daring-rss

Last year Nolen Royalty made a website called One Million Checkboxes, which presented to the user exactly what it claimed on the tin. The gimmick was that the million checkboxes were shared globally. If toggled checkbox 206,028 in my browser, you’d see checkbox 206,028 flip state in your browser. Totally pointless. Totally fun.

Here, Royalty tells the story of how the site was used by bot-writing teenage hackers:

Lots of people were mad about bots on OMCB. I’m not going to link
to anything here — I don’t want to direct negative attention at
anyone — but I got hundreds of messages about bots. The most
popular tweet about OMCB complained about bots. People … did not
like bots.

And I get it! The typical ways that folks — especially folks who
don’t program — bump into bots are things like ticket scalping
and restaurant reservation bots. Bots that feel selfish and unfair
and antisocial.

And there certainly was botting that you could call antisocial.
Folks wrote tiny javascript boxes to uncheck every box that they
could — I know this because they excitedly told me. […]

What this discord did was so cool — so surprising — so creative.
It reminded me of me — except they were 10 times the developer I
was then (and frankly, better developers than I am now). Getting
to watch it live — getting to provide some encouragement, to see
what they were doing and respond with praise and pride instead of
anger — was deeply meaningful to me. I still tear up when I think
about it.

Via Jason Kottke, who aptly observes that the way the hackers got in touch with Royalty “reminds me of the palimpsest (layered communication) that the aliens use to communicate with Earth in Carl Sagan’s Contact (and the 1997 movie).”

 ★ 

Last year Nolen Royalty made a website called One Million Checkboxes, which presented to the user exactly what it claimed on the tin. The gimmick was that the million checkboxes were shared globally. If toggled checkbox 206,028 in my browser, you’d see checkbox 206,028 flip state in your browser. Totally pointless. Totally fun.

Here, Royalty tells the story of how the site was used by bot-writing teenage hackers:

Lots of people were mad about bots on OMCB. I’m not going to link
to anything here — I don’t want to direct negative attention at
anyone — but I got hundreds of messages about bots. The most
popular tweet about OMCB complained about bots. People … did not
like bots.

And I get it! The typical ways that folks — especially folks who
don’t program — bump into bots are things like ticket scalping
and restaurant reservation bots. Bots that feel selfish and unfair
and antisocial.

And there certainly was botting that you could call antisocial.
Folks wrote tiny javascript boxes to uncheck every box that they
could — I know this because they excitedly told me. […]

What this discord did was so cool — so surprising — so creative.
It reminded me of me — except they were 10 times the developer I
was then (and frankly, better developers than I am now). Getting
to watch it live — getting to provide some encouragement, to see
what they were doing and respond with praise and pride instead of
anger — was deeply meaningful to me. I still tear up when I think
about it.

Via Jason Kottke, who aptly observes that the way the hackers got in touch with Royalty “reminds me of the palimpsest (layered communication) that the aliens use to communicate with Earth in Carl Sagan’s Contact (and the 1997 movie).”

Read More 

Benj Edwards:

On Thursday, ABC announced an upcoming TV special titled, “AI
and the Future of Us: An Oprah Winfrey Special.” The one-hour
show, set to air on September 12, aims to explore AI’s impact on
daily life and will feature interviews with figures in the tech
industry, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Bill Gates. Soon after
the announcement, some AI critics began questioning the guest list
and the framing of the show in general. […]

In a nod to present-day content creation, YouTube creator Marques
Brownlee will appear on the show and reportedly walk Winfrey
through “mind-blowing demonstrations of AI’s capabilities.”

Brownlee’s involvement received special attention from some
critics online. “Marques Brownlee should be absolutely ashamed
of himself,” tweeted PR consultant and frequent AI
critic Ed Zitron, who frequently heaps scorn on
generative AI in his own newsletter. “What a disgraceful thing
to be associated with.”

What a jackassed take from Zitron. I mean think about it. Imagine that Oprah’s producers get in touch with MKBHD to ask if he’d like to participate in a prime-time network TV special about AI, specifically to show cool AI use cases, and he was like, “Nah, I don’t think this special is going to sufficiently present the viewpoint of ‘non-doomer AI critics’.”

