(date: 2024-05-10 15:45:52)
date: 2024-05-10, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Daring Fireball
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2398450/Classic_Marathon/
date: 2024-05-10, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/patriarchy-according-to-the-barbie-movie
date: 2024-05-10, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/10/business/apple-siri-ai-chatgpt.html
date: 2024-05-10, updated: 2024-04-30, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Some squids are “consorts,” others are “sneakers.” The species is healthiest when individuals have different strategies randomly.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/05/friday-squid-blogging-squid-mating-strategies.html
date: 2024-05-10, from: mrusme blog
“Cartagena is a Spanish city and a major naval station on the Mediterranean coast, south-eastern Iberia. As of January 2018, it has a population of 218,943 inhabitants. This makes Cartagena Murcia’s second-largest municipality and Spain’s sixth-largest city that is not a provincial-capital. The wider urban or metropolitan area of Cartagena, known as Campo de Cartagena, has a population of 409,586 inhabitants.”
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/travel/spain/cartagena/
date: 2024-05-10, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044591-we-will-teach-you-how
date: 2024-05-10, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Daring Fireball
https://twitter.com/sama/status/1788989777452408943
date: 2024-05-10, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044599-a-lovely-essay-variations
date: 2024-05-10, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044592-seabike-is-an-underwater-
date: 2024-05-10, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/nasa-visualization-of-flying-into-a-supermassive-black-hole
date: 2024-05-10, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044593-a-neat-technique-to-rebui
date: 2024-05-10, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-05-10, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044594-a-love-letter-to-bicycle
date: 2024-05-10, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
A few weeks ago, a friend told me about her experience volunteering at Hopelink, a local food bank. She chatted with the market manager about donations of food from individuals, saying she’d heard it was more efficient to just donate money. He acknowledged that the center could buy food more cheaply than individuals, but pointed […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/05/10/efficiency-isnt-everything/
date: 2024-05-10, from: Doc Searls (at Harvard), New Old Blog
There is a war going on. Humanity and nature are on one side and Big Tech is on the other. The two sides are not opposed. They are orthogonal. The human side is horizontal and the Big Tech side is vertical.* The human side is personal, social, self-governed, heterarchical, open, and grounded in the physical […]
https://doc.searls.com/2024/05/10/personal-vs-personalized/
date: 2024-05-10, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/miranda-lamberts-wranglers-chappell-roans-good-luck-babe
date: 2024-05-10, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Bruce Schneier blog
This is another attack that convinces the AI to ignore road signs:
Due to the way CMOS cameras operate, rapidly changing light from fast flashing diodes can be used to vary the color. For example, the shade of red on a stop sign could look different on each line depending on the time between the diode flash and the line capture.
The result is the camera capturing an image full of lines that don’t quite match each other. The information is cropped and sent to the classifier, usually based on deep neural networks, for interpretation. Because it’s full of lines that don’t match, the classifier doesn’t recognize the image as a traffic sign…
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/05/new-attack-against-self-driving-car-ai.html
date: 2024-05-10, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044595-ai-copilots-are-changing-
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-05-10, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
This
year’s
Knicks
are as memorable as the 1970
team.
Brunson, DiVincenzo, Hart, Anunoby and Hartenstein. They have totally
distinct superpowers. Tonight’s game will be played without Brunson and
Anunoby, both injured. That means McBride and Atchiuwa start, probably.
I kept wanting to tell friends about these guys, they’re just as
exciting as the starters. And don’t forget there’s another
center and
forward still on
the bench who have done real starting minutes this year and two years
ago. They are Knicks too.
http://scripting.com/2024/05/10.html#a153045
date: 2024-05-10, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
This is a hard idea to get across, but there’s nothing wrong with a news organization favoring things they depend on to exist.
For example, a news org that covers San Jose, CA is entitled to favor San Jose. It’s okay for them to do things that help San Jose in competition with other cities. They could sponsor a food drive for the neediest in their community. It wouldn’t be a conflict of interest, because it’s understood that they have an interest in the success of San Jose.
A columnist that covers the NY Mets can be happy when the Mets win the World Series, and sad when they don’t. This is not an integrity issue, or something they need to disclose, unless it’s not obvious that they cover the Mets.
In that sense, every news org in the United States depends on the First Amendment, so it can be assumed they’re in favor of democracy, because without it they couldn’t exist.
This is why the editor of the NYT’s statement about not favoring democracy is so ridiculous. He can’t be objective about that, because the existence of his organization depends on the continuation of democracy in the US.
Whether he knows it or not, he’s against Trump and in favor of the Democrats in the upcoming election.
Sometimes it’s hard to see what’s totally obvious. Ask a fish about water and they’ll say there is no such thing. Same with free speech and the NYT. They are a product of free speech, without it, it makes no sense, doesn’t work. But that’s been true forever, so it feels like a given, but it isn’t.
http://scripting.com/2024/05/10/152411.html?title=theNytRunsOnFreedomAndApparentlyTheyDontKnowThat
date: 2024-05-10, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044590-some-tips-for-long-walks
date: 2024-05-10, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/the-lowest-possible-score-in-super-mario-bros-1
date: 2024-05-10, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044556-i-missed-this-from-last
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-05-10, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
A useful thread, where people share answers to a request for “an extremely minimal, clean blogging site with practically no bells or whistles where I can just share things on my mind.”
http://scripting.com/2024/05/10.html#a122741
date: 2024-05-10, from: Ayjay blog
The Great Texts program here at Baylor, where I teach about half my classes, begins its course of study with a series of periods: Ancient, Medieval, Early Modern, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Twentieth Century. Then it diverges into genres, themes, and topics. I’ve just concluded teaching Great Texts in Christian Spirituality — for the third […]
https://blog.ayjay.org/christian-spirituality-categories/
date: 2024-05-10, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Bribery
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/with-trump-everythings-for-sale
date: 2024-05-10, from: Om Malik blog
This past week, Apple released an ad to support the new iPads and highlight their extreme thinness. The advertisement showed creativity being crushed into the iPad. The ad, called Crush, was universally panned by everyone on social media. Apple eventually apologized. The Crush-ad masked the actual product announcement, and the company found itself on the back foot instead. The backlash highlighted Apple’s dilemma, succinctly summed up …
https://om.co/2024/05/09/apple-is-primed-to-stumble/
date: 2024-05-09, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-05-09, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
Could it be the spark needed to finally ignite a solution?
https://steady.substack.com/p/bidens-big-dream-for-the-middle-east
date: 2024-05-09, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Daring Fireball
https://9to5mac.com/2024/05/07/new-ipad-pro-ipad-air-apple-stickers/
date: 2024-05-09, from: John Naughton’s online diary
The Sea, the Sea From the cafe at Inch beach, Co Kerry, one Sunday morning. Quote of the Day “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no-one was listening, everything must be said again.” Andre … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/friday-10-may-2024/39427/
date: 2024-05-09, updated: 2024-05-09, from: Daring Fireball
https://prolost.com/blog/panavision-iphone
date: 2024-05-09, updated: 2024-05-09, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.theverge.com/24151209/ipad-pro-smart-keyboard-folio-review-discontinued
date: 2024-05-09, updated: 2024-05-09, from: Daring Fireball
https://world.hey.com/dhh/hating-apple-goes-mainstream-fe740007
date: 2024-05-09, updated: 2024-05-09, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/spring-and-summer-skies-amy-jean-porter
date: 2024-05-09, updated: 2024-05-09, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-05-09, updated: 2024-05-09, from: Daring Fireball
https://twitter.com/asallen/status/1788428991118164356?s=46&t=MqzoMDbTTz9SD-vhv6gL8w
date: 2024-05-09, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
@taichara pointed me to a blog post that Creative Commons (CC) wrote in 2023 about the court cases against GitHub, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and the claim that their use of copyrighted works to train the machines is copyright infringement. CC does not agree.
As Creative Commons has argued elsewhere, and others agree, I believe that this type of use should be protected by copyright’s fair use doctrine. In this blog post I will discuss what fair use is, what purpose it serves, and why I believe that using copyrighted works to train generative AI models should be permitted under this law. – Fair Use: Training Generative AI
I guess I don’t mind that blog post. For one, Fair Use is a very USA thing and I don’t live there. Furthermore, the CC licenses don’t say “this material is fine for AI training” – so whether this is fine or not will be decided by the courts. I would only worry if CC turns out to be working on a version 5 of their licenses with an explicit exception for AI training. And even then, we can keep on using version 4 of the license. There is no automatic upgrade option.
This is why I feel fine.
Imagine the Dude from The Big Lebowski saying, “Yeah, well, that’s just, like, their opinion…”
It doesn’t look as if CC will be changing the license. The courts still get to decide. If the courts decide in favour of free-for-all AI training, then rich people win for the moment. But even then, we can still nationalise their businesses, or prohibit AI training, or raise prices on electricity and water. The fight isn’t over. Not by a long shot.
Maybe this is a thing with lawyers. We trust people who share our values and we’d trust somebody when they write something along the lines of “AI training is terrible and AI use is dubious but what can you do, it’s in the hand of the courts, we certainly don’t support it.” But lawyers trust other lawyers who say “we’ll see what the courts say but our understanding is that nobody should stop AI training because that’s the trade-off copyright makes and we support people and corporations exercising their rights.”
The apparent moral support on copyright grounds is revolting, but this approach seems typical to me. They say: The point of the law is this or that. We say: The result of these actions is bad for society and bad for the climate. They are externalising all the costs. The artists and authors who want to produce new works are losing their jobs. The people double-checking the computers and their training are burning out. The communities where these corporations build their computing centres suffer from water scarcity because the water is used to cool the computers. The countries where these corporations build their computing centres need to build more power plants because so much electricity is required to train their models. The move to renewable energies is delayed. Phasing out nuclear power is delayed and more radioactive waste ends up on our lands.
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. – Long-term nuclear waste warning messages, Wikipedia
Or we can believe in nuclear fusion:
AI models made up of billions of parameters require huge amounts of energy to train. OpenAI’s old GPT-3 system reportedly consumed 936 megawatt hours … the average household consumes about 10.5 MWh per year. That means training GPT-3 consumed as much energy as about 90 households consume in a year. – Energy breakthrough needed to build AGI, says OpenAI boss Altman, The Register
Sadly, nuclear fusion only seems to be working inside the sun:
1955: At the first Atoms for Peace meeting in Geneva, Homi J. Bhabha predicts that fusion will be in commercial use within two decades. – Timeline of nuclear fusion, Wikipedia
And what for? The people who are looking for answers get served bullshit slop that’s wrong and hurtful and racist and misogynist. We see this in customer service degrading, in search engines degrading, in websites degrading. The corporations don’t mind that they’re feeding us slop as long as they are making money.
