Rob Fahrni

Priss and Flynn living the good life.

Ms. Gracie living her best life. 🥰

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

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

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

I hope you enjoy the links.

Erik S Lesser • VICE

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jonathan J. Cooper • The Associated Press

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

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

Noor Al-Sabai • Futurism

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

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

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

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

Dave Winer • Scripting News

How podcasting got its name

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

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

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

Podcasting is amazing and I appreciate it.

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

NASCAR

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

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

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

Tim Hardwick • MacRumors

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

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

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

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

Jake Kanter • Deadline

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

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

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

Gustaf Kilander • The Independent

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

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

I hope the man loses by a wide margin.

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

John Scalzi

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

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

Hmmmm, I think he’s on Bluesky. 🤔

Louie Mantia

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

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

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

Jowi Morales • Tom’s Hardware

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

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

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

Hello there Walking Stick.

This is the monster that got Kolby the other day. It was buzzing around the back door and he swatted it out of the air. It latched onto the underside of his paw and stung him. It didn’t last long after that.

Kolby hopped around for a while, licked his paw for an hour or so, and was all back to normal. He’s been himself ever since. Still snapping and swatting at bugs outside.

In the pictures I’ve included it’s missing the back part of its abdomen. The stinger was pretty darned long.

Fangora

After bringing in an estimated $11.5 million over the long Labor Day weekend, director Fede Alvarez’s Romulus has now earned $91 million domestically along with a huge $195 million overseas, bringing its running total to $296 million worldwide. That means it’s second only to director Ridley Scott’s ambitious 2012 prequel Prometheus, which took in $403 million globally in its day.

Emphasis is mine. Prometheus is the number one movie in the Alien franchise? 😳

That’s shocking to me. Prometheus was good, don’t get me wrong, but to be the top film is, well, shocking.

Here’s my list. I know you didn’t ask for it, but you’re gonna get it anyway. 😂

Worst to first

• Alien Resurrection
• Prometheus
• Alien 3
• Alien: Covenant Alien
• Aliens

Aliens was such a masterful piece of filmmaking.

I haven’t seen Alien: Romulus so my list isn’t complete yet, but I’m looking forward to seeing it.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

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

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

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

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

Stephanie K. Baer • The San Francisco Standard

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

R.I.P.

Ryan Smith • AnandTech

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

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

WordPress Blog

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

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

Alex Kladov

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

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

Tim Hardwick • MacRumors

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

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

Asahi Lina

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

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

Toby Christie • Sports Illustrated

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

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

You can’t make it out in these pictures but some trees around our home are starting to change color. It’s incredible how that just happens. Before you know it the ground is covered in multi-colored leaves. Perfect for making piles so grandkids can jump in them. 😃

Chillin’ for a bit.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’ve been a bit obsessed with the idea of creating a CAD package for the Mac recently. For the challenge of it is why, but it would only be doable in a decent amount of time with financial backing large enough to hire a few folks to pull it off.

There is a way to jumpstart the process. The Open Design Alliance has portable libraries for reading and writing DWG files as well as rendering and so much more. All in portable C++.

Imagine a beautiful CAD app created just for the Mac. And yes, I know many already exist. 😁

Oh, right, I have a Mac app I need to finish.

Well, let’s get to it! Enjoy the links.

NBC News

DNC 2024 highlights: Kamala Harris accepts historic nomination in speech capping Democratic convention

We have our nominee! Now, let’s push her across the finish line and get our first Madame President!

Marc Palmer • Shareshot

Today we launched Shareshot! We’ve been working on this app for almost exactly a year, and we’re so pleased to be able to finally ship it. Here’s a little backstory and behind-the-scenes for those of you into app development.

Congratulations, Marc! Shareshot is a beautiful example of iOS craftsmanship. Go give it a try!

Alex Gaynor

I am an unrepentant advocate for migrating away from memory-unsafe languages (C and C++) to memory safe languages in security-relevant contexts. Many people reply that migrating large code bases to new languages is expensive, and we’d be better off making C++ safer. This is a reasonable response, after all there’s an enormous amount of C++ in the wild.

