer, I feel myself grasping for certainty.

I’ve watched on Mastodon as amazing developer after developer lose their jobs or are having a very difficult time finding one.

This scare me to death. I’m aging, tired, and my brain definitely doesn’t work as well as it once did — it’s not as fast as before. Sure, I can do the work, but could I get past an interview? That’s the biggest fear.

Starbucks Stories & News

He shares the story of Starbucks® Pumpkin Spice Latte – which has become the company’s most popular seasonal beverage of all time – was created 11 years ago.

This is an article I stumbled on from 2014. I thought I’d share it since Starbucks is about to unleash Pumpkin Spick Latte season on us. It’s not a goto drink for me but I’ve had a few. My wife and daughters love them. Heck, they love all things pumpkin spice. Me? I’m just into good pumpkin pie. 🥧

Grace Kay • Business Insider

During an earnings call on Tuesday, UPS CEO Carol Tomé said that by the end of its five-year contract with the Teamsters union, the average full-time UPS driver would make about $170,000 in annual pay and benefits, such as healthcare and pension benefits.

This article is about how tech workers don’t like the thought of UPS drivers making more than them. I say more power to ‘em!

I’ve often thought it would be amazing to work in a coffee shop. Of course I’d never expect to make that kind of money but I have a feeling I’d enjoy the change. At least for a little while. 😃

Scarheel • Atlas Obscura

From 1810 to 1823, Jean Lafitte and his brother Pierre were among the most notorious and successful privateers in the Americas. Like many great pirates, Jean Lafitte’s exact origins are shrouded in mystery, but he is believed to be born either in France or one of its Caribbean colony Saint-Domingue (now called Haiti) and he had a spectacular reputation for drinking, womanizing, and debauchery.

Who doesn’t like a little pirate lore? I know in real life these folks were scoundrels but we’ve romanticized them and there’s something about that skull and cross bones I like.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’m getting more and more excited about writing code full time at work. I’m sure that won’t last but I’m going to enjoy every minute of it while I can. 😃

I ran into issues getting my git SSH keys to work earlier in the week and while I find that frustrating it was also a nice challenge to fix. I’m up and running and ready to break some stuff! 👍🏼

I hope you enjoy your coffee and the links.

Sarah Burns • The Irish Times

Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor has died at the age of 56, her family has announced.

The 80’s was my era of music and I most certainly remember Nothing compares 2 U, it was a big hit.

The thing that really struck me is, she was 56 years old. As I age my mortality has occupied more of my thoughts than I care to admit, but there you go.

God speed. ❤️

Jacob Zinkula • Business Insider

ChatGPT creator says AI advocates are fooling themselves if they think the technology is only going to be good for workers : ‘Jobs are definitely going to go away’

Emphasis is mine. I’ve not used ChatGPT but we’re pushing into AI hard at WillowTree. It’s such a hot button item at the moment all agencies will have to take it very seriously.

For my daily work I see it as a really smart auto complete. The next evolution in code assistant. It felt like cheating early on but as a developer you still have to validate the output. Did you get valid and good code? It may not work all the time. Yes, it’s fallible but it’s also early days. I am certain I’ll use it at some point to help generate some code.

Give it another 10 years to mature. I’ll be really close to retirement by then and the next next generation can use it to their advantage. 😃

Owen Bellwood • Jalopnik

According to General Motors boss Mary Barra, Chevrolet has backtracked on its plans to completely kill off the Bolt, which has so far seen its sales more than double in 2023. Now, the company is working on a next-generation Bolt, which will join Chevy’s other electric models: the Silverado EV, Blazer EV and Equinox EV.

I found this really encouraging! We need more little EVs in the market and I always thought the Bolt was a nice little car.

Hopefully the next generation gets its fire issues under control.

Oh, the only downside I can think of is Chevy’s insistence on building their entire infotainment system.

Manton Reece

Dave Winer posted a 12-minute audio recording on his blog, addressed to me but applicable to everyone who is creating tools for the social web. Listening to it, I have a bunch of thoughts. In this post, I just want to start with server-to-server ActivityPub, and leave some of the other technologies Dave brings up for later.

Dave Winer has created a bunch of the technologies we rely on everyday in the blogging world; blogs, RSS, and Podcasting delivery. Now he’s trying to unify the mechanism to span posting to multiple social networks and blogging.

Manton Reece is the creator of Micro.blog — the service I use to publish this site — and is into open standards like MetaWeblog and ActivityPub, so much so Micro.Blog is a Fediverse server by federating with Mastodon.

To see these two chatting about putting something together to bride these systems is nice to see. I see what Dave is proposing as the next version of MetaWeblog, perhaps extended to accommodate new blogging and social network norms.

Perhaps Micropub could serve to do this? I’ve not looked into it but it seems like it could be the way to go?

I have my own opinions on the matter and I’m sure I’ll voice them at some point. In the meantime it’s nice to see this happening and I’m going to keep an eye on it. 👀

Robert Reich

Someone who has tried to overthrow the U.S. government cannot be president.

Mr. Reich is point out what may sound obvious at first but what he’s really saying is it shouldn’t take a conviction to eliminate TFG. We all know he tried to overturn a fair and valid election in 2019. We all know he rallied his supporters to storm the Capitol and try to stop the formality of recording the election results.

He doesn’t need to be convicted. He’s a danger to democracy and the rule of law. That’s disqualifying. ⚖️

leboncoin Engineering Blog

I recall how, when I was a junior developer, I often felt happy and reassured when I was writing software. It felt like a safe place compared to the overwhelming complexities of the world. The simple, deterministic functions, mechanical in their way of working, offered comfort. If you inject an input, it always gives the same output. It’s controllable, manageable, uncomplicated!

If you’re good at what you do eventually someone will notice and give you more to do with greater responsibility. Eventually you’ll be mentoring people and more junior developers will naturally look to you for your experience.

It’s not a bad thing. It’s just what happens and isn’t isolated to software engineering. This happens in all fields.

While I enjoy working with Junior folks there’s also this big part of me that’s ready to sit in the corner and just work on features and bugs, and that’s all. A simplified dev life. 😃

Dean Obeidallah

Barbie not only broke box office records, she destroyed the GOP’s Barbie Boycott

Barbie isn’t a film I plan on seeing but it sounds like the GOP is once again up in arms over cultural issues dealt with in the film.

I hope it breaks all the records. 🎬

Tony • arcadeblogger.com

I was visiting my family in the Chicago suburbs recently, when my niece mentioned she saw “some TRON thing” sitting on a curb while she was riding her bike through the neighbourhood.

As a teen I remember well the arcade in Exeter. It was called the Quarter Slot. Ahhh, good times. Anywho, I will never forget the Tron game — not the one mentioned in the article — because there were two guys who spent a crazy amount of time playing it and taking copious notes on how to beat every level.

Yes, those were the days.

James Surowiecki • Fast Company

Threads has one big advantage over Twitter: Zuckerberg understands advertising

If Threads can pull people away from Twitter — I mean, ahem, X — does that help to extinctify the ailing bird?

Who knows. Musk is crazy rich so I’d imagine he can keep it afloat for a very long time.

All I want to know is when will he be selling Twitter.com and for how much? It would make for a great Mastodon instance. 🐘

Ryan Erik King • Jalopnik

The Alpine F1 Team is currently competing at each race weekend with the odds slightly stacked against them. The Renault power unit used by the French factory team is believed to be 30 horsepower behind their rivals. Under normal circumstances, Alpine would be told simply to improve on their own, but there’s currently a freeze on engine development. The FIA, the sport’s governing body, wants to allow Alpine to catch up.

Alpine is kind of what remains of the Renault team and it seems like they’re going backwards.

I’d love to see them move closer to the front of the pack but they continue to be one of the “back of the pack” teams with flashes of brilliance on rare occasion.

Formula One is an extremely tough sport to compete in. Teams with extremely deep pockets can buy great engineering and dedicate huge resources to land their teams in victory lane. It also makes the races really boring. 😃

Here’s hoping Renault is given a chance to fix their horsepower issue ahead of next season. At this point I suppose it doesn’t matter much.

I’m a Haas supporter myself. It’s the only American team on the grid so why not support them? They also have Guenther Steiner who is the most entertaining of all the Principals in F1. 😃

Oh, by the way! Since you’re an American team why not use American built power? I mean, you run Ford motors Stuart Haas Racing, why not work with them on an amazing F1 power unit? I’d love to see that! Don’t let Red Bull be the only team doing it!

Who else is looking forward to the next season of Drive to Survive?

Tim Hardwick • MacRumors

Apple has become the target of a £785 million ($1 billion) class action lawsuit on behalf of over 1,500 developers in the UK over its App Store fees, reports TechCrunch.

