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Digital Surveillance Isn’t an Inevitability
Last week, Apple announced that they are hitting pause on their initiative to implement a surveillance system to add software to users’ iPhones to perform client-side scanning for CSAM. Here’s hoping that the “pause” is mostly just Apple PR trying to save face and that they ultimately are going to quietly scrap the plans. I…
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OnlyFans and the Cautionary Tale of Scale
It’s hard to look at OnlyFans’s announcement yesterday of their upcoming ban on sexually explicit content without seeing where scale, and companies’ pursuit of scale, played a part in seriously disrupting a lot of creators’ lives. Follow the Money First, and probably most pertinent, there’s the issue of credit card processors. There are only a…
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Electron Has Its Place!
I love to rag on Electron, but like many things, it has its place. For instance, Electron is perfect for stuff like the Docker desktop app, and not just because both are notorious for hogging system resources on my computer. I don’t need to interact with Docker’s GUI that often, and the UI is mostly…
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Tech Ennui
I’ve been feeling a little down about tech lately. It’s nothing really big; it’s just a mixture of little things that have slowly been adding up to more papercuts in my digital life. The world within my computers/devices is like home to me. In many ways, it is my home. I’ve moved from place to…
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Leaky Abstractions: When IFTTT Triggers Aren’t What They Seem
As part of my ongoing initiative to always show up to internet arguments with receipts, I built a bespoke Rube Goldberg machine that can automatically download and archive tweets I like, turning them into Markdown files, complete with attached Twitter images and video downloaded. Once I really get all the kinks worked out I promise…
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Electron Is Bad
So I was discussing 1Password’s recent decision to switch to Electron, and I want to elaborate a little more on why I hate Electron so much. You might not know what Electron is, but there’s a good chance you’ve got one running on your computer right now. Slack and Discord both use Electron, as does…
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More on Apple’s “child protection” features
Regarding Apple’s upcoming feature to scan children’s Messages content for sexually explicit media, there’s a detail I had missed about how it worked: The “phone will rat on you to your parents” function is only going to happen when the child is under 12. For older children, the Messages app will just warn them in…
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Apple’s TV strategy
From a recent MacRumors post, Apple’s neglect of home/living room hardware has gotten even Apple’s own engineers concerned: In his latest “Power On” newsletter, however, Bloomberg journalist Mark Gurman says that Apple engineers have personally expressed concerns to him about the direction of Apple’s living room hardware strategy. The pundits are all suggesting that what…
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1Password’s New Apps
Today 1Password announced a completely redesigned app in 1Password 8. But it has a dirty little secret. It’s no longer a native Mac app; it uses Electron instead. I strongly dislike Electron apps. Developers love making apps with Electron, mostly because it’s a lot less effort and you can use familiar web technologies to make…
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The Ultimate Preventative Medicine
Prediction: In future decades, we’re going to realize that the most powerful way to fight decades of growing obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other metabolic disorders is to work less and live less stressful lives. For decades we’ve been desperate for something to blame, from more sedentary jobs to the fact that kids don’t play…