It's been a gloomy week. Sorry.
1. Surprise! Apple’s sync stuff is entirely cryptic
The magnificent Howard Oakley, who knows more about the technology in the Mac than any man has a right to know, has been digging into the way iCloud sync works, and found it imposes some completely invisible quotas. This is the flip side of Apple’s “it just works” philosophy – it works, but Apple is not going to make it easy for you to troubleshoot if it ever doesn’t.
2. Google, the most disappointing monopoly
Google, on the other hand, loves being open. It publishes papers about AI, takes part in academic malarkey, and generally is open and lovely and cuddly. Except for one area: search, where its openness definitely has some limits. Cory Doctorow, as always, is on the money with his criticism of how big tech companies are enshittifying their products. Search is just the latest, and it won’t be the last.
3. Free money rots your morals, say people who have rotten morals
Some weirdo Republicans in the US are trying to proactively prevent anyone from implementing universal basic income (UBI), because they want wage slaves to stay in their place or something. Like the four day week, UBI is one of those things where no amount of actual tests and data will convince right wingers that it’s a good thing.
4. It shouldn’t need saying, but it does need saying
Corporations are not to be loved. Even the good ones.
5. Measles infected kids can skip quarantine in Florida
I could make this post into ten things which demonstrate that Republicans are stupid, ignorant, and liable to get people killed. They really are the worst.
6. And speaking of not loving corporations…
One of the things that amateur commentators about the EU DMA Apple shenanigans don’t appear to have understood is that the EU aren’t going to start investigating whether Apple is complying until after the deadline on 7th March. The pundits currently doing victory dances about how the EU can’t write clear laws or about how Apple has done an end run around them are going to end up amending a few blog posts.
7. Leadership is in the details
On a very different topic, this article from Gaël Clichy on Pep Guardiola’s leadership style is well worth a read. What often gets lost in leadership theory is the role that attention to detail plays. Pep gets it.
8. Federation, uh huh. Federation
Bluesky is finally federatable. This is a big deal: federated services are the future, and I always had some doubts over whether Bluesky would, in fact, ever release it. I take my hat off to them, and possibly eat it too.
9. Google to Apple: "hold my beer"
Google, which generates 30 percent of its sales from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, views the DMA as disrespecting its expertise in what users want.
I am so looking forward to the flurry of investigations which start after the 7th March deadline for DMA compliance. I wonder if the big tech companies are just thinking that if they're all shady about the way they comply, the EU just won't have enough people to investigate them all?
10. VICE pivots to… not posting
Remember VICE? The company that pivoted to a strategy of giving its senior executives big bonuses days before it entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy? Well it's latest pivot is to not posting anything on its website, and becoming a "content studio" (whatever that is) which licenses its content to other publishers. No, I have no idea what that means either, other than it undoubtedly means more layoffs in an industry that has already seen quite a lot this year. And it's only February.