Unfortunately this is pocket change for Apple. I don’t make much as a developer of apps for Apple devices but to those who do giving up 15 to 30% of revenue is a big deal.

Even if Apple allow for third party stores or payment processors they’re still going to charge their fee. Might as well keep the App Store as it is and be done with it.

Daring Fireball

Translation From Hostage Code to English of X Corp CEO Linda Yaccarino’s Company-Wide Memo

I mean, if Yaccarino isn’t actually asking for help to get out now I suppose she will be in six months to a year because Space Karen won’t agree with her about something and drive her insane or sack her.

Just let Twitter fade away, sell off the domain, and let’s move forward with the open web.

Janis Mara • berkeleyside.org

Peet’s is widely credited with transforming the industry — after all, the three founders of Starbucks learned much of their craft from founder Alfred Peet — but there’s much more to it than that.

I’d always known Peet’s was a big influence in the coffee world but I had no idea how much of an influence it really was.

This story is a fun read about one employees view from the inside. ☕️

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Sorry for the lateness in publishing today. We had a deployment of some services for a project at work and duty calls! I did have my fair share of coffee to get the old noggin going this morning.

Chris Benshoof

Today, with one command and a couple of cores, I’ve decompiled and annotated every Sierra SCI game, and practically every version, and dumped the results on github for everyone to enjoy.

Many moons ago Sierra On-Line was the game company to work for. They were nestled in the woods of Oakhurst, California, and made fun games.

In 1988 or ‘89 I applied for a job as a Tester and was offered a position, but, I’d also been offered a job as a developer at another company for more money. You can guess which job I took. Right, the dev job.

Anywho, if you’re a Sierra On-Line games fan and a developer have fun checking out the code.

Chance Miller, Benjamin Mayo, Zac Hall, and Filipe Espósito • 9to5mac.com

10 million join Threads in under ten hours, boosted by Instagram integration

I installed Threads and gave it a look. It’s a nice app, scrolls a bit slow at times, and has a look that has me questioning what technology they used to build the app. Apparently one of the Slacks I’m a part of has been having that discussion. I’ll be check it out in a bit.

My initial observation is it’s where all the brands and party people hang out.

One thing I really disliked about it is you are forced to see posts from people you don’t follow. That makes your timeline super noisy. I’m sure they’ll figure it out.

Congratulations to the Facebook folks who worked on the app and got it out the door. Now, take the next step in life and quit this disgusting company. 😃

Definitely a huge difference in privacy between Threads and Mastodon.

I’m all in on Mastodon. ❤️

Chad Hanson • Los Angeles Times

The naturally regenerating giant sequoia forest was so vigorous and lush that, in many places, we had to pull the stems of young sequoias apart just so we could walk between them. There were hundreds of them on almost every acre — many of them already 8 or 9 feet tall.

When I was in Yosemite a couple years back there was a lot of burnt out space with saplings growing all over the place. Here’s hoping the little ones continue to grow like mad.

Chance Miller, Benjamin Mayo, and Zac Hall • 9to5mac.com

Electrify America is the largest alternative to Tesla’s Supercharger network, offering nearly 800 charging stations across the United States. The company offers a CarPlay app that makes it easy to find Electrify America charging stations nearby; the app can also route you directly to those charging stations.

I had to link to this article today because WillowTree may, or may not, have worked on one of the apps mentioned in the article. 😁

Peter Cohen • iMore

Game Porting Toolkit in macOS Sonoma won’t fix what’s broken with Mac games

The TL;DR is Apple doesn’t really care about games and doesn’t really invest time and money to help game developers take a chance on the platform.

EditorDavid • Slashdot

2096 subreddits were still dark on Friday, as PC Magazine shared this update about ongoing protests at Reddit: To stamp out any remaining protests, Reddit is sending “final warnings” to subreddits that decided to permit NSFW content as a way to derail the company’s advertising business.

That number is much bigger than I expected it to be, wowzer!

Reddit really stepped in it, didn’t they? Who’s to say the new moderators of these subreddits won’t pull the same trick once they’re in charge?

Eric Wills • GQ

On a Wednesday afternoon in mid-April, the greatest bowler in the world, perhaps in the history of the sport, sat in a booth in a Bowlero in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, a cold wind lashing outside, and pondered how it had all gone wrong.

I’m not a bowler but I’m somewhat familiar with the sport because my grandmother was a great bowler. Seeing someone over the age of 10 using both hands is odd, but if you can be a champion bowler who cares how many hands you’re using. Right?

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

It’s been an interesting week, it’s just felt off for some reason. I think part of it is having our new pup — Cocoa — in the house and part of it is work.

Ever since our layoff things haven’t felt the same, because frankly, they’re not. Our company structure has changed and we’re still adapting and moving thing around. It feels way more corporate than ever but I suppose that happens when you get beyond a couple hundred people. We’re near one thousand, even after the layoff.

After the project I’m working on comes to a close at the end of July I’m hoping to get a little bench time to work on my SwiftUI (worst technology name ever) skills and shake the cobwebs out of the old programmer brain. 🧠

Ashur Cabrera

We’re giving ourselves the weekend to rest, then Phase 2 kicks off Monday when we start working on paperwork and logistics to pack a few bags, our pup, and try our luck at spending the next few years abroad. (More on this later in the summer ☺️)

Ashur is a friend, all around great fella, and very talented web developer. He’s even contributed his amazing web talent to Stream and I’m forever grateful for it.

Anywho, I’m so excited for him and this new adventure. Doing it while you’re young is the right call. Do it while your body can take it. Get out, explore!

I still hope to convince Kim we need to go all in on the RV lifestyle. Still not there yet. Maybe someday.

Enjoy this new adventure Ashur! 🧳

Joel Clay • blog.meldstudio.co

It is also what backs a number of the Swift concurrency primitives – with a cross platform, open source implementation of CoreFoundation released as the backing implementation. That source code is invaluable in gaining a better understanding of how CFRunLoop works. At just under 5k lines of quite readable C code, one could grok it at a high level in a few hours.

If you know me you know I love browsing C and C++ code. The thing I find extremely interesting about this code is how many OS’es it is targeted to run on; macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Makes me wonder who’s writing code against those platforms and how the new all Swift based frameworks work on those platforms.

This article takes a deep dive into CFRunLoop and it’s a good read if you’re into C code. 😃

NBC News

The Supreme Court issued a divided ruling on a pair of challenges to affirmative action policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, with potential implications across higher education and beyond.

The Republican built court is doing its job dismantling years and years of progress. They’ve already set Women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and now affirmative action back. What’s next?

Here’s hoping most institutions of higher education don’t change their policies. Just leave that to the rich white racist institutions that take in dumbass rich white kids whose parents buy their way in.

Speaking of dumbass rich white kids…

Daniel Golden • ProPublica

My book exposed a grubby secret of American higher education: that the rich buy their under-achieving children’s way into elite universities with massive, tax-deductible donations.

Screw Harvard and the entire Ivy League. As a nation we need to get our belief that going to one of those schools magically makes you smarter or better than everyone else. They cater to the rich and powerful who can afford to buy their way in, like Jared Kishner’s dad did for him. It’s all about keeping the rich and powerful in power.

Sure, turn away the dark skinned people with great grades and SAT scores and let the idiots in.

I’m sure there are many other schools doing the same thing and they should all be shamed.

The question is how to stop it?

Doc Searles

For almost the whole time I wrote at the old blog, the URL doc.searls.com took you there as a redirect. Now that URL goes here, directly. Put another way, this was a Harvard blog until yesterday (and again, everything until that day remains so: that’s its legacy). From now on, it’s mine alone. It has crossed from one state to another. I’m not sure yet how it will change, if at all. But I feel energized about what new things I might do with it.

Speaking of Harvard, it sounds like they’ve shut down and archived a bunch of blogs and their associated blogging tools. I’d venture to guess the tools they were using were long in the tooth, not well maintained, and a security risk, but I could be completely wrong about that! 😆

It’s nice to see Doc in his new home. I just need to remember to subscribe to the new site.

Keaton Brandt

Instead, I think it’s safe to say it’s largely Apple’s fault. Or, maybe “fault” is the wrong word. We’ve moved on from the era of beautiful Mac software to the era of web-based apps, for better and for worse. There’s no one simple reason for this evolution, but it’s interesting to think through some of the factors.

This piece goes to all kinds of interesting places. I think the bottom line is Apple is running Microsoft’s playbook from the late 90’s when the web was taking off and they were desperately trying to keep folks tied into their OS and tools.

Eventually Microsoft got their act together and found their way into web technologies. Heck, they even went as far as scrapping their own home built browser for Chromium, but that’s another story I’m very opinionated about.

