2025-04-26 03:24:30
Via Phil comes this wonderful beat down on the idea that humans can colonise Mars. Outside of science fiction -- and more on that shortly -- Mars just is not a place amenable to any kind of multicellular life, let alone mammals. And turning it into somewhere that might be would involve so much effort that could be better focused on, you know, just keeping the one planet we know is habitable working as intended.
It's no surprise that Mars colonisation appeals to the same bunch of internet-native rich bores that are obsessed by everything from AGI to life extension. Cory Doctorow has reviewed Adam Becker's book on them and their ideas, and it sounds like an insta-buy to me.
Any article which starts by mentioning Harlan Ellison's second-best story is always going to get my attention, but one which also skewers some specific stupidity or our tech overlords is definitely worth a read. This time it's Eric "grown up in the room" Schmidt who gets the kicking. Schmidt appeared before Congress and sombrely informed them that within a few years AI would be soaking up 99% of all current power generation and, therefore, the US should be racing to build power capacity though "renewable, non-renewable, whatever. It needs to be there, and it needs to be there quickly."
Of course, the AI that Schmidt talks about had better be good at writing its own prompts, because increasing energy generation that much in that short an amount of time would require enough non-renewables to come online to cook the planet. But hey, think of how fast it could generate memes.
I'm not a home SAN kind of guy, but those who are tell me that Synology has always been the best choice for anyone wanting to store a lot of stuff locally rather than leaning too much into the cloud. So when I saw that the company is now insisting that customers should be using its own-brand and approved disks rather than anything they want to use, I let out a big sigh. Why can't we have nice things? Oh yeah, capitalism.
Big golf clap to Automattic, the company that has managed to burn away more goodwill thanks to the antics of its CEO than any other bar Tesla. This time, it’s not attempting to betray the spirit of open source software, or using arbitrary systems to control competitors. No, it’s just watermarking documents in an attempt to find who has been leaking stuff to the press.
Here’s a tip to Matt Mullenweg: if you don’t want people to leak, perhaps you should shut up occasionally yourself?
This is a great article about the internet of slop, but this sentence sums up so much of what’s wrong: “Today’s internet isn’t really designed for us, but rather to elicit certain responses from us, responses which are hostile to human flourishing”
Who could possibly have imagined that there would be a thriving market in hacked internet devices which allow you to stream subscription sports (and other channels) without paying? Apart from everyone who has ever read any cyberpunk novel?
In the UK, this is apparently now so common that the police aren’t even going after low-lever sellers – they’re making the usual song and dance about “going after the big fish” and “connections to organised crime” (hint for plod: sooner or later, all crime has “links to organised crime”)
And boy, was Henry Blodget wrong. Nowadays, he’s reduced to making up fake people for attention.
I have to confess that not so long ago I was a little obsessed with smart devices. That’s why virtually every bulb in my house is smart. Look! I can turn them off and on without leaving the sofa! From my PHONE!
And then one day you wake up and you realise that your bedroom light is coming on randomly at 4am and you can’t work out which of the many doohickies in the house or cloud are doing it.
And then the next day, you realise that your thermostat has stopped working despite only being eleven years old, because Google has decided to not bother with it anymore.
And that is why I no longer buy smart anything.
2025-04-18 22:54:44
You know the Macalope, right? The legendary "part man, part Mac, part antelope" of Mac punditry? You don't? Honestly, I think less of you.
Anyway, I don't want to get all judgy about this. But you should read The Macalope's recent column both for its critique of AI and for an addendum to Betteridge's Law of Headlines which I support: "the answer to any Trip Mickle article about Apple is 'NO.', whether the headline is phrased as a question or not."
I'm not ignoring the news that a US judge has found Google has a monopoly on some areas of online advertising, although I will not that taking longer than five minutes to work this out bamboozles the brain. Neither will I focus on the absurd idea that simply because Instagram "was what it was in 2020 because of the investments that Facebook made in the intervening years" made the ownership of Instagram (and WhatsApp!) by Meta any less of a competition issue. "I bought up all the potential competition but hey I didn't just shut it down so that's OK" is quite the viewpoint.
