by Ian Betteridge

Ten Blue Links “Sometimes we must make a quirkafleeg” edition

1. How do you tell an AR product doesn’t have a mass market application?

When people start talking about how good it is for use in surgery. Don’t believe me? Here’s a Microsoft piece from 2018 talking about surgeons were using HoloLens. These kinds of applications are as old as AR itself, and they represent the kind of niches which are the most obvious business-side areas for using the tech. Industrial applications are exactly what Microsoft spent a decade trying to push for HoloLens. It didn’t work. It won’t work for Apple, either.

2. Reach in the gutter, not the stars

Dave Lee, who knows a thing or two, sums it up nicely: “When Reach goes out of business it’ll blame AI or Big Tech or the BBC or the TikTok generation or literally anything that allows the bosses to avoid admitting they forced their employees to publish complete shit”.

And of course when complaining about the BBC, they won’t mention the £8m a year that the BBC puts into funding more than 150 local reporters. Some of whom work at titles owned by, erm, Reach.

3. The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily you friend

You might have noted that Penguin Random House came out strongly against AI software makers lifting their books for profit. But as Cory Doctorow points out, that doesn’t mean one of the most rapacious groups in publishing has suddenly gained a moral compass. Instead, it just wants to make sure that it gets some money from any AI-related work using “its” content:

This is a pretty naive take. What’s far more likely is that PRH will use whatever legal rights it has to insist that AI companies pay it for the right to train chatbots on the books we write. It is vanishingly unlikely that PRH will share that license money with the writers whose books are then shoveled into the bot’s training-hopper. It’s also extremely likely that PRH will try to use the output of chatbots to erode our wages, or fire us altogether and replace our work with AI slop.

4. All WordPress, all the time

WordPress.com, the organization which believes trademarks are a vital weapon to defend their business, are routinely misusing other companies’ trademarks by republishing plugins on a private repo for their customers. We are very much at “you couldn’t make it up” now.

5. What’s the deal, Dale?

Why is the owner of “Britain’s greenest energy supplier” so against heat pumps? The cynical bones in me want to say that the interests of an energy supplier definitely don’t align with the idea of using less electricity.

6. The deeply disappointing iPad mini

You know how in bad science fiction there’s a moment when someone defeats an invasion of killer robots by asking a question which ties them in knots by making no sense?

“Why is a mouse when it spins?”

“Because… BZZZZT… DAMN… YOU… PUNY… HUMAN.. .BZZZT”

Cue triumph of humanity..

You can get a similar effect from me by asking “hey Ian what’s your favourite iPad?” I’m typing this on an M4 11in iPad Pro and it’s gorgeous. That screen! That speed! That pencil! OK maybe not so much that pencil. On the other hand, the iPad mini. The size! The lovely compactness! The USB-C! The pencil! OK, maybe not the pencil either.

The problem is that Apple does not love the mini as much as its users do, which is why this review of the latest version rings true to me. The one quibble I have is with the placement of the camera – if my use is anything to go by, having the camera at the top in portrait makes sense for the mini where it doesn’t for everything bigger.

7. Everything you ever wanted to know about Mac firmware (but were afraid to ask)

As always, the irrepressible Howard Oakley will be your guide. I love Howard’s in-depth technical work. Those of us who worked with him on MacUser knew he was brilliant, but I didn’t know he was this brilliant.

8. An interview with Iain Banks

Iain Banks was a genius writer, and one of the things which I love most about his is how his literary touchpoints are so similar to mine: M John Harrison, Barrington Bailey, and John Sladek are the ones he lists in this interview, but there are many others.

9. Apple Intelligence gets closer and closer

A lot of people are underwhelmed by Apple Intelligence, which is finally getting closer to officially rolling out in the UK. Personally I have found things like email summarization useful, but not game changing – and that’s OK. I would rather generative AI happens on-device, where I have more control over what data leaks out, and be a little underwhelmed.

10. The great awake

When I was twenty-seven, my Sleep stepped out of me like a passenger from a train carriage, looked around my room for several seconds, then sat down in the chair beside my bed.

If that first line doesn’t get you reading there’s no hope for you.

by Ian Betteridge

Nuvia, Qualcomm and ARM’s license to print money

Ah, the nuclear option. So why is ARM cancelling Qualcomm’s right to make ARM-compatible chips?

To understand what’s going on, you need to know a little bit about how ARM makes money. ARM doesn’t make processors. Instead, ARM develops processor core designs, which you can license to build your own chips, with ARM earning a per-unit fee. That’s known as a Technology License Agreement, or TLA, and it’s used by a lot of companies wanting to build, say, an industrial controller which includes an ARM core. 

The other option – and one that’s only used by a limited bunch of companies – is an Architecture Licensing Agreement, or ALA. In this case, you have the right to build your own ARM-compatible core, using it yourself or selling it to third parties. Apple, for example, has an ALA, and its “Apple Silicon” designs are not based on ARM cores at all. The rumour is that Apple pays relatively small amounts of this (some reports say it accounts for as little as 5% of ARM revenue), despite Apple Silicon being the driving force behind the world’s most successful smartphone – and now, iPad and Mac too.

NUVIA and Qualcomm

NUVIA was a startup founded by former Apple and Google chip designers with the intention of creating a new generation of server processors, ones which would dramatically improve both power efficiency and speed over what was already out there. As such, it acquired an architecture license, allowing it to build its own cores. And we know, it created some pretty-fast cores, with fees and royalty rates to ARM which reflected its focus on the server market. 

Qualcomm also had both an ALA and a TLA, but its attempts to design its own fast ARM cores had repeatedly failed. The last custom core it shipped was the Kryo, in 2015 (2018’s Kryo200 series was based on an ARM core design). Instead it was forced to rely on ARM core designs, which is why its chips were good enough for smartphones, but didn’t get to the performance levels required for servers or computers. 

This is why Qualcomm bought Nuvia: without it, the company was effectively locked out of the server and computer markets, and with pressure on it from the likes of Microsoft to create a chip capable of competing on power and performance-per-watt with Apple, it needed something.

