filmgirlcw

This is true based on the conversations I’ve had with my USDS friends too, but I’m under no illusion that DOGE will actually empower people to do the right things.

Like, as someone who is generally fairly process averse, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a huge middle ground between too much process that hampers getting things done and no process that leads to decisions that either break things, or worse, set disastrous acts in motion because basic checks or conversations with people who have more context didn’t happen.

I think if there was a good-faith attempt from the DOGE folks to audit and understand certain systems and processes, instead of gleefully dismantling and freezing programs, firing people, gleefully announcing how much money was “saved” (and often with incorrect amounts) and reflexively ripping on how terrible everything is, you’d probably get some cooperation from the people who have had to deal with bullshit bureaucracy. But that isn’t what happened.

What’s happened is akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water, all real security issues being completely ignored, under the guise that 19 year old crypto bros have the work experience, social skills, or common sense to foresee what is happening.

Governments are inefficient. That’s as much a feature as it is a bug. But with USDS in particular, you had people who left high paying jobs to work for the government because they wanted to make things better for democracy and the country. That is decidedly not the goal of DOGE employees, who want to out McKinsey McKinsey when it comes to just slashing and burning.

>The bad guys already know that your email is the best target. Magic links just make that very explicit.

That's a good point. I guess my rationale is that it being explicit makes me feel less comfortable for my parents/non tech-savvy friends, who already may not follow best-practices for email hygiene (and may not use email providers that enforce stricter hygiene like 2FA or other methods of protection) and thus, systems like this, make their email even more explicitly the ultimate place to go for access to stuff.

thanks for writing what you wrote -- I think it's important that we have this conversation as broadly as we can

I think as Ricky wrote last week [1], they should augment Magic Links or other auth methods. There are some positives about Magic Links for sure (though I don't know if making your email an even stronger attack vector is necessarily one of them), but for people who use a password manager, for example, they are a definite friction point that I think passkeys most certainly could alleviate.

There are definite UX problems around passkeys that could be improved and I think exporting will make syncing across systems a lot better (one of the reasons I use 1Password as my primary password and passkey system is so I can use my passkeys across devices; of course it helps that my employer uses 1Password as our system so I am logged into my personal and enterprise accounts and can auth then from personal or work devices, provided additional auth or enrollment isn't needed) -- but if the problem as 404 defines it is that they don't want to be responsible or even have to worry about storing your passwords/auth controls, I think passkeys is at least better for a subset of users than Magic Links.

But again, like Ricky, I don't think it should be viewed as either or. It should be both.

[1]: https://rmondello.com/2025/01/02/magic-links-and-passkeys/

I think this is really great as a response to 404's post last week. I love 404 but I'm as annoyed by Magic Links as OP for the same reasons they mention.

Ricky Mondello wrote a really great blog last week[1] about how passkeys, as OP alludes to at the end, can be used alongside Magic Links, that I think is worth a read.

[1]: https://rmondello.com/2025/01/02/magic-links-and-passkeys/

Thank you for building this! I’ve loved using this over the last two months or so and really appreciate the work you’ve put into it.

I’ve been a very happy iTerm2 user and support the dev on GitHub Sponsors (and I’ll continue to do that), but I love your commitment to making a fast, native app (and cross platform, no less) and really appreciate this very obvious labor of love that has also been really interesting to watch from afar as the development has progressed!

I mean, they did face repercussions.

The DoJ reached settlements with 8 different companies and there was a civil penalty too. Whether the repercussions were enough is a valid question, but Jobs was dead by the time the civil action was ruled on and on medical leave when the DoJ settlement in 2011 took place, so it’s hard to play a “what if” game here — especially since these lawsuits and DoJ investigations (correctly) caused tech companies to have to change their policies.

But Apple’s egregious no-poach agreements and collusion with other companies to do the same didn’t cause Palm’s collapse. And being able to more easily hire Apple employees wouldn’t have saved Palm.

I don’t think we can even reasonably talk about Palm circa 2007 and iPhone 2007 in the same sentence.

PalmOS was an aging clusterfuck that was a PDA with cellular glommed onto it (and the good Treo’s of the era ran Windows Mobile, which was better in some ways but a ridiculous mess for its own reasons) and the iPhone, even without apps or 3G was such a revelation and improvement that it single-handedly reshaped not just mobile, but personal computing, nearly overnight.

The software the iPhone did have was truly impressive — at least for the core feature that really set it apart: the web browser.

The capacitive touch screen and the on-screen keyboard made mince meat out of every other mobile operating system in existence or even in development; Google completely changed Android from being a Palm/BlackBerry clone to being an iPhone clone as soon as they saw it. People were willing to jailbreak and reverse engineer their iPhones to run apps on it.

