Linkblogs
- I read a lot, I just didn’t read a lot that was actually on the syllabus. ↩︎
Ten Blue Links "my god, what have I done?" edition
1. Well who could possibly have seen this coming?
I wrote a while ago that the era of major levels of affiliate revenue for publishers was going to come to an end within the next three to five years. Generative AI writing means both that Google is likely to become a sea of slop, and that anyone with a search engine – especially Google – is going to cream off the best quality search results for itself.Amazon is taking this a step further by using generative AI to do product recommendations on site. Given that a large number of searches for products begin on Amazon anyway, this is more bad news for anyone who makes money from sending traffic towards the Seattle company. And as users get more and more exposed to using conversation to hone down what they want, this is going to get worse for publishers who focus on “an article” as the canonical way of recommending products.
The truth is that articles have never been brilliant at recommending the right solution for any individual. For example, the answer to “what car is right for me” has always depended on your use of it. Conversational agents using good quality data will be a better solution in the long run.
2. Turkeys, meet Christmas
Yes, I know that advertising revenue is toast, but if you are a major publisher and you’re giving OpenAI the rights to mine your content, you are silly. The sum of money they’re paying is never going to go up: and when your licensing deal ends, they will have used everything you have ever done to train a model which can recreate your style of content in seconds. Golf, as they say, clap.3. Possible sign of the end times: I agree with DHH
David Heinemeier Hansson is not on my Christmas card list. He’s one of those techbros for whom the phrase “arrogant asshat” is entirely appropriate. But for once, I’m going to agree wholeheartedly with something he wrote: Automattic demanding a tithe from WP Engine is a violation of the ideals of open source software, reduces trust in it, and in my view shows that Matt Mullenweg’s “principles” begin and end at maintaining control over WordPress.4. Where all the Chief Metaverse Officers gone?
Good question. My bet is the B Ark.5. Oh boy, Roblox is toast
Where “toast” means “full of child grooming”. Ouch.6. Quote of the week
The truth is the news media is effectively in the tank for Trump, sanewashing his literal nonsense, outright lies, and violence-inspiring hate speech against even legal immigrants. But our major political news media remains so hyper-focused on appearing not to favor one political side over the other that it’s completely lost sight of what ought to be their north star: the truth. John Gruber, “Why Is Jack Smith’s Unsealed Motion, Outlining Trump’s Criminal Actions to Overturn the 2020 Election, Not the Top Story?”
7. Elon, phone home (from Mars)
I increasingly wonder why Elon Musk is bothering trying to establish himself on Mars, and not just because it looks like a complete dump up there. (Seriously, if you think that’s beautiful, I have around a hundred thousand disused quarries I’d love to show you right here on Earth.) The ever-wonderful Marina Hyde, wondering what reality Musk occupies.
8. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you that lovely Google would do this
Yeah no of course I’m not. Turns out that Google Pixel phones give it your location, email address and more every fifteen minutes, without consent. And no, before you say something, using an iPhone isn’t much a miracle cure.9. This stuff matters
I could have written a WordPress special edition this time out. But I wondered if that would be too “insider baseball” for most people.But a big chunk of the internet runs on WordPress. Publishers use it a lot. It’s become the IBM of web servers: “no one ever got fired for recommending WordPress”. And the hold-outs in the publishing space who have had their own bespoke software or used something else appear to be dwindling every year.
So WordPress matters, to a degree that few other software platforms do. It became popular in part because it was open source, so anyone could customize it and bend it to their will, and because so many people used it that it was easy to support and find developers for. It saw off semi-forgotten closed source rivals.
If you want a summary then Mathew Ingram’s article is a good place to go. Mathew has written something which encapsulates the feeling that I think many people have: profound disappointment in Mat Mullenweg’s behaviour, in his refusal to understand that being both the CEO of WordPress.com and the effective owner of WordPress.org places him in a position which needs to be handled sensitively. Using WordPress.org to attack a commercial rival of his company means it “now looks like the CEO of a multibillion-dollar corporation is using his control of a theoretically open-source foundation to extort money from a competitor.” That is unacceptable.
10. A hole is a hole
“There is no such thing as a magic hole that only good guys can use”. Wendy Grossman has spent a long time pointing out that if you build a backdoor in a system to let “good guys” in law enforcement use, you’re opening the same thing for people who you would really rather not let into systems. And so it goes.Ten Blue Links, literary salon Edition
1. Apple’s built in apps can do (almost) everything
One of the characteristics of hardcore nerdery is the tendency to over engineer your systems. People spend a lot of time creating systems, tinkering with them, making them as perfect as possible, only to abandon them a few years down the line when some new shiny hotness appears.I’m as guilty of this as the next nerd, but at least I’m aware of my addiction. It’s one of the reasons why I have spent time avoiding getting sucked into the word of Notion, because I can see myself losing days (weeks) to tinkering, all the while getting nothing done.
That said, if you are going to create an entire workflow management system and you’re in the word of Apple, you could do a lot worse than take a leaf out of Joan Westenberg’s book and use all Apple’s first party apps. They have now got to the point where they are superficially simple, but contain a lot of power underneath.
The downside is it’s an almost certain way of trapping yourself in Apple’s ecosystem for the rest of time. Yes, Apple’s services – which lie behind the apps – use standards and have the ability to export, but not all of them, and for how long?
It’s a trade off, and from my perspective not one that really works for me right now. But if it does for you, then it’s a good option (and better than Notion).
2. Juno removed from the App Store
AKA “why I do not like any company, no matter how well intentioned, to have a monopoly on software distribution for a platform.” Christian Selig created a YouTube player for the Apple Vision Pro. It doesn’t block ads or do anything which could be regarded as dubious. But Google claimed it was using its trademarks, and Apple removed it.Why is this problematic? Because it’s setting Apple up as a judge in a legal case. YouTube could, and should, have gone to a judge if it believed it had a legal case for trademark violation. That’s what judges are for. Instead, probably because it knew that it wouldn’t win a case like that, it went to Apple. Apple (rightly) doesn’t want to get involved in trademark disputes, so it shrugged and removed the app.
This extra-legal application of law is one of the most nefarious impacts of App Store monopolies. And if it continues to be allowed, it will only get worse.
3. The horrible descent of Matt Mullenweg
You will be aware of the conflict between WordPress — by which we mean Matt Mullenweg, because according to Matt he is WordPress — and WPEngine. I have many opinions on this which I will, at some point, get down to writing. The most important one is simple: if you make an open source product under the GPL, you don’t get to dictate to anyone how they use it and don’t get to attempt to punish them for not contributing “enough”. Heck, you don’t get to decide what “enough” looks like.The whole thing has brought out the worst in Mullenweg, as evidenced in his attacks on Kellie Peterson. Peterson, who is a former Automattic employee, offered to help anyone leaving WordPress find opportunities. Mullenweg decided this was attacking him, and claimed this was illegal. I don’t know about you, but when a multi-millionaire starts to throw around words like “tortuous interference” I pay attention.
As with many of that generation of California ideologists Mullenweg appears to have decided that he knows best, now and always. Yes, private equity companies that use open source projects and contribute nothing back are douchebags, but they’re douchebags who are doing something that the principles of open source explicitly allow them to do. Mullenweg’s apparent desire to be the emperor of WordPress is worrying.
4. OpenAI raises money, still isn’t a business
Ed Zitron wrote an excellent piece this week on the crazy valuation and funding round which OpenAI just closed, pointing out that (1) ChatGPT loses money on every customer, and (2) there is no way to use scale to change this: the company is going to keep losing money on every customer as models get more compute-hungry. Neither Moore’s Law nor the economies of scale which made cloud services of the past profitable are going to come riding to the rescue.I think Ed’s right — and it’s important to note, as Satya Nadella did, that LLMs are moving into the “commodity” stage — but one other thing to note is that many of the more simple things which people use LLMs for are being pushed from cloud to edge. Apple’s “Apple Intelligence” is one example of this, but Microsoft is also pushing a lot of the compute down to the device level in the ARM-based Copilot PCs.
This trend should alleviate some of the growth issues that OpenAI has, but it’s a double-edged sword because it makes it less likely that someone will need to use ChatGPT, and so even less likely to need to pay OpenAI.
5. Why I love Angela Carter
I think I first read Angela Carter during my degree, one of the few books that I bothered to read for my literature modules1. This piece includes possibly my favourite quote from her: “Okay, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what?”And the point is: sometimes it’s fine not to be subtle. Sometimes it’s fine to be overblown. Sometimes the story demands it, like a steak needs to be juicy.
6. And speaking of writers I love
I can’t tell you enough to just go and read M John Harrison. Climbers is sometimes regarded as his best novel, and this essay on why it’s the best book written about 21st century male loneliness despite being written in 1989 captures a lot of it. I like the line from Robert Macfarlane’s introduction: “To Harrison, all life is alien”. Amen to that.7. No really this week is all lit, all the time
Olivia Laing is another writer that makes me salivate when I read her. Like Harrison and Carter, her prose is as good as her fiction, and her recent book The Garden Against Time – an account of restoring a garden to glory – is one of the best yet. If you need any further persuading, you should read this piece in the New Yorker.8. Down in Brighton? Like books?
Next weekend is the best-named literary festival in the world down in Brighton. The Coast is Queer includes loads of brilliant sessions including queer fantastical reimaginings, the incredible Julia Armfield on world building, Juno Dawson’s trans literary salon, and the unmissable David Hoyle. I’m going, you should go.9. Harlan the terrible
Like Cory Doctorow, I grew up worshipping Harlan Ellison. And like Cory, as I’ve grown older I have see that Harlan was an incredibly complicated person. Cory has written a great piece (masquerading as just one part of a linkblog) which not only looks at Harlan, warts and all, but also talks about the genesis of the story he contributed to the – finally finished! – Last Dangerous Visions.10. Argh Mozilla wai u doo this?
No Mozilla, no, online advertising does not need “improving… through product and infrastructure”. Online advertising needs to understand that surveillance-based ads were always toxic and the whole thing needs to be torn up. I agree with Jamie Zawinski: Mozilla should be “building THE reference implementation web browser, and being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.”To be clear: I think Mozilla’s goals are laudable, in the sense that at the moment the choice for people is either accept being tracked to a horrendous degree or just block almost every ad and tracker. But you can’t engineer your way around the advertising industry’s rapacious desire for data. It’s that industry which needs to change, not the technology.
Ten Blue Links “reinventing drink ordering” Edition
1. Inventing the future
If there is a book about Apple, I have probably read it. On my first day working at the company in 1989 I was given the obligatory copy of then-CEO John Sculley’s Odyssey: From Pepsi to Apple. After that, I devoured as much as I could.
