Elon Musk walked into Twitter HQ carrying a sink; in hindsight it should have been a toilet, because Twitter is now circling the bowl.
Elon Musk eases return-to-office order - The Washington Post
One Twitter staff member said the numbers of employees seeking to leave had alarmed Twitterâs managers, who had formed âwar roomsâ to determine which employees should be asked to stay on.
Resignations and departures were already taking a toll on Twitterâs service, employees said.
Musk fires Twitter engineers after critical posts on Twitter and Slack:
Musk had already tweeted Monday that he had fired at least one engineer who publicly criticized him on Twitter. The latest terminations come in the wake of Muskâs decision to let go of about half of all Twitter employees in a bid to cut costs.
Some Twitter employees confirmed the layoffs on their verified accounts.
âLooks like i just got fired for s—posting too âïžâ one wrote in response to another person who said they had been let go.
Precisely two years ago today, I wrote this, in the context of Instagram.Blog of Drew - Own Your Content:
A personal website and domain name remains the most reliable way to avoid your content serving as feed stock for a commercial enterprise.
Today, it holds up in the context of Twitter.
The more things changeâŠ
Molly White, reporting on her brilliant site tracking all the happenings in the crypto/NFT world.
FTX files for bankruptcy, Sam Bankman-Fried resigns:
Aaaand there it goes.
FTX announced that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States. Sam Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO.
I wonder how all the Diamond Hands crypto HODL bros are feeling.
There’s only one thing worse than a Ponzi scheme, and that is being the one holding the “asset” when the music stops and there is no next fool in line.
Update, 10 November: Now the official checkmark has been unrolled out. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Twitterâs solution for ruining verification is another check mark - The Verge:
Twitter is rolling out another type of check mark to help distinguish accounts that users actually need to know are real. Although you can pay $7.99 per month for a blue check mark with the new version of Twitter Blue, select accounts for governments, companies, or public figures will get a gray âOfficialâ check mark Twitter is on the pathway to full farce.
Can Elon Musk Make the Math Work on Owning Twitter? Itâs Dicey. - The New York Times:
Last year, Twitterâs interest expense was about $50 million. With the new debt taken on in the deal, that will now balloon to about $1 billion a year. Yet the companyâs operations last year generated about $630 million in cash flow to meet its financial obligations.
That means that Twitter is generating less money per year than what it owes its lenders.
I was welcomed as a guest on the podcast/YouTube show “Throwback Hoops” Episode 46 to talk Australian basketball. We covered women’s world, cup, NBL Round 1, and gave our predictions for the league’s awards. đ đ
Podcast link
If you have kids, you and they might enjoy the wonderful Like You â A Mindfulness Podcast for Kids. I’ve been a Patreon supporter for almost as long as Noah Glenn has been producing it. My kids fall asleep listening to Noah almost every night.
Like You is a mindfulness podcast for kids. We use breathing, affirmations, music, and imagination to explore feelings, relieve anxiety, encourage self-esteem, and grow empathy, all while having fun!
This 3D Version of Tokyo's Subway System Looks Like a Labyrinth of Roller Coasters:
…by creating a 3D model of Tokyoâs tangled subway system, one which has brightly colored tubes swooping up and down, running over and around each other like the tracks of one of the craziest roller coasters ever.
I’ve appreciated the scheduling efficiency of the Tokyo subway system in the past, but this 3D impression of how all the lines interact is something else.
Last Week on My Mac: Security updates are down again â The Eclectic Light Company:
Howard Oakley is doing an amazing job at diagnosing and bringing to light (pardon the pun) issues involving macOS Content Caching Server:
Over the last three months, of the nine security updates to XProtect pushed by Apple, only one has been delivered and installed correctly through my Monterey Content Caching server, that on 4 August.
I’ve been getting back into Agenda as a work diary and daily tracker.
The app is brought to a new level of usefulness thanks to the ingenuity of Shortcuts developer Scotty Jackson.
Scotty Jackson:
This is all about my Rapid Log Shortcut, for use with the Agenda app ⊠and my Agenda Daily Log Shortcut. The basic conceit of this Shortcut is that it appends provided input to note in Agenda.
Matt Birchler writing on his blog makes a succinct point.
Mobile games are a shit industry with shit companies making shit games that donât exist to entertain, they exist to extract as much money as possible from a few whales who will spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.
Fun is not the point.
Matt nails it. This is why I enjoy playing games on Xbox and Switch, and get nothing from mobile gaming.
Maureen Dowd: Donald Trump, American Monster
Shelleyâs monster, unlike ours, has self-awareness and a reason to wreak havoc. He knows how to feel guilty and when to leave the stage. Our monsterâs malignity stems from pure narcissistic psychopathy â and he refuses to leave the stage or cease his vile mendacity.
Maureen Dowd truly is a great writer. I would love to be able to craft words in such a way.
Riccardo Mori really nailed it with his latest post, Raw power alone is not enough where he talks about how Apple has left its software to wither, while it has been busy beefing up its hardware offering. The article is full of juicy content, but I’ve pulled out the parts that resonated with me:
Without innovation in software, all weâre doing with these new powerful machines is essentially the same we were doing 20 years ago on PowerPC G4 and G5 computers, but faster and more conveniently.