Palm, like most everyone else, was caught completely flat-footed. They weren’t working on webOS in 2007; their next-gen version of Palm OS (the name escapes me) was not going to set the world on fire and Windows Mobile (who they increasingly had offloaded software duties to) was also not doing super well. It took new investors (and management changes that included ousting Colligan, who by all accounts is a pretty great guy and who did lead Palm and Handspring well in different environments) and a brand new engineering team for Palm to create webOS, an OS that had a lot of promise but was still largely better as a tech demo than a finished product, and even with insane work, webOS launched 2 years after iPhone and couldn’t compete on hardware or software.

Foleo, which was from the older era of Palm, never could have worked. Ever. Even in a world without iPhone, it’s a dud. But with iPhone, it’s DOA before it even gets to production.

But the Foleo was by all accounts a bad device (when Palm enthusiasts were able to use obtain nearly final release Foleo’s years later, this was vindicated by even the most strident of Palm fanboys). The price was ridiculous ($600 before a $100 introductory rebate) for a thing that also required a $400 or $500 phone to work.

It wasn’t a netbook at all, it was a thin client for an extremely underpowered mobile phone with a very outdated operating system.

Ignoring for a moment that the netbook craze was extremely short-lived and largely a placeholder for what people really wanted (sub $500 laptops), no attempt at any of these sorts of companion devices has ever achieved critical mass and Palm was right to cancel a product that wouldn’t have moved the needle. Why Samsung even bothers maintaining DeX mode is beyond me.

Another smart phone pioneer that struggled and was never able to adequately respond to the iPhone did release their own take on the Foleo. It was called the BlackBerry Playbook and it was an absolutely terrible tablet and a colossal failure.

Canceling Foleo in 2007 was prudent. It is a shame the post-Colligan Palm was never able to find success; webOS had many great ideas. But the Palm Foleo was a product that absolutely did not need to exist.

Yes. The first A-series designs launched while Jobs was still alive.

That said, from what I understand, a lot of the team was hired after. So it’s certainly not an indicator one way or another about the post-Jobs talent/innovation pipeline.

It’s not a PR stunt at all. If there is any PR benefit, it is totally incidental and not at all planned.

The reality is that a core part of how the company’a product works is broken with the latest version. That means that customers of tools like Super Duper (and presumably also Carbon Copy Cloner) who rely on the tools for bootable backups need to potentially hold off on upgrading to 15.2. Considering that this is a tool a lot of Mac admins use, this is a thing you want to let people know about, if for no other reason than to reduce or try to anticipate support loads.

And unfortunately, filing Radars often doesn’t solve these sorts of issues. And the customer is always going to blame the third-party. So it is incumbent on the third-party to let people know the issue while at the same time, hopefully apply pressure through negative publicity to get the problem fixed.

Phil Schiller (Apple’s head of marketing and the App Store) once said that “running to the press” doesn’t work, but it absolutely does. And especially when it comes to changes that might be bugs (but could also be signs of feature removals), getting public sentiment on your side is often the only recourse third-party devs have.

Yes, that ensuing discussion could be PR as a side effect, but no respected third-party devs (certainly not ones as longstanding as the Super Duper folks) are using this as a marketing opportunity.

They just want their business to not suffer because of a bug they can’t control or fix.

Absolutely not. First, the light seal would be different for each person, making for a subpar experience (an experience you’re paying for). Second, given the germs and potential disease spread via the face/eyes, this seems like a terrible idea unless you were able to sterilize each AVP after each flight, a task that might work for the Bose headphones they put in business class, but that would def be a thing I wouldn’t trust most airlines to do well. Third, you know these things would break all the time, again, leading to a subpar rental experience.

That said, I am a little surprised the Middle Eastern and Asian airlines haven’t adopted these for their international first class cabins (your Singapore Suites, Ethiad Apartments and the private rooms on Emirates).

I think the bigger problem would be, would they be willing to invest the engineering resources to do all that.

If the crux of the argument is that WP Engine doesn’t give back, I wonder how likely it would be that they’d be willing to do that.

Of course, if they were willing, they’d be allowed to do that and might even find success. I’ve often wondered why a host hasn’t tried to do a more focused WP-fork and the main conclusion I’ve come to is that they just aren’t willing to invest the significant resources that that would require.

It wasn’t a host, but CraftCMS was born out of ExpressionEngine (not the code; the Craft code all unique) and the makers of the most popular EE plugins being frustrated with the core EE direction.

