My family and I ate a reasonable amount of chocolate this weekend, which is to say a copious amount!

Google’s self-designed office swallows Wi-Fi “like the Bermuda Triangle”

Ron Amadeo writing for Ars Technica Having an office with barely working Wi-Fi sure is awkward for a company pushing a “return to office” plan that includes at least three days a week at Google’s Wi-Fi desert.

Once More With Feeling: Banning TikTok Doesn’t Do Much If We Don’t Regulate Data Brokers And Pass A Privacy Law

Karl Bode writing for TechDirt You could ban TikTok with a patriotic flourish from the heavens immediately, but if we fail to regulate data brokers, pass a privacy law, or combat corruption, Chinese (or Russian, or Iranian) intelligence can simply turn around and buy that same data (and detailed profiles of American consumers) from an unlimited parade of different data brokers, telecoms, app makers, marketing companies, or services.

A Roku Terms of Service Update Locks Up Your TV Until You Agree

Scharon Harding writing for Wired If you want to opt out of the new “Dispute Resolution Terms,” you have to write a letter. I never really liked Roku.

I hate daylight saving time…

Google says the AI-focused Pixel 8 can’t run its latest smartphone AI models

Ron Amadeo writing for Ars Technica We’re five months removed from the launch of the Pixel 8, and that doesn’t seem like a justifiable position anymore: Google says its latest AI models can’t run on the Pixel 8. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Deadpool & Wolverine | Official Teaser

Looking forward to this!

LastPass Rip-Off Named ‘LassPass’ Made It Into the App Store

John Gruber writing over at Daring Fireball But what’s the counterargument? That anything short of 100 percent accuracy at flagging scams and rip-offs renders the entire App Store review process pointless? That if, say, 1 in every 1,000 scam attempts slips through, the entire process should be scrapped? That argument can’t be taken seriously. Best take I’ve seen on this whole situation.

YouTube says a Vision Pro app is ‘on the roadmap’

Nilay Patel writing for The Verge This of course follows YouTube, Spotify, and Netflix all declining to allow their iPad apps to run on the Vision Pro before launch — and the last time we asked, there was no mention of a proper visionOS YouTube app coming in the future, so something’s changed in Mountain View. (One theory: the immediate popularity of Christian Selig’s Juno app for YouTube on the Vision Pro.)

Looking forward to the time when I have to explain to my in-laws that in order to install that app that they want on their iPhone they’ll have to download and sign up for the Facebook App Store, oh, but not that Facebook App Store, that’s a fake one. But this is all good and better because it’s more open now and you have more choice. Yes, you’ll have to give your credit card information to the Facebook App Store before you can download that free app.

Full, automatic podcast transcripts coming to iOS 17.4

Jason Snell writing at Six Colors By default, Apple’s backend systems will find a new episode of a podcast and transcribe it. When a new podcast episode drops, the transcript won’t be available right away—but will appear once Apple has had a chance to consume it.

Language Is a Poor Heuristic for Intelligence

Great post by Karawynn Long on LLMs and language as a sign of intelligence over on their Nine Lives newsletter. Everyone should definitely read it, but here’s a few of my favourite quotes: “Language skill indicates intelligence,” and its logical inverse, “lack of language skill indicates non-intelligence,” is a common heuristic with a long history. It is also a terrible one, inaccurate in a way that ruinously injures disabled people. Now, with recent advances in computing technology, we’re watching this heuristic fail in ways that will harm almost everyone.

This just seems dumb to me, but I guess to each their own.

'Most sophisticated' iPhone attack chain 'ever seen' used four 0-days to create a 0-click exploit - 9to5Mac

Over at 9to5Mac But interestingly, Larin, Bezvershenko, and Kucherin note there is a mystery remaining when it comes to CVE-2023-38606 that they’d like help with. Specifically, it’s not clear how attackers would have known about the hidden hardware feature: We are publishing the technical details, so that other iOS security researchers can confirm our findings and come up with possible explanations of how the attackers learned about this hardware feature.

Green Day Changes 'American Idiot' Lyrics to Slam 'MAGA Agenda'

Julyssa Lopez writing for Rolling Stone Frontman Billie Joe Armstrong drew cheers from the live audience when he sang out, “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda” during his performance. The original line is, “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda.” ❤️ Green Day!

We finished the first season of The Wheel of Time and have started working our way through the second. I really like it, hopefully there’s a third season coming.

GM’s CarPlay replacement software is off to a disastrous start - 9to5Mac

Chance Miller writing for 9to5Mac Some of the early real-world reviews of the 2024 Chevy Blazer EV have emerged, and it certainly doesn’t sound like GM’s “Ultifi” infotainment software is ready for prime time. I don’t suspect this will get any better anytime soon.

Beeper is giving up on its iMessage dream

Emma Roth writing for The Verge What started as a simple app download in Beeper Mini has become an increasingly complex process for Beeper users, and its latest fix seems like its most desperate attempt yet: Beeper wants users to own or rent a jailbroken iPhone, along with having a Mac or Linux computer. I think it’s safe to say Beeper Mini is no more.

Some things I think Apple’s new Journal app needs:

macOS and iPadOS support - the iPhone is fine for short, quick entries, but I want to be able to use a keyboard for those longer entries.
Weather information - I like capturing the weather with my entires, temperature, conditions, they just add a bit to the memory.
Export capabilities - Some way of getting the entries out of the app. Even something as basic as save to PDF would be enough for me.

2023 Gingerbread House

Annual gingerbread house decorating complete.

Been playing a lot of #Destiny2 since the new season launched. The new coil activity is a lot of fun. Think I’ll play some #BaldursGate3 this weekend though, I want to progress my Dark Urge playthrough.

Netflix In Talks For Gigantic Fantasy Adaptation

Michileen Martin writing for Giant Freaking Robot We don’t know yet if the Baldur’s Gate project Netflix has in mind is a series and/or movie, though narratively speaking the former would seem to make the most sense. Not counting the early 2010s remakes of the Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II, the series spans nine games and over a century of story. I’d love to see this happen!

Apple has seemingly found a way to block Android’s new iMessage app

Chris Welch writing for The Verge It appears that Beeper Mini, an easy iMessage solution for Android, was simply too good to be true — or a short-lived dream, at least. On Friday, less than a week after its launch, the app started experiencing technical issues when users were suddenly unable to send and receive blue bubble messages. The problems grew worse over the course of the day, with reports piling up on the Beeper subreddit. Several people at The Verge were unable to activate their Android phone numbers with Beeper Mini as of Friday afternoon, a clear indication that Apple has plugged up whatever holes allowed the app to operate to begin with.

There’s a new iMessage for Android app — and it actually works

Jacob Kastrenakes writing for The Verge Messages sent from Beeper Mini on my Pixel 8 appear as blue bubbles on the iPhones of my friends and family members. Group chats I’m on automatically switched over to iMessage as soon as someone fired off a meme. Reactions, threads, photos, and videos (without the messy text message compression) all came through. The best thing I can say about Beeper Mini is that almost no one noticed I was using it: blue bubbles just started appearing — no lost messages to speak of.

Chrome’s next weapon in the War on Ad Blockers: Slower extension updates

Ron Amadeo writing for Ars Technica Google’s first attack on ad blockers is blowing up the “WebRequest API”—the primary API that ad blockers use—and replacing it with a more limited filtering API that Google has more control over. The new declarativeNetRequest API now has extensions ask Chrome to block a network request on their behalf, features arbitrary limits on the number of filtering rules, and puts limits on how effective individual rules can be.