Public iCloud Links to Be Checked ‘For Harmful Content’ ⇥ support.apple.com

Apple, in a support article published yesterday (emphasis mine):

When you share content that’s stored in iCloud, such as a photo in iCloud Photos or a file in iCloud Drive, you can choose to Share a Link or Send a Copy of the item. If you choose Share a Link, you can either share the item with “People you choose” — only people you invite or approve — or with “Anyone with the link,” which makes it accessible to anyone who has the link, including Apple. Starting in version 27.3 or later of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS, items shared using Anyone with the Link will be checked by Apple for harmful content.

Good.

Many years ago, in covering the iCloud CSAM detection features Apple later scrapped. In my coverage, I wrote:

Let’s apply this logic to something less heinous like copyrighted materials. If these files are merely stored in a cloud service and are not being shared to any third party, should the service provider be monitoring its systems and terminating user accounts with files matching known pirated copies? I am not sure that makes much sense.

Once these files are shared beyond the user’s personal drive, I am fully on board with scanning for legal purposes. Google Drive, for example, will allow users to store copyrighted materials but attempts to restrict sharing options if those files match valid takedown requests. Apple and Google check email attachments for child abuse materials, while Facebook scans users’ messages. That makes sense to me. As with social media companies moderating their platforms, I think there ought to be different expectations when things are broadcast to the world.

Private storage features in iCloud or any other provider’s service should be treated, legally, as an extension of internal storage since they are so tightly integrated into modern operating systems. They are not, but they should be. But when things are publicly accessible, it is fair to lose that expectation.

No word on what Apple means by “harmful content”, though I am sure you can think of the more obvious categories. It remains baffling to me why there is still no way to easily report abuse.

CBC News Updates Article About ‘Wonder Valley’ Data Centre Complex ⇥ cbc.ca

Two days ago, Eagle Andersen reported for CBC News that the Wonder Valley data centre complex — previously — would “release the equivalent of 23 atom bombs of heat waste” every day. This figure is quoted in the headline, and repeated in the first two paragraphs:

An analysis of the mammoth data centre proposed by celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary suggests it would release the equivalent of 23 atom bombs of heat waste into the boreal forest of northwestern Alberta every day.

If the Wonder Valley project goes ahead, “‘about 23 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs worth of energy every single day will get dumped into that landscape,” said Utah State University physicist Robert Davies.

If you are steeped in the world of data centre media coverage, you might recognize this comparison. Dan Robinson, writing for the Register in May:

A proposed mega-scale datacenter in the US state of Utah has caused controversy after a physics professor estimated that the facility and its associated power generation could dump 23 atomic bombs’ worth of energy per day. But the real question is whether it will actually ever get built.

Take a wild guess which physics professor made that estimate.

It is not a surprising repetition as the projects in Alberta and Utah are quite similar. Not only are both backed and promoted by Kevin O’Leary, they are being jointly marketed as 7.5 gigawatt twins. But a comparison to one of the most extraordinary acts of war ever committed is hardly meaningful except — as it was in this case — as a made-for-headlines quote.

The editors at CBC News clearly thought this was too much, and substantially revised the article. It now carries a more responsible headline — “Physicist warns proposed data centre would generate ‘large, if not extreme’ heat waste” — and carries an editor’s note and correction:

This story and its headline have been updated to provide further context about the preliminary nature of Robert Davies’ assessment and align with our journalistic standards and practices. An earlier version of this story also said that at full operation, the project would release around 18 gigawatts of heat a day, according to Davies. In fact, Davies said the project would consume energy at a continuous rate of 18 gigawatts, or about 1.5 petajoules per day.

The differences between the versions are remarkable. The new one contains far more caveats, including an acknowledgement from Davies that “of course, that’s not explosions”, and that the numbers in his report are “a first-order estimate intended to convey scale”.