No, what I love the way that Meta has decided that the solution to Facebook's decline -- driven entirely by its own avarice which has degraded the quality of the feed for years -- is to reintroduce, erm, a feed that's just your friends. I mean, sure, that's better than the utter useless hellscape of AI slop, random "recommended" pages and posts and ads (oh so many ads) that we have now. But does anyone believe that in the year of our lord twenty twenty five the best Facebook can do is go back 20 years? Seriously?
Facebook's problem is simple, and it can be summed up in two words: Mark Zuckerberg. A man notably low on empathy who sees the internet as a way to move every stray dollar, pound, euro and yen from your pocket into his pocket, Zuckerberg decided long ago that no one other than him would be allowed any real power the change the company. He's a perfect example of why the theory of the "benevolent dictator for life" in leadership is utter bunk.
A BDFL can work, but not when when that dictator is a billionaire with zero empathy. As Robert Shaw might have put it, "you know the thing about a billionaire is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’…"
What was the golden age of blogs? I would always argue it really got fun sometime around 2005, although I have friends who would say that was when it all went horribly wrong. What's certain is that by 2010 there were a lot of really good, interesting blogs around which created amazing and original posts on just about any topic you wanted to read about.
One of my favourites was Another Nickel in the Machine, a blog which told stories about London's history. It petered out in around 2017, but there are a tonne of great articles on there. One of my favourites was the story of Warren Street, just off Euston Road and a place that will be familiar either because you know the name of the tube station, or you have used it as a cut through to get someone more interesting.
I used to walk down Warren Street every day when I worked at Dennis Publishing, getting out of the tube and walking round to first Bolsover Street then Cleveland Street. When I first started working there, in 1995, Warren Street still had the last remnants of what used to be its main business, buying and selling used cars. There was, I think, one garage still working, and if you looked carefully you could see the semi-hidden frontages of others.
What I didn't know was quite how shady this business had been in the 1950s -- until I read the story of Warren Street and the murder of Stan "The Spiv" Shetty. I think you might enjoy it too.
And it also reminded me of the internet we have lost. Today, if you wanted to create something like this and find an audience, where would you do it? Instagram? TikTok? Another platform full of AI-generated crap and clickbait? The web and blogging democratised publishing. Sadly, the platforms made sure they took back control.
Whether it's deliberate or these little boys are just incredibly stupid, the security damage this is causing will take decades to unpick. At this point, if I was any intelligence agency working with the US, I would regard it as completely compromised.
It’s a pretty astounding statistic, and one that I felt I had to check, but it’s true: the average age of Apple’s board is 68 years old. The youngest member is 63, and well-off enough to have already retired.
This can’t be good for the company, but it’s not telling the whole story. This, after all, is the board of directors and what DHH seems to want to ignore is that, in a company like Apple, the board isn’t making operational decisions and definitely isn’t developing new products. Apart from in exceptional circumstances, the full board only meets four times a year (the independent directors have to meet an additional four times a year without management present.)
So what about Apple’s senior leadership team? After a bit of digging, it looks like the average age of them is around 58 – by coincidence, the same age as me. By comparison, Meta is about 44. For transparency’s sake, DHH and Jason Fried are 45 and 51 respectively, making 37signals somewhere between Meta and Apple.
All of which proves, I think, precisely nothing apart from DHH is happy to cherry pick data when it suits him.
I found myself waxing lyrical the other day about the hyphen, em-dash and en-dash and realised that I sounded like a dinosaur. But apparently their use has been widely claimed to be a “tell” that text is written by AI rather than a human.
And it is true that LLMs love an em-dash, almost as much as they love a bullet point. And boy do they love a bullet point.
