Rob Fahrni

I usually provide my own commentary under each snippet of news with my big link posts but not today. I collected so many links before posting I figure it’s just better to throw in some commentary here at the top and call it good.

TL;DR: Space Karen is out of touch with how his social network was being used and why it had become the defacto place for breaking news. By trying to monetize it he’s busted it.

Tech Dirt

Elon Musk has demonstrated contempt for free speech in general, and journalism in particular, with his behavior at Twitter.

NPR

Twitter labels NPR’s account as ‘state-affiliated media’, which is untrue

WP Tavern

Twitter suspended WordPress.com’s access to the Twitter API without notice yesterday.

Platformer

His arraignment was carried live on cable news and National Public radio, but I learned of the day’s events where I still see almost everything first: Twitter, which, despite its perilous decline under Elon Musk, remains home base for the U.S. press corps even as the site itself increasingly orients itself to make fools of them.

Reuters

NEW YORK, March 31 (Reuters) - Elon Musk asked a U.S. judge on Friday to throw out a $258 billion racketeering lawsuit accusing him of running a pyramid scheme to support the cryptocurrency Dogecoin.

The Editorial Board

Musk sucks at Twitter, succeeds at fascism

The Atlantic

Today, Twitter feels more expired than evil. The company is worth less than half of what Musk paid when he bought it in October, according to the chief twit himself.

ArsTechnica

Twitter has made good on one of CEO Elon Musk’s many promises, posting on a Friday afternoon what it claims is the code for its tweet recommendation algorithm on GitHub.

Vox

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he said he wanted to protect its place as a “digital town square,” where ideas from all corners of the internet could flourish. But soon, if you want your voice to really be heard in the town square, you’ll need to pay.

Tech Crunch

It’s five months since Elon Musk overpaid for a relatively small microblogging platform called Twitter.

Reason

The layoff would’ve been bad enough on its own, but because of the rules of Vong’s visa, it landed him in a bureaucratic mess that now prevents him from returning to the United States.

Platformer

But Twitter does have a different standard for celebrities – including Musk himself. For months, the platform has maintained a list of around 35 VIP users whose accounts it monitors and offers increased visibility alongside Elon Musk, according to documents obtained by Platformer.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. The Ice Cubes Mastodon app is a really nice implementation of a SwiftUI application for a large social network.

It’s all open source, created, and mostly maintained by an individual: Thomas Ricouard.

Part of me says “Yes! Go for it! This will help keep the app going!” but another part of me says “Heck no! They’re taking advantage of your kindness by offering to support just the code bits, not reimburse you for your time, and try to make money off of it! What happens if the effort to monetize it fails? Does the code live on without an owner?”

Now, I suppose since it’s open source software anyone could fork it and use it to build their own version at any time.

I think the thing that bothers me personally is no offer to throw some cash at Mr. Ricouard for all the time he dedicated to this project.

I say pay Mr. Ricouard for his creation, move “ownership” to a Medium backed repository, and allow Mr. Ricouard to continue his fine work.

Monetizing it seems weird to me. I suppose you could sell a subscription through IAP that also gives the subscriber a Medium account? But to do that you’d need to offer more of a carrot for subscribers. Perhaps the continued offer of a me.dm account plus some other special offer would do it? Tricky.

In the end I suppose it all boils down to what Mr. Ricouard would like to do.

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?

Momma Eastern Bluebird is giving me the stink eye. She’s not happy I’m 10 feet away as she builds her nest. Dad shows up once in a while to stare me down. 😆

Sitting on the front porch this morning, enjoying a nice cup-o-joe while I work.

Since I don’t really code any longer I had to open my Stream project so I’d look like a legit developer. 🤣

You can support my endeavors as an “Indie” dev by downloading Stream and leaving a tip! Thank you! 🙏🏼

This is the largest “refactor” I’ve done with my Home Screen in a really long time. I even moved one of my apps — RxCalc — to a different screen and stashed it in a group.

Just mowed the lawn — weeds — for the first time this year. Cut down a small tree for Kim, it was in really bad shape, and trimmed up some stumps remaining from last years post snowstorm cleanup.