There was only one problem: according to ARM, Nuvia could not transfer technology created under its ALA to another company without ARM’s consent. That means that – even though it has its own ALA – Qualcomm couldn’t use the processor cores which Nuvia had developed. It needed ARM’s permission first, and ARM wasn’t going to give that permission unless Qualcomm paid it more money. Qualcomm didn’t, leading to ARM terminating Nuvia’s ALA in March 2022. At that point, ARM also reminded both Nuvia and ARM that they would need to stop using and destroy the technology Nuvia had developed under that ALA. 

Qualcomm, obviously, did no such thing. It needs those cores. Without them, it’s back to either the hopeless task of developing its own cores, or licensing ARM designs which it can’t make competitive with Apple or Intel.

What’s crazy about this is that in April 2022, Qualcomm’s general counsel sent a letter to ARM acknowledging the termination, recognising its obligations, and stating that Nuvia and Qualcomm were in compliance. In May, it then asked ARM to certify that a new processor was in compliance with ARM architecture. ARM claims this processor was, in fact, based on Nuvia designs – and so violates those licenses.  That processor is, of course, today’s Snapdragon Elite.

Who is going to win?

Mostly, lawyers. Big, expensive IP lawyers.

The most likely outcome is that ARM and Qualcomm come to an agreement allowing it to keep processors based on Nuvia designs on the market, and ARM gets more money. 

But there is a curve ball here: in making the Snapdragon Elite, Qualcomm has made an ARM core which is miles ahead of anything ARM designs. And, under its ALA, it could license that core to other chip makers – something that competes directly with ARM. 

That’s very different to the situation with Apple, which won’t ever license its Apple Silicon cores to anyone else. ARM wants ARM-based processors to take over the world, but it would much rather all the design licensing money comes into ARM than into Qualcomm, which would than only have to pay it a smaller slice of the licensing pie.

My bet is on some kind of large exchange of cash. But this might not be as predictable as that. 

Notably, there’s no indication ARM has cancelled any of Qualcomm’s technology licensing agreements (TLAs). It remains free to make chips based on ARM-designed cores, covered by its TLAs – which are most of its processors (including all the Snapdragon 8 series, apart from 8 Elite). Despite reports you might read, this isn’t going to “upend the smartphone market”. Nor has it “cancelled Qualcomm’s license to use its chip design standards”, which is a fancy way of saying “I don’t know the difference between an ALA and TLA”. 

Instead, think of this as removing one of the planks which might have formed a defence for Qualcomm’s legal team. It could have argued that, as it also had an ALA, it had the same rights to develop new processors as Nuvia anyway. Or it could have claimed that the Snapdragon 8 Elite wasn’t actually based on existing Nuvia designs at all (good luck with that), so was covered by the Qualcomm ALA. 

The defence is no longer available, and so it makes it hard to see how Qualcomm can legally continue shipping Snapdragon 8 Elite. Unless, of course, it comes to a costly agreement with ARM in the next 60 days. 

My money is on the money changing hands.

by Ian Betteridge

10 Blue Links, “WordPress+SEO+WWIII” edition

1. The era of the search engine traffic strategy

I spent a good ten years knee-deep in SEO and building content strategies for scale publishers around search, but as some of you will know I think that era is over. It’s almost a year since I published an article which outlined why I think so (LLMs change the game) and later looked at what publishers can do to respond. I missed the Gartner study from February which drew much the same conclusions.

I also wrote about how this would impact affiliate revenue, which has been the great strategic play which kept many scale publishers afloat, and which they have now invested heavily in. My perspective was that in three to five years it was probably toast, but things move fast — for example, Google is now experimenting with a feed of products for you in shopping. All in all, publishers need to remember that platforms serve their own interests, and really will kill anyone else if they feel like it. Own your own content strategy.

I’m no longer as immersed in that world, but from what I hear on the grapevine everyone is either waiting for the shoe to drop or is pedaling furiously to stay in much the same place. All of this is masked of course by Google’s other algo-twiddling, but the long term trend remains the same: search is dead, baby. Search is dead.

2. Who could possibly have predicted this?

I’m shocked, shocked I tell you that young men who listen a lot to Joe Rogan tilt towards supporting Donald Trump. Of course this has a lot of people wringing their hands and blaming right wing influencers etc etc.

And there’s a kernel of truth there. But literally in the third paragraph it also notes that the percentage is… 75 to 18 favorable to Joe Biden, even in this demographic. Generally it’s 88-6.

What can you make of this? Well not as much as the NYT would love to make. I would love to have access to the full data so I could crunch it, but it seems to me that young men listening to and enjoying a consistently right-wing idiotic podcast are more likely to skew to the right. And they aren’t event skewing to the right much. I’m sure the Democrats would take a 75-18 split in the general election.

Meanwhile the NYT itself consistently makes life easy for the right wing, by excluding trans voices from its coverage of gender issues to holding Trump to lower standards than Biden to downplaying Trump’s threats to democracy. Maybe look closer to home, people?

3. The paranoid turn

Something is rotten in the state of WordPress. I’m finding it hard to keep up, but thankfully The Internet Provides.

My own personal bit of this: I’m currently hosting this on WordPress.com, but I’m likely to shift in the near future. I’m taking the opportunity to reevaluate how I use my domains, so there will be some change here. What I am thinking of is converting my “name” domain to just be a relatively static site about me and what I do, and using my Technovia domain to, once again, be a blog. That runs on Micro.blog, which I like very much, but I think I’m likely to use self-hosted WordPress for ianbetteridge.com.

I just don’t want to pay money to a company that’s clearly as noxious as WordPress. I don’t expect that to change anything about Mullenweg’s behaviour, but I am certainly not comfortable with rewarding it. The warning signs were there, I just ignored them for too long.