I don’t think I have read a book like John Buck’s Inventing the Future, though. It’s getting on for 500 pages of interviews, history and anecdotes about Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, and I highly recommend it if you want to hear stories which haven’t been told before about Apple. I really wish it had an index, but it’s still well worth the money.
2. Apple’s web video mojo
Durig a conversation about Apple QuickTime, Kevin Marks pointed me at this article he wrote back in 2006 on why the company was losing its web video mojo. Kevin was right then – Apple could have owned web video – and someone really needs to sit down and write the history of that part of the company’s story. How did they mess up? As Kevin puts it “they invented pop-up web ads, and put one in before playing any web QT movie to sell the 'Pro' version of the player. They crippled the QT Player to remove the editing features unless you paid - even for the Mac users who had had the benefit before.” A lesson for today’s Apple, too.
3. Future is cleaning house
IMore, the 16 year old site which was born in the wake of the iPhone, is to close down. It’s not the only one of Future’s tech brands to be shuttered: AnandTech, the technology brand which had one of the best reputations in the world, is also going although its archive will stay online for the foreseeable future. I’m not surprised – while both sites were well regarded, they were not a great fit for the affiliate-led strategy that Future has been pursuing for many years (where it was ahead of most publishers).
4. “Pray we don’t alter the deal further”
One of the reasons I loathe – and I really do mean that – the current generation of tech giants is their ability to lock down markets for software and pull the rug out from under existing application developers. The latest example is iA, which has effectively killed off the Android version of its wonderful writing app iA Writer after Google changed the rules regarding letting applications access Google Drive. “In order to get our users full access to their Google Drive on their devices, we now needed to pass a yearly CASA (Cloud Application Security Assessment) audit. This requires hiring a third-party vendor like KPMG.” Yes, that’s right: pay an auditor maybe a couple of months of revenue in order to access cloud storage. But it’s not just Google: Apple has the same control, as iA point out in a footnote.
5. Halide rejected from the App Store
No really, it’s not just Google. After seven years, and despite being featured in the iPhone 16 keynote, an update to Halide was rejected from Apple’s App Store because its permissions prompt wasn’t explicit enough that the app, which is a camera app and takes pictures, was in fact a camera app which takes pictures. Apple admitted this was a mistake, but how many “mistakes” never get corrected because the app isn’t high profile enough to get the right level of attention?
6. Why this blog will be moving soon
I’m not a massive fan of WP Engine as a company, and I wouldn’t recommend them as a WordPress host for a bunch of small reasons, but I have no doubt at all that Matt Mullenweg’s apparent crusade against them is one of the hollowest and most disingenuous set of complaints I have seen in a long time. Pulling the rug out from users getting security updates is an unforgiveable move.
This blog is hosted by WordPress.com, and I don’t particularly want to move back to self-hosting WordPress. Anyone got any recommendations?
7. Return to work and die
I mean, literally die. For four days. With no one noticing.
8. Remember the TouchPad?
This one is a definite trip down memory lane: The HP TouchPad was a WebOS tablet that had many of the attributes necessary to compete with the iPad, and yet was dumped by HP 49 days after its release. And I had completely forgotten that Russell Brand did an advert for it. Oh boy.
9. Cosmic Alpha 2
COSMIC DE has moved into alpha 2. If you don’t know about it, it’s a new Linux desktop environment which has been created as part of the next big upgrade to PopOS, the distribution created by computer maker System76 for its range of machine. I’m using it on my ThinkPad, and – so far at least – it's been stable and very usable considering its alpha status. I’ve seen release versions of open source products be less stable. I might write something longer about my experience of Cosmic DE as I use it more.
10. Douchebros want to ruin bars, now
Sometimes I really wish that the idea of “disruption” in business had never been invented, because it really does attract some of the worst ideas. Case in point: disrupting queuing for a drink in a bar. No. Just no.
Ten Blue Links, "Turn to the left" edition
QuickTime
My first look at QuickTime came before it was publicly released. I was working at Apple in IS&T in 1990, and we had a session one afternoon showing everyone the world of the future. Of course, Knowledge Navigator took pride of place, but also shown off was an early version of a revolutionary new multimedia technology which would allow you to play video, in real time, in colour, on your Mac. QuickTime.
I was also there for the launch of QuickTime 3.0 in 1998, although all I remember of that event was the use of Sarah McLachlan’s Building a Mystery video (possibly one of the most 90s pieces of film ever made).
And, in 2001, on the top floor of the Dennis Publishing office I sat in the corner and tried to work as on screen a postage-stamp sized QuickTime video showed me a live feed of first one then two planes hitting the World Trade Center. A handful of years before the towers had been beacons as a train swung into New York, bringing me from Boston to Manhattan and into the best city in the world for the very first time. Even at QuickTime size, I felt like I was watching a friend take their last breath.
QuickTime, then, is woven through many memories for me. Anyway, Howard Oakley has written a brief history of it, and as a technology it probably deserves more. As a carrier of memory, it definitely means more to me.
2. Go to your room!
Sooner or later, your parents tell you to clean up your room. While Apple is now a middle aged company its recent descent into teenage tantrum behaviour has finally caused the EU to lose patience, ground it, and demand it thinks about its future conduct.
3. Editing vs accreting
Me and John Gruber have our disagreements but I couldn’t agree more with almost everything in his article on the difference between Tim Cook’s Apple and Steve Jobs’ Apple. I would compare Jobs to a brilliant magazine editor, pulling together and inspiring creative people while also editing: taking out what it’s needed to tell the story. Cook, on the other hand, is someone who accretes, who adds on more stuff in order to build.
4. No, Larry, no
Larry Ellison has always had an interesting reputation in Silicon Valley. Extraordinarily rich after Oracle became the data foundation of almost everything in the world, Ellison has a kind of noxiously playful arrogance. One of the most stomach-turning episodes of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs hagiography involves Ellison and Jobs playing a prank call on an Apple fan, first offering him a job, then laughingly turning down the poor sap. It’s gross. And it’s very Ellison.
With great money comes great stupidity, and it’s worth considering that as context when you read about Ellison’s view that pervasive surveillance cameras will bring world peace, or something. A man so divorced from a world which doesn’t involved super yachts, billionaire friends and the ability to buy as many Miata’s as you want (if you know, you know) is not someone that the world should listen to about the future.
5. Where the iPad ends
I don’t think there is a device which divides opinion more than the iPad. I see this in myself: there are days when I absolutely love my iPad Pro and everything that it represents. A device which can transform into anything you want it to be, that’s simple to use, that has a screen which is better than anything you own. And then there are days when I hate it. Not because of how it works, but because the degree of control over the experience of computing which it represents is an antithesis of many of my values.
But. There’s something about it, and I think this archive article by Tim Bajarin from the iPad’s tenth anniversary on the device’s influence is worth reading. How pervasive is the iPad’s influence now? In some senses, the use of ARM and amazing displays which are clearly the direction that computers are going in probably represents its deepest impact so far. Yes, touch screens are common in the Windows world, but slate-style computers haven’t really taken off in the way they should have. I’m still typing this on a Mac, after all.
6. Engagement bait
Been on Threads lately? You’ll have noticed that the main feed is a torrent of engagement bait. Of course you can switch to look at just the people you follow, but Meta makes every effort to pull you back into the “For You” feed, which shows you what appears to be a random mix of stupid questions and inane comments, written by people who pull on engagement like lungs pull on air.
Similarly, anecdote from the blue side of the Meta empire notes the home feed in Facebook is now showing more and more “content” from pages, groups and pretty much anything except the people you want to see: your friends and family, the ones you love, and an occasional cute dachshund.
Why, though? Speculating wildly, I think both Threads and the Facebook home feed represent a desperate bid for novelty. The action in terms of keeping you in touch with the people you’re close to has moved elsewhere, into different kinds of messenger application both private (iMessage, WhatsApp) and semi-public (Telegram). What’s left for Facebook? Pictures of old dogs?
And Threads is attempting to defining itself as “not Twitter”, while also trying to appeal to the same kinds of core influencers – journalists, those who aren’t visual enough for Insta. What better way to win than rigging the game towards a stream of infinite engagement bait?
7. Death to all Word
It’s 11 years since Charlie Stross wrote about how he hated Microsoft Word. It’s still a great read, and Charlie’s point – that until Microsoft Word dies, it’s unavoidable – remains as sound as ever.
8. You put the Lime in the coconut
I love electric bikes. I own one, and it’s got me back into cycling. So I’m in favour of people using them. But… well, is it just me or do techbros ruin everything? In this case, Lime and other e-bike rental companies are essentially creating fat rideable litter across areas to such a degree that local authorities want them banned, and local residents want them crushed. The bikes, not the techbros. Although hey, if that’s what the people want…
9. Fashion
It’s an unlikely thing for a boy from Derby, part of the post-industrial hinterland that is the East Midlands, to love fashion. But I always have. I think it was fashion that first made me love magazines, the heft and visual delight of something like Vogue. When I became an editor of a magazine which, while a tech mag, was also read by a huge number of creative people in design, it was probably the best job I ever had – even if I didn’t know it at the time.
I still love magazines, which is why I absolutely adored “In Vogue: The 90s”, a documentary about the eponymous magazine and the the era that made me. Highly recommended.
10. Art for art’s sake
I spent five years working on a PhD thesis titled The implications of Kant’s philosophy of mind for artificial intelligencein the early 90s, when cognitive science – that blend of philosophy, computing and psychology - was probably at its academic height. But like Kant, my interests in philosophy were broad, and I spent a chunk of my time in both medical ethics and the philosophy of art. The paper I presented to the conservators of the V&A on analogies from principles in medical ethics is long lost, but I’m glad that my comparison of the principle of dignity in death being more important than the relentless preservation of life with conservation of art works didn’t stick too heavily in anyone’s mind.
I’ve realised lately quite how much a blend of technology, art and design has influenced my working practice. I’m not an artist – words are the only medium that I have ever found which I have any talent at – but I love art, and artists, and design, and designers. I love how they see the world.
That’s probably why I love this interview with Jenny Saville much. Saville is one of those artists whose work you would instantly recognise, but whose face you might not remember. And in particular, I love this quote:
When I paint, I don’t search for beauty, but for the power of life’s force: when you fall in love with someone, it's life’s force. When you see amazing food or you listen to music that goes right inside your body, that’s life’s force. That moment is not an intellectual space, it's something beyond – you can't articulate it. It’s about the moments that help you breathe deeper.
That’s a good one to ponder on.
