2025-01-30 06:46:51
Fascinating thread — and an almost entirely civil discussion of what has become, for obvious reasons, an inflammatory topic. These are mapping and metadata nerds approaching the dilemma in the very nerdiest of ways. I found it rather soothing, and also quite informative — particularly the posts from Minh Nguyễn, who seems to be an OpenStreetMap super user. First:
So it turns out the UNGEGN is not actually a decision-making authority on individual toponyms. Their role is to encourage and facilitate standardization. They literally issue guidelines about guidelines. The closest thing to an authority on the gulf’s name in international law would be the International Hydrographic Organization. The IHO’s Limits of Oceans and Seas has been frozen in time without any updates since 1953, apparently because Japan and South Korea can’t agree on a name for the sea separating them. Maybe a certain dealmaker can get them to the bargaining table…
My kneejerk reaction to Trump’s “Gulf of America” executive order was that mapmakers should just roll their eyes, make the jerk-off motion, and ignore it. But that’s not practical. Mapmakers seek to appeal to authority on names. What’s the alternative? That Google and Apple (and OpenStreetMaps) serve as their own authorities on the names of geographical names? That’s not right. So you might think, well, the Gulf of Mexico is an international body of water, so the mapmakers should appeal to an international authority. The UN! But as Nguyễn cites, that’s not what the UN’s Group of Experts on Geographical Names does.
Another post in the thread from Nguyễn:
Ironically, Spanish-language media keeps having to explain why Gulf of America is problematic in English. In Spanish, América refers to the Americas as a whole, not the U.S. specifically. If one didn’t know any better, one would think it’s a gift to Cuba! Of course, this doesn’t justify the attempt to rename the gulf, since the intention is abundantly clear, but it does leave the name vulnerable to others reclaiming it for themselves. A more erudite politician might’ve chosen Gulf of Florida, which at least has a historical basis, dating to around the same time as Gulf of Mexico. But here we are.
And from yet another post by Nguyễn, a link to this new report on the order’s implications for the entire federal government from the Congressional Research Service (a nonpartisan arm of the Library of Congress). Now we’ve gotten more good nerds involved: librarians. And whatever the answer is, it’s complicated.
I don’t like this ostensible renaming (rebranding?) of the Gulf of Mexico any more than you do. It’s petty and pointless, except for the trolling spite, which, of course, is the point. I don’t know what Apple is going to do, but I suspect, ultimately, if the Department of the Interior really does make this official, Apple Maps will follow suit, but perhaps with something like “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)” for users in the US.
Google should have simply done what Apple is doing, though, and remained utterly silent on the issue until and if it’s actually made official. Best thing we can hope for is that the Department of the Interior stalls on making the change in the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) and that Trump forgets about it by then.
2025-01-30 05:57:23
David Pierce, writing at The Verge, “The Pebble Smartwatch Is Making a Comeback”:
Rather than buy another smartwatch, Migicovsky decided to try and get Pebble going again. He sold his most recent startup, a messaging app called Beeper, to Automattic last year and left the company in the fall. Since then, he’d thought about starting a Pebble-like product from scratch, figuring it’d be easier to do the same thing again a second time. “But then I was like, what if I just asked Google to open-source the operating system?” he says. It felt like a long shot, but he knew the code was just sitting dormant inside Mountain View somewhere. So he asked. A few times.
To Migicovsky’s surprise, Google agreed to release Pebble OS to the public. As of Monday, all the Pebble firmware is available on GitHub, and Migicovsky is starting a company to pick up where he left off.
The company — which can’t be named Pebble because Google still owns that — doesn’t have a name yet.
My first idea for a new name: Rebble — a rebellious return of Pebble. My second idea: Quixote — because this isn’t going to be a hit this time either. (Quixote also would have been a good name for Beeper Mini’s attempt to backwards engineer access as an unsanctioned iMessage client for Android.) But, thankfully, it doesn’t sound to me like Migicovsky’s goal is to boil the ocean. (Update: Turns out, Rebble is the name of a community project to write new firmware to keep old Pebble watches running.)