4. RIP uBlock (sorta)

Google has long had ad blockers in its sights, but simply banning them was always likely to attract the kind of heat towards its monopoly on browsers that the company could do without. Now that it seems possible Chrome will be taken away from the company, it no longer has to play nice, so it’s used the cover of Manifest v3 to rid the world of uBlock Origin.

Switch to Firefox. Or, if you must use a Chrome-based browser, try a DNS-based blocker, which will have the additional benefit of extra protection from malware. Whatever you do, don’t just keep using Chrome.

5. Microsoft leader to head up UK industrial body

I have no idea whether Clare Barclay is a good choice for this post on individual merit, but it’s pretty indicative of the state of UK industrial strategy that a software person ends up overseeing the British government’s industrial strategy. The UK doesn’t really have an industrial strategy: decades of failing to invest in either light or heavy industry have left it miles behind the likes of Germany, China, the US and many others. I recently went to Innotrans, the biannual global event for the rail industry, and the lack of big UK companies there surprised me. German and Chinese companies rule the globe, thanks to long-term thinking and not seeing selling off assets as “foreign investment”. Good luck to Barclay. She’ll need it.

6. Who could possibly have believed etc etc

Surprise! The robots at the Tesla Cybercab event were humans in disguise. Who could possibly have predicted this plot twist.

7. Remember Meetup?

I had almost forgotten it, despite it being something that I got a lot of value out of a while ago. Turns out that it’s now owned by the notorious Bending Spoons, a company that goes around buying up software and raising prices.

8. This is why monolithic app stores are bad

“We have to follow local laws” says Apple, Google, and every single major company in the world. Which is, mostly, fine and completely understandable. However, when the only option for installing software is a single app store, this also means the government has absolute control over what software a person in their country can run.

The latest example of this is Apple’s removal of the Current Time app from the Russian app store (you thought Russian sanctions meant Apple wasn’t operating there? Oh bless you). What is Current Time? It’s an “independent Russian-language media service and website run by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL)”. Radio Free Liberty, if you don’t know it, is funded by a grant from the US government in order to provide access to uncensored media to people in countries where what you can read and listen to is tightly controlled.

Yes, that’s right: a US company is removing an app funded by the US government, in order to keep on the right side of Vladimir Putin and what keep whatever profits they make from Russia.

It’s not the first time Apple has done this, of course. It also removed VPNs from the app store, so Russians couldn’t get access to uncensored media.

None of this would really matter if alternate, safe app stores could be installed. But they can’t. You have to jailbreak your phone, with all the attendant risks that involves (particularly in a repressive regime). But they aren’t, because Apple, Google and the rest would rather make a load of money than help global users have free access to information.

9. Hugo Barra, intelligent agents and Meta

I love Ben Thompson’s interviews, although they also frustrate me a little as a journalist because I think Ben sometimes lets his excitement over technology get the better of him. The most recent one with Hugo Barra is really interesting, as they focus on the next wave of user experience — a world of agents, rather than apps — which is something I’m solidly behind.

There is one point, though, where I think it would have been worth asking some harder questions. When talking about the future, Hugo mentions this:

HB: It’s all good, I think it was ChatGPT for me, and I haven’t stopped thinking it since. I do think that one of the great advantages that Meta has [compared to Apple] is the fact that it doesn’t have a legacy operating system that it needs to keep nourishing.

It’s true that Apple now has a lot of legacy in terms of tech that it would want to leverage and support. However, Meta has something that is arguably harder to move beyond: a business model, based on advertising. And agents, which deliver information to you in a proactive way, are incompatible with the advertising model which relies on putting content next to content. The point of agents is to filter out things you don’t want to see. Agents are opinionated, and they’re on the side of the person who is using them. It’s hard to see how ads fit into that world.

10. Just how close to WWIII were were in 1999?

This is a fascinating story: how General Sir Mike Jackson, who died recently, prevented NATO troops from ending in a firefight with Russians, effectively subverting a direct order from his US superior officer. Well worth a read.

by Ian Betteridge

Ten Blue Links “my god, what have I done?” edition

1. Well who could possibly have seen this coming?

I wrote a while ago that the era of major levels of affiliate revenue for publishers was going to come to an end within the next three to five years. Generative AI writing means both that Google is likely to become a sea of slop, and that anyone with a search engine – especially Google – is going to cream off the best quality search results for itself.

Amazon is taking this a step further by using generative AI to do product recommendations on site. Given that a large number of searches for products begin on Amazon anyway, this is more bad news for anyone who makes money from sending traffic towards the Seattle company. And as users get more and more exposed to using conversation to hone down what they want, this is going to get worse for publishers who focus on “an article” as the canonical way of recommending products.

The truth is that articles have never been brilliant at recommending the right solution for any individual. For example, the answer to “what car is right for me” has always depended on your use of it. Conversational agents using good quality data will be a better solution in the long run.

2. Turkeys, meet Christmas

Yes, I know that advertising revenue is toast, but if you are a major publisher and you’re giving OpenAI the rights to mine your content, you are silly. The sum of money they’re paying is never going to go up: and when your licensing deal ends, they will have used everything you have ever done to train a model which can recreate your style of content in seconds. Golf, as they say, clap.

3. Possible sign of the end times: I agree with DHH

David Heinemeier Hansson is not on my Christmas card list. He’s one of those techbros for whom the phrase “arrogant asshat” is entirely appropriate. But for once, I’m going to agree wholeheartedly with something he wrote: Automattic demanding a tithe from WP Engine is a violation of the ideals of open source software, reduces trust in it, and in my view shows that Matt Mullenweg’s “principles” begin and end at maintaining control over WordPress.

4. Where all the Chief Metaverse Officers gone?

Good question. My bet is the B Ark.

5. Oh boy, Roblox is toast

Where “toast” means “full of child grooming”. Ouch.

6. Quote of the week

The truth is the news media is effectively in the tank for Trump, sanewashing his literal nonsense, outright lies, and violence-inspiring hate speech against even legal immigrants. But our major political news media remains so hyper-focused on appearing not to favor one political side over the other that it’s completely lost sight of what ought to be their north star: the truth.
John Gruber, “Why Is Jack Smith’s Unsealed Motion, Outlining Trump’s Criminal Actions to Overturn the 2020 Election, Not the Top Story?”