We are enabling this because these corporations are powerful and rich. They buy our politicians with money and promises of jobs, they don’t pay the taxes they ought to pay and then they don’t deliver on the jobs, and the jobs they offer are menial and subservient when we’d prefer to be creative and free. We thought we’d be writing and painting all day while the machines serve us but we end up serving them while they do the writing and painting, badly!
It’s hard to defend against these corporations because the knowledge required to defeat them is not known to us all. We don’t read about it in the media. Instead, they volunteer for all the posts, offer their experts, pay for their own research, write their own glowing press releases and commission promising reports. This is how regulatory capture works.
So yes, we should nationalise them, regulate them, force them to pay for the true cost of resources they use, outlaw their energy waste, force them to label their output, shun them. We should kick them from our company. Like a creeping disease their rot spreads, destroying the technology we built, the search engines, databases, websites, turning it all into AI slop. It is revolting.
And maybe copyright is not the right tool to stop corporations from training their machines on our works. But in the big picture, they are still wrong.
@eloquence says:
The folks who are calling such training “theft” might regret what they seem to be implicitly asking for, i.e. much stricter copyright. Copyright law won’t prevent Microsoft, Google, OpenAI or Adobe from making shady licensing deals, but they’ll prevent the free/open community from keeping up.
It’s true, I don’t want to ask for stricter copyright. But I still oppose all the things that are wrong with the current AI bubble.
@mcc recently wrote about a similar thing: We use free software licenses in order to distribute our software for the benefit of our fellow humans but not necessarily to train the machines of corporations that are responsible for all the slop.
Like, heck, how am I supposed to rely on my code getting preserved after I lose interest, I die, BitBucket deletes every bit of Mercurial-hosted content it ever hosted, etc? Am I supposed to rely on Microsoft to responsibly preserve my work? Holy crud no. We want people to want their code widely mirrored and distributed. That was the reason for the licenses. That was the social contract. But if machine learning means the social contract is dead, why would people want their code mirrored? – mmc
We’re using copyright to keep the software free. If AI regurgitating our software from its impenetrable memories circumvents copyright it also circumvents our licenses and therefore pulls the claws and teeth free software has to fight for its freedom.
This is why opposing the current AI bubble is important. No matter how I look at it, the big picture shows that this kind of AI is our enemy.
This is why we continue fighting all the negatives these corporations bring to the table. And if it turns out that their business model doesn’t work unless they bring all these negatives to the table, then I guess that’s just that. We are under no obligation to support their business model. In fact, it is our right and our duty to regulate the world in order to improve it for all of us. We’ve been doing it for a very long time.
Here’s to hoping for the next AI winter.
In the history of artificial intelligence, an AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence research. The field has experienced several hype cycles, followed by disappointment and criticism, followed by funding cuts, followed by renewed interest years or even decades later. – AI winter, Wikipedia
#Copyright #Artificial Intelligence
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-05-09-ai-copyright
date: 2024-05-09, updated: 2024-05-09, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/romanian-singer-maria-coman
date: 2024-05-09, updated: 2024-05-09, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3moprE5S3Qc
date: 2024-05-09, updated: 2024-05-09, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/take-two-trips
date: 2024-05-09, updated: 2024-05-09, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044588-this-is-the-first-im
date: 2024-05-09, updated: 2024-05-09, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/diary-comics-dec-21-25
date: 2024-05-09, from: Jeff Geerling blog
Achieving Pro Zoom meeting quality on my Mac
<div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p><img class="insert-image" width="700" height="auto" alt="Azden shotgun mic on desk setup" src="https://www.jeffgeerling.com/sites/default/files/images/desk-setup-azden-mic.jpg"></p>For the past decade, I’ve worked remote. I slowly moved from full-time software and infrastructure dev to YouTuber, and throughout that time, I kept tweaking my desk video recording/conferencing setup.
I wanted to document my setup today, as I’ve tweaked it a bit in my new studio space. Hopefully some of my tools and techniques can help you, or maybe you can find a way to make a simpler (hopefully cheaper) but higher quality setup!
I made a video going through everything in detail, but I’ll mention the highlights in this post:
<span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>Jeff Geerling</span></span>
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/achieving-pro-zoom-meeting-quality-on-my-mac
date: 2024-05-09, from: Matt Haughey blog
You've probably seen the tone-deaf ad from Apple about their new super thin iPad (update: they apologized for it).
I get the concept they were going for—it's like a thousand devices rolled into one, but the way the ad was shot revels in destruction
https://a.wholelottanothing.org/apples-misstep/
date: 2024-05-09, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Thoughts on demonstrations, free speech, Joe Biden, and hypocritical Republicans
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/antisemitism
date: 2024-05-09, updated: 2024-05-09, from: Bruce Schneier blog
There’s a new report on how criminals are using generative AI tools:
Key Takeaways:
- Adoption rates of AI technologies among criminals lag behind the rates of their industry counterparts because of the evolving nature of cybercrime.
- Compared to last year, criminals seem to have abandoned any attempt at training real criminal large language models (LLMs). Instead, they are jailbreaking existing ones.
- We are finally seeing the emergence of actual criminal deepfake services, with some bypassing user verification used in financial services.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/05/how-criminals-are-using-generative-ai.html
date: 2024-05-09, updated: 2024-05-09, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044554-i-maintain-that-the-trash
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-05-09, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I’m tired of people using the term “podcast” when I can’t find it at the place where I get my podcasts.
http://scripting.com/2024/05/09.html#a152444
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-05-09, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
It’s
pretty easy to create a FeedLand
news service for your friends or co-workers, and it’ll plug into a lot
of the stuff we’re working on now for presenting news without requiring
people to learn a feed reader. That’s a bridge too far for many people.
In other words, your understanding of feeds (RSS, Atom, etc) can be of
service to others. And by collecting useful sources of news, maybe even
insightful ones, we can help upgrade the quality of news we all get. The
first step is to learn how to use FeedLand, and
it’s pretty
easy, esp if you already understand feeds. And with categories and
OPML subscription lists, you can organize your feed reading everywhere,
not just in FeedLand.
http://scripting.com/2024/05/09.html#a151859
date: 2024-05-09, from: David Rosenthal’s blog
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“If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company.”Elon Musk, 24th April 2024
Of Tesla’s total quarterly sales of $21.3bn, 82 per cent were indeed “automotive revenues” while the rest were energy and services.82% of $21.3B is $17.5B, so Tesla has almost an entire quarter of unsold cars on hand.
…
Tesla burned through $2.5bn of cash in the quarter. Inventories grew by over 10 per cent to $16bn.
A cut-price Model 2 was first teased at the 2023 Tesla AGM, with Musk saying in January that it would be in production towards the end of next year, but the expected spring product announcement never came.The resources that could have developed a Model 2 or refreshed the existing models instead went to develop the “Incel Camino”, the Cybertruck. This isn’t just a $82K laughing-stock, but a manufacturing nightmare that will be lucky to sell 20% of Musk’s 250K/year projection, especially since it cannot be road-legal in either of Tesla’s #2 and #3 markets (China and EU). It will definitely be a drag on the results for some time. So the Models S (2012), X (2015), 3 (2017) and Y (2020) will have to soldier on for a while.
Tesla now states it is “accelerating” plans, though as with the Cybertruck it’s easy to mistake the accelerator for the brakes. The notion that a Model 2 might be built in new factories in Mexico or elsewhere have been replaced with vague commitments to retool existing infrastructure and production lines.
Shrinking margins on shrinking sales hit earnings per share:Extreme pricing pressure is forcing affordable vehicles on Tesla, irrespective of whether it chooses to launch one. Amid a lack of demand for EVs in general, and Teslas in particular, its quarterly automotive revenues were down nearly 13 per cent over the past year and by over 19 per cent sequentially.
- Sequential growth in units sold was down 13 per cent sequentially.
- Tesla’s price per vehicle, excluding regulatory credits and leasing or finance income, was $38,924.
- This was down 13 per cent from $44,642 last year, which itself was down 11 per cent from $50,037 the previous year.
“Clean” automotive margins (which exclude regulatory credits and leasing income) were down from 29.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2022, to 18.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2023, and again to 15.6 per cent in the first quarter of 2024. If you back out the new IRA US tax credits (which Tesla doesn’t seem to disclose) then automotive gross margin looks to have fallen even further, to around 14.1 per cent.
GAAP EPS was down 53 per cent year-on-year, accelerating from the 23 per cent drop in the first quarter of 2023. Even using non-GAAP EPS it’s a 47 per cent decrease over the past year.
In the summer of 2022, when the stock was above $300 share, analysts were expecting Q1’24 EPS of $1.80. Instead, they got $0.45. That is a 75 per cent downgrade to expectations.
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| Source |
Tesla released its 10-Q, a quarterly report that provides a more detailed view into the company’s financial position. For several years running, Tesla has provided regular updates in these statements on how much revenue it’s taken in from customers and not yet fully recognized. Some of this deferred revenue relates to a work-in-progress product: Full Self-Driving, or FSD, for short.
Tesla’s deferred automotive revenue amounted to $3.5 billion as of March 31, little changed from the end of last year. Of that amount, Tesla expects to recognize $848 million in the next 12 months — meaning much of the performance obligations tied to what it’s been charging customers for FSD will remain unsatisfied a year from now.
…
In these filings, Tesla also reports how much deferred revenue it’s actually recognized — and the Austin-based company has consistently undershot its own forecasts. It has recognized $494 million of deferred revenue in the last 12 months, short of the $679 million that it projected a year ago.
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The carmaker reported this week that its operating margin shrank to 5.5% in the first quarter, the lowest since the last three months of 2020. The measure of profitability was at 16% when Zachary Kirkhorn, Tesla’s then-chief financial officer, said during an earnings call that it was key to the company.General Motors operating margin is 7.35%. But not to worry, Tesla isn’t a car company, its an AI and robotics company:
“As a management team here, we’re most focused on what our operating margin is,” he said in January 2023, in response to an investor question on a different earnings metric. “That is what we’re primarily managing to now.”
If the auto business is worth 3 or 4 times the multiple of a Stellantis or Volkswagen, then it would get a forward PE of, say, 20x. That’s more than generous for a business the CEO talks about as a legacy sideline.Tesla will definitely issue more shares, for example after the 13th June shareholder vote when they will reward Musk’s corporate experiments in robotics and AI by reinstating the $56B incentive package cancelled by the Delaware court.