It’s nice to get the yard cleaned up a bit but I’m pooped out. My legs are like “DUDE! We’re too old for this!” 😁

I’m not sure what kind of birdie this is but it’s a beautiful blue and orange. The picture doesn’t do it justice.

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.

I took these pictures of Flynn a few days back and saved them for today. It is #Caturday after all!

Flynn emerged from his blanket to look for the bird that caught his attention, then back under the blanket he went. 😆

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.

Where’s Flynn? I don’t see him.

View from the back deck. It’s 80F outside, sunny, with a slight breeze. Pretty magical. 🕶️

It looks like 20 years after the initial post and at least 14 years after leaving Blogger I’ve broken the rules. 🤣

Who thought this would be done today? 😳

Oh, right, it was me. The further I go up the hill the more dirt I have to remove. 🤣

New York Times

Mr. Trump, who faced his first criminal investigation in the late 1970s, has been deeply anxious about the prospect of arrest, which is expected to include being fingerprinted, one of the people said. When the Trump Organization’s former chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, was arrested in 2021, Mr. Trump watched in horror as television news showed Mr. Weisselberg flanked by officers in the courthouse and said he couldn’t believe what was being done to him.

Arrest him on Monday and make sure you do a perp walk for all the world to see. The man’s calling for people to protest to take their country back. Sound familiar?

Wow! Kolby let me sleep in this morning, 9AM! Late start to the day for me. Felt great. I decided I’d get all fancy this morning so I’m having a mocha. ☕️

Enjoy the linkage.

IGN

Lance Reddick, the actor known for roles in The Wire, John Wick, and Horizon Zero Dawn, has died at age 60.

Folks may know him best from John Wick but he was amazing in Fringe and The Wire. He played the hard nosed boss man in both of those series and he was good at it. RIP. 😔

WordPress

We’re excited to announce that Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, has acquired the popular WordPress plugin ActivityPub.

I love this and I hope more companies and individuals with publishing platforms follow suit.

If you’re interested Micro.blog already supports ActivityPub and is an excellent choice for your publishing platform. It’s well managed so you get a great community all for $5US per month. Yes, I use it to publish this blog.

The Sun Gazette

THREE RIVERS – It has been nearly a week since the latest storms flooded and eroded three large sections back on South Fork Road in Three Rivers leaving my family and approximately 160 other people stranded.

This is from my hometown paper in Exeter, California. The poor valley has seen its share of devastation over the last month and to hear of these poor folks stranded in Three Rivers makes my heart ache for them. Luckily they’re very resourceful and are making due. Hang in there y’all, this too will pass. ❤️

Platfomer

After months of silence, and a multi-billion-dollar effort from ByteDance to avoid this scenario, the Biden administration is picking up where its predecessor left off: attempting to force the company to divest itself of TikTok in the name of national security.

I don’t know how to feel about this. Sure, we shouldn’t allow China to use a platform as a propaganda mechanism for national security reasons but couldn’t there be a different arrangement around monitoring and servers living in the US without a connection to China?

I’m obviously naïve to the details and over simplifying it.

Please drop me a note via email — rob.fahrni@gmail.com — or Mastodon and explain what I’m missing. Thanks! 👍🏼

Slate

As the startups that make up Silicon Valley Bank’s customer base scrambled to figure out whether they would be able to make payroll, a group of extremely online venture capitalists spent four days emoting on Twitter, ginning up confusion and hysteria about the threat of a systemic risk if depositors didn’t get all their money back, pronto.

Gotta love those libertarian frat bros with who want government out of everything but are first in line with their grubby little hands wide open clamoring for rescue when they’re scared they’ll lose everything.

Do us all a favor, crawl into your apocalypse bunkers and stay there. Oh, and take Musk and TFG with you. 😇

Kottke

I’ve been writing kottke.org for 25 years. A little context for just how long that is: kottke.org is older than Google.

Congratulations Jason! Here’s to many more fruitful years! 🥳

Rolling Stone

Members of the South Carolina State House are considering a bill that would make a woman who has an abortion in the state eligible for the death penalty.

That’s the GOP for you. The pro life party ready to kill if you don’t carry a baby to term. Jerks, hypocrites, ass holes, dicks… I could name call all day. Our country is losing ground and sliding into authoritarianism and the MAGA party is leading the charge. So much for small government and fiscal responsibility. They’re the party of cruelty and white supremacy.