7. Elon, phone home (from Mars)

I increasingly wonder why Elon Musk is bothering trying to establish himself on Mars, and not just because it looks like a complete dump up there. (Seriously, if you think that’s beautiful, I have around a hundred thousand disused quarries I’d love to show you right here on Earth.)
The ever-wonderful Marina Hyde, wondering what reality Musk occupies.

8. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you that lovely Google would do this

Yeah no of course I’m not. Turns out that Google Pixel phones give it your location, email address and more every fifteen minutes, without consent. And no, before you say something, using an iPhone isn’t much a miracle cure.

9. This stuff matters

I could have written a WordPress special edition this time out. But I wondered if that would be too “insider baseball” for most people.

But a big chunk of the internet runs on WordPress. Publishers use it a lot. It’s become the IBM of web servers: “no one ever got fired for recommending WordPress”. And the hold-outs in the publishing space who have had their own bespoke software or used something else appear to be dwindling every year.

So WordPress matters, to a degree that few other software platforms do. It became popular in part because it was open source, so anyone could customize it and bend it to their will, and because so many people used it that it was easy to support and find developers for. It saw off semi-forgotten closed source rivals.

If you want a summary then Mathew Ingram’s article is a good place to go. Mathew has written something which encapsulates the feeling that I think many people have: profound disappointment in Mat Mullenweg’s behaviour, in his refusal to understand that being both the CEO of WordPress.com and the effective owner of WordPress.org places him in a position which needs to be handled sensitively. Using WordPress.org to attack a commercial rival of his company means it “now looks like the CEO of a multibillion-dollar corporation is using his control of a theoretically open-source foundation to extort money from a competitor.” That is unacceptable.

10. A hole is a hole

“There is no such thing as a magic hole that only good guys can use”. Wendy Grossman has spent a long time pointing out that if you build a backdoor in a system to let “good guys” in law enforcement use, you’re opening the same thing for people who you would really rather not let into systems. And so it goes.

by Ian Betteridge

Ten Blue Links, literary salon Edition

1. Apple’s built in apps can do (almost) everything

One of the characteristics of hardcore nerdery is the tendency to over engineer your systems. People spend a lot of time creating systems, tinkering with them, making them as perfect as possible, only to abandon them a few years down the line when some new shiny hotness appears.

I’m as guilty of this as the next nerd, but at least I’m aware of my addiction. It’s one of the reasons why I have spent time avoiding getting sucked into the word of Notion, because I can see myself losing days (weeks) to tinkering, all the while getting nothing done.

That said, if you are going to create an entire workflow management system and you’re in the word of Apple, you could do a lot worse than take a leaf out of Joan Westenberg’s book and use all Apple’s first party apps. They have now got to the point where they are superficially simple, but contain a lot of power underneath.

The downside is it’s an almost certain way of trapping yourself in Apple’s ecosystem for the rest of time. Yes, Apple’s services – which lie behind the apps – use standards and have the ability to export, but not all of them, and for how long?

It’s a trade off, and from my perspective not one that really works for me right now. But if it does for you, then it’s a good option (and better than Notion).

2. Juno removed from the App Store

AKA “why I do not like any company, no matter how well intentioned, to have a monopoly on software distribution for a platform.” Christian Selig created a YouTube player for the Apple Vision Pro. It doesn’t block ads or do anything which could be regarded as dubious. But Google claimed it was using its trademarks, and Apple removed it.

Why is this problematic? Because it’s setting Apple up as a judge in a legal case. YouTube could, and should, have gone to a judge if it believed it had a legal case for trademark violation. That’s what judges are for. Instead, probably because it knew that it wouldn’t win a case like that, it went to Apple. Apple (rightly) doesn’t want to get involved in trademark disputes, so it shrugged and removed the app.

This extra-legal application of law is one of the most nefarious impacts of App Store monopolies. And if it continues to be allowed, it will only get worse.

3. The horrible descent of Matt Mullenweg

You will be aware of the conflict between WordPress — by which we mean Matt Mullenweg, because according to Matt he is WordPress — and WPEngine. I have many opinions on this which I will, at some point, get down to writing. The most important one is simple: if you make an open source product under the GPL, you don’t get to dictate to anyone how they use it and don’t get to attempt to punish them for not contributing “enough”. Heck, you don’t get to decide what “enough” looks like.

The whole thing has brought out the worst in Mullenweg, as evidenced in his attacks on Kellie Peterson. Peterson, who is a former Automattic employee, offered to help anyone leaving WordPress find opportunities. Mullenweg decided this was attacking him, and claimed this was illegal. I don’t know about you, but when a multi-millionaire starts to throw around words like “tortuous interference” I pay attention.

As with many of that generation of California ideologists Mullenweg appears to have decided that he knows best, now and always. Yes, private equity companies that use open source projects and contribute nothing back are douchebags, but they’re douchebags who are doing something that the principles of open source explicitly allow them to do. Mullenweg’s apparent desire to be the emperor of WordPress is worrying.

4. OpenAI raises money, still isn’t a business

Ed Zitron wrote an excellent piece this week on the crazy valuation and funding round which OpenAI just closed, pointing out that (1) ChatGPT loses money on every customer, and (2) there is no way to use scale to change this: the company is going to keep losing money on every customer as models get more compute-hungry. Neither Moore’s Law nor the economies of scale which made cloud services of the past profitable are going to come riding to the rescue.

I think Ed’s right — and it’s important to note, as Satya Nadella did, that LLMs are moving into the “commodity” stage — but one other thing to note is that many of the more simple things which people use LLMs for are being pushed from cloud to edge. Apple’s “Apple Intelligence” is one example of this, but Microsoft is also pushing a lot of the compute down to the device level in the ARM-based Copilot PCs.

