Rexfeng

I’ll link first to The Verge’s “Everything Announced at Meta Connect 2024” roundup because Meta still hasn’t posted today’s keynote address on YouTube; best I’ve found is this recording of the livestream, starting around the 43m:20s mark. I watched most of the keynote live and found it engaging. Just 45 minutes long — partly because it was information dense, and partly because Mark Zuckerberg hosted the entire thing himself. He seems very comfortable, confident, and natural lately. Nothing slows an on-stage keynote down more than a parade of VPs. There was clearly no political infighting at Meta for stage time in this keynote. The keynote was Zuck’s, and because of that, it was punchy and brisk.

In terms of actual products that will actually ship, Meta announced the $300 Quest 3S. That’s more than an entire order of magnitude lower-priced than Vision Pro. Vision Pro might be more than 10× more capable than Quest 3S, but I’m not sure it’s 10× better for just playing games and watching movies, which might be the only things people want to do with headsets at the moment. They also launched a 7,500-unit limited edition of their $430 actually-somewhat-popular Ray-Ban Wayfarer “smart” glasses made with translucent plastic, iMac-style. It’s been a while since someone made a “look at the insides” consumer device. That’s fun, and a little quirky, too.

The big reveal was Orion, a working prototype of see-through AR glasses. Meta themselves are describing them as a “dev kit”, but not only are they not available for purchase, they’re not available, period. They’re internal prototypes for Meta’s own developers, not outside developers. They do seem interesting, for a demo, and I’m hearing from our Dithering correspondent on the scene in Menlo Park that using them is genuinely compelling. There can be no argument that actual glasses are the form factor for AR.

The Verge’s Alex Heath opened his piece on Orion today with this line:

They look almost like a normal pair of glasses.

That’s stretching the meaning of “almost” to a breaking point. I’d say they look vaguely kinda-sorta like a pair of normal glasses. Both the frames (super chunky) and the lenses (thick, prismatic, at times glowing) are conspicuous. They look orthopedic, like glasses intended to aid people whose vision is so low they’re legally blind. It really is true that Meta’s Ray-Ban Wayfarers are nearly indistinguishable from just plain Wayfarers. Orion isn’t like that at all. If you went out in public with these — which you can’t, because they’re internal prototypes — everyone would notice that you’re wearing some sort of tech glasses, or perhaps think you walked out of a movie theater without returning the 3D goggles. But: you could wear them in public if you wanted to, and unlike going out in public wearing a VR headset, you’d just look like a nerd, not a jackass. They’re close to something. But how close to something that would actually matter, especially price-wise, is debatable. From Heath’s report:

As Meta’s executives retell it, the decision to shelve Orion mostly came down to the device’s astronomical cost to build, which is in the ballpark of $10,000 per unit. Most of that cost is due to how difficult and expensive it is to reliably manufacture the silicon carbide lenses. When it started designing Orion, Meta expected the material to become more commonly used across the industry and therefore cheaper, but that didn’t happen.

“You can’t imagine how horrible the yields are,” says Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth of the lenses. Instead, the company pivoted to making about 1,000 pairs of the Orion glasses for internal development and external demos.

Snap recently unveiled their new Spectacles, which they’re leasing, not selling, for $1,200 per year. Snap’s Spectacles are so chunky they make Orion look inconspicuous in comparison. But the race to bring AR glasses to market is clearly on.

See Also: Heath’s interview with Zuckerberg for Decoder.

Next-Day Addendum: I woke up this morning with the following competitive back-and-forth in my head:

1. Facebook ships VR headsets and a software platform with an emphasis so strong on “the metaverse” that they rename the company Meta.
2. Apple announces, and then 7 months later ships, Vision Pro with a two-fold message in comparison: (a) the “metaverse” thing is so stupid they won’t even use the term; (b) overwhelmingly superior resolution and experiential quality. Consumer response, however, is underwhelming.
3. Meta drops the “metaverse” thing and previews Orion, effectively declaring that they think VR headsets are the wrong thing to build to create the product that defines the next breakthrough step change in personal computing. AR glasses, not VR headsets, are the goal.

It’s a lot of back-and-forth volleying, which is what makes the early years of a new device frontier exciting and highly uncertain. Big bold ideas get tried out, and most of them wind up as dead ends to abandon. Compare and contrast to where we’ve been with laptops for the last 20 years, or the pinnacle we appear to have reached in recent years with phones.

Donald Papp at 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 9V 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.

Clever.

Los Angeles Dodgers DH Shohei Ohtani entered last night’s game in Miami with 49 stolen bases and 48 home runs for the season. Only five other players in MLB history have ever hit 40 home runs and stolen 40 bases in a season. No player had ever achieved a 50-50 season.

Ohtani went 6-for-6, hitting 3 homers, stealing 2 bases, and knocking in 10 RBIs — thus breaking 50 in both categories in the same game. Unreal. It’s the second-greatest single-game performance by a hitter in baseball history. (Everyone knows the greatest, especially Dodgers fans.)

Postscript: I want to add my sincere kudos to Marlins manager Skip Schumaker (great baseball name). Asked why he didn’t walk Ohtani intentionally, he replied, “That’s a bad move, baseball-wise, karma-wise, baseball-gods-wise. You go after him and see if you can get him out.” That’s what he said to the media after the game. During the game, in the dugout, when asked if the Marlins should walk Ohtani, he put it even better: “Fuck that.”

