Search Results for: coffee

The Decaf Project ⇥ youtube.com

Here is something I am very excited about: James Hoffmann has finally figured out a way to do what he has been calling — for years — the “decaf project”. The goal is to taste the same batch of coffee decaffeinated in three different processes, and alongside the caffeinated batch.

I am looking forward to this. I ordered my tasting kit from Rosso right here in Calgary; kits are available from dozens of roasters worldwide. If you really like coffee, you might consider ordering one for yourself, too.

Apple’s ‘Best Albums’ List Available in $450 Coffee Table Book Form ⇥ assouline.com

I am not sure what amuses most about this book, as there is so much to choose from. The $450 price tag, perhaps, for what appears to be the same short essays featured in Apple Music. Maybe it is the lack of anything released before 1959. Perhaps it is in celebrating the hollowness of Apple’s ranking.

For me, though, it is that this book, which features the covers of the hundred best albums of all time, contains — according to this product page — exactly 97 illustrations. Which three album covers are missing, I wonder?

(Via Christina Warren.)

Discovering New Music in 2024 ⇥ technologyreview.com

Tiffany Ng wrote a fantastic article for MIT Technology Review about the gradient of recommendations that runs between the automated and the more personal. I think the whole thing is worth reading — call it a personal recommendation — but I wanted to highlight a few specific things in no particular order. First:

Music enthusiasts are creating new ways to reinvigorate this sense of curiosity, building everything from competitive recommendation leagues to interactive music maps. Before streaming, discovering music was work that brought a distinctly emotional reward. […] Sharing music was a much more personal, peer-to-peer exercise, and making a mixtape for a crush was a substantial labor of love. […]

This is followed by an immediate comparison to today’s automated systems which allow anyone to generate a playlist with little effort or emotional investment. This is an agreeable argument, but I also think much of the emotional connection comes from the personal connection the giver — and, ideally, the recipient — are hoping to achieve. Put another way, if you found someone else’s mixtape on the ground, you might treat its recommendations as barely more consequential than those from Apple Music or Spotify.

Next:

Similar to Music League is a private Facebook community called Oddly Specific Playlists, a group that connects users from all corners of the internet with playlists inspired by (as the name suggests) very specific things. […]

“If a social network is any good, then it has to have some actual people putting new content into the ecosystem and organizing it in a coherent way — like someone making a hand-curated playlist,” says Kyle Chayka, a New Yorker staff writer and author of Filterworld: How Algorithms Flatten Culture. That’s just what the members of Oddly Specific Playlists do, even if the results can be hard to manage.

Oddly Specific Playlists reminds me of a long-defunct service called the Yams. The Yams allowed members to text one of their operators with playlist requests using as specific or as vague language as you wanted. When I asked Shannon Connolly, CEO of the Yams, about scalability she mentioned having a larger staff, but I still had concerns about its longevity — concerns that were, it turns out, sadly justified. A Facebook group of hundreds of thousands of people sure is one way to achieve a similar result at scale.

Also, I just finished Chayka’s book, and I did not love it. The premise is very good: how our world is shaped by automated recommendation features created by companies with their own motives. But few of the examples felt complete and I did not feel like I was learning much. Chayka spent too many pages on the interior design trends of coffee shops and Airbnbs. You may like it more than I did, and if you are looking for something along similar lines, I preferred Tom Vanderbilt’s “You May Also Like” and especially Cathy O’Neil’s “Weapons of Math Destruction”.

One last thing:

Alex Antenna, who has created a website called Unchartify to offer a more manual way of navigating Spotify’s database, attributes these pigeonholes to Spotify’s push for personalization. He built his site to bypass the plethora of “made for you” playlists and highlight lesser-known corners of Spotify’s database.

Unchartify is extremely cool, and you do not need to be a Spotify user to take advantage of it — just click “continue as guest” on the homepage. You can browse by genre or, more helpfully, begin with an artist, album, or label you already like and fall down a narrowing genre rabbit hole.

‘The Tyranny of the Algorithm’ ⇥ theguardian.com

Kyle Chayka, in the Guardian, describes the universalized interior design trends of what he calls post-recession “hipster coffee shops”:

Of course, there have been examples of such cultural globalisation going back as far as recorded civilisation. But the 21st-century generic cafes were remarkable in the specificity of their matching details, as well as the sense that each had emerged organically from its location. They were proud local efforts that were often described as “authentic”, an adjective that I was also guilty of overusing. When travelling, I always wanted to find somewhere “authentic” to have a drink or eat a meal.

If these places were all so similar, though, what were they authentic to, exactly? What I concluded was that they were all authentically connected to the new network of digital geography, wired together in real time by social networks. They were authentic to the internet, particularly the 2010s internet of algorithmic feeds.

This is an excerpt from Chayka’s new book “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture”, out this week. I have put myself on the waiting list for it at the library and I am looking forward to reading it, but I am already skeptical of the argument it will make based on what is presented here.

Based on the title, you can probably predict it references Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat”, which is a questionable start. Where Friedman proposes an economic playing field he says has been levelled somewhat by globalization and technology, Chayka argues a similar effect has occurred in cultural and expressive terms primarily through algorithmically promoted, sorted, and filtered ideas. On its face, this will be a compelling investigation. I think the role played by automated systems in our understanding of current events needs ongoing serious longform exploration. There have been plenty of books about individual companies, and there have been article-length vibes-based stories, but the only deep exploration in this vein I can remember is Cathy O’Neil’s excellent “Weapons of Math Destruction” from 2016. Chayka seems to present a more recent evaluation.

Unfortunately, my first glimpse of it is this Guardian story. While the book has a more generic title, this excerpt is specifically about the apparent influence of Instagram and Australian café culture on coffee shops and restaurants. Chayka writes that it