This trend should alleviate some of the growth issues that OpenAI has, but it’s a double-edged sword because it makes it less likely that someone will need to use ChatGPT, and so even less likely to need to pay OpenAI.

5. Why I love Angela Carter

I think I first read Angela Carter during my degree, one of the few books that I bothered to read for my literature modules1. This piece includes possibly my favourite quote from her: “Okay, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what?”

And the point is: sometimes it’s fine not to be subtle. Sometimes it’s fine to be overblown. Sometimes the story demands it, like a steak needs to be juicy.

6. And speaking of writers I love

I can’t tell you enough to just go and read M John Harrison. Climbers is sometimes regarded as his best novel, and this essay on why it’s the best book written about 21st century male loneliness despite being written in 1989 captures a lot of it. I like the line from Robert Macfarlane’s introduction: “To Harrison, all life is alien”. Amen to that.

7. No really this week is all lit, all the time

Olivia Laing is another writer that makes me salivate when I read her. Like Harrison and Carter, her prose is as good as her fiction, and her recent book The Garden Against Time – an account of restoring a garden to glory – is one of the best yet. If you need any further persuading, you should read this piece in the New Yorker.

8. Down in Brighton? Like books?

Next weekend is the best-named literary festival in the world down in Brighton. The Coast is Queer includes loads of brilliant sessions including queer fantastical reimaginings, the incredible Julia Armfield on world building, Juno Dawson’s trans literary salon, and the unmissable David Hoyle. I’m going, you should go.

9. Harlan the terrible

Like Cory Doctorow, I grew up worshipping Harlan Ellison. And like Cory, as I’ve grown older I have see that Harlan was an incredibly complicated person. Cory has written a great piece (masquerading as just one part of a linkblog) which not only looks at Harlan, warts and all, but also talks about the genesis of the story he contributed to the – finally finished! – Last Dangerous Visions.

10. Argh Mozilla wai u doo this?

No Mozilla, no, online advertising does not need “improving… through product and infrastructure”. Online advertising needs to understand that surveillance-based ads were always toxic and the whole thing needs to be torn up. I agree with Jamie Zawinski: Mozilla should be “building THE reference implementation web browser, and being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.”

To be clear: I think Mozilla’s goals are laudable, in the sense that at the moment the choice for people is either accept being tracked to a horrendous degree or just block almost every ad and tracker. But you can’t engineer your way around the advertising industry’s rapacious desire for data. It’s that industry which needs to change, not the technology.

  1. I read a lot, I just didn’t read a lot that was actually on the syllabus. ↩︎
by Ian Betteridge

Ten Blue Links “reinventing drink ordering” Edition

1. Inventing the future

If there is a book about Apple, I have probably read it. On my first day working at the company in 1989 I was given the obligatory copy of then-CEO John Sculley’s Odyssey: From Pepsi to Apple. After that, I devoured as much as I could. 

I don’t think I have read a book like John Buck’s Inventing the Future, though. It’s getting on for 500 pages of interviews, history and anecdotes about Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, and I highly recommend it if you want to hear stories which haven’t been told before about Apple. I really wish it had an index, but it’s still well worth the money.

2. Apple’s web video mojo

Durig a conversation about Apple QuickTime, Kevin Marks pointed me at this article he wrote back in 2006 on why the company was losing its web video mojo. Kevin was right then – Apple could have owned web video – and someone really needs to sit down and write the history of that part of the company’s story. How did they mess up? As Kevin puts it “they invented pop-up web ads, and put one in before playing any web QT movie to sell the ‘Pro’ version of the player. They crippled the QT Player to remove the editing features unless you paid – even for the Mac users who had had the benefit before.” A lesson for today’s Apple, too.

3. Future is cleaning house

IMore, the 16 year old site which was born in the wake of the iPhone, is to close down. It’s not the only one of Future’s tech brands to be shuttered: AnandTech, the technology brand which had one of the best reputations in the world, is also going although its archive will stay online for the foreseeable future. I’m not surprised – while both sites were well regarded, they were not a great fit for the affiliate-led strategy that Future has been pursuing for many years (where it was ahead of most publishers). 

4. “Pray we don’t alter the deal further”

One of the reasons I loathe – and I really do mean that – the current generation of tech giants is their ability to lock down markets for software and pull the rug out from under existing application developers. The latest example is iA, which has effectively killed off the Android version of its wonderful writing app iA Writer after Google changed the rules regarding letting applications access Google Drive. “In order to get our users full access to their Google Drive on their devices, we now needed to pass a yearly CASA (Cloud Application Security Assessment) audit. This requires hiring a third-party vendor like KPMG.” Yes, that’s right: pay an auditor maybe a couple of months of revenue in order to access cloud storage. But it’s not just Google: Apple has the same control, as iA point out in a footnote.

5. Halide rejected from the App Store

No really, it’s not just Google. After seven years, and despite being featured in the iPhone 16 keynote, an update to Halide was rejected from Apple’s App Store because its permissions prompt wasn’t explicit enough that the app, which is a camera app and takes pictures, was in fact a camera app which takes pictures. Apple admitted this was a mistake, but how many “mistakes” never get corrected because the app isn’t high profile enough to get the right level of attention?

6. Why this blog will be moving soon

I’m not a massive fan of WP Engine as a company, and I wouldn’t recommend them as a WordPress host for a bunch of small reasons, but I have no doubt at all that Matt Mullenweg’s apparent crusade against them is one of the hollowest and most disingenuous set of complaints I have seen in a long time. Pulling the rug out from users getting security updates is an unforgiveable move. 

This blog is hosted by WordPress.com, and I don’t particularly want to move back to self-hosting WordPress. Anyone got any recommendations?

7. Return to work and die

I mean, literally die. For four days. With no one noticing. 

8. Remember the TouchPad?

This one is a definite trip down memory lane: The HP TouchPad was a WebOS tablet that had many of the attributes necessary to compete with the iPad, and yet was dumped by HP 49 days after its release. And I had completely forgotten that Russell Brand did an advert for it. Oh boy.

