stephen.nyc

Tag: Technology

  • Salesforce shuttering Slack’s remote work research group Future Forum amid back-to-office push

    From Kylie Robison & Jane Thier at Yahoo Finance:

    On Friday, the executive leader of the Future Forum, Brian Elliot, wrote “there’s no easy way to say this” to employees in Slack’s internal #friends-of-future-forum channel, disclosing that the company planned to shut down the research group at the end of March, according to screenshots of the message seen by Fortune. He did not cite a reason for the closure, and a Slack spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.

    “I believe this is what’s best for Slack,” Elliot wrote, adding that the company will continue its investment in research around the future of work, but did not describe details for what lies ahead for the consortium.

    At the launch of Future Forum in September 2020, Elliot wrote a blog post that outlined its mission, citing “the sudden move to remote work provides the opportunity to question decades of orthodoxy about a 9-to-5, office-centric, homogeneous work culture.”

    Shutting down Future Forum, makes zero sense. Clearly the business knows there’s money to made from remote work. Especially considering the CEO made moves to acquire Slack for $27B back in 2021. This is either cowardice or poor management. Even more confounding, Marc Benioff seriously believes folks who work remotely are less productive.

  • Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Deep Voodoo raise $20M investment

    Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Deep Voodoo raise $20M investment

    The duo’s deepfake studio raised a combined $20M investment from Connect Ventures, Creative Artists Agency and New Enterprise Associates. The deepfake studio opened its doors in 2020 according to TechCrunch:

    The Parker/Stone cachet showed when the company made its public debut alongside no lesser a personage than Kendrick Lamar. The video for “The Heart Part 5” has the musician delivering his lyrics in seemingly one take, but when he addresses the camera directly his face takes on the aspects of others: OJ Simpson, Nipsey Hussle, Kobe Bryant and Kanye West:

    It comes as no surprise that this technology, is making its way to Hollywood and artists. Deepfake studios are the next logical step. There has always been a symmetry between the porn industry and Hollywood.

  • The Apple Stores last headphone heads

    The Apple Stores last headphone heads

    Michael Steeber runs an awesome blog called Tabletops. It features stories and analysis of Apple Store’s visual displays and floor designs. His latest post caught my eye. Apple Stores used to feature wooden “headphone heads” in their music bays. I always thought they were quite striking, but it sounds like Apple is phasing them out:

    The Music bay, complete with its rows of spherical wooden heads, was part of the original set of Avenues introduced in 2015. It was perfectly suited for the on-ear Beats era and predated AirPods entirely. Apple began phasing out the display in June 2021, but at least two stores are still holding on: Apple Park Visitor Center, with its custom Apple Music display, and Apple Upper East Side, the first store in the world to pilot Avenues.

  • Lucasfilm’s 1983 image, The Road to Point Reyes took one month to render

    Lucasfilm’s 1983 image, The Road to Point Reyes took one month to render

    From The Computer Museum:

    One of the most significant static images in the history of computer graphics, The Road to Point Reyes is one of Lucasfilm’s most important early projects. Begun in 1983, Rob Cook directed the image and conceived the scene, while Alvy Ray Smith, Loren Carpenter, Tom Porter, Bill Reeves, and David Salesin provided various elements including shading, hidden surface routines, and fractals. The single image, which Smith has described as a ‘one-frame Movie,’ took a month to render, and was eventually displayed at The Computer Museum in Boston.

  • The End of the Silicon Valley Myth

    Over the past decade, Silicon Valley has prioritized profit, market expansion, and extracting maximum profits over safety. The promise of democratizing technology has come to an end.

    theatlantic.com

  • Ecosia and carbon offets

    Ecosia is a non-profit web search engine (powered by Bing), dedicated to planting trees from the profits of web search ads. It’s pretty ingenious. According to TechCrunch, it’s pretty popular in Europe. It’s not a total panacea for climate-change, and it rightly so is criticized for greenwashing, since the organization itself isn’t even planting the trees:

    Ecosia also isn’t planting trees for carbon offsetting — another measure that’s frequently framed as climate action but has been extensively criticized as greenwashing.