I am curious how Davies arrived at an energy consumption figure of 18 gigawatts, though. Not only is that more than double what the project’s website claims, it is over 60% more electricity than is currently being generated in Alberta, and around 77% of the total capacity of our entire grid.

While I still doubt this project is much more than a self-promotional effort by an opportunistic and loudmouthed investor, and the environmental impact of data centres like these must be a greater priority than it currently seems to be, I am glad editors were able to put this professor’s figures in their fuller context. A comparison to a bomb is not especially helpful because the difference between heat emitted slowly and heat emitted instantly is not slight. But because the loud and pervasive marketing of A.I. boosters is something news outlets feel compelled to cover in a fair and balanced way, I understand fighting their fire with fire.

The Adult Children Cleaning Up Their Parents’ Feeds ⇥ nymag.com

Jessica Lucas, in a fascinating New York magazine article about older people succumbing to compulsive social media use, and the adult children who are trying to stabilize their feeds:

Most adult children seem to know instinctively that their parents’ social-media use has long since outstripped whatever cognitive good it once served. They have watched their parents surrender ever-larger portions of their lives to their phones, triggering a kind of grief and, occasionally, anger. Every hour handed over to the feed can feel like a choice on their parents’ part to willingly accelerate their own deterioration. Anne, a 55-year-old writer living in New York, regularly travels out of state to visit her mother, Rosa, who is in her 80s. She often arrives to an unsettling scene: Rosa on the couch, “hunched over” her phone, “slack-jawed.” Over the years, Anne says she has watched her mother abandon crossword puzzles, newspapers, and books in favor of the feed. “I don’t think a younger version of her would have recognized that behavior as something she had as a goal for herself later in life,” she tells me.

Lucas also describes a kind of A.I.-generated video genre that preys on seniors; these videos are everywhere. If I am not signed into my YouTube Premium account, I often see ads from some company named Oathill Media with A.I.-generated seniors extolling the benefits of cheap life insurance. I cannot imagine this is wholly legitimate, and I know people who have been tricked by similar videos.

More broadly, this is one reason I think age-based regulations are insufficient. We should expect more from the giant corporations that make their money from, apparently, building compelling venues for advertisers. That should not be solely because Google and Meta collect an enormous amount of data to enable targeting. The platforms they manage are not actually safe; they are just popular. And, with descriptions like those in this article, it seems difficult to argue even the most frequent users are actually enjoying themselves without further intervention.

Colossus is Silicon Valley’s Investor-Backed ‘In-Flight Magazine’ ⇥ sfstandard.com

In September, I linked to a lengthy profile of Mark Zuckerberg written by Jeremy Stern in Colossus. It was a useful complement to Meta’s Connect presentation. But I had not heard of Colossus before then, and I wish I had done more digging into how what seemed to be a small publication was granted such generous access.

Andrew Fedorov, the San Francisco Standard:

Colossus is the brainchild of Patrick O’Shaughnessy, a Connecticut-raised heir to an oil fortune, who went to work for his father James’ firm, O’Shaughnessy Asset Management, in 2007. Patrick took over the company in 2018 and sold it four years later to Franklin Templeton. In 2016, he launched a podcast called “Invest Like the Best,” borrowing the title of a book his father published in 1994.

Well, that makes sense. This is yet another venue where, after mainstream media outlets and even tech-focused publications recognized a more skeptical tone toward the industry, CEOs and executives can appear to deliver their talking points with little pushback. It is in the same vein as Cheeky Pint and Alex Heath’s Sources, except there is a serious-looking print copy you can order to leave in waiting rooms and on shelves around the office.

‘No One Paid Me to Disagree With Jonathan Haidt’ ⇥ made-not-found-by-danah-boyd.ghost.io

danah boyd, like Andrew Gelman and Candice Odgers, says she was not paid by Meta or anyone else to disagree with Jonathan Haidt’s conclusions about social media:

What kills me in the contemporary teens-and-tech debate is that there’s no space for actual research or critical nuance. You’re either opposed to the tech companies or in their pockets. And this week’s absurd discovery reinforces this infuriating polarity, painting those of us who are critical of Jonathan Haidt as being corporate shills. I find this especially frustrating because I did work in tech for a lot of my career. I played the role of friction inside many companies (although never Meta). I repeatedly got threatened by tech executives for challenging corporate mantras or providing research that contradicted their interests – and yet I persisted. Cuz many tech companies are far more complicated than people realize.