9. Cosmic Alpha 2

COSMIC DE has moved into alpha 2. If you don’t know about it, it’s a new Linux desktop environment which has been created as part of the next big upgrade to PopOS, the distribution created by computer maker System76 for its range of machine. I’m using it on my ThinkPad, and – so far at least – it’s been stable and very usable considering its alpha status. I’ve seen release versions of open source products be less stable. I might write something longer about my experience of Cosmic DE as I use it more.

10. Douchebros want to ruin bars, now

Sometimes I really wish that the idea of “disruption” in business had never been invented, because it really does attract some of the worst ideas. Case in point: disrupting queuing for a drink in a bar. No. Just no.

by Ian Betteridge

Ten Blue Links, “Turn to the left” edition

QuickTime

My first look at QuickTime came before it was publicly released. I was working at Apple in IS&T in 1990, and we had a session one afternoon showing everyone the world of the future. Of course, Knowledge Navigator took pride of place, but also shown off was an early version of a revolutionary new multimedia technology which would allow you to play video, in real time, in colour, on your Mac. QuickTime.

I was also there for the launch of QuickTime 3.0 in 1998, although all I remember of that event was the use of Sarah McLachlan’s Building a Mystery video (possibly one of the most 90s pieces of film ever made).

And, in 2001, on the top floor of the Dennis Publishing office I sat in the corner and tried to work as on screen a postage-stamp sized QuickTime video showed me a live feed of first one then two planes hitting the World Trade Center. A handful of years before the towers had been beacons as a train swung into New York, bringing me from Boston to Manhattan and into the best city in the world for the very first time. Even at QuickTime size, I felt like I was watching a friend take their last breath.

QuickTime, then, is woven through many memories for me. Anyway, Howard Oakley has written a brief history of it, and as a technology it probably deserves more. As a carrier of memory, it definitely means more to me.

2. Go to your room!

Sooner or later, your parents tell you to clean up your room. While Apple is now a middle aged company its recent descent into teenage tantrum behaviour has finally caused the EU to lose patience, ground it, and demand it thinks about its future conduct.

3. Editing vs accreting

Me and John Gruber have our disagreements but I couldn’t agree more with almost everything in his article on the difference between Tim Cook’s Apple and Steve Jobs’ Apple. I would compare Jobs to a brilliant magazine editor, pulling together and inspiring creative people while also editing: taking out what it’s needed to tell the story. Cook, on the other hand, is someone who accretes, who adds on more stuff in order to build.

4. No, Larry, no

Larry Ellison has always had an interesting reputation in Silicon Valley. Extraordinarily rich after Oracle became the data foundation of almost everything in the world, Ellison has a kind of noxiously playful arrogance. One of the most stomach-turning episodes of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs hagiography involves Ellison and Jobs playing a prank call on an Apple fan, first offering him a job, then laughingly turning down the poor sap. It’s gross. And it’s very Ellison.

With great money comes great stupidity, and it’s worth considering that as context when you read about Ellison’s view that pervasive surveillance cameras will bring world peace, or something. A man so divorced from a world which doesn’t involved super yachts, billionaire friends and the ability to buy as many Miata’s as you want (if you know, you know) is not someone that the world should listen to about the future.

5. Where the iPad ends

I don’t think there is a device which divides opinion more than the iPad. I see this in myself: there are days when I absolutely love my iPad Pro and everything that it represents. A device which can transform into anything you want it to be, that’s simple to use, that has a screen which is better than anything you own. And then there are days when I hate it. Not because of how it works, but because the degree of control over the experience of computing which it represents is an antithesis of many of my values.

But. There’s something about it, and I think this archive article by Tim Bajarin from the iPad’s tenth anniversary on the device’s influence is worth reading. How pervasive is the iPad’s influence now? In some senses, the use of ARM and amazing displays which are clearly the direction that computers are going in probably represents its deepest impact so far. Yes, touch screens are common in the Windows world, but slate-style computers haven’t really taken off in the way they should have. I’m still typing this on a Mac, after all.

6. Engagement bait

Been on Threads lately? You’ll have noticed that the main feed is a torrent of engagement bait. Of course you can switch to look at just the people you follow, but Meta makes every effort to pull you back into the “For You” feed, which shows you what appears to be a random mix of stupid questions and inane comments, written by people who pull on engagement like lungs pull on air.

Similarly, anecdote from the blue side of the Meta empire notes the home feed in Facebook is now showing more and more “content” from pages, groups and pretty much anything except the people you want to see: your friends and family, the ones you love, and an occasional cute dachshund.

Why, though? Speculating wildly, I think both Threads and the Facebook home feed represent a desperate bid for novelty. The action in terms of keeping you in touch with the people you’re close to has moved elsewhere, into different kinds of messenger application both private (iMessage, WhatsApp) and semi-public (Telegram). What’s left for Facebook? Pictures of old dogs?

And Threads is attempting to defining itself as “not Twitter”, while also trying to appeal to the same kinds of core influencers – journalists, those who aren’t visual enough for Insta. What better way to win than rigging the game towards a stream of infinite engagement bait?

7. Death to all Word

It’s 11 years since Charlie Stross wrote about how he hated Microsoft Word. It’s still a great read, and Charlie’s point – that until Microsoft Word dies, it’s unavoidable – remains as sound as ever.

8. You put the Lime in the coconut

I love electric bikes. I own one, and it’s got me back into cycling. So I’m in favour of people using them. But… well, is it just me or do techbros ruin everything? In this case, Lime and other e-bike rental companies are essentially creating fat rideable litter across areas to such a degree that local authorities want them banned, and local residents want them crushed. The bikes, not the techbros. Although hey, if that’s what the people want…

9. Fashion

It’s an unlikely thing for a boy from Derby, part of the post-industrial hinterland that is the East Midlands, to love fashion. But I always have. I think it was fashion that first made me love magazines, the heft and visual delight of something like Vogue. When I became an editor of a magazine which, while a tech mag, was also read by a huge number of creative people in design, it was probably the best job I ever had – even if I didn’t know it at the time.