These galaxy-brain peanut gallerians haven’t even seen clips from the show, let alone the entire special itself. They’re judging it by the guest list. A guest list that in fact includes obvious critics and skeptics. Edwards:

Other guests include Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin from the
Center for Humane Technology, who aim to highlight
“emerging risks posed by powerful and superintelligent AI,” an
existential risk topic that has its own critics. And FBI
Director Christopher Wray will reveal “the terrifying ways
criminals and foreign adversaries are using AI,” while author
Marilynne Robinson will reflect on “AI’s threat to human values.”

It’s also quite likely that invited guests weren’t told who the other interview subjects were. That’s just not now these things work. Oprah’s production surely shot dozens of hours of interviews to cut into a one-hour special — some of the subjects were likely left on the cutting-room floor.

If you don’t think it’s anything short of fucking cool that Marques Brownlee is getting a spot to show off cool AI use cases to Oprah in a prime-time network TV special, you’re a jackass. And if you’re going to argue that there are no cool AI use cases, you’re a liar.

 ★ 

Benj Edwards:

On Thursday, ABC announced an upcoming TV special titled, “AI
and the Future of Us: An Oprah Winfrey Special.” The one-hour
show, set to air on September 12, aims to explore AI’s impact on
daily life and will feature interviews with figures in the tech
industry, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Bill Gates. Soon after
the announcement, some AI critics began questioning the guest list
and the framing of the show in general. […]

In a nod to present-day content creation, YouTube creator Marques
Brownlee will appear on the show and reportedly walk Winfrey
through “mind-blowing demonstrations of AI’s capabilities.”

Brownlee’s involvement received special attention from some
critics online. “Marques Brownlee should be absolutely ashamed
of himself,” tweeted PR consultant and frequent AI
critic Ed Zitron, who frequently heaps scorn on
generative AI in his own newsletter. “What a disgraceful thing
to be associated with.”

What a jackassed take from Zitron. I mean think about it. Imagine that Oprah’s producers get in touch with MKBHD to ask if he’d like to participate in a prime-time network TV special about AI, specifically to show cool AI use cases, and he was like, “Nah, I don’t think this special is going to sufficiently present the viewpoint of ‘non-doomer AI critics’.”

These galaxy-brain peanut gallerians haven’t even seen clips from the show, let alone the entire special itself. They’re judging it by the guest list. A guest list that in fact includes obvious critics and skeptics. Edwards:

Other guests include Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin from the
Center for Humane Technology, who aim to highlight
“emerging risks posed by powerful and superintelligent AI,” an
existential risk topic that has its own critics. And FBI
Director Christopher Wray will reveal “the terrifying ways
criminals and foreign adversaries are using AI,” while author
Marilynne Robinson will reflect on “AI’s threat to human values.”

It’s also quite likely that invited guests weren’t told who the other interview subjects were. That’s just not now these things work. Oprah’s production surely shot dozens of hours of interviews to cut into a one-hour special — some of the subjects were likely left on the cutting-room floor.

If you don’t think it’s anything short of fucking cool that Marques Brownlee is getting a spot to show off cool AI use cases to Oprah in a prime-time network TV special, you’re a jackass. And if you’re going to argue that there are no cool AI use cases, you’re a liar.

Read More 

Apple Newsroom:

With iOS 18 and watchOS 11, the Apple Sports app will offer Live
Activities for all teams and leagues available in the app for the
first time ever, delivering live scores and play-by-play at a
quick glance to a user’s iPhone and Apple Watch Lock Screens.

Coming in an app update later this year, Apple Sports will also
introduce a new drop-down navigation for the main scorecard views,
making it even faster to switch between My Leagues, My Teams, and
users’ feeds for favorited leagues. A new enhanced search makes it
easier to view matches for leagues fans do not currently follow.

Does anyone understand why it requires iOS 18 for Live Activities? Perhaps it’s just a subtle nudge to get people to upgrade their device OS?

 ★ 

Apple Newsroom:

With iOS 18 and watchOS 11, the Apple Sports app will offer Live
Activities for all teams and leagues available in the app for the
first time ever, delivering live scores and play-by-play at a
quick glance to a user’s iPhone and Apple Watch Lock Screens.

Coming in an app update later this year, Apple Sports will also
introduce a new drop-down navigation for the main scorecard views,
making it even faster to switch between My Leagues, My Teams, and
users’ feeds for favorited leagues. A new enhanced search makes it
easier to view matches for leagues fans do not currently follow.