But it’s also true that people like me -- who grew up with proper typography -- also love them. Sometimes I’m sloppy and use hyphens or em-dashes or en-dashes interchangeably, but I use them a lot and I can assure that you I am, in fact, human.
Remember when VW got caught cheating on its emissions tests by intentionally programming its diesel engines to activate emissions controls only during laboratory testing, so that it appeared to meet government standards without the pesky process of, you know, actually meeting government standards?
In a case of “hold my beer” it turns out that Tesla has been using similar sneaky tactics to avoid having to meet its warranty commitments. The company is accused of updating the software in its cars to artificially inflate mileage, thus cutting off the 50,000 mile warranty before owners have actually reached 50,000 miles.
Of course, Tesla is ripping off customers directly rather than ripping off governments, so it probably won’t get anything like the $30bn of fines globally that VW was hit with. But it should be. Oh, it really should be.
Once again, the rumours are swirling around that the this year the iPad will get an operating system that doesn’t hobble anyone who wants to do serious work with it or use it as their only computer.
Forgive me if, like Stephen Hackett, I’m sceptical. In fact I would go further: I’m jaded. Maybe Apple will pull a rabbit out of the hat, or maybe it won’t, but I always end up thinking the company has ended up in a situation where it just doesn’t have to try. The iPad is the only game in town if you want a tablet (come on Google and Samsung, you know you’re not kidding anyone). Android on tablet is a joke. It just doesn’t need to do much more than incremental improvements to keep selling iPads by the container load.
I’ve spent a lifetime not only buying but also promoting the new shiny hotness, whatever that was at the time. I’ve written many reviews encouraging people to spend their cash on this year’s Mac, the latest watch, or even that throw-away printer that’s so cheap you might as well dump it rather than get new ink.
For which, of course, I am profoundly sorry.
Perhaps I’m coming to this -- or rediscovering it -- late in life but I love repair culture now, and that’s why I really enjoyed this article about the “frankenlaptops” made by Indian repair technicians. The tide on repairability was turning, but I am afraid legal efforts in the US to force manufacturers to make products easier to fix and update are likely to stall with the Great Orange Tyrant in power. So I guess it’s up to us now.
2025-04-12 20:49:55
You might have noticed that it's been the 50th anniversary of Microsoft, and the company held an event which was interrupted by protests from the company's own employees about its involvement in selling tech to Israel. Actually, you might not have noticed that because an awful lot of sites chose not to cover it, or chose to minimise it to a couple of lines.
I've never seen a protest like that at an event, which probably indicates quite how much we are living in interesting times. But while the times are different, so are the companies themselves. Paul Thurrott wrote a good article about how the Microsoft of today is not the same as the Microsoft of the past, but the same is true of Apple. Even a company that has always been fairly obviously odious – Facebook, I'm looking at you – used to be relatively benign in its impact. Now, it's killing kids and not bothering too much about it.
Perhaps that's always been more obvious in Europe, which has had some long-standing beefs with the big tech companies. But Europe has also always been fairly content with the status quo of the US having effective control over the technology platforms that we all use. The European Union has been happy enough to try and reign in what big tech does, without challenging the American monopolies with actual products.
The radical randomness of Donald Trump's policies seem to have undermined that delicate balance, and now we have a situation where as well as the potential for a trade war, we have a tech war brewing too. Many people here are asking if "Europe’s reliance on American tech not just a competitiveness problem but a critical national security vulnerability?" As Henry Farrell writes, the dependence of Starlink for defence is the most obvious thing, but there are others. When every copy of Windows requires that you have a Microsoft account, the potential for a malicious US to cause tech chaos for the rest of the world is huge. That's not to say that Microsoft itself would cause issues, but it's an American company, and we have seen this year just how vulnerable American democracy really is.
Another thing that the current crisis has illustrated is how far out of their depth technology leaders when it comes to politics. They expected their support for Trump to buy them something, whether that support was the hundreds of millions which Elon Musk poured in to the Orange Dictator's campaign or the million dollar donations they put into this inauguration.