You’d imagine that smartwatches have evolved considerably since 2012. I’ve tried every single smart watch out there, but none do it for me. No one makes a smartwatch with the core set of features I want:
- Always-on e-paper screen (it’s reflective rather than emissive. Sunlight readable. Glanceable. Not distracting to others like a bright wrist)
- Long battery life (one less thing to charge. It’s annoying to need extra cables when traveling)
- Simple and beautiful user experience around a core set of features I use regularly (telling time, notifications, music control, alarms, weather, calendar, sleep/step tracking)
- Buttons! (to play/pause/skip music on my phone without looking at the screen)
- Hackable (apparently you can’t even write your own watchfaces for Apple Watch? That is wild. There were >16k watchfaces on the Pebble appstore!)
If their goal is to be to smartwatches what Playdate is to handheld gaming, that’s definitely achievable, and if they succeed, will by definition be a lot of fun.
The whole tech world needs more projects that aren’t trying to become billion- (let alone trillion-) dollar ideas, but are happily shooting for success as million-dollar ideas (or less!). Many of the best and most beloved movies ever made weren’t big-budget Hollywood blockbusters. If your list of all-time favorite movies doesn’t include a bunch that were made on shoestring budgets, your whole list probably sucks, because you have no taste. The same is of course true for music, games, and everything else. Indie art is often great art, imbued by the souls and obsessions of its creators, and blockbuster art is often garbage art, imbued only by soulless corporate bureaucracies.
Computer hardware and software can be — ought to be — attempts at creating art.
2025-01-29 10:13:53
Here’s an addendum to my post yesterday on the recent shake-up atop the generally stable “top free downloads” list in the App Store. Some of the shake-up is from new entrants, like the much-ballyhooed AI chatbot DeepSeek. But a lot of it is the direct result of the sudden absence of ByteDance’s entire lineup of apps: TikTok, CapCut, Lemon8, and Marvel Snap. Alternatives are vying to fill those voids. [Update, one day later: Marvel Snap is back in the App Store, because it now has a new publisher.]
TikTok returning to operational service in the U.S. after an outage of just one day has squelched the outrage surrounding its ban. The app stopped working; TikTok users, unprepared for its ban, freaked out; the app started working again the next day; and TikTok fans more or less went back to scrolling their feeds and shut up. Controversy over.
But the controversy shouldn’t be over. And unless something changes, it’s going to slowly simmer back to an eventual boil.
Nobody is really talking about the fact that ByteDance apps remain banned, legally speaking, in the U.S. right now, and already-installed copies of their apps are only continuing to function because TikTok’s U.S. cloud providers, Oracle and Akamai, restored service on the word of President Trump that they won’t be held accountable for doing so, despite being in clear violation of the PAFACA Act. But neither Apple nor Google has restored any of ByteDance’s apps to the App Store or Play Store. That hasn’t interfered with TikTok going back to operational via copies of the app already installed on users’ phones, but it’s an insurmountable — although incremental — problem in the long run.
The conventional wisdom is that Oracle and Akamai are being a bit reckless (“If Trump says we’re good, we’re good — what could go wrong, it’s not like Trump has ever changed his mind...”) and Apple and Google are prudent, more staid (“We’re following the letter of the law and will continue to follow the letter of the law”). And perhaps that’s all there is to this. But now that we’re over a week into this post-ban period, I’m starting to wonder if it’s purely a coincidence that these four companies split along these lines. The two cloud providers required for TikTok to function on one side, the two app store providers on the other.
With TikTok’s cloud provider access shut off, it was like a guillotine. TikTok was working for everyone in the U.S., then boom, it was shut down for everyone. Then, just as suddenly, it was back.
Being locked out of the App Store and Play Store, on the other hand, is a slow squeeze. The first thing that comes to mind, obviously, is no new users. No growth. TikTok already has a mind-boggling number of users in the US (estimates seem to range from 120 to 170 million), but no growth is no growth.
The second thing that comes to mind is no app updates for US users. No new features. No bug fixes. No security patches. TikTok, like most popular apps, typically pushes updates to the App Store and Play Store every two or three weeks. What happens now that that’s stopped for US users? Is ByteDance still going to push app updates to users in the rest of the world? TikTok obviously has a lot of American users but most of its users live elsewhere.
