Total: 53 posts
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Of course, just as I consider going all-in on Tapo and Kasa, they abandon one of their most useful features, IFTTT support, for more AI garbage.
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Facebook has been caught with its hand in this cookie jar over and over again. It’s like Zuckerberg doesn’t think anyone outside the company can… read computer code:
The most recent version of Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, strips out the unactivated software components that powered the system Meta internally called NameTag. The version published the day of WIRED’s report included several code libraries explicitly named for face recognition. Friday’s release includes none of them.
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Mike Masnick of Techdirt:
But at a time when the Supreme Court keeps telling us we shouldn’t believe that they make decisions on partisan grounds, it sure would help if they actually stopped doing things differently depending on the partisan valence of each case – something Alito seems to do quite regularly.
Absolutely right.
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Paul McCartney, in an interview by The Rest is History’s Tom Holland:
You would know certain chords. And then someone would know an extra cord. So you would go to his house and learn this extra cord, and you’d build up your knowledge through things like that.
It’s wild to find out that Paul McCartney and I learned how to play guitar in basically the same way.
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Jeremy Yurow, writing at Courthouse News Service about Hawaii’s new “anti-Citizens United” law:
The bill takes aim at the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, which allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money in elections. Lawmakers, drawing from a legal theory developed by the Center for American Progress, argued that because states create corporations and grant them their powers, Hawaii could simply decline to grant corporations the power to spend in elections.
You love to see it.
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Matthew Haughey, who has a masters degree in soil chemistry, writes about why some farms plant red clover in the spring.
Haughey jokingly swears he’s fun at parties, but people with specialized science knowledge are precisely the folks I want to talk to at parties.
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Click any linked term inside an article to load its entry. New topics are documented at the moment of first access. Use the Stumble button in the header to navigate to a random existing article.
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The fact that there is no statutory ban on the government commercially sourcing personal location data without a warrant is a mockery of the Fourth Amendment.
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This ruling seems to be shocking parts of the tech web, but all the court did was apply the plain language of Apple’s developer agreement. The company has never needed cause to expel an app from the App Store.
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🔗Jay Willis in his Balls & Strikes newsletter:
Although the force of the Republican Party’s response to Scalia’s death felt like a “shocker” to some, the reality is that the right had been quietly putting in the work–of building a judicial pipeline, of championing a particular vision for the Constitution, and of making sure the base understood the stakes of every Supreme Court vacancy–for a long time. The left had not.
The long game has been the weakest part of the liberal political playbook for at least the 42 years I’ve been alive. They’re always skating to where the puck is…
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At $150 per ticket, a family of four will pay $600 for the 80-minute tour of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. The money grab is going to be prohibitive for a large swath of the very people most likely to appreciate and delight in the experience. 😠
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I will always link to something Bari Weiss doesn’t want people to read or watch or know. In this case, she spiked a 60 Minutes segment about one of Trump’s more egregious presidential crimes, the CECOT renditions, but it aired in Canada anyway, and made it onto the Internet Archive.
Source: The Verge via Daring Fireball
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Stuff like this fills a geek’s heart to bursting.
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This is a sentiment I share. There are too many normies in the law.
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“A never-before-seen 1996 interview of Steve Jobs”
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This feels both more momentous and more silly than it should:
The last penny was minted Wednesday afternoon at the US Mint in Philadelphia, overseen by US Treasurer Brandon Beach. […] The penny costs nearly four cents to mint, more than the coin’s worth.
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Law
I imagine Sotomayor & Kagan sometimes ask Jackson to tone down her rhetoric & she replies “absolutely not, if the Republic must burn, let those who still love it see us defending it even as the flames climb our robes.” 🔥
🔗Supreme Court lets Noem end legal status for many Venezuelans in the U.S.
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The Internet Phonebook is “an annual publication for exploring the vast poetic web, featuring essays, musings and a directory with the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators.” What’s not to love? I’ve already ordered a copy.
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Palantir is often called a data broker, a data miner, or a giant database of personal information. In reality, it’s none of these—but even former employees struggle to explain it.
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Most people’s to-do lists are, almost by definition, pretty dull, filled with those quotidian little tasks that tend to slip out of our minds. Pick up the laundry. Get that thing for the kid. Buy milk, canned yams and kumquats at the local market.
🔗 Leonardo Da Vinci’s To-Do List from 1490: The Plan of a Renaissance Man ➚
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WikiTok is “a TikTok-style interface for exploring random Wikipedia articles,” and I absolutely love it.
🔗 WikiTok ➚
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🔗 “The list provided phonetic pronouncers for all the Russian men expected at the summit, including ‘Mr. President POO-tihn.'” npr.org
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Where in Reddit continues its slide into enshittification by choosing the exact worst (and probably easiest) solution to the problem of AI scraping.
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The only thing worse than losing an appeal at the circuit level is going to this particular SCOTUS supermajority for a predictable—and predictably ideological—loss that may last decades or more.
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Sophie, whose localghost website is a joy to explore, defends the craft of main websites for people to enjoy, not for AI bots to grind up to feed their slop machines.