Does anyone understand why it requires iOS 18 for Live Activities? Perhaps it’s just a subtle nudge to get people to upgrade their device OS?

Read More 

“Departure Mono is a monospaced pixel font inspired by the constraints of early command-line and graphical user interfaces, the tiny pixel fonts of the late 90s/early 00s, and sci-fi concepts from film and television.”

Both the font (by Helena Zhang) and website (by Tobias Fried) are fantastic. Free and open source, too.

 ★ 

“Departure Mono is a monospaced pixel font inspired by the constraints of early command-line and graphical user interfaces, the tiny pixel fonts of the late 90s/early 00s, and sci-fi concepts from film and television.”

Both the font (by Helena Zhang) and website (by Tobias Fried) are fantastic. Free and open source, too.

Read More 

Jay Peters, The Verge:

X is currently banned in Brazil following an order from a
Supreme Court justice, and Brazilian users seem to be turning to
Bluesky, an alternate social network, in droves.

“Brazil, you’re setting new all-time-highs for activity on
Bluesky!” the official Bluesky account said in a post.

“There will almost certainly be some outages and performance
issues,” Bluesky developer Paul Frazee said. “We’ve never
seen traffic like this. Hang with us!”

Back in May 2023, I made a bold prediction that hasn’t panned out:

Bluesky is going to skyrocket to mainstream popularity and
actually replace Twitter, and Mastodon cannot, because Bluesky is
being designed to be simple, fun, and — most importantly — easy
to understand.

That prediction might have proven wrong anyway, but the event I didn’t foresee at the time was Meta’s Threads (which launched last July). Threads is thriving, and by some measures, for some communities, has overtaken X as the preeminent Twitter-like social network. But, for better (in some ways) and worse (in others), Threads is quite different from the Twitter of yore.

What’s great about Bluesky is that of today’s four major Twitter-like platforms — X, Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky — it’s the one that’s closest in spirit to old Twitter. Yet, personally, it gets the least of my attention of the four. Still rooting for Bluesky, though, and I’m not surprised at all that, faced with a sudden shutdown of X, that Bluesky is seeing a jolt of Brazilian signups.

 ★ 

Jay Peters, The Verge:

X is currently banned in Brazil following an order from a
Supreme Court justice, and Brazilian users seem to be turning to
Bluesky, an alternate social network, in droves.

“Brazil, you’re setting new all-time-highs for activity on
Bluesky!” the official Bluesky account said in a post.

“There will almost certainly be some outages and performance
issues,” Bluesky developer Paul Frazee said. “We’ve never
seen traffic like this. Hang with us!”

Back in May 2023, I made a bold prediction that hasn’t panned out:

Bluesky is going to skyrocket to mainstream popularity and
actually replace Twitter, and Mastodon cannot, because Bluesky is
being designed to be simple, fun, and — most importantly — easy
to understand.

That prediction might have proven wrong anyway, but the event I didn’t foresee at the time was Meta’s Threads (which launched last July). Threads is thriving, and by some measures, for some communities, has overtaken X as the preeminent Twitter-like social network. But, for better (in some ways) and worse (in others), Threads is quite different from the Twitter of yore.

What’s great about Bluesky is that of today’s four major Twitter-like platforms — X, Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky — it’s the one that’s closest in spirit to old Twitter. Yet, personally, it gets the least of my attention of the four. Still rooting for Bluesky, though, and I’m not surprised at all that, faced with a sudden shutdown of X, that Bluesky is seeing a jolt of Brazilian signups.

Read More 

Paul Graham:

The theme of Brian’s talk was that the conventional wisdom about
how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew,
well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in
a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be
optimistically summarized as “hire good people and give them room
to do their jobs.” He followed this advice and the results were
disastrous. So he had to figure out a better way on his own, which
he did partly by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple. So far it
seems to be working. Airbnb’s free cash flow margin is now among
the best in Silicon Valley.

The audience at this event included a lot of the most successful
founders we’ve funded, and one after another said that the same
thing had happened to them. They’d been given the same advice
about how to run their companies as they grew, but instead of
helping their companies, it had damaged them.