Instead, they have got tariffs which will impact hardware makers like Apple directly and induce a recession. The uncertainty created by Trump's constant flip-flops mean that businesses will be cautious about spending money, hurting advertising-driven companies like Google and Facebook.
There are two kinds of extortionist: the ones that keep to their word, and the ones that don't. Tech leaders are quickly finding out that Trump falls into the latter camp. While I love the schadenfreude involved, I don't think the price was worth paying.
You can bet that quite a few of the PayPal Mafia, for example, are now waiting for Trump to keel over from the inevitable heart attack and get their boy Vance on the throne. The problem with electing someone who wants to be king is, well, kings are never predictable.
How could they have been so blind and stupid? It's worth remembering that the techbro worldview is shaped by two tenets:
Except that when you back and elect someone who believes "l'etat, c'est moi", and is prepared simply to ignore the law to do what he wants, neither of those things can or will be true. Zero interest rates are not coming back if Trump succeeds in his grand project of deglobalisation, and it turns out that state power wielded by a king has a lot of impact. The likes of Peter Thiel should have known this, but what they didn't realise is in Trump's world, there is only room for one king: King Donald.
Of course, the economic theory which underlies Trump's tariffs is less a theory than a fantasy. It's a view of America straight out of a Normal Rockwell painting, a longing for a world which hasn't existed for forty years or more. You can see this when you look at what manufacturing something like an iPhone in the US would actually involve. It's not just that it would cost twice as much: it's that it's just not really possible.
The iPhone, like many tech products, can only really exist in a globalised world with few trade barriers. You can shift where things are assembled around, but no single country has the economic capability to design and construct something so complex, with such diverse parts, all by themselves. As Apple's supply chain web page notes, its products are “Designed by Apple in California. Made by people everywhere.”
We're all, though, guilty of trying to recreate a semi-mythical past and I think to a certain degree developers are guilty of taking that view when comparing how they interacted with Apple in the past versus the present. Apple was always a bit of a shit to deal with, but it was also exciting. Hitching your wagon to Apple platforms – particularly, of course, the iPhone – meant you had the chance to reach users who were both high spending and appreciated good design. What did it matter if sometimes someone got Sherlocked?
That said, Matthew Bickham's essay about the increasingly hostile way that Apple interacts with developers is well worth a read. Apple may have occasionally shanked some poor programmer to build a feature into the Mac, but the company no longer really needs developers at all. And certainly, it doesn't need the kind of companies who only work on the Mac, taking full advantage of their platforms' capabilities. They would rather have a ChatGPT or TikTok than an OmniFocus or Magic Lasso. Apple is too big to fail, which means it's too big to care.
Perhaps the company will learn the lesson that it can't make everything itself from its struggles with Siri. In some ways, it's the perfect example of what happens when a company no longer has to really care about the user experience of its applications. Siri is bad. But no third party can sweep in and replace it on everyone's iPhones. You can't, say, switch to Google's Gemini. So why care that Siri is bad? There's no real cost to Apple, and no real benefit to getting it right.
Some time this summer, BBC Radio 4 will cease transmitting on long wave. For some people – me included – this will be a minor blip, accompanied by a little bit of nostalgia for a childhood which involved late night secretive radio listening under the bed covers.
But for about 600,000 homes around the UK, it also means something slightly different: electricity meters will, which no longer work. The Radio Teleswitch Service (RTS) runs over long wave, and effectively tells hundreds of thousands of meters when to change from one tariff to another. It's a simple and incredibly reliable system -- unlike smart meters, which use the internet instead and are liable to things like random charging errors.
How many times do we hear about a simple, resilient system being replaced by something which doesn't work as well, but which offers more commercial opportunities. All the time, my friends. All the time.