Cards Against Humanity:

We have terrible news. Seven years ago, 150,000 people paid us $15 to protect a pristine parcel of land on the US-Mexico border from racist billionaire Donald Trump’s very stupid wall.

Unfortunately, an even richer, more racist billionaire — Elon Musk — snuck up on us from behind and completely fucked that land with gravel, tractors, and space garbage.

Just look at it! He fucked it.

How did this happen? Elon Musk’s SpaceX was building some space thing nearby, and he figured he could just dump his shit all over our gorgeous plot of land without asking. After we caught him, SpaceX gave us a 12-hour ultimatum to accept a lowball offer for less than half our land’s value. We said, “Go fuck yourself, Elon Musk. We’ll see you in court.”

Jason Snell:

Netflix has been slowly rolling out a big catalog of games, tied to a Netflix login. There are loads out now, including the excellent Lucky Luna and Laya’s Horizon (both from Snowman, developer of the excellent Alto’s series of iOS games).

Maybe, a year (or years) from now, there will be a GamesIndustry story like this one about Apple Arcade, about Netflix: “Mobile Developers Describe Working With Apple Arcade as a ‘Very Difficult and Long Process’”.

But in the meantime, I think Netflix is doing what Apple claimed they were doing with Apple Arcade — except Netflix didn’t lose focus five minutes into the initiative. I know for a fact, knowing them personally, that there are game developers who are repulsed by casino-style pay-to-win monetization, who are basically desperate for a monetization path that is up-front and completely healthy to all players. And they realize that such paths go through mainstream subscription services.

Apple Arcade, on the surface, sounds like exactly what they’re asking for. And it would give Apple device exclusivity. But Apple has botched this. It’s hard to believe, but they have. The general gist among game developers is that Apple is a hard-driving partner with whom, most likely, you’ll break even at best. The hard-driving part is to be expected. That’s Apple. It would be really weird and alarming if they weren’t demanding. But the “break even at best” part is not.

Spotify, in an update to an older post on the company blog:

While we are still many steps from a level playing field, we are beginning to see progress because of the European Commission’s historic decision on March 4, 2024 which found that Apple violated the EU’s antitrust laws and fined them over €1.8 billion. Starting today, Spotify is opting into Apple’s “entitlement” for music streaming services, created after the European Commission’s ruling. This means we will finally be able to offer something as obvious as it is overdue: iPhone consumers in the EU will now see pricing information for Spotify in the app and the fact that they can go to our website to purchase items directly.

Jess Weatherbed, at The Verge:

One thing that’s missing is the ability to click a link to make those purchases from outside the Apple App Store. Spotify says it’s opting into the “music streaming services entitlement” that Apple introduced after being served a €1.84 billion (about $2 billion) EU antitrust fine in March for “abusing its dominant position” in music streaming, rather than accepting the complicated new developer terms Apple outlined last week. Unlike the entitlement, the latter would allow EU developers to link to external payment options with Apple taking a cut of off-platform sales. Spotify clearly doesn’t want to do that, saying that Apple is demanding “illegal and predatory taxes.”

So after all this, all that Spotify’s app is now doing differently in the EU is (a) showing the prices of its available plans, and (b) telling users, without offering a tappable link, that to sign up, they need to go to Spotify’s website. It doesn’t even tell you the URL of the website, it just says “To buy Premium, go to the Spotify website.”

For anyone who isn’t paying close attention to these arguments over Apple’s draconian anti-steering terms for apps, it is surely very surprising that it took years of legal wrangling and a $2 billion fine (which, it should be noted, Apple hasn’t yet paid, and which quite possibly will be reduced or thrown out upon appeal) just to allow Spotify to present this information to users. Just to tell them the price and tell them they need to go to Spotify’s website to sign up.

These anti-steering provisions are indefensible. They make Apple look bad in the court of public opinion, and they look even worse in actual courts of law.

I neglected to call this paragraph out yesterday in my first link to this announcement from Patreon:

Patreon is home to an incredible range of creators, all with unique circumstances and billing needs. Apple’s in-app purchase system, on the other hand, only supports Patreon’s subscription billing model. Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon continue to use unsupported billing models or disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their App Store.

Right now Patreon is offering its creators two options for dealing with the upcoming changes in its iOS app:

• Raise prices for users who subscribe through the app by 30 percent to accommodate Apple’s cut of the transactions. (This is the default.)
• Keep prices the same and pay Apple’s fees out of the creator’s share of the transaction.

What Patreon seems to be suggesting above is that if they offered a third option — not to allow subscriptions within the iOS app, controlled by each creator for their own subscriptions — that Apple has threatened to remove the Patreon app from the App Store.

I humbly suggest Patreon go ahead with that anyway. Let’s see how many of Patreon’s creators tell Apple to bugger off. And if Apple were to respond by removing Patreon from the App Store for offering this choice, how would that not backfire spectacularly in Apple’s face? I believe it would be a positive publicity bonanza for Patreon, and for high-visibility creators on their platform, as well. And this example would be a disaster for Apple publicity-wise and in the face of growing regulatory and antitrust scrutiny, especially right here in the U.S.