There is an enormous amount of C and C++ in the world. Too much to simply replace. I like Alex’s pragmatism on the matter. He has some proposals to improve the language without taking it too far down the path to incompatibility.

Just this week my interest in Rust began to grow. I’ve been using Swift daily since 2014, maybe 2015, and I really love the language and its ability to leverage the compiler to fix many of the memory issues seen in C and C++, like dangling pointers, forgotten allocations, and object lifetimes. We also have Rust to provide us with a solid memory protection model and the ability to be used for high performance code that is cross platform.

Rewriting software is costly and can also cost you your company. So taking that on should probably be avoided like the plague.

What if you picked your battles? How about writing new code in Rust or Swift? Perhaps improve public access to API’s by fronting it with Rust? How about picking some code known to cause a lot of crashes in your app and rewrite just that bit?

We can use tried and true methods in C++ to improve memory safety but it requires developers to be extremely disciplined.

Simple things like filling new memory allocations with known patterns. I prefer to fill the memory with zeros. You can also do the same when you delete it.

Reference counted pointers — AKA smart pointers — help.

Modern C++ has introduced mechanisms to transfer pointer ownership, always a tough problem to handle and the problem that lead to the creation of smart pointers.

Anywho, the piece is an easy read with good ideas. Go give it a gander.

Jess Weatherbed • The Verge

Many Procreate users can breathe a sigh of relief now that the popular iPad illustration app has taken a definitive stance against generative AI. “We’re not going to be introducing any generative AI into our products,” Procreate CEO James Cuda said in a video posted to X. “I don’t like what’s happening to the industry, and I don’t like what it’s doing to artists.”

I can really appreciate this stance. Artists often have a deep psychological attachment to their work and the creative process — hell — they go through to bring it to life. Taking that work, that style, and using it to train an AI to rip them off is just slimy.

Caleb Newton • Bipartisan Report

A dozen individuals who served as lawyers in Republican presidential administrations are bucking Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and endorsing Democratic presidential pick Kamala Harris in a new letter that was publicized first at Fox News. The list includes prominent former judge J. Michael Luttig, who also served in the Reagan Administration.

Even with all of this at least half the country will vote for the Orange Man. It’s shocking, really.

Joe Brockmeier • lwn.net

The FreeBSD Project is, for the second time this year, engaging in a long-running discussion about the possibility of including Rust in its base system. The sequel to the first discussion included some work by Alan Somers to show what it might look like to use Rust code in the base tree. Support for Rust code does not appear much closer to being included in FreeBSD’s base system, but the conversation has been enlightening.

Speaking of Rust! Apparently Rust has found its way into the Linux Kernel and Microsoft has used it for Windows API development. It’s time for FreeBSD to get on board!

I wonder if Apple with push some Swift into Darwin or XNU at some point? Swift was written so it could be used for system level programming.

Carole Cadwalladr • The Guardian

Inciting rioters in Britain was a test run for Elon Musk. Just see what he plans for America

Musk has gone deep down the MAGA rabbit hole. His ketamine addled brain lives in its own world of conspiracies and white supremacy.

He’s unraveling in real time. Dumping his, often wacko, thoughts on X. He behaves more like a two year old than a man in his 50s.

Why do people still believe this man is some kind of genius? He’s a man child who throws hissy fits until he gets what he wants.

Money can’t buy happiness but it can buy politicians.

Matt Birchler • Birchtree

Why does Apple feel it’s worth trashing their relationship with creators and developers so that they can take 30% of the money I pay an up-and-coming creator who is trying to make rent in time each month? This isn’t a hypothetical, I genuinely want to know. Is the goal to turn into Microsoft, because this is how you turn into Microsoft.

Hate to say it Matt but Apple is today what Microsoft was in the 90’s. They are the 800lb gorilla in the room throwing their weight around.

I really love Apple products and their development tools and can’t see switching away from them. I just wish they’d be a bit kinder to the development community, that’s all.