Street numbers for Tesla are consistently far too high but even using the 2024 consensus EPS of $2.64, Tesla would be worth just over $50 per share. Using today’s diluted shares (and assuming that they don’t issue more, which they will) that works out to a market cap of $181bn.
Tesla’s fully diluted market cap at pixel time is still $580bn. Simplistically, that means shareholders are already paying around $400bn for corporate experiments in “robotics and AI”, along with anything else Musk has or tries to conjure up.
Even Tesla’s harshest critics must concede that the company’s Supercharger network is its star asset. Tesla has more fast chargers in operation than anyone else, and this year opened them up to other automakers, which are adopting the J3400 plug standard.Like most of the recent desperation moves, this was Musk’s decision:
All of which makes the decision to get rid of senior director of EV charging Rebecca Tinucci—along with her entire team—a bit of a head-scratcher. If I were the driver of a non-Tesla EV expecting to get access to Superchargers this year, I’d probably expect this to result in some friction. Musk told workers that Tesla “will continue to build out some new Supercharger locations, where critical, and finish those currently under construction.”
The decision to cut the nearly 500-person group, including its senior director, Rebecca Tinucci, was made by Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk in the last week, according to a person familiar with the matter.In return for gorvenment subsidies, Tesla had been turning Superchargers into a separate business:
Access to high-speed charging is critical to EV adoption, and Tesla invested billions of dollars into developing a global network of Superchargers that became the envy of other automakers. It’s also a critical driver of Tesla sales, and the carmaker pointed to the division’s growth during its first-quarter results just last week.But maybe Musk couldn’t resist a chance to mess with the competition:
“Starting at the end of February, we began opening our North American Supercharger Network to more non-Tesla EV owners,” Tesla said in its shareholder deck.
The Musk-led company has also signed charging partnerships with carmakers including Stellantis NV, Volvo, Polestar, Kia, Honda, Mercedes-Benz and BMW. It’s not clear who will now oversee Tesla’s partnerships with those companies. GM, Volvo and Polestar were all due to open NACS chargers to their customers in the immediate future, according to Tesla’s website.
The job eliminations mean Rivian, Ford and others have lost their main points of contact in Tesla’s charging unit shortly before the kickoff of the busy summer driving season. Tinucci was one of the main executives building and managing outside partnerships and was thought of highly, two people who had worked with her inside and outside of Tesla said.Musk Undercuts Tesla Chargers That Biden Lauded as ‘a Big Deal’ by Craig Trudell suggests a political motive:
In addition to potentially compromising budding partnerships with other carmakers looking to tap Tesla’s chargers, another consequence of Musk’s move may be undercutting Biden’s EV push in the midst of his reelection campaign. Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked electric cars on the campaign trail and predicted a “bloodbath” for the auto industry if he isn’t elected.Faced with a huge short-term threat to his wealth Musk isn’t concerned with the longer term, when unlike robotaxis, Superchargers could have been a nice little earner:
Tesla had been building a tidy charging business over more than a decade. BloombergNEF estimates that the company delivered 8% of the public charging electricity demanded globally last year. Before Musk’s surprise decision, the researcher was projecting that Tesla’s annual profit from Supercharging could rise to around $740 million in 2030.Musk may already be having second thoughts:
That level of earnings is now likely out of reach, as BNEF’s estimates assumed Tesla would accelerate the pace of installations through the end of the decade. Musk had given indications this was the plan.
The move will slow the network’s growth, according to a person familiar with the division, who asked not to be identified discussing private matters. There already are discussions about rehiring some of the people affected in order to operate the existing network and grow it at a much slower rate, the person said.Way to motivate the team, Elon!
Many Tesla fans had been holding out hope that Musk would debut a cheap Model 2 EV in recent weeks. Instead, the tycoon promised that robotaxis would save the business, even as both of its partially automated driver assistance systems face recalls and investigations here in the US and in China.Cutting off communication with the regulators who will have to approve robotaxi service isn’t likely to help. And if there was another technology critical to Tesla’s success it would be batteries:
Delivering on that goal is more than just a technical challenge, and it will require the cooperation and approval of state and federal authorities. However, Musk is also dissolving the company’s public policy team in this latest cull.
Earlier this month, Tesla engaged in another round of layoffs that decimated the company and parted ways with longtime executive Drew Baglino, who was responsible for Tesla’s battery development.Jonathan M. Gitlin rounds up reactions in What’s happening at Tesla? Here’s what experts think. He quotes Ed Niedermeyer:
Car companies “go bankrupt because A, they overinvest in factories, and then demand falls off. Which… that fits the profile,” said Niedermeyer. “And B, they don’t invest in products. Not investing in products is sort of a longer-term cause, and the proximal cause is [that] demand falls, and you’ve been investing in too many factories, and you get crushed by those fixed costs. So those cases that are common across most auto industry bankruptcies are certainly there.”Musk isn’t listening, because he is still firing people:
But with almost $27 billion of cash on hand, that shouldn’t happen any time soon. “The thing that is really hard to understand is that if you have tens of billions of dollars in cash but you’re losing market share and you’re losing margin, losing pricing power, and all the other things that are happening with the business—you don’t cut your way out of that problem,” Niedermeyer continued. “That’s the confusing part about all this. What would you use that cash for if not to solve those problems? And yet, instead, they’re cutting.
”One of the things I’ve said for a really long time, and I think this is what’s happening, is that an automaker is not really real until they survived a serious downturn,” Niedermeyer said. And while the broader economy looks fine, EV sales are battling a strong negative headwind. “The car game is a survival business. You can capture more upside than the other guy in the good times. And that can be really good for your stock. But if you do that by not investing in the things that protect you in the downturn, it doesn’t matter. And you’re just another one on the list of defunct automakers,”
On Sunday night, even more Tesla workers learned they were no longer employed by the company as it engaged in yet another round of layoffs. … The latest round of layoffs has affected service advisers, engineers, and HR.
CEO Elon Musk, who has a unique penchant for redirecting the conversation, used Tuesday’s earnings call to deflect from the poor numbers, focusing instead on the company’s commitment to artificial intelligence and a fully autonomous car. Details on Tesla’s apparent new offerings — which include the “more affordable models” and the “cybercab” — were scant and did not address how the company would overcome the technological and regulatory hurdles ahead.`Musk has form when it comes to hyping his technologies and companies. His tweeting that funding had been secured to take Tesla private at $420/share led to a settlement with the SEC that is still in place:
The supreme court on Monday rejected an appeal from Elon Musk over a settlement with securities regulators that requires him to get approval in advance of some tweets that relate to Tesla, the electric vehicle company he leads.The hype is starting to wear thin but not yet with the markets, as Brandon Vigliarolo points out in Musk moves Tesla’s goalposts, investors happily move shares higher:
Elon Musk has a strategy and you may have seen it before: When things aren’t going well, he’ll say something wild to take everyone’s eyes off the trouble, and raise share prices with dreams.Last year Tesla shipped 1.8M vehicles. There are 6 years left to the “end of the decade”. Musk is promising to ship an average of at least 3M vehicles/year, all of which would be enrolled in the robotaxi fleet. Even if this were plausible, one has to question where all the riders would come from for a fleet 2.5 times bigger than Uber’s global driver list. Note that in the US 36% of adults have used Uber or Lyft, so the market is already close to saturated. I’m sure we all remember that:
…
The first quarter of 2024 didn’t go well for Tesla, either economically or reputationally. As we reported earlier, sales fell, net profit tumbled off the same cliff Tesla’s stock price earlier careened over, and production and deliveries decreased as well.
But give Musk a chance to toss out a flash grenade and he’ll do just that: This time around with some wild predictions about his automaker producing a “purpose-built robotaxi” dubbed the “Cybercab,” and Tesla’s latest vision for the future as one in which it is focused on “solving autonomy.”
…
“It’s like some combination of Airbnb and Uber, meaning that there will be some number of cars that Tesla owns itself and operates in the fleet … and then there’ll be a bunch of cars where they’re owned by the end user,” Musk said. He added the fleet will likely grow to include “several tens of millions” of vehicles by the end of the decade.
Musk spent plenty of time in the 2010s claiming he’d have one million robotaxis on the road by 2020.Pumping the stock full of hype is a Musk habit:
Getting in trouble over “Full-Self Driving” claims? Stick a guy in a robot suit and call it Optimus to distract shareholders. Fail to get FSD realized this year - again? Just kick it down the road. Journalists calling him out on his nonsense? Rant about the “woke mind virus” and the media on Twitter.Vigliarolo isn’t alone. In Musk Sells the Tesla Dream, But Don’t Ask for Details Liam Denning notices a detail from the earnings call:
Of course, Optimus has been nowhere to be seen and was barely mentioned during the call. Likewise, Tesla’s dreams of tens of millions of robotaxis on the road in the next six years rests on the need for serious technological breakthroughs the automaker has failed to make despite years of trying. Oh, and a ton of permits if this is to operate in the States, at least.
There was an odd tweak to the low-cost vehicle strategy Tesla laid out in March 2023, when management talked about cutting costs in half with revolutionary manufacturing methods. Now, Tesla talks about melding aspects of next-generation platforms with its existing ones in the new models, enabling the company to build them on existing manufacturing lines. To be clear, that is an intriguing possibility, offering efficiencies to reduce stubborn costs.Tesla is starting to have serious competition:
But also to be clear: It won’t deliver a $25,000 Model 2 anytime soon — “this update may result in achieving less cost reduction than previously expected” — and also isn’t what Tesla talked about only a year or so ago. It is a major overhaul of strategy requiring details.
So consumers — some of whom are turned off by Musk’s incessant posting on X, the social platform he owns, and by his controversial political comments — have a lot of choices when it comes to buying an electric car. Tesla’s share of the EV market in the US was roughly 51% in the first quarter, Cox says, down from almost 62% a year earlier.To respond to this competition, Tesla has understood for a long time that they needed a $25K Model 2:
The competition is even fiercer outside the US, where Chinese carmakers dominate. About half of all EVs sold globally are Chinese brands — BYD, the top brand within China, sold more cars than Tesla did in the last quarter of 2023, though Tesla regained the lead in the following quarter.