Ten Blue Links, “hell of a lot of Apple here, Ian” edition
1. Oh was there some new Apple stuff?
Apparently there was. I didn’t get chance to watch the keynote live — I was in Amsterdam for a conference — but the only thing that really stood out for me when I saw it later was the feature for AirPods Pro which allows them to function as a proper hearing aid. My old ears will thank Apple for it (and so will my bank manager, as I won’t have to spend around £1,000 on something I don’t need most of the time).2. Private cloud compute
And speaking of new Apple stuff, I’m actually pretty impressed with the way that Apple has implemented its private cloud compute system. Yeah, I know, AI is evil and all that.3. How an iPhone screen repair led to a social media ban
However, back in the world of older Apple stuff, this whole story is likely to make your jaw hit the floor. After Apple replaced Finn Voorhees’ iPhone screen, they found when trying to log into Snapchat they got a an “SS06: Device Banned” error message. It turned out that the phone Finn got was a refurb (which should be fine) but that the previous owner had been banned from the service – and Snapchat uses a little-known feature to lock out not only the user, but the device if someone is banned. Unfortunately this device ban flag persists even if the phone is factory reset.4. The new Reeder
One of the things which keeps pulling back to using the Mac, iPad and iPhone is thethird party developer ecosystem. This, of course, is one of the reasons why I end up getting angry at Apple for wanting their pound of flesh from every developer. It’s not the Mac that keeps me on the Mac. It’s the developers. Apple should be paying them, not the other way round.Anyway, Reeder has been one of my favourite Mac and iOS applications for a long time. It’s an RSS reader (the clue is in the name) that’s a beautiful piece of design.
Silvio Rizzo, its author, has rebuilt the app from the ground up to change its focus and, as he puts it, make it something that’s “rebuilt for today”.
What does that mean? The starting point is that the way we get information is no longer all about RSS. In fact, we get feeds from social media, from YouTube, from podcasts, and many other places.
So Reeder now supports all of the above, putting everything into a single feed. It’s still a lovely design, but I suspect this approach won’t be for everyone. It reminds me of the “river of news” concept that Dave Winer was talking about more than a decade ago. I’m not sure if I like it yet, but I am going to give it a go.
5. iA Writer keeps getting better
Information Architects – iA – are one of my favourite developer teams. Not only do they produce great apps, they’re good people too. iA Writer, which was their first and flagship product, is the best distraction-free Markdown writing application that exists.But it’s had one small weakness which means I don’t use it for as much as I would want: it’s not really designed to handle long-form articles made up from smaller pieces, whether that’s a novel or book-length project of just something composed from small parts. It can do transclusion in writing, and that’s a useful feature, but it’s not quite what I need.
A case in point: although the tools I use to write these linkblog posts vary, I often use Ulysses for it. I will write each of the ten blue links in a separate document, allowing me to go as short or long as I want without distraction. Then I just number them, move them into the right order, and publish direct to Wordpress.
I can’t quite do that with iA Writer — yet. I could create each document separately, but in order to make a single document which I could publish in one click, I would have to create a document, use the transclusion feature to “insert” all the elements, and publish it. It’s just a little less elegant than the same process on Ulysses.
The good news is that it’s moving closer to having the right tools for the job. The latest version includes a “tree view” for files in its sidebar, making it significantly easier to structure texts. I’m really looking forward to what they do next.
6. One for the book pile
This looks like essential reading: an amazing collection of interview and anecdotes from the hackers and nerds who made all the most amazing Apple technology (via Nick Heer, where I get a lot of my best links from.)7. Ice. Ice. Baby
When the wonderful Mac menu bar app Bartender was sold there was a little bit of concern that the new owner wouldn’t, perhaps, be the best steward for it. But if you want an app to manage all the clutter in your menubar then look no further than Ice. Not only is it really good, it’s also open source. Recommended.8. Spamming the regulator
Look this is nerdy as hell, but you know I love a little bit of light reading about competition law. This paper looks at a new tactic from big companies who are under investigation for antitrust violation: gathering together so many thousands of pages of evidence and expert testimony that the case either becomes logjammed forever, or the regulator and judges can’t properly evaluate the evidence.9. Rage bait on Threads
It’s a problem. For me Threads is mostly unusable junk because the “For you” view is swamped by engagement bait and nonsense. I’m happy that mostly I can now follow the people I want to follow who are only active on Threads from my Mastodon account, but I would love for Meta to actually realise this is a problem and engage with it. The service will go down the toilet pretty fast if it doesn’t.10. America’s best paid CEOs have the worst paid employees
I’m sure this is a complete coincidence and the money will trickle down Real Soon Now.Ten Blue Links, “I was a teenage anarchist” edition
1. Model collapse isn’t just for AI
When a large language model starts to ingest a lot of content written by either itself or other large language models, it falls into what’s called model collapse: a state where, like a snake eating its own tail, it no longer makes sense.
Back when I was working on the philosophy of AI in the 1990s, one of the strands of study was using computers to understand human behaviour by creating models and seeing if the quirks of us meat sacks would emerge from the model. And I would argue that model collapse is one of these quirks. If the information you are exposed to is limited to an echo chamber, then you see the same kind of behaviour in people.
Unfortunately – but predictably – the “super-smart” Silicon Valley billionaires are just as susceptible to model collapse as either an LLM or every other human. Only, unlike most people (and most LLMs) the damage they can do because of this model collapse is actually enormous. Musk, Andreessen, Thiel and the rest have created a model of the world which bears no relation to reality, but unfortunately, they have it in their power to influence the world so it matches their views.
2. RIP AnandTech
At its height, AnandTech was the best site around for deep, highly researched reviews of significant products. As such, it was an outlier as technology product writing moved to an affiliate-based revenue model which focused on lists of potential options for purchase. It had more akin to the technology publishing landscape that I learned the trade in, where products were tested (occasionally to destruction) in labs by people who focused on devising ever more fiendish methods of working out how a product would perform in the real world.
I’m sad to see it go, but at least it doesn’t have to suffer the same fate as so many other sites which have simply been used as fodder for boosting the SEO rankings of lesser brands.
3. Monoculture is mono failure
Diversity, as anyone smart knows, is strength. That applies to farming. It applies to organisations. And it applies to platforms. Diversity protects you from the impact of monocultures, which inevitably contain the seeds of their own downfall.
And yet, the technological systems we currently have implicitly rewarded monocultures, monopolies and monopsonies. Wherever you look, from hardware systems to social media platforms to online retailing, we are creating failure points through a lack of diversity. CrowdStrike is just the latest example, but 21st century capitalism’s addiction to the Highlander Principle (“there can be only one!”) is going to present some profound problems over the next few decades. Assuming of course we survive them at all…
4. I just wish Bluesky was actually a federated system
Bluesky, the “not Twitter” that isn’t either Mastodon or Threads, has seen an influx of users from both Britain and now Brazil as people become more and more annoyed with Elon Musk. But it’s also been focusing on some fascinating approaches to content moderation and protecting users. The latest is the ability, if a post of yours is quoted, to “decouple” the post from the quote – effectively stopping in its tracks one commonly used method of abuse, the “quote tweet pile-on”.
I still don’t like that it’s not, yet, truly federated: you can’t run your own server, and even if you use a name based on your own domain you can’t move servers no matter what. But I like that they are experimenting with different options.
5. JISC leaving Twitter
And speaking of leaving Twitter, JISC announced it would be ceasing activity on there. The organisation is “the UK digital, data and technology agency focused on tertiary education, research and innovation”, a non-profit which drives digital transformation in education in the UK. It’s a big deal that it no longer believes being active on Twitter is in alignment with its values.
6. The NeXT IPO that never happened
Via Michael Tsai, this is not only a great little potted history of NeXT, the company that effectively did a reverse takeover of Apple (and ruined my 30th birthday), but also reveals that it was at one point planning an IPO. The thing that made an IPO possible wasn’t the hardware (NeXT was out of that market) or NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP. Instead it was WebObjects, the web development platform which made creating complex dynamic sites much more easy than before. At the beginnings of the Dotcom boom, this was a major potential business.
Extra bonus fact: Dell apparently used WebObjects to create its online store in just four weeks. That, at the time, was incredible.
7. Moof!
8. Starship Stormtroopers
I was far too young to read New Worlds magazine, but by my early teens I had moved on from Tolkien to Michael Moorcock, borrowing the Dorian Hawkmoon and Corum Jhaelen Irsei series from the local library and being absolutely amazed by the sheer muscularity of the writing. At some point – and I can’t remember where I found it – I read Moorcock’s “Starship Stormtroopers” essay on the fascistic nature of much of the Science Fiction canon, and that was it: my life – and my politics – changed for good. I became a teenage anarchist.
I’m not sure if I am still one today (the teenage bit, definitely not) but I occasionally reread the essay, just to remind myself that it’s OK Not To Like Frank Herbert.
9. The best novel about 21st Century male loneliness
The second of the holy trinity of New Worlds writers that changed my view of fiction was, of course, M John Harrison. There’s an argument to be made that Harrison is our best living writer, although I’m sure that he would hate anyone for making it. Harrison was unique at the time for not allowing genre to dictate what he should write, and Climbers, his 1989 novel about rock climbing in Yorkshire, saw him walk a long way out of science fiction without breaking a step. It’s a brilliant book, and I was really pleased to see this article which argues that it’s also become the definitive novel about 21st century male loneliness.
And I think it’s right: part of the impact of our relationships moving from primarily face to face to being mediated by the internet is, as Sherry Turkle put it, that we are alone together. In that sense, it mirrors the mental state of going climbing, which is a social activity done primarily in solitude.
10. Ignorance of your (global) culture is not considered cool
I think of myself as pretty well-educated. But I didn’t understand the role that India played in essentially creating the numbering system which we all used – I, like most, thought it originated with Arab mathematicians.
But it didn’t, and the forthcoming book by William Dalrymple about how India changed the world got ordered quickly once I read this article. And it is, as Dalrymple notes, ironic that the innovations in banking, accounting and business enabled by the Indian system of numbers when it reached the west did so much to create the financial muscle which allowed Europe to ultimately subjugate India. After all, it was “the East India Company – run from the City of London by merchants and accountants, with their ledgers and careful accounting – that ran amok and seized and subjugated a fragmented and divided India in what was probably the supreme act of corporate violence in history.”
Ten Blue Links, "Cthulhu lives!" edition
1. The smartest comment you will read about AI and art this week
From the wonderful Laurie Anderson, about an AI version of her late husband, Lou Reed: “I mean, people might have black-and-white photographs of their grandparents or even a VR representation, but nothing can capture these people. They’re dead. I like what the Dalai Lama said about an artificial flower being as good as a real flower, because it reminds you of the real one. I’ve done versions of Lou’s voice and Lou’s writing made from AI trained on his work. It’s not Lou but it reminds me of Lou. It’s about the reminding of how you feel about that person.”