Jay Barmann • sfist.com

This is very sad. HRD Coffee Shop (521A Third Street), which has seen two generations of owners in SoMa/South Beach and became so well known for its fusion-style burritos and Mongolian beef cheesesteak a decade ago that they were paid a visit by Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives in 2010, closed for good on Friday, June 23. The restaurant had just celebrated its 70th birthday this year.

This was one of the places on my “need to eat there someday” list and it’s a real shame to see it close down. I really wanted to try their spicy pork and kimchi burrito. Guess that ain’t gonna happen now. 😔

Pieter Hintjens

It’s one of my interview questions: “what is Good Code?” Surprisingly, almost no-one gets it right. It’s not about speed, elegance, language, or style. Good Code is code that solves real problems for real people, in an effective way. Let me list the top 10 rules for writing good code.

I enjoy reading how others approach coding. I’m constantly hearing the term “best practices” and makes me cringe a little.

I don’t agree with Pieter’s number zero rule: Use Git and Github. I know git is super popular and I use it and GitHub every day, but it’s not the only version control system on the planet and there are others that work just fine. The advice I’ve always given folks is pick a version control system and use it.

GitHub is, of course, a very good choice. 😃

[David Pierce • The Verge](<https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social)

To executives, Google Reader may have seemed like a humble feed aggregator built on boring technology. But for users, it was a way of organizing the internet, for making sense of the web, for collecting all the things you care about no matter its location or type, and helping you make the most of it.

I remember how down my brother was when Google shut down Reader. He had a really nice workflow and could navigate Reader with his keyboard. It also had some very unique to Reader features he made good use of. I don’t remember what they were but I should ask him. If they’re unique perhaps Stream could benefit from implementing some? 🤔

Jason Kottke

When you write some code and put it on a spacecraft headed into the far reaches of space, you need to it work, no matter what. Mistakes can mean loss of mission or even loss of life. In 2006, Gerard Holzmann of the NASA/JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software wrote a paper called The Power of 10: Rules for Developing Safety-Critical Code. The rules focus on testability, readability, and predictability:

I’ve heard about these rules before and they’re no bad at all, especially for smaller, self contained programs. Anything mission critical should be extra safe in its implementation.

Remember when the Mars Lander crashed because the teams used different measurement systems? It only cost $125 million to build. Good times. 💥

Jack Gutzler • beyondtheflag.com

As NASCAR descends upon the streets of Chicago for the inaugural race at the new Chicago Street Course, a new chapter in the sport’s 75-year history will be written.

Since getting into NASCAR I’ve had this one marked on my calendar and wish I could’ve attended it. I’ve never been to Chicago or a NASCAR race, why not get a twofer?

I’ll be watching it from the safety of my own living room this time around. 🛋️

Manton Reece

Meta adopting ActivityPub has the potential to fast-forward the progress of the social web by years. Ever since I grew disillusioned with Twitter a decade ago and started pushing for indie microblogs, then writing a book about social networks and founding Micro.blog, I could only dream of a moment where a massive tech company embraced such a fundamental open API.

I’ve been trying to keep my nose out of the discussions around this on Mastodon. Opinions vary, of course, and some folks are very angry about the whole thing. It mostly boils down to folks in marginalized and discriminated against groups who made their homes on Mastodon being afraid. They don’t want to have to deal with the hate that will come along with an extremely popular, large, instance. I can’t say that I blame them.

I’m hopeful this will all work out and won’t divide the community.🕊️

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

We’ve been home for a week now and it’s been really nice to sleep in our own bed!

Now, if we could get Cocoa to sleep past 5:30AM I’d be thrilled. 😃

I hope you have a nice cup of coffee or tea ready and I hope you enjoy the links.

CNN

Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has refused to surrender, and called Vladimir Putin “deeply mistaken” following the Russian president’s address describing his actions as betrayal.

I heard about this as I was crawling in bed. I hope the Wagner Group is able to destabilize Putin and end the war in Ukraine.

Probably too much to hope for. 🙁

iamthatis • Reddit

I wanted to address Reddit’s continued, provably false statements, as well as answer some questions from the community, and also just say thanks.

I love this openness from Christian Selig. If folks don’t know, Christian tapes his conversations with Reddit folks. It’s been very interesting to read bit the transcript he’s shared. It’s clear they have lied.

I just wish Christian had posted this all to a weblog so it would have a more permanent home. Who knows what’s going to happen with his subreddit.

Platformer

After a bruising week of protests and locked-down forums, things started to get back to normal Tuesday on Reddit, as — oh wait, what’s this?

Subreddit moderators are doing all they can to screw things up on Reddit. I applaud their effort.

Polygon

If you want to watch pop culture eat itself, go see The Flash, a movie that starts out as a sprightly superhero adventure, then dissolves into a self-referential requiem for the DC Universe.

I’m torn about seeing this movie given all the hubbub surrounding Ezra Miller but I really want to see Michael Keatons older Batman!

Trisha Gee

These days, distributed version control systems like Git have “won the war” of version control. One of the arguments I used to hear when DVCSs were gaining traction was around how easy it is to branch and merge with a VCS like Git. However, I’m a big fan of Trunk-Based Development (TBD), and I want to tell you why.

I’d imagine most folks I work with today have no clue how we used to work. I didn’t use git for version control full time until around 2014 I’d imagine? I found it terribly frustrating to work with at first but know I’m fine with it.

Anywho, up until 2014 I’d worked with so many different version control systems. I’d imagine I worked with CVS the longest and we had one main branch — trunk — and everyone committed directly to it. Yes, breaking the build was definitely frowned upon so you had to be very careful about your commits!

LA Weekly

When North Carolina Gov. Patrick McCrory signed House Bill 2 into law, I wonder if he was thinking long-range about what the result might be. I can’t see him and his staff wondering out loud if their thick-skulled, cracker logic might result in Bruce Springsteen not only canceling his upcoming show in Greensboro, depriving the state of revenue and its residents of a Springsteen concert, but inspiring Mr. Boss to issue a press release that more people have read than will ever peruse House Bill 2.

Henry Rollins seems to be a really great dude. Part punk, part philosopher, always interesting to listen to or read.

The Guardian

Seven years after the Brexit referendum, the proportion of Britons who want to rejoin the EU has climbed to its highest levels since 2016, according to a new survey.

I mean, duh! The British version of MAGA didn’t work out so well. It’s been terrible for so many. I hope they rejoin the EU.

Hendrick Motorsports

The NASCAR Next Gen Garage 56 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 was a hit from day one in Le Mans, among fans, media and even other competitors. And it was fast on track, consistently putting down lap times that bettered cars in the GT class. The car ran near the top of the GT field for more than 20 hours until a drive line issue sidelined the team for more than an hour. Overall, the car was running at the finish, completed 285 laps on the 8.4-mile circuit and finished 39th in the 62-car field.

This car is an absolute beast and looked out of place at Le Mans. It would also look out of place on a NASCAR track. It is a beautiful car with some really excellent engineering. Oh, yeah, and it is super fast! Good old American V8 horsepower under the hood.

I kind of wish I’d been more of a car guy when I was younger. My Dad certainly is and has built some beautiful cars in his time. His ‘37 Chevy Coup Street Rod is stunning and he used to drag race a 454 powered ‘51 Anglia.

I had the opportunity to learn a lot but didn’t. If I could do it today I’d love to be a mechanic or engineer for a NASCAR, IndyCar, or F1 team. I’d love to specialize in engines. I do find them fascinating and would love to rebuild one again. I rebuilt a Chevy small block in High School my senior year. Yeah, I took auto shop because I wanted to do something “easy.” 😃

Cadillac Racing

After 21 years, Cadillac Racing marked our return to the iconic 24 Hours of Le Mans on June 10—11 with our highest finish ever in front of a record audience of 325,000 spectators. Our No. 2 V-Series.R led laps for the first time in Cadillac history and finished on the podium in 3rd, with the No. 3 just behind in 4th, and the No. 311 fighting back for 10th in class.

There’s an article on Jalopnik that includes a video of one of these cars doing a bump start and it sounds mean. It instantly made me think of the Batmobile for some reason.

Now, let’s get more American manufacturers back in NASCAR. Cadillac would be a super interesting entry! I think Dodge is an obvious entry for NASCAR Cup, Xfinity, and Truck series given their history of legendary cars like the Challenger and their RAM trucks.

Cadillac would be super cool to see in NASCAR Cup racing but it may be too lowbrow for them? 🤣

Traveler Dreams

Renting an RV and embarking on a road trip across America can seem like more of a fantasy trip than a real thing you actually do. But you can truly make it a reality. And if you do, it can turn into a thrilling and liberating experience that will leave you with unforgettable memories. Here’s why you should take the plunge.

