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The Bigger-Compromise Edition Monday, June 17, 2019

The iPhone X Notch: It's Time For Haters To Apologize, by Leif Johnson, Macworld

The notch isn’t an ideal design element, but nothing yet comes closer to achieving the dream of a fully featured phone with almost a full-screen display. For the moment, at least, every alternative feels like a bigger compromise.

At Stanford Commencement, Apple CEO Tim Cook Calls For Accountability In Silicon Valley, by Thy Vo, San Jose Mercury News

“In a world without digital privacy, even if you have done nothing wrong other than think differently, you begin to censor yourself,” Cook said. “To risk less, to hope less, to imagine less, to dare less, to create less, to try less, to talk less, to think less.”

“Your generation ought to have the same freedom to shape the future as the generation that came before,” he said. “If you want to take credit, first learn to take responsibility.”

Apple Wants To Make Oscar-worthy Movies To Beef Up Streaming Service, by Alexandra Steigrad, New York Post

Hollywood sources say the tech giant has been approaching “elevated” directors and other film talent in recent months to talk about bankrolling projects with Oscar-winning potential.

Apple is looking to spend $5 million to $30 million per project, sources said, adding that the company is being driven by Netflix’s recent spate of Oscar nominations and win for Best Foreign Film with “Roma” — legitimizing Netflix head Reed Hastings’ standing in Hollywood.

Stuff

Microsoft Launches Its To-Do App On The Mac App Store With Outlook Syncing, Shared Tasks, More, by Michael Potuck, 9to5Mac

Microsoft has made its To-Do app available for the first time to Mac users. The company has launched Microsoft To-Do via the Mac App Store and includes rich features like shared tasks and lists, file attachment support, syncing with Outlook, and more.

LumaFusion 2.0 Gains More Powerful Engine, External Display Support, by Roger Fingas, AppleInsider

Luma Touch on Sunday launched LumaFusion 2.0, an upgrade of its professional video editor for iPhones and iPads with an array of both engine and interface improvements.

How To Keep AirPods In Your Ears, by Jason Hiner, CNET

There's plenty to like about Apple AirPods: No wires to get tangled, automatic pairing with Apple devices, good battery life and solid audio performance. But there are two things not to like. There's the premium price tag and the fact that they can fall out of your ears so easily. While there's not much we can do about the price, there is a low-cost solution to help keep the AirPods snug in your ears.

Notes

Fans Are Better Than Tech At Organizing Information Online, by Gretchen McCulloch, Wired

Kudos to the fans. One of the nominees for the Hugo Awards this year is Archive of Our Own, a fanfiction archive containing nearly 5 million fanworks—about the size of the English Wikipedia, and several years younger. It's not just the fanfic, fanart, fanvids, and other fanworks, impressive as they are, that make Archive of Our Own worthy of one of the biggest honors in science fiction and fantasy. It's also the architecture of the site itself.

At a time when we're trying to figure out how to make the internet livable for humans, without exploiting other humans in the process, AO3 (AO3, to its friends) offers something the rest of tech could learn from.

Self-Driving Cars Have A Problem: Safer Human-Driven Ones, by Christopher Mims, Wall Street Journal

Some of this technology has been in development for years, but the newest versions of it—with advanced object recognition, radar-and-laser detection and lightning-fast artificial intelligence—were created for autonomous cars. Many tech entrepreneurs have argued that fleets of robo-taxis would convince us to abandon personal car ownership in favor of “transportation as a service.” Some of them have predicted these robot cars will start populating U.S. roads within the next two years.

But the paradox of how this evolution is playing out is that technology developed to give us driverless vehicles from the likes of Tesla Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo could actually delay their adoption.

Bottom of the Page

Everytime I take my AirPods out of their charging case, I'm silently telling them: thank you for your service; sorry about having to move yet another day towards when your batteries will die.

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Everytime I take off my glasses at night to go to bed, I silently congratuate myself for having survive yet another day. Too bad it's just another day towards my death.

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Thanks for reading.