I had been meaning to link to a piece by Mizuko Ito, writing in the MIT Press Reader, for weeks; I think it complements boyd’s perspective:

We can advocate for features and policies that make platforms better for learning, belonging, and wellbeing. When parents and teens are asked, they want to keep using social media with more ways to flexibly protect their privacy, control recommendation algorithms, and monitor their own technology use. The emphasis on bans has come at the cost of progress on platform policies and features that make the online world better for people of all ages. These include privacy legislation and efforts centered on children’s digital rights and the duty of care.

You do not need to be paid by Meta — or Snap, or TikTok — to find Haidt’s conclusions unconvincing or unhelpful. But because some of its executives discussed following the same playbook as big companies in other controversial industries, like agribusiness, fossil fuels, and tobacco, in swaying research to be more favourable, the well has been poisoned. The people most visibly criticizing Haidt’s work insist they came to their conclusions entirely independently. I believe them. After those meeeting notes became public, however, I would not be surprised if many people do not.

Eternal Black October ⇥ todayintabs.com

Rusty Foster, of the excellent Today in Tabs newsletter you should probably be reading:

Neat! There’s a remote-exploitable kernel memory race condition in the Linux IPv4 TCP code. A bunch of other linux kernel vulnerabilities were accidentally posted to a public mailing list before patches were ready for them. The official Claude Code extension for VS Code on Cursor has been dropping “a persistent SSH backdoor across macOS, Linux, and Windows.” The Department of Homeland Security was hacked. Fanfiction site AO3 was hacked. Polymarket was hacked. Binance was hacked. I’ve been writing for about an hour now so chances are very good that several more things have been hacked that I don’t know about yet.

Any of these would probably have been the worst computer security incident in any average month in the last 25 years. But this is not even a complete list, it’s just a haphazard roundup of what came across my feeds. In fact, if you have any professional contact with tech, you’ll have noticed that I didn’t even mention the worst one yet.

The security incidents listed above — plus the foreshadowed PHP2Shell one — all have different explanations. The Binance theft, for example, appears to have been the fault of a uniquely criminal nation state, while several vulnerabilities have either been found or surfaced and made operational with the use of artificial intelligence tools. Even so, this feels less like a coincidence and more like a preview of the next several years in ebbs and flows.

North Korea Gets Away With $3 Billion From Binance ⇥ citationneeded.news

Molly White, writing at Citation Needed:

A notorious North Korean cybercrime group has stolen around $6.4 billion in cryptoassets from multiple hot wallets belonging to Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, and still controls around $3 billion of it after stablecoin issuers and other protocols froze what they could. These estimates are still in flux as various platforms work to freeze tokens or otherwise thwart the attacker from cashing out, and as both Binance and independent security researchers continue their investigations.

Alex Hern on Bluesky:

No way to prevent this, says only financial sector where this regularly happens.

The currency of the future is vulnerable to, apparently, “a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop”.

Meta Executives Met to ‘Get the Academic Community to Disavow’ Jonathan Haidt ⇥ cailinoconnor.substack.com

Cailin O’Connor, professor at the University of California Irvine:

Yesterday saw reporting on new, internal Meta documents released through the ongoing lawsuit. Meta had been using a favored industry strategy of including their attorneys on any risky internal correspondence so that this correspondence would be protected by attorney-client privilege. The judge called bullshit.

The resulting documents reveal:

  1. Explicit plans by Meta to discredit psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has been raising alarms about social media and youth mental health.