This is something I dream about all the time but I can’t quite get Kim convinced we need to sell everything and go all in on the RV lifestyle.

As a compromise we’d like to acquire a smaller RV and do some two week to one month excursions to see if we like it. It would also be great for week long camping trips with the entire family.

Maybe someday it’ll be a reality? 🤞🏼

Business Insider

When former NBC Universal executive Linda Yaccarino was named Twitter’s next CEO last month, advertisers breathed a sigh of relief.

I don’t expect Ms. Yaccarino to last very long at Twitter. I think my original quesstimate was six months but I could see it lasting as long as a year.

Musk is too much of a control freak. The kind of boss I’d hate working for.

The best piece of advice I ever got from my VP of Engineering and CTO at Pelco was “You have to convince people your vision is the right way to go so they follow. You won’t get their best work if you’re a tyrant.” It was something like that. Basically be a leader, not a bully.

Teri Kanefield

This blog post is meant to be read in order. Later answers are shorter because they rely on the information presented in the earlier answers.

This is a really nice piece if you’re following along with the TFG Top Secret documents prosecution. Dude is such a knucklehead and honestly believes he has magical powers to declassify things with his mind. Dumbass.

The New York Times

The engineers reminded him of their commutes. The working parents reminded him of school pickup times. Mr. Medina replied with arguments he has delineated so often that they have come to feel like personal mantras: Being near each other makes the work better. Mr. Medina approached three years of mushy remote-plus-office work as an experiment. His takeaway was that ideas bubble up more organically in the clamor of the office.

I believe with all my heart CEO’s like this are real control freaks and must have the adoration of their people surrounding them at all times. I can have these ah-ha moments, Slack someone, and fire up a zoom call to have the same conversations. It’s just not face to face in a building I have to commute to.

If our company demanded everyone come to the office, of course I’d comply, but I really don’t believe it’s necessary.

Just my horrible opinion.

Assigned Media

A federal court heard both sides during a trial where trans youth, their parents, and their doctors challenged a law banning gender affirming care in Arkansas. The court found that the law violated the right to due process and to equal treatment under the constitution, and ordered the law struck down because Arkansas failed to demonstrate a compelling state interest justifying the unequal treatment.

We really need the courts to continue overturning these idiotic and dangerous laws.

You cannot force people to be someone they are not and denying them healthcare because they’re different than you is barbaric.

Apparently Meta’s Project 92 is going to federate with a limited set of Mastodon instances, pay them, and allow them to display Meta ads in exchange for a cut.

Embrace and extend. Amirite?

Let’s see how this plays out.

Good morning from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina! ☕️

Kim and I rented a place for a week to share with our kids, grandkids, and our dogs! We arrived around 7PM Friday evening, got setup, had some pizza, and pretty much passed out.

We haven’t had time to do any real recon of the are but I did manage to find a decent pizza joint and a Food Lion so we could pick up odds and ends to stock the fridge for the week.

From Friday to Tuesday it’s all about our kids and grandkids. Tuesday forward it’ll just be Kim and I and our oldest grandchild until next Saturday.

I was hoping to get some extra bunk time but that ain’t gonna happen with a puppy who thinks 5:30AM is play time. 🤣

We’re going to have a great time at the beach and whatever else we can drum up.

Enjoy the links.

Daring Fireball

But even just a small taste of VisionOS made me feel confident that it is going to be the next major platform for Apple and Apple developers, alongside MacOS and iOS/iPadOS.

I wasn’t too excited about any new AR/VR headset Apple was set to release, then I saw it in the keynote.

At first I was disappointed because they were showing someone in an office using it to replace their monitor(s) and that’s kind of boring.

The we see someone celebrating a child’s birthday wearing the headset. Really? What a complete douchebag. No, seriously, that’s a really bad move.

But, when I saw them demonstrate watching movies with it, I was excited! That is what I’d use it for!

Am I spending $3,500 anytime soon on one? Hell no! It’s still to early for me, especially at that price. It’s hard to justify it.

Steven Beschloss

Donald Trump himself broke the news this evening that he’s been indicted—making him the first former president to ever be charged with a federal crime.

King ding dong himself is finally being indicted for his retention of government documents. It’s not about him accidentally having a few mixed in with his other papers, it’s about boxes of them, not returning them on request, and lying that he did return them.

The right like to say “What about Biden and Pence?” Indeed, what about them. They self reported having documents and turned them over right away.

TFG is a real garbage human wrapped in a suit. My hope is, at a minimum, he’s banned from running for any federal office ever again.

Colin Paice

Easy question – hard answer, how to I convert a hex string to hex byte string in C?

Go along for the ride. I haven’t taken the time to think through how to solve this and I only have nits to pick with Colin’s solution.

Virginia Mercury

Richmond’s post-graduation mass shooting reflects America’s gun violence epidemic

This is so sickening. The shooting is absolutely horrific but to do it at a graduation? It’s heartbreaking how callous our nation has become.😔

Swift.org

This document is the reference guide describing how to mix Swift and C++

Since this was done as an official way to use C++ from Swift there was all kinds of thought out into safety. That’s fine, but if you have a great hunk of C++ that has been thoroughly tested and you feel good about it you probably don’t need the training wheels provided by this support.

Just wrap your C++ in a thin layer of Objective-C++ and call it from your Swift code without penalty. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Robert Reich

Goodbye, CNN’s Chris Licht. But what’s the lesson?

I know he screwed the pooch with that TFG interview thing but man, that was pretty quick.

512 Pixels

The number of 2019 Mac Pros sold cannot be huge, but the new one’s numbers are going to be even smaller. As a Mac Pro fan that worries me. Yes, there are users who are reliant on PCI solutions and I’m sure those folks will upgrade to this new machine at some point.

Who is this computer for? That’s the question on most folks minds. When I heard it wasn’t nearly as expandable as the 2019 version it made me wonder why they bothered? Beyond the awesome SOC it doesn’t have more to offer than its 2019 counterpart.

Then again, I’ve never been the target of this computer. I’m still using a 2019 MacBook Pro and I’m fine with it. Heck, I have a brand new M2 based MacBook Pro sitting in a box waiting for me to set it up. 🤣

Audibon.org

But as Adams scanned the bustling crowd of King Penguins, elephant seals, and Antarctic fur seals, he spotted something bizarre in the distance.

Go check out the post. This bird is gorgeous and I want it.

Jalopnik

Could The NASCAR Garage 56 Camaro Beat Every GTE Car At Le Mans?

I’d love to watch this all the way through but that’s not gonna happen. I hope NASCAR has partnered with someone to do a full documentary on it. The process from concept to reality to running the race. I hope it makes it the full 24 hours. That alone would be a huge victory.

Good morning! ☕️

Kim and I are on the road this morning. We’re headed to Nashville, Illinois, to pick up a new pup! I hope to post some pictures as we go.

The Hollywood Reporter

Tina Turner, the trailblazing rock star who set world records for ticket sales — and whose dramatic triumph over domestic abuse and the music industry itself made her a feminist icon — has died. She was 83.

Tina Turner is part of the soundtrack of my high school years.

God speed.

Deadline

Ray Stevenson, a veteran actor whose dozens of film and TV credits include RRR, the Thor and Divergent films, Vikings and Star Wars animated series, died Sunday.

I’ve always liked Ray Stevenson. I enjoyed his version of The Punisher but I’d wager he’s best known as Volstagg in Thor.

The Iconfactory

We’re proud to announce that version 1.0.4 of Notchmeister is now available to download. And with it comes a revolutionary new feature called Fusion Dice.

Software should be fun. I’ll bet Notchmeister was fun to build and it’s probably going to be fun to use.

Jalopnik

I usually get the same answer whenever I bring it up: “No, you can’t make your own engine. The castings are too complicated. How will you actually pour your own block? Do you have foundry in your mom’s basement? It’s too expensive to machine one from scratch. You don’t know what you’re doing!”

I’ve had it in mind I should build a four cylinder motor from the ground up. Sure, why not? Maybe some day. 😃

Rolling Stone

President Joe Biden and the Republican Party at loggerheads in the ongoing debt ceiling negotiations as the GOP insists on steep spending cuts and work requirements for aid recipients. Although both Biden and Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy sounded hopeful there was a deal to be made just last week, talks appear to have broken down over the last couple days.

Here we go. Headed for a cliff.

Los Angeles Times

The slow-motion rebirth of Tulare Lake has inundated farm fields and threatened levees, homes and whole towns. On Monday, the state projected the lake would reach its peak in the next week or so, but the floodwaters will linger for perhaps two years.

This is a wild thought. Tulare Lake hanging around for a couple years? That’s a crazy thought. I wish I could see an aerial view of it.

