Rob Fahrni

Good morning! 🌅

Another 8AM wake-up. Kolby, our puppers, must’ve read my blog post a few weeks back complaining about him waking me up at 6:30AM on the weekend. 😄

Coffee in hand, time for links! Enjoy. ☕️

The Wall Street Journal

It sounded like a dream partnership when Apple Inc. reached out to Joe Kiani, the founder of a company that makes blood-oxygen measurement devices. He figured his technology was a perfect fit for the Apple Watch.

Sherlocking is an Apple tradition. Tim Cook comes across as a nice Southern Gentleman but under that demure exterior is a cold blooded killer. Hey, he’s the CEO of the most successful company in the world, I wouldn’t expect anything less. Other companies innovating on an Apple platform is great for Apple. It gives them a blueprint without having to do it themselves.

Lucky for me there’s no way Apple could Sherlock the advanced algorithm AI ML of Stream! It’s too powerful for anyone but me to understand! 🤣

How’s that for completely shameful self promotion? 👍🏼

Red Shirts Always Die

Season three of Star Trek: Picard has been a hit for Paramount+. Fans love nostalgia, for good or bad, they do.

I’ve been thirsting to watch Picard since the original season but I’ve refused to add yet another streaming service to our mix. I’m hoping we’ll get some kind of licensing deal that allows other streamers access to it. 🤞🏼

Daring Fireball

But what got me thinking about this issue this week is the dumbest adware in iOS I’ve seen.

I hear this from folks from time to time. Apple is advertising in their apps now. I’m certain Steve Jobs has rolled over in his grave.

I’ve seen a couple myself but they’ve been very subtle and easily dismissible. Do I want to see ads in Apple products? Nope. It feels beneath them but they gotta add that shareholder value and squeeze every last penny out of their products.

New York Times

In a move that brings to a close a pioneering era of online journalism, BuzzFeed is shutting down its namesake news division.

Not that I’m a huge BuzzFeed reader but this was very surprising. This media outlet with a funny name eventually became a Pulitzer winning company. That’s something to be proud of. I wish everyone well and hope they land on their feet. Tech has been a been a real mess lately. So many layoffs.

MSNBC

If you’re a transgender resident of Missouri, the next 10 months are set to be horrible. Under an emergency regulation from state Attorney General Andrew Bailey, it will soon become incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for many patients to receive any sort of gender-affirming care.

More GOP cruelty. They love, love, love, guns but hate people. I don’t know how else to say it. They’re control freaks who want a nation of drones who push buttons to churn out widgets to make them rich at the cost of their humanity. It’s really very disgusting. Let people live their lives with dignity and respect.

Los Angeles Times

Andrew Toles hasn’t played for the Dodgers since Sept. 30, 2018. However, he just had his contract renewed for another year last week.

This is a class move by the Dodgers organization. Not many companies would be so thoughtful.

Texas Tribune

Public schools in Texas would have to prominently display the Ten Commandments in every classroom starting next school year under a bill the Texas Senate approved Thursday.

Here we are again. Yet another red state trying to make a ridiculous law infringing on Constitutional rights and freedoms. This will not holdup under judicial review but these assholes love to challenge law in hopes of overturning it. Maybe this is their retaliation for us normals wanting to revoke the Second Amendment.

The First Amendment reads: “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.”

Emphasis is mine. This should override any state sponsored law. It’s just a GOP game.

Gus Mueller

Twenty years ago today, March 27, 2003, I released VoodooPad 1.0.

I didn’t see this until this week. Congratulations Gus! Twenty years is a quite an accomplishment. 👍🏼

The Verge

Volkswagen is pulling the cover off the ID.7 flagship electric vehicle that aims to rescue the sedan from the dustbin of vehicle history.

This is a really nice looking ride, not to mention great for consumer choice.

Traditional car companies have caught up with Tesla and are making better cars. The gravy train had to end at some point.🚂

New York Times

A new state-funded project in the San Joaquin Valley hopes to find a new way to build drought resilience. The idea is simple: Cover the state’s canals and aqueducts with solar panels to both limit evaporation and generate renewable energy.

I grew up and spent most of my life in the San Joaquin Valley of California — hello Exeter — and saw canals everyday.

I recall a particular canal at the base of Rocky Hill, in Exeter, that had an underground section. Because it dove underground it provided and excellent hill for speeding and jumping down on our bikes.

This idea is really interesting but makes me wonder if they can pull it off? Canals are already extremely dangerous. What would adding covers to them do? Once you’re in one it’s extremely difficult to get out. In my experience folks are usually pulled out by someone who notices they’ve fallen in.

