John’s Blog

Nilay Patel isn’t afraid to make an endorsement, writing at The Verge:

In many ways, the ecstatic reaction to Harris is simply a reflection of the fact that she is so clearly trying. She is trying to govern America the way it’s designed to be governed, with consensus and conversation and effort. With data and accountability, ideas and persuasion. Legislatures and courts are not deterministic systems with predictable outputs based on a set of inputs — you have to guide the process of lawmaking all the way to the outcomes, over and over again, each time, and Harris seems not only aware of that reality but energized by it. More than anything, that is the change a Harris administration will bring to a country exhausted by decades of fights about whether government can or should do anything at all.

It is time to stop denying the essential nature of the problems America faces. It is time to insist that we use the power of our democracy the way it’s intended to be used. And it is far past time to move beyond Donald Trump.

A vote for Harris is a vote for the future. It is a vote for solving collective action problems. It is a vote for working together, instead of tearing our world to shreds.

David Folkenflik, for NPR:

The Washington Post has been rocked by a tidal wave of cancellations from digital subscribers and a series of resignations from columnists, as the paper grapples with the fallout of owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of roughly 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.

This whole situation is a complete mess.

I have no problem with a newspaper declining to endorse a candidate. It’s an outdated practice that makes little sense in today’s media landscape. But the timing is just plain awful. If you’re not going to make an endorsement then announce that a year in advance. Not days before the general election. Just sloppy all around. I feel for the editorial staff and the integrity of the great people at the Post that had nothing to do with this decision.

The backlash has been so fierce that Jeff Bezos has written an op-ed in response:

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.

Again, no disagreement here. But this should have been announced a year ago, at least.

The first few Apple Intelligence features are rolling out this week with iOS 18.1.¹ I’ve been using the betas of this for a few months now, and it’s a good upgrade overall.

The marketing blitz for Apple Intelligence has been very aggressive. If you’ve watched any live TV over the past month you’ve likely seen dozens of Apple Intelligence ads.

I can’t help but think most casual phone users will be very confused by what Apple Intelligence actually does. Is it useful? Sure! Especially the notification summaries feature, it’s very handy. But is it worth buying a new phone just for this? I’d say no. Handy features, not life changing.

This is the first of a few batches, and things will certainly get better and more robust over time.

And also on macOS Sequoia, but I’m not even close to upgrading my primary work machine for another few months, or when XCode requires me to. ↩

Gareth Edwards, writing for Every:

On October 3, the British government announced that it was giving up sovereignty over a small tropical atoll in the Indian Ocean known as the Chagos Islands. The islands would be handed over to the neighboring island country of Mauritius, about 1,100 miles off the southeastern coast of Africa.

The story did not make the tech press, but perhaps it should have. The decision to transfer the islands to their new owner will result in the loss of one of the tech and gaming industry’s preferred top-level domains: .io.

The .io domain is still wildly popular. Let’s hope a good actor takes over the oversight of the tld.

For those of us observing from the sidelines, the great Wordpress fight of 2024 is getting ugly. It’s feeling more like giant companies battling about money.

Last week, DHH chimed in on one of the issues at hand:

And yet, I can see where this is coming from. Ruby on Rails, the open-source web framework I created, has been used to create businesses worth hundreds of billions of dollars combined. Some of those businesses express their gratitude and self-interest by supporting the framework with dedicated developers, membership of The Rails Foundation, or conference sponsorships. But many also do not! And that is absolutely their right, even if it occasionally irks a little.

For any successful open source project there are bound to be many more users of the project than contributors. I’m guilty of this for sure. I don’t have the drive like many others to contribute freely to open source. I would like to spend more time here, but it’s low on my long list of priorities. And that’s okay!

That’s the deal. That’s open source. I give you a gift of code, you accept the terms of the license. There cannot be a second set of shadow obligations that might suddenly apply, if you strike it rich using the software. Then the license is meaningless, the clarity all muddled, and certainty lost.

Bingo. I saw a lot of feedback this past week basically saying “gosh I don’t usually don’t agree with DHH, but he’s exactly right this time.”

Matt Mullenweg had originally published a rather nasty post in response, but it was taken down. I’m glad Mullenweg reconsidered. There’s no need for personal attacks in any of this. He did leave a few responses which are reasonable arguments.

I can’t shake the feeling that I wouldn’t want to be building a business on Wordpress right now. It used to be the safe, stable, easy choice. Things change.