The Washington Post

Two of Donald Trump’s employees moved boxes of papers the day before an early June visit by FBI agents and a prosecutor to the former president’s Florida home to retrieve classified documents in response to a subpoena — timing that investigators have come to view as suspicious and an indication of possible obstruction, according to people familiar with the matter.

Can we convict this dude and put him behind bars for a while?

Such a scumbag.

Good morning!

I couldn’t wait to get started this morning. I got my pot started and sat down to put this post together. When the coffee finished I poured my first cup. I almost let that cup get too cool to drink. The shame! I’ve since remedied the situation and have resolved to not let it happen with my second cup! ☕️

Enjoy the linkage!

Sprudge

Espresso is basically magic. The more I learn about what goes on inside the black box that is the portafilter, the more certain I am of it.

Yes, pulling a really great shot feels like magic. When Haileigh — our oldest daughter — was a barista at a very snobby coffee shop she’d spend the morning adjusting the grinder. That would result in a half to one pound of coffee being ground just to get it properly set up. Was the espresso great? It certainly was. 🪄

Mediaite

Now Disney is cancelling plans to build a massive nearly $1 billion office complex in Orlando, costing the state more than 2,000 six-figure jobs.

I would love to see Bob Iger move jobs out of Florida. The state has gone full fascist under DeSantis and isn’t a safe place for LGBTQ+, black and brown folks, women, and children. Their educational system is teaching them to become white supremacists and intolerant and even their institutions of higher education are under attack.

If you can, get out.

gonsoloblog

TLDR: Render Disney’s Moana scene in less than 10.000 lines of Swift code.

Man, I love the field I work in and the nerds who comprise it. I say that with the utmost respect.

Joyce Vance

Monday morning, American democracy became more brittle, at least in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that prohibits the state’s public colleges and universities from continuing their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

Ah, yes, more of Florida’s fascist Governor making Florida a worse place to live. It makes me wonder if he’s setting it up to secede from our Union, kind of like Texas? It’s like the South is trying it’s damndest to rise again. We can’t let that happen.

Matt Corey

Ok, it didn’t exactly go down like that, and no, it wasn’t “take this job and shove it” either, but I actually did it. I left a great job that I enjoyed, and now I’m officially self employed. What hell am I thinking!?

Matt is going Indie and I’m more than a bit jealous! I wish I could pull it off. I’m pulling for you to be wildly successful Matt! 👍🏼

Defector

I’d like the record to show that I resisted getting AirPods for a long time. 

This is a really great piece by everybody’s favorite swole woman, Casey Johnston.

Her post is all about her quest to recover her lost — and subsequently stolen — AirPods. Go read the piece, it’s really good.

Steve Roy

Five years later I’m still as happy with this decision as I was then. I post to my site, and it gets cross-posted to social media. Today that means Mastodon. Eventually it may mean something else. But no matter what, steveroy.ca will always be the source of truth.

Making your weblog the hub of your social media presence is smart and the proper way to own your content. It’s why I started posting more short content without titles here. While I can’t auto post my content to Mastodon — I could but Micro.blog has some limitations — I do re-post most of my short posts there.

The Pink News

Actor and trans icon Elliot Page has opened up about how gender-affirming care changed his life in a moving Instagram post.

I’ve read stories like this time and again. As soon as a trans persons begins or completes their transition they become a much happier person. I’m happy for Elliot and wish him many long, happy, and fruitful years ahead.

Netflix Technology Blog

The Compute team at Netflix is charged with managing all AWS and containerized workloads at Netflix, including autoscaling, deployment of containers, issue remediation, etc. As part of this team, I work on fixing strange things that users report.

The modern day hero of computing is the DevOps engineer. They’re a mix of geeky computer tech and software developer all rolled into one extremely busy package.

If you’re a Unix/Linux geek I’d imagine you’ll enjoy the piece.

Jalopnik

New cars are getting too expensive, but the value from some of the old standards from Honda, Toyota and Hyundai is still there

Yep, cars are crazy expensive. Yep, good inexpensive cars are impossible to find. Yep, there are good used cars on the market.

Your mileage may vary. 🚙

Orhun Parmaksız

That day I decided to write my own pastebin service. And of course, I was going to write it in Rust.

Neat little piece about one persons quest to make their own thing. All in Rust of course. Because why not?

Steven Beschloss

The offering of “thoughts and prayers” after each murderous mass shooting has become a nauseating refrain. You know the drill: The speakers/tweeters utter this blood-stained phrase (or a close variant) like robots.

Thoughts and prayers is the GOP way to get evangelical Christian support. That’s all it is, a ploy for votes, an an easy one at that. Just drop a few simple words on social media and gain support for your Godliness. Disgusting, the whole lot. 🤬

I suspect Jesus would support an end to the violence.

PC Gamer

Activision Blizzard’s mandatory return-to-office policy is causing an unnecessary loss of talent, to the point where it could affect development of major titles like World of Warcraft and Diablo 4, according to some Blizzard developers.

Return to office has been a real hot button topic all over the country. Many jobs, like mine, don’t really require me to drive to the office.

Now, having said that, a lot of folks NEED and LOVE the interaction they have in person in an office. Our CEO is a prime example. He believes in person work is the best way to work. That’s all fine and good. Just remember others of us find it distracting, especially in open space offices.

I work in an all remote team at WillowTree but I think about going into the office once in a while for a little human interaction. 😁

One other note. I’d probably find it more tolerable since becoming an Engineering Director because I spend most of my day interacting with other folks. But developer Rob loves quiet and an open floor plan office was horrible for that. I can control my home workspace. At the office I’d have to find a place to hide to do meaningful work as a developer.

I like to tease my JavaScript friends when I get the chance. Most of them own up to the fact it’s a terrible language.😁

It’s the language of the web. No way around it at the moment. Some other thing will come along to replace it. I suppose WebAssembly could eventually be ubiquitous enough to allow us to code in other languages daily but it seems JavaScript is here to stay.

Had a good sleep! Time for coffee and some links.

Today’s will be abbreviated because we have our granddaughter over and she’s more fun to play with. 😀

Tennessean

Ten days after a shooter unloaded 152 rounds inside a Nashville school and killed six people, Tennessee House Republicans on Thursday expelled two Democratic lawmakers for breaking House rules and mounting a gun-reform protest on the chamber’s floor.

Yeah, they kick out the two black representatives and allow the white one to stay. Good job saying the quiet part out loud. It’s disgusting on so many levels to watch out country regress back to 1950’s America.

The Verge

I had a corpse on my phone, and I kept checking in on it. Ever since January 12th, my preferred iOS Twitter app had been locked in stasis, frozen on an error modal informing me that “there was a problem authenticating with Twitter,” and wow, was there ever. Without any notice, Twitter had revoked the mainline access credentials for Tweetbot and every other third-party client not operated by Twitter itself.

I’m happy the Tapbots folks were able to somewhat recover from Space Karen’s sudden decision to destroy a third-party ecosystem without notice.

Ivory is a beautiful app for Mastodon. Go buy it and support this amazing indie shop.

Steven Beschloss

In 1991, Warren Burger, the former Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, appeared on PBS News Hour and said exactly what he thought about the Second Amendment: “If I were writing the Bill of Rights, there would be no such thing as the Second Amendment—that a well-regulated militia being necessary for the defense of the state, the peoples’ rights to bear arms.”

Once again, it’s the guns.

ProPublica

For over 20 years, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been treated to luxury vacations by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow.

The man is now saying “Oh, I thought those trips were ok because they were personal trip.” Really? 😳

Come on man, we’re not that dumb. Time for an independent ethics oversight. Sorry Clarence, time to pay for your own luxury trips. Better yet, it’s time to resign in shame. Of course he won’t do that because Republicans only care about money and power. Zero ethics.

Github

Since the beginning, GitHub.com has been a Ruby on Rails monolith. Today, the application is nearly two million lines of code and more than 1,000 engineers collaborate on it daily.

I had no idea GitHub ran on Rails. Huge codebase with a huge team.

I’m a Shadow Phantom

Horrible leadership, racism, sexism, abuse, and violations of countless labor laws in both the U.S. and internationally could only lead to one possible outcome. The lawsuits are piling up and the employees are going to take the hit. Payroll is going to be missed.

This is a great playbook for destroying a company.

Denver Pride

Beyond supporting Denver PrideFest, Molson Coors has a distinguished history of supporting LGBTQ communities across the country, with significant support for organizations such as Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Matthew Shepard Foundation, National Amateur Gay Athletics Association of America, National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, LGBT Victory Institute, Out & Equal, and One Colorado.

I haven’t looked into the whole kerfuffle but apparently Budweiser became enemy number one to MAGA’s everywhere.

Guess it’s time to add Coors to the list?