Higher education in the UK is in what you might call "a bit of a state". But the problems for higher education globally go deeper. Lack of reading and writing skills. Using ChatGPT, not just as a tool to help research and interrogate ideas, but just to do the work. Chronic absenteeism from classes, with the expectation that lecturers will spoon-feed them. It's a mess.
Patti Smith, writing in 2017 about the death of her friend Sam Shepard. I wish I could write this well.
Have a splendid week, lovely people.
2025-04-05 04:07:13
Was there really an idyllic time when technology wasn't political? Almost certainly not: anything capable of changing the world, as tech does, is always going to be subsumed by ideology.
And that's not a bad thing. Ideology is the way we govern power, and ungoverned power corrupts anyone and anything it touches. No one is immune.
Perhaps that's why the Trump era -- and I am trying not to write much about the man -- is a story of technology as well as corruption and duplicity. We have a generation of technology leaders who have been corrupted by power that was ungoverned for a long time. So here we are.
Anyway, on to the links.
Live. In front of plenty of people. Yowzah.
Despite being able to cherry-pick the technology of OpenAI, Microsoft Copilot has always felt like an also-ran. Around that powerful protest, the company announced many new features, but few of them sounded like anything that isn't available elsewhere.
Microsoft's bet is it can do a better job of user experience than anyone else, as it's able to build AI into Windows, Office, and all the rest of its products. I think it has a chance, mainly because OpenAI and everyone else are just so bad at user interfaces.
Thanks to the Trump-induced stock market crash, both Klarna and StubHub are delaying their IPOs, which means a delayed (and possibly reduced) payday for the VCs who put millions into them. Of course, this means they will be out by a few millions, they won't really miss. Meanwhile, the people whose pensions have just seen all the gains of the last few years wiped out have a lot less to lose in terms of cash, but a lot more to lose in terms of financial security.
But the VCs have more to lose than just a short-term delay on an IPO. Jason Koebler at 404Media expertly skewers the same Trump-supporting VCs, whose president has implemented measures that will hurt them a lot over the long term. Tariffs mean less money spent by ordinary people, which hits the potential for growth of new companies. The tech industry has thrived on cheap labour and low-cost assembly, which will be impossible if Trump succeeds in moving manufacture back to the US (hint: he won't).
And of course, the agencies, and people who the tech sector relied on to give them help and quiet subsidies are now either being gutted, or looking for a way to leave America. The billionaires may just be about to get a lesson in how dependent they are on all the people who they have thought were expendable.
Also, bad for the VC and big tech classes: the rest of the world no longer sees them as reliable partners. In Europe, the desire for tech sovereignty -- up to now a fringe movement -- is getting support from mainstream politicians. It would be ironic if the hubris of the likes of Zuckerberg ended with their influence and power waning.
Expect from pushback from the US over this. But at this point I can't see the EU backing down. In fact, I see this as Europe flexing its muscles and reminding both Musk and the US that they're a set of sovereign nation states, and that in union there is strength.
Once again, the European Commission is desperate to be able to break encryption, despite the French National Assembly rejecting a bid to force backdoors into services.
Reading all this, looking at the impact of so much madness from Trump, much of it either using technology or encouraged by some of the biggest names in tech, there's only one obvious thing to ask: why? It is, as Hamilton Nolan points out, against the interest of all Trump's rich backers and of capitalism itself. It's a great piece, and well worth your time.
2025-03-29 23:43:52
Another great piece by Cory Doctorow – who is essential reading – on how the so-called “Khanservatives” (anti-big tech Trumpists) have apparently lost the internal battle with the pro-techbros wing. I always thought Cory’s optimism that they might continue the fine work done by Lina Khan at the FTC was trying to look too hard for a silver lining to the Trumpist cloud, but I can’t blame him for holding on to some hope that the most effective antitrust team of the last 50 years might win out.
In fact, as Cory notes, not only have the tech billionaires won, they are attempting to use American power to ensure that no one in the world can regulate them. That is something we really can’t allow, despite the best efforts of the UK Labour Party. So much for the “sovereignty” that Brexit bought.