Musk first teased about such a car in September 2020, saying a series of innovations Tesla was working on would enable it to make an EV at that price within about three years. As recently as January, Musk said Tesla was “very far along” with work on its lower-cost vehicle.But as always, Musk’s schedule was just a fantasy, and then the need to pump the stock took over:
Then, in early April, Reuters reported that Tesla had shelved plans for the cheaper vehicle to prioritize its robotaxi, creating bedlam among investors. The tension within Tesla over Musk’s desire to focus on the robotaxi is nothing new. It was chronicled by Walter Isaacson, who wrote in his book published in September that the billionaire had “repeatedly vetoed” plans to make a less-expensive model. Musk refused to give any details about a new, more-affordable model when asked about them by analysts on the first-quarter call.My guess is that it has dawned on Tesla that, without the resources sunk into the Cybertruck, they simply can’t build a $25K car and make money, unlike the competition:
China’s EV advantage is in batteries — the most expensive part of an EV. They’re much cheaper in China because of the country’s control of the mining and processing of component materials such as lithium, cobalt, manganese and rare earth metals. UBS analysts say BYD had a 25% cost advantage over North American and European brands in 2023. Its cheapest model goes for $10,000. Tesla’s cheapest Model Y — the world’s best-selling car of any kind last year — is about $35,000 in the US after accounting for federal tax credits.China’s other advantage is in driver assistance technology:
“Chinese EVs are simply evolving at a far faster pace than Tesla,” agrees Shanghai-based automotive journalist and WIRED contributor Mark Andrews, who tested the driver assistance tech available on the roads in China. The US-listed trio of Xpeng, Nio, and Li Auto offer better-than-Tesla “driving assistance features” that rely heavily on lidar sensors, a technology that Musk previously dismissed, but which Tesla is now said to be testing.
These numbers look even worse for Tesla. Last year Matthew Loh reported that Elon Musk says the difference between Tesla being ‘worth a lot of money or worth basically zero’ all comes down to solving self-driving technology, and the reason was that owners would rent out their Teslas as robotaxis when they weren’t using them. This was always obviously a stupid idea; who wants drunkards home-bound from the pub throwing up on their Tesla’s seats? But the fact that the numbers don’t add up for robotaxis in general, and the fact that Hertz is scaling back its EV ambitions because its Teslas keep getting damaged because half of them are being used by Uber drivers as taxis, make the idea even more laughable.Even for Waymo, it turns out that replacing a low-wage human with a lot of very expensive technology (Waymo’s robotaxis “are worth as much as $200,000”), and higher-paid support staff isn’t a path to profitability.
The U.S. government has opened a formal investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot partially automated driving system after a series of collisions with parked emergency vehicles.Since then the evidence has piled up, as the Washington Post team report:
…
NHTSA says it has identified 11 crashes since 2018 in which Teslas on Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control have hit vehicles at scenes where first responders have used flashing lights, flares, an illuminated arrow board or cones warning of hazards.
At least eight lawsuits headed to trial in the coming year — including two that haven’t been previously reported — involve fatal or otherwise serious crashes that occurred while the driver was allegedly relying on Autopilot. The complaints argue that Tesla exaggerated the capabilities of the feature, which controls steering, speed and other actions typically left to the driver. As a result, the lawsuits claim, the company created a false sense of complacency that led the drivers to tragedy.Musk claimed they would never settle these cases, but:
Tesla this month settled a high-profile case in Northern California that claimed Autopilot played a role in the fatal crash of an Apple engineer, Walter Huang. The company’s decision to settle with Huang’s family — along with a ruling from a Florida judge concluding that Tesla had “knowledge” that its technology was “flawed” under certain conditions — is giving fresh momentum to cases once seen as long shots, legal experts said.The regulators move slowly but they keep moving:
Meanwhile, federal regulators appear increasingly sympathetic to claims that Tesla oversells its technology and misleads drivers. Even the decision to call the software Autopilot “elicits the idea of drivers not being in control” and invites “drivers to overly trust the automation,” NHTSA said Thursday, revealing that a two-year investigation into Autopilot had identified 467 crashes linked to the technology, 13 of them fatal.Last December, the NHTSA forced Tesla to recall more than 2M vehicles because Autopilot:
has inadequate driver monitoring and that the system could lead to “foreseeable misuse,”The agency suspects the recall wasn’t adequate:
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration disclosed Friday that it’s opened a query into the Autopilot recall Tesla conducted in December. The agency is concerned as to whether the company’s remedy was sufficient, in part due to 20 crashes that have occurred involving vehicles that received Tesla’s over-the-air software update.The recall involved an over-the-air update, but Tesla’s attitude to regulation showed through:
the agency writes that “Tesla has stated that a portion of the remedy both requires the owner to opt in and allows a driver to readily reverse it” and wants to know why subsequent updates have addressed problems that should have been fixed with the December recall.What is the point of a safety recall that is opt-in and reversible? Clearly, it is to avoid denting the credibility of the hype. The NHTSA is not happy:
In a separate filing, NHTSA detailed findings from its investigation that preceded the December recall. The agency found that Autopilot didn’t sufficiently ensure drivers stayed engaged in the task of driving, and that Autopilot invited drivers to be overconfident in the system’s capabilities. Those factors led to foreseeable misuse and avoidable crashes, at least 13 of which involved one or more fatalities, according to the report.The NHTSA is skeptical that the recall was effective:
“Tesla’s weak driver-engagement system was not appropriate for Autopilot’s permissive operating capabilities,” NHTSA said. This resulted in a “critical safety gap” between drivers’ expectations and the system’s actual capabilities, according to the agency.
But NHTSA says it knows of at least 20 crashes involving Tesla Autopilot that fall into three different categories. It says there have been nine cases of a Tesla having a frontal collision with another vehicle, object, or person, for which there was time for an alert driver to have avoided the crash. Another six crashes occurred when Teslas operating under Autopilot lost control and spun out or understeered into something in a low-grip environment. And five more crashes occurred when the driver inadvertently canceled the steering component of Autopilot without disengaging the adaptive cruise control.The agency is giving Tesla until July 1st:
NHTSA also says it tested the post-recall system at its Vehicle Research and Test Center in Ohio and that it “was unable to identify a difference in the initiation of the driver warning cascade between pre-remedy and post-remedy (camera obscured) conditions,” referring to the supposedly stronger driver monitoring.
to send NHTSA a lot of data, including a database with information for every car it has sold or leased in the US, with information on the number and dates of all Autopilot driver warnings, disengagements, and suspensions for each of those vehicles. (There are currently more than 2 million Teslas on the road in the US.)Finally, Mike Spector and Chris Prentice report that In Tesla Autopilot probe, US prosecutors focus on securities, wire fraud:
Tesla must also provide the cumulative mileage covered by Autopilot, both before and after the recall. NHTSA wants Tesla to explain why it filed an official Part 573 Safety Recall Notice, “including all supporting engineering and safety assessment evidence.” NHTSA also wants to know why any non-recall update was not part of the recall in the first place.
U.S. prosecutors are examining whether Tesla committed securities or wire fraud by misleading investors and consumers about its electric vehicles’ self-driving capabilities, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters.This is all about Autopilot, but Fake Self Driving has problems too, as the Washington Post team reported in Tesla worker killed in fiery crash may be first ‘Full Self-Driving’ fatality:
…
Reuters exclusively reported the U.S. criminal investigation into Tesla in October 2022, and is now the first to report the specific criminal liability federal prosecutors are examining.
Investigators are exploring whether Tesla committed wire fraud, which involves deception in interstate communications, by misleading consumers about its driver-assistance systems, the sources said. They are also examining whether Tesla committed securities fraud by deceiving investors, two of the sources said.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is also investigating Tesla’s representations about driver-assistance systems to investors, one of the people said.
Two years ago, a Tesla shareholder tweeted that there “has not been one accident or injury” involving Full Self-Driving, to which Musk responded: “Correct.” But if that was accurate at the time, it no longer appears to be so. A Tesla driver who caused an eight-car pileup with multiple injuries on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in 2022 told police he was using Full Self-Driving. And The Post has linked the technology to at least two serious crashes, including the one that killed von Ohain.The regulators still approve Waymo’s cautious and well-engineered robotaxi effort. Uber’s and Cruise’s robotaxi efforts flamed out. Given the lack of sensors, the history of crashes, the fact that their “autonomy” technology is still at level 2, and the resistance to regulation, why would any regulator approve even the testing, let alone the revenue service of a Tesla robotaxi?
EV carmaker Tesla is considering a wonderful money-making wheeze – use all of that compute power in its vehicles to process workloads for cash, like a kind of AWS on wheels.Seriously? Unless you’re a gig worker for Uber or Lyft, who clocks 56 hours/week sitting behind the wheel? I can’t believe that Musk is under-estimating the potential here:
The Elon Musk-led outfit said in its recent earnings conference call for calendar Q1 that it had noticed its vehicles spend a considerable amount of their time just sitting there not moving. Many pack in a decent amount of processing power, so why not get them to do something useful and earn some cash for the company as well?
Speaking on the conference call, Musk said that he thought most Teslas were probably used for about a third of the hours in a week.
“And now that we have already paid for this compute in these cars, it might be wise to use them and not let them be, like, buying a lot of expensive machinery and leaving to them idle. We don’t want that. We want to use the computer as much as possible and close to like basically 100 percent of the time to make full use of it,” Elluswamy said.Tesla is currently selling around 2M vehicles/year, so “at some point” will be sometime in the 2070s, by which time the vast majority of the vehicles Tesla has shipped will have been scrapped, and even if they still work 50 years of Moore’s law will have made all but the last few obsolete.
“It takes a lot of intelligence to drive the car anyway. And when it’s not driving the car, you just put this intelligence to other uses, solving scientific problems like a human or answering dumb questions for someone else,” he added.
…
“If you get, like, to the 100 million vehicle level, which I think we will at some point get to, and you’ve got a kilowatt of usable compute – I think you could have on the order of 100 gigawatts of useful compute, which might be more than anyone, more than any company, probably more than any company,” he mused.
Of course, all this compute capacity isn’t sitting conveniently clustered together in a datacenter. It is distributed here and there, reached via a cellular connection in each Tesla, or possibly via Wi-Fi if the car is on the owner’s driveway.
So the model Tesla would be looking at is perhaps more akin to edge computing, such as Heata in the UK, which uses heat from servers in homes to provide domestic hot water and rents out the compute capacity via cloud company Civo.
Among the issues we can see is that Tesla would be effectively using electricity that the car owner has paid for to run any workloads while it is idle, so would they get a cut of the money generated?
Yes, it seems. CFO Vaibhav Taneja, said “the capex is shared by the entire world. Sort of everyone owns a small chunk, and they get a small profit out of it maybe.”
…
IDC Senior Research Director for Digital Infrastructure Andrew Buss said the idea sounds technically feasible, but the potential downsides are perhaps too big to justify it being actually implemented.