Good morning y’all. It’s raining this morning, a repeat performance of last weekend. I did manage to get the steps completed in the garden now we let the rain test my work.

This week I had to get a tooth and removed and a bone graft due to a 20 plus year old root canal failing. I don’t recommend it. 🦷

Time to go lay down in a field and have Kim throw some dirt on me. 😂

CNN

On Monday, it was Nashville’s turn to join the roster of cities made notorious by a mass shooting epidemic much of the country seems prepared to tacitly accept as the price of the right to own high-powered firearms. 

No words. 😔

Microsoft Design

Today marks the debut of the new Microsoft Teams app, released in public preview for Windows customers.

This redesign of Teams looks extremely thoughtful, well planned, and well executed. I’d like to get my hands on it and run it through dumpbin and other tools to see just how it’s put together.

It’s my understanding it’s a native app — no more Electron — with an HTML/CSS/JavaScript filling using the new, Chromium based, WebView2 control

It also means no Mac or Linux client until they can get those items ported to Mac and Linux. You can write C#/.Net code on Linux and Mac today, but as far as I know WebView2 hasn’t been ported. Heck, who knows, the shell around the app could be written in C++? I’m not really clear on that bit, it’s why I want to get my hands on it. 😁

Wired

The US Republican Party has become increasingly authoritarian and extreme in recent years, and it doesn’t seem likely to moderate that in the foreseeable future.

Red States are becoming more and more radical. The entire anti-LGBQT, anti-woman, anti-education, movement is in full swing.

Next thing you know women will have to walk 10 paces behind their husbands in their modest to the ground dress with their eyes on the ground. Disgusting.🤬

Dave Winer

In September 2004, the activity we called audioblogging was starting to gain traction.

Neat little story about how podcasting got its name. 👍🏼

The Guardian

A dispute between the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and Disney over control of the company’s Florida theme park district hinges on a clause referencing King Charles III and his descendants.

The authoritarian was outwitted in this story. If you haven’t heard about this yet go read it. 🤭

John Nunley

This year is supposed to be the year of the Rust GUI. So why is it still so unsafe?

This discussion focused around handles in Windows is quite interesting.

Having written a lot of Windows code that uses handles everywhere — HWND, HINSTANCE, HANDLE, anyone(?) — because that’s the way the Windows API works I don’t see it as an issue.

A HANDLE is a persisted thing that allows Windows to shuffle the underlying object around if needed. It’s a remnant of 16-bit Windows days, because 640k of memory was a precious commodity. It’s a safe thing to the developer as I see it but I do not fault anyone wanting to make things even safer for developers. 👍🏼

John Scalzi

Trump is and has always been the sort of person who believes that laws are for the little people, and has acted accordingly.

I love John Scalzi’s books and prior to Twitter becoming a worthless piece of poo I really enjoyed reading his tweets. In case you don’t know he’s had a blog for many years and it doesn’t disappoint.

Judo Blog

We believe that designer-developer handoff is broken and to solve this problem well requires software that is familiar to designers and developers alike—software that makes building an app’s user interface a collaborative process instead of handing off files back and forth.

I’d really like to take a look at Judo to see how it could improve my own coding efforts. Stream for Mac could use some help. It’s been a slog for me and I keep switching between AppKit and SwiftUI. I really need to focus on SwiftUI going forward.

Los Angeles Times

Only two centuries ago, a shallow inland sea dominated California’s Central Valley.

Tulare Lake is fascinating. California Highway 41 runs right through the lake between Lemoore and Kettleman City. I’ve heard tale in the olden days one had to catch a barge or take a boat from Lemoore to Kettle City.

We drove that route all the time when we lived there. It’s one way to get from the San Joaquin Valley to the Central Coast and all the lovely towns and beaches we fell in love with. Places like San Luis Obispo, Avila Beach, Cambria, Morro Bay, and Pismo Beach.

As it is today you’d have to go out to I-5 and loop back to get to Kettleman City.

Good morning. I got to sleep in a bit this morning and I’m grateful for it.

It’s wet and rainy this morning which has turned my garden steps project into a muddy mess so I won’t be working on that today. We’ll see how it looks Sunday morning.

In the meantime I hope you enjoy the links as much as I’m enjoying my coffee. ☕️

The Washington Post

Former president Donald Trump warned early Friday of “potential death & destruction” if he is charged in Manhattan in a criminal case related to alleged hush-money payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels to conceal an affair.

As much as I’d rather not waste time on this asshole I feel the need to.

TFG is the target in four separate investigations. Of which this is the least of them. A teensy part of me would like to see this one put on the back burner and one of the more serious crimes prosecuted, say election interference in Georgia or stealing Government documents — including Top Secret documents.

Should the whole paying the porn star off with campaign money go unpunished? No. The law is the law and nobody, not even an ex-President, is above it.

If he’s arrested I hope he is perp walked out of wherever he is. Yes, I’m being very petty, but this man has stomped on the law his entire life and walked away unscathed. It’s time he paid the piper.

And if you think it’s better not to arrest him because he’s asking his supporters to be violent then you don’t understand all we’re doing is postponing the inevitable. See my earlier mention of three other cases he’s involved in. ⚖️

CNN

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will appear later Thursday before US lawmakers, many of whom want the app banned in the United States because of the risk they say it presents to national security. The clamor for a sale is growing louder again.

Politics aside I feel like there is a technical solution to be had here. A 100% Western clone of TikTok running in the United States that cannot interact with TikTok in China. Run it as two companies doing similar things, including the Western version having its own cut of all source code and developed separately. The code would eventually diverge into something different on both sides.

I can’t see spinning it out to be an option and China can certainly hurt some large American companies in retaliation, Apple anyone? 🍎

It’s a real sticky situation. It’s a little ironic Apple may be in control of the system that excludes TikTok from the App Store if Congress passes laws banning it, not to mention Google doing the same for Android.

We’re gonna have a lot of pissed off teenagers in the States. 🤬

New Scientist

Mathematicians have discovered a single shape that can be used to cover a surface completely without ever creating a repeating pattern.

I would love to have a shower done using this pattern. 🎨

The Iconfactory

You’ll see a lot of problems with SwiftUI mentioned in these posts, but the overall experience was wonderful. This new way of building apps gets a wholehearted recommendation from our entire team: designers and developers alike.

I know I’m constantly talking about The Iconfactory. Why not? They’re an amazing group of folks who build beautiful, fun, applications for Mac and iOS and Wallaroo is no exception. I’ve been a subscriber since it shipped and rotate my wallpaper often. 🦘

I’m looking forward to the Mac release.

Oh, this snippet is from part one of a series so make sure to check out the other parts. They’re a great read for any Apple loving developer.🧰

Rogue Amoeba

Even 18 years on, I find this story rather terrifying. If not for an offhand conversation in which we had no involvement, things could have turned out very differently for our company.

It’s a short story well worth the time to read if you do anything with audio on your Mac. And by anything I mean listening to music or podcasts. 😃

The Conversation

This message of inclusion becomes even clearer when Jesus is later confronted by a single scribe (12:28). In answer to the scribe’s question on the most important laws, Jesus summarised the theological ethic of his gospel: love of God and love of neighbour (12:29-31).

Once again I make my case that Jesus was woke. In the end wokeness means love and equality for all. Jesus taught that. I 100% believe that. ❤️

David Smith

Widgetsmith has just achieved a remarkable milestone, surpassing 100 million downloads since its launch in September 2020. A number that I can’t really wrap my mind around. A number larger than the population of all but 14 countries (🤯).

I don’t know David personally but from all I’ve heard about him he’s one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet and I’m thrilled for him!

Congratulations! 🥳

Sourcegraph

In one shot, ChatGPT has produced completely working code from a sloppy English description! With voice input wired up, I could have written this program by asking my computer to do it.

I’ve been a little late to jump into the “AI” fray. It’s seems to be at peak hype and I’m still studying it. Part of me sees using it as cheating. Part of me sees it as a great way to learn. Two competing thoughts. I think it’s healthy and I expect to start using some of this tooling in the very near future for code projects. 🤖

I also wish the term AI wasn’t used for this stuff. It’s not the sentient form we’ve discussed in stories from Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man to the manipulative and ultimately murderous Ava from Ex Machina.

I know, those are robotic forms, but they’re what come to mind when I think AI. A form you recognize and can interact with as you would with any other human being.

It also makes me wonder where The Singularity fits in.

[Mac Rumors](<https://www.macrumors.com/2023/03/23/apple-tracking-staff-office-attendance/)

In a post on Twitter, Schiffer said that Apple is now actively tracking in-person attendance using badge records and will give employees “escalating warnings” if they don’t come in the required three times per week.