2. There’s definitely a German compound word for this
What is a remembrance of futures which never happened called? This article about an edition of Saturday Review World which looked at the world of 2024 from the perspective of 1974 includes quotes from Wernher von Braun, Neil Armstrong and many others. I would love a copy.
3. Your occasional reminder that macOS malware exists
And this one is a data stealer, called — and I am not making this up — “Cthulhu Stealer”. You can’t get more scary than a bit of Cthulhu.
4. Adversarial interoperability made the computer we know and love
Every time I set yet another account of how antitrust is “stifling innovation” I am going to send this article to its author. Adversarial interoperability made the PC possible, stopped Microsoft completely owning all office documents, and helped save Apple. And now, thanks to extensions to IP law, it’s more than a little broken.
5. File under the dumb stuff that happens in app stores
Application developer makes a piece of software which allows people to use their existing account with Digital Ocean to do a cool thing. Apple nopes it because Digital Ocean isn’t paying them a cut of all their revenue, although the app isn’t made by Digital Ocean. Rent seeking, much?
6. Are we the baddies?
And speaking of Apple, this article sums up how, I think, many people are feeling about the company these days – folks who in the past would have not only been fans of the products, but also been evangelists for the way the company was different to the rest. This paragraph, in particular: “But another part is that despite achieving massive success, Apple continues to make decisions that put it at odds with the community that used to tirelessly advocate for them. They antagonize developers by demanding up to one-third of their revenue and block them from doing business the way they want. They make an ad (inadvertently or not) celebrating the destruction of every creative tool that isn’t sold by Apple. They antagonize regulators by exerting their power in ways that impact the entire market. They use a supposedly neutral notarization process to block apps from shipping on alternate app stores in the EU. Most recently they demand 30% of creators’ revenue on Patreon. No single action makes them the bad guy, but put together, they certainly aren’t acting like a company that is trying to make their enthusiast fans happy. In fact, it seems Apple is testing them to see how much they can get away with.”
7. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you etc
Who amongst us could possibly have predicted that the emissions claims of giant technology companies would turn out to be complete hogwash based on dubious accounting techniques. And that, in fact, their emissions have been steadily climbing even before the current vogue for carbon-hungry AI? (Via the super-smart Rachel Coldicutt.)
8. The best iOS is the one you can’t get, Americans
As Federico says, the fork of iOS that’s available in the EU is the best version of iOS.
9. Just in case you have forgotten how bad Microsoft was
Remember when Microsoft deliberately broke Windows if it was running on a competitor’s version of DOS? This is why you don’t let platforms have as much control as the likes of Google and Apple have today. It’s not that they’re bad people: it’s that all the economic imperatives are towards things which harm competition and so, over time, harm customers.
10. No
Ten Blue Links, "Gnarls Barkley is innocent" edition
1. Just because we killed you doesn't make us liable
Dr. Kanokporn Tangsuan died after eating a meal at a Disney resort. Her family claims this is down to an allergic reaction after the restaurant allegedly failed to label their food properly. So far, so tragic — but tragic in a completely normal way. What makes this incomprehensible, though, is that Disney's legal team have decided that a clause in the Disney+ streaming service's ToS — which one of the plaintiffs had trialled a few years ago — means the case can't be tried in a court. While this sounds extreme, terms of service are chock-full of this kind of stuff, all designed to create a parallel legal system that's easier for large companies to game to their advantage. Not content with having a legal system that's inherently rigged in their favour thanks to costs and their ability to lobby to have laws they don't like watered down, companies are trying to avoid any legal responsibility. Truly, we live in feudal times.
2. But wait, what's this coming over the horizon?
Finally — finally — though, big companies are getting held to some semblance of account. Last week Google found that just because you're acknowledged as the best product doesn't mean you can also pay potential competitors to ensure they don't challenge you. Cory Doctorow's talk at Defcon 32 outlines what's going on, and why regulation and law is the biggest sharpest tool in the box to ensure a competitive landscape in tech and elsewhere. Required reading.
3. You all know who Stanley Baldwin is, right?
Baldwin was the British prime minister who finally stood up to the press barons in the UK -- and won. That's a lesson today's leaders, including Keir Starmer, should take to heart. This article highlights European Commission Thierry Breton's public letter to Elon Musk as a similar moment. It is, of course, only part of Europe's ongoing campaign to make big tech companies actually follow the same laws as everyone else. You might agree or disagree with individual actions, but if you don't believe that companies should be subject to the law “without fear or favour” then you probably shouldn't keep reading this blog.
4. “Associated fees”
I genuinely try not to include yet more Apple-bashing every week, but — oh Tim! – they make it really hard for me. Take the announcement this week it would finally (I'm using that word a lot this week) open up the NFC features on iPhones to third parties globally, allowing them to create payment systems which don't have to go via Apple Pay. Yay! Except… “to incorporate this new solution in their iPhone apps, developers will need to enter into a commercial agreement with Apple, request the NFC and SE entitlement, and pay the associated fees”. What fees? Who knows — Apple isn't saying yet — but the idea that a developer can do anything at all on the iPhone without paying the company even more money seems to be one that Tim and the boys can't accept.
5. Double Cory
Another thing I try not to do is link to the same person in a week, but in addition to a great speech at Defcon, Cory Doctorow gave Apple a well-deserved kicking over everything that I seem to write about every week. And it relates back to the sad story of Dr Tangsuan, too. As Cory puts it: “Apple doesn't oppose regulation; Apple loves regulation, so long as they're the ones doing the regulating. They want to be able to shape and define the digital market, backed by the power of the state, but without any input from the state. In modern corporate orthodoxy, the state is an enforcer for corporate will.”
6. Who controls what you see on the web?
Another of Cory's concepts that I like is the idea of a web browser as user agent. It's a piece of software designed to show you the web in the way you want: with or without ads, text-only with all the crap giant images stripped out, or whatever. I was thinking about this when I read Nick Heer's article on the way Google is taking increasing control over the way that search results are represented on its site. As I have written before, the AI answers which are now infesting results are not only hard for publisher will become the default click for most users — even if they are generally pretty bad results. Currently there are many ways to get rid of them, but I doubt those will last if Google gets its way.
7. Damn, I want one
Ars Technica has a long (of course) review of the latest Framework laptop, and it makes me want one. I'm 99% sure that my next computer will be a Framework because I adore the concept of being able to easily upgrade everything on it (and reuse parts elsewhere). One impressive thing about the new model: compared to the original, you're getting roughly double the battery life. It's still not MacBook Air level, but it's close enough for most people.
8. The early history of CP/M
Annoyingly I didn't note down where I found this (if it's your site, please let me know) but this is an amazing article by Gary Kildall, who wrote CP/M, on its early history, from a 1980 edition of Dr Dobbs.
9. The later years of Douglas Adams
Although Douglas Adams was MacUser's first inside-back cover columnist (and owner of the first Mac in the UK), and Michael Bywater was a regular columnist later on, I never realised the two were friends. Or, in fact, that Bywater was Adams' occasional ghostwriter when Douglas was finding it difficult to get motivated. Parts of this article reference events I remember, particularly the launch of Starship Titanic, but there is a lot in it that I didn't know.
10. The NSA is refusing to release a historic video of Grace Hopper
Via Bruce Schneier, the NSA has discovered in its archives a video of a talk by Grace Hopper on “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People” — but, so far, is refusing to release it. The reason is that the recording is in a tape format which they can't easily watch as they no longer have a player capable of working with it. That in turn means that the NSA can't view it and redact it (as, legally, they probably have to if it's an internal document). Of course, they could borrow such a player from someone else, which the NSA seems reluctant to do. This kind of information archaeology always reminds me of Mark Pilgrim's post from (crikey) 18 years ago: “I’m creating things now that I want to be able to read, hear, watch, search, and filter 50 years from now. Despite all their emphasis on content creators, Apple has made it clear that they do not share this goal. Openness is not a cargo cult. Some get it, some don’t. Apple doesn’t.”
Ten Blue links, "so much Apple, so little time" edition
1. IBM 1956 = Google 2024 (and Apple, and Microsoft, and and and)
As I've noted before, you are likely to read an awful lot of bad punditry about Apple's cases with the EC/DOJ in the next few months/years. But you're likely to hear a lot of even worse punditry about the judgement in Google's case. One thing to bear in mind whenever you read something is this: what is legally permissible when you're a smaller company can become illegal action when you're a monopoly. A “distribution agreement” that's OK when you're a scrappy upstart in a competitive market is likely to be exclusionary practice for a monopoly.
2. "The Purpose of antitrust is to protect competition"
Another great piece in The Verge was the long interview with Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general for antitrust at the DOJ. It's worth a read in its entirety, but probably the most important point is where Kanter talks about "the restoration and validation of a core of element of antitrust — the purpose of antitrust is to protect competition and the competitive process." This is bringing the US view of antitrust both back to its pre-1980s roots and closer to that of the EU (which is obsessed with protecting competitive markets), and it bodes badly for big tech companies.
3. Acquisition by stealth
Interestingly, one of the questions that Kanter is asked but doesn't really answer is about Microsoft's deal which saw it gain 51% of OpenAI and a chunk of control over it without actually buying the company. These "acquisitions by stealth" are increasingly common, as big tech firms see them — wrongly — as a way of avoiding antitrust trouble. The latest such deal has seen Google “buy” Character.ai by hiring its team, licensing the tech and handing investors a cheque for $2.5bn. The company still exists — in theory — but as Ed Zitron points out "without exclusive access to their models, and without an engineering team, the company is effectively dead." The problem for the likes of Google, as Kanter makes clear in his Verge interview, is that the DOJ is wise to the move. I wonder which big tech company will get hauled through court over this practice first.
4. Apple's increasingly Vista-like prompts
Since macOS Catalina, Apple has loved prodding you to check if you really wanted to do something. This is not a bad thing: Unix-based/like systems like macOS let users do many things which could endanger the security of the computer, and there are many people out there who make a living from fooling you into doing something you shouldn't. But, as Jason Snell notes, macOS Sequoia takes this a step further by making you confirm permissions over and over again — in some cases, every week. Jason says, "at some point, the user must be in charge" and this is an argument that I come back to a lot. There is a group of (very loud on the internet) people who want Apple to oversee their computers, “protecting” them from everything so they never have to learn to take any responsibility for themselves. I'm not one of those people, and I genuinely think most computer users don't fall into that camp either.