“They’d not even be edge processing nodes as the code and data would have to be centrally managed and stored and then packaged and sent for processing before being returned once complete,” he told The Register.
Other downsides include third-party code and data running on a private asset, Buss said, and if taking power from the battery, this would accelerate the degradation of these, which are the single most expensive and crucial part of a Tesla and need to be kept in as optimal a shape as possible for longevity and consistency of range.
In other words, Tesla might well find that implementing this idea may prove more trouble than it is actually worth for the returns it generates.
And as The Register noted after the earnings conference, Elon has a habit of throwing out wild ideas when things aren’t going well to distract the punters and energize investors. This could well be one of them.
https://blog.dshr.org/2024/05/elon-musk-threat-or-menace-part-5.html
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-05-09, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
StackExchange and OpenAI have made a deal. I used to use StackExchange all the time, now I never do, ChatGPT is much better. There’s a lot of anxiety out there, it seems but this is like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. There was a time when StackExchange was a godsend for programmers. But that time has passed. Here’s a demo. I was trying to figure out why some ancient code wasn’t working. I never understood how it worked, and now I had to figure out what was going wrong. So I debugged it, carefully, step by step, with ChatGPT. It’s as if I was working with another programmer who had read and fully understood every StackExchange message, and was willing to work with me for no pay to get to the bottom of the problem. This is what we call disruption. It’s a whole new level of programming. Here’s the transcript.
http://scripting.com/2024/05/09.html#a140644
date: 2024-05-09, from: Jessica Smith’s blog
A couple of days I posted about wanting to get back into The Sims (2 & 4). What I didn’t mention then, that I will now, is I’d kinda been wanting to get back into casual gaming already. I’ve never been a real Gamer™ exactly, but I have purchased a bunch of indie games through Steam and itch.io over the years, and spent a fair bit of time… you know… casually gaming. For the most part I like turn-based RPGs, simulation games, and the occasional puzzle game. Nothing with too grim or dreary an atmosphere. And, of course, I’ve only really played games on computers (well, and the occasional mobile game, I guess). My parents never let us have a gaming console growing up, and with my disability it’s too hard to use a controller anyway – my right hand just isn’t dexterous enough to operate its side of the controls.
When I was playing a lot of indie games between about 2018–2020, I mostly did so on a desktop computer, running Linux. Not only did a ton of indie games support Linux natively, but Steam rolled out an embedded implementation of Wine called Proton, so most games without official Linux versions worked on Linux, too. I mean, in 2017 I’d been using PlayOnLinux to play The Sims 4, so I already knew Wine wasn’t too bad by that time, but I guess Steam’s real triumph was in rolling the compatibility layer into the client, moving a lot of the hassle behind the scenes and out of the player’s way. Even though I haven’t been playing games so much since 2020, as I understand it, Proton has just got better and smoother ever since, such that these days the only games that really don’t work with it are always-online multiplayer games with kernel-level anticheat, which I don’t play, anyway. At any rate, even five years ago, life as a Linux-using indie gamer was good.
But, time passes. I stopped being able to use that desktop so much when a) the monitor broke and, because it was within warranty, I spent a couple of months working through the warranty process with the retailer instead of just buying a new one; and b) Viv started working from home a lot when the Covid pandemic began, and commandeered that desk and computer for himself. I started using a MacBook Air as my primary computer, and switching back and forth between it and the desktop was a bit of a hassle, and since the only thing the desktop was really better for was playing games, I just… stopped doing that so much. I could still play a number of games on the Mac anyway… just not the more demanding ones, but also not the ones so undemanding that they only had 32-bit versions, and definitely not the ones that lack native Mac versions. (There’s no equivalent of Proton for Mac.) But a few games, sure.
Anyway, getting to the Steam Deck. It had been playing on my mind for a while that I really did have this backlog of games that I should probably work through at some point. The desktop has become really inconvenient to use (and as I mentioned in the Sims post, its Linux install is currently not even working properly, for reasons I have not been able to work out), and my MacBook Air isn’t designed for gaming. I’d kind of presumed that the eventual answer would be to buy another Linux computer – preferably a laptop, for the portability – but a gaming laptop is like AUD$3000 and not even really very portable and honestly I didn’t even want a whole new computer, just a gaming device, and then one day the obvious answer finally hit me… a Steam Deck. Duh!
Valve, for some reason, has declined to sell Steam Decks in Australia, but you can easily buy grey-imported ones. Last week, after about a month of dithering, I took the plunge and ordered one – one of the new OLED screen ones, with 512GB storage space. Today, it arrived!
There are a number of reasons I think the Steam Deck is a very exciting device. Firstly, it’s purpose-built to make it really easy to just pick up and jump straight into a game, suspend and resume as needed, etc.. It’s all the convenience of picking up your phone to scroll social media, except doing something that is actually fun instead of doomscrolling social media. You can use it easily on the couch (well, maybe not if your cat is as obsessed with sitting on your lap as mine, but in theory). It’s just like… if one of the biggest obstacles to me working through my game backlog is the hassle, the Steam Deck should really help with that.
Secondly, it offers a lot of different ways to control your games (D-pad, joysticks, A/B/X/Y buttons, trackpads, a touchscreen, bumper buttons…) and they are all reconfigurable! There is a very detailed guide on the Steam Community site . Like I mentioned in my introduction paragraph, I’ve never been able to play with a video game controller and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to have any accessibility issues with the Steam Deck. Well, I’m not sure it’d enable me to play the kinds of fast-paced action games or high-precision platformers that I don’t feel able to play already, but you can totally do things like tell the D-pad to work as A/B/X/Y and use the left joystick for directions so you can control a game entirely from the left side of the device. No problem. Plus, with any game that’s designed to work entirely with a mouse, you can just use the touchscreen. I think it’s really cool just how customisable the Deck is in this regard.
And thirdly, I love the fact that the Steam Deck is really just a Linux computer under the hood, after all. If you remember my post about the Sims the other day, and how miffed I was that I couldn’t play my copy of The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection on my Mac, you’ll be pleased to hear that one can play it on the Steam Deck. There is a brief guide here , which links to another, seemingly more detailed, guide on YouTube. The process isn’t quite as easy as “find game in Steam store, purchase, install” of course, but it’s doable! You can also use your Steam Deck to play games from other online stores like itch.io or GOG, you can connect to most providers of cloud storage you might use to share data painlessly with your other computers, and you can install and use other software beyond games – pretty much anything available on Linux. You can connect peripherals like a keyboard, external monitor and mouse/touchpad and play like on a more traditional computer if you want. It’s very flexible. And much, much cheaper than a gaming laptop 😁
At approx. AUD$1,075, it was still a bit of a splurge, but I haven’t treated myself to any “new shinies” since 2020, and honestly I’m excited to get into this thing. Let’s see how it goes!
https://www.jayeless.net/2024/05/i-bought-a-steam-deck.html
date: 2024-05-09, from: Ayjay blog
Adam Kirsch: In his poem “Little Gidding,” written during World War II, T. S. Eliot wrote that the Cavaliers and Puritans who fought in England’s Civil War, in the 17th century, now “are folded in a single party.” The same already seems true of Vendler and Perloff. Today college students are fleeing humanities majors, and […]
https://blog.ayjay.org/intrinsic-values/
date: 2024-05-09, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
I hadn’t thought of it quite this way, but developing taste requires choosing what to give your attention to. Intentionality. You cannot develop a useful preference for or against something if you don’t know what you are listening to or watching, if you can’t describe what it is to find more of it. You can […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/05/09/taste-requires-intentional-attention/
date: 2024-05-09, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
Time for a tab cleanout! I haven’t read these yet but they’ve all turned up for me in the past couple weeks, so I’m setting this post up like a mini climate themed magazine 😄 Climate Nausea: Drought, quinoa, and the experience of food writing in this moment by Alicia Kennedy Plastics production alone will […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/05/08/climate-roundup-may-2024/
date: 2024-05-09, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Daring Fireball
New iPad Pros and iPad Airs.
date: 2024-05-09, updated: 2024-05-09, from: Daring Fireball
@Ayjay blog (date: 2024-05-08, from: Ayjay blog)
Dan Kois: Most alarmingly, kids in third and fourth grade are beginning to stop reading for fun. It’s called the “Decline by 9,” and it’s reaching a crisis point for publishers and educators. According to research by the children’s publishers Scholastic, at age 8, 57 percent of kids say they read books for fun most […]
https://blog.ayjay.org/46195-2/
date: 2024-05-08, updated: 2024-05-08, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/wes-andersons-montblanc-commercial
date: 2024-05-08, updated: 2024-05-08, from: Daring Fireball
https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/apple-ipad-pro-ad-criticism-hugh-grant-1235996294/
date: 2024-05-08, updated: 2024-05-08, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044585-its-time-to-tax-the
date: 2024-05-08, updated: 2024-05-08, from: Daring Fireball
https://simonwillison.net/2024/May/8/slop/
date: 2024-05-08, updated: 2024-05-08, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/the-gentle-librarian
date: 2024-05-08, updated: 2024-05-08, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044582-hackers-can-reprogram-nes
date: 2024-05-08, updated: 2024-05-08, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-05-08, updated: 2024-05-08, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044579-after-launching-last-mont
date: 2024-05-08, updated: 2024-05-08, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-05-08, updated: 2024-05-08, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044580-attempting-to-thwart-tick
date: 2024-05-08, updated: 2024-05-08, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/fantastical-portraits-of-cate-blanchett
date: 2024-05-08, updated: 2024-05-08, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044569-id-missed-that-elena-ferr
date: 2024-05-08, updated: 2024-05-08, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/parents-micro-targeted-by-their-kids-hard-drawn-ads-on-facebook
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-05-08, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
A
free idea for Apple that might boost their stock price. I use the
Voice
Memo app to take notes while I’m programming. Sometimes I talk for
as much as fifteen minutes, because I ramble a lot, but I figure stuff
out this way. I’m sure at some point the Voice Memo app will do
automatic transcripts, I wish it did now. When I finish a memo, a few
minutes or seconds later, there’s an email waiting for me with the text
of the memo. Now here’s how they boost the stock price. They also
provide an edited version of the memo, without repetition and
rambling, and sidebars (they can be treated as sidebars, and appear at
the end). I understand that
$AAPL is depressed
because the lack of an
AI
story. Here’s a use that every stock trader will understand
immediately. Huge value. I’m sure others are doing it. But Apple has the
high ground. All kinds of services could be attached. I could, in the
middle of my ramble, order a product from Amazon. Or send an email to my
doctor to schedule a new appointment. (Disclaimer: I’ve owned a bunch of
Apple stock since the mid-90s, so I stand to profit if they do it and
I’m right.)
