The quiet plan to make the internet feel faster
Engineers and major companies are pushing a technology called L4S that they say could make the web feel dramatically faster. But how?
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Engineers and major companies are pushing a technology called L4S that they say could make the web feel dramatically faster. But how?
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Senator Warren, who often calls out anticompetitive big tech behavior, weighed in today on Apple’s blockage of Beeper’s Android iMessage workaround.
She’s right that SMS is less secure than Apple’s encrypted iMessage platform. Things could improve with RCS on iPhones, if Apple works out encryption for it.
A Savanah, Georgia NBC morning show booked Dan Deacon in 2005, airing him right when people were waking up. I grabbed a time-stamped link below, but the pre-performance interview is well worth a watch if you’re curious about this young Deacon’s equipment.
That’s right, Dan Seifert joined the pod this week (click here to listen in your favorite podcast app) with his unhinged and totally useable Dex setup and we spent quite a bit of time talking about the dream of a phone that actually doubles as a laptop.
We also talked about Google’s big new AI, the chaos at Spotify, and even found time to talk about a few gadgets and the perils of owning digital media.
A judge had ruled in November that postal workers who, in solidarity with Tesla’s unionized Swedish mechanics, refused to deliver the plates had to let Tesla pick them up. But Fortune writes that another Swedish court overturned the ruling pending a final decision.
The strike began when Tesla refused to bargain with around 120 unionized Swedish mechanics. Soon, other unions joined, including dockworkers and postal workers, then the strike spread to unions in Denmark and Norway.
A pair of stories in The Washington Post today highlighted how little seems to stop Tesla drivers from ignoring company guidance about where and how to use Autopilot. It’s resulted in years of fatal crashes, court cases, scoldings, and investigations, but no impactful regulation.
As some drivers choose to use Autopilot where they shouldn’t, they wait for Full Self Driving, which Musk has promised for years, but Tesla has never delivered on.
[The Washington Post]
This series is all about infrastructure: the invisible layer of wires and guts and light that makes everything run. It’s not in the best shape, but what would it take to make it better?
After reiterating that the 13- and- 15-inch MacBook Airs will each get upgraded to Apple’s M3 chip next year (and that Apple will drop the 2020 M1 Air from its lineup), Mark Gurman wrote this in his Power On newsletter for Bloomberg:
The move means there’s only a couple Macs left that don’t have the latest processor generation: the Mac Studio and Mac Pro. But they probably won’t get upgraded until the end of 2024 at the earliest, if not 2025.
That’s not terribly surprising, but Gurman notably didn’t mention the Mac Mini, a machine he’s written previously would get an M3 upgrade next year along with the new MacBook Air models, in today’s newsletter.
Filed under:
A lot of homes are being built, but a lack of understanding of internet infrastructure and a need to cut costs means they kind of suck for internet.
I’m currently sitting in the seventh row of the stands at the HyperX Esports Arena in Las Vegas, where 16 Excel whizzes are going to spend the night competing to solve puzzles with spreadsheets. T-shirts are being thrown, all the lights are green, thousands of dollars in prize money is at stake, the energy in here is already off the charts. The stream — on Twitch, YouTube, and ESPN — starts at 10:30 ET, and it’s definitely the most fun you can have on this Saturday night.
It’s down to just three of the six gyroscopes NASA upgraded it with in 2009 — and one of those is flaking out. According to Ars Technica, the agency’s engineers figured out a way to keep the Hubble going on a single gyro.
In this one-gyro mode, Hubble’s control system would receive inputs from the single gyroscope in combination with magnetometers, Sun sensors, and star trackers.
Unfortunately, it’s also got issues with one of its guidance sensors, and its orbit is decaying, putting it a little over a decade from falling out of the sky. NASA and SpaceX have studied whether they can push it farther out again.
Listen, that’s none of your, my, or anyone else’s business. The point is, it happened. What Hi-Fi? wrote about it a few days ago, and the $549.95 Yamaha CD-C603 sounds just fine — if you don’t mind spending hundreds more than you might for one of the old carousel-style CD changers with nearly all the same features on eBay.
After Apple seemingly blocked its iMessage for Android solution, the company posted that Beeper Cloud is “now fully working with iMessage.”
But that’s not its famed “breakthrough” Beeper Mini approach that runs directly on Android phones and sends messages straight to Apple’s servers — that’s still broken. Beeper co-founder Eric Migicovsky told The Verge in an email that Beeper Cloud uses Pypush and doesn’t use Mac servers owned by the company.