Kelly Dobkin • Los Angeles Times

chef and co-owner Eric Park serves a black sesame misugaru drink that combines espresso, oat milk, the multigrain powder and gets topped with black sesame cream. It’s nutty, sweet and frothy, but not too rich thanks to the bitterness of the espresso.

Ok, now I really want to try misugaru. The one described above sounds incredible. 🤤

Alex Henderson • Raw Story

Reading through the Ohio Revised Code, Case Western Reserve University Law Professor Atiba Ellis couldn’t help looking for an alternative interpretation. Was there an error? Shoddy drafting? Because why on earth, he wondered, would a person clear that third bar, and submit documentation proving they broke the law by registering to vote?

This is just another GOP scheme to kick people off voter rolls. 🤬

Foone

ahh, another startup that burnt out trying to build some silly AI project on crap hardware. I wonder what they did? I check their URL: ahh. healthcare. great, great.

This Mastodon thread is an interesting read and a cautionary tale. Before you sale off old hardware make sure you remove its storage or at the very least wipe the storage with a destructive reformat.

Zarar

Around 2AM this morning I had a realization that this was the most stressed I have ever been. On verge of a complete breakdown.

Ahhh, the life of a software developer. I’ve seen and experienced this stress on numerous occasions. I don’t recommend it.

Daryl Baxter • iMore

This MacBook app generated $100,000 in seven days, now Stripe won’t pay up

This is a wild story and I hope the developer is able to get paid and save his company.

Kim has been making family photo albums and she ran across pictures of 40 year old Rob with dark hair! It’s wild to think my hair was dark brown at one time. 🤣

She sent me a picture of a couple of them and said I looked just like my brother.

I mean, we are brothers.

I’ve been meaning to register Hayseed as an LLC for eons.

Finally did it.

Had a little help mowing the lawn.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I still get a bit lost in my new gig — at WillowTree — as a React Native/TypeScript dev. The syntax is making more sense and getting easier to follow, but, I do have a difficult time understanding the errors produced by yarn ts:check. It’s the same each time I learn a new language.

I’m also developing an interest in Rust. That’ll have to be a part time interest for a long time I suppose. I have more important business to attend to. 😃

Onward!

Filipe Espósito • 9to5Mac

Shareshot is an iOS app that transforms how you share iPhone and iPad screenshots

A friend of mine, Marc Palmer, is part of the duo who created Shareshot! It is, as always, absolutely beautiful, full featured, and stable.

If I’m not too lazy moving forward I should use it to make screenshots for Stream blog posts and the like.

Congratulations, Marc! 🥳

Andrew Carter • WillowTree Blog

Mobile app interactivity, multimodal voice technology, and AI are all converging with Apple Intelligence — Apple’s new artificial intelligence feature set announced at this year’s WWDC, coming soon with iOS 18 (maybe in October). And the secret sauce powering those awesome interactions is something called App Intents.

Andrew is pretty legendary in the halls of WillowTree. So damned smart and witty, and he plays a mean fiddle and banjo.

Anywho, go give his piece on App Intents a gander, you might learn a thing or two.

Kelly Crandall • Racer

Austin Dillon has been stripped of the NASCAR Cup Series playoff eligibility that came with his victory at Richmond Raceway.

Austin Dillion looked great all night. I don’t recall how many laps he lead but it was a lot. He was two laps short of victory when a late caution came out.

On the restart he was beat off the line by Joey Lagano and fell into second place.

I wanted to see Mr. Dillion win so badly. He hasn’t had a win in a couple years and Richard Childress Racing needed one but the way he did it was not great.

He kept the win but was stripped of his points and playoff berth. They should’ve disqualified him and given the win to Legano, if I’m being honest about my feelings.

Scharon Harding • Ars Technica

Sonos is laying off about 100 people, the company confirmed on Wednesday. The news comes as Sonos is expecting to spend $20 to $30 million in the short term to repair the damage from its poorly received app update.

It’s incredible how much an app redesign can make or break an application or company.

Another critically acclaimed podcasting app called Overcast was also redesigned and released recently. It too has had a very difficult time with its subscribers. Lots of one star reviews and hate.