http://scripting.com/2024/05/08.html#a143605
date: 2024-05-08, updated: 2024-05-08, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044575-the-cheese-making-magic-o
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-05-08, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Now that I have my blogroll as a regular feature in my blog, I am able to keep current with more bloggers. It’s actually much more than a blogroll, it’s a feed reader. When a feed that I’m following updates, it moves to the top of the list. And if I want to see what’s new, I just click on the wedge next to its name to reveal the most recent five posts. From there, I can get to the full post by clicking on the permalink. If you want to get a feel for it without taking the plunge yourself, you can leave my blog open in a browser tab. You’ll get exactly what I get.
http://scripting.com/2024/05/08.html#a135612
date: 2024-05-08, updated: 2024-05-08, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044572-a-short-essay-on-freedivi
date: 2024-05-08, from: Anton Zhiyanov blog
Build your own document database with SQLite.
https://antonz.org/sqlite-generated-columns/
@Jessica Smith’s blog (date: 2024-05-08, from: Jessica Smith’s blog)
Gidget is eight years old (approaching nine!) and TODAY she suddenly realised what scratching posts are for. She’s been going nuts today sharpening her claws on the posts in her cat tower, instead of 100% of the time on the bed. Who said an old cat can’t learn new tricks? 😅
https://www.jayeless.net/2024/05/gidget-noticed-scratching-posts.html
date: 2024-05-08, from: Ayjay blog
After reading various writings about the brows — including, first of all, this unsent letter by Virginia Woolf and this 1949 essay by Russell Lyne, I find myself impatient and wanting to cut to the chase. I’ll come back to these matters later when I’ve had more time to think them over, but in the […]
https://blog.ayjay.org/back-to-the-brows/
date: 2024-05-08, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
I have the greatest respect for the anydice.com website by Jasper Flick. So cool!
Recently, @vdonnut wondered about a dice pool roll where a result of 5 or 6 on a six-sided die is a success.
The answer:
function: ROLL:s count fives and above {
result: (ROLL >= 5)
}
loop N over {1..10} {
output [Nd6 count fives and above] named "successes for [N] dice"
}
2024-05-08. @fastfox wrote in to say that there’s an existing function to handle the 5–6 is a success part:
loop N over {1..10} {
output [count {5..6} in Nd6] named "successes for [N] dice"
}
Nice!
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-05-04-any-dice
date: 2024-05-08, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Did yesterday’s speech hit the target or miss the boat?
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/office-hours-is-biden-focusing-on
@Jessica Smith’s blog (date: 2024-05-08, from: Jessica Smith’s blog)
I’ve clearly entered the “mumsy” demographic, because just about every time I go to the supermarket now they’re playing music that was, like, everywhere on the radio when I was 14. Today it was the Veronicas…
https://www.jayeless.net/2024/05/mumsy-demographic.html
date: 2024-05-07, from: John Naughton’s online diary
Wisteria Such an amazing plant. Comes back year after year. There are some really ancient ones in Cambridge. Quote of the Day ”Comparative religion is an admirable recipe for making people comparatively religious. Ronald Knox Musical alternative to the morning’s … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/wednesday-8-may-2024/39420/
date: 2024-05-07, updated: 2024-05-07, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044574-for-the-first-time-ever
date: 2024-05-07, updated: 2024-05-07, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/how-rope-was-made-the-old-fashioned-way-1
date: 2024-05-07, updated: 2024-05-07, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/07/business/tiktok-ban-appeal.html
date: 2024-05-07, updated: 2024-05-07, from: Daring Fireball
https://twitter.com/NintendoCoLtd/status/1787736518762881197
date: 2024-05-07, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
I fooled it. Co-op City is in a part of the Bronx that is not old. There’s nothing rustic about it. Or even possible.
Before Co-op City became a massive housing project it was an amusement park called FreedomLand.
http://scripting.com/2024/05/07/181531.html?title=rusticCoopCity
date: 2024-05-07, updated: 2024-05-07, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044573-new-pompeii-excavations-r
date: 2024-05-07, updated: 2024-05-07, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.techmeme.com/240507/p21#a240507p21
date: 2024-05-07, updated: 2024-05-07, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/the-light-eaters-and-plant-intelligence
date: 2024-05-07, updated: 2024-05-07, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044552-ive-known-anil-dash-for
date: 2024-05-07, from: James Fallows, Substack
… while another tries to find its way. Reports from Time and the NYT.
https://fallows.substack.com/p/election-countdown-182-days-to-go
date: 2024-05-07, updated: 2024-05-07, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044571-did-you-know-that-broccol
date: 2024-05-07, updated: 2024-05-07, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/an-update-on-the-beloved-broccoli-tree
date: 2024-05-07, updated: 2024-05-07, from: Bruce Schneier blog
This attack has been feasible for over two decades:
Researchers have devised an attack against nearly all virtual private network applications that forces them to send and receive some or all traffic outside of the encrypted tunnel designed to protect it from snooping or tampering.
TunnelVision, as the researchers have named their attack, largely negates the entire purpose and selling point of VPNs, which is to encapsulate incoming and outgoing Internet traffic in an encrypted tunnel and to cloak the user’s IP address. The researchers believe it affects all VPN applications when they’re connected to a hostile network and that there are no ways to prevent such attacks except when the user’s VPN runs on Linux or Android. They also said their attack technique may have been possible since 2002 and may already have been discovered and used in the wild since then…
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/05/new-attack-on-vpns.html
date: 2024-05-07, updated: 2024-05-07, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044567-thanks-to-a-newly-deciphe
date: 2024-05-07, updated: 2024-05-07, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044568-this-is-the-goofiest-dork
date: 2024-05-07, from: Doc Searls (at Harvard), New Old Blog
Among all artists, writers alone suffer the illusion that the world needs to hear what they have to say. I thought that line, or something like it, came from Rollo May, probably in The Courage to Create. But a search within that book says no. ChatGPT and Gemini both tell me May didn’t say it […]
https://doc.searls.com/2024/05/07/burning-to-write-and-vice-versa/
date: 2024-05-07, updated: 2024-05-07, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044562-a-north-yorkshire-county-
date: 2024-05-07, from: Jeff Geerling blog
Raspberry Pi is getting into the services game
<div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>...and it's all free—<em>so far</em>.</p>
Raspberry Pi today launched Raspberry Pi Connect, a free remote VPN service for all Pi OS users.
If you create a Raspberry Pi
ID, you can sign up for Connect, install rpi-connect on
a Pi 4 or 5 running 64-bit Pi OS 12 ‘Bookworm’, and register that Pi
with the service.
Then, on any other device’s web browser, you can log in and remote control your Pi through Connect’s web-based VNC viewer.
The VNC server is based on wayvnc, and the Connect service allows for as many registered Pis as you want (though I’m guessing the interface is optimized for the majority use case of one or a few).
<span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>Jeff Geerling</span></span>
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/raspberry-pi-getting-services-game
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-05-07, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
BTW, I was struck that famous editor and writer Ben Smith said he was ashamed at starting out as a blogger, on an MSNBC show hosted by a true hack. The quote was from Jeff Jarvis, who like me, cross-posts to a variety of social webs, presumably manually. Where did I put my comment? Hell if I know. Heh I found it. My comment: “I didn’t know he had been a blogger. So my respect for him went up dramatically in an instant, and in another instant, plummeted. What’s wrong with people?” Bad news for Ben, he’s still is a blogger, btw, in his heart. I can tell. And true journalists and true bloggers share an ethos that the fakers like Morning Joe will never understand. So I guess when you’re on with Joe you have to pander. Just remember Ben, we know who you are. Even if you have forgotten. 😄
http://scripting.com/2024/05/07.html#a115333
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-05-07, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I
said this to a friend recently, in an email: “I noticed a change with
the doctors, where earlier they would dismiss my fears of having this or
that fatal disease, now they’re always looking for the thing that’s
going to kill me.“ The friend, a retired English professor, said the
sentence was very effective. Part of me would like to send the sentence
and the review to my freshman English professor, I think she would be
proud. Instead I decided to blog it.
http://scripting.com/2024/05/07.html#a115159
date: 2024-05-07, from: Jessica Smith’s blog
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve felt this rising tide of nostalgia building up in me and urging me to revisit the Sims games. I used to be an avid player of The Sims 2 in the late 2000s and early 2010s, playing legacy challenges (where you strive to play the same family over 10 generations) and participating in the thriving LiveJournal Sims community of the era. Around the time this nostalgic impulse started, I stumbled upon a corner of Reddit where people are still talking about, and playing, The Sims 2, and that in turn got me sucked into YouTube videos such as Tanic Sims 2’s series on the borked character files of the premade hoods and this two-hour masterpiece by April Black on the scourge of hood corruption, and how many of the things Simmers long thought cause it actually don’t.
Anyway, it made me really want to play The Sims 2 again. I do actually own the Ultimate Collection via EA Origin, but there was a slight problem… the computer I use is a Mac. And we do have a Linux desktop as well, and these days Wine/Proton/etc. is so good that TS2 can easily be played on that OS now… but somehow that install of Linux got borked and only works in recovery mode, which is sufficient to run the Plex server I mainly use that desktop for these days, but not really good enough for TS2. Alas.
Another option would have been to purchase Aspyr’s Mac port – the Super Collection – for AUD$50 in the App Store. I do want to admit that in principle (even though I already own the game on another platform) this seems like a worthy option. Unlike EA, Aspyr has actually put the effort in to keep their port updated for new versions of Mac OS, including upgrading the game to 64 bits when Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications, and updating the game again to run natively on Apple Silicon (the M1 chips and beyond). That’s great and they deserve to be supported for that! My reasons for not just choosing that option are a bit on the selfish and picky side. Firstly, EA never allowed Aspyr to port the last couple of expansion packs (FreeTime and Apartment Life) to Mac OS, and FreeTime in particular is so fundamental to all my nostalgic memories of the game (plus, packed with quality of life features) that I just don’t know that I’m willing to play without it. Secondly, the April Black video I linked in paragraph #1 introduced me to the fact that Macs have a hardcoded limit of approximately 10,000 files that can be open at one time… which can be a potential cause of corruption in The Sims 2, which was designed to draw on a large number of tiny, atomic files (e.g. every Sim in a neighbourhood gets its own individual file) instead of large consolidated ones. Considering that on top of that, I have a folder of all the custom content I was using at the time I stopped playing The Sims 2, which I actually think is pretty lean, and yet by itself it has 4,242 files in it… yeah, I was nervous about the possibility that playing TS2 on a Mac would not be very sustainable for me. Alas.