    There’s a whole episode of Last Week Tonight dedicated to carbon offsets. Carbon offsets are suspect and a victim of their own success. The entire concept has been commandeered and ensnared by shady marketing. Company executive pine to be viewed as a climate-righteous leader in their space and yearn to be viewed as a “climate-conscious company.” More often than not, these companies use third-party companies (called offset brokers) to offset their footprint. Unsurprisingly, this ends up begin abused by offset brokers bullshit promises and inflated claims:

    So, is using Ecosia worth it? Maybe. Maybe not. It appears that Google, DuckDuckGo and even Microsoft/Bing are all carbon offsetting. So no matter who you choose to search the web with, you’re participating in some sort of carbon offset program. The real question remains, just how much of your carbon offset is bullshit or not?

  • So long Twitter, hello fediverse

    So long Twitter, hello fediverse

    For as long as I’ve known the web, I have known the little textarea element. It’s a simple element. In all likelihood, it’s just about as ubiquitous as the input tag on websites. It’s a captivating little thing. Before the modern inventions of React or complex JavaScript libraries, all it ever really contained was text.

    I suppose that’s the case to this today. But, it has long evolved into a springboard for authoring webpages. Modern publication inventions such as tweets, blogs, posts, blocks and countless others all stem from the textarea (sprinkle in some JavaScript magic, some drop zones and you have yourself a little “composer” where you can add images, video and more).

    Looking over the W3C spec for the textarea and looking back on SMS character limits (they were varied to say the least), it doesn’t take much imagination to see why Twitter came about in the first place. It seemed that short-form blogging was always destined to become a thing. Twitter’s success can largely be attributed to the fact that there’s really a lack of competition in the short-form blogging space.

    Tumblr and WordPress have always occupied the space between short and long-form blogging, sure. But, the spiritual successor to status messages (aka away messages)? Twitter has owned that (and marketed themselves as such) ever since it became a mainstream social network.

    While Twitter’s previous management has a long and well-documented history of running this company into the ground, Musk maintains no exception either. He’s nosediving and it’s headed for a calamitous user exodus. With no Trust & Safety board and a hostile CEO at the helm, banning tweets to Mastodon, banning journalists, then re-instating some of them — he’s clearly on a tyrannical, pathetic war path toward creating a platform that benefits Elon, elites and promotes a right-wing stochastic terrorist echo chamber.

    Needless to say, I’m getting the heck out of dodge. Like many others before me, I am kissing my neat little Twitter handle goodbye. Meanwhile, I was enthralled and delighted by Matt Mullenweg’s Decoder interview. There’s a brief point where he discusses what it means to be a good steward of Tumblr and how it has humbled him. Between Automattic’s Tumblr, the fediverse and this blog (which is also powered by WordPress an Automattic invention), I’m absolutely delighted to leave Twitter behind. Not to mention, the kind folks at Tumblr are considering adding ActivityPub support to their network which would effectively make Tumblr that largest Mastodon instance on the fediverse.

    You may be asking, “but, wait — how will I find my friends on Mastodon?!” Well, I have some good news! First off, don’t deactivate your Twitter. Follow these steps to get started with Mastodon

    1. First, join an instance. Doesn’t matter where you join! You can move freely about the fediverse. Think of each instance like an email handle.
    2. Next, add your Mastodon handle to your Twitter profile (this will make it easier for folks to find you in the fediverse).
    3. Finally, go here and sign in with your Twitter creds to find your friends who have also moved to the fediverse: movetodon.org

    With your help Twitter can be given a proper burial. It should go down as one of the worst acquisitions in business history and become the cautionary tale that it deserves. The textarea and microblogging on the other hand is never going away. In fact, I would argue that the slow death of Twitter reveals what we all want deep down — each of us want to own a little piece of web. One step closer to a de-commodified web utopia.