From the perspective of creators, this clearly ought to be an option. They don’t want to charge their fans 30 percent extra just to pad Apple’s bottom line. They don’t want to earn less money themselves. Thus, they might not want to participate in App Store in-app payments at all. How is that not a perfectly reasonable choice for Patreon to offer and for some of its creators to make? And then just put right there in the app that this creator’s subscriptions are only available on the web. Dare Apple to strike that down on the anti-steering grounds that are in the bullseye of regulators around the world.

Patreon, with an army of devoted creator fans on its side, should call Apple on this bluff. I don’t think they could lose.

Patreon:

As we first announced last year, Apple is requiring that Patreon use their in-app purchasing system and remove all other billing systems from the Patreon iOS app by November 2024.

This has two major consequences for creators:

1. Apple will be applying their 30% App Store fee to all new memberships purchased in the Patreon iOS app, in addition to anything bought in your Patreon shop.
2. Any creator currently on first-of-the-month or per-creation billing plans will have to switch over to subscription billing to continue earning in the iOS app, because that’s the only billing type Apple’s in-app purchase system supports.

Before we go any further, we want to be crystal clear about one thing: Apple’s fee will not impact your existing members. It will only affect new memberships purchased in the iOS app from November onward.

Patreon’s messaging on this change seems pitch-perfect to me. They’re not whining, they’re not calling for users to get their pitchforks out, but also, they’re making crystal clear that these changes, and the timeline for implementing them, are demanded by Apple — and that Patreon benefits from these changes not at all.

This might epitomize the way Apple can be penny-wise but pound-foolish when it comes to the App Store. However much money they think they might get from these Patreon subscriptions once the Patreon iOS app switches to IAP, I refuse to believe it’s worth the further degradation of Apple’s brand that this dispute with Patreon is incurring. The paying users of Patreon are fans. They are such dedicated and devoted fans of certain creators and artists that they choose to pay those creators money. And now these users are being informed that Apple is putting the squeeze on these creators and inserting themselves into a relationship that these fans see as being between them and the artists they support.

In some sense it’s fair that Apple is applying these rules to Patreon, because there are other Patreon-esque platforms, like Fanhouse, that have been required by Apple to use the App Store’s IAP all along. But the fans of Patreon creators aren’t going to see this as fair at all. How do you put a price on that goodwill? How do you put a price on the number of Patreon iOS users — who are all, by definition, Apple customers — whose view of Apple will shift from “Apple is a company that supports small indie creators and artists” to “Apple is a company that uses its position of power to extract exorbitant rent from small indie creators and artists” because of this change?

Jason Snell, “Apple’s Permissions Features Are Out of Balance”:

Some users will make bad decisions. That’s just reality. The wrong reaction is to take the decision out of every user’s hands to protect the ones who might do something stupid. Apple needs to find that balance, that protects people but gives users freedom to do what they want, however dangerous it might be.

Apple’s recent feature changes suggest a value system that’s wildly out of balance, preferring to warn (and control) users no matter how damaging it is to the overall user experience. Maybe the people in charge should be forced to sit down and watch that Apple ad that mocks Windows Vista. Vista’s security prompts existed for good reasons — but they were a user disaster. The Apple of that era knew it. I’d guess a lot of people inside today’s Apple know it, too — but they clearly are unable to win the arguments when it matters.

Never would have guessed I’d still find use for the “Windows Vista” tag in my CMS in 2024, but here we are.

Here’s a developer note from Apple confirming another change in MacOS 15 that many of us were hoping was a bug or glitch in the developer betas:

In macOS Sequoia, users will no longer be able to Control-click to override Gatekeeper when opening software that isn’t signed correctly or notarized. They’ll need to visit System Settings > Privacy & Security to review security information for software before allowing it to run.

Why? Is there any evidence that the Control-clicking shortcut was insufficient? If so, what is that evidence? It seems to me that the sort of technically unsophisticated non-expert users whom these features are meant to protect are the same users who have no idea the Control-click shortcut to launch non-notarized apps even exists.

I mean, if there are exploits running wild because unsophisticated Mac users are Control-clicking malware apps they’ve somehow downloaded, where are they? I can only see two possible explanations for these changes: (a) these decisions that are making MacOS increasingly annoying for expert and power users are being made by cover-your-ass bureaucrats for no good reason, and no one who knows better is shooting them down within Apple; or (b) there’s a serious rash of unreported abuse of these features and Apple is too timid to publicize them to justify the increased frequency and arduousness of these permission nags, lest they admit the Mac has any problems at all.

Neither is a good look.

On the whole I continue to think it’s a tremendous advantage for Kamala Harris to drop into the race as a fresh candidate just three months ahead of the election, but I think this branding effort is one area that shows signs of being rushed. It’s not horrible but it’s not good. It’s just meh, and in no way memorable or distinctive. I don’t see how the two typefaces pair together at all. It’s has nothing like the cohesiveness of the Biden-Harris brand from 2020 (and the first half of 2024).

Also, I think the gist of this Fast Company story, suggesting the logo is a nod to the branding from Shirley Chisholm’s groundbreaking 1972 campaign for the Democratic nomination, is nonsense. “Harris” is presented in all-caps in a compressed sans serif typeface, yes, but it’s not even vaguely the same typeface. If anything, Chisholm’s branding was better, stronger, and more timeless — I wish the Harris branding was more like Chisholm’s. And it’s not like anyone in today’s US electorate actually remembers what Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 campaign posters looked like.