Craft has a thriving business and EE has been sold several times and is much smaller than it was, so it ultimately worked.

But that was in some ways the opposite of this scenario; you had some of the largest ecosystem members who were unable to contribute meaningfully to core (because of the license/structure of EE at that time), opting to do their own thing.

I don’t anticipate any of the major hosts willing to invest what it would take to build/maintain their own WP fork.

I love this so much! Great work, Naya!

Incidentally, I was creating an image for a slide for a talk a few weeks ago, showing off HTML circa 1996 and decided to do it in Windows 95 (which is what I used to write my first web pages when I was 12) and it was a lot harder than I thought it would be (mostly because the intricacies of what HTML versions were supported in the included browser versions of the Electron emulator I was using), to recall what tags did and didn't work.

But I credit HTML with everything for me, as far as computer programming is concerned. Having a way to express markup in a text editor and see the results on a web page was life-changing.

Love to see first graders doing this now!

I think the assessment, harsh as it might be, is fair. Morgan Ames' excellent 2019 book on the OLPC project, "The Charisma Machine" [1], does a really good job looking at all the things that went wrong in the project. There was a lot of hubris in this project from top to bottom -- a lot of Ivy League intellectuals who believed they knew how to best teach the developing world and that somehow, this device would be the one to do it. It wasn't.

Well-intentioned or not, I think its broader impact is probably overstated in many circles (the notion that we wouldn't have sub-$300 laptops without OLPC is just silly), especially since many of the promises behind the device (the price, the crank, the way it would "reshape" education") were just untrue.

Is it a blind waste of investment looking for a problem to solve like Juicero? No. Is it a scam like Theranos? Also no. But given the poor-execution of the project, the imperialist nature of its whole raison d'être, and the negative effects its failure had on the EdTech movement as a whole, I think it is definitely worthy of critique.

[1]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537445/the-charisma-machine/

This is from a MSCHF drop from 2021. I bought them all, of course, and they are some of my favorite stupid little toys ever.

Absolutely agree. Again, I’m so grateful other members of the community heard my kvetching and shared my outrage and shared the news so we could fix the byline issue.

Automattic offers this as a service. I think it’s $35,000 — so not too much, but probably out of range for a lot of places.

This is what I said to 404 Media yesterday [1]:

> “It’s gross. We have decades of this stuff built up and it keeps changing hands and changing hands. And what recourse do we have as the writers?,” Warren said. “We also do such a bad job of web preservation, of preserving the history of the web as it was. So it’s kind of fucked to me that these approximations of the past are being recreated in these really blasphemous ways.”

Unfortunately, an archive wouldn’t have solved this particular issue. The problem here was threefold.

First, the original domain had been inaccessible (but still owned by AOL/Verizon/Yahoo/Apollo Global) for close to ten years. It used to redirect to Engadget.com, where most of the archives (sans images as most of them were mangled in CMS migrations, I guess) still exist. (It is important to note they didn’t redirect individual URIs, just to the main Engadget domain.) That means that what was sold was explicitly the domain and not the content. (Many of us original authors owned the content, it turns out. And AOL and its I guess follow-on companies had a non-exclusive perpetual license to it)

Second, the domain was sold (and explicitly not the content) to a shady web hosting adjacent operator who runs a lot of these sorts of spam/splog operations, who then decided it would be fine to take the content from archive.org, recreate slugs (which I’m pretty sure there is no legal recourse for in any jurisdiction, which is fine) and poorly rewrite the articles (this is probably copyright infringement, as many of the headlines and text are extremely close or identical. Just worse because they’ve been mangled by AI summarizers) and then attribute that content to the bylines (incorrect at that) of the old staffers

Third, this operation then decided to start publishing automated and ripped off content under those same bylines of previous staffers, potentially creating confusion and professional repercussions, not to mention making a mess of SEO for those authors, etc., etc..

If the owner of a domain or brand determines that there is value in that domain or brand, having archives (which we had here) isn’t enough to stave off absolute ghouls who want to use late 2010s splog techniques to try to game Google or something, attempting to steal the bylines and identities of the former contributors. (The economics of this whole thing make no sense. But whatever. Not my circus.)

I’ll quote myself again (also from my interview with 404 Media):

> “What’s worse than not having a good archive of my work is having one that is bastardized with my name but not my face and not my words on it,” Warren told 404 Media. “If they wanted to try to revive an old brand, fine, but leave the original writers out of it, and leave the old content out of it too because a lot of that old stuff has been rewritten and regurgitated and I don’t have any idea what it is, and it’s not what I actually wrote.”