This article on “AI: The new aesthetics of fascism” by Gareth Watkins has got a lot of attention, but I have mixed feelings about it. I think my first issue is the notion that what the far right does with AI-generated images is art at all. Not all mark making is art. Leni Riefenstahl was an artist and a fascist, and made fascist art – but not everything created every time some lackey of Goebbels picked up a camera was art.
And some of what Gareth says is just weirdly wrong. For example, “for its right-wing adherents, the absence of humans is a feature, not a bug, of AI art.” Leaving aside (again) that problematic usage of “art”, there is no absence of humans when someone (clue’s in the word) uses an AI tool. What there is is an absence of a lot of human labour and craft. And I think that’s more important to Gareth’s thesis than pretending no human was involved.
Then there’s stuff like this: “Where mechanically produced art used to draw attention to its artificiality… AI art pretends to realism.” Really? Does “make a picture in the style of Studio Ghibli” really pretend to realism?
There’s a good argument about the politics of AI striving to get out from Gareth’s article, but it’s constantly undermined by sloppy thinking like this. Of course, generative LLM-based AI is an attempt to remove workers from the picture, to replace workers who are free with capital that can be owned – that’s been a trend since the invention of capitalism! But in trying to stretch this to a point about art, aesthetics and why it’s favoured by the right, Gareth misses the mark. It’s not about aesthetics: it’s about capital.
If you want to read something that might be a prompt to think about all this, and in particular why it’s all really about kittens, you might want to read “Is accelerationism the same as falling in love?” Think of the use of AI image generation as connected to the “right accelerationist” wing of online culture (and yes, all this is very terminally online in a way that old people like myself find it difficult to fathom). Warning: this is dense.
For about a year, I have had the title “what would it mean to create a computer to last 100 years” in my notebook. Finally, I don’t have to actually write that because Thomas Hunter has basically done it for me.
Elon Musk’s xAI, which has almost no revenue, has acquired Elon Musk’s X, it’s only customer, for $33bn in its own shares. Got that? A company which makes no money has “acquired” a company that its founder owns for a price that’s essentially made up.
Capitalism, eh?
What this really means is that the ability of X — formerly Twitter — to inflate its share price and make Musk richer on paper is pretty limited. Social media is not the new hot stock, and with X’s revenues declining, it’s not even stable. Much better to effectively swap that stock for shares in an AI company, which, while having even less revenue, is hotness is share price terms.
How does that work? Well, the combined entity is worth, on paper, $113bn - $80bn for xAI and $33bn for X. That $33bn will now inflate the rate of the rest of the “hot” AI stock, significantly more than it would just as a social media company. It’s nonsense, of course, but if you like to grow magic beans it’s a good strategy.
Why does Musk care about “on paper” wealth through shares, which aren’t traded? Because, like many people whose wealth is tied up in stocks, he has borrowed vast amounts of money using shares as collateral. Borrowing against X stock was basically impossible, as it was already leveraged to, erm, pay for its own purchase. Borrowing against Tesla is harder currently, as it’s not exactly looking healthy. Borrowing against SpaceX? Well, the recent failures of the Starship rocket won’t have helped there.
But borrowing against an AI stock? Bingo.
No, really. Truly, we have entered the universe of Nathan Barley: “they babble into their hand held twit machines about that video of a woman being bummed by a wolf”.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about Europe getting out from under the US defensive system. The notion of disabled F35s tumbling from the sky is far-fetched, but ensuring that European weapons don’t require US permission seems sensible in a world where Trump is mumbling about invading Greenland.
But what’s also worrying many is the dependency of Europe on US tech stacks. Every single mainstream operating system and most of the dominant digital services are US-owned and operated, with data that flows into US servers. In the current climate, that doesn’t seem wise either.
Hence, the timely proposal for EU OS, a KDE-based immutable Linux distribution designed to replace our dependency on Windows and so on. While the base chosen — Fedora — is also US-based, it’s open source, so it could be forked.