    Update: Elon banned links to Instagram, Mastodon and other social platforms and then reversed that decision. Then ran a poll on wether or not to step down, which ended with 58% in favor of him stepping down. Despite claiming he would abide by the results, there’s been no indication he would do so. Even more concerning, it appears he’s spellbound by the idea of restricting poll voting on Twitter to Blue subscribers. Welcome to hell, Elon.

    If you are so inclined, you can find me in several places on the web now!

    I’m on Tumblr where I may shitpost, share photos, re-blog cool things and whatnot: tumblr.com/petrey

    Elsewhere, on the fediverse I have several handles. However, I’m mostly here with my fellow hackers and unix computer club community: tilde.zone/@petrey

    Follow me wherever you’d like, but wherever you go, this blog remains ✨

  • Audubon’s Bird Migration Explorer web app is absolutely superb

    Audubon’s Bird Migration Explorer web app is absolutely superb

    North America alone is home to hundreds of migratory bird species. Ever see a songbird and wonder where they’ve been or where they’re going next? Now you can! Audubon’s bird migration web app is powered by research from hundreds of partners, including Cornell. Cornell in particular has an eBird database maintained by their Lab of Ornithology. It’s a remarkable high-quality database. Some of the other data sources:

    Marshall Johnson, chief conservation officer for the National Audubon Society shared some thoughts on the importance of publishing such a tool. We have a responsibility to understand and conserve these environments:

    “The most effective migratory bird conservation efforts are informed by the best-available science, engage local communities, and are supported by partners and governments across their migratory ranges,” […] “The Bird Migration Explorer makes it plain to see how connected we are by these incredible birds. It’s clearer than ever that we have a collective responsibility and opportunity across the hemisphere to protect these birds and the places they need, today and tomorrow.”

    Who would have known that the Peregrine Falcon migrated so far south!

  • Rockstar Games hacked, leaked footage of upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 game

    Rockstar Games hacked, leaked footage of upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 game

    It was a big weekend with this game leak. GTA 6 peaks and leaks are hyped up so much, they’re about on par with the level of hype Half-Life 3 confirmed memes. It just isn’t going to happen and everyone doubts the claims when users post them on Reddit.

    Until it does. The leaks over the weekend were genuine and bold. High-quality footage of the in-development game were stolen from Rockstar. According to The Verge, over 3GBs of videos were obtained by a hacker.

    On Sunday morning, the hacker posted a 3GB file containing 90 videos of early GTA VI gameplay footage, which aligns with previous reports that indicate the game could feature a female protagonist for the first time.

    Which of course elicited a response from Rockstar:

    You know you have the Real McCoy when two things happen:

    1. There’s an official Twitter response
    2. Reddit posts start disappearing

    For example, this megathread on r/GTA6 was taken offline sometime last night. But, not before the page was archived.

    Wayback Machine screenshot of the fabled megathread on r/GTA6

    While the gameplay is still in early development, the footage and content looks absolutely fantastic. Game leaks can be a kiss of death from the public. However, support for GTA 6 has been overwhelmingly positive following the leaks. Probably due to the size and variety of what was shared. In previous leaks, such as the Nvidia PC Leak of 2021, not much qualitative data was obtained. This was a gargantuan leak, and according to the hacker, more is yet to come.

    The videos (which have been taken down in most of the links on Twitter and Reddit) were very convincing and very Rockstar-esque. But, I found these two still photos from the deleted megathread to be the most convincing evidence:

    Redwood Cigarettes are a GTA Staple. This is either the most elaborate fake of all time or the real deal
    MAYBE main character with a different hairstyle

    It’s bittersweet that these details were leaked. But, not much can be gleaned from the story from these videos and photos. There’s evidence of a male and female lead (which was previously leaked but these photos suggest a confirmation on the Bonnie and Clyde story mode) — but apart from that, not much else is known.

    What is known, is the hacker that stole the footage and data from Rockstar (which included source code mind you), is in some very hot water.

  • Adobe set to acquire Figma for $20B

    Adobe set to acquire Figma for $20B

    Big news yesterday in the tech world. Adobe likely minted a few millionaires with this deal. Figma was snatched up by Adobe for $20B

    For years, Figma stood headstrong in its’ resolution that collaboration in design tools begins and ends on the web — and they’re right. Productivity tools such as video creation, document collaboration, email, and even cloud storage (Dropbox) have had tremendous growth.