It sounds like the economic downturn is about to hit Apple. Having mandates like this that ultimately result in termination is a simple way to let go of people without announcing you’re slashing jobs.

All of this in the name of Shareholder value makes me kind of sick to my stomach. Yet another case of the rich becoming richer at the expense of common folk.

As I’m getting started it’s a nice crisp 27F outside just before 8AM EST. The sun is out and will be all day. We’ve had a very mild winter this year, with the exception of that polar blast around Christmas, and I don’t expect us to get any snow.🌞

My coffee is in hand, time to get started. Hope you enjoy the links. ☕️

Reuters

A gunman opened fire on Monday night on the main campus of Michigan State University, killing three people and injuring five, before an hours-long manhunt for the suspect ended with his death, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot, police said.

It’s the guns. I don’t know what else to say. Over and over and over again we see this and do nothing. A truly American thing and not one to be proud of. 😞

Chicago Tribune

Kansas City Chiefs win the Super Bowl for the 2nd time in 4 years, beating the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35 on a FG with 8 seconds left

I’m happy for the Chiefs and their fans. It was a great Super Bowl, a nail biter, not a blowout. Oh, and the Mahomes to Kelce connection is without a doubt the best in football and one of the best ever. If Patrick Mahomes can stay healthy and have a 20-year run he’ll break all kinds of records and win some more rings.

Macworld

Just short of the 10th anniversary of that first Mac Pro misstep, Apple is now late in concluding its processor transition by shipping the first Apple silicon-based Mac Pro. What’s worse, reports from Bloomberg suggest that the company has ditched the next Mac Pro’s highest-end processor, calling the computer’s entire purpose into question.

Given Apple’s new chip architecture with memory and processor built into the chip I have a difficult time defining what a pro machine should or would be. Maybe you have to accept a new definition? Maybe it doesn’t mean a flexible and expandable architecture?

What I’d like to see is Apple give the Professional computing world a way to use their current investment in Mac Pro a way to replace the x86 based Xeon chips with Apple Silicon. Of course Apple would never do such a thing because money. 💸

Linode

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Feb. 15, 2022 – Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the world’s most trusted solution to power and protect digital experiences, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Linode, one of the easiest-to-use and most trusted infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform providers.

I follow a number of indie software developers and they tend to use Linode for their service backends. Two that come to mind are Micro.blog, the system I use for publishing my blog, and Overcast, the indie podcast app for iOS. I’m sure there are many more out there I don’t know about. I’ve never done any large scale backend work for my indie endeavors but if I did I’d most likely choose Linode because they’re inexpensive, reliable, and have great customer service.

Hopefully they don’t start hiking prices, laying off people, and becoming a terrible place to host. 🤞🏼

Semafor

Spotify’s podcast push began in earnest in 2016, when Ek invited audio executives including higher ups at Gimlet to the company’s headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden to explain the emerging American podcast market.

Spotify calls their recorded audio podcasting. It’s not. Podcasting is the audio plus a delivery mechanism in the form of RSS. Yes, you can have a podcast as I’ve defined it behind a paywall. They just want to lock you into their app with their advertising and try to upsell you on other things. That’s fine. It’s their business but don’t call them podcasts. Ok, off the soap box. 📦

I was listening to the Pivot Podcast last night and Scott Galloway point out that very few podcasts make a profit. That’s true of what he defines as a podcast. Remember, this started as an open technology built by Dave Winer and Adam Curry. It was used and loved long before businessmen decided they could monetize it. Just like blogging. It’s was and still is a way for us mere mortals to communicate to the outside world, even if we’re not paid a dime to do it.

Oh, and I have a feeling some of the small podcasting shops are doing just fine, but they do things differently and have well loved shows. They’re just not exclusive to Spotify or Apple or whatever Big Co place you get your podcasts. They’re fully open and downloadable using your podcast player of choice because they’re built on top of RSS as the delivery mechanism.

The key phrase to listen for when you hear a podcast advertised is ”Download wherever you get your podcasts.” Then you know it’s a real podcast.

Crooks and Liars

The hearing got incredibly creepy when Arkansas state Sen. Matt McKee asked a trans pharmacist if she had a penis. “Do you have a penis?” he asked the woman, who seemed stunned at the question.

Unbelievable. I wish we could get past this and so many other things. So many people want to control how others behave and how they live their life. Often times based on some form of religion they’ve twisted to support their hate, disdain, or jealously of others.

Let people live their lives. Show them respect and grace as fellow human beings. It’s not our job to tell folks how they should live. That goes for women, brown skinned people, and the LBGTQ+ community. ❤️

Doctorow

After half a decade of sedate, steady growth, Mastodon suddenly surged, from 600,000 daily users to 2.6 million in the space of months.

Some folks are already writing off Mastodon. Silly people. If you’re looking to get a huge following and interacting with movie stars, influencers, government officials, and the rich and famous, don’t expect that from Mastodon. It’s not built for that. It’s built like your everyday neighborhood for us commoners to engage in. It’s real people carrying on real discussions. Sure, there’s gonna be some hate but there are mechanisms in place to take care of that crap. I love it and I’m excited to see it grow. There’s no algorithm to encourage you to follow people or corporate master to satisfy and no need to grow to billions of users because of it.

It’s like blogging. It’s all open and up to us, everyday people, to keep it. ✌🏼

New York Times

Lurking behind the concerns of Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, over the content of a proposed high school course in African American studies, is a long and complex series of debates about the role of slavery and race in American classrooms.

Talk about hateful, mean, and unsympathetic to fellow human beings. DeSantis is an authoritarian who wants to mold Florida into his own disgusting image. He doesn’t want you to think for yourself or question authority, no sir. He wants a bunch of dumb drones serving the rich and powerful.

Get out if you can. It’s a terrible state. If you can’t, or don’t want to, I wish you luck and hope you find a way to help change the state. 🍀

Joseph Heck

In the past couple of years, I’ve had the occasion to want to make an XCFramework – a bundle that’s used by Apple platforms to encapsulate binary frameworks or libraries – a couple of times.

I don’t know Joseph personally but I’ve interacted with him on the NetNewsWire Slack and Mastodon and he’s a really kind, thoughtful, selfless man. He’s given me feedback on Stream and Mac programming questions. All that to say he’s one of the good ones.

Anywho, this is a great piece on how he built an XCFramework with a Rust core. Rust has become the new, safe, language for creating highly performant software and being able to use it natively on iOS or Mac and integrate it right into Xcode is wonderful. 🧰

Cory Doctrow

Mobile tech is a duopoly run by two companies – Google and Apple – with a combined market cap of $3.5 trillion. Each company uses a combination of tech, law, contract and market power to force sellers to do commerce via an app, and each one extracts a massive commission on all in-app sales – 15-30%!

Web tools continue to improve to the point that native apps may become a thing of the past for many companies. Of course folks like me will continue to do native iOS, and hopefully Mac, apps for as long as we can, but the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Native apps are becoming less and less important with each passing day. Learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

New York Times

Over the past year, we have seen a sweeping and ferocious attack on the rights and dignity of transgender people across the country.

A really great piece by Jamelle Bouie. Please, go read it if you can.

Yours truly who accidentally started a conversation about SwiftUI List performance. Smooth, fast, stable, code is important to me and most developers. we do strive to make our apps the best they can be. I’m still learning, still trying, to make all my apps better each time I work on one. This conversation may change how I do Stream for Mac.

I’ve had a head cold for the past week and my body is finally getting on top of it, finally. As a result I’m tired this morning and my brain is foggy and doesn’t want to do anything. Coffee to the rescue, I hope! ☕️

Hope you enjoy the links.

CNN

More than 23,000 people have been killed and tens of thousands injured after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Turkey and Syria on Monday, officials said.

It’s been a very sad week for the people of Turkey and Syria. So many dead and wounded. I haven’t kept up with it like I normally would for such a tragedy. Why is that?

Thankfully people are still being rescued from the rubble. America needs to send help.

Arstechnica

According to The Register, Google and Mozilla have recently been spotted working on versions of Chromium and Firefox that use their normal Blink and Gecko rendering engines, respectively.

It doesn’t surprise me to hear Google and Mozilla have native browsers built for iOS. Why not, their code is very portable already, it makes sense.

Some competition on the platform would be good for Apple and consumers.

Colm Doyle

It’s hardly insightful to suggest that the last few years have substantially changed the day to day experience of a knowledge worker. Nearly overnight even the most remote skeptical leadership teams were forced to embrace flexible work practices like working from home.

At WillowTree our CEO, Tobias, is a huge proponent of working in the office full time. When COVID hit we were just getting ready to move into our newly renovated building at Woolen Mills, but that didn’t happen and everybody went remote.