Reuters

March 14 (Reuters) - Facebook-parent Meta Platforms (META.O) said on Tuesday it would cut 10,000 jobs this year, making it the first Big Tech company to announce a second round of mass layoffs as the industry braces for a deep economic downturn.

Layoffs, layoffs, and more layoffs. As a middle aged middle manager this scares the crap out of me. Poop rolls down hills. Who’s next?

Oh, and what’s all this talk about a financial downturn? Is that just news to me? 😳

The Verge

T-Mobile is buying Mint Mobile, the budget-friendly mobile carrier that’s partially owned by Ryan Reynolds. In a post published on Wednesday, T-Mobile announced that the deal’s valued at up to $1.35 billion and comes as T-Mobile looks to build out its prepaid phone offering.

I just finished my free trial and we’re trying to decide if we’d like to go with Mint, then this happens which leaves me scratching my head. Do we do it or not?

The Verge

Here’s the best printer in 2023: the Brother laser printer that everyone has. Stop thinking about it and just buy one. It will be fine!

After having a little chuckle over the headline I looked over my shoulder and noticed it’s the printer we have. 😂

Kim’s flag selection for March.

Cal Newport

Back in 2016, I reported on a rumor that was circulating about employee dissatisfaction at Meta (then, Facebook). Developers, it seemed, were unhappy with the company’s trendy, but also unbearably noisy and distracting, 8-acre open office floor plan.

Open floor plans are a trend I’d love to see go away. The open concept is great for homes but not for business. Sure, it looks really great! All that open space, busy employees flitting about, doing the work of the business like a bunch of busy bees. But like a bunch of busy bees it causes a very distracting hum in the area. When I started at WillowTree I absolutely hated our open space. Too darned noisy to find flow — something WillowTree holds in high regard — because I need quiet to think and code. Quiet for me became Tool cranked to eleven in my headphones as I tried to ignore all the movement around me. 😂

Cubicles? In many ways those are worse than an open floor space. They oppressive in their own way. A tiny space to call your own, only everyone can see right inside it and your back is turned to any traffic passing by or your buddy tapping you on the shoulder making you jump in fright. No thank you.

Offices — in my opinion — are the one true answer. Microsoft figured this out a long time ago and that caused other software companies to model their environment the same way. A trend, just like open office spaces. At Visio I had an office, it was glorious. I could configure it the way I wanted and I was able to pick an inside office since I really enjoyed my workspace to be dark.🍄

For me, one of the great things to fall out of the pandemic was the formation of a 100% remote team at WillowTree. Working from home has been glorious. I have complete control over my workspace. Sure, it’s a small area in the basement but it’s quiet and setup just the way I want. I do miss hanging out with my coworkers, doing lunch, grabbing a coffee, or taking a walk on the mall during a 1:1, but I really enjoy the flexibility of being able to have coffee with my wife or doing the dishes at lunch.

Open office plans are the devil. Banish them. 🤣

What is woke?

Woke is compassion
Woke is kindness
Woke is diversity
Woke is understanding
Woke is listening
Woke is humanity
Woke is love

For all Christians, please understand Jesus was woke.

For all MAGA’s, please understand you cannot use your religion as a cudgel to control people. The former President you worship is not God or ordained by God to be supreme leader. He’s a grifter, a conman, nothing more.

For all white supremacists, you are not better than everyone else. Non whites have been around a lot longer than you.

For the GOP, why do you hate women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community? How folks live and believe is their business, not yours. If you believe God doesn’t want you to have abortions or be gay, fine. Believe that all you want but leave everyone else alone. Controlling people through a government based on religion is called a Theocracy . It’s not good. It’s not Democratic. It’s not what our founders intended. The First Amendment protects our right to a religion of our choice, which includes the freedom to not have one. Don’t force your, often misguided, beliefs on others.

Having Christianity be the religion of the country would make us no better than Iran or any other theocracy.

It seems Kolby hasn’t figured out the concept of sleeping in on the weekend, no sir. We had the discussion again this morning at 4:45AM. Goofy dog. 😂

I managed to fall back to sleep on the couch until 6. Coffee time! ☕️

CNN

Forceful flooding that washed away roads and sent residents across parts of northern and central California fleeing their homes is expected to continue Saturday and through the weekend as more rain arrives.

