Jarrod Blundy
Welp, the Nazis have made it to Threads. Just spent the last five minutes reporting an awful number of awful people posting swastikas as replies to what I thought was going to be a fun Thread.
This is why we can’t have nice things. Hope Meta can get it under control.
🆕📝 ‘The Too-Slick Apple Event’
Sometimes, all it takes is pointing out one small observation to completely change my mind. “Strong opinions, loosely held” I think is what they call it.
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you’re about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won’t do for Scripting News readers […]. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It’s got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we’ll get in there.
Love this from Dave Winer’s newsletter plug. Reminds me of Micro.blog’s ethos, but here we have weekly and monthly roundup options. @manton, what do you think about daily?
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The real web, the small web, the indie web is amazing. Don’t give Facebook and the rest of these clowns your content. Don’t give them the time or your attention. Get a blog, a website, a Mastodon account, something you control, and share links to cool things you find. Make a list of your favourite blogs or websites or photos of cats. Write about a pizza you had that was delicious. Share a recipe. Go down a rabbit hole for hours on end adding weird stuff to your site. Just do it somewhere you control because the real web is fantastic.
Hear, hear!
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If Beeper were granting its users free access to Centurion Lounges, I’m not sure how anyone could defend it, because everyone can see how a premium airport lounge costs a lot of money to run: leasing the space, hiring staff, and all the free food and beverages. But that’s exactly what Beeper is doing with iMessage: granting free access to a premium perk intended solely for Apple’s device owners while they’re using those Apple devices.
It’s not a perfect analogy, but Gruber makes a cogent and compelling case for Apple’s defense against Beeper.
Raycast’s one-keystroke access to ChatGPT is worth the price of admission to the Pro subscription all on its own. I know there are many similar solutions, but it being just ready in my quick launcher is so nice.
I meant to post this back in July. By November, I’d already canceled my subscription. 😬
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I also get to decide which rooms I want to be in, and which rooms I want to invite other people into. I don’t have any interest in hanging out in a room with Nazis, and I certainly don’t have any interest in inviting my friends to hang out there with me. If I find that the owner of the living room allows people who make me or my friends feel unsafe — or, as is true in this case, pays them to hang out there, and makes money from their presence — I can use the law of two feet to leave.
Well worth reading in full and bookmarking.
Mastodon has most of the internet people I know, Bluesky has a subset of people I’m interested in, Threads has the highest quality algorithm for discovery and is reaching the least technical audience. Micro.blog is where I have a (small) sense of community. It could be worse.
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Same. Especially that bit about Micro.blog.
🔗 So You Just Found Out Amazon Is Greedy // Joe Rosensteel
Whine and kick and scream, of course, but you’re trying to make a logistics center feel ashamed. Good luck.
Thanks to how they account for things we’ll never be able to make it unprofitable for them - because it was always unprofitable. There’s nowhere to go but up, to ads, and profit.
Thanks to @maique I remembered Indie App Santa is a thing that exists this time of year!
🎅🏼 Christmas is in the past now, but #indieAppSanta keeps going. Today’s app is a nice one…
If you need countdown (or up) widgets, that also work on your Apple Watch, and come in a few cool designs, you might like this. Lifetime unlock free today.
Finished reading: The Narrow Road Between Desires by Patrick Rothfuss 📚
Pat’s writing envelopes my mind like a warm embrace. The prose is so unique. I really enjoyed this small story about Bast, and the ‘Author’s Note’ bit at the end nearly as much.
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More designers from Ive’s team at Apple now work at LoveFrom than remain at Apple.
A true changing of the guard.
I’m not particularly worried for Apple. Honestly, I’m just more excited to see what comes out of both design groups.
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I think it’s fun to think about the first few decades of computers where people were skeptical that desktop software could be made to run well in the browser. Photoshop was often brought up as neigh impossible to ever run as a web app, for example. Today we’re wondering how long it will be until the cutting edge web apps of today can run locally.
Well spotted! Intriguing trend…
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It’s the smaller projects that would be threatened, projects often helmed by people of color and queer folks. […]
We know this because it has already happened quite a bit in 2023. Paramount canceled Ziwe, the source of countless viral interview clips starring Black comedienne Ziwe, and entirely removed Rise of the Pink Ladies — a surprisingly good Grease prequel centered on the experience of a butch lesbian in the 1950s.
I confess I hadn’t considered this angle.
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To sum up, Nazis can fuck right off and private companies who write posts that say, “we don’t like Nazis, but we’ll keep taking their money,” are going to have to deal with the fact people are going to see them as the place that welcomes Nazis.
@matt@isfeeling.social said everything on this matter that I wanted to, so you should go read his whole post.
Great explanation, too, about how companies can (and should) limit what they chose to host, but you can still say whatever you want by self-hosting.
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If it were necessary to license published materials for training large language models, it would necessarily limit the viability of those models to those companies which could afford the significant expense.
As opposed to the “usual” way of training with data scraped from the web…a legally-contested practice.
It reminds me of when Craig Federighi said something like “We don’t need to train ML algorithms on our users’ photos when we can just buy images elsewhere.”
Me? I approve.
It’s so annoying how beautiful and perfect @nickheer@c.im has made his site.
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Do that for each band, and I’d be done in a few minutes. Wrong! Because each thread is its layer, the total number of layers in this project quickly grew to over 63,000 (63,158, to be exact), which hammered the Mac’s memory. Oddly enough, my MacBook Air (MBA) handled the project more efficiently than my Mac Studio, which has more cores and memory, making me think something was happening in how the software was optimized for that chip.
Just wild, both in the complexity and which computer performed better. Look great too!
🆕📝 Letters with Austin #2, December 2023
My next letter with Austin!
🔗 My Handwriting Can’t Keep Up // Greg Morris
In reality, I didn’t need to speed up my writing to match my thoughts; instead, I needed to slow my thoughts to match my writing pace.