Teriyaki rice balls, miso ramen, and more will be available at stateside 7-Elevens

It’s hard to escape the magnetic field of Japanese convenience store food. Onigiri stuffed with tuna and mayonnaise, fluffy egg salad sandwiches, and other convenience store snacks have permeated nearly every corner of the internet. Now, stateside fans may finally get a taste of these affordable bites without needing to buy plane tickets to Japan. 7-Eleven has confirmed to Eater that it plans to bring Japanese and other international favorites to U.S. stores.

In a statement to Eater, 7-Eleven said that the U.S. arm of the company is working closely with its international counterparts in Japan and beyond to introduce new items, including chicken teriyaki rice balls, miso ramen, and sweet chile crisp wings, to its stateside stores. Additional items from international markets that are headed to the U.S. include Mangonada donuts with Tajin, barbecue pork sliders, and chicken curry bowls.

In February, Bloomberg noted in a report that Ryuichi Isaka, CEO of 7-Eleven parent company Seven & I Holdings, believes the Japanese 7-Eleven model can be duplicated in the U.S. His focus is on bringing fresher foods to U.S. stores, including sliders, ham-egg-and-cheese french toast, and chicken salad sandwiches. The report also details Isaka’s hopes that stateside 7-Eleven offerings will eventually be able to rotate seasonally, as they do in Japan.

Although the famous Japanese 7-Eleven egg salad sando wasn’t on the initial list of Japanese items coming to the U.S., TikTok creators from across Orange County have reported sightings of milk bread egg sandwiches at local stores. On July 24, TikTok creator Greenonionbun posted a video showing the egg salad sandwich she found at a local 7-Eleven; a day later, Arioutdoors posted a similar video of an egg salad sando from a Garden Grove 7-Eleven.

Bloomberg

Priced at $5.99, the sandwich comes with egg salad made with mayonnaise and Dijon, and is served on milk bread. In contrast to the Japanese version, the egg salad sandwich at U.S. locations is served with the crust still on; the original’s crust is neatly trimmed off. While the U.S. version costs almost $6, the Japanese sandwich hovers at around 238 yen, or $1.55, based on current exchange rates. Previously, the 7-Eleven egg salad sandwich was served on white bread, and the online catalog listing has not been updated to reflect the milk bread yet. 7-Eleven confirmed that the introduction of the milk bread sandwiches is part of this shift to offering fresher food and tailoring options to the local market.

This isn’t the first time Japanese konbini culture has cropped up in Los Angeles: Japan’s FamilyMart introduced Famima, a Japanese-style convenience store, to the U.S. market with locations throughout LA beginning in 2006. During its tenure, Famima sold items including onigiri, fried chicken, steamed pork buns, and pre-packaged bento boxes. The company couldn’t make it last, though, with all Famima locations shuttering by October 2015.

Interest in Japanese convenience stores, or konbini, has spiked online in recent months. As of July 2024, there are over 152 million posts on TikTok about konbini food, drink, and snacks. Most involve creators doing an on-screen taste test or showing off a product haul, often with a cost total at the end. The proliferation of these videos has stimulated a new audience who are waiting for the chance to try the now-famous famichiki and pancake sandwich.

In Los Angeles, restaurants like the now-closed Konbi and Katsu Sando have helped bring a taste of Japanese convenience store tradition to the city with their more upscale katsu sandwiches. Supermarkets like Nijiya and Mitsuwa also offer a prepared foods section similar to what would be found at a konbini, but don’t offer the 24-hour access to go along with it. With the arrival of Japanese convenience store classics in stateside 7-Elevens, Angelenos may finally get a taste of the konbini life complete with late-night hours and plastic-wrapped rice balls.

Any skepticism about the sudden arrival of viral sandwiches in the Southland may point to a Bay Area 7-Eleven hoax from earlier this year. In March 2024, a thread on X that claimed 7-Eleven stores in San Francisco had started selling Mayor London Breed-branded onigiri took the region by storm. Stateside fans of the triangle-shaped rice and seaweed balls found in convenience stores across Japan hoped they could get a taste after watching numerous TikToks from creators doing live mayo onigiri taste tests. But almost as soon as the rumor caught on, it was dispelled. The creator of the thread, Danielle Baskin, ended up being a local conceptual artist who wanted to show proof of concept that Japanese-style convenience foods could work in the U.S.

7-Eleven has not given a timeline for the new products to arrive in stores, and has not indicated which stores will be getting the new items.

Josh Marshall, writing at Talking Points Memo:

Political violence and especially electoral violence strike at the heart of the open, free and democratic choice-making upon which our civic democratic system and the legitimacy of its choices are based. We must condemn it in every instance as well as expressing our personal sympathy for its victims. We do so not to box check some vague concept of civility or comity but because it strikes at the taproot of civil peace. It is equally not a license to squelch political speech or in this case threaten or intimidate those calling attention to the real and profound dangers of Donald Trump returning to the White House. We are already seeing this attempt in the making.

Political violence is abhorrent, and as Marshall aptly notes, strikes at the heart of the very concept of democracy. Words cannot express strongly enough the feelings that an event like yesterday’s evokes, no matter which side of the political spectrum we’re on. We call many things “unacceptable” but an assassination attempt is more than that. It’s sick, and, correctly, makes us feel sick. It’s like how our bodies revolt when we consume poison. An assassination attempt is poison to the body politic.