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🔗 This is a delightful demonstration of the nuance of “progress.” kieranhealy.org
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🔗 Apple Sues Jon Prosser Over iOS 26 Leaks (Eric Slivka / macrumors.com)
Legal/ethical merits of a trillion-dollar giant suing an indie influencer aside, it's absurd Apple's mad Prosser released iOS 26 early when Apple's doing the same by shipping an update that's unreadable under many common conditions.
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🔗 [Apple Sues Jon Prosser Over iOS 26 Leaks (Eric Slivka / *macrumors.com*)](https://www.macrumors.com/2025/07/17/apple-sues-jon-prosser-ios-26-leaks/) Legal/ethical merits of a trillion-dollar giant suing an indie influencer aside, it's absurd Apple's mad Prosser released iOS 26 early when Apple's doing the same by shipping an update that's unreadable under many common conditions...
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This explains a lot about why I always found Leno so boring—he lacked a point of view. Easily the least interesting late night host of his generation.
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🔗 Merlin Mann writes in On Chasing the Right “Zero.” about the widely misunderstood idea that defined a part of his career:
Put to best use, Inbox Zero is merely a philosophical practice of learning to be parsimonious about which and how many inputs we allow into our lives–and, then, to responsibly but mindfully tend to those inputs in a way that is never allowed to hinder our personal commitment to doing the work that really matters to us.
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🔗 Purple Heart Army veteran self-deports after nearly 50 years in the U.S.
Juliana Kim at NPR:
So, Park booked his flight and spent his final days in the U.S. — playing one last round of golf with his friends, savoring Hawaii’s famous garlic shrimp, and enjoying time with his children and 85-year-old mother.
" I have to accept the fact that this is probably the last time I’ll see her," he said.
Any government, any official, and any voter who supports this is a national disgrace.
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🔗 The WSJ Editorial Board found the unanimity of some recent “culture war” SCOTUS decisions surprising. But it’s not: the liberal justices tend to be principled, while the conservatives tend to torture the Constitution for predetermined ideological outcomes.
(Full article here)
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Trump is intentionally and unapologetically empowering child predators. And, by extension, so is every person who voted for him. That is not an opinion. It is an irrefutable fact.
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I hope Facebook’s executive team are investing in some quality knee pads… 🔗 bloomberg.com
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🔗 Ben Nacar is an incredible pianist who, I recently learned, does an annual video surveying the classical music that left copyright protection that year. The video he did this year features music from 1929, all of which is now in the public domain.
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🔗 Mike Masnick is always a must-read, but his recent piece calling bullshit on Zuckerberg’s “move” of Meta’s moderation teams just proves how important his voice is as we all buckle up for a four-year ride on the malevolent-jackass express…
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🔗 Mike Masnick is always a must-read, but his recent piece calling bullshit on Zuckerberg's "move" of Meta's moderation teams (https://www.techdirt.com/2025/01/21/the-emptiness-of-zucks-promise-to-move-biased-trust-safety-from-california-) just proves how important his voice is as we all buckle up for a four-year ride on the malevolent-jackass express…
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Nick Heer has a great post about the vapid coverage of vapid Elon Musk, but this bit from the end of Heer’s post struck me as the perfect Twitter bio for Musk:
words from the fingers of a dipshit
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🔗 Apple Will Revamp Siri to Catch Up to Its Chatbot Competitors
Tripp Mickle, Brian X. Chen and Cade Metz report at The New York Times that:
The decision came after the executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT. The product’s use of generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry, create computer code and answer complex questions, made Siri look antiquated, said two people familiar with the company’s work, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly.
Apple can’t be serious here. My earliest IFTTT recipes made Siri look antiquated. Siri has been, to put it as politely as Siri deserves, trash for years. The user experience of the earliest Echo Auto was head and shoulders above Siri. If you need a reminder set, Siri will work more often than not. But that’s been its only viable use case since release.
Apple has been marketing off of machine learning since 2018 and probably earlier, so it’s just bonkers that they didn’t decide to scrap Siri at least that long ago and turn their machine learning resources toward something better.
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🔗 Does the Statute of Limitations Ever Apply in Legal Malpractice?
Hey look, my employer has a blog about the kind of work I do, and I wrote a thing for it.
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🔗 Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book | Books | The Guardian
I’m not quoting from the review or her memoir because Noem is deplorable, and because, somehow, it’s worse than the headline suggests.
When people tell you who they are, believe them.
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🔗 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)
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🔗 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.
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I do something similar (even in name), with quicklinks.(dot)lol, but Floh Gro’s solution using an action in Drafts for iOS is faster, and private.
Update February 1, 2025: I let my above quicklinks domain lapse and someone else snagged it, and it redirects somewhere weird, which I don’t have time to vet for malicious or nefarious intent, so I’ve removed the hyperlink. However, you should still be able to access the latest version on both this website, at ql.joeross.me, and at the GitHub repository.
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🔗 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.
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🔗 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…
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🔗 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) ‘"';
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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.
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🔗 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.