Candice Odgers, also a professor at the University of California Irvine:

This is why I cannot believe that I have to write this post. Today the London Times wrote an article lazily suggesting that I, and others, were paid by Meta to critique the arguments made by Jonathon Haidt in the Anxious Generation.

So let me say this next part very clearly. I have never been approached by Meta to shape what I say publicly about the research on adolescents and social media. My views are my own, and are grounded in the years of research I’ve done on this topic.

I could not see anything in the unsealed notes (PDF) directly referencing Odgers, nor does the Times article actually claim Meta paid her. It does, however, create the implication that her disputes with Haidt’s book are suspicious by tying them to those meeting notes.

Two things can be true, though. Meta could have attempted to sway opinion among academics and media — one executive hoped they could “get Gellman to write a take-down piece”, referring presumably to Andrew Gelman, who says he has “never been contacted by anyone at Facebook or Meta regarding Jonathan Haidt or his work”. Even if Meta is not getting positive coverage from this “whisper campaign”, the public knowledge of it will poison the waters of this debate. That is unfortunate because of the second thing that can be true: Haidt’s research might not be as solid as he and others believe. But good luck having that conversation now.

Reddit Is Further Locking Itself Down ⇥ axios.com

Reddit administrator “judy-funnie” (via Michael Tsai):

Because RSS is now a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse, we’ll stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026 while preserving moderation workflows that depend on it through supported alternatives.

[…]

To close this gap, in the next few months, we’ll further limit access for logged-in users to only those who have used Old Reddit in the last six months (which covers the vast majority of all Old Reddit users). […]

Old Reddit is a lightweight website that generally respects its users, so it is a priority for people to switch to its bloated replacement. Not for users, of course, but for someone.

Reddit administrator “boat-botany”:

We’re sharing the timeline for moving public API apps and bots to the Developer Platform. Register now, apply for migration funding by November 30, and start planning and testing your move. Starting January 12, 2027, we’ll begin removing API access for apps and users that haven’t registered or engaged with us. Remaining public API access will end in March 2027.

Sara Fischer, Axios:

Reddit has long championed the open web. Now, it’s pushing to build a more direct relationship with users while also protecting its data from increased scraping in the AI era.

In an interview Thursday, Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman said the company is making the change to improve its user experience, bolster its ads business and prevent bots from scraping its proprietary data.

Two of those three reasons seem believable.

There was once a time when we could use a relatively inexpensive computer to connect to the web and freely read discussion boards. It feels almost quaint now that A.I. “hyperscaler” companies have scraped everything they could access on the web, and with — as near as makes no difference — unlimited funding, bought a bunch of graphics processors and memory. Now the price of every kind of computer hardware has gone up, and companies like Reddit are trying to control access. This is not because Reddit respects users’ unique contributions, nor will it compensate them. It is just not making enough money for shareholders.

Huffman blames declining Google search traffic — a disappointingly familiar story. It is an extraordinary coup. The web’s most important referral source built up a vast data set and then yanked away the entire reason everyone contributed to it. “Evil” is four-letter euphemism.

A Further Status Update on the Toaster-Refrigerator Project ⇥ apple.com

Joanna Stern, reporting for ABC News in 2012:

And it was on that last point that Cook had a lot to say. When asked if Apple was planning to merge its tablet and laptop products, much as Microsoft is proceeding with Windows 8, Cook responded with a quip: “You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those aren’t going to be pleasing to the user.”

Cook elaborated that converging the iPad with a laptop would result in tradeoffs, ones Apple isn’t willing to make. “We are not going to that party, but others might from a defensive point of view.”