5. Weaponised litigation
Elon Musk is suing an advertising group because no one wants to put ads next to homophobic, transphobic, racist and far-right content. Nothing says “loser” like this level of entitlement.
6. Fees fees and more fees
Does Apple really think that crap like this is going to fly? As Benjamin Mayo points out, this means that, in theory, Apple could end up being entitled to fees from a service which is purchased on Android. John Gruber is correct, in saying "what Apple wants is to continue making bank from every purchase on digital goods from an iOS app". But Apple just isn't going to get that unless it starts playing the game with a little more wisdom and stops this kind of playground nonsense. Microsoft tried the same. How did that work out for them?
7. But you know Apple earns its App Store money
There is currently a deluge of fake reviews for Mac App Store products. Maybe Apple is too busy attempting to weasel out of its legal responsibilities to proactively stop them?
8. On notarisation
If you want to know a huge amount about the way that notarisation of applications works on the Mac, by the way, Howard is your man.
9. When Apple's line was a mess
Oh the Performa line. A bit before Apple was in its “beleaguered” phase, it came up with the Performa brand for its “consumer” PCs. Performas weren't actually much different to the rest of the line, but they came with some consumer software. Occasionally Mac models got three versions, all identical apart from the badge. My second Mac, for example, was the LC475, which was called that name when sold to education, but was also the Performa 475 when sold to consumers, and the Quadra 605 when sold to business. What a mess that whole era was.
10. And speaking of retro
Ten Blue Links, "Sunday is the new Friday" edition
Yeah, this one is late. I'm doing some extra work, OK? Anyway, onward.
1. Nerdy. Very nerdy
First something nerdy. Very nerdy. Of course, it’s from Howard Oakley, which is both the man who knows more about the Mac than anyone outside Cupertino and one of the world’s leading experts on cold weather survival and injury. Anyway, yes: ResEdit. If you’re old enough to remember the classic Mac, you’ll probably remember ResEdit, which let you tinker with all kinds of fun things from icons to menus. I miss ResEdit.
2. No, it’s not the fault of the EU that Microsoft hasn’t secured its kernel
Thank $DEITY$ for Paul Thurrott, who did what hundreds of other journalists couldn’t do and actually found what Microsoft was referring to when it claimed it had been forced by the European Commission to open up its kernel to third parties. This obvious bunk was swallowed and regurgitatd by the usual crowd of pundits who don’t believe big tech companies can be regulated, as well as a few who should have known better, but Paul did the work – and of course it turns out the EC did nothing of the sort. As Paul notes: “The EU didn’t force Microsoft to change Windows. It asked Microsoft to address the complaints it had raised, and this was only one of them. This change to Kernel Patch Protection was of Microsoft’s design…”
3. VCs are immoral, part 378
In particular, the odious duo of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who are basically backing Donald Trump so they can pay less tax – and screw everyone who will suffer, and screw America sliding into a dictatorship. It’s great to see sites like The Verge giving them the kicking they deserve.
4. Unpersons
This is your obligatory regular missive on the general brilliance of Cory Doctorow, and this week it’s all about what happens when big tech companies pull the rug out from your lives. In this case, it’s Google, but it could equally be Microsoft, or Apple.
5. Ritual de lo Habitual
I’m a little bit astounded that Jane’s Addiction’s fantastic Ritual de lo Habitual is THIRTY FOUR YEARS OLD. This interview with Casey Niccoli, who made the artwork for the cover (and without whom JA wouldn’t have been JA) brought a lot of that era back. Also Perry Farrell is clearly an ass.
6. And speaking of asses
7. And speaking of Nazis
This is a wonderful essay-length piece reflecting on the author’s family and their ties to Nazism, about which they were not even vaguely ashamed or repentant.
8. And speaking of Nazi sea-monkeys
No really. Like lots of British kids who read American comics, I was obsessed with Sea-Monkeys, not realising of course they were just shrimp. What I didn’t know what that their inventor was a Nazi who once said “Hitler wasn’t a bad guy, he just received bad press.”
9. Surprise and delight
One of the things I have been pondering of late the sorry state of user interfaces. There seems to be remarkably little thinking going on in artistic terms. This video of Susan Kare demonstrating original Mac user interface really got me thinking about it, because the Mac user interface was packed full of delightful little elements. I wonder why we don’t often see that now?
10. Of course they are doing this. Of course they are
I’m shocked, shocked I tell you that Anthropic, yet another AI start-up, are scraping data and completely ignoring robots.txt files in order to do it. Now, I am not a copyright absolutist, but one thing that a couple of decades of publishing has taught me is there’s no blanket right to suck all the data on the internet into a vast machine while offering nothing in return.
Ten Blue (Screen of Death) Links, "Why is my PC not working?" edition
1. Oh come on, Apple
Back when Apple changed its app guidelines to permit emulators and HTML 5-based mini games it looked like the dawning of just a little bit of light in Cupertino. Completely coincidentally these changes were made just before the DOJ case at which this kind of restriction was central. And weirdly, it looks like Apple is now walking those changes back -- without, of course, putting that in writing.
When Sticky was rejected on the basis of Rule 4.7, the company appealed. Cue a call with someone from Apple:
"In our case, after the appeal, we were called up by someone from Apple who started the call saying they did not consent to it being recorded (how’s that for inspiring trust?), who walked-back what they had said about HTML5 (and of course they did not put that in writing in the message they sent afterwards), but then came up with a couple of brand-new reasons for keeping our update off the store: claiming that we had changed the app concept… because our app was different some 4 years ago and hundreds of updates ago when it started! And including mentioning rule 4.7 regarding emulators… which we are not and do not claim to be!"
2. It's all about the user experience
Unless you have an ad blocker in place you will be very familiar with the contextual advertising from Taboola. Those blocks at the bottom of web pages listing amazing hair loss treatments and cheap junk? That's Taboola. Now you can argue that those ads are junk because people click on them (and there's something to that), but junk they are.
They do, though, make publishers a lot of money -- and now Apple wants a chunk of that money, and has struck a deal with Taboola to become an advertising partner on Apple News. Om Malik has had enough. I'm not one to pull the "this would never have happened in Steve's day" card, but really, Jobs had taste: there's zero chance he would have got into bed with Taboola for a few billion dollars.
3. The objects of our life
And if you don't believe, that, I recommend watching the video that's just been found and released by the Steve Jobs Archive. It's Steve’s talk at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen, and it's a great watch. For all his faults, the man had taste.
4. Eazel come, Eazel go
There was a point towards the end of the 90s when I began to believe that desktop Linux really was the future. Yes, I know. But one of the things which persuaded me was Eazel, a startup which included legendary Apple people like Andy Hertzfeld, Mick Boich and Susan Kare, who were aiming to create a user interface for Linux which did not suck. Eazel didn't last, but its product did: if you use GNOME today, you're looking at something which started life as Eazel's Nautilus file manager. I very much wish it still had Susan's icons in it. Apple rehired a bunch of Eazel employees, so if you're using macOS, you are also seeing something with Eazel DNA.
5. Return to office is a failure
Of course, it depends on what kind of work you do, but for millions of office workers around the world the one good outcome of the pandemic has been more working from home. Home working has many advantages, particularly for mid-career workers (less so for younger ones) but finally Gartner has come out and done some really interesting and in-depth research. High performing employees, in particular, hate return to office mandates because they prize flexibility and see them as a sign of distrust by managers. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you can't manage remote workers, that's your problem not theirs.
6. Google is mind-bogglingly bad
So says Om, and I have to agree: in terms of product design, Google has got a lot worse over the last few years.
7. "Privacy preserving" Lololollol
There's a bit of a brouhaha because both Firefox and Safari have added a default-on "privacy preserving ad tracking" feature, which anonymously measures ad clicks at the browser level and passes that on to advertising companies. It's not a big deal for me -- I block ads at the DNS level, so don't see them to click on them -- but it's made a lot of people unhappy.
8. Calling for civil war is, apparently "controversial"
And now for some awful people. I had never heard of this guy before he started shooting his mouth off, but apparently he's some kind of crypto big cheese, which already tells me a lot. But what made me laugh is the headline, which refers to his comments as "controversial". Apparently, calling for civil war, calling for anyone not voting for Trump to "die in a fire", alluding positively to a conspiracy theory that the guy who shot Trump was related to Elizabeth Warren… these things are all "controversial". Not "violent", "traitorous", "racist"… oh no, those words are going too far!
9. This is where it was always going
Elon Musk has decided that he owns Twitter, so he can use it for whatever he wants. An object lesson why platforms should not be owned by billionaires.
10. Return of the underdogs
One thing Apple does extremely well is advertising, and my favourite ads of the last few years have been the ones that focus on The Underdogs - I find them incredibly funny and charming, and a bit of light relief from all the travails of tech. Enjoy.
Ten Blue Links, "Three Lions On My Shirt" edition
1. Couldn’t happen to a nicer billionaire
What’s interesting about the European Commission’s charges against Twitter (which I refuse to call X because it’s a stupid name) is the focus on the blue checks' policy. Everyone knew this was a bad idea driven solely by Musk’s hatred of anyone more fascinating than him. The chickens have well and truly come home to roost – at a cost of up to 6% of the company’s global revenue.
2. The end of the cheap money era
If you’re a football fan, you might know the name Clearlake Capital for its ownership of Chelsea – and the fact that it’s spent getting on for £1bn on players. All that money has to come from somewhere and like all private equity companies, Clearlake has piled a lot of debt on to its companies. The era of cheap money is over, so it’s finding it harder to follow the same model.
3. The toxic nature of the OpenAI board seat
Not that long ago, Microsoft was proudly talking about its “observer” seat on the OpenAI board. Now it’s decided it’s “no longer necessary”. I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that both the EU and US authorities have been looking at the relationship between the two companies with interest. The tech pundits will be along to tell us how this is stifling innovation or some such real soon now.
4. And speaking of private equity
Charlie Mullins, who sold Pimlico Plumbers to a private equity company, now has regrets. I’m not surprised: the private equity model is based on “efficiencies”, which can be translated as “worse services”, and Pimlico became successful because of its customer service. Of course, it doesn’t matter to the PE companies: they can always flip the business to some other sucker further down the line, after they have drained it through special dividends.
5. Little tech (not to be confused with small tech)
Techno-optimism is so last week. Now, the odious Andreessen is promoting the idea of “little tech” which, of course, means the kind of startups that A16Z invests in. And of course, there’s no need for those companies to actually grow: the aim is to flip them to one of the big tech firms before the need to make a profit actually arrives. I’m actually glad that the thing which some smart analysts once told me didn’t happen – VC companies investing in businesses solely to flip them – is now a part of the business they’re happy to admit is the goal.