The great Dave Winer, on blogging for 30 years:

Today’s the big day. Thanks to John Naughton’s wonderful piece in the Guardian, I’m hearing from people all over the world about what blogging means to them. I appreciate all of the messages, but would appreciate them even more if they were on your blog. We need to keep using the tech. Blogging is kind of lost, and I would like to see that change. Every time you post something you’re proud of on a social media site, how about taking a moment and posting it to your blog too. And while there, if appropriate, link to something from some part of your post, even though the social media sites don’t support linking, the web is still there and it still does.

I’m not quite sure yet what to make of Orion, Meta’s new prototype AR glasses product. The hands-on demos, like this one for The Verge look really amazing. This is clearly the future for wearable AR products, but the future is still very far off.

The Wordpress and WP Engine battle continues.

Ivan Mehta has a good summary on TechCrunch:

In response [to the WP Engine cease-and-desist], Automattic sent its own cease-and-desist letter to WP Engine, saying that they had breached WordPress and WooCommerce trademark usage rules.

Mullenweg then banned WP Engine from accessing the resources of WordPress.org. While elements like plug-ins and themes are under open source license, providers like WP Engine have to run a service to fetch them, which is not covered under the open source license.

This broke a lot of websites and prevented them from updating plug-ins and themes. It also left some of them open to security attacks. The community was not pleased with this approach of leaving small websites helpless.

This really messed a bunch of folks up and I feel bad for the developers and maintainers of the sites hosted on WP Engine now. I would guess the vast majority of WP Engine customers were completely unaware of these issues when they chose the hosting provider. Now their sites are left vulnerable and they’re having to move hosting or explain to their customers what’s going on.

I have a few friends still in the Wordpress development game, and this is just a shame for them. Good people, trying to make a decent living, working off of an open source project and good brand reputation. Now all of that is up in the air.

I can certainly see Mullenweg’s key points here, and I sympathize. But was this the correct way to go about all of this?

Also earlier this month, Mullenweg announced that they’d offer a salary buyout for any Automattic employee that wanted to leave the company because they disagree with the direction. 159 people (8.4% of the company) took the offer.

What’s next…?

Hursh Agrawal, CEO of The Browser Company, on the company blog:

We want to let all Arc users know that a security vulnerability existed in Arc prior to 8/25/24. We were made aware of a vulnerability on 8/25, it was fixed on 8/26. This issue allowed the possibility of remote code execution on users’ computers. We’ve patched the vulnerability immediately, already rolled out the fix, and verified that no one outside of the security researcher who discovered the bug has exploited it.

The vulnerability was discovered by “xyzeva”, who has an awesome write up on their blog, including this summary of the facts:

• arc boosts can contain arbitrary javascript
• arc boosts are stored in firestore
• the arc browser gets which boosts to use via the creatorID field
• we can arbitrarily change the creatorID field to any user id

thus, if we were to find a way to easily get someone elses user id, we would have a full attack chain

This was an incredible find, and honestly, quite a sloppy bug. I’ve been using Arc for a few months now as my daily driver and I really like it. Glad this is fixed.

Also, nice to see that Arc is taking care of the hacker for disclosing this vulnerability properly with a $20k bounty.

Donald Papp for Hackaday:

There’s a wild new feature making repair jobs easier (not to mention less messy) and iFixit covers it in their roundup of the iPhone 16’s repairability: electrically-released adhesive.

Here’s how it works. The adhesive looks like a curved strip with what appears to be a thin film of aluminum embedded into it. It’s applied much like any other adhesive strip: peel away the film, and press it between whatever two things it needs to stick. But to release it, that’s where the magic happens. One applies a voltage (a 9 V battery will do the job) between the aluminum frame of the phone and a special tab on the battery. In about a minute the battery will come away with no force, and residue-free.

This is so cool.

via Daring Fireball

Big drama in the world of Wordpress, by far the world’s most popular CMS.

Matt Mullenweg, on the Wordpress blog:

I spoke yesterday at WordCamp about how Lee Wittlinger at Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102B assets under management, can hollow out an open source community. (To summarize, they do about half a billion in revenue on top of WordPress and contribute back 40 hours a week, Automattic is a similar size and contributes back 3,915 hours a week.) Today, I would like to offer a specific, technical example of how they break the trust and sanctity of our software’s promise to users to save themselves money so they can extract more profits from you.

The specific example has to do with WP Engine disabling revisions to posts.

What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.

This is one of the many reasons they are a cancer to WordPress, and it’s important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread. WP Engine is setting a poor standard that others may look at and think is ok to replicate. We must set a higher standard to ensure WordPress is here for the next 100 years.

Mullenweg continues later on his personal blog:

So it’s at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to? Someone who’s going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone who’s going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers?