    Adobe’s humble beginning began way back in the 1980’s at Xerox PARC long before Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal on the web in 1989 was published. Ever since Sketch entered the market, the design tool market is becoming increasingly crowded. Adobe was once was a Goliath organization. A looming tower so large that no one dare take them on. Well, Figma gave them a really good run for their money.

    Chances are, Adobe was forced to make such a ludicrous offer, the board (and the founders) couldn’t refuse. For years, Figma has been eating Adobe’s lunch. They’ve been on buying spree building a moat around their Creative Cloud garden. Make no mistake, this deal will be bad for knowledge & design workers in the long-term, as design tool choices begin to dry up, and users are forced into Adobe’s suite of creative tools. If past is precedent, Figma will be slowly rolled into their brand and ecosystem and we’ll all be worse off for it. They’ll slowly raise the pricing, and lock us into expensive yearly plans to get access to Figma’s effortless product.

    How is the design world feeling about this? Well, this kind of hits the nail on the head:

    This won’t be the last we hear about Adobe + Figma. For now, pricing will remain unchanged, and educational account will continue to be free.

    This won’t be the last acquisition we’ll see from Adobe, but it might be last one that tops $20B.

  • DALL·E: Creating Images from Text

    DALL·E: Creating Images from Text

    We’ve trained a neural network called DALL·E that creates images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language.

  • Refactored and Re-loaded

    It’s a tough business to manage a website.

    Between, the pandemic, looming anxiety, and a medically necessary surgery to repair my right knee (more on that later), it seems I’ve left my website in a sorry state for a few months now. I migrated my website to a static infrastructure thanks to Gatsby and Netlify earlier this year. I’ve largely been really happy with this setup of publishing in WordPress, and triggering Netlify page/post generations via a web hook. The pagespeed score alone was incredible. I could sing praises all day long, but what I want to write about today, is refactoring.

    I let my v1 repo sit untouched for roughly 8 months. Yikes. I had plenty of errors and was hastily written. It was not typed at all, and was largely a mess. I decided to get serious, and wrote a list of must-haves for a v2:

    • Typescript baby
    • styled-components
    • Better support for more post types (such as bookmarks or projects)
    • More effective linting setup and better error handling
    • Client-side Apollo-powered GraphQL queries for bookmarks and dynamic content where possible (such as comments, coming later)
    • DRY out the code base, and remove unused dependencies
    • More effective theming approach

    A tall order indeed. However, it was possible! I powered through it, and renamed my .js files to .ts and .tsx and largely followed Gatsby’s own provided typescript example, which was really helpful when it came time to debug build-time errors locally. As I was working on this refactor, I scoped out Brian Lovin’s website and just fell in love with the feed/timeline style he uses to organize his bookmarks. So, naturally, I took great inspiration from him to build something similar:

    I’m pretty pleased with the results. I’ve wanted something like this for a very long time. So, I want to take a moment to thank Brian for open sourcing his site (although his site is powered with next.js, it was an inspiration none the less). It paved the road for me to investigate a path forward building a similar suite of components using Apollo Client and wp-graphql.

    Ultimately, the list of changes and new features led to this nightmare diff (mostly configuration and newlines to get typescript working):

    ????

    But it built successfully, and I was happy to finally have Typescript at the ready.

    Up next, I will be finally adding back the commenting ability to my blog posts (and maybe setup a proper site search?). After that, I’ll probably add some portfolio and personal work. But, until then I will be resting comfortably sipping IPAs and mulled wine during this holiday, playing video games and pampering my two buds, Frank and Kevin:

    Merry Christmas!

  • Replacing Pre-installed Mac OS PHP Version with Homebrew’d PHP Version

    This was a long and winding path. Every couple of years I go through the same problem. New PHP version, determine installation method, feverishly Google. Sigh.

