daring-rss

Chance Miller, writing for 9to5Mac:

With macOS Sequoia this fall, using apps that need access to
screen recording permissions will become a little bit more
tedious. Apple is rolling out a change that will require you to
give explicit permission on a weekly basis to these types of apps,
and every time you reboot your Mac. […] In the current macOS
Sequoia beta, this prompt says:

“[App name] can access this computer’s screen and audio. Do you
want to continue to allow access? This application may be able to
collect information from any open applications on your desktop
while the app is running.”

Users can then choose to “Continue To Allow” that app to have
screen recording access, or they can click “Open System Settings”
and immediately be taken to the preferences pane for screen
recording permissions.

This prompt is designed to appear on a weekly basis. The first
time you attempt to use the app each week, you’ll see this prompt
and have to decide whether to “Continue To Allow” or change the
permission settings. The prompt will also appear each time (for
each app) when you use that app for the first time after rebooting
your Mac.

I think it shows just how much care and thoughtfulness went into turning up the dial on these nags that the button label incorrectly capitalizes the “to” in “Continue To Allow”. You can say, well, that’s a little thing. But that’s exactly the sort of little thing that almost never shipped from Apple, even in beta, until the last few years.

Having to click through these confirmation nags every week, for every such utility you use, is not a little thing at all. It’s the sort of thing companies do when decisions like this are made by people looking to cover their asses, not make insanely great products.

 ★ 

Chance Miller, writing for 9to5Mac:

With macOS Sequoia this fall, using apps that need access to
screen recording permissions will become a little bit more
tedious. Apple is rolling out a change that will require you to
give explicit permission on a weekly basis to these types of apps,
and every time you reboot your Mac. […] In the current macOS
Sequoia beta, this prompt says:

“[App name] can access this computer’s screen and audio. Do you
want to continue to allow access? This application may be able to
collect information from any open applications on your desktop
while the app is running.”

Users can then choose to “Continue To Allow” that app to have
screen recording access, or they can click “Open System Settings”
and immediately be taken to the preferences pane for screen
recording permissions.

This prompt is designed to appear on a weekly basis. The first
time you attempt to use the app each week, you’ll see this prompt
and have to decide whether to “Continue To Allow” or change the
permission settings. The prompt will also appear each time (for
each app) when you use that app for the first time after rebooting
your Mac.

I think it shows just how much care and thoughtfulness went into turning up the dial on these nags that the button label incorrectly capitalizes the “to” in “Continue To Allow”. You can say, well, that’s a little thing. But that’s exactly the sort of little thing that almost never shipped from Apple, even in beta, until the last few years.

Having to click through these confirmation nags every week, for every such utility you use, is not a little thing at all. It’s the sort of thing companies do when decisions like this are made by people looking to cover their asses, not make insanely great products.

Read More 

Kylie Robison, reporting for The Verge:

Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased,
according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June,
only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with
direct knowledge of sales and return data told me. As of today,
the number of units still in customer hands had fallen closer to
7,000, a source with direct knowledge said. […]

Once a Humane Pin is returned, the company has no way to refurbish
it, sources with knowledge of the return process confirmed. The
Pin becomes e-waste, and Humane doesn’t have the opportunity to
reclaim the revenue by selling it again. The core issue is that
there is a T-Mobile limitation that makes it impossible (for now)
for Humane to reassign a Pin to a new user once it’s been assigned
to someone. One source said they don’t believe Humane has disposed
of the old Pins because “they’re still hopeful they can solve this
problem eventually.”

Starting to think maybe Humane is in trouble.

 ★ 

Kylie Robison, reporting for The Verge:

Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased,
according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June,
only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with
direct knowledge of sales and return data told me. As of today,
the number of units still in customer hands had fallen closer to
7,000, a source with direct knowledge said. […]

Once a Humane Pin is returned, the company has no way to refurbish
it, sources with knowledge of the return process confirmed. The
Pin becomes e-waste, and Humane doesn’t have the opportunity to
reclaim the revenue by selling it again. The core issue is that
there is a T-Mobile limitation that makes it impossible (for now)
for Humane to reassign a Pin to a new user once it’s been assigned
to someone. One source said they don’t believe Humane has disposed
of the old Pins because “they’re still hopeful they can solve this
problem eventually.”

Starting to think maybe Humane is in trouble.

Read More 

Big new update to the amazing flight-tracking app, with a particular focus on flight delays — both predicting them, and explaining them. I’ve was using Flighty 4 in beta over the weekend, when my wife and I were in Montreal for a wedding. Our flight home Sunday was delayed by thunderstorms — both in Montreal and Philadelphia — and the information from American Airlines at the airport was all over the place. The information from Flighty was consistent, and spot-on. Wound up being about a 40-minute delay, no big deal — exactly as Flighty presented.

