Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Feeling a little groggy this morning. I basically passed out sitting on the couch watching TV at around 7PM last night. I woke up a few minutes later and don’t remember closing my eyes. 🤣
Please, send all the coffee.
It looks like I’ll get an opportunity to work on Stream for Mac today, which is very exciting!
Anywho, enough of that, I hope you enjoy the links.
Kate Wagner • Internet Archive
Most of us have the distinct pleasure of going throughout our lives bereft of the physical presence of those who rule over us. Were we peasants instead of spreadsheet jockeys, warehouse workers, and baristas, we would toil in our fields in the shadow of some overbearing castle from which the lord or his steward would ride down on his thunderous charger demanding our fealty and our tithes. Now, though, the real high end of the income inequality curve—the 0.01 percenters—remains elusive. To their great advantage, they can buy their way out of public life. However, if you want to catch a glimpse of them, all you need to do is attend a single day of Formula 1 racing.
This piece by Kate Wagner originally appeared in Car and Driver last week but was taken down the same day it went up. Luckily we have The Internet Archive.
This is a really scathing look at F1. It is most certainly a sport for the rich and famous. A playboys paradise. 🏎️
What an amazing ride this past month has been! We appreciate the support of everyone who backed our Project Tapestry Kickstarter as well as those who helped us spread the word far and wide. We couldn’t have reached our goals without your help and we’re so very excited to have an opportunity to bring Project Tapestry to life.
I’m really excited to see what our awesome friends create for us! It’s also gonna be fun to see what others create to extend it! 😍
The courts were never going to save America from Donald Trump
Trump got exactly what he needed to avoid a trial that could possibly convict him. Sure, it may start before the election but will it have time to complete?
We all know he did it. We all know his strategy is to run out the clock, get elected, and make it all magically go away. Justice is supposed to be blind, but not in this way.
Yet another way the rich and powerful have an advantage over the rest of us. Would you or I have been given the chance to take our argument to the highest court in the land? Probably not.
The man is a criminal and deserves to do a little jail time. It would be fine with me if he was confined to his “club” in the third-world shit hole of Florida. They deserve him. ⚖️
Unix, and many other systems from that, use a type for time that is seconds since the start of 1970. It is a simple system. Those seconds were stored in a signed 32 bit number, which allows -2147483648 to +2147483647 and hence dates from Fri 13 Dec 19:45:52 GMT 1901 to Tue 19 Jan 02:14:07 GMT 2038. This seemed a pretty good range. especially for adult engineers living in the early 70s. But 2038 is getting closer and closer. I may (hopefully) live to see it.
Time is hard. When I was at Pelco we had to deal with time issues around the world. A really bad choice was made in our UI products to use local time within the app and not just for display purposes. That was fun to fix.
Check out the post for some history and what we’ll need to keep an eye out for if you write date code at a lower level. I’d imagine most modern languages have really great support for dates built in. Question is how about old school services that remain online because they just work and nobody wants to work on them? 😃
Chance Miller, Ben Lovejoy, Zac Hall, and Filipe Espósito • 9to5Mac
Epic says Apple will reinstate developer account, clearing path for Epic Games Store on iPhone
It’s time to get out your popcorn. Apple and Epic are having a little pissing contest. The EU isn’t having it. It looks like Apple is being forced to play nice and they definitely don’t like it.
I haven’t really kept up with the nuanced bits but Apple really doesn’t want to open the platform up any more than they have to. 🍿
Apple hit with first ever EU fine following Spotify complaint
And a nice little follow on to the Epic post above. Spotify is also in the pissing contest with Apple and they’re not backing down.
Shuttering the App Store is not an option because Apple makes a ton of money off of developers. They certainly don’t host us out of the kindness of their hearts. It’s a business after all with shareholders — ALL HAIL THE SHAREHOLDERS!
I can see arguments from both sides. Apple built the platform and should be able to administer it as they see fit. It’s not the only mobile platform on the planet. If you’re a developer and really hate the 15-30% fee you can go elsewhere.
If you’re Spotify or Epic you’re also a business that needs to make a profit and, in Spotify’s case, the margins on music are so thin they can’t afford to give Apple that much money. Heck, I don’t understand how any company could make their own App Store work in the EU given the rules Apple setup to create and maintain one.
Susannah Cullinane, Sara Smart, Cindy Von Quednow and Mary Gilbert • CNN
California’s mountain towns and ski resorts are digging out after a blockbuster blizzard buried them and major roads under several feet of snow.
The last 10 or so years we lived in California’s San Joaquin Valley we were always in some kind of drought situation. Fast forward a few years and it’s been flooded the last two years with tremendous snowpack, which is very much needed.
I’ll bet the Sierra Nevada looks spectacular from the valley floor right now. Folks who live there will understand what I’m saying. Looking up from the great valley to see the Sierra Nevada is awe inspiring on a beautiful clear day. Especially when it’s covered in snow. 🏔️
Climate experts are warning that the Smokehouse Creek fire in the Texas panhandle—now the largest in the state’s history with over over 1 million acres burned and counting—provides a horrifying look into a future of runaway temperatures that result in extreme destruction.
And Texas is in the complete opposite situation of California. It’s on fire and not just a tiny fire. It’s a monster eating everything in its path. 🔥