Why was everyone telling these founders the wrong thing? That was
the big mystery to me. And after mulling it over for a bit I
figured out the answer: what they were being told was how to run a
company you hadn’t founded — how to run a company if you’re
merely a professional manager. But this m.o. is so much less
effective that to founders it feels broken. There are things
founders can do that managers can’t, and not doing them feels
wrong to founders, because it is.

 ★ 

Paul Graham:

The theme of Brian’s talk was that the conventional wisdom about
how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew,
well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in
a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be
optimistically summarized as “hire good people and give them room
to do their jobs.” He followed this advice and the results were
disastrous. So he had to figure out a better way on his own, which
he did partly by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple. So far it
seems to be working. Airbnb’s free cash flow margin is now among
the best in Silicon Valley.

The audience at this event included a lot of the most successful
founders we’ve funded, and one after another said that the same
thing had happened to them. They’d been given the same advice
about how to run their companies as they grew, but instead of
helping their companies, it had damaged them.

Why was everyone telling these founders the wrong thing? That was
the big mystery to me. And after mulling it over for a bit I
figured out the answer: what they were being told was how to run a
company you hadn’t founded — how to run a company if you’re
merely a professional manager. But this m.o. is so much less
effective that to founders it feels broken. There are things
founders can do that managers can’t, and not doing them feels
wrong to founders, because it is.

Read More 

Apple Original Films had originally promised writer-director Jon Watts and co-stars George Clooney and Brad Pitt a wide theatrical release for their upcoming (and seemingly well-reviewed) movie Wolfs. But, pretty much at the last minute, Apple canceled those plans, and instead will screen it in limited theaters for one week before streaming it on Apple TV+ at the end of this month.

David Canfield interviewed Watts for Vanity Fair, where Watts said he only found out about the change in plans a few days before it was announced:

Canfield: As somebody who’s worked in indies, who’s worked in
the MCU, and has now made a standalone studio movie, how do you
see the state of theatrical versus streaming, especially given the
pivot with this movie? Does it concern you at all?

Watts: You want the movie to be seen, and if you maximize the
way that people are able to actually see a movie, I think that is
good — I watched so many movies that really influenced me on VHS
because I grew up in a small town in Colorado, so we just didn’t
have those movies in the theaters. But for me, the theatrical
experience is still the number one. It’s up to the people that are
able to make those decisions to put them in theaters for people to
see, and just have the confidence that people will go see them.
People want to go to the movies. People love the movies.

Canfield: If you had known then what you know now about the
way this movie will be released, would you have gone in another
direction, given that you were talking to a lot of studios?

Watts: [Laughs] I try to not think about hypothetical
situations like that.

It doesn’t sound like Apple’s change of plans has resulted in bad blood, per se — merely disappointment. Watts has already agreed to write, produce, and direct a sequel. But it feels like Apple is still in the early stages of navigating its role as a Hollywood studio. I think there’s still a sense that Apple is a creator-friendly partner for big-budget movies, but a move like this, contradicting the obvious wishes of both the director and two of the biggest stars in the business, works against that reputation.

Also, a week-ago report in The New York Times by Nicole Sperling reported that Clooney and Pitt were paid “more than $35 million each”. But speaking at the Venice Film Festival premiere of Wolfs yesterday, Clooney said that number was bullshit:

“[It was] an interesting article and whatever her source was for
our salary, it is millions and millions and millions of dollars
less than what was reported. And I am only saying that because I
think it’s bad for our industry if that’s what people think is the
standard bearer for salaries,” Clooney said. “I think that’s
terrible, it’ll make it impossible to make films.”

 ★ 

Apple Original Films had originally promised writer-director Jon Watts and co-stars George Clooney and Brad Pitt a wide theatrical release for their upcoming (and seemingly well-reviewed) movie Wolfs. But, pretty much at the last minute, Apple canceled those plans, and instead will screen it in limited theaters for one week before streaming it on Apple TV+ at the end of this month.

David Canfield interviewed Watts for Vanity Fair, where Watts said he only found out about the change in plans a few days before it was announced:

Canfield: As somebody who’s worked in indies, who’s worked in
the MCU, and has now made a standalone studio movie, how do you
see the state of theatrical versus streaming, especially given the
pivot with this movie? Does it concern you at all?