I still love magazines, which is why I absolutely adored “In Vogue: The 90s”, a documentary about the eponymous magazine and the the era that made me. Highly recommended.

10. Art for art’s sake

I spent five years working on a PhD thesis titled The implications of Kant’s philosophy of mind for artificial intelligencein the early 90s, when cognitive science – that blend of philosophy, computing and psychology – was probably at its academic height. But like Kant, my interests in philosophy were broad, and I spent a chunk of my time in both medical ethics and the philosophy of art. The paper I presented to the conservators of the V&A on analogies from principles in medical ethics is long lost, but I’m glad that my comparison of the principle of dignity in death being more important than the relentless preservation of life with conservation of art works didn’t stick too heavily in anyone’s mind.

I’ve realised lately quite how much a blend of technology, art and design has influenced my working practice. I’m not an artist – words are the only medium that I have ever found which I have any talent at – but I love art, and artists, and design, and designers. I love how they see the world.

That’s probably why I love this interview with Jenny Saville much. Saville is one of those artists whose work you would instantly recognise, but whose face you might not remember. And in particular, I love this quote:

When I paint, I don’t search for beauty, but for the power of life’s force: when you fall in love with someone, it’s life’s force. When you see amazing food or you listen to music that goes right inside your body, that’s life’s force. That moment is not an intellectual space, it’s something beyond – you can’t articulate it. It’s about the moments that help you breathe deeper.

That’s a good one to ponder on.

by Ian Betteridge

Ten Blue Links, “hell of a lot of Apple here, Ian” edition

1. Oh was there some new Apple stuff?

Apparently there was. I didn’t get chance to watch the keynote live — I was in Amsterdam for a conference — but the only thing that really stood out for me when I saw it later was the feature for AirPods Pro which allows them to function as a proper hearing aid. My old ears will thank Apple for it (and so will my bank manager, as I won’t have to spend around £1,000 on something I don’t need most of the time).

2. Private cloud compute

And speaking of new Apple stuff, I’m actually pretty impressed with the way that Apple has implemented its private cloud compute system. Yeah, I know, AI is evil and all that.

3. How an iPhone screen repair led to a social media ban

However, back in the world of older Apple stuff, this whole story is likely to make your jaw hit the floor. After Apple replaced Finn Voorhees’ iPhone screen, they found when trying to log into Snapchat they got a an “SS06: Device Banned” error message. It turned out that the phone Finn got was a refurb (which should be fine) but that the previous owner had been banned from the service – and Snapchat uses a little-known feature to lock out not only the user, but the device if someone is banned. Unfortunately this device ban flag persists even if the phone is factory reset.

4. The new Reeder

One of the things which keeps pulling back to using the Mac, iPad and iPhone is thethird party developer ecosystem. This, of course, is one of the reasons why I end up getting angry at Apple for wanting their pound of flesh from every developer. It’s not the Mac that keeps me on the Mac. It’s the developers. Apple should be paying them, not the other way round.

Anyway, Reeder has been one of my favourite Mac and iOS applications for a long time. It’s an RSS reader (the clue is in the name) that’s a beautiful piece of design.

Silvio Rizzo, its author, has rebuilt the app from the ground up to change its focus and, as he puts it, make it something that’s “rebuilt for today”.

What does that mean? The starting point is that the way we get information is no longer all about RSS. In fact, we get feeds from social media, from YouTube, from podcasts, and many other places.

So Reeder now supports all of the above, putting everything into a single feed. It’s still a lovely design, but I suspect this approach won’t be for everyone. It reminds me of the “river of news” concept that Dave Winer was talking about more than a decade ago. I’m not sure if I like it yet, but I am going to give it a go.

5. iA Writer keeps getting better

Information Architects – iA – are one of my favourite developer teams. Not only do they produce great apps, they’re good people too. iA Writer, which was their first and flagship product, is the best distraction-free Markdown writing application that exists.

But it’s had one small weakness which means I don’t use it for as much as I would want: it’s not really designed to handle long-form articles made up from smaller pieces, whether that’s a novel or book-length project of just something composed from small parts. It can do transclusion in writing, and that’s a useful feature, but it’s not quite what I need.

A case in point: although the tools I use to write these linkblog posts vary, I often use Ulysses for it. I will write each of the ten blue links in a separate document, allowing me to go as short or long as I want without distraction. Then I just number them, move them into the right order, and publish direct to WordPress.

I can’t quite do that with iA Writer — yet. I could create each document separately, but in order to make a single document which I could publish in one click, I would have to create a document, use the transclusion feature to “insert” all the elements, and publish it. It’s just a little less elegant than the same process on Ulysses.

The good news is that it’s moving closer to having the right tools for the job. The latest version includes a “tree view” for files in its sidebar, making it significantly easier to structure texts. I’m really looking forward to what they do next.

6. One for the book pile

This looks like essential reading: an amazing collection of interview and anecdotes from the hackers and nerds who made all the most amazing Apple technology (via Nick Heer, where I get a lot of my best links from.)

7. Ice. Ice. Baby

When the wonderful Mac menu bar app Bartender was sold there was a little bit of concern that the new owner wouldn’t, perhaps, be the best steward for it. But if you want an app to manage all the clutter in your menubar then look no further than Ice. Not only is it really good, it’s also open source. Recommended.

8. Spamming the regulator

Look this is nerdy as hell, but you know I love a little bit of light reading about competition law. This paper looks at a new tactic from big companies who are under investigation for antitrust violation: gathering together so many thousands of pages of evidence and expert testimony that the case either becomes logjammed forever, or the regulator and judges can’t properly evaluate the evidence.

9. Rage bait on Threads

It’s a problem. For me Threads is mostly unusable junk because the “For you” view is swamped by engagement bait and nonsense. I’m happy that mostly I can now follow the people I want to follow who are only active on Threads from my Mastodon account, but I would love for Meta to actually realise this is a problem and engage with it. The service will go down the toilet pretty fast if it doesn’t.