6. AI slop
Christina Warren noticed something odd: her byline was appearing against articles which she hadn’t written. It turns out that TUAW, which she used to write for a good decade and a bit ago, had been acquired by the kind of company which churns out AI-generated crap content, and they had been using the bylines of people who used to work there. Related: I have no idea who owns some of the domains I used to work on, including macuser.co.uk, which doesn’t appear to have moved to Future alongside the old print product.
7. Piracy is back, baby
Wendy Grossman – who has been writing a weekly column on the internet for longer than some of you have been alive – has written an excellent piece on the second coming of internet piracy. As Wendy notes, the emergence of piracy as a more mainstream activity comes at the same moment that streaming services have started to get pricier and worse. The removal of decades of Comedy Central clips is teaching a new generation that you can’t trust content will remain online. There is a reason I have a couple of 4Tb drives attached to a local machine, kids.
8. RIP Bruce
I missed that Bruce Bastien had died. Before Microsoft used tying, bundling and other illegal behaviour to destroy all its competitors in the 1990s, I used WordPerfect rather than Word, and it still offers features which you can’t get anywhere else. Technically, it still exists, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Related: I’m amazed to find you can still buy Quattro Pro too.
9. Switching
You can now easily transfer your images from iCloud to Google Photos. Why would you want to do that? Because if you have many images stored only in Apple’s cloud, downloading them all and then exporting using the Photos app is a horrible experience. Unless you like watching Photos’ memory usage balloon to more than 64Gb and then take down your whole system, of course. Google Photos, on the other hand, lets you download them all from the browser thanks to Google Takeout.
10. No politics allowed
When big tech platforms talk about not allowing political speech, what they almost always mean is “no political speech we don’t like”. And when Meta says it about Threads, what it means is “no marginalised people here, please.” Kudos to MacStories for publishing this.
Ten Blue Links, "delayed by the election" edition
1. I'm shocked, shocked I tell you
Surprise! The use of energy-intensive AI to make stupid graphics that look instantly like AI and write words that it would take you five minutes to right have pushed Microsoft's greenhouse gas emissions up by 30% since 2020 and Google's up 48% since 2019. But it's OK, Google's energy usage is only 0.1% of the entire planet's, it's not like it's much… there's more on this in Paris Marx's article, which is a good read too.
2. Destructive investment
Related to this of course is the entire system of investment, which focuses — at least in the US — on the primacy of shareholder interests over those of the country. This system has led directly to a lot of terrible outcomes, from Apple's “growth at all costs” approach to abusing its power in the market through to, well, Elon Musk. The same dynamic is gradually seeing many of our most valuable institutions fall into the hands of private equity companies, a group for whom the phrase “vulture capitalism” was virtually invented. And much of this delusional behaviour is, unfortunately, driven by myths about early tech companies, from the startup-in-garage to the founders-as-heroes. I have to confess that I, too, once believed in these myths. I no longer do.
3. When Apple says protecting users, it means protecting profits
A single app store and an operating system which doesn't let you install the apps you choose is a single point for any government to control your experience. That's one of the reasons why battles to prevent Apple and others having a monopoly on software installation is important. Apple's desire to “own” software distribution is not about protecting users: it's about protecting profits. Case in point: the company has bowed to pressure from the Russian government and removed a number of VPNs, which allow Russians to bypass state censorship, from the App Store. If Apple allowed sideloading, which it easily could, this would not be a big deal. But it would rather adopt the “principle” that users aren't allowed to install software from anywhere they want rather than oppose state surveillance.
4.Apple “crippled watchOS to lock out competitors”
When Apple changed its heart monitoring APIs in watchOS 5, it's claimed, it did so to ensure third-party competitors didn't get access to the same data its own apps had. I don't know if this is true, but even if it's not, it's another example of why platform owners like Apple need to be made to ensure a level playing field if innovation is to thrive.
5.Apple (Computer) Says no
Want to run DOS on your iPhone or iPad? Apple says you can't. Why not? Because Apple says so. Just because you paid Apple £1000 for your iPhone doesn't mean you get to install things you want. It's not like you own it or anything. What makes this even worse is that notarisation should be a system which is used solely to stop malware. In practice, Apple is simply using it to enforce its app store rules outside the app store — which discredits the whole purpose of notarisation.
6.Nerd History heaven
How well I remember the process of juggling INITs and CDEVs. As always, Howard has the details.
7. Meanwhile, In Microsoft land
Now if you're thinking about maybe ditching your Apple products and exchanging them for one of those fancy new Copilot + PCs, you might want to reconsider. Microsoft is going through one of its periodic seasons of hand-wringing about security, while, of course, adding in insecure features by design. Everything that Microsoft is currently doing to Windows is aiming towards a single goal: to make sure you can't use Windows without connecting to a Microsoft account, and ensuring it has access to your data. Case in point: the New Outlook, which the company has been prodding users towards for a while. Unlike the old bundled Mail app, which used IMAP or POP, new Outlook only talks to Microsoft's servers: to use it with a non-Microsoft account you have to give Microsoft access to all your third-party email. Oh, and don't think you can use it without also having Edge installed. Not doubt, if questioned, it would claim this is all for “security” or “the benefit of users”. A plague on all their houses.
8.Proton Changes
Proton, everyone's favourite bunch of Swiss-based nerds, is going to move towards a non-profit structure. This is a good thing. Owned by a Swiss non-profit foundation, the company can't be as easily taken over — and the foundation itself is legally obligated to act in a way which supports its original mission.
9. Docs, docs and more docs
And speaking of Proton, they launched their own collaborative cloud-based document system. It seems like a pretty private system: everything is encrypted end-to-end, and no data is collected that isn't necessary to make the thing work.
10.Sixteen Kids and a hitman
Away from the world of technology for the last couple of pieces. This story of an evangelical man who went on to the dark net to hire a hitman to have the biological parents of his adopted children murdered is quite the thing.
Ten Blue Links, Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it infamy edition
1. Oh Perplexity, why must you test me so?
I have been a big proponent of Perplexity for a while, mostly because I found it incredibly useful as a research tool. Turns out the reason it was useful as a research tool was it was scraping a load of data that it shouldn’t, pretending to be academic researchers to get access to Twitter, and more. Suffice to say, I no longer recommend it. But more than that: organisations which engage in this kind of perfidious conduct should be actively shunned.
2. The cows are lying down
And speaking of AI, 404 Media decided to conduct an experiment: how much would it cost to basically clone their site using LLMs and off-the shelf tools? The answer: $365.63. And they wouldn’t have to employ any of those pesky journalists to do it.
3. Better by you…
What was the internet like 20 years ago? Without coming across like an old git, the answer is just “better”. Like Richard, I started blogging using Radio Userland, a long-forgotten application developed by Dave Winer. Like everything Winer makes, it was really an outliner (when I first worked at Apple in 1989, we used MORE for presentations – it was also a Winer product, and also really an outliner). It was also local: it generated all the HTML for your blog on your Mac and then uploaded the changed files. I still there there’s something in that approach.
4. Are you though? Are you really?
Ever wondered what it’s like being a low-ranking professional tennis player? No, I hadn’t either — but this great piece in The Guardian had me laughing, then shaking my head, then laughing again. My favourite line: ““I am going to fight my natural hand-to-eye coordination, no matter how bad it is, I am going to hit all of these motherfucking balls until I develop a shot. I am going to do this for months and months and months: I am not going to let these rich fucks beat me.”
5. Breakin’ the law, breakin’ the law
Confession time: whenever I buy an ebook which is encumbered with DRM, I crack it and save a local copy. I don’t give it away, loan it, upload it anywhere — but I don’t trust companies to keep their unspoken promise that I will always be able to access that book. Why don’t I trust them to? Here’s why. And yes, I did have books which used this DRM system.
6. And speaking of Microsoft DRM systems
Oops. Repeat after me: DRM is pointless.
7. Creative destruction
Look, in the great long list of terrible things that the Tories have spent fourteen years doing to Britain, the effective destruction of much of the support for the arts that had been built up for decades may not seem like the worst. But in terms of the breadth of people it affects, it’s probably the broadest. Obviously, underfunding organisations and forcing them to spend more time chasing money than supporting creative work is bad. But they have also hammered funding for adult education cources which aren’t “vocational”, which means that drawing, painting and other creative practice classes are not being cut – something disproportionately affects older people. Capitalism hates creativity.
8. PRs: please don’t do this
I don’t get that many unsolicited press releases these days (don’t think of this as a request) and I doubt that even during the Journalism Peak of my career I got as many as Jay Rayner, but I completely sympathise with his public letter asking that PRs do at least the minimum amount of research before sending him stuff.
9. The grumpiest man from Wales is back
God I love John Cale. Way back in the first years of this century I was lucky enough to see him do readings from his book What’s Welsh for Zen? at Komedia in Brighton, and he almost bit the head off an audience member who was trying to video him. In the twenty four years since he’s just got grumpier and he remains a vital creative force. I adore him.
10. The best reason not to use AI
We really do not need another global power crisis while we’re trying to stop the planet burning.
Ten Blue Links “Liberation Serif is cool now” edition
1. Dell to employees: “screw you”. Employees to Dell: “you first”
Everyone enjoys seeing a few chickens coming home to roost, and especially when the chickens are landing on the roof of a huge corporate entity and crapping all over its well-manicured rooftop executive garden. The latest to find out the hard way is Dell, which ordered its employees to make a choice: become “hybrid” workers travelling to an office 39 times a year (monitored of course) to spend their time on Zoom calls from an empty office, or be “remote” workers. Oh, and if you’re remote, you’re not allowed to get promoted or apply for another role in the company, ever.
No doubt the conversation in the executive suite was about how remote workers weren’t “team players” and so weren’t the kind of people who “deserved” promotion, no matter how well they actually do their job. But it’s turned out that if you choose to wield the stick rather than the carrot, people don’t respond too well: in fact, nearly 50% of employees have chosen collectively to shrug their shoulders and stay at home.
That’s bad enough now, but it’s also really going to choke Dell as a business in the future. Retention is always an issue, and the retention of employees who have no prospects in a company is an almost impossible task. Any competent leader at Dell will be spending a lot of their time in the next year recruiting, while good employees go elsewhere to further their career in remote roles.
And failing to retain costs money: way back in my early career, a slightly drunk finance director told me that when you accounted for the time of managers recruiting, the effort to find someone good, and short-term costs of backfilling vacant roles, you were basically burning about £2000 every time you recruited a replacement. The cost to Dell of increasing employee churn, with around 120,000 employees, is a lot: if this move adds another 5% to its churn rate, it runs into hundreds of millions of dollars.
