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Matter Announces it's Business Model
From the Matter blog:
How will Matter make money? That's a question we get asked with increasing frequency, and reasonably so. People want clarity when they adopt a new tool, especially when they’ll be investing in it over time. Today, we’ll finally answer that question!
The gist is that Matter will
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Main Character of the Day on Mastodon
You know how you can become the "main character of Twitter" for a day? Yeah, that same thing happens on Mastodon as well. Yesterday the Raspberry Pie account earned that distinction with a sequence of events summarized here.
Basically, there was a movement on Mastodon to boot Raspberry Pi out of the fediverse
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Unabashedly Good Apple News
Jim Morrison: Apple Kills Its Plan to Scan Your Photos for CSAM. Here’s What’s Next
At the beginning of September 2021, Apple said it would pause the rollout of the feature to “collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features.” In other words, a launch was still coming.
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The Web is Eating My Mac Alive
Jason Snell: My social media is in an Mac app, or it’s nowhere
Likewise, my use of private social apps like Slack and Discord is magnified by their availability on my Mac as discrete apps rather than bookmarks in Safari. I can launch them or quit them or hide them on their own, and
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Structural Reasons You Think Open Source Apps are Ugly
Koos Looijesteijn: Why is open source software so badly designed?
Great design isn’t done by picking up a tiny issue and creating a solution for it. It’s done by gaining deep understanding for the problems people have, the context in which they use products and by testing solutions with people. It’s labor-
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Consider the Source
Ben Thompson in his daily update today:
First, I wrote at the beginning of the year, in the context of the Joe Rogan controversy, that tech companies needed to understand that “free speech” was no longer a defense in terms of elite culture; that statement got a lot of pushback, but this seems like confirmation
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The "USB-C is Too New" Argument Crumbles
Chris Hannah: The iPhone Will Switch To USB-C
When I list all the devices I use, Macs, ThinkPad, Nintendo Switch, iPad, Pixel 6, work phone (it's some Motorola Android phone), and iPhone 13, only one of them uses a port that's not USB-C. I didn't realise it
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Don't Miss Out on Your Golden Trump Award
Nick Heer: Republicans Ignore Door Opened for Them and Sue Google
Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee has continued to send out emails promising subscribers the “GOLDEN TRUMP” award if they donate money within the hour. They really sent that email. And they also sent one with the subject line “READ THIS MESSAGE IMMEDIATELY”. And they
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Full Season Drops or Weekly Releases?
Netflix had a good quarter in Q3, and in their results (PDF), they committed themselves to releasing shows all at
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macOS Updates Just Don't Really Matter to Me
I was reading John Voorhees' excellent macOS Ventura review today and something dawned on me: none of this matters to me.
Truly, I've been using Ventura on my personal Mac all summer and Monterey on my work Mac, and I use them both exactly the same. Literally the biggest difference in my
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Pocket Casts, Open Source, and My Hope for a Second Good Podcast Player on Android
Paul Sawers: Podcast app Pocket Casts goes open source
By making Pocket Casts open source, this means that anyone can access the code, fix bugs, create new features, and even fork it to build their own competing service on top of the Pocket Cast codebase.
This is great, and speaking as someone who thinks Pocket
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A Trifecta of Bozos
Charlie Warzel: The Big Tech Whiplash Is Here
Soon, we may enter an era where mercurial celebrity landlords dictate the terms of service on their own social networks—ones that are explicitly positioned against content moderation and in favor of a facile understanding of free-speech maximalism.
And:
None of these men has signaled any
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“The Algorithm” Loves Conservative Content
Katyanna Quach: YouTube more likely to recommend conservative vidoes to all
YouTube's recommendation algorithm not only gently traps viewers in mild echo chambers, it is more likely to suggest conservative-leaning videos regardless of your political alignment.
As a scummy politician once said, it’s not about what’s actually happening, it’s
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The iPad is a Landscape-First Device in 2022
John Gruber: The iPad Lineup Is, Like, Growing Out Its Bangs or Something and Looks a Little Weird Right Now, but Apple TV Has Been Going to the Gym and Looks Great
The front-facing cameras ought to all be on the long side. Whatever debate there was over this 10 years ago when the
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The Awkward iPad Lineup for Holiday 2022
Jason Snell: The iPad’s erratic odyssey continues
Overall, Tuesday’s announcements left me with mixed emotions. The individual products look fine, and I look forward to trying them out. But zoom out to the iPad line as a whole, and it’s kind of a mess. From the old ninth-generation iPad all the
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Even VR for Work Enthusiasts Don't Use VR for Work
I shared a clip from this week's Sharp Tech (a show I'm enjoying with hosts I like), and Ben Thompson's explanation for why he thinks VR is actually "anti-tech" really blew me away. Read my short thread for more on this specific point.
The counterargument is
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Google Pixel Watch
Ben Schoon: Google Pixel Watch
The bezels around the Pixel Watch’s display are not small, that’s true, but they’re not noticeable unless you’re looking for them. Google’s software does a great job of blending the content on the screen into the edge of the display.
This makes total sense, and
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Ye Unhinged
Michelle Goldberg: Kanye Shows Where the Right’s Troll Politics Lead
What’s striking about Ye’s naked antisemitism isn’t that he crossed a line but that, for some of his powerful allies, he didn’t. The tweet from the House Judiciary Republicans has not, as of this writing, been taken down. On Monday