Flighty costs $48/year for an annual subscription, but has a super clever $4/week option for infrequent travellers. And if you don’t like subscriptions, Flighty offers fairly-priced lifetime purchases.

 ★ 

Big new update to the amazing flight-tracking app, with a particular focus on flight delays — both predicting them, and explaining them. I’ve was using Flighty 4 in beta over the weekend, when my wife and I were in Montreal for a wedding. Our flight home Sunday was delayed by thunderstorms — both in Montreal and Philadelphia — and the information from American Airlines at the airport was all over the place. The information from Flighty was consistent, and spot-on. Wound up being about a 40-minute delay, no big deal — exactly as Flighty presented.

Flighty costs $48/year for an annual subscription, but has a super clever $4/week option for infrequent travellers. And if you don’t like subscriptions, Flighty offers fairly-priced lifetime purchases.

Read More 

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).

 ★ 

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).

Read More 

Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire:

In many ways, Tim Walz is the person J.D. Vance pretends to be.
He’s an authentic, decent and normal guy.

 ★ 

Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire:

In many ways, Tim Walz is the person J.D. Vance pretends to be.
He’s an authentic, decent and normal guy.

Read More 

Nate Silver:

This was a choice designed to maintain the social fabric of the
Democratic Party, and avoid news cycles about a disappointed left
and Democrats’ internal squabbling over the War in Gaza. Or at
least, that’s what I think it was: we’ll need to learn more about
Harris’s deliberation process. I’m not inclined to be too
deferential to any political candidate, but it’s plausible that
there were vetting issues with the runner-up, Gov. Josh Shapiro of
Pennsylvania. Harris certainly has more information about the
internal feeling within the Democratic caucus than I do, or she
may just have thought the chemistry of a Harris-Shapiro ticket
wouldn’t work.

It’s a nice pick: Walz, a two-term governor and six-term U.S.
Representative, is from the family of Tim Kaine-style VP choices:
inoffensive, unlikely to cause any harm, “safe”. Although maybe
that’s unfair: Walz is likely to be better on the stump than
Kaine. If you surveyed Democratic members of Congress, he’d
probably be who they’d choose. But I believe he’s
probably the wrong choice, a step back toward the
Democratic Party’s instincts to triangulate instead of the
boldness the Harris campaign has displayed so far. […]

On Saturday, I made the case that Harris should pick
Shapiro. And nothing has really changed since then — although
you could argue that Harris’s increasingly strong position in the
polls compels greater risk-aversion than when she’d
initially appeared to be an underdog against Donald Trump. The
basic reasons for picking Shapiro are that he increases the
likelihood you win Pennsylvania, he has a demonstrated
track record of popularity in the most important swing state, he’s
obviously an extremely talented politician and perhaps a future
standard-bearer for the party himself. And also, the reasons for
not picking Shapiro aren’t great. Democrats in the political
bubble overstate the salience of the Gaza issue and
understate the benefits of moderation, and that’s before getting
into the issue of Shapiro’s Jewishness.

My fear is that Walz is, as Silver also worries, another Tim Kaine. Tim Kaine didn’t lose the 2016 election but he didn’t help win it either. Kaine is a fine senator but a total milquetoast. Zero charisma. As soon as the 2016 election was over he completely disappeared from the national stage. It’s been 8 years and I’ve only seen Kaine in the news once in that entire stretch, and that was because he got stuck on I-95 for 27 hours because of a snowstorm. Bill Clinton picked a running mate who had the charisma and gravitas to run for and win the presidency on his own. (Gore lost by like 600 votes in Florida, of course, but clearly he could have won.) Barack Obama picked a running mate who went on to run for president and beat Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton picked a running mate with the personality of a wet towel.

I’m thinking Walz is more like Biden in 2008 though. Reassuring in-his-60s white guy with a solid career, thorough knowledge of the issues, and with good zip on his political-barbs fastball.

 ★ 

Nate Silver:

This was a choice designed to maintain the social fabric of the
Democratic Party, and avoid news cycles about a disappointed left
and Democrats’ internal squabbling over the War in Gaza. Or at
least, that’s what I think it was: we’ll need to learn more about
Harris’s deliberation process. I’m not inclined to be too
deferential to any political candidate, but it’s plausible that
there were vetting issues with the runner-up, Gov. Josh Shapiro of
Pennsylvania. Harris certainly has more information about the
internal feeling within the Democratic caucus than I do, or she
may just have thought the chemistry of a Harris-Shapiro ticket
wouldn’t work.