More important, over the long term, is probably the development of more services which are European-based and owned. There are some about: Switzerland’s Proton, and Nextcloud is largely European too. But it’s a lot of work — and most likely a lot of money — to push them more to the mainstream.
One of the characteristics of a technology bubble is that large corporate IT customers suddenly need to have “a strategy” for adopting whatever the bubble is. This is largely down to HBR-reading executives who have remarkably little experience in technology – studies indicate that between 20-30% of CEOs come from a finance background, with remarkably few coming from tech. CEOs read about the new tech hotness, demand a strategy, and away we go.
And that is probably one of the reasons why employees don’t share the enthusiasm of executives for AI, to a remarkably high degree. Less than half (45%) of employees — versus 75% of the C-suite — think their company's AI rollout in the last 12 months has been successful. Only 57% of employees say that their company even has an AI strategy — but 89% of the C-suite believes they do. Of course, many people believe that AI is coming for their jobs, but those who have encountered AI at work point out that it just doesn’t work well. Because, well, it doesn’t.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m AI-agnostic, in the sense that I think LLMs can be a terrific tool to remove some of the most dull mental work, leaving time for people to use their brains for creativity. But currently, it’s clear that the C-suite often thinks it’s the creative stuff that can be replaced with AI. That’s possible – but if you do, you’re going to lose any competitive advantage you once had.
It’s nearly ten years since the first time a SpaceX rocket landed vertically, something which looked spectacularly cool. But nearly twenty years before that, the McDonnell Douglas DC-X – a rocket which far fewer people know about – did much of the groundwork for understanding the potential for vertical landing.
DC-X had an interesting birth. Pitched by science fiction writer and computer journalist Jerry Pournelle to vice president Dan Quayle, the aim was to build something small and relatively cheap using as many off the shelf parts as possible. And the intention was that it would be reusable, with a very short time between landing and being made ready to take off again. This would dramatically reduce the cost of putting something in orbit.
It’s a fascinating story, and one of those “what ifs” which could have changed how space flight evolved.
Setting up a Windows PC takes a while. Unless you are careful, it will also involve giving Microsoft the ability to track your location, use all your browsing data to sell you advertising, and more. It’s basically an OS that’s designed to identify and track you, in some ways worse than Google’s ChromeOS.
You also need to log in using a Microsoft account, at least officially. But there has always been a way to sidestep that requirement. Until now. Because we can't have good things.
2025-03-23 03:40:00
It’s easy to blame Elon Musk’s politics for Tesla’s issues – if being a drug addled Nazi with a penchant for rash, inept decisions can be referred to as “politics”. But it’s not the only factor. The past year has seen it face tough competition for the first time, notably from the likes of China’s BYD. That company recently announced a new charging system capable of delivering 250 miles of range in just five minutes, which – if it pans out – would be a lot faster than Tesla’s superchargers.
Perhaps most important of all, though, the stock has been overpriced for years. At 100 times its earnings, even after recent falls, Tesla shares are priced far more highly than anything else in the automotive industry. To deliver on this value, Tesla would not just have to become the biggest carmaker, it would have to take over half the global car market. That was never likely, and it’s even more unlikely now that other car companies have caught up and overtaken Tesla in EVs.
Maybe there is a pattern here: perhaps companies headed by Musk start off fast out of the blocks, but then collapse under the weight of his egotistical demands.
Take, SpaceX, for example. You might have noticed it has been having a little trouble with Starship, the big rocket which is not only designed to be the super-heavy lifter of Elon’s dreams, but forms part of the NASA plan to get back to the Moon.
Unfortunately, Starship’s problems are more than teething problems. As this article explains, it ran slap bang into something that trumps (ho ho) even Elon’s self-belief: physics. To get rid of the momentum of an orbital rocket (17,500mph) it needs to handle some hefty manoeuvres as it reenters the atmosphere, before it lands vertically. That means it needs to be more robust and heavier, and – to add to the fun – it turned out that Elon’s much-vaunted engines produced nowhere near enough thrust to reach orbit with the claimed payload.