But the third factor is the most insidious: even if the build of TikTok already installed on an American user’s phone continues to function, that user can’t reinstall TikTok (or any of ByteDance’s other apps) on a new or restored phone until those apps are back in the app stores. Wipe and restore your phone from backup? No more TikTok. Buy a new phone? No TikTok on the new phone.
Trump’s reprieve was a declaration that the Justice Department wouldn’t enforce the law for 75 days. If ByteDance doesn’t sell TikTok — and it sure doesn’t seem like they have any more intention to sell it now than they did before the ban took effect — what happens? Another (even more shambolically illegal) Trump extension that only keeps TikTok functioning, but not available in the app stores? Because the other side isn’t budging either: China hawks like Senator Tom Cotton have not shifted an inch. They’re tolerating Trump’s 75-day reprieve but not budging from their overall “sell or you’re banned” stance.
I’m not saying this is a backroom plot between the administration and these companies, but I’m not saying it isn’t a backroom agreement either. Trump isn’t complaining about Apple and Google not getting on board. And neither Apple nor Google seem worried about Trump’s wrath for not following Oracle and Akamai’s leads. The goal of the legislation isn’t to pull the plug on TikTok for Americans — it’s to pressure ByteDance (and really, their bosses in the Chinese Communist Party) into selling the app. Instantly banning TikTok’s US operations resulted in instant and vociferous outrage from TikTok users — the pressure turned out not to be on ByteDance and the CCP, it was on the US government to give people back their beloved TikTok. So I think everyone on the US side is looking at the current detente — TikTok being available to existing users through existing copies of the app, but not being available in app stores — as a way to turn the pressure up only on ByteDance. Slowly strangle TikTok over a period of months, rather than behead it overnight.
But what happens if the CCP stands pat? If they just wait it out? If ByteDance were a normal company they’d face financial pressure to capitulate and sell. But the CCP isn’t under any financial pressure to allow ByteDance to sell. Say what you will about the Chinese government, but they do not lack for patience. What happens then, when word starts spreading amongst TikTok fans not to upgrade their phones, lest they lose access to the app? Apple’s going to have some strong feelings about that.
2025-01-29 09:00:22
Google, in an announcement on X:
We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps. We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.
For geographic features in the U.S., this is when Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is updated. When that happens, we will update Google Maps in the U.S. quickly to show Mount McKinley and Gulf of America.
Also longstanding practice: When official names vary between countries, Maps users see their official local name. Everyone in the rest of the world sees both names. That applies here too.
Jennifer Elias, reporting for CNBC:
Google’s maps division on Monday reclassified the U.S. as a “sensitive country,” a designation it reserves for states with strict governments and border disputes, CNBC has learned. [...]
Some team members within the maps division were ordered to urgently make changes to the location name and recategorize the U.S. from “non-sensitive” to “sensitive,” according to the internal correspondence. The changes were given a rare “P0” order, meaning it had the highest priority level and employees were immediately notified and instructed to drop what they were doing to work on it.
Google’s order states that the Gulf of America title change should be treated similar to the Persian Gulf, which in Arab countries is displayed on Google Maps as Arabian Gulf.
No word from Apple on how Apple Maps will handle this. (I’ve asked for comment; will update if I get an answer.) Re-renaming Denali back to Mount McKinley seems like a no-brainer for the maps to comply with. A country names its own mountains. If Obama could rename it, Trump can re-rename it.
The Gulf of Mexico, though, is an international body of water, and its name wasn’t even debated until Trump started talking about it a few weeks ago. Google (and perhaps Apple) having a policy where they simply follow the naming conventions of the GNIS seems not merely sensible but utterly uncontroversial ... until now.
There are three countries in the world that don’t use the metric system as their official units of measure: the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar. I expect there will be fewer — namely, one — who go along with calling it the “Gulf of America”.