It’s a nice pick: Walz, a two-term governor and six-term U.S.
Representative, is from the family of Tim Kaine-style VP choices:
inoffensive, unlikely to cause any harm, “safe”. Although maybe
that’s unfair: Walz is likely to be better on the stump than
Kaine. If you surveyed Democratic members of Congress, he’d
probably be who they’d choose. But I believe he’s
probably the wrong choice, a step back toward the
Democratic Party’s instincts to triangulate instead of the
boldness the Harris campaign has displayed so far. […]

On Saturday, I made the case that Harris should pick
Shapiro. And nothing has really changed since then — although
you could argue that Harris’s increasingly strong position in the
polls compels greater risk-aversion than when she’d
initially appeared to be an underdog against Donald Trump. The
basic reasons for picking Shapiro are that he increases the
likelihood you win Pennsylvania, he has a demonstrated
track record of popularity in the most important swing state, he’s
obviously an extremely talented politician and perhaps a future
standard-bearer for the party himself. And also, the reasons for
not picking Shapiro aren’t great. Democrats in the political
bubble overstate the salience of the Gaza issue and
understate the benefits of moderation, and that’s before getting
into the issue of Shapiro’s Jewishness.

My fear is that Walz is, as Silver also worries, another Tim Kaine. Tim Kaine didn’t lose the 2016 election but he didn’t help win it either. Kaine is a fine senator but a total milquetoast. Zero charisma. As soon as the 2016 election was over he completely disappeared from the national stage. It’s been 8 years and I’ve only seen Kaine in the news once in that entire stretch, and that was because he got stuck on I-95 for 27 hours because of a snowstorm. Bill Clinton picked a running mate who had the charisma and gravitas to run for and win the presidency on his own. (Gore lost by like 600 votes in Florida, of course, but clearly he could have won.) Barack Obama picked a running mate who went on to run for president and beat Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton picked a running mate with the personality of a wet towel.

I’m thinking Walz is more like Biden in 2008 though. Reassuring in-his-60s white guy with a solid career, thorough knowledge of the issues, and with good zip on his political-barbs fastball.

Read More 

CNN:

During recent remarks at a “White Dudes for Harris” fundraiser,
Walz made a rough-and-ready case for the vice president before
would-be small-dollar donors.

“How often in 100 days do you get to change the trajectory of the
world? How often in 100 days do you get to do something that’s
going to impact generations to come?” Walz asked. “And how often
in the world do you make that bastard wake up afterwards and know
that a Black woman kicked his ass, sent him on the road?”

I was hoping for Buttigieg or Shapiro, but that quote alone makes me like the cut of Walz’s jib. Also, Walz is the guy who got the whole “they’re weird” thing going.

 ★ 

CNN:

During recent remarks at a “White Dudes for Harris” fundraiser,
Walz made a rough-and-ready case for the vice president before
would-be small-dollar donors.

“How often in 100 days do you get to change the trajectory of the
world? How often in 100 days do you get to do something that’s
going to impact generations to come?” Walz asked. “And how often
in the world do you make that bastard wake up afterwards and know
that a Black woman kicked his ass, sent him on the road?”

I was hoping for Buttigieg or Shapiro, but that quote alone makes me like the cut of Walz’s jib. Also, Walz is the guy who got the whole “they’re weird” thing going.

Read More 

David McCabe, reporting for The New York Times:

Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, a
federal judge ruled on Monday, a landmark decision that
strikes at the power of tech giants in the modern internet era and
that may fundamentally alter the way they do business.

Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of
Columbia said in a 277-page ruling that Google had abused a
monopoly over the search business. The Justice Department and
states had sued Google, accusing it of illegally cementing its
dominance, in part, by paying other companies, like Apple and
Samsung, billions of dollars a year to have Google automatically
handle search queries on their smartphones and web browsers.

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its
monopoly,” Judge Mehta said in his ruling. […]

Monday’s ruling did not include remedies for Google’s behavior.
Judge Mehta will now decide that, potentially forcing the company
to change the way it runs or to sell off part of its business.

It’s worth a reminder that under U.S. antitrust law, having a monopoly is not in and of itself illegal. It’s just that monopolies must operate under different rules, and Mehta has rules that Google broke (and continues now to break) those rules.

And you don’t have to be an expert to know that Google Search is a monopoly. By market share it’s possibly the biggest monopoly in all of computing today. Maybe it’s still Windows, but most estimates peg the Mac’s share of the U.S. PC market at about 15 percent. I wouldn’t be surprised if fewer than 10 percent of Americans even know there exist search engines other than Google, let alone use one as their default.