Ooops.
All of this could have been (and was) predicted from the start, and could have been avoided had the company used half-scale prototypes to understand some of the issues. But it didn’t because Elon. And here we are – not on the way to the Moon.
I wonder if Tim Cook thought that donating $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund would mean the World’s Flakiest President™ would mean he would go into bat against Europe for Apple. If he did, he should probably ask for a refund because Trump hasn’t said a word about the latest mandate that Apple open up many of its systems to enable third-party devices to interoperate at the same level as its own. While John Gruber notes that the tenor of the announcements has changed – it’s much less bullish, more matter of fact – the core remains that “the EU isn’t backing down from its general position of seeing itself as the rightful decision-maker for how iOS should function and be engineered, and that Apple’s core competitive asset—making devices that work better together than those from other companies—isn’t legal under the DMA.”
And he’s right! But I would rephrase it: Apple has made deliberately ensuring that other companies' peripherals cannot work as well as its own a core competitive asset. Where I suspect I disagree with John is that this is precisely the kind of thing that I think governments should stop when companies have large degrees of control over markets.
I love the way my AirPods work so seamlessly with my iPhone and Mac. But you know what I would love more? Not having to buy Apple headphones to get the same experience. I’d probably still buy AirPods, but I very much like the choice. Is Apple afraid of the competition?
David Pierce loves Kagi, and so do I. It costs $10 a month, but in return, there are no ads, no AI summaries (unless you want to turn them on) and no tracking. It feels like Google did ten years ago, when the results you got weren’t dominated by stuff that Google wants you to see, rather than you wish to see. Recommended.
This is just a lovely piece of writing. I’m not anti-AI, but a vision of the future which is the kind of gleaming perfection of AI visionaries – “all watched over by machines of loving grace” – doesn’t appeal to me. I like the messiness of our humanity.
Even though I’m AI-agnostic, there are clear dangers to the technology. They are not the obvious ones – use of energy, getting things wrong when you use them as a search replacement – because to me most of these can be solved in time.
Instead, the biggest danger comes from the complexity and opacity, which makes them vulnerable to manipulation, either deliberately or otherwise. And of course, if there’s one group of people who have become adept in manipulation, it’s the far right. The first step of this is usually a call to “remove bias”, and lo and behold, that’s what Trump is already doing by implementing directives on “AI fairness” – which means, of course, making sure AI spews out right wing talking points.
What’s the connection between gambling companies and the right-wing grifters offering easy solutions to young disaffected men? Both encourage blaming your problems on people like you. “If we want to reach those lost boys and turn them around, we need to stop lying about what makes them such easy marks for a very old, and very transparent, set of cons.”
The Verge is doing such good work that barely a week goes by without me including them, but I couldn’t miss out on this article by Elizabeth Lopatto on how Musk and Trump built their own reality. What binds them together is the replacement of reality with spectacle: “The proclivity for spectacle is the thing Musk and Trump truly have in common, though the media they target is different: Musk is an online guy, and Trump was forged in reality TV.”
Essentially, reality is boring for them, so why settle for it? The problem for us is we end up living in the spectacle they create.
Bill Gates has revealed that Satya Nadella nearly got passed over for the CEO job at Microsoft. Gates doesn’t mention who was against the appointment – he says he was for – or who the other options were. But it’s definitely a sliding doors moment, as it’s easy to see how someone else might not have made the big decisions that Nadella has.
Yeah, I know, I was surprised too. What I always find interesting is how many products got bought by Yahoo and then floundered in limbo for long periods of time. Flickr, Tumblr, Huffington Post – all felt the heavy hand of Yahoo ownership, and all saw promising growth sink into the abyss. Good luck to them.
