😠 If your iPhone on iOS 17 becomes unresponsive, be warned:
You may lose that day’s photos if you decide to force a reboot before getting them off the phone.
This happened to me today. I lost three photos of my son being cuter than any other son in the world.
🔗 Some legal malpractice cases are bogus, and many are defensible. But some are, well, not, which is apparently how State Bar Court Judge Yvette D. Roland in California viewed the misconduct proceedings against John Eastman, the now-disbarred architect of the 2020 fake electors nonsense. (PDF)
🔗 Manton Reece - An update on the pricing update
Micro.blog is such a great value. Like omg.lol, Micro.blog is a positive community built by people who didn’t see exactly what they wanted on the web, so they decided to make it.
Bilby, 2018 - ★★★★
This short is, indeed, extremely cute. But it's also impressively executed in terms of the writing and the animation.
Parenting pro-tip: Shorts like this one are good to keep handy for when you need to extinguish a tantrum without starting a longer watching session.
👑 That feeling when you've been reading The Hobbit to your kids and your four-year-old daughter insists, and I mean INSISTS, that the friend she made recently at dance class, whose name she had trouble remembering until just now, is named Thorin
I do something similar (even in name), with quicklinks.lol, but Floh Gro’s solution using an action in Drafts for iOS is faster, and private.
🔗 Manton Reece - Recommendations and blogrolls on Micro.blog
I’ve long meant to get a blogroll up on this site, and it’s another testament to the fact that I’ve chosen the right community that it was recently integrated into Micro.blog, including auto-updating, public OPML and JSON exports.
Bilbo is, ever was, and ever shall be, my people.
“Back now to the Mountain!” cried Thorin. “We have little time to lose.” “And little food to use!” cried Bilbo, always practical on such points. – The Hobbit, Chapter 15, The Gathering of the Clouds, by J.R.R. Tolkien
🔗 U.S. versus Apple: A first reaction – Six Colors
I haven’t read the complaint yet, but this was… not what I expected Attorney General Merrick Garland to have his people focused on…
🔗 Scholarfy | Google Scholar bookmarklet by Johan Ugander
This is a useful bookmarklet to move a standard Google search to Google Scholar. I use it with modified version I made with ChatGPT to search an exact phrase, for use in searching for legal opinions.
Here’s “my” code:
javascript:location = ‘scholar.google.com/scholar"’ escape(document.forms[0].elements[‘q’].value) ‘"';
The best part about the 32-Bit Cafe is that we’re trying to move the internet forward productively in the ways we can make an impact, participating in the creation of web services, websites, and weird, wacky web projects. We want to bring back the idea of personal websites to the many of us who have been stuck in social media cycles since the emergence of Web 2.0. Not to mention, we’re not just helping people build their first websites; we’re also making our own hosted services for anyone to use and participate in to help with decentralizing hosted services.
This is exactly the kind of thing I love to see.
⚖️ It is an uncharacteristic misstep, in terms of both litigation strategy and public relations, for Apple to poke the EU bear by terminating Epic’s developer account. Whether Apple is right about Epic's intentions is irrelevant. This move looks petty and, worse, calculated to avoid exactly the kind of competition from exactly the kind of competitor the Digital Markets Act intends to encourage.
😔 Yahoo is accelerating its enshittification of Engadget, in a move that really surprises absolutely no one because, well, it's Yahoo:
"Engadget, which is operated by Yahoo, will lay off 10 employees, according to people with knowledge of the situation who say staff were “blindsided” by the decision. In addition to cutting staff, the editorial team will split into two sections: 'news and features' and 'reviews and buying advice.' The news teams will focus on traffic growth, while the reviews teams will report to commerce leaders."
This is sad. I have been an Engadget reader since the beginning, and while its glory days have been gone for a while, the writers keeping it alive have done great work.
Chris Geidner at Law Dork has the best explanation of why the 5th Circuit’s jurisprudence has become so, to use a legal term of art, whacky:
At the end of the day, there are essentially three groups of active judges on the Fifth Circuit: There are “mad vibes” judges, legally conservative judges, and legally moderate (or more left) judges.
Geidner is so insightful and prolific that, and I mean this as a high compliment, it irritates me a little.
The top seven free apps in the news category of the iOS App Store are a mix of proudly user-hostile mismanagement, fear mongering, hyperlocal hate, and Nazi monetization.
🔗 Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice
Bill Toulas, writing at Bleeping Computer:
Targeting open-source software developers tends to backfire for companies, as others fork or clone the code repositories to prevent the projects from disappearing.
At this time, the Haier home assistant plugins have been forked 228 times, many occurring since the news of the legal threats.
Now?
1,462 forks.
These were niche plugins for niche software for a niche audience before Haier let the lawyers loose.
Hey Haier, Ms. Streisand called… she wants her effect back.
☄️ I’m watching this Yaccarino interview very long after it occurred, but time has not dulled the stings of how uninformed and naive she was about Twitter and Musk.
It’s hard to believe a seasoned executive fell so far so fast, but there’s no denying the descent when you’re standing in the crater…
Stop turning awesome apps into internet noise machines
The news aggregating app Artifact is shutting down.
Jarrod Blundy wrote at his blog HeyDingus:
I do wonder if it would have had a brighter future without the ability to add comments. I never engaged with that social aspect of the service, and I expect it contributed massively to its complexity and moderation costs.
I think about this every time a good news or link aggregation app goes away. These apps are, fundamentally, trying to help you sort the signal from the noise in an overwhelming “media ecosystem” or whatever we’re supposed to call it these days.
As soon as they add their own social layer on top of the news and the links, they have betrayed their best use case and their most loyal users. It’s like buying a pair of earplugs, only to have them turn into in-ear headphones or hearing aides you don’t need and never asked for.
Engagement, which they thought would spike after going social, craters. Resources, which were optimized and sufficient and scalable with increasing revenue over time, are siphoned off, as Jarrod wrote, into moderation and increasingly complex development cycles.
It’s a kind of death spiral that most founders notice too late, so kudos, of a sort, to Artifact’s founders for knowing the telltale signs of a terminally ill app, and letting it die with some dignity.
There are already plenty of places to share links and half-baked hot takes. The real challenge, for Artifact’s founders and anyone else with the leadership, technical and fundraising skills to tackle it, is to build something extremely useful to individuals without draining all of its lifeblood into a push for “social” that ultimately just turns it into another internet noise machine.