But only one of the candidates in this election has ever incited political violence. That candidate is Donald Trump, particularly and especially on January 6, 2021. Only one candidate has ever mocked and cracked jokes about a near-miss assassination attempt against one of his political adversaries. That candidate is Donald Trump, who (along with his son) has repeatedly mocked Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul after an unhinged lunatic, asking “Where is Nancy?”, broke into their home and bashed Paul Pelosi’s head with a hammer, fracturing his skull to an extent that required surgery.

Donald Trump wasn’t an inch away from assassination because of Democratic rhetoric against his threat to democracy. He is a threat to democracy. He threatened democracy on national television. He has repeated, literally hundreds of times over the last three and a half years, that the fairest election this nation has ever held was “rigged” because he lost. Ask him today and he’ll say the same. Give Trump credit: he fully admits that the only election results he will accept are results that declare him the winner. But that, quite literally, is a threat to our democracy. He tried to remain in office after losing, by almost the exact same Electoral College margin he declared “a massive landslide victory” when he won in 2016, by overthrowing the duly elected government of the United States. Ask him today if he should still be in the White House.

Do not accept, not even at this fraught moment, the claims of anyone blaming yesterday on Democrats describing Trump as a threat to democracy. Saying so is not even on the spectrum of hyperbole. We saw what we saw after the 2020 election, and especially on January 6.

Do not fret, either, that yesterday’s event somehow cedes the election to Trump, on the grounds that he survived and projected strength. The side that wants a strongman was already voting for him. They’re the same people who claimed, wrongly, that being convicted of 34 felonies somehow helped him electorally. This is, no question, an indelible image and a photo for the ages. But Teddy Roosevelt was shot campaigning in 1912 — and unlike Trump took the stage to deliver his speech after taking the bullet — and lost the election by 347 Electoral College votes (an actual landslide) to Woodrow Wilson. Running for president for the third time in 1972, virulently racist Alabama governor George Wallace was shot, leaving him paralyzed. Wallace lost the primary. Gerald Ford survived not just one but two shooting attempts within 17 days in 1975. Ford wore a bulletproof trench coat in public for the remainder of his term. He lost the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter. (It was quite close.)

The truth is that our nation, great though it is in so many ways, has a horrific history of political violence and a seemingly innate obsession with firearms. Four presidents have been assassinated in office — Lincoln in 1865, Garfield in 1881, McKinley in 1901, and Kennedy in 1963 — all by gunshots. Three more — Roosevelt, Reagan (who nearly died), and now Trump — have been wounded by gunshots. And there have been numerous other failed attempts, including a nut who fired shots into the White House during Barack Obama’s first term in 2011.

Also, yesterday’s events will be old news by election day. There are 113 days until November 5. It’s been 129 days since Joe Biden’s strong State of the Union speech. Does that State of the Union feel recent to you today? That’s how old yesterday’s shooting will feel when we vote.

So here is what the Democrats should do. Tomorrow morning Chuck Schumer should put on the floor of the Senate a law mandating strict background checks for all gun purchases. Perhaps tie it to a reinstitution of the 1994 assault weapons ban that Republicans allowed to expire in 2004. Give it a name like the “Anti Political and School Violence Act”. Make Republicans shoot it down. Make them say, as Trump himself did after a school shooting massacre in Iowa this year, that we “have to get over it, we have to move forward.” It’s not just an outrage when your right-wing authoritarian hero gets his ear nicked by an assassin’s bullet. It’s an outrage when anyone is shot by a nut with a gun.

Make them say it. See how that flies.

Luca Casonato:

So, Google Chrome gives all *.google.com sites full access to system / tab CPU usage, GPU usage, and memory usage. It also gives access to detailed processor information, and provides a logging backchannel.

This API is not exposed to other sites - only to *.google.com.

This is interesting because it is a clear violation of the idea that browser vendors should not give preference to their websites over anyone else’s.

The DMA codifies this idea into law: browser vendors, as gatekeepers of the internet, must give the same capabilities to everyone. Depending on how you interpret the DMA, this additional exposure of information only to Google properties may be considered a violation of the DMA. Take for example Zoom - they are now at a disadvantage because they can not provide the same CPU debugging feature as Google Meet.

I frequently bemoan the DMA’s ambiguity but here I’d say it’s crystal clear. Chrome is a designated gatekeeping platform, and granting system-monitoring privileges only to Google’s own websites is clearly in violation. Here’s a Hacker News comment from a purported Google employee who calls the feature “mundane” while admitting that Google Meet uses it as a tool to debug bad connections, even though no other web-based meeting app has access to it. I can think of no better example proving that Google views the open web as a platform that it owns.

But put the DMA aside. This is just creepy. It’s clearly a privacy violation. I don’t want Google to know what kind of CPU I have, how many cores, and how busy they are. And the makers of other Chromium-based browsers are so lazy that their browsers — Microsoft Edge and Brave at least — include this same “feature”. I don’t mean that Edge grants system-monitoring privileges to Microsoft’s websites. Edge grants these privileges to Google’s websites, and Google’s alone.

But speaking of the DMA, Chromium is, far and away, the most popular browser engine that the DMA compels Apple to allow on iOS. There are legitimate reasons to wish that Apple allowed third-party browser engines on iOS. But there are also legitimate reasons why Apple doesn’t allow them. Chrome really is bad. Better to let the market decide than let clueless regulators decide.