So, I turned my sights to the newest instalment of the franchise, The Sims 4. Now I played this version of the game quite a bit in 2017–8, and I remember being impressed at first by the graphics (it’s so much prettier than unmodded TS2) and the quality of life improvements offered by the game engine, like better routing and Sims’ new ability to multitask. However… the shine wore off. The main issue I had with TS4 was just that it wasn’t as fun as TS2. The zany shit that used to keep me so entertained as a teen was just so much rarer in TS4. Most Sims’ personalities were so bland, with personality points gone and replaced with just three traits (plus an aspiration trait) and no more than a handful of those traits did anything more than “give Sims an emotion buff sometimes”. There were no more wants and fears, just “whims” which were rarely interesting, and nothing bad happened if you ignored them entirely (Sims couldn’t go into aspiration failure any more). So… I started playing a legacy in The Sims 4 and did get up to generation 6. After a couple of fun generations where I really put effort into making my Sims generate drama, I got a generation where my heir had TRIPLETS and my entire game became a production line of desperately trying to build up the toddlers’ potty training skill to the point that they could at least fucking toilet themselves and it was literally a neverending process and none of my adult Sims were doing anything interesting either and I got so frustrated that I just… never opened the game again. 😅
That said, quite a few years have passed since 2017–8. It occurred to me that more mods might’ve come out giving the Sims more personality and making their autonomous behaviour more individualised. It also seems like the game itself has come out with updates addressing some of the stuff I criticised (for example they supposedly replaced whims with wants & fears again, and as of a recent expansion Sims can “self-discover” new traits?)… basically, I started to wonder if it was worth trying again.
So, I installed the base game via the Origin app (which supposedly already booted off everyone in favour of EA’s new app, but it hasn’t booted me off) and started a new save. I haven’t got very far into it yet, and I’m also adding mods progressively, bit by bit, rather than adding every “give your Sim more personality!” mod all at once, to make the investigation easier for myself if I inadvertently add something bugged or something that conflicts with another mod. That said, some of the mods I’m interested in playing with are:
Now, having said all of this… I’m not sure how much it’ll satisfy that part of me nostalgic for the Sims community on LiveJournal. Because a big part of my fun wasn’t just playing my game, it was publishing updates on my legacy and – perhaps even more important – reading other people’s updates on their legacy. There are sooooo many hilarious people whose legacies I used to read – hell, I started reading them even before I owned a Windows computer to play TS2 on myself! – and I really also miss… that. For nostalgia’s sake I went back to revisit some of them today, but between Tinypic purging old pictures, Photobucket watermarking old pictures, and LiveJournal itself becoming a gross ad-infested shell of what it once was, it was just sad. I can put together legacy updates for myself, and I can publish them on the internet (I even have a dedicated subdomain , originally to host my pictures, but when LJ went downhill I started backing up the actual updates there too), but… I have no idea where a Simmer shares these things, these days, for potential interested readers to find. At least in 2017–8, I knew Tumblr was popular, but I tried searching tags like “sims 4 legacy”, “sims 4 gameplay” and so forth today and did not find a single “legacy update” as I would think of them. Mostly I found custom content, people posting their own challenge rules based on the original legacy challenge, and the occasional “artsy” highly edited screenshot with no or minimal commentary. I don’t really want contextless game screenshots… I want funny shit. I want quirky Sims autonomously starting drama and being hilarious! Where is that?! Or does everyone who wants that just stick with TS2? Because like, at least I found one active TS2 legacy posting updates on Reddit… actually I found an active TS4 legacy on Reddit too, but it’s a bit more serious and less “this is what happened in my game lol”. Are people just making videos of that style of content now, instead of screenshots with commentary, and posting them on YouTube? Because… I am not going to do that. Haha.
Well… anyway… step 1 is to actually play my game, right. Experiment with mods and see if it feels fun enough for me to persist with it. It’s sad about the difficulty finding or sharing legacy updates, but it’s really just an adjunct to actually playing the game anyway, I suppose.
https://www.jayeless.net/2024/05/getting-back-into-the-sims-games.html
date: 2024-05-07, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Judge Merchan must jail Trump, Biden must stop sending weapons to Netanyahu
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/standing-up-to-trump-and-bibi
date: 2024-05-06, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
Trump fundraising off a threat from the judge
https://steady.substack.com/p/contemptible
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/cj-sansom-novels
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-10, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-08, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/05/06/apple-homepage-erasable-logo/
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044566-i-am-needs-to-read
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044561-zadie-smith-to-send-the
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/squaring-the-reality-of-what-we-see
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044564-hey-everyone-its-hot-fran
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/02/apple-sales-ai-iphone-earnings-regulations/
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044557-booting-up-an-apple-iic
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Daring Fireball
https://512pixels.net/2024/04/ai-overlay-tmp-home-folder-mac-os/
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUjyEp93Trk
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044559-these-folks-wrote-an-auto
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/skating-the-contours-of-nature
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044553-oh-cool-spiders-can-swim
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Daring Fireball
https://restofworld.org/2024/exporter-whatsapp-encryption-india/
date: 2024-05-06, from: Ayjay blog
Last night Teri and I watched Swing Time, and afterwards played a little game: We went back to the dance scenes and tried to pause at instants when Astaire and Rogers didn’t look elegant. Couldn’t do it. At every moment they are balanced and poised, they’re perfect images of grace.
https://blog.ayjay.org/elegance-personified-really/
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044555-wondering-why-people-inve
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/jason-polan-i-want-to-know-all-of-you
date: 2024-05-06, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
Some pragmatic notes how cross-posting works these days.
I use regularly: Twitter, Threads, Facebook, Mastodon, Bluesky.
Two that have APIs I can use: Mastodon and Bluesky.
I can’t send images to Bluesky via their API, they broke the interface. My way of doing it is now called “legacy.” The app that uses that feature doesn’t work. But I don’t even remotely have the time to go back and fix it.
The items in my linkblog come from this flow. If it appears in my linkblog, it also appears on Masto and Bluesky.
When I want broader distribution, I do this:
I’m sure a lot of people are doing something very much like this. I can actually witness Jeff Jarvis doing it. I think Jay Rosen probably is too.
One thing that Bluesky may not be aware of is that their character limit is signficantly lower than the others, so sometimes I can’t include them in this rotation.
I’d love to see one of these support the features of textcasting. I would give them 100 good netizen points for that, because it wouldn’t be long before the others did it, and we’d have a much more complete network writing environment.
http://scripting.com/2024/05/06/135847.html?title=crosspostingIn2024
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-05-06, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
An
unsung miracle of ChatGPT. I usually write my prompts very carefully,
esp when using it to build software, but I just tried not really caring,
and asking a question the way I thought of it, so it rambled a lot, was
repetetive and had an error I didn’t bother to correct, to see what
would happen. It didn’t even criticize me. It figured out what I was
trying to ask/say, and gave me the answer I was looking for. Yes I am
aware that all my fellow programmers taught it how to do this, though I
have no idea how it does that, but it is freaking amazing. I keep
finding miracles in this tech.
http://scripting.com/2024/05/06.html#a134032
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044550-the-trailer-for-senna-a
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Lots of complicated details here: too many for me to summarize well. It involves an obscure Section 230 provision—and an even more obscure typo. Read this.
date: 2024-05-06, from: Ayjay blog
I haven’t forgotten about middlebrow matters, but right now my mind is on something else. Something related, though. Readers of Gaudy Night (1935) will recall — stop reading if you haven’t read Gaudy Night and don’t want any spoilers — that the plot hinges on an event that occurred some years before the book’s present-day: […]
https://blog.ayjay.org/the-integrity-of-science/
date: 2024-05-06, from: Daniel Stenberg Blog
On Friday May 3, 2024 I had several of my curl friends over for dinner in my house. An unusually warm and sunny spring day with a temperature reaching twenty degrees centigrade. The curl up 2024 weekend started excellently and the following morning we all squeezed ourselves into a conference room in downtown Stockholm. I … Continue reading I survived curl up 2024
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/05/06/i-survived-curl-up-2024/
date: 2024-05-06, from: Robert Reich’s blog
And they’re widening inequality. Here’s what to do about them
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/stock-buybacks-are-lethal-literally
date: 2024-05-06, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
“When we consume, we never do it on our own (the isolated consumer is the carefully maintained illusion of the ideological discourse on consumption). Consumers are mutually implicated, despite themselves, in a general system of exchange and in the production of coded values.” — Jean Baudrillard See also: How we feel about what we consume Performing […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/05/05/the-consumer-society/
date: 2024-05-06, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
In his latest book Local, Alastair Humphreys visits the suburbs, exurbs, and industrial-rural lands surrounding his home, encountering plenty of litter. At first, he’s disgusted and thinks poorly of those who’ve tainted their environment. People he encounters blame the Travelers, saying that because they don’t own the land they don’t treat it well. But after […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/05/05/theft-of-the-land/
date: 2024-05-06, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
Back
when I did my first XML-based serialization format, I did it because the
XML people were asking developers to do that. “Now you can create your
own formats!” The theory was they had finished their work, XML was ready
to go, and developers should start building on it. So I did, thinking in
the back of my mind, “they don’t really mean it.” This was based on
experience with commercial platform vendors who heavily evangelized
their products when they were new, but took
umbrage at the
chutzpah of the
developer who thought they could do anything really useful or important,
don’t they know that’s what BigCo’s do. Anyway a few years later, that’s
exactly what happened. Predictably, the big companies, IBM, Microsoft,
Google, Sun etc thought they should define the syndication format of the
future, so they set about to do it as a “standard” and thus was born
Atom. My opinion,
one way is
better than two, and they should have jumped on the
RSS bandwagon. But
that’s not what they do. They’re still
trying to make RSS
unnecessary, you think they would have figured out that there’s no point
in trying to do that.
It isn’t going away. 😄
I wonder if anyone has thought of working with ChatGPT or Meta.ai to create a Busy Developer’s Guide to ActivityPub? Here’s the prompt. “I want to write a simple bridge between my writing app and any app that runs in the Fediverse, using only ActivityPub. The operations are basically those of the MetaWeblog API, create a post, update a post. Just to start. How should it handle identity? I work in Node.js.” I asked both AI tools, and the Meta.ai answer was pretty useless, but ChatGPT gave what seems to be a reasonable outline for the project.