Rewrites can kill companies. Don’t do it. Evolve your code over time. Think of it as a Ship of Theseus.

Tasha Robinson • Polygon

Ryan Reynolds had very specific tech (and humor) requirements for Wolverine’s corpse

I still haven’t see the new Deadpool but I really want to. Deadpool’s obsession with Wolverine is funny as heck and I’m here for it. Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman are hysterical.

Juan José López Jaimez and Meador Inge • Google Bug Hunters

In a throwback to the past, this blog post takes us on a journey back to a time when eBPF was a focal point in the realm of kernel security research. In this update, we recount the discovery of CVE-2023-2163, a vulnerability within the eBPF verifier, what our root-cause analysis process looked like, and what we did to fix the issue.

Fresh off the heels of the Crowdstrike fiasco we get a story of how Google engineers found vulnerabilities in a Linux technology that allows for similar extensions to the OS. Similar in desired outcome, not in implementation.

Matthias Endler

Quite a few websites are unusable by now because they got “optimized for Chrome.” Microsoft Teams, for example, and the list is long. These websites fail for no good reason.

Chrome has definitely become the new Internet Explorer in a way. Devs have become lazy and don’t code for the open web, they’re coding against a specific browser. Not good. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Stan Alcorn • Rest of World

How Spotify started — and killed — Latin America’s podcast boom

What Spotify has done is not podcasting if it doesn’t allow any podcast player to subscribe to a feed. That’s part of what makes a podcast a podcast. What they’ve done is something that needs a new name.

Lately I’ve heard some podcasts announce ad free versions available on Apple Podcasts, which is also just as bad as Spotify’s locked up audio thing.

Please, don’t do this, keep your podcast a podcast and find a better way to create subscriptions. Others have done it. You can too.

Patreon

Apple is requiring that Patreon switch to their iOS in-app purchase system starting this November, or risk being removed from the App Store. Here’s what’s coming, and what you can do about it.

My opinion on this is simple.

If they really believe in creators Patreon should abandon their iOS App in favor of a really great mobile experience on their website.

Liam Proven • The Register

Before WordPerfect, the most popular work processor was WordStar. Now, the last ever DOS version has been bundled and set free by one of its biggest fans.

It’s not surprising how many fans of WordStar exist. Many of them are novelists and columnists. The best of the best writers in the world. Of course they’re most likely of a certain vintage, if you know what I mean? 😂

I started as a BASIC programmer and used WordStar as my editor until I discovered Brief. True story.

David Edwards • Raw Story

Judge Chutkan faces call to seize Trump’s passport after threat to flee to Venezuela

Can Judge Chutkan do the opposite and encourage Trump to move to Venezuela, now? That would solve a lot of problems with the upcoming election and help preserve democracy.

It would be a great service to the country. 🇺🇸

Rex Huppke • USA TODAY

Trump rambles, slurs his way through Elon Musk interview. It was an unmitigated disaster.

I listened to it for a few minutes and the Orange Man sounded like Sylvester the cat!

Sufferin’ Suckatash! 😋

Dunkin’s Bonfire S’mores Frozen Coffee is absolutely delicious.

It’s so good and bad for you I wish I’d never discovered it. 😃

I’m getting pretty good at this selfie thing all the kids do these days.

And, yes, it is hot and sweaty outside today. The yard won’t care for itself.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

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

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

We’ll see what next week brings.

Hope you enjoy the links.

Alex Butler • UPI

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

YAY KATIE! 🇺🇸

Jay Famiglietti • The New York Times

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

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

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

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

Herb Sutter

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other words, ‘a’ is random.

Mike Masnick • Techdirt

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

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

More Fediverse integration, not less.

