Recent Articles

Will Knight:

The result seems to match the responses you’d expect from a human driver. But what if one day it did something unexpected—crashed into a tree, or sat at a green light? As things stand now, it might be difficult to find out why. The system is so complicated that even the engineers who designed it may struggle to isolate the reason for any single action. And you can’t ask it: there is no obvious way to design such a system so that it could always explain why it did what it did.

Later in the article:

Tom Gruber wouldn’t discuss specific plans for Siri’s future, but it’s easy to imagine that if you receive a restaurant recommendation from Siri, you’ll want to know what the reasoning was.

I get the desire to know how this stuff works, and it seems important while simultaneously not important. If it works, it works, and who cares how it works? If it saves your life, because it found cancer well in time to treat it, do you care?

Likewise: do you really care why Siri thinks you would like a restaurant? Or why Netflix thinks you would like another show? Not really.

Then pull this thread more: when you do a massive calculation on a calculator, do you know how it works? I mean there are mathematical rules, but how do you know if it is right? Surely someone, somewhere knows it is right? Right? Do you know that for sure?

Can of fucking worms.

Interesting look into the “fearless girl” statue. Not a simple thing. I had no clue about any of this. (I mean I knew about the statues.)

Neil Cybart:

The writing is on the wall. Apple will not be able to address its Achilles’ heel until iPad can be used for developing apps. This will involve Apple ramping investment and resources into iPad software, hardware, and accessories

I can’t wait for the day you can publish apps from an iPad, that’s the day we start getting fucking amazing iPad apps. It takes away every excuse “Pros” use for not making true pro grade software for the iPad. Apple included.

Joe Cieplinski:

People argue with me about this, and they’re wrong.

Shit, that should have been the tagline for this site.

This is definitely one of the oddest backpacks I have seen hit the market recently. At first I thought it looked great, but then the more I see of it, the less I like it. Going from 25 liters to 40 liters, by expanding the depth of the bag? I mean, I hate falling over backwards because my pack is 14 feet thick.

What an odd design…

Ina Fried:

The company declined to say why the voice assistant feature was being delayed. However, in demos for Axios and others, it failed to work properly.

Huh, wonder why.

Sandi Doughton on a new early warning system for earthquakes:

For nearby earthquakes, the warning may be only seconds. But for a quake on the offshore Cascadia Subduction Zone, the Puget Sound region could get as much as two or three minutes’ warning.

The technology is widely used in Japan, where people receive warnings on their cellphones and bullet trains are wired to come to a stop.

This sounds like the most paralyzingly and terrifying alert to get — I imagine I would be deer in headlights on that one. Still, sounds great, and something I honestly thought we would never get.

Eli Rosenberg and Maya Salam:

Security officials have warned for years about the risks that hacking attacks can pose to infrastructure. The number of attacks on critical infrastructure appears to have risen: to nearly 300 in 2015 from just under 200 in 2012, according to federal data. In 2013, hackers tied to the Iranian military tried to gain control of a small dam in upstate New York.

That’s a stark increase and as good as any other reason for the government to put security of these systems at the forefront. But, and I know it’s not really the same thing, this seems a lot like pulling the fire alarm in a building. Illegal, yes, but still pretty rare.

That said: please secure the fuck out of that dam.

Michelle Castillo:

One alternative for tech companies is to build out in other cities like Seattle, Austin or Chicago that offer a fun lifestyle but might not be as expensive. Not only are salaries cheaper, office rent and other expectations are lower as well. (The only exception was New York, which was mostly on par with San Francisco according to the companies surveyed.)

The median home price in Seattle now: $700,000. As my wife commented the other day: “I don’t understand how someone who does not already own a home in a big city, will ever afford to own a home in a big city.” Which is also the problem of why talent isn’t leaving San Francisco. Because once you have a stable place to live in a city like that, should you leave, it is likely that you would have a lot of trouble affording to move back. A bit Hotel California-ish. It’s not likely to change unless everyone goes remote.

A big thanks to Walt Mossberg for his tireless work. Mossberg was one of the reasons I started this site. Both because I loved reading his takes, and because I (naturally) thought I could do it better.

Ulysses has released version 2.8 and it has a feature I have been waiting for: Touch ID support. Now you can secure your entire Ulysses library with Touch ID and keep prying eyes out of your stuff. I feel strongly that every app should have this option, so it’s great to see the best iOS app gain it too.

Additionally this release adds some new filtering options and some much welcomed new group icons.

What a great app. Be sure you own a few dozen copies.

Dan Goodin:

TVs and other Internet-connected appliances almost universally lack application sandboxing and other exploit mitigations that are a standard part of computer and mobile operating systems. Even worse, most devices run old versions of Linux and open source browsers that contain critical vulnerabilities. While patches are generally available on the Internet for the individual components, manufacturers rarely give customers a way to install them on the devices in a timely way.

This is not a great hack (broadcasting malicious code over TV signals), but even worse is that unlike your other devices most IoT devices never see an update. It’s like people didn’t even think they might need to update these TVs at any point. FFS.

I don’t often agree with Lifehacker, but they sure got this one right.

Kim Zetter on Samsung’s Tizen OS:

But the operating system is riddled with serious security vulnerabilities that make it easy for a hacker to take control of Tizen-powered devices, according to Israeli researcher Amihai Neiderman.

“It may be the worst code I’ve ever seen,” he told Motherboard in advance of a talk about his research that he is scheduled to deliver at Kaspersky Lab’s Security Analyst Summit on the island of St. Maarten on Monday. “Everything you can do wrong there, they do it. You can see that nobody with any understanding of security looked at this code or wrote it. It’s like taking an undergraduate and letting him program your software.”

JFC.

Jean-Louis Gassée:

As hoped for in this space, it’s part of a shift that partially explains Cook’s fervor for the iPad: iOS, not macOS, will be the software engine of Apple’s future. Mac fans, I’m one of them, might disagree with Apple’s strategy, but here it is in plain view.

Sure is a lot of smoke around the future of the iPad for there not to be big things in store.