[1]: https://www.404media.co/a-beloved-tech-blog-tuaw-is-now-publ...

(Putting the very funny pun aside)

No, as the person who is responsible for this story becoming “a thing” and one of the people whose identities was misappropriated, I’m mad at both.

I’m mad at AOL/Verizon/Yahoo/Apollo Global/whoever the owner of the original domain was for selling the domain in this way. Especially since the the site and domain had been dead for almost 10 years (and the content on that site was archived, granted the images didn’t survive, on Engadget), which makes me question why they’d wait so long and do it this way.

But I’m genuinely and completely outraged that my name was used, however briefly, on new articles (as well as AI-summarized versions of old articles I didn’t even write the first time — tho my original words were rewritten with AI and had another byline slapped on them) on a website that used to exist, and is for better or worse, something that will always have an association with me.

The most disastrous damage has been resolved, thanks to bad publicity and a strongly-worded email I sent yesterday threatening legal action if my name wasn’t removed (and I would have contacted a lawyer to send a cease and desist if they hadn’t removed my name), but despite seeing zombie sites reappear, it genuinely never occurred to me that anyone would be brazen enough to try to reconstruct archives and new content and attribute it to the original staffers of a publication.

(Christina Warren here) From what I can glean, it looks like they took a dump of the site from Archive.org and got a lot of the blog slugs, kept the headlines (or made very superficial changes), assigned a random writer name to those stories and then told AI to rewrite the prose. Except it was super sloppy and some posts would just end abruptly. My assumption is that they might have only had partial feeds or a certain number of characters that they were grabbing per post. 404 Media has some examples (https://www.404media.co/a-beloved-tech-blog-tuaw-is-now-publ...) in their article about this. Regardless, the scheme seems to be to try to get some sort of domain authority, fill a site with archives and then hope that they can profit somehow using stuffed affiliate links and putting ads all over the site. I don’t think many of these tactics even work anymore, given Google's changes around this sort of thing, but I just assume that this was the angle and that the entity that bought the site (who did something similar to iLounge back in 2019), got it very cheap and was able to put this WordPress-based monstrosity together pretty quickly.

The good news for all of us who worked at TUAW is that the bad publicity coupled with the terse email I sent the site owner earlier today (where I had to pull the “don’t make me get my lawyer involved” card, even tho the legalities of this are tricky and enforcement would be extremely difficult), meant that they changed the bylines at least. I'm not happy that old urls to stories I wrote will now once again work, but take people to AI-generated slop instead, but honestly, I’ll take it. Yahoo might still own the content (but it also might belong to the writers, I’d have to check my contract from 2007, assuming I still have it), in which case, they would have much better resources for going after these people, but speaking only for myself, my concern was making sure my name wasn’t attached to things I didn’t write — especially new content — even putting the money it would cost aside, I simply don't have enough time to try to stop any copyright infringement.

I’m immensely grateful to Engadget, 404 Media, Six Colors, AppleInsider, and others who publicized this. When John Gruber texted me this morning with the link to a website that died a decade ago, my initial reaction was a swift “wtf” and I’m chuffed that we got this result as quickly as we did.

Here is a free link https://www.wsj.com/tech/bruce-bastian-wordperfect-lgbtq-act..., although I'm not sure how many clicks it will support, but here it is anyway.

Funnily enough, I’m in the middle of a Newsradio rewatch. First time I’ve watched the show in years and it still holds up.

As Bill (Phil) would say, “good times.”

It’s also available on macOS.

Genuinely, same! And I knew intrinsically that that was wrong (The Times uses or used WordPress in some capacity), but I thought “maybe it was a weird straggler” — but nope. Turns out the art installation I’ve seen countless times had a name.

> The Internet can be dumb as snot. Have doubt.

Yeah, that’s sort of the point of the original post. Have doubt.

One of the central rules of the internet (and outside the internet. But especially on the internet.) is that people are often fucking liars. This is especially true when it comes to memorabilia.

This seller’s history is littered selling so-called authentic things like business cards and concert tickets and based on this incident, I personally think every single one of them is fraudulent.

You might like playing contrarian to defend the honor of an obvious forger, and that’s your right. But it isn’t defamation to call a liar a liar. Truth is an affirmative defense.

Someone with an actual Apple badge from that era said the badge is fake. The text doesn’t match that person’s badge. The photo use for Sherry is obviously both a stock photo and too high resolution to be used on an employee badge from a tiny company in California in the 1970s. The badge is too well-preserved, even for a relic that the seller claims to have purchased in 2001 (or was it 2003 or 2004, seeing as their own story kept changing). There are so many red flags when looking at this thing that it doesn’t matter if one of the proof points doesn’t live up to your standards. This is a fake item.

