This quote from James Murdoch is absollutely telling, and absolutely true. Tabloids were the original media trolls: Musk and his acolytes are just the digital native equivalent.
Like many people who grew up in media in the 90s/00s, I am endlessly fascinated by the Murdochs, and this Atlantic piece on James is absolutely juicy reading.
I’m watching a video from someone who switched from MacBook to Ubuntu on a ThinkPad and they have have HELL getting DaVinci to work. God bless them.
Apple to court: Please let us help Google avoid the law
Apple asks court to halt Google search monopoly case | The Verge:
Apple writes that if its appeal isn’t handled until after the remedies trial has begun and it’s unable to participate, “Apple may well be forced to stand mute at trial, as a mere spectator, while the government pursues an extreme remedy that targets Apple by name and would prohibit any commercial arrangement between Apple and Google for a decade. This would leave Apple without the ability to defend its right to reach other arrangements with Google that could benefit millions of users and Apple’s entitlement to compensation for distributing Google search to its users.”
Translation: “Hey, Google’s been paying us $20bn in order to avoid competition and we think that’s just fine, kids. Oh and we would very much like to have similar deals in the future, so us big tech corps can keep things sewn up nice and tight. PS DONALD PLEASE HELP."
A brief history of the Finder
A brief history of the Finder – The Eclectic Light Company:
Thus, each Finder window could only show the contents of a single folder, and that location couldn’t be changed within that window. Navigating from one folder to another was accomplished by opening windows. It wasn’t uncommon to end up with stacks of half a dozen or more, each displaying the contents of a different folder, and Steve Jobs once unjustly criticised this as turning the user into a window janitor.
It’s difficult to explain to people who have grown up in the era of the GUI how advanced the Finder felt when it first appeared. As it developed, it got more complex, but the basics of how it works have come to dominate the way almost every user interface functions.
Ted Cruz thinks that free speech is censorship
Ted Cruz thinks that kids having access to free internet is “censoring conservative viewpoints”:
Cruz’s press release said that “unlike in a classroom or study hall, off-premises hotspot use is not typically supervised, inviting exposure to inappropriate content, including social media.” Cruz’s office alleged that the FCC program shifts control of Internet access from parents to schools and thus “heightens the risk of censoring kids' exposure to conservative viewpoints.”
Has there ever been a clearer demonstration that conservatives believe only their viewpoints should be allowed? Putting forward any other opinion is, apparently, “censorship”. In the sense that the truth is “censoring” lies, I suppose.
Pebble is back, baby, bac
Kudos to Google for open sourcing the Pebble operating system. And I’m really looking forward to getting a Pebble this time round:
Rather than buy another smartwatch, Migicovsky decided to try and get Pebble going again. He sold his most recent startup, a messaging app called Beeper, to Automattic last year and left the company in the fall. Since then, he’d thought about starting a Pebble-like product from scratch, figuring it’d be easier to do the same thing again a second time. “But then I was like, what if I just asked Google to open-source the operating system?” he says. It felt like a long shot, but he knew the code was just sitting dormant inside Mountain View somewhere. So he asked. A few times.To Migicovsky’s surprise, Google agreed to release Pebble OS to the public. As of Monday, all the Pebble firmware is available on GitHub, and Migicovsky is starting a company to pick up where he left off.
WANT:
Part of prolific fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld’s estate is currently being auctioned off. The auction includes what you’d expect from an average estate auction: flatware, silverware, artwork, and books.
Hey Meta, what are you running your servers on again?
Wait what now? Linux is malware? The same Linux that Meta runs a load of servers on?
Facebook is banning posts that mention various Linux-related topics, sites, or groups. Some users may also see their accounts locked or limited when posting Linux topics. Major open-source operating system news, reviews, and discussion site DistroWatch is at the center of the controversy, as it seems to be the first to have noticed that Facebook’s Community Standards had blackballed it.A post on the site claims, “Facebook’s internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labeled groups associated with Linux as being ‘cybersecurity threats.’ We tried to post some blurb about distrowatch.com on Facebook and can confirm that it was barred with a message citing Community Standards.
The unread email count on Mike McCue’s home screen is literally giving me the fear.
So much of this Reid Hoffman article on “making AI work for us” reads like someone who didn’t have any friends when they were a child and now wants a robot friend who is wise, kind and doesn’t try to steal their lunch money. It would be sad if these guys weren’t bending the world to their will.
I’ve been saying this for a long time: SEO should not define your content strategy, and long term the publishers which do so will pay a hefty price. That doesn’t mean you don’t consider SEO important. It just means it’s not everything.
Trump's new age of acquiesence
Lewis Goodall is really on point with this:
That is how Trumpism is best understood. It is about the free expression of power, without hindrance, even over our collective understanding. And this week, it reached a new apex: Trump wants the power to shape not only the present, but the past, history itself. That is how the pardoning of the January 6th insurrectionists should be seen. There was much speculation that Trump might only pardon some, not all of those impriosned, to leave some of the most egregious offenders, including those literally caught on film violently assaulting police officers. But he is said to have told his team to “fuck it. Release them all.” This wasn’t just about rewarding his people, though it is truly chilling to consider that he has released his own de facto paramilitary force, loyal entirely to himself, highly armed, precisely at the moment he takes away the state security provided to a whole host of his enemies. It’s about something deeper: about history and how we understand it.