Apple, today:

Apple today introduced the all-new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, featuring breakthrough tandem OLED technology that delivers game-changing front-of-screen performance. Available in 14- and 16-inch models, MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display offers a visual experience unlike any other, transforming pro workflows with up to 2000 nits peak HDR and SDR brightness, an industry-leading 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio for exceptional detail, a 120Hz variable refresh rate, and a wider colour gamut covering both P3 and Adobe RGB for brilliant colours. The new MacBook Pro also introduces intuitive Touch capabilities on the Mac for the first time, opening up a whole new dimension for pros to interact with their content, from manipulating 3D models to playing musical instruments onscreen. […]

One might point out, as they watch the Apple Developer videos about these touch features, that Apple is not in fact delivering the toaster-refrigerator hybrid of doom. MacOS looks mostly the same; even though touch targets in parts of the U.I. are larger, most controls remain the same visual size. When needed, MacOS gives more room, like if you use a finger to show a menu instead of a pointing device. This is merely about bringing touch as an optional interaction element to the Mac. And just look at the quote above: Apple does not even mention touch features — sorry, “Touch capabilities”, with a capital T — until the third sentence. If anything, this is a MacBook Pro with a nicer display that happens to support touch.

But Apple is still asking people to pay more for it than the standard model, though not by as much as it might first appear. While the M6 MacBook Pro starts at $2,000 USD, the touch ones have an M5 Pro chip. Thus, the equivalent non-touch models start at $2,500 USD, and the touch ones at $2,900 USD. For that $400, you get an ostensibly nicer screen that supports touch input and has a Dynamic Island instead of a notch, and a lighter and thinner chassis.1

What you do not get, though, is a true hybrid of an iPad and a Mac. The display does not fold back to create a tablet, for example, and it does not support Apple Pencil input. Yet. Apple also has not managed to reinforce the human arm or fix the ergonomic issues it has repeatedly identified when it was not selling a Mac with a touch screen. This is evidenced by the section of the developer video suggesting that developers should place denser and finer-grained controls around the edges of the screen where users can support their hand with the metal frame.

Maybe I am just showing my age.

  1. If component prices were not what they are, I wonder if these MacBook Pros would have been introduced as a replacement for the existing M5 Pro and M5 Max models, perhaps with a smaller price increase. ↥︎

Rest of World Faces Prospect of Shutting Down ⇥ semafor.com

Maxwell Tani, Semafor:

The globally-minded tech news startup Rest of World is scrambling to find a new home — or faces the prospect of shutting down.

The six-year-old digital publication has seen the social and web search traffic on which it depends evaporate. This sharp decline has prompted the organization’s founder and primary financial backer, Sophie Schmidt, to explore other options for its future.

This is disappointing. Rest of World is one of my favourite publications with a scope unlike anything else. It is essential reading.

Schmidt is the daughter of former Google executive Eric Schmidt who I just happened to read, owns one percent of Anthropic which will surely grow his already ungodly fortune when the company begins trading publicly in the coming weeks. While Rest of World is not a family affair, that windfall alone could probably run the publication — already largely funded by the Schmidt Family Foundation — for years, enough to buy it some time to figure out how to survive as typical referral sources become more insular. But that is apparently not happening — a huge loss.

The Annoying Implementation of Translation in Safari ⇥ lapcatsoftware.com

Jeff Johnson:

The Safari web browser has a longstanding annoying misfeature: it announces “Reader Available” and “Translation Available” in the address bar, whether you like it or not, with no way I know of to stop that madness. This behavior is bad on Mac, worse on iPhone. Below is a screen recording of Safari on Mac.

Yes, and it gets worse. The worst part of this behaviour is, for me, the translation icon in Safari on MacOS. When “Translation Available” is displayed, the icon is grey and positioned on the lefthand side of the address bar, but if you click on it, you will see the website settings menu. Instead, you have to wait until the animation is complete, at which point the icon will appear on the opposite side of the address bar — still grey, though! — at which point it becomes active.

Utter madness.

Apple Finds Some Personality ⇥ wallpaper.com

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

Every five years when we hit an anniversary, I struggle to recontextualize the iPod. But this year, for the 25th anniversary, I’ve been thinking about Apple’s little music player a lot more.

Stephen Hackett:

This link — which you gotta manually open in your browser — is the best thing I’ve seen on the Internet in a long time.