And for what? Because Michael Dell likes to see a “lively” office? Michael, the 1990s called, and they would like their ideas about business back.
2. It was 20 years ago today…
How can it be 20 years since Cory Doctorow travelled from London to Redmond and into the belly of the beast to deliver the good news that DRM doesn’t work? Cory was right: DRM doesn’t work, and it never has. But the tech companies have managed to use its spiritual successors likes parts pairing and app stores, enabled by exploiting the intersection between bad law and technology, to do things which would have sounded wild to them in 2004. Had Bill Gates thought about a software store on Windows that he got 30% of the cut from for no additional work, he would have probably drooled so much the hydration would have killed him.
3. And the bullshit machine goes marching on
I have to confess that I was pretty enthusiastic about Perplexity, which I’ve used as an example of how a large language model-based tool could actually improve on the existing state of the art. And I still believe that search, in the way we think of it now, is going away and will be replaced by conversational engines giving answers that tap into public data. You shouldn’t have to master how to use a search engine (or the frankly shitty experience that most SEO-led pages now deliver) to find what you want. And where you don’t quite know exactly what you want – such as when you’re buying a product – having a conversation with something that knows about products is a better way to do it.
But oh: it turns out that Perplexity not only just makes stuff up, it has been scraping data it shouldn’t have and trying to cover its tracks. Why are startup people, so often, utter shitheads about stuff like this? It’s just so unnecessary.
4. $325m worth of humans delivering pizza
I absolutely love Joan Westenberg’s writing, and this piece on Zume is a perfect example of how she cuts through the bullshit. Zume, in case you missed their flashy pitch, was going to revolutionise food delivery by cooking the food in ovens on route to you. It started with pizza, but, of course, had the stink of “disruption” about it, the kind of smell that always ends up spreading to a thousand other areas. It turned out, of course, that its magic robot roving ovens made pizza that was just bad – so they ended up having stationary “mobile” ovens and using human delivery drivers to actually take the product to the customer.
In other words, VC’s decided that a company of pizza vans was worth $2.25 billion.
Masters of the universe, my ass.
5. Here we go again
Governments really, really, really hate encrypted messaging. The “good” governments hate it because they think it aids criminals; the bad ones hate it because it aids dissidents. And just because we beat them once, doesn’t mean they’re not going to try it again. Meanwhile, you can find me on Signal.
6. But muh users!
I see that Apple is up to its bullshit again? A terrible shame that it’s not going to get its way.
7. AI is a feature, not a platform, not a product
I’ve seen a few articles floating around about how Apple’s “Apple Intelligence” announcements shows that AI is a feature, not a product or platform (Benedict Evans has written a good one) and there is definitely something to this. But it’s worth remembering that the canonical use of “feature not product” was Steve Jobs telling this to Dropbox. And somehow, Dropbox is not only still around, it’s a good product – and still better than anything Apple has developed. What Apple has done is great: but in terms of the future, general purpose intelligence will probably win out for many tasks. Just because automatic gearboxes exist doesn’t mean sometimes a manual shift isn’t the right option.
8. Developers? Before the app store? THIS CANNOT BE
Someone should tell Tim Cook that a reality distortion field only works if you have the charisma of Steve Jobs.
9. Meanwhile, in Keir Starmer’s inbox…
...will be the terrible state of the universities, several of whom are likely to go bust within the first year of a Labour administration. Lots to do, boss, lots to do.
10. Masters of the universe, Redux
Every day, there’s another piece of evidence suggesting that far from being the Übermensch of their dreams, masters of the universe, probably lords of time, venture capitalists are really quite dumb. You have to love it.
Ten blue links, "what a beautiful day, hey hey" edition
1. Looks like a publisher, is actually an AI content farm
I'm still hearing about publishers who think the answer to their prayers is replacing human writers with large language models. But the real issue, and the one that actually puts the whole publishing model at risk, is the ability of companies to just start up massive "news" websites, win for a few months before Google works out they are are crap, rinse and repeat. BNN was an example o this. I saw it a lot for a while, but then it vanished. Here's the story.
2. Publishers doing the right thing
Over here, a group of publishers are suing Google for rigging the ad market. I don't know, yet, which publishers, but my gut feeling would be it's mostly small ones as larger ones tend not to want to antagonise Google. This is of course a better approach than anything which relies on copyright, news taxes and so on, because it's simply true: Google and Facebook have, between them, stitched up the ad market.
3. Alexa, why does my toothbrush not work?
Things which rely on a connection to the internet to work are always vulnerable to simply being switched off by the people who made the product, and there's no better illustration of this than Oral-B "smart" toothbrush. Part of me thinks that if you bought a toothbrush you could talk to you take a little bit of the blame, but I have also been caught by products which promised to have functionality which later disappeared. So I can't blame you too much if you bought a toothbrush expecting to be able to, erm, use it to manage your smart home.
4. Garry Tan promotes antisemitism
You might not know about Garry Tan yet, but you're likely to hear more about him. He's one of those venture capitalist vultures who seem to believe that having a lot of money makes them smart, but of course he's as dumb as the next arrogant bozo. He's so dumb, in fact, that he has taken to promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories aimed at George Soros. Well, he's either dumb or just a racist. Which is it Garry?
5. Was Jack Dorsey always this awful? Reader, I am adding to this headline purely to avoid my own law, because yes, yes he was
Dorsey doesn't like plebs, doesn't want to take any responsibility for anything and has a shitty beard. That's all.
6. The Tories hate the young, but luckily the young hate the Tories
It's entirely predictable that the Tory manifesto will be full of regressive nonsense, but what they have managed to do in recent elections is dangle just enough carrots towards young people to make them, at least, not bother to vote Labour. Usually this involved some magic incantation involving the word "aspiration". Not so now! Showing once again that Sunak has no political instincts at all, he has instead adopted a "fuck you young people" approach which is likely to get people voting against him, while adding nothing significant to his popularity amongst older voters. Stupidity, he is it.
7. Things I did not realise about my home town
It basically was the place the modern version of Dracula first made his appearance. Go, Derby!
8. Speaking of the undead
Tim Montgomerie, editor of Conservative Home, expects to see a poll which has Reform ahead of the Tories. I wouldn't be surprised either, and it will probably mean the Tories lurch even more to the right. But: they should also remember that they are so far behind in most polls that even adding every single Reform voter to their tally would still see them lose, comfortably. And it would probably alienate what few more moderate Tories they have left.
9. Now that's the right way to do AI
10. At last
On one hand, Apple actually building a proper password management app is a good thing. The password keychain functions are a little bit buried at the moment, which discourages people from using them -- and using a password manager is a great way to Do Better Secures. But... Apple's features can be a bit of a roach motel: you can get in, but you'll never get out again. So far, that hasn't been true of passwords, but let's hope no bright spark in Cupertino thinks that now is the time.
Ten blue links, just when I thought I was out edition
There’s a lot of AI in this edition. Sorry. One day I’ll stop talking about it, probably when silenced by the machines. For those whose interests are less one dimensional, I’ve included some actual culture towards the end.
1. Google zero is icumen in
As Nilay Patel writes, “the entire business of the modern web is built around Google”. We, as publishers and makers of stuff, have allowed the ludicrous situation where a single company has effectively enclosed the web. And it’s not like we weren’t warned. But as Nilay also writes, and I’ve written about extensively, that era is coming to a close. The consequences of this will be huge and painful but the key point for publishers is simple: don’t let it happen again.2. Reader, they are letting it happen again
Oops.3. “Publishers lack strategic patience”
Focus on your audience. Do great journalism. Get it to your readers. Don’t sell your Crown Jewels. Jessica Lessin, who has built a successful subscription business based on exactly this process, notes that publishers lack strategic patience, which is one of the reasons they constantly jump into bed with tech platforms then wonder what happened when the platforms treat them as suppliers and not partners. This is completely correct: publishers are not good at strategically cultivating a long-term relationship with their audiences. That would require investment and hard work, rather than focusing on short term revenue.4. Who amongst us etc etc
And that’s why you end up with companies like AdVon, which specialises in in producing cheap AI-generated affiliate content which gets published on well-known brand sites. How do brands like USA Today or Sports Illustrated end up putting something which is obviously going to damage brands over the long time on their sites? Because they have no long term strategy.5. Now this makes sense
“A new theory: somewhere in the Silicon Valley universe there’s a cadre of techies who have eidetic memories and they’re feeling them start to slip. Panic time.” Wendy Grossman (who you should read every week) makes me feel a bit seen. I was arguing earlier in the week about how Microsoft’s Recall feature was a boon to people like me who are getting to the point in their lives where memory isn’t as much of a given as it used to be. Is it a good feature? Unknown until we have hands on with the code and implementation. Is the principle that machine learning should happen on-device a good one? Yes.6. Black boxes you can trust
Now this will be interesting: Apple is rumoured to be planning to implement a black box system for cloud-processed AI features. Given the company’s PR line on privacy, this would make sense – and might actually put some pressure on others to do the same.7. Fixing old computers is the hotness
The Canon Cat is one of the more fascinating old computers, designed by Jef Raskin after leaving Apple and probably much closer to his original vision for the Macintosh than Steve Jobs’ cut-down Xerox Star. This article goes through restoring one, which means diving deep into the hardware with some interesting historical asides.8. Under-sung hero of the week
Isabella Blow.9. “We conflate all these scales of harm”
A fascinating interview that I had missed with RF Kuang, who talks about everything from so-called cancel culture to why she’s very bad at taking holidays (something we share).10. What was new is old now
I never really got on with New Atheism, for the same reason that I never really got on with hardcore rationalists: it smelled like macho bullshit dressed up in pseudo-scientific clothing. The recent trend of new atheists turning out to be ardent supporters of transphobia and hostility towards pro-Palestinian activists makes me think my gut feeling about them was correct. New atheism was always a conservative and reactionary movement, led by privileged white men as convinced of their own infallibility as the hardcore religious they spent so much energy opposing. “New Atheism will continue to haunt us for as long as we refuse to acknowledge that the way things are always includes the possibility that things could be different.” Amen to that.Ten Blue Links, All Your Computer Screengrabs Are Belong To Us edition
What a weird week. You might have noticed Microsoft had a few announcements. I’m not going to dwell on them – but what I will say is that moving AI from the cloud to the device while preserving privacy is hard, but a lot easier than keeping AI in the cloud. And so to the links…
1. Privacy sandbox is coming, and publishers might be in (more) trouble