Fast forward a year and a half later and WillowTree is making preparations to return to the office on a hybrid schedule. Then COVID spiked again so it was out on hold. Eventually a poll was taken, we do lots of polls at WillowTree, asking if folks preferred in office or work from home. Tobias himself was shocked to learn that over 20% of the company preferred it.

Things changed based on the poll and a team was created to that would allow anyone to work from anywhere. I’m part of that team and I love it. I’m grateful our leadership is open to big change. So far it’s been really amazing.

Facebook Engineering Blog

Facebook for iOS (FBiOS) is the oldest mobile codebase at Meta. Since the app was rewritten in 2012, it has been worked on by thousands of engineers and shipped to billions of users, and it can support hundreds of engineers iterating on it at a time.

If you’re a developer go read this piece. When folks think of mobile software they most likely think of toy sized apps like Stream, not a lot going on. Then you run into a beast of a codebase like Facebook and you realize mobile software is “real” bonafide software with real challenges.

Mike Masnick

In the past few decades, however, rather than building new protocols, the internet has grown up around controlled platforms that are privately owned.

This is a piece from 2019 and it holds up really well. He’s basically discussing what ActivityPub and Mastodon have become. A lot of the challenges around siloed social networks is around “free speech.” I put that in quotes because most folks think free speech is a free for all, anything goes, and you can’t ban me because I said something nasty or threatening to you. Of course a platform could ban you and it has nothing to do with free speech. Companies and individuals don’t have to take the abuse and can choose to ban you if they want. Mastodon has helped this in many ways. I run my own Mastodon server and it’s by invitation only so I know and trust the folks on it to maintain a certain decorum. I know they won’t be nasty or threatening and it’s self policing. We need more small instances with better community management.

Cloudflare

Today we’re introducing Wildebeest, an open-source, easy-to-deploy ActivityPub and Mastodon-compatible server built entirely on top of Cloudflare’s Supercloud.

I read through this post and I think it’s really wonderful to see addition ActivityPub based services come online. It’s an exciting time!

Cordi

About the tech experience on Mastodon. This is the last of three posts I have on Mastodon. I’ve been on the app for more than two months and have been content to ghost Twitter.

A nice series of posts about one persons experience with Mastodon. If you have friends fearful of joining they should go read this and see what someone else has experienced. Sure, it’s not Twitter, it’s even better, and it’s growing day by day.

Jack Dorsey believed Twitter should be open, not a silo. Mastodon and ActivityPub are delivering that vision. A central hub, controlled by a single corporation, is no longer in charge. The people are.

Digits to Dollars

After 30 years of dominance, the industry has come to come view Intel as a giant who has fallen on hard times. We do not think this is the right way to view the company, and it creates mental blind spots which hinder our ability to assess what are the right next steps for the company.

It’s hard to believe Intel is having so much trouble. They coasted for so long on their x86 architecture and still make a ton of money from it but the times they are a changing. Apple creating their own, much better, silicon must scare the pants off of Intel internally. They’re lucky Apple doesn’t care to sell their tech to any computer manufacturer. Imagine a Windows PC running on Apple Silicon. That would be glorious. 😃

Dave Rogers

What is somewhat more puzzling to me is the nature or character of the people who are attracted to this type. The toadies and sycophants, the enablers and lickspittles who compete for proximity to someone in power, someone in control.

I love reading Dave’s stuff. He’s an extremely kind, compassionate, man and a great writer. Unfortunately he lives in Florida and that state is full of looney birds, especially at the government level. Their Governor is is King Looney, a complete nutter, with fantasies of making Florida a totalitarian government run by him. His desire to control everything is exactly the opposite of a free nation and against everything our nation was founded on. He needs to go.

Dave, like many of us, can’t understand why people want this sort of strongman creating horrible policy in charge. Why would you want your rights squashed? You’re American, don’t you believe in freedom for all?

Good morning coffee lovers! Hope you’re ready for some randomness because you’re gonna get some. Cheers! ☕️

Associated Press

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Thousands of frustrated Texans shivered in homes without power for a second day Thursday, most of them around booming Austin, and fading hopes of a quick fix stirred grim memories of a deadly 2021 blackout after an icy winter storm across the southern U.S.

Poor Texans are, once again, struggling through big cold snap. It’s not surprising though, the GOP run state doesn’t care about people, only profits.

I read something yesterday that rings true: How can you tell when you’re going to have six more weeks of winter? Ted Cruz goes to Mexico.

Folks, stop voting for Republicans. They don’t care about you one little bit.

Ars Technica

HBO’s The Last of Us tries a little tenderness in a surprising episode 3

This was a fantastic episode! We got to see a couple live their best lives under terrible circumstances. I didn’t play the game so I didn’t know Bill was gay but he was already an interesting character up to that point. A prepper with the talent of a gourmet chef and a musician. Being gay was just the cherry on top and his commitment to his partner was heart warming. This episode was a quiet reprieve to what I’d imagine will be non-stop violence to the bitter end.

ESPN

Tom Brady says he is retiring “for good” from football, ending a storied 23-year NFL career during which the star quarterback won seven Super Bowls and set numerous records.

Tom, Tom, Tom. I have a horrible feeling Mr. Brady returned to football because his wife broke the news to him that she wanted a divorce not long after he retired. Football was the distraction he needed to get through it. Now the divorce is final, he’s suffered that initial pain, and it’s time to move on.

I’m so sorry you had to go through that Tom. Divorce is nothing but pain for all involved. I hope you have a beautiful life. You are football’s GOAT.

NetNewsWire

Because of Twitter’s announcement that free access to the Twitter API will end February 9, we will be removing Twitter integration from NetNewsWire in the next release (6.1.1) for Mac and iOS.

Space Karen strikes again! This time he’s hitting anyone whow uses the Twitter API. He’s tightening up while over on Mastodon things remain completely open for business! Following folks on Mastodon from your favorite feed read is so easy you don’t need a special plug-in to do it! It supports RSS right out of the box. Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

Also, who wants this domain? It would be great for a Space Karen watch site, like Twitter is going great.

Jeffrey Zeldman

Before the present owner, I was a Twitter Blue customer, because I always pay for software—to support its creators and help prevent it from disappearing, as so many great websites and platforms have done over the years.

Jeffrey Zeldman is an American treasure and web hero. I’ve enjoyed reading him for years and years now. This time Jeffrey shares his adventure of trying to give Twitter money. Their payment system failed. Doesn’t surprise me.

America, America

The authoritarian strongman types want us to believe in their power. They may even want us to think that their power is divinely influenced, a sign that they’re not like the rest of us, but better. Look no further than the surreal video released just weeks before the Florida gubernatorial election, complete with Voice of God-style narration and mad text about how Ron DeSantis is the fulfillment of God’s plan for a protector and a fighter.

I’m sure Florida has it’s share of wonderful people but why would you choose to live there? DeSantis is a true authoritarian scared of America’s future without bullies like him. Future America will happen. You may slow it down but it will happen. I hope to one day have a liberal society built on love and compassions for our fellow man, not some nasty place full of scared, old, white men grasping for every little bit of power they can. It’ll happen. May just be after I’m going. Here’s hoping it happens before then.

eFinancialCareers

The real problem is that C++ is neither easy nor loved. Rust got an 87% approval rate in the “most loved” category of the Stack Overflow Survey. However, only 9.3% of respondents used Rust at all and only 8.8% did so professionally. C++, meanwhile, languished at 48%.

Look, I don’t want to work on some web3 thing either. Why would I use my talents as a C++ developer to work on a thing I don’t care for? Sure, you could offer me tons of cash and it would be tempting but ultimately I’d be bored to death.

I’ve worked on award winning Windows Applications and highly performant video encoding and decoding systems. I can’t see working on trading systems. Nope, nope, nope.

NBC News

The U.S. military has been monitoring a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that has been hovering over the northern U.S. for the past few days, and military and defense leaders have discussed shooting it out of the sky, according to two U.S. officials and a senior defense official.

This is really strange to me. We should bring it down, but in a controlled way if at all possible. It would be fascinating to examine what the onboard package contains.

Who knows, maybe it’s full of radioactive material in hopes we will shoot it down. That would be our luck. 😂

Yahoo!

WESTLAKE, Ohio, January 30, 2023–(BUSINESS WIRE)–TravelCenters of America Inc. (Nasdaq: TA), the nation’s largest publicly-traded full-service travel center network, announced today an agreement with Electrify America to offer electric vehicle charging at select TA/Petro locations with the first stations planned to be deployed in 2023. Electrify America is the largest open direct current fast-charging network in the U.S.

This is excellent! There are so many nice electric vehicles on the market today so setting up a massive charging network makes sense.

The old time car companies have caught up to Space Karen’s car company and in many ways surpassed it. Good. We need the competition.