This looks enough like my own iPod library circa twenty years ago that it threw me a little. I hope this is not appearing solely for the occasion of the iPod’s anniversary. It is a nice surprise.

Charlotte Gunn, Wallpaper:

Apple Music has enlisted British producer Fred Again.. to help turn sound into something tangible for its new visual identity. Built around the idea of being ‘made by sound’, the redesign takes an experimental approach, using musical frequencies to create rippling, liquid forms. The results were achieved by playing music into a shallow bath of mineral oil and filming the resulting vibrations.

There is a corresponding video illustrating the process alongside the mnemonic created by Mr. Again. While I am not sold on the six-note sequence — it sounds to my ears somehow both cramped and unsatisfied — it is a very cool visual effect. Apple is justifiably proud of what it has created; it is showcasing a version of the icon in its social media profile pictures.1

So why, then, does the updated icon in iOS 27.2 look nothing like that?

Apple employs plenty of creative people doing interesting and exciting work. I think the Apple Music rebrand is fantastic, and the iPod Easter egg shows a little personality from a largely sanitized company. A music app should display some kind of verve for life. Alas.

  1. Check out those low, low, low TikTok view counts, too. ↥︎

A.I. Has Made It Easy to Brute Force the Internet ⇥ 404media.co

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

To give you a sense of what I’m seeing, Matthew Green, a Johns Hopkins professor and one of the most respected cryptographers in the world, posted “we’re in the part of the movie where you need to throw whatever you can in the path of the zombies and hope it slows them down,” and “so many people discovering that the whole Internet is dry tinder and the only thing keeping it from burning is the fact that teenagers haven’t found the matches yet,” […]

And all those posts came before people using AI-powered tools found vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language that powers much of the internet. […]

Charlie Warzel, the Atlantic (gift link):

Once the patch was released yesterday, websites everywhere went offline to implement the fix. These included government websites in Germany and Finland, some hospital and school websites in Europe, and international sites such as 4chan. During this race to secure the majority of the internet, I noticed one name pop up in posts on Reddit and X: Ondřej Surý.

There are likely to be many more weeks like this one which, in the best case, leaves us with more secure digital infrastructure and better practices for the future. But it is going to be an uncomfortable ride to get there and, as usual, much of the hard work will be done by volunteers with little financial support or credit.

Anyway, I still think PHP is pretty great.

Australia Becomes Latest Region to Require More Competitive iOS App Distribution ⇥ ia.acs.org.au

Tom Williams, Information Age:

Apple has been ordered to open its “walled garden” to allow third-party app stores and alternative in-app payment systems in Australia, in a landmark court decision which the technology giant says it will appeal.

Apple has until at least March 2027 to allow Australian users to download apps through alternative app stores, including direct web downloads, Federal Court Justice Jonathan Beach ruled on Thursday.

Lex Friedman:

Apple is building third-party app store support country by country, under protest, with a different set of rules in each place, and appealing every ruling along the way. They are frustrating developers, and in some cases users, and in many places — governments. This is the most expensive and painful way possible for Apple to support these stores that it seems it will inevitably need to support in more and more places.

It seems unsustainable to keep dripping out rule changes one country at a time, especially as many of them slightly differ in the details even when regulators’ overarching aims are similar. The reasons for the company’s stubbornness — namely: security and privacy — become much less believable as a growing number of regions require alternative distribution channels, essentially without issue.

Apple should just rip off the bandage and do Gatekeeper for iOS.

PHP Warns Admins to Expect Emergency Patches Tomorrow ⇥ bleepingcomputer.com

Lawrence Abrams, Bleeping Computer:

In an advisory published Tuesday, the PHP development team announced that it plans to release security updates on Wednesday, October 21, at 14:00 UTC (10:00 AM Eastern), to address two vulnerabilities, each rated 9.2 under CVSS v4.0.

The PHP security team also sent a notice to its ANNOUNCE mailing list, urging administrators to prepare to install the security updates as soon as they become available.

