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The Double-Edged Edition Saturday, July 27, 2024

Steve Jobs Knew The Moment The Future Had Arrived. It's Calling Again, by Steven Levy, Wired

At Aspen, Jobs wasn’t bothered by the specter of unintended consequences. When an audience member asked him about privacy violations—another headache caused by pervasive digital tech—he shrugged off the question. “I haven’t heard a ton of issues concerning these giant databases knowing everything about us that had much substance to them,” he said. “The thing I’m most concerned with is the ability to turn all this stuff into something we can do something about.”

Eventually Jobs came to recognize the double-edged nature of computer tech, and tried to shape Apple as a champion of privacy. But his early apparent naivety is one of the startling aspects of this speech. Just as digital tech was finding its way, so was Steve Jobs. Technology historian Leslie Berlin, executive director of the archive, says revealing that was a big reason for the exhibit. “It shows Steve very young, with so many of the elements that made him great, and also still figuring things out,” she says. “We felt this talk could really resonate with that stage of people's lives where they’re working outside the main lanes, trying to pull together things that haven’t been pulled together in exactly this way before.”

Stuff

Apple Music Launches New 'Radio Spins' Data For Artists And Labels, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

The company says that artists can now see “when and where” their music is being played on radio stations around the world.

Pixelmator Pro 3.6.5, by Agen Schmitz, TidBITS

The Pixelmator Team has issued Pixelmator Pro 3.6.5 with extended RAW image support. You can now open and edit RAW images from more than 20 new camera models, including the Nikon Z 6 III, Olympus E-M1 Mark II, and the newly released Fujifilm X-T50 cameras.

Notes

Apple Reaches Its First-Ever Retail Union Contract Deal In US, by Josh Eidelson, Bloomberg

Apple Inc. has reached a tentative collective bargaining agreement with retail employees in Maryland, the International Association of Machinists said Friday, a first for the company’s US stores.

The deal is subject to approval by the roughly 85 employees in the bargaining unit, who are slated to vote on it Aug. 6. The agreement includes rules about scheduling, severance, and sub-contracting, and requires that any discipline not be “arbitrary, capricious or without merit,” an IAM spokesperson said. The three-year deal will increase pay by an average of 10% and maintains the status quo on healthcare, retirement, and staffing, according to the union.

After 15 Years, The Maintainer Of Homebrew Plans To Make A Living, by Chris Chinchilla, The Next Web

But despite these features and its widespread use, one area Homebrew has always lacked is the ability to work well with teams of users. This is where Workbrew, a company Mike founded with two other Homebrew maintainers, steps in.

The CrowdStrike Outage And Market-Driven Brittleness, by Barath Raghavan, Bruce Schneier, LawFare

We need deep complexity in our technological systems, and that will require changes in the market. Right now, the market incentives in tech are to focus on how things succeed: A company like CrowdStrike provides a key service that checks off required functionality on a compliance checklist, which makes it all about the features that they will deliver when everything is working. That’s exactly backward. We want our technological infrastructure to mimic nature in the way things fail. That will give us deep complexity rather than just surface complexity, and resilience rather than brittleness.

How do we accomplish this? There are examples in the technology world, but they are piecemeal. Netflix is famous for its Chaos Monkey tool, which intentionally causes failures to force the systems (and, really, the engineers) to be more resilient. The incentives don’t line up in the short term: It makes it harder for Netflix engineers to do their jobs and more expensive for them to run their systems. Over years, this kind of testing generates more stable systems. But it requires corporate leadership with foresight and a willingness to spend in the short term for possible long-term benefits.

Bottom of the Page

I find the Paris Olympics opening ceremony to be elegant and effortless -- even though it is also obvious a lot of effort has been put into it. Too bad about the rain, though.

And now, let's see how many other ceremonies are moving out of the stadium in the coming years.

~

Thanks for reading.