Search Engines and SEO Spam - Initial Charge:
What I think I want is a search engine that only gave me results from small, independent weblogs.
More often than not I just want to find information from a normal person thatâs writing about something because they care deeply about it. And thatâs very difficult to find in search engines today.
I want the same thing that Mike Rockwell at Initial Charge wants: a search engine focused on nerds who blog about stuff they love.
Om Malik:
Instead of using technology and starting to flag downright criminal behavior, the company hums, and haws. They donât need an oversight committee â they need a moral compass.
Am I being silly to suggest that Facebook and Purdue Pharma have much in common?
Colin Devroe is quitting social media:
I also spend an inordinate amount of time scrolling tweets, clicking links, reading threads, and darting between subjects like a kitten chasing a laser.
I love this analogy.
I think the cumulative effect on my brain since 2006 has been that my ability to focus has been effected. Not that I canât focus. I can sit down and get into flow on a programming project more often than not.
Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew - The New York Times:
But Facebookâs research tells a clear story, and itâs not a happy one. Its younger users are flocking to Snapchat and TikTok, and its older users are posting anti-vaccine memes and arguing about politics. Some Facebook products are actively shrinking, while others are merely making their users angry or self-conscious.
It’s hard to feel sorry for Facebook.
I’m a huge YNAB fan and a LaunchBar user. I often get jealous of Alfred users because the system of “workflows” in Alfred seems to have caught on better than LaunchBar’s “Actions”.
Righting that wrong has appeared @ptujec on Github. He has a number of LaunchBar Actions, notably two built for YNAB.
I found a bug in the script, raised an issue on Github and it’s already been fixed. Thanks!
I’m thinking about a transition from OmniFocus to Things. I’ve used OF since launch, so this is no trivial matter.
This line from a post by micro.blog user @40Tech resonates:
OmniFocus almost begs you to add projects and contexts.
I never seem to gain value from contexts/tags, but I add them every time, because nature abhors a vacuum.
My main area of doubt is templating. I’ve got a nice Drafts template built that populates a standardised OmniFocus project.
I barely scratch the surface with my use of BBEdit. I’m not a coder. I use it for a bit of Markdown text editing (when I’m not using one of the other myriad Markdown apps I own) and for doing other small pieces of text manipulation.
So when I saw that v14 was released, I figured I could skip the upgrade. Reading through the features, I was sure I could skip the upgrade.
“From this vantage, âOffice Space,â the Gen-X slacker paean that came out 20 years ago next month, feels like science fiction from a distant realm. Itâs almost impossible to imagine a startup worker bee of today confessing, as protagonist Peter Gibbons does: âItâs not that Iâm lazy. Itâs that I just donât care.â Workplace indifference just doesnât have a socially acceptable hashtag. "
Three Things Today | tyler.io:
So what is Three Things? Well, it’s a calendar that lets you schedule tasks on each day. It’s meant to be excruciatingly pragmatic and realistic about how life works. (At least my life.) It literally will not allow you to schedule more than three tasks per day.
This is a nifty little application. Pick three things. Do them. If you don’t, defer them. That’s about it.
What an honour for the podcast Hemispheric Views I create together with Jason and Martin to be included in Michael Camilleri’s podcast queue.
Podcasts Iâm Listening To: Spring 2021:
Hemispheric Views: Did we need another three-white-guys-talk-about-Apple podcast? Probably not but the difference here is that two of the hosts are Australian. Andrew Canion, Jason Burk and Martin Feld have a great rapport and listening to a tech podcast with more of an international focus is a refreshing change.
The Neuroscience of Busyness - Study Hacks - Cal Newport:
You want more out of your employees? Radically reduce their responsibilities, then leave them alone to execute. You want your small business to grow? Focus your attention on a single target, and give yourself the space to do it better.
This sounds right to me.
Does anyone know where I can get a decent icon file of a MacBook Air (Space Grey)? I want to replace the hard disk icon of Macintosh HD.
I’ve finally been able to get rid of the stupid mechanical disk icon. My Macs don’t even have those sort of hard drives. Now I have nice icons that represent the computer I’m using.
Source: Quick Tip: High quality Mac icons are coming from inside your Mac!
Brett Terpstra:
I had previously bemoaned the fact that the proxy icon is now hidden behind a hover delay in Big Sur. Listeners of Hemispheric Views will be aware of my love for the macOS proxy icon.
I am overjoyed to learn that macOS-magic-man Brett Terpstra has found a way to have the proxy icon ready for action without delay. Thank you, sir, for fixing what Apple broke.
Game Crafter Deal of the Day:
“Up to 4 players take turns drawing cards and making movements through one of four caves in an attempt to outpace their competitors on the way to the treasure room.”
This board game has been designed by my friend Jason Burk. It’s on sale today; grab it while you can!
My mate Jason is digging into Fastmail, and liking what he sees.
Fastmail. Who Knew? - //Jason Burk:
Recently after a discussion about email on Episode 023 of Hemispheric Views, I dug into the settings and configuration of Fastmail and I was pleasantly surprised by how much more than a simple host they truly are!
I’ve been again trialling Hey for the past week or so, but I still don’t think it matches the combination of Fastmail & Sanebox.