Update December 9th, 2023, 1:55PM ET: Updated with input from Beeper co-founder Eric Migicovsky.
After being told earlier this year it can’t enforce its NDAs that forbid bad reviews from unhappy customers. the company has shut down its customer care support and canceled all outstanding tooth aligner orders. It also says that its “Lifetime Smile Guarantee no longer exists.”
SDC is still happy to take in money, though:
I’m on the SmilePay Plan. Do I need to keep paying for my aligners?
SmilePay customers are expected to continue to make all monthly payments until payment has been made in full per the terms of our SmilePay program. For more questions, please contact HFD at 1-877-874-3877 or support@gohfd.com.
New York Times reporter Erin Griffith threaded a tidy summary of SmileDirectClub’s history of suing dentists.
The New York Times published a look at OpenAI’s firing and rehiring of CEO Sam Altman. The moment-by-moment rundown doesn’t dig into the claims of Altman being “psychologically abusive” from yesterday’s Washington Post story.
Remember, this all started less than a month ago.
The company acknowledged on Thursday that ChatGPT has been phoning it in lately (again), and it’s fixing it. Then overnight, it made a series of posts about the chatbot training process, saying it must evaluate the model using certain metrics — AI benchmarks, you might say — calling it “an artisanal multi-person effort.”
You know, like bread with seeds in it.
Found this while I was poking around Denon’s site and found a page about its history, and this logo stopped me instantly. Just look at this thing!
Denon, listen, you gotta put this on the front of a receiver. Just one. I will buy it tomorrow, I don’t care.
That said, things with Beeper Mini might be a little messed up while you wait. The company posted that the fix is “very close, and just a matter of a bit more time and effort.”
The company says it’s resetting the counter on trial memberships as soon as the fix is int... but because of how iMessage works, it won’t fall back to SMS for up to a day.
There are some very good options if you’ve got the time. Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron is in theaters, while Leave the World Behind is streaming on Netflix. When it comes to games, things are pretty busy: Baldur’s Gate 3 finally hit Xbox, Final Fantasy XVI has some surprise DLC, Lego Fortnite launched, and Apple Arcade added a few new titles like Sonic Dream Team.
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They met for an hour on Thursday, lead attorneys for both sides told Judge James Donato in a filing (pdf) this evening, following an earlier settlement discussion between Sweeney and Google’s heads of partnerships and product management for Android that was ordered by the court.
“These meetings did not result in a settlement.”
Also new: This is the final verdict form (pdf) the jury will use to decide Epic v. Google.
The lawsuit, which was certified on Friday, is “the largest ever certified under California’s Equal Pay Act,” Variety reports.
VR studio Tender Claws and the Tender Claws Human Union have reached a tentative collective bargaining agreement, and it’s “one of the first union contracts for video game developers in the US,” according to a press release. Proposals in the agreement include pay scales, codifying LGBTQIA+ inclusive benefits, benefits like dental insurance, and codifying virtual reality breaks.
Tender Claws is currently developing Stranger Things VR.
[Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE-CWA)]
Google is telling users who pay less for Premium because they once had Google Play Music or YouTube Red that they’ll owe the recently-instated $13.99 per month fee in January, 9to5Google reports.
Google had already said that it was going to give legacy subscribers a grace period before bumping them up to the higher fee, but that period is now coming to an end.
Instagram boss Adam Mosseri’s small announcement is important to anyone who publishes content on the internet. Until now, traffic from Threads was indistinguishable from Instagram in the metrics used by sites like this one, But now that it has a separate link referrer, site owners can see for themselves how much traffic it’s sending in comparison to competitors.
On the other hand, Twitter / X allegedly just signed up 10 million new people in a week, if you can believe that.
In a redux of a case against Apple and iOS, Epic aims to dismantle barriers that could spell higher fees for app makers — and, Google argues, keep Android safe and competitive.
Ten years old, but new to me: a website that plays a tone every time a Wikipedia page is updated. It’s a soothing antidote to ... basically every other browser tab, at this point.
The bell-like sounds of a celesta correspond to edits with a net addition of content to Wikipedia, and the strums of a clavichord correspond to net subtractions of content.
That, of course, is from Wikipedia.
[listen.hatnote.com]
Today’s Windows 11 Insider Preview (Build 22635.2850) adds WhatsApp to the “Share using” sheet in the OS, according to a blog post about the update. Microsoft plans to add more apps to the share window over time.
There’s also now a one-click install experience in the Windows Store app that lets you continue browsing as the app downloads and installs.
[Windows Insider Blog]