Does Google hate publishers? You should know all about “privacy sandbox”, its not-really-private way of using aggregate data to target ads to people, which will just cement its position as Lord of The Ads. One thing that still isn't clear is if, in fact, publishers that don't use it will get downranked in search. At a time when AI answers and Google's general love of all things Reddit are already making them suffer. It will neither confirm or deny this. Which usually means it's going to do exactly that. If you're a user, Kagi is over there (and it's incredibly good).2. Speaking of the media apocalypse…
This is one of the most depressing things I have read in quite some time. Audience from social media: dying. Audience from Google: dying. CPMs: Hilariously bad. One slight positive: Journalism has always existed with various business models, and it's not always been about scale and advertising.3. Ben and Satya talk cricket. Oh, and AI
I've always loved Ben Thompson's work, even though I often don't agree with him these days. This long interview with Satya Nadella is worth a read in its entirety, and no, it doesn't feature cricket. Well only a bit. Related: I recently set up a new PC. What sport did it automatically show me in the widgets? Cricket. I see what you did there, Satya.4. Twenty-four hours
Did you know that the Japanese used to have their own system of timekeeping which had longer or shorter segments depending on the time of year? And they built beautiful, elaborate clocks to tell time in it? I didn't, and now I really want to use that time system myself.5. Not sent from my iPad
MG Siegler -- who, I am glad to say, is back writing regularly about tech -- hits the nail on the head about the latest iPad, and iPads more broadly. It's frustrating when you hit a wall with software like Safari, and you hit a wall far too often.6. Reading comprehension and the age of AI
It's not just AI that threatens the truthfulness of our politics and culture: we have also lost, in some cases, the ability to read and comprehend long-form, detailed content. We have become the tldr; society.7. The coming apocalypse in UK universities
Unless you work in the sector, you might not realise quite how stuffed UK universities are. And when I say “stuffed”, I mean “pretty close to technical bankruptcy and no longer able to carry out their core function”. It's yet another thing which the inevitable Labour government is going to have to pick up and fix, with both short and long-term measures required.8. No, today's AI isn't sentient (but this article is rubbish)
There are few people with any knowledge of AI who claim that today's large language models (LLMs) are sentient, but that's the straw man this article starts with. Worse, though, is to follow. Despite it being co-written by a proper professional philosopher, the writers seem blissfully unaware that its insistence human-style embodiment is required for AI is one of those points that has been debated for longer than computers have existed. Read, but then read some proper philosophy of AI.9. Media companies are making the same mistakes with AI they make with all new tech
Jessica Lessin has written a good piece for The Atlantic on how media companies' rush to make deals with the likes of OpenAI to provide access to their content is short-sighted and stupid. She's right: it is. When are media companies going to learn that when tech companies refer to “media partners” they mean “suckers”?10. How do you become a writer? You write
Oh Ursula, how right you were. She was talking about fiction, but the same is true of any kind of writing. How do you become a journalist? Write journalism.Ten Blue Links, "Did they really crush that lovely piano?" edition
1. Yes, Apple, we're also talking about you
Cal Newport reckons that it's time to dismantle the technopoly. Taking a cue from Neil Postman's (great) book, he defines this as the “submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.” Postman was writing in 1992(!) but if you think about the technopoly as it exists today, we're really talking about how every single technical development is thought of as an unalloyed good, from AI scraping the whole of human knowledge to Apple crushing creative tools into a product it sells (at a 40% margin). We'll come back to that one later.
2. And speaking of dodgy corporate behaviour
Along comes Google, which – against the orders of the DOJ – routinely destroyed internal communications. The only reasonable conclusion is it did this deliberately. A fine will be just “cost of doing business”. It's time to dismantle corporate repeat offenders.
3. Maybe Facebook might end up interoperable
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been a target of the far wing for a while, who see it as a charter for “big tech” to stifle their speech (which, of course, means not letting the right stifle the speech of its enemies). But as Cory Doctorow explains, it's also the only thing which stops big tech companies from censoring anything which might cause them to end up in court for libel. More than that, though, a case which is currently going through the courts might end up with Facebook and others being prevented from messing with tools which let you customise your feed on their services – for example, by filtering out all that “for you” crap which the algorithm wants you to get angry about.
4. This week's product I am a little obsessed with
An e-reader that's the size of a phone and runs Android? You have no idea how hard it is for me not to hit the buy button on this one.
5. Hey, so what about that Apple ad?
Like John Gruber, I didn't think too much about Apple's “crush” ad when it was shown as part of the introduction of the new iPad Pros (more on those anon). But the more I thought about it, the more I realised quite how tone deaf it was. The intention was to show all those wonderful creative tools being squished into an iPad, which could do it all. The execution was showing many lovely things being destroyed. How did that get past Apple's senior team? That's the bit which, if I were an Apple shareholder, I would worry about.
6. And so on to the product I'm not obsessed with
Yeah, new iPad Pros. Yeah, M4 processor. Yeah… same old iPadOS. For about the tenth year running, I'm left hoping this will be the year when Apple finally produces an operating system that can make the most of all that power. I suspect I'm going to be disappointed, again.
7. Tesla is doomed, redux
Honestly, if I held Tesla shares, I would be looking to sell them at the earliest opportunity I could take a profit. Unless Western governments intervene plenty of car companies will go to the wall because when it comes to quality EVs, Chinese manufacturers are miles ahead. So why am I mentioning Tesla is particular? Because it's vulnerable, and the stock is still massively overpriced because Musk has managed to convince suckers investors Tesla is a tech leader.
8. Where the world of scams is going
It's going to get really bad. Five years from now, this kind of fake person attack will be both commonplace and convincing, and I really don't know how we combat it.
9. You can't have it both ways, Elon
“X Corp. wants it both ways: to keep its safe harbours yet exercise a copyright owner’s right to exclude, wresting fees from those who wish to extract and copy X users’ content.” This is another example of how the safe harbour provisions of US law for internet companies are a double-edge word. On one hand, they protect them from libel based on what their users say. On the other hand, they can't then claim all the intellectual property rights over that content as if they were publishers. X Corp isn't the only company to want a smorgasbord of rights, though: Meta had previously made the same kind of claim, and lost.
10. “Blockchain Rasputin over here is mad that moderation exists”
Headline of the week, easily. Moreover, Jack Dorsey man, WTF happened?
Ten Blue Links, Sunday rail replacement bus service edition
I managed not to do any writing at all this week, as I'm off work over the coming days and so didn't have a lot of time. But I can't miss out on my link blog because if I did, the backlog of fun things to write about next week would end up so big I would have to make it 20 blue links. And who wants that? So here we are.
1. Microsoft takes security seriously (again)
Anyone old enough to remember Windows in the 90s knows what an awful, insecure mess it was. In 2002, Bill Gates sent out a memo on “trustworthy computing” and, within a couple of years, Windows security had improved massively. Now, Satya Nadella is doing the same thing – but his memo isn't quite as good. It's overdue: Windows has, once again, become a buggy mess and where there are bugs there are security holes. Why now? Mainly because putting AI into Windows will be the foundation of keeping people on the platform, so an insecure Windows is, once again, a bad thing for Microsoft.
2. Why I don't trust Google with my files, redux
It's not just that I don't trust Google not to scrape the content I create to build some mega profile of me and target ads. Heck, thanks to NextDNS and uBlock Origin, I don't really often see ads unless I want to. It's that I know creating content where you don't have a local backup is a bad idea. And this is why. Yes, you can use Google Takeout to export your Google Docs into formats that other apps can read, but for all that is holy, please don't use their web apps to write the only version of your novel. If you really want to use a browser to write, sign up for a free Nextcloud account and use Collabora Office, which saves files as OpenDocument by default.
3. Hell freezes over
I have always had a lot of time for Paul Thurrott. He's been writing about Microsoft for almost three decades and has always been an unapologetic fan of Windows. But he's also a strong critic of some of Microsoft's business practices, and he's not afraid to talk about the enshittification of Windows 11. And now he's reviewed a 15in MacBook Air and loves it. Everything that Paul says tallies with my experience on the 13in Air. It's an absolutely joyous machine to use, although the base model doesn't have enough storage (forget the complaints about 8Gb memory, for the usage that you're going to put this machine to, it's fine).
4. And they wonder why people are “quiet quitting”
As I occasionally say to young journalists, you owe the company that you work for precisely nothing apart from the work you're contracted to do. If someone comes along with a better offer, don't think you should stay because of “loyalty”. While no employer, I have ever worked for likes laying people off, or in fact has done it except where there's been good reason to do it, neither will any employer avoid making you redundant because you're “loyal”. This person at Tesla seems to have found that out the hard way.
5. Fusion failures
There is no one better at writing about the core technology in the Mac than Howard Oakley, my former colleague at MacUser who spent several decades writing the help section. I don't know how many readers Howard saved from some kind of technical jam, but it's a lot. Howard probably knows more about the Mac than anyone outside of Cupertino (and most likely quite a lot more than most inside Cupertino), and this example looking at the technology of Fusion Drives (and why they fail) is a good example. He's also one of the nicest people it has ever been my privilege to work with.
6. Fast fashion is bad, and Shein is the baddest
OK, maybe not the absolute worst, but there are good reasons to never buy anything from Shein if you want to avoid things like forced labour and the destruction of the planet.
7. And speaking of brutal companies
There are so many reasons why Amazon should be broken up, but this look at its absolutely atrocious business culture and ethics just adds to the pile.
8. You never think it will happen to you, until it happens to you
Gen X -- my people! -- are apparently finding it really tough to get jobs, thanks to a combination of ageism and, well, more ageism. We are, apparently, set in our ways and expensive, which means no one wants to hire us. And, of course, women get it worse than men.
9. The cost of doing business
The headline on this piece from Om says it all: “billions in profits, millions in fines”. Fines will never keep pace with the money that tech and comms companies can make from abusing customers. Only break-ups and active restrictions will ever work. I can't think of a single example where a mere fine has caused a tech business to change its ways.
10. Tech journalism, or just “journalism”?
I left this one until last, and it's a great piece: Asterisk Mag has had a look at the quality of technology journalism in the mainstream and found it wanting. It notes that it often focuses on scandals, personalities and sensationalism due to competitive pressures in the media industry, rather than, you know, actual insight into tech. And they are right, but I think even if you look outside the mainstream it's pretty dire. Try reading the kind of in-depth technical analysis you got in Byte magazine and then looking through even Ars Technica (which is good by today's standards) and you can see the difference. This is mostly down to economic pressure: at least from the perspective of journalists themselves, research shows that when times are tough, quality declines. And times, now, are very, very tough indeed.