Word on the street is that these exploits have leaked, and that remote code can likely be executed all the way back to PHP 5. If you have access to your website’s php.ini file, it might be worth turning off multipart uploads for now.

NetNewsWire 7.2 ⇥ netnewswire.blog

Brent Simmons:

We’ve released NetNewsWire 7.2 for Mac with a new column view layout: choose View > Use Column Layout to switch. (Choose it again to switch back.)

This is a new feature in the sense that the previous version of the app didn’t have it — but NetNewsWire of Yore, before the 2018 reboot, certainly had this feature. Even NetNewsWire 1.0 had this feature! In fact, back in those days it was the only layout. In some ways this is the oldest NetNewsWire feature and we’re celebrating its triumphant return. :)

I have been using this view since it appeared in the beta last month and I am a huge fan. It feels like coming home. (Though, I have to say: I recognize there is a history to the name “Column View”, but it is strange to me that the layout more typical of modern apps is reminiscent of what Finder calls the “Column View”. This one is more like a row-based view in my 2026 head.)

The iOS version of NetNewsWire 7.2 adds iPhone Duo support.

What Is the Truth? ⇥ lrb.co.uk

Geoff Mann, London Review of Books:

The dubious achievement of prediction markets is to have found a new way to exacerbate and exploit the simultaneously frantic and passive experience of the world that is a defining aspect of our age. Like any kind of gambling, they are enervating. We put our money down and then (unless we are using a hairdryer on an airport thermometer) fidget anxiously till it’s over. The world happens to us. This passivity is characteristic of the politics of those who think we are stuck with the world we have. The best we can do is make money while events wash over us: ‘Don’t blame me. I didn’t start the war, I just bet on it.’ Such people may think they are ‘courageous’ or ‘gutsy’ because they take ‘risks’ (this is the way people in the financial sector have always talked), but the whole charade is a profitable supplication to, even a cowering before, the power of ‘the markets’. To put the case more gently, the appeal of ‘risk-taking’ just now, especially but not only to young men, may be an indicator of how little control many people feel they have over their own slice of the world, and of the feeling that they can’t shape their lives in a meaningful way. Marking time through a series of ‘settlements’ and ‘closes’, hoping for a windfall, may look like the best way to buffer oneself against an uncertain future.

The “hairdryer on an airport thermometer” phrase is a reference to a story I had not heard before about a temperature sensor at Charles de Gaulle Airport. It is dumb as hell in the best and worst ways you can imagine.

The only way users of Kalshi and Polymarket are predicting anything is if they have either knowledge of — or control over — an outcome. We recently had a by-election in Alberta. Kalshi members bet with 99% odds that one candidate would win — right up until the votes began to be tabulated. Betting on nigh everything is treacherous, and claiming it is not gambling but “prediction” markets is laughable.

The Last Skeuomorph in iOS? ⇥ jarrettfuller.blog

Jarrett Fuller [sic]:

It’s 2026 and when I click the button on my glass phone, it makes a shutter sound! There are still skeuomorphs in iOS after all! The skeuomorphic designs of the early camera simulated a shutter closing and opening when you a took a photo but that’s long been replaced with just a subtle blink of the screen. And yet! The shutter sounds remains.

As Fuller writes, it might be the very last one. I would also make a case for the lock sound. It is not quite the padlock noise it used to be, but it definitely retains a mechanical quality that resembles what it is supposed to be.

One nitpick:

[…] (The irony is not lost on me that this new phone actually does have a physical shutter. That shutter, though, is silent. Apple is essentually simulating the shutter sound while a real shutter is actually firing.)

The new iPhone has physical aperture blades on its main camera, but I am pretty certain it, like all iPhone cameras before, continues to use an electronic rolling shutter.

Update: Via Marcin Wichary, there is lots of good discussion on Kottke, including skeuomorphic icons for apps I do not keep on my Home Screen and, thus, forgot about.