What the remedies should — or even could — be for Google here, I don’t know. Microsoft lost a similarly huge antitrust case in the U.S. in the 1990s and effectively escaped unscathed.

See also: Techmeme’s roundup of coverage and commentary.

 ★ 

David McCabe, reporting for The New York Times:

Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, a
federal judge ruled on Monday, a landmark decision that
strikes at the power of tech giants in the modern internet era and
that may fundamentally alter the way they do business.

Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of
Columbia said in a 277-page ruling that Google had abused a
monopoly over the search business. The Justice Department and
states had sued Google, accusing it of illegally cementing its
dominance, in part, by paying other companies, like Apple and
Samsung, billions of dollars a year to have Google automatically
handle search queries on their smartphones and web browsers.

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its
monopoly,” Judge Mehta said in his ruling. […]

Monday’s ruling did not include remedies for Google’s behavior.
Judge Mehta will now decide that, potentially forcing the company
to change the way it runs or to sell off part of its business.

It’s worth a reminder that under U.S. antitrust law, having a monopoly is not in and of itself illegal. It’s just that monopolies must operate under different rules, and Mehta has rules that Google broke (and continues now to break) those rules.

And you don’t have to be an expert to know that Google Search is a monopoly. By market share it’s possibly the biggest monopoly in all of computing today. Maybe it’s still Windows, but most estimates peg the Mac’s share of the U.S. PC market at about 15 percent. I wouldn’t be surprised if fewer than 10 percent of Americans even know there exist search engines other than Google, let alone use one as their default.

What the remedies should — or even could — be for Google here, I don’t know. Microsoft lost a similarly huge antitrust case in the U.S. in the 1990s and effectively escaped unscathed.

See also: Techmeme’s roundup of coverage and commentary.

Read More 

Apple’s success with services is no more a distraction from their core business than their success with their own chain of retail stores has been.

Jason Snell, “Existential Thoughts About Apple’s Reliance on Services Revenue”:

The intersection of hardware and software has been Apple’s home
address since the 1970s. And yet, a few years ago, Apple updated
its marketing language and began to refer to Apple’s secret sauce
as the combination of “hardware, software, and services.” […]

Last quarter, Apple made about $22 billion in profit from products
and $18 billion from Services. It’s the closest those two lines
have ever come to each other.

This is what was buzzing in the back of my head as I was going
over all the numbers on Thursday. We’re not quite there yet, but
it’s hard to imagine that there won’t be a quarter in the next
year or so in which Apple reports more total profit on Services
than on products.

When that happens, is Apple still a products company? Or has it
crossed some invisible line?

What a great column from Snell. One way to look at it — as Snell points out in the first paragraph quoted above — is that Apple has always been a two-sided coin. They are the company that best exemplifies Alan Kay’s adage: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” Apple has always been like one of those optical illusions that looks like one thing at first, but looks like another if you stare at it for a few seconds. A hardware company that makes great software. A software company that makes great hardware.

Coins only have two sides though. If services constitute a new third dimension for the company, and we carry this analogy through, it’s like a coin whose edge just keeps getting thicker. If the edge gets thick enough, it’s no longer a coin — it’s something else. A stick or a baton.

But another way to look at it is that services are just another form of software. Software that runs not on the personal computing devices Apple sells to customers, but which run on servers in the cloud. And, importantly, is sold to users via lucrative recurring subscriptions. Content often isn’t what we think of as software (like say music, movies, and TV shows) but content from the App Store is. But the key is that it’s all stuff that the users of Apple’s devices consume on those devices. Apple’s core business is designing, engineering, producing, and selling those devices. Services are just a huge, and growing, part of what users do and consume on those devices.

To extend Kay’s axiom for today’s world, I suspect Apple’s leadership sees things this way: People who are really serious about device platforms should make their own services. Viewed that way, Apple’s success with services is no more a distraction from their core business than their success with their own chain of retail stores has been. It’s just a necessary evolution.

Read More 

Charlotte Klein, who wrote the New York Magazine piece over the weekend reporting on how Bloomberg shit the bed by publishing news of Evan Gershkovich’s release in a prisoner swap before he was actually released from Russian custody:

Jennifer Jacobs — one of the two Bloomberg reporters who bylined the embargo-breaking Gershkovich piece — has been fired, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Accountability comes for every organization, eventually.

 ★ 

Charlotte Klein, who wrote the New York Magazine piece over the weekend reporting on how Bloomberg shit the bed by publishing news of Evan Gershkovich’s release in a prisoner swap before he was actually released from Russian custody:

Jennifer Jacobs — one of the two Bloomberg reporters who bylined the embargo-breaking Gershkovich piece — has been fired, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Accountability comes for every organization, eventually.

Read More