    For my own sanity. I thought it was best to record my workflow. I tried installing PHP via a tried-and-true method:

    brew upgrade
brew install php

    Awesome. Easy enough right? I now should have PHP 7.4 (as of writing it should be 7.4, that is) installed via Homebrew. Yet when I ran php -v the terminal output was infuriating incorrect:

    PHP 7.3.3 (cli) (built: Mar 30 2019 08:43:01) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.3.3, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v7.3.3, Copyright (c) 1999-2018, by Zend Technologies

    What gives? Why is it still showing the system pre-installed PHP? I Googled and searched for answers frantically to no avail. Then, finally it hit me. My damn .zshrc file. I still have the old installation in my $PATH. To update, I simply removed the old line. Next I added the php keg, so it’s in my $PATH:

    echo 'export PATH=/usr/local/Cellar/php/7.4.9/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.zshrc

    I reloaded my shell with source ~/.zshrc and now, when I run php -v I see some results:

    PHP 7.4.9 (cli) (built: Aug  7 2020 19:23:06) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.4.0, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v7.4.9, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies

    Hope this helps someone else who just wanted to install a damn PHP version but may have overlooked their shell configuration “run commands,” after upgrading with Homebrew ????

  • Photos of the rare P-series iPhone prototypes running Acorn OS

    Photos of the rare P-series iPhone prototypes running Acorn OS

    The iPhone has no doubt been a crazy success since the early days. But how did the iPhone end up being such a success? Speculation, rumors and the lack of a design-first company in the market left Apple wide-open to squeeze into a already crowding market of cell phones and catalyze the smartphone industry into the behemoth that it is today. It took years of research, iteration and trial and error to produce the first iPhones. Apple was prototyping devices in secrecy with fabricators in China as early as 2005 with Foxconn and Pegatron. Looking back, we can see the design lineage and early ideas that were afoot in the company.

    Early on, there was a bet that the clickwheel, an invention of the successful iPod could be re-used in the iPhone. Thanks to @DongleBookPro, and (a few others over the years), we have some interesting images of late Acorns OS. Apple installed numerous diagnostic tools on these devices such as fabricator diagnostics, carrier and engineering diagnostic UI. Hap Plain of Cult of Mac put together this video showing just how rudimentary some of these early P-series iPhones worked here:

    The rudimentary touch-operated Acorn OS that ran on these prototypes eventually were refined and became the much beloved iOS. For further reading I recommend 9to5mac’s piece on the history behind Acorn OS and how it came to be.

  • ByteDance in talks to sell TikTok to Microsoft

    ByteDance in talks to sell TikTok to Microsoft

    According to the Wall Street Journal, ByteDance, the parent company behind TikTok is in talks to sell the app to Microsoft. As a primer, Microsoft prefers to buy their innovations instead of inventing or building them. No shame there. It’s literally how Microsoft has done business for years. They bought MS-DOS (QDOS) in 1981 from a Seattle software firm. In 2016, they purchased LinkedIn for $26B. A pretty hefty price-tag.

    How much do you think Satya Nadella will pony up for TikTok? $10B? $30B? Who knows. What we do know, is that the entire deal could evaporate (or at the very least go on hold). You see, the two parties are waiting for guidance, and approval from America’s favorite dictator — President Trump. Yesterday he said he was going to sign an executive order to force the app to cease operations in the US. Everyone is waiting to make moves until he literally makes an executive decision.

    Regardless, it’s unclear just how profitable TikTok could be, but they’re investing heavily in a in-house business-first ads platform. Think… Facebook or Twitter. I think that’s pretty telling. I guess we’ll have to wait until the curtain is pulled back to know more.

  • LA Metro Says TAP Transit Cards May Support Apple Pay Later This Year

    LA Metro Says TAP Transit Cards May Support Apple Pay Later This Year

    According to this official tweet from LA Metro:

    It’s happening! It’s long been known that LA Metro has been working on upgrading its TAP system, and it’s about time. Contactless payments are clearly the future. New York City has had it for nearly a year (although, not all 472 stations support it yet). I wonder if TAP contactless will be live by the time iOS 14 hits the ground running?