Marques Brownlee gets a look at the Disney Holotile
This is the first video I’ve seen that explains how these things actually work. Like Marques, I’m excited for the future of this tech.
X-Men ‘97 Lego Intro
The Long Comics History Behind X-Men's Sentinel Program
For all those enjoying the new X-Men ‘97 cartoon I liked this article from Gizmodo.
Since almost the very beginning, the X-Men and their people have been hunted by the Sentinel Program—and now X-Men ‘97 is playing with that legacy too.
The sentinels have always been my favourite X-Men villains. Probably because I grew up watching the original X-Men cartoon and they were featured pretty heavily in that.
This whole YouTube, AppleTV, screensaver thing really pisses me off. Why the fuck does Google think I want to see some random bullshit from YouTube rather than my photos on the screen as a screensaver!?
Does everything need to be an ad?
Joe Rosensteel writing for Six Colors
Last week, YouTube rolled out a new version of its app for Apple TV. It overrides the screensaver by starting a slideshow just before the Apple TV’s screensaver is supposed to come on. If you’re watching a video, it’ll be an endless loop zooming into the video’s thumbnail and fading to black. If you were just paused somewhere in the app’s interface, it’ll be stills taken from a random assortment of YouTube videos on nature, or stills from drone footage.
Premier Doug Ford, Ontario medical group warn Ottawa’s capital-gains tax increase will hurt doctors
Laura Stone and Marieke Walsh writing for The Globe and Mail (Apple News+ Link)
“I’ve been getting more messages from doctors than ever before this morning,” Mr. Ford said at an unrelated news conference in Oakville, Ont., west of Toronto.
Don’t tell me Ford is all of a sudden concerned about doctors. He’s concerned for his coporate donors and developer buddies who are going to be impacted by this.
Elon Musk’s X botched an attempt to replace “twitter.com” links with “x.com”
Jon Brodkin writing for Ars Technica
Security reporter Brian Krebs called the move “a gift to phishers” in an article yesterday. It was a phishing risk because scammers could register a domain name like “netflitwitter.com,” which would appear as “netflix.com” in posts on X, but clicking the link would take a user to netflitwitter.com.
This is something you’d expect from a high school computer science assignment, not a company that’s supposed to be worth $44 billion.
Facebook Notifications
I have Facebook notifications set to deliver in the scheduled summary. It’s worked fine for a long time, but now all of a sudden I’m getting these notifications each day. These are not time sensitive Facebook.
Needless to say I’ve disabled Facebook’s ability to send me “time sensitive” notifications.
Destiny 2 is getting a surprise new subclass and a lot more in The Final Shape
Ryan Gilliam writing at Polygon:
The star of the trailer is the new Prismatic subclass, which allows players to combine all of the other game’s subclasses into one. Bungie calls this an “advanced” subclass, and it looks like it’ll offer an entirely new way to play. Prismatic Guardians even gain the ability to use a super-powered grenade that combines darkness and light together. Other subclasses will be getting grenades as well that combine elements: stasis and void for Warlocks; strand and arc for Titans; and solar and statis for Hunters.
The #eclipse was pretty amazing. Completely overcast, but when totality happened, everything went dark, like all of a sudden it was the middle of the night. At the horizon it looked like sunset.
YouTube CEO warns OpenAI that training models on its videos is against the rules
Sarah Fielding writing for Engadget
Now, YouTube’s CEO Neal Mohan has responded with a clear warning to OpenAI that using its videos to teach Sora would be a “clear violation” of the platform’s terms of use.
That’s pretty rich coming from Google.
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.