Bradley Brownell • Jalopnik

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

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

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

Nadine Yousif and Michelle Fleury • BBC News

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

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

Stephen Moore

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

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

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

It’s just the way, at least for me. 😃

Hanaa' Tameez • Nieman Journalism Lab

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

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

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

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

Simon Willison

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

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

Charlie Savage • The New York Times

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

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

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

Nikita Shukla • earth.org

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

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

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

Stephanie Apstein • Sports Illustrated

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

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

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

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

John Brayton • Golden Hill Software

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

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

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

Congratulations, John! ❤️

ESPN

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

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

Congratulations, Simone! You make us proud! 🇺🇸

Kylie Robison • The Verge

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

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

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

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

Epic Games

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

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

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

Andrew Harnik • AlterNet

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

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

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

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

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

NASCAR

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

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

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

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

Eirka Turlock • CNN

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

This is completely unacceptable! 🤣

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

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

David Goodwin • AppleVis

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

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

Game Informer

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

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

Josh Marshall • Talking Points Memo

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan Adamczeski • Advocate

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

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

Pathetic man.

Lincoln Carpenter • PC Gamer

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

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

Jordan Novet, Ari Levy • CNBC

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

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

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

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

Theo Burman • Newsweek

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

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

The poor folks in Canada as well. 🇨🇦

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

Since we can use Swift to write code for Windows I’m excited to give it a try.

I’m hoping I can bring over all of Stream’s model, network, utility, and view model code over without changes, or perhaps few changes?

The other thing I’m thinking is, I should be able to port my C++ framework for building Windows apps to Swift. That would be something really special and would allow me to do a full version of Stream for Windows. Heck, if my shared code comes right over and I can rebuild my Framework in Swift, I should be able to do a Windows release pretty quickly.

Of course I really need to focus on the Mac version first.

Hey, Microsoft, can you make Visual Studio support Swift as a first class citizen so we can build and debug using it? Please? 🙏🏼

Michael Gold • The New York Times

In the closing minutes of his speech to a gathering of religious conservatives on Friday night, former President Donald J. Trump told Christians that if they voted him into office in November, they would never need to vote again.

“Christians, get out and vote. Just this time,” he said at The Believers’ Summit, an event hosted by the conservative advocacy group Turning Point Action, in West Palm Beach, Fla. “You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

The Cheeto finally did it! He said the quiet part out loud for all Americans to hear. He doesn’t plan on leaving office at the end of his four year term if he wins in 2024. Unbelievable.

If that doesn’t stop you from voting for Trump nothing will and our beautiful Republic will be lost forever.

Folks have been saying he’s a threat to democracy for quite a while and he just said it himself. Believe him. Vote for Kamala Harris.

We also need to be extra vigilant just before, during, and after the election, especially if he loses.

Rest assured there will be another coup attempt if he loses.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

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

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

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

Barack Obama

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

Thank you President Biden for serving your country. ❤️

Robert Reich

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

Biden bowed out with grace and dignity.

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

David Gilmour • Mediaite

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

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

Luke Deniston

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

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

Jess Weatherbed • The Verge

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

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

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

The Futon Critic

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

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

M.G. Siegler • Spyglass

Apple Should Buy HBO

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

Isabel van Brugen • Newsweek

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

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

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

Jowi Morales • Tom’s Hardware

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

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

Gil Duran • The New Republic

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

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

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

Elizabeth Lopatto • The Verge

The moral bankruptcy of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz

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

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

Stu Sjouwerman • KnowBe4

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

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

Steven Vaughan-Nichols • ZDNet

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

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

It’s a good deal for corporations.

One of Kim’s mini roses.

Thank you President Biden for digging America out of the mess the former guy left.

You’ve served your country with dignity and respect. We won’t soon forget that.

Switched up the good old springboard again. I’m diggin’ the new neon theme in McClockface.

The Official Windows Blog

On July 18, CrowdStrike, an independent cybersecurity company, released a software update that began impacting IT systems globally. Although this was not a Microsoft incident, given it impacts our ecosystem, we want to provide an update on the steps we’ve taken with CrowdStrike and others to remediate and support our customers.

What Microsoft is actually saying:

WHAT THE F*CK DID YOU DO!?

I still love Microsoft Windows as an operating system and development platform so this event is a real bummer for everyone involved.

Lotsa love to all those IT folks out there busting their butts to fix up their broken PC’s. ❤️