This is crazy to watch. Drought for years and years and now flooding.

Platformer

Twitter’s decline is paving the way for other platforms to build next-generation replacements. And now the biggest player in the game is getting involved: Meta is in the early stages of building a dedicated app for people to post text-based updates.

Oh, sure, now Meta wants to get in on the action with their own decentralized network offering. 🤣

Just put up a Mastodon instance and call it a day.

NetNewsWire Blog

If you see a page offering a download of NetNewsWire for Android, please remember that it’s a scam and you should definitely not install it.

I wonder what kind of recourse Brent has to stop this sort of thing?

Jalopnik

Lewis Hamilton’s car was not its best last year, when Hamilton finished in sixth place for the championship, and Mercedes finished third in the Constructor’s Championship, both results below their standards.

I got into F1 a few years back and don’t watch it super closely but perhaps it’s just time for another team to be on top for a while?

Krzysztof Kowalczyk

SumatraPDF is an open-source document reader for Windows. It started as a PDF reader, hence the name, but over time I’ve added for e-book formats (epub, mobi), comic books (cbz, cbr), DjVu, XPS, image formats etc. It’s about 127k lines of C++ (not counting libraries written by others).

It’s nice to see a traditional Win32 application live on. Makes me want to work on it. That, of course, will never happen.

The New Republic

The Tennessee House of Representatives has passed a bill that would allow people to refuse to perform a marriage if they disagree with it.

Can someone please stop the GOP? They really want a society run by old white men with all kinds of weird hang ups?

The Verge

Spotify is redesigning the core homescreen of its app, trying to make it easier for users to find new stuff to listen to — and watch. The new design goes heavy on imagery and vertical scrolling, turning your homescreen from a set of album covers into a feed that much more closely resembles TikTok and Instagram.

I’m sure this is controversial but I don’t think it’s a bad idea. Folks will get used to it and it’ll feel natural after a while.

Medium

A few weeks ago, we announced that Medium is embracing short-form writing by launching our very own Mastodon server at me.dm. Starting today, we’re opening up me.dm access for our member community. If you’re a Medium member, you can create an account on me.dm.

Another controversial thing but I don’t have a problem with Medium running their own instance.

NBC News

Elon Musk took aim at a disabled Twitter employee Monday who tagged him in a tweet to ask if he’d been laid off.

BBC

A Twitter employee has appealed to Elon Musk on the platform to ask whether he had been sacked.

Sure, let’s pick on the guy in a wheel chair, Space Karen.

Stay classy, ass hole.

[Platformer](<https://open.substack.com/pub/platformer/p/how-a-single-engineer-brought-down)

Twitter’s website is breaking in novel new ways — and while the company managed to recover from its latest outage within a couple hours, the story behind how it broke suggests there are likely to be similar problems in the near future.

I feel like Twitter will survive, but not because of Musk “magic.” It will continue because it will slowly lose users and the folks who remain will be able to apply more duct tape, bailing wire, and bubble gum to it to keep it going.

Rewrites are not really an option. You can swap out pieces — slowly — but that takes time. Declaring it needs a rewrite is a very lofty ideal. Best of luck with that.

Why not just pack it in and use Mastodon? 🐘

The Daily Beast

A Twitter engineer identified only as Sam told BBC News: “Wherever he goes in the office, there are at least two bodyguards—very bulky, tall, Hollywood movie bodyguards. Even when [he goes] to the restroom.” He said the constant use of bodyguards suggested that Musk, who has sacked a huge number of Twitter staff including coders, does not trust his remaining staff at Twitter HQ in San Francisco.

He should be paranoid of some angry geek handing him his ass one day.

BBC

Twitter insiders have told the BBC that the company is no longer able to protect users from trolling, state-co-ordinated disinformation and child sexual exploitation, following lay-offs and changes under owner Elon Musk.

Fascists gonna fascist.

Couple of random shots of my sticker decorated water bottle.

The first one is the sticker I received for backing the Phoenix project. Phoenix was the update to Twitterrific for Mac a number of years back.