Watts: You want the movie to be seen, and if you maximize the
way that people are able to actually see a movie, I think that is
good — I watched so many movies that really influenced me on VHS
because I grew up in a small town in Colorado, so we just didn’t
have those movies in the theaters. But for me, the theatrical
experience is still the number one. It’s up to the people that are
able to make those decisions to put them in theaters for people to
see, and just have the confidence that people will go see them.
People want to go to the movies. People love the movies.

Canfield: If you had known then what you know now about the
way this movie will be released, would you have gone in another
direction, given that you were talking to a lot of studios?

Watts: [Laughs] I try to not think about hypothetical
situations like that.

It doesn’t sound like Apple’s change of plans has resulted in bad blood, per se — merely disappointment. Watts has already agreed to write, produce, and direct a sequel. But it feels like Apple is still in the early stages of navigating its role as a Hollywood studio. I think there’s still a sense that Apple is a creator-friendly partner for big-budget movies, but a move like this, contradicting the obvious wishes of both the director and two of the biggest stars in the business, works against that reputation.

Also, a week-ago report in The New York Times by Nicole Sperling reported that Clooney and Pitt were paid “more than $35 million each”. But speaking at the Venice Film Festival premiere of Wolfs yesterday, Clooney said that number was bullshit:

“[It was] an interesting article and whatever her source was for
our salary, it is millions and millions and millions of dollars
less than what was reported. And I am only saying that because I
think it’s bad for our industry if that’s what people think is the
standard bearer for salaries,” Clooney said. “I think that’s
terrible, it’ll make it impossible to make films.”

Read More 

I really dug this interview by Zach Baron for GQ with George Clooney and Brad Pitt, who are co-stars in the upcoming Apple feature film Wolfs:

Clooney: We’re lucky too. We’re in a profession that doesn’t force
you into retirement.

Baron: Well, there’s two sides of that coin, right? There is that
cliché for actors of: All of a sudden the phone stops ringing.

Clooney: Okay, but there’s two ways of doing this, right? The
phone stops ringing if your decision is that you want to continue
to be the character that you were when you were 35, and you want a
softer lens. But if you’re willing to, say, move down the call
sheet a little bit and do interesting character work, then you can
kind of — you have to make peace with the idea that you’re going
to die! I will walk up to people and they’ll be like, “Oh, you’re
older than I thought.” And I’m like, “I’m 63, you dumb shit!” It’s
just: That’s life. And so as long as you can make peace with the
idea of change, then it’s okay. The hard part is, and I know a lot
of actors who do this — and you do too — who don’t let that go
and try desperately to hold onto it.

 ★ 

I really dug this interview by Zach Baron for GQ with George Clooney and Brad Pitt, who are co-stars in the upcoming Apple feature film Wolfs:

Clooney: We’re lucky too. We’re in a profession that doesn’t force
you into retirement.

Baron: Well, there’s two sides of that coin, right? There is that
cliché for actors of: All of a sudden the phone stops ringing.

Clooney: Okay, but there’s two ways of doing this, right? The
phone stops ringing if your decision is that you want to continue
to be the character that you were when you were 35, and you want a
softer lens. But if you’re willing to, say, move down the call
sheet a little bit and do interesting character work, then you can
kind of — you have to make peace with the idea that you’re going
to die! I will walk up to people and they’ll be like, “Oh, you’re
older than I thought.” And I’m like, “I’m 63, you dumb shit!” It’s
just: That’s life. And so as long as you can make peace with the
idea of change, then it’s okay. The hard part is, and I know a lot
of actors who do this — and you do too — who don’t let that go
and try desperately to hold onto it.

Read More 

Special guest Taegan Goddard, longtime writer and founder of Political Wire, joins the show to talk about the past, present, and future of independent media.

Sponsored by:

WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million MAUs.
Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.

 ★ 

Special guest Taegan Goddard, longtime writer and founder of Political Wire, joins the show to talk about the past, present, and future of independent media.

Sponsored by:

WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million MAUs.
Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.

Read More 

Chance Miller, ace reporter for 9to5Mac, joins the show to talk about the latest changes to Apple’s DMA compliance plans with iOS, expectations for the September Apple event, and more.

Sponsored by:

WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million MAUs.
Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.

 ★ 

Chance Miller, ace reporter for 9to5Mac, joins the show to talk about the latest changes to Apple’s DMA compliance plans with iOS, expectations for the September Apple event, and more.

Sponsored by:

WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million MAUs.
Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.

Read More