(Via Simon Willison.)

Matt Levine, in his Money Stuff column:

OpenAI was founded to build artificial general intelligence safely, free of outside commercial pressures. And now every once in a while it shoots out a new AI firm whose mission is to build artificial general intelligence safely, free of the commercial pressures at OpenAI.

Louie Mantia:

Apple’s announcement of “dark mode” icons has me thinking about how I would approach adapting “light mode” icons for dark mode. I grabbed 12 icons we made at Parakeet for our clients to illustrate some ways of going about it. [...]

Unfortunately, some icons appear to have lost or gained weight in dark mode. For example, the Settings gear didn’t change size in dark mode, but it appears to occupy less space because the dark circle around it blends with its background. That makes it appear smaller than the Find My icon, which now looks enormous next to FaceTime. This is a remnant of some questionable design choices in iOS 7 that have lingered now for the last decade.

That last sentence is the most diplomatic thing I’ve ever heard from Louie. What a splendid post this is — exemplary work to illustrate his advice.

Tantacrul, on X:

I’m legit shocked by the design of @Meta’s new notification informing us they want to use the content we post to train their AI models. It’s intentionally designed to be highly awkward in order to minimise the number of users who will object to it. Let me break it down.

Each step of the process exhibits one or more dark patterns — and there are an absurd number of steps. Meta at its worst. This exemplifies everything untrustworthy and icky about Meta and AI itself. It’s just gross.

From a New York Times story by Nico Grant, under the headline “Google’s A.I. Search Errors Cause a Furor Online”:

With each mishap, tech industry insiders have criticized the company for dropping the ball. But in interviews, financial analysts said Google needed to move quickly to keep up with its rivals, even if it meant growing pains.

Google “doesn’t have a choice right now,” Thomas Monteiro, a Google analyst at Investing.com, said in an interview. “Companies need to move really fast, even if that includes skipping a few steps along the way. The user experience will just have to catch up.”

That quote is insane. There’s no reason Google had to enable this feature now. None. If their search monopoly has been losing share recently, it’s not because of rivals who are serving up AI-generated slop. It’s because even before this, Google’s search results quality was slipping in obvious ways. This is just making it worse. They’ve turned Google Search — the crown jewel of the company, arguably the greatest consumer product ever made — into the butt of jokes.

LLM-powered search results are a bauble. The trust Google has built with users over the last 25 years is the most valuable asset the company owns. Google most certainly does have a choice, and they’ve chosen to erode that trust just so they can avoid accusations that they’re “behind”.

Behind is where you want to be when those who are ahead are publishing nonsense.

Super Mario Maker and its sequel are terrific games that let fans create and share their own Mario levels with ease. But it was a bit of a disappointment that Nintendo only factored in the 2D Mario games. None of the plumber's 3D incarnations have made it to a Mario Maker title to date. So thank goodness for modders.

A pair of modders named Arthurtilly and Rovertronic have released an open-source Super Mario 64 mod that aims to make it a cinch for players to create and share their own levels. You'll need your own (legally obtained) Mario 64 game file and a separate piece of software to infuse the mod into it. It's even possible to use Mario Builder 64 on a Nintendo 64 if you have a supported flashcart.

You'll have more than 100 parts to build your levels with. The creation tool includes some custom parts from a previous mod, so you have extras like permanent powerups at your disposal. To share your creations and find those made by others, the recommended places to look are a website for Mario level modders and Rovertronic's Discord server.

It'll be interesting to see if ridiculous 3D kaizo-style levels start popping up, while the mod could allow speedrunners to create custom training grounds where they can practice strategies. Personally, I'm hoping for creators to build levels that rely on half-A presses to beat.

Tom Warren, writing for The Verge:

On a recent morning at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft representatives set out new Surface devices equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips inside and compared them directly to Apple’s category-leading laptop. I witnessed an hour of demos and benchmarks that started with Geekbench and Cinebench comparisons, then moved on to apps and compatibility.

Benchmark tests usually aren’t that exciting to watch. But a lot was at stake here: for years, the MacBook Air has been able to smoke Arm-powered PC chips — and Intel-based ones, too. Except, this time around, the Surface pulled ahead on the first test. Then it won another test and another after that. The results of these tests are why Microsoft believes it’s now in position to conquer the laptop market.

Microsoft’s comparison were all against M3 MacBook Air models. Fair enough, insofar as the MacBook Air is by far Apple’s best-selling line of laptops, and the M3 models shipped just two months ago. But the MacBook Airs are fanless. A lot — most? all? I’m not sure — of the new “Copilot+ PCs” Microsoft showed off today have fans. (Or if you prefer, “active cooling systems”.) Microsoft’s own new Surface Laptops have MacBook-Air-esque pricing (13-inch starts at $1,000; 15-inch starts at $1,300) but they weigh about 0.3 pounds more than the equivalent-sized MacBook Air. Those weights puts them more in the class of the M2 13-inch MacBook Pro.

All of this app compatibility and performance is nothing without battery life, though. Microsoft uses a script to simulate web browsing. On 2022’s Intel-based Surface Laptop 5, it took eight hours, 38 minutes to completely deplete a battery; the new Surface Copilot Plus PC lasted three [sic] times that, hitting 16 hours, 56 minutes. That’s an incredible jump in efficiency, and it even beats the same test on a 15-inch MacBook Air M3, which lasted 15 hours, 25 minutes. That’s a whole hour and a half more.