In response, WP Engine has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Automattic, including this interesting line:

Stunningly, Automattic’s CEO Matthew Mullenweg threatened that if WP Engine did not agree to pay Automattic – his for-profit entity – a very large sum of money before his September 20th keynote address at the WordCamp US Convention, he was going to embark on a self-described “scorched earth nuclear approach” toward WP Engine within the WordPress community and beyond. When his outrageous financial demands were not met, Mr. Mullenweg carried out his
threats by making repeated false claims disparaging WP Engine to its employees, its customers, and the world.

🍿🍿

Nilay Patel’s annual iPhone review for The Verge is a great read, as always. This year I really enjoyed his take on the camera system and the new “Photographic Styles” features:

The iPhone 16 and 16 Pro allow you to exclude yourself from this narrative entirely with a huge upgrade to the Photographic Styles feature that allows you to adjust how the camera processes colors, skin tones, and shadows, even after you’ve shot a photo.

It’s a subtle feature, but allowing these styles to be changed after capture is very nice.

You can pick between five “undertone” settings that are meant to adjust skin tones and nine “mood” settings that feel a lot like high-quality Instagram filters. You can shoot with a live preview of any of the styles, and then you can tweak the settings or even switch styles entirely later on.

And all of these styles offer three new fine controls: there’s “color,” which is basically saturation, and “palette,” which is the range of colors being applied. Most importantly, there’s a new control called “tone,” which lets you add shadows back to your photos. It turns out Apple is using “tone” in this context to mean “tone mapping,” and in my tests, the tone control allowed me to reliably bring the iPhone’s image processing back to reality by turning it down.

The tone control is semantically aware — it will adjust things like faces and the sky differently, so it’s still doing some intense computational photography, but the goal is for you to be able to take photos that look a lot more like what a traditional camera would produce if you bring the slider all the way down.

See also, Halide’s new “Process Zero” features.

So many great tools for photographers using phones. More of this, please.

Julie Jargon, for The Wall Street Journal: (Apple News+ Link)

Starting this week, [Instagram] will begin automatically making youth accounts private, with the most restrictive settings. And younger teens won’t be able to get around it by changing settings or creating adult accounts with fake birth dates.

Account restrictions for teens include direct messaging only with people they follow or are already connected to, a reduction in adult-oriented content, automatic muting during nighttime hours and more.

Under the new accounts, teens won’t be able to see sensitive content, such as posts or videos that show people fighting or that promote cosmetic procedures—and Instagram’s algorithm won’t recommend sexually suggestive content or content about suicide and self-harm.

A Wall Street Journal investigation earlier this summer revealed that sexual videos were being recommended to teen accounts. Mosseri said Instagram has worked hard to ensure that the platform doesn’t show teens such content. The new teen default settings should significantly reduce the chances of that, he added.

Teen accounts will receive notifications telling them to close the app after an hour. (They can ignore it.) Sleep mode, which mutes notifications overnight, will be automatically enabled.

Good changes overall, and certainly better than nothing.

It seems pretty clear to me that kids shouldn’t be on social media at all and I’m shocked that so many parents allow it. What would be better is to prevent all kids and teens from using social media until they are mature enough to handle it, but that’s not going to come from Meta.

OpenAI’s new “o1” model looks very cool and has a different approach than the company’s other model offerings:

We trained these models to spend more time thinking through problems before they respond, much like a person would. Through training, they learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies, and recognize their mistakes.

In our tests, the next model update performs similarly to PhD students on challenging benchmark tasks in physics, chemistry, and biology. We also found that it excels in math and coding.

Fascinating stuff. o1 is trained on how to solve problems, not just with the world knowledge base of traditional LLMs.

Ben Thompson has a high-level explanation for how the model works on Stratechery:

In summary, there are two important things happening: first, o1 is explicitly trained on how to solve problems, and second, o1 is designed to generate multiple problem-solving streams at inference time, choose the best one, and iterate through each step in the process when it realizes it made a mistake. That’s why it got the crossword puzzle right — it just took a really long time.

Federico Viticci has dropped his amazing annual review of the new version of iOS, out this week.

Never have I been in the position to witness the company finding itself unable to ignore a major industry shift. That’s exactly what is happening with AI. As we saw back in June, Apple announced a roadmap of AI features that will be gradually doled out to users and developers over the iOS 18 cycle. Most of them won’t even be launching this year: I wouldn’t be surprised if we see them just in time before the debut of iOS 19 at WWDC 2025.

What’s even more fascinating is realizing just how much of a priority Apple Intelligence must have been for the iOS, iPadOS, and macOS teams. Let’s face it: if it weren’t for the handful of additions to iOS, which are also cross-compatible with iPadOS, I wouldn’t have much to cover today without Apple Intelligence.

Viticci’s reviews are the best. I’ve been using the betas of iOS 18 for months and I still learned a few things from this review.