The second is my company logo and all the Stream icons as a hero shot.

Kolby decided it was time to get up at 5:45 this morning and since our granddaughter is visiting it was best not to try and convince him to go back to bed. 😂

Bring on all the coffee! ☕️

Harpers

In 2006, when DeSantis was there, it was one of the worst times at Guantánamo. The administration, the guards, all of them were the worst.

DeSantis is more dangerous than Trump. He had a higher IQ and he’s managed to single handedly turn Florida into the absolute worst state in the nation.

How do these folks get into politics? 👹

TechCrunch

Bluesky, the Twitter alternative backed by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, has hit the App Store and more testers are gaining access. Though the app is still only available as an invite-only beta, its App Store arrival signals that a public launch could be nearing.

From the screenshots in the article it looks a lot like Mastodon to me, but the account names are slightly different. On a Bluesky server my handle would be @fahrni.curmudgeon.cafe instead of @fahrni@curmudgeon .cafe. It’s a matter of a single character.

More importantly it’s just like Mastodon in that here is no single authority or silo controlled by a corporation, as is the case with Twitter.

Are they late to the party? Perhaps. 🤷🏻‍♂️

New York Times

The drugmaker Eli Lilly and Company said on Wednesday that it would significantly reduce the sticker prices of several of its lifesaving insulin products that are used by diabetes patients and whose prices Lilly has repeatedly increased in the past.

It’s about time. Shame on them for taking advantage of folks who need this medication to survive.

Bloomberg

Apple Inc. has abruptly shut down one of its retail stores in Charlotte, North Carolina, after the mall where it’s located suffered at least three shootings in recent months.

This is kind of scary. Three shootings at a mall in recent months. Who can blame them for closing it down?

We are a uniquely violent nation. Violent with lots of guns. 🔫

Formula 1

American automotive giants Ford have confirmed their intention to make a Formula 1 comeback when new engine regulations are introduced in 2026, meaning another chapter will be added to the American organisation’s rich history in the sport.

This makes me extremely happy! I wish Haas was using Ford engines since they’re an American team, but you can’t go wrong with the hottest team on the grid. 🏎️

Associated Press

Dilbert comic strip creator Scott Adams experienced possibly the biggest repercussion of his recent comments about race when distributor Andrews McMeel Universal announced Sunday it would no longer work with the cartoonist.

Flat out racist! He should be shunned but he has a friend in Elon Musk and I’m sure the white supremacist wing of the GOP loves him. 👎

9 to 5 Mac

Now, Kuo reports that Apple has restarted iPhone SE 4 development, which will be the first iPhone to include Apple’s in-house 5G modem.

I wonder if Apple is considerering this a replacement for the iPhone Mini?

It looks like it’ll be a really nice phone.

Business Insider

Perhaps the final nail in the coffin of Musk’s automation ambition came in early February when Mercedes-Benz received the first-ever certification for Level 3 driving automation — designed to require human intervention only in severe conditions — on public roads in the US.

Musk seems to have too much on his plate. He’s destroying Twitter and neglecting Tesla. 🚗

MSNBC

Ukrainian soldiers astonished the world last year by stopping Russia’s assault on Kyiv, liberating over half of the territory once held by Russian occupiers, and thwarting Putin’s attempt to overthrow President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s democracy. By providing weapons and economic aid, the U.S., NATO and other democracies have played a critical role in helping Ukrainians achieve these victories.

I hope we continue to support Ukraine and they defeat Russia and Putin once and for all.

Associated Press

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday signed a bill that gives him control of Walt Disney World’s self-governing district, punishing the company over its opposition to the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law.

More of this guy. He’s wrecking Florida.🐊

I had a very vivid dream last night the moon was extremely close to Earth and you could see other planets behind it in the distance. The sky was always dark but you could see the stars. On the opposite side of the moons orbit around Earth was a clump of asteroids, or whatever the proper term is for a collection of rocks traveling in a pack. When the collection of rocks was passing by a number of them would fall from the sky, crashing into Earth. We all knew it was the end of our planet because the moon was going to eventually crash into us and there was nothing we could do.

It’s so difficult to describe. It’s like something you’d see in a sci-fi movie. It was both beautiful and terrifying.