In releasing everyone, the message he sends is that his narrative of January 6th is the correct one- that these were minor incidents. That we did not see what we saw, that we cannot believe our own eyes. This coincides with the new Congress, at Trump’s behest, investigating not the Jan6th insurrectionists, but the Congressional committee which investigated them. He and his allies have been spreading conspiracies about what happened at the Capitol for years. The pardons are the final coup de grace: Nothing could have happened because no crimes occurred. It was all just a liberal, Democratic confection, like everything else. As Orwell said, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” In effect, Trump pardoned himself.
One of the genuinely fascinating things about this interview with Marc Andreessen is how much it reeks of “they made me do it!” – the cry of a little boy who never grew up. Andreessen, like all his cohort, cannot accept personal responsibility for anything.
Always remember, the right hates people capable of understanding their grift
‘He feels empowered’: DeSantis kicks off takeover of second liberal Florida school:
Florida’s rightwing governor, Ron DeSantis, has engineered a second “hostile takeover” of a liberal-leaning state school, education watchers say, after he installed a number of staunch conservatives to the board of trustees at the University of West Florida (UWF).
The move almost exactly mirrors the governor’s 2023 seizure of power at Sarasota’s New College of Florida, in which he ousted the sitting board of the popular liberal arts school and replaced them with hardline cronies in what a national university professor’s union denounced as an “aggressively ideological and politically motivated” move.
Meta’s Free-Speech Shift Made It Clear to Advertisers: ‘Brand Safety’ Is Out of Vogue - WSJ
Brand safety “has become politicized and it was never motivated by politics,” said Brad Jakeman, a former marketer at PepsiCo. The movement around brand safety happened because “we heard from our consumers that they felt uncomfortable with our brands being connected to content that they found offensive,” he said.
In December, just days after advertising giant Omnicom agreed to acquire Interpublic, Jordan launched a probe into the merger, seeking information on the companies’ ties to the trade group that Musk sued. Among the requests made in Jordan’s letter to Omnicom’s CEO: “all documents and communications related to so-called ‘brand safety.’” Ad executives say they are wary of putting a target on their backs by speaking up about brand safety, and some agencies are now reluctant to send clients “point-of-view” memos on the topic when online controversies arise.
(My emphasis). This is the chilling effect of Trumpism, which extends a long way beyond his executive power. It’s the ability to make people and companies believe that it’s simply not worth the hassle to go up against them, to rely on the expense and inconvenience of doing anything which may be percieved as not being in line with them. In the end, people will censor themselves.
Daring Fireball: Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber
Daring Fireball: Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber:
Old Siri — which is to say pre-Apple-Intelligence Siri — does OK on this same question. On my Mac running MacOS 15.1.1, where ChatGPT integration is not yet available, Siri declined to answer the question itself and provided a list of links, search-engine-style, and the top link was to this two-page PDF listing the complete history of North Dakota’s Class A boys’ and girls’ champions, but only through 2019. Not great, but good enough.
New Siri — powered by Apple Intelligence™ with ChatGPT integration enabled — gets the answer completely but plausibly wrong, which is the worst way to get it wrong. It’s also inconsistently wrong — I tried the same question four times, and got a different answer, all of them wrong, each time. It’s a complete failure.
I’ve been saying for a while that most LLM-based “assistants” will be worse than what they replace. Older assistants were limited in domain, but largely pretty good at what they could do. LLM-powered assistants don’t know their own limitations.
Congress finds Trump's TikTok sale scheme confusing, possibly illegal - Live Updates - POLITICO
Congress finds Trump's TikTok sale scheme confusing, possibly illegal - Live Updates - POLITICO:
Members of Congress are declaring themselves bewildered by Donald Trump’s latest proposal to save TikTok by brokering a joint-ownership deal.
“I don’t know what he means by that," said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), of Trump’s suggestion to broker a “joint venture” in which “the U.S. should be entitled to get half of TikTok.”
“I don’t understand what the president is doing,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
One thing that is worth remembering about Trump: his entire career has been built on the principle of making it costly to oppose him, often by tying up his “enemies” in court. Opposing him then become so costly in time and money that it’s not worth the effort. Will this also work on Congress? I think we’re about to find out.
Quarter of English councils may have to sell homes
Quarter of English councils may have to sell homes to balance books, study finds:
As part of other efforts to balance budgets, 28% of councils said they expected to sell off existing housing stock, while 45% are already using reserves to cover day-to-day spending. Of the 76 councils, 71 highlighted at least one sign of financial stress over housing.
One of the worst legacies of the Thatcherite era was the sell-off of council housing. While it meant that council tenants could get on “the property ladder”, the law prevented councils from reinvesting the money in new housing, which meant that stock ran down over time. Add in the horrible squeeze on council funding of the austerity era and you get a toxic brew that will take Labour a decade to sort out.