Microsoft ran a similar test for video playback, which saw the Surface Copilot Plus PC hit more than 20 hours in a test, with the MacBook Air M3 reaching 17 hours, 45 minutes. That’s also nearly eight hours more than the Surface Laptop 5, which lasted 12 hours, 30 minutes. If those battery gains extend beyond basic web browsing and video playback, this will be a significant improvement for Windows laptops.

I presume Warren meant that the new Surface Laptop lasted twice as long as the old Intel-based model, not three times as long. But this highlights my main hardware takeaway from today’s event: the M3 MacBook Air served as a good foil/benchmark for all these comparisons — performance, battery, price — but the real comparison was Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite vs. Intel’s and AMD’s x86 offerings.

I’ll go out on a limb and say that today marks the beginning of the end for x86. Either the x86 architecture has reached an inevitable endpoint, or Intel and AMD are just unable to compete talent-wise. (Or both.) But as of today the performance-per-watt gulf between ARM and Intel/x86 is no longer just an Apple silicon thing — it’s now a PC thing too. If there was any chance for Intel or AMD to catch up, it had to happen between the M1’s breakthrough introduction in 2020 and now. But they couldn’t do it.

The saddest part of the event were the cursory appearances — each by pre-recorded video, despite it being an in-person event in Redmond — of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and AMD CEO Lisa Su. Their token appearances felt like Microsoft pretending they haven’t moved on from x86, during an event whose entire theme was, effectively, “moving on from x86”. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite is only being compared to Apple’s base M3, so it’s still up to Intel and AMD to offer chips with performance on the level of the M3 Pro and Max, but the writing is on the wall. The future belongs to ARM system architectures.

Jodi Kantor, reporting for The New York Times:

After the 2020 presidential election, as some Trump supporters falsely claimed that President Biden had stolen the office, many of them displayed a startling symbol outside their homes, on their cars and in online posts: an upside-down American flag.

One of the homes flying an inverted flag during that time was the residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in Alexandria, Va., according to photographs and interviews with neighbors.

How in the world did this not come to light before now?

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

Profile in courage.

Casey Newton, with a sharp take on Google’s sprawling announcements at I/O yesterday:

This new approach is captured elegantly in a slogan that appeared several times during Tuesday’s keynote: let Google do the Googling for you. It’s a phrase that identifies browsing the web — a task once considered entertaining enough that it was given the nickname “surfing” — as a chore, something better left to a bot. [...]

This is such a keen observation. Part of what makes the web the web is that it’s very fun. Or at least was, and is supposed to be. The idea that people find it a chore now isn’t a condemnation of Google but the state of the web itself.

Still, as the first day of I/O wound down, it was hard to escape the feeling that the web as we know it is entering a kind of managed decline. Over the past two and a half decades, Google extended itself into so many different parts of the web that it became synonymous with it. And now that LLMs promise to let users understand all that the web contains in real time, Google at last has what it needs to finish the job: replacing the web, in so many of the ways that matter, with itself.

Oof. What a depressing vision.

Jeff Johnson:

I’ve discovered that starting in February, Apple mistakenly subtracts the price of the previously purchased app twice from the proceeds of a “Complete My Bundle” purchase, thereby causing me to take a loss on each such bundle purchase. This accounting change has cost me thousands of dollars over the past few months.

Long story short, Johnson has a years-old Safari extension power user tool called StopTheMadness, which typically cost $10. Last year he released StopTheMadness Pro, which costs $15. Because the App Store doesn’t support upgrade pricing, Johnson created a bundle that includes both versions. Because StopTheMadness Pro is a superset of the non-pro version, the only reason the bundle exists is to allow people who previously purchased the regular version to upgrade to StopTheMadness Pro for the difference between $15 and the price they paid for the regular version.

The way it should work — and for the first few months of the bundle, did work — is that Apple should subtract the price the user originally paid from the $15 price of the bundle. Starting in February, Apple effectively began subtracting the price the user originally paid twice.

Surely this is a bug, not an attempt by Apple to swindle developers. But, how surprised are you that this bug, left unfixed, works in Apple’s favor, not the other way around? If Apple were erroneously paying developers too much, rather than too little, I’m guessing it would be fixed already.

Update: Jeff Johnson, a few hours after I posted:

Good news, everyone!

I just received a phone call from an Apple representative. They confirmed that there was indeed a software bug in the bundle pricing calculation, which was fixed yesterday. They also said that affected developers, such as myself, would be compensated for our lost revenue.

That’s all I know for now. I was told that I would also be receiving a follow-up email later.

The conversation was pleasant, and the Apple representative was very nice about it.

Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac:

There appears to be an increasingly widespread Apple ID outage of some sort impacting users tonight. A number of people on social media say that they were logged out of their Apple ID across multiple devices on Friday evening and forced to reset their password before logging back in…

We received our first tip about this around 8 p.m. ET. In the hours since then, the problem has gained significant traction on social media.

Apple’s System Status webpage doesn’t indicate that any of its services are having issues this evening. Still, it’s clear based on social media reports that something wonky is going on behind the scenes at Apple. A few of us here at 9to5Mac have also been directly affected by the problem.