You’re the one trying to score internet points, not the author who was sharing an interesting exchange he had with a seller who was not only selling a fake item, but probably also forged receipt documents related to the fake item.

> It seems you're very focused on what people "oughta" pay for. But what matters is simply what people do pay for. You tell this story, but it seems very inconsistent with my experience or my understanding of pricing theory.

I don’t know who the “you” is referring to. All I said was that in my personal experience, there have been occasions (not frequent, but it has happened) where I’ll buy a perpetual license to something for a task I use a few times a year. Because the $20 or whatever the license cost was worth the time I saved. In most cases, what I said was that if I didn’t use a piece of software after the trial expired, that was a good forcing function to figure out if it was something I find value in or not. And in most cases, the answer is going to be “I don’t need to buy this.”

I’m not at all focused on what people oughta pay for so I don’t know where you are misreading this.

I also said that for business and SaaS options like the OP article is about, things are completely different (your Copilot example). The comment I replied to was about consumer software trials and how they don’t think time limits make sense. I happen to disagree.

But to push back, if you’re talking about a 5 minute task, that you’re using once every few months, a free trial timed the way you are asking, might mean you never end up needing to purchase a license. I understand that that is useful for you, but that isn’t exactly good for someone trying to sell a piece of software. (I understand you also gave usage based examples, but even in those scenarios (which require additional work to code for trial versions, versus a pure time-lock), there is always going to be someone who says “5 saves isn’t enough” or whatever the metric is).

> The idea that, as a consumer, I'm going to sit down and fully evaluate a piece of software over the course of 7/14/30 consecutive days to then make a purchasing decision is bizarre.

Maybe it’s my past life as a software reviewer (and current life as someone frequently asked about my assessment/opinion on apps), but for consumer software (SaaS, especially for business like what OP article is about, I think is different), I really don’t think this is that bizarre.

To me, a trial is really instructive because if I’m finding myself opening or using an app frequently during the trial, that’s a good indicator I’ll get value out of the application. Similarly, if I did a trial in January for one task, then came back to do that same task again in May and the trial is expired, it’s a good way for me to evaluate if it makes sense for me to buy a license or not. There are some programs I use two or three times a year that I purchase because it is useful enough for that one task, but there are others that I use infrequently enough to try to seek out other options. A time-based trial, for me, is a good forcing function to determine if I’m actually going to use the program.

Incidentally, and I realize the appeal for the show is significantly less if you aren’t a teenage girl (as I was when I watched it), but Felicity is excellent and she’s excellent in it. Like, beyond excellent. Like, there was the acting all the other WB actresses were doing in the late 90s/early 2000s and then there was what she was doing.

If that show had aired on a real broadcast network (as JJ Abrams' next shows were) and not on The WB, she would have been nominated for Emmys out the wazoo. As it was, she won the Golden Globe for that first season, but she should have at least been nominated for the Emmy for her work on that show, because she was every bit as good or better than her peers on cable or network.

I agree we need to do that, but I would argue at this point, the best option for the people without the skills/interest is probably buying a Synology. It would be awesome if there was a free OSS solution that people could just follow instructions and deploy on an inexpensive miniPC and not have to worry about anything and have auto-updates and zero problems, but I don't know if that is realistic. If we do ever see it, I feel confident it won't be free.

I see tools like this as a really good middle ground between piecing all the different parts together and managing runbooks and whatnot and buying an off-the-shelf appliance like a Synology or other consumer/prosumer/SMB NAS.

I've been evaluating it alongside Cosmos and Umbrel, in addition to tools I've used before like CapRover. I like it but I don't have any strong feelings yet. I will probably do some sort of writeup after I do more evaluations and tests and play with more things but I haven't had the time to dedicate to it.

If you're already familiar with setting things up Salt/Ansible/whatever and Docker compose, you might not need something like this -- especially if you're already using a dashboard like Dashy or whatever.

The biggest thing is that these types of tools make it a lot easier to set things up -- there are inherent security risks too if you don't know what you are doing, though I argue this is a great way to learn (and it isn't a guarantee that simply knowing how to use Salt or Ansible or another infrastructure as code tool will mean any of the stuff you deploy is any more secure) and a good entryway for people who don't want to do the Synology thing.

I like these sorts of projects because even though I can do most of the stuff manually (I'd obv. automate using Ansible or something), I often don't want to if I just want to play with stuff on a box and the app store nature of these things is often preferable to finding the right docker image (or modifying it) for something. I'm lazy and I like turnkey solutions.