10. America’s best paid CEOs have the worst paid employees

I’m sure this is a complete coincidence and the money will trickle down Real Soon Now.

by Ian Betteridge

“Ireland doesn’t want the money”

John Gruber on the EU ruling that Apple owes 13bn euro in taxes to Ireland:

Ireland doesn’t want the money… What a great win for Margrethe Vestager, making clear to the world that the EU is hostile to successful companies. Good job.

Ireland has long had a reputation as, effectively, an in-EU tax haven — one which walked very close to the line of EU and international law And the country has been especially "favourable" to large tech companies. As the Irish Independent notes:

The Government continues to claim there was no special treatment for Apple, and these were all ­merely legitimate tax exemptions. The ECJ says otherwise, with its final judgment: “Ireland granted Apple unlawful aid, which Ireland is required to recover.” The judges ruled that Apple’s two units incorporated in Ireland enjoyed favourable tax treatment compared with resident companies taxed in Ireland that were not capable of benefiting from such advance rulings by the tax authorities here. A rotten deal, indeed.

And the Irish government itself has long known that its sweetheart deals weren’t up to international standards:

As finance minister from 2017, Paschal Donohoe wisely started a process of bringing Irish rules into line – including rolling back the IP reliefs – and eventually signed up to the new OECD corporate tax deal.

Ironically — and counter to John’s point — the conversation in Ireland is already about how to use the windfall from Apple to invest in infrastructure which will help maintain its position as a hub in the EU for tech businesses:

And then there is what Ireland can – and cannot – offer. Promises – about clean energy, top-class education, abundant water and so on – count for little now. The State has the resources to address this, helped by another €14 billion which will soon be resting in our account. But the question investors are asking is whether Ireland can actually deliver.

It’s not just tax, of course. Ireland has also been recognised as the most lax data protection regime in Europe, so much so that the EDPB was forced to step in and make the Irish DPA enforce its own rules against Meta. John’s reaction to that case was a little different.

by Ian Betteridge

Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

I could — and probably should — write an entire essay about the cult of the founder in Silicon Valley, how it developed and the damage it has done. This article from Dave Karpf, though, encapsulates some of my own thinking. Contrasting Aaron Swartz and Sam Altman — both members of the first Ycombinator cohort — is such an interesting approach.

But the other reason why the whole founder mode thing is a hot mess is that Paul Graham is entirely wrong about management and leadership. Yeah, I know: Graham has been involved with building more companies than I have. But he’s never actually run, or even been in a senior leadership role, in a large company.

There’s a key paragraph in his essay which I think shows this:

Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it’s described that way, doesn’t it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.

If you are hiring “professional fakers” that means you are a poor manager. One of the most important thing that leaders focus on is hiring the right people, and that takes experience, or training, or both. Founders tend to lack all of these things, so of course they don’t always hire great people. And even good leaders don’t have a 100% hit rate (John Browett anybody?). As Allison Morrow puts it, founder mode is just another way of telling toxic bosses they are really great. And lord knows, that is not what Silicon Valley needs right now.

Another tell on Graham’s lack of experience in this area: his lack of knowledge that companies other than Steve Jobs’ Apple run annual retreats for the 100 most influential people, regardless of level. As Karpf notes, many companies do this. Heck, I have been part of retreats like that even at old-school publishing companies.

But if you have never worked in large companies, and you have the kind of founder myopia that Graham has, you wouldn’t know that.

I think Dave gets it right when he connects founder mode with other Silicon Valley craziness:

This is all of a piece with Andreessen’s techno-optimist manifesto and Balaji Srinivasan’s bat shit bitcoin declarations. A small, cloistered elite of not-especially-bright billionaires have decided that they are very, exceptional, and that the problem with society these days is that people keep treating them like everyone else.

I think all this also relates to a post on Threads by Neil Cybart:

One thing I have noticed is that some people in tech (writers, journalists, etc.) are becoming tired. Seems like it started around the pandemic. They have lost interest. However, they think the issue is Big Tech becoming boring instead of themselves. A good sign that it may be time for a re-shifting of voices in tech. I think we are going to see that play out in the coming years.

I have been thinking about Neil’s post a lot since I read it (always the sign of a good post!), in part because I too have felt bored by tech. Given that I have been fascinated by tech for almost the whole of my life, that has felt like a pretty odd place to be, mentally.

But I don’t think it’s that people themselves are getting boring: it’s that the landscape and characters in tech coverage have become more one dimensional. The hype cycle driven by characters like Graham often feels like you are being bludgeoned around the head if you’re not “all in” on crypto, or the metaverse, or LLMs, or whatever.

And the personalities — and tech is, and always has been, as much about people as things — are cartoon villains/heroic founders (delete as appropriate) who live in a bubble of their own. Musk, Graham, Altman… you name it.

Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz. As Dave Karpf rightly identifies, the hacker has vanished from the scene, to be replaced by an endless array of know-nothing hero founders whose main superpower is the ability to bully subordinates (and half of Twitter) into believing they are always right.

Where the hackers exist, they are either buried in the depths of big companies (does Johny Srouji ever leave that pristine basement?) or working on interesting but niche open source projects, often involving writing yet another text editor.

In allowing and encouraging the likes of Graham to define what tech looks like, we have made tech look boring, unless you are the kind of teenage who dreams of getting rich quick by starting a company, riding a hype cycle, and flipping it to some sucker for a few hundred million.

I doubt that commentators who love technology are bored with tech. But I do think we are bored with blow hards like Graham being the centre of attention, of hype cycles, and of huge corporations that are more interested in boosting revenues through digging moats and buying off potential competition.

Perhaps what Neil is detecting isn’t boredom, but dismay. If you lived through the excitement of the 80s and 90s, and the web optimism of the 00s, it’s difficult to look at people like Graham — people who aren’t as bright as they think they are — and get excited about the future of the industry.