ActivityPub is a product of Architecture Astronauts. Start with a simple idea but generalize it too far, so it can do everything, so much so that no one understands how to do the simple stuff. You have to understand the theory before you do can anything pragmatic. It’s why I said last week that they need a BDG asap, with implementations in all major runtime environments. I would help them design it, I’m a fairly typical “busy developer.” I would support it if it were easier to understand, thus more likely not to be revised with breakage to apps. I’ve also seen this happen before, in fact it happens more often than not. If you don’t understand a format, you can’t actually support it. This is part of the you can’t lie to a compiler axiom.
http://scripting.com/2024/05/05/002726.html?title=randomRssActivitypubNotes
date: 2024-05-05, from: John Naughton’s online diary
Totem pole? On a Norfolk beach. Quote of the Day “You feel that its words are coming of out of your body and then you dig the words into the page. It’s a physical experience.” The late Paul Auster on … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/monday-6-may-2024/39413/
date: 2024-05-05, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
This is interesting and fair, but in her larger point about consuming media by ‘stained’ people, I think overlooks our emotional responses to learning bad things about people whose art we liked. (Note: I haven’t read the book, only this interview.) It’s possible that we as individuals read too much into what we like, that […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/05/05/how-we-feel-about-what-we-consume/
date: 2024-05-05, updated: 2024-05-08, from: Ron Garret
This is the sixth installment in a series about the scientific method. My central thesis is that science is not just for scientists, it can be used by anyone in just about any situation.In part 2 of this series I gave a few examples of how the scientific method can be applied in everyday situations. In this chapter I want to show how it can be used to tackle what is considered to be a
https://blog.rongarret.info/2024/05/languages-are-theories-debunking-new.html
date: 2024-05-05, updated: 2024-05-05, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk6UVnMn9ts
date: 2024-05-05, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Friends, My students are graduating at a tremulous time. The largest campus protest movement of the 21st century. The first criminal trial of a former U.S. president. The most restrictive abortion laws in the nation. Two horrific wars. All of this coming after the first pandemic in living memory, one that claimed the lives of a million Americans. And after the first attack on the U.S. Capitol in history, provoked by the first president who refused to accept electoral defeat.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/what-im-telling-my-graduating-students
date: 2024-05-05, from: Dave Rupert blog
I wanted to experiment with the new CSS function
light-dark() and get a sense of how to use it in a CSS
architecture of nested (web) components. I think it’s going to be a
powerful tool in the
new responsive world of component architecture but I don’t want to
recommend something unless I have experience with it in a project first.
My first pass was to add light-dark() to my components…
/* global.css */
:root {
--dark: #000;
--light: #fff;
}
/* Inside <my-component>'s Shadow DOM */
:host {
background-color: light-dark(var(--light), var(--dark));
color: light-dark(var(--dark), var(--light));
}
But if every component is in charge of it’s own
light-dark() handling for border,
background, and color on every element… the
codebase will get messy managing dark mode in a lot of different places,
leading to a lot of inconsistencies over time. A more elegant solution
for me would be to handle this job in a single location at the root
scope level and leverage the cascade a bit.
:root {
color-scheme: light dark;
--surface-color: light-dark( #fff, #000 );
--text-color: light-dark( #000, #fff );
}
The nice thing about using light-dark() at the root token
level is your components can be dumber. You provide default light-dark
experience and, like good children, your components abide in their
parent’s decision. Of course, due to the nature of CSS custom
properties, your components aren’t locked into the system and your
component level styles can opt out (read: not include) or override the
global variables if necessary.
/* Inside <my-component>'s Shadow DOM */
:host {
background: var(--surface-color);
color: var(--text-color);
}
/* this is a real example from my past */
:host[theme="lunar-new-year"] {
--surface-color: red;
--text-color: black;
}
At this point in the experiment I was pleased with the results… until I
deployed it to production. I overestimated the browser support for
light-dark() and it didn’t work on my phone running Safari
17.4 (but it’s coming in Safari 17.5). I replicated the issue by
changing light-dark() to light-d0rk() to
verify and fixed it by adding a tried-and-true CSS @supports query.
:root {
--surface-color: #000;
--text-color: #fff;
/* NOTE: For Safari 17.4 (2024-05) */
@supports (color: light-dark(black, white)) {
color-scheme: light dark;
--surface-color: light-dark( #fff, #000 );
--text-color: light-dark( #000, #fff );
}
}
Now Safari 17.4 and other browsers that lack support will only have a
dark theme and newer browsers will get the light-dark()
enhancement. I also threw a little NOTE: and datestamp in
there so future versions of me will know when and
why
I built this fence.
https://daverupert.com/2024/05/light-dark-experiment/
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-05-05, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
We should all be working together as opposed to trying to find bullshit excuses not to.
http://scripting.com/2024/05/05.html#a145527
date: 2024-05-05, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
As
a boomer who marched on Washington as a high school student, who started
an underground newspaper, and organized student strikes, I support
today’s students making their political opinions heard. I also see
journalists doing what they did in the 60s and 70s, reporting on
violence as if it were caused by the protestors, which wasn’t true then
and I’m pretty sure it isn’t true now.
And they describe them as Palestinians, when that also is certainly not what’s really going on. My guess is that 99% of them are American students, who, growing up were taught that America had great values, only to discover that America often has taken the wrong side in a war, as we are now in the war between Hamas and Israel.
We shouldn’t have taken a side in that war, as long as Israel insists on killing massive numbers of civilians in Gaza. Yes, what Hamas did was unsupportable, and provocative, and just plain wrong, but Israel is killing far more people than Hamas did, and further, it’s exactly what Israel, which pretends to represent Holocaust survivors, should not be doing, perpetrating a new Holocaust.
As Americans we have a responsibility to think for ourselves, and that’s why I support the students. They aren’t right or wrong, but they are continuing the legacy of free speech in the US, and our government and journalists are lining up against them, which to me is as tragic in the 2020s as it was in the 1970s.
http://scripting.com/2024/05/05/140147.html?title=iSupportTheStudents
date: 2024-05-05, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
A Reason To Smile
https://steady.substack.com/p/blackbird-996
@Jessica Smith’s blog (date: 2024-05-05, from: Jessica Smith’s blog)
On our way home from our regular beach walk, Gizmo saw a cat! Actually he didn’t see her at first, and was just like, “wtf humans, why did you stop?” But then the cat meowed, and Gizmo very sweetly put his paws on the brick wall and looked up in hope 😆 The cat didn’t actually jump down to become his friend, but she didn’t run away either – that’s something!
https://www.jayeless.net/2024/05/gizmo-saw-a-new-cat.html
date: 2024-05-05, from: Robert Reich’s blog
And last week’s winner
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/sunday-caption-contest-protest
date: 2024-05-05, from: Dave Rupert blog
An unseasonable gloomy spring in Austin, TX. The kids are nearly done with school for the year and summer plans are shoring up. My son goes to middle school next year. Unbelievable.
We’ve battled some on-and-off sicknesses these past couple months and with all the holidays every week has felt like a false start. But here we are, barreling into summer. I’ve already been out on the lake to surf on my cousin’s boat, so I’ve got that going for me.
In April my wife’s entire family came out from Arizona to Austin for the eclipse on April 8th. We got a big Vrbo near the lake right in the path of totality. The weather was cloudy and dismal in Austin for the eclipse. But then… ten minutes before full totality, the sky broke open.
I’ve seen partial eclipses before and those were cool. But nothing prepared me for seeing the total eclipse. The complete darkness. The confused birds. The sudden drop in temperature. The fully visible halo effect eminating from the sun. It’s other worldly to see the big space rock that goes around our planet move in front of the big fireball that keeps our planet alive.
Happy to get to celebrate something so cosmic with the family.
I turned 44 at the end of April and had an uneventful birthday. That’s how birthdays go after the big four-oh. I spent most of my day cleaning the house and watching anime. My family treated me to a “fancy dinner” at a place with cloth napkins and the kids behaved themselves through the whole meal.
The highlight of my birthday was exchanging texts with some old friends who have known me for decades. Old friends like that – even though you often live distant parallel busy lives – have the ability to tap into a deep well of friendship. For that I am thankful.
I haven’t talked about it much, because I don’t want to jinx it, but I’ve been making some games in my spare time. And not one style of game either, a big swath of random ideas in different formats.
Making games has been a fun and different way to spend my time. I don’t have much to show for all that tinkering right this minute, but soon maybe?
You know that feeling when your boss emails you and asks “Hey, you got a minute?” and those minutes until you talk to your boss feels like hours as your amygdala floods your limbic system with intense, wet, hot anxiety? That’s more or less what I’ve been feeling for the last two months as I waited for a life-changing email. There were two emails actually. Then that got stressful. Then I had to wait on a package.
To be totally honest, all that waiting nearly broke me. I’m a decently patient person but a giant cloud LOOMING over me every day that I’m unable to control is distressing. Then your friends and family and kids ask you “Hey did that life-changing email come yet?” and you have to say “Nope, not yet” over and over.
But the email did come. And so did the package. And the giant cloud of concern is slowly dissipating. And on Monday I’ll embark on the next big phase of my adult life. Ominous, I know.
What you jackals come here for…
I took some time to do some deep dives both formally and informally.
I’ve put on a bit of weight and that’s frustrating but I think again it’s stress-related.
Reading is still on a book-a-week clip. This year I’m mulling around tech and ethics, as well as reading about people who created or harnessed a new technology. I also got back into comics and have read some wonderful pieces. If it’s sci-fi themed and has good art, I’m all-in.
Finished
In Progress
Slowed down a lot on blogging. That’s okay. I still have three dozen drafts but I’m being pretty choosy about where I toil. It’s easy for me to lose a weekend tinkering on a handful of posts, or piecing together a giant overly complex post like this. I need to stop doing that. Or I need to do that more often. Who knows.
FrontendMasters Boost (1 post)
This Blog (5 posts)
Movies
TV
Anime
Podcasts
A normal couple months of ShopTalk with some great guests.
Mentioned above, I’ve been making some games.
A great couple months of Gunpla with some really stellar models.
For my birthday I got the Perfect Grade Unleashed RX-78-2 which is like the pinnacle of Gundam models. It’s $300 worth of plastic and I couldn’t be more excited to build it.
I hope to pick up again here and I have some projects behind the scenes, but not much to show at this point.
I’m bad at setting calendar reminders for community group meeting times. I hope to be more involved going forward.
https://daverupert.com/2024/05/vibe-check-32/
date: 2024-05-05, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
Adobe’s gambling that the creative industries will be replaced by in-house staff doing it all themselves — and maybe it’s a “good” gamble if they can convince a lot of corporations they can cut out all the photographers and stylists and creative directors because any of their staff can do “the same” with a CC […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/05/04/scale-requires-deskilling/