Apple’s separate Developer System Status dashboard lists “Account” as having undergone maintenance and also having additional maintenance scheduled for later today. Apple ought to provide an explanation for exactly what’s gone wrong here, but has not yet.

The lockout hit Michael Tsai (again) and he copiously documented the entire experience, including being required to wait an hour before setting a new password because he has Stolen Device Protection enabled — despite the fact that he was at home, which is supposed to be a trusted location.

I just checked on my own iPhone, and the only two “Significant Locations” listed in Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → System Services → Significant Locations are “Work” and my favorite (and truly oft-visited) grocery store. But the “Work” location is centered three entire city blocks (~0.2 miles) from my home, which leaves my home just outside the radius that counts as that location. Luckily I wasn’t hit by this account lockout, but this also reassures me that I’m right to not yet have enabled Stolen Device Protection.

Absolutely scathing dissection of what’s gone wrong at Google Search, by Ed Zitron for his newsletter/blog:

In an interview with FastCompany’s Harry McCracken from 2018, Gomes framed Google’s challenge as “taking [the PageRank algorithm] from one machine to a whole bunch of machines, and they weren’t very good machines at the time.” Despite his impact and tenure, Gomes had only been made Head of Search in the middle of 2018 after John Giannandrea moved to Apple to work on its machine learning and AI strategy. Gomes had been described as Google’s “search czar,” beloved for his ability to communicate across departments.

Every single article I’ve read about Gomes’ tenure at Google spoke of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation of one of the most important technologies ever made, who had dedicated decades to maintaining a product with a — to quote Gomes himself — “guiding light of serving the user and using technology to do that.” And when finally given the keys to the kingdom — the ability to elevate Google Search even further — he was ratfucked by a series of rotten careerists trying to please Wall Street, led by Prabhakar Raghavan.

Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently destroying search, did before his job at Google?

He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 — a tumultuous period that cemented its terminal decline, and effectively saw the company bow out of the search market altogether. His responsibilities? Research and development for Yahoo’s search and ads products.

Long story short, Ben Gomes was a search guy who’d been at Google since 1999, before they even had any ads in search results. He was replaced by Prabhakar Raghavan, who previously was Head of Ads at the company. So instead of there being any sort of firewall between search and ads, search became a subsidiary of ads.

Zitron’s compelling narrative is largely gleaned through emails released as part of the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google. Is the story really that simple? That around 2019 or so Google Search’s institutional priorities flipped from quality-first/revenue-second, to revenue-first/quality-second? It might be more complicated than that, but the timeline sure does add up.

And as a truism this feels right: if content reports to ads, content will go to hell. Publications, TV networks, operating systems, search engines — no matter the medium, you can’t let the advertising sales inmates run the asylum.

The FTC:

Today, the Federal Trade Commission issued a final rule to promote competition by banning noncompetes nationwide, protecting the fundamental freedom of workers to change jobs, increasing innovation, and fostering new business formation.

“Noncompete clauses keep wages low, suppress new ideas, and rob the American economy of dynamism, including from the more than 8,500 new startups that would be created a year once noncompetes are banned,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “The FTC’s final rule to ban noncompetes will ensure Americans have the freedom to pursue a new job, start a new business, or bring a new idea to market.”

As I wrote a year ago, I used to think that noncompete agreements (“agreements”?) were mainly a thing in the tech industry. But their use became so rampant that even sandwich shop chains were requiring them.

North Korean animators may have helped create popular cartoons for Amazon Prime Video, Max and other streaming services. Researchers from the Washington-based 38 North project allegedly discovered a misconfigured cloud server on a North Korean IP address that contained thousands of animation files, as reported by Wired. US sanctions prohibit commercial activity with North Korean entities, due to human rights abuses and the advancement of its nuclear weapons program. 

The server included animation cells, videos and notes discussing the work, in addition to requested changes. Some images appear to be from the popular Prime Video superhero show Invincible and others from an upcoming Max children’s anime called Iyanu: Child of Wonder. The data, which was analyzed in part by the Google-owned security firm Mandiant, provides a glimpse into how North Korea likely skirts sanctions.

The researchers were able to analyze incoming connections to the server and noted access from three Chinese cities, suggesting front companies of some kind. “All three cities are known to have many North Korean–operated businesses and are main centers for North Korea’s IT workers who live overseas,” the report indicates.

Michael Barnhart, who works at Mandiant, said there was nothing in the research to indicate that Max, Amazon or any subsidiaries knew that the work was being handled by North Korean animators. It was likely subcontracted without their knowledge, as reported by Reuters. Barnhart has “high confidence” that the contracts were with Chinese companies who outsourced to animators who work on North Korea’s behalf.

In 2022, the FBI and the US Treasury issued an advisory to warn businesses about the risks of inadvertently hiring North Korean tech workers through this kind of outsourcing. A spokesperson for the US Treasury told Reuters that it has no comment on this particular allegation, but noted that North Korea's efforts to generate revenue for its weapons programs through abuses of the subcontracting system was an ongoing concern.

Amazon has directed inquiries to Skybound, the company behind Invincible. It says it has no knowledge of any North Korean entities working on its animation projects but has initiated an internal review to verify and rectify lingering issues. "We have also notified the proper authorities and are cooperating with all appropriate bodies," the Skybound’s head of corporate communications Hannah Cosgrove said. Max has not responded to requests for comment.