2025-01-29 05:34:37
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch “Automattic and Others Back Openvibe, an App That’s Unifying the Open Social Web”:
Launched in 2024, Openvibe initially supported three of the more prominent open social networks, all of which operate using different protocols: Mastodon uses ActivityPub, Bluesky runs on AT Protocol, and Nostr powers a number of third-party apps. Openvibe later added support for Instagram Threads, as that app became further integrated with ActivityPub and opened itself up to the developer community.
As CEO Matej Svancer explained at the time, the idea behind his app was to offer users a more friendly and “easy-to-use gateway” to the open social web. Because of the different protocols these networks utilize, it can be difficult for newcomers who end up having to switch apps or limit their engagement to just their preferred platform.
But Openvibe doesn’t just let people stay connected with friends across all these services in a combined timeline, it also allows cross-posting to multiple networks at once.
I just gave it a try, and my take is that Openvibe is definitely interesting, but it’s not for me, and I’m not really sure who it is for. I signed into all three of my personal accounts that Openvibe supposedly supports: Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. I got a home timeline that mashes together all the posts from my Bluesky and Mastodon accounts. I don’t see any errors related to Threads, but I don’t see any posts from Threads. That kind of makes sense because Threads doesn’t offer an API that allows for full third-party clients. Threads does have an API for posting, so I presume my Threads account in Openvibe is write-only. Openvibe’s website and the app itself make it seem like I should see content from my Threads timeline, though. (Perhaps I don’t because I turned off “fediverse sharing” with my Threads account a few weeks ago — because I prefer keeping these networks separate. But if that’s the problem, Openvibe doesn’t explain that I need to re-enable it.)
I really don’t see the point of mashing the tweets from two (or more!) different social networks into one unified timeline. To me it’s just confusing. I don’t love the current situation where three entirely separate, thriving social networks each merit some portion of my attention (not to mention that a fourth, X, still kinda does too). But when I use each of these platforms, I want to use a client that is dedicated to each platform. These platforms all have different features, to varying degrees, and they definitely have different vibes and cultural norms. Pretending that they all form one big (lowercase-m) meta platform doesn’t make that pretense cohesive. Mashing them all together in one timeline isn’t simpler. It sounds simpler but in practice it’s more cacophonous.
The idea that this might in any way appeal to “newcomers” is bananas to me. The concept of streaming multiple accounts from multiple networks into one timeline is by definition a bit advanced. In my experience, for very obvious reasons, casual social network users only use the first-party client. They’re confused even by the idea of using, say, an app named Ivory to access a social network called Mastodon. The idea of explaining to them why they might want to use an app named Openvibe to access Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads (and the weirdo blockchain network Nostr) is like trying to explain to your dog why they should stay out of the trash. There’s a market for third-party clients (or at least I hope there is), but that market is not made up of “newcomers”.
Also, Openvibe is not a good app. It doesn’t look great, the custom font is somewhat cartoon-y (which I find both unattractive and off-putting), there’s a lot of gray-on-white low-contrast iconography and text, and, worst of all, it seems to update your feeds periodically and when it does, it refreshes and scrolls the timeline while you’re looking at it. It’s like having a book turn the page automatically while you’re reading in the middle of a page. When you leave and come back to the app a few minutes later, the timeline needs to reload, which contributes to the app feeling pretty slow. The overall look, feel, and layout says “generic Twitter-style social network”.
I do use and very much see the point of Croissant, a multi-network app for cross-posting to Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. Croissant isn’t a client for consuming content from those platforms; it’s just a tool for sending new posts to those platforms.
And I’d love it if Tapbots’s aforementioned Ivory added support for Bluesky accounts. But when I use Ivory (as when I used Tweetbot, for years, before it), I don’t see — and wouldn’t want to see — a single timeline from all configured accounts. I want to switch between multiple accounts, each with their own discrete timelines. Openvibe is in many ways the opposite of Ivory, starting right from its slogan: “All decentralised social networks, single timeline”.
2025-01-29 03:26:02
Chance Miller at 9to5Mac has a good rundown of everything new in iOS 18.3, and his colleague Ryan Christoffel has a similar rundown for MacOS 15.3 all-five-vowels Sequoia. (See also: Michael Tsai.)