/Film

Roman has slowly but surely become a more competent businessman and human being throughout all four seasons of “Succession.”

Ah, Succession, my favorite 💩show of all time.

Of all the characters I’ve always found Roman the most likeable of all the Roy family — that’s not saying much as they’re all disgusting pigs — and I’m really anxious to see where we land at the season finale.

Some thoughts. Shiv aborts her baby. Tom murders Shiv and commits suicide. Kendal becomes a homeless drug addict. Roman starts an online dating service. Connor goes back to his life a solitude. Cousin Greg dupes them all and ends up in charge of the family fortune.

Sounds about right. How many of these will I get correct? Guess we’ll find out. 🤣

Ed Zitron

I’ll get right to it: Mark Zuckerberg is an ineffective, incompetent, and directionless executive, one bereft of complete or concrete ideas.

I feel like the only reason the Zuck is still CEO is because he has more than a 50% interest in the company with a handpicked board of sycophants.

Mark’s not going anywhere.

Just watching a little TV.

This fella knows how to live. He parties all night and sleeps all day.

More flowers coming in.

I love movies and I love going to the theatre to see movies. I haven’t made this list since 2019 because when COVID hit I just didn’t feel like it.

I don’t know if we’ll go catch any of these in theaters but I’d like to.

Enjoy.

Here’s a list of prior years.

Flynn in his natural state.

Kim’s rhododendrons have struggled mightily over the last couple seasons. She moved them last summer in an attempt to get them to survive and she used a different amended soil meant for rhododendrons. It seems to have worked. They’re quite a bit happier and putting off flowers. Finally!

Good morning!

I managed to sleep until 8AM! That’s pretty good and I needed it. Still groggy but the magic elixir should help. ☕️

New Republic

On Thursday, Tennessee Republicans had their first opportunity to show Democrats, Tennesseans, and the country their willingness to work together to enact baseline gun safety reform.

Not unexpected from the GOP in any state. They only care about children when they’re in the womb. After birth it’s game on, “good luck making it to adulthood kid.”

Techdirt

That became ridiculously clear on Thursday when Chris Best went on Nilay Patel’s Decoder podcast at the Verge to talk about Substack’s new Notes product, which everyone is (fairly or not) comparing to Twitter.

I listened to the entire podcast and I’d encourage you to do the same. Nilay is so good at asking those questions that make people squirm and he doesn’t let go. This was by no means a “gotcha” question. It’s very relevant to running a social network, which Substack Notes is.

Vox

Logan Roy is dead.

Man, that episode was amazing and uncomfortable. I love how we didn’t see him die, as it could be in real life. The kids just got that dreadful call many of us have received. We never really see an actual dead, or dying, Logan Roy. Just someone lying on the ground receiving CPR. I think it was brilliant and caught me off guard which was also perfect.

Now, what do the kids do? Do they find a way to bring Pops business into the 21st century, sell it as scraps, or run it in the ground?

We obviously don’t know how this ends but it’ll be a complete train wreck all the way to the end and I’m here for it. 🍿

Wired

Montana lawmakers voted 54-43 today to ban TikTok from operating in the state and forbid app stores from offering it for download.

I’ve been on the fence about TikTok for a few weeks now. At first I was in the die hard ban them group but I’ve been questioning that position for a while.

I wonder if their strategy to wall off content from China by keeping it here in the states could work?

Apple allows the Chinese government access to iCloud in China, why couldn’t the opposite work here?

I’d imagine the moderation team could be immense and I’d also imagine a substantially large team dedicated to tooling to make this work, but it might work, right? 🤷🏻‍♂️

The Nation

Two Sundays ago, I got a call from the Texas Tribune informing me that the board had voted to lay off the entire staff and shutter the publication.

The Texas Observer is a small progressive paper in, you guessed it, Texas. Yeah, the state that has drive-thru margarita stands that give free guns away with a purchase of $5US or more (yes, the gun part is full on sarcasm.)

Texas needs an independent progressive voice and I’m hopeful the Observer hangs around for a very long time. This is one of those times I wish I were very wealthy. I’d happily fund them for years just to make sure Texas progressives had a place to get their news.

Mozilla Blog

Total Cookie Protection is Firefox’s strongest privacy protection to date, confining cookies to the site where they were created, thus preventing tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site.

This is a very nice feature. Your turn Google and Microsoft.

Newsweek

President Donald Trump has such a fragile ego, his secret service agents are forced to act like “fluffers” and tell people to say nice things to him before he enters a room, Donny Deutsch has claimed.

I LOL’d when I read the term fluffer and I’m happy to know this man is super fragile. I also wonder if a few weeks in a prison cell would break him or make him an even more disgusting human. Somehow I fear the latter would occur.

Mission Local

Mission Local is informed that the San Francisco Police Department early this morning made an arrest in the April 4 killing of tech executive Bob Lee, following an operation undertaken outside the city’s borders. The alleged killer also works in tech and is a man Lee purportedly knew.

This is turning into a wild story and crap like this happens every day.

Slash Film

True Detective: Night Country Trailer: Jodie Foster Headlines The Return Of The HBO Series

I loved the first season of True Detective. The second was good but not as gripping as the first. I think that’s part of why I’ve never watched the third season but I’ve heard it harkens back to the first season. I need to go play catch-up before we get this Jody Foster version. I’m really looking forward to it.

Reuters

The person who leaked U.S. classified documents prompting a national security investigation is a gun enthusiast in his 20s who worked on a military base, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing fellow members of an online chat group.

How in the world does a 20 something get access to top secret documents when he’s not part of the security apparatus of the United States? What a dangerous and embarrassing situation for the US government.

NBC News

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump has asked a federal appeals court to take immediate action to block former Vice President Mike Pence from testifying in the Justice Department’s probe into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

I’ll bet he’s asking the courts to block Pence from testifying. I’d imagine Pence, being the weakling coward he is, will take the fifth a bunch and not say much.

At first I thought he acted bravely on January 6. Then I realized he didn’t do nearly enough to stop it from getting that far. He was a witness to the planning and could’ve stopped it long before it happened.

Kim’s lilacs are coming in.

This morning we were talking about Priss and Flynn when they were kittens. Thought I’d share some pictures.

The trees are happy the sun is out. Soon enough they’ll be so thick with leaves they’ll cast great shade.

The Verge

Tumblr is somewhere between a social network and an old-school blogging platform, and like most major blogging tools, every post has a dedicated section for freeform category tags. The tags typically appear in a smaller, lighter font under each post, visible but tastefully separated. You might tag a post with the name of a loose topical community like #writeblr, the name of a fandom or hobby, or an internal filter that helps people navigate your blog.

I really like this idea. No only has Tumblr done it right, so has Micro.blog.

Both are microblogging platforms with a timeline and the ability to do long form blog posts complete with titles.

I use Micro.blog for this blog and love it. I’ve settled on Mastodon for more of a Twitter like experience and use Micro.blog for blogging.

Having a true tagging feature would be really amazing and would clean up the hashtag soup you find in some Mastodon posts. 👍🏼

CNN

A 23-year-old bank employee opened fire at his workplace in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, on Monday morning and livestreamed the attack that left four dead and nine others wounded, authorities said.

More dead and wounded. Our obsession with guns in America is an epidemic. It should be treated as such and removed from society.

We can start by revoking the Second Amendment. [insert gasps and pearl clutching here.]

Next outlaw weapons of war for use by the general population.

Add longer waiting periods for delivery of weapons.

Outlaw selling at gun shows.

Require purchasers to be over 21 in all states.

Require every gun to be insured for death and dismemberment, like a cars accidental death and dismemberment.

Require training by a US Certified weapons specialist.

Require recertification of the permit to own a weapon, every year.

Require background checks and certification from doctors stating the mental well being of the potential owner.

All weapons registered with a central database managed by the ATF.

Require annual inspections for each weapon to certify they’re in good working order and have not been unsafely modified.

There’s my starting list. As much as I think it’s fine to not own a gun and don’t see the need for them, you can still have your guns. Just be responsible owners.

The gun used in the shooting was an AR-15-style rifle, a federal law enforcement source told CNN. The AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle, is the most popular sporting rifle in the US, and about 24.6 million people have owned an AR-15 or similarly style rifle, according to the 2021 National Firearms Survey.

Ah, yes, the favorite weapon of mass murderers, the AR-15 was used in this multiple murder as well.

We’re a pathetic nation that values guns over people, and don’t even care enough about children to do anything sensible to prevent mass killings.

The performative GOP loves to talk about mental health in this nation when something like this happens. Yes, let’s take care of mental health issues in this country, but that’s a separate issue, isn’t it?

The problem is easy access to guns.

Kim’s first set of seasonal flowers are coming in. I love watching this area of our flower beds progress through the seasons. One set of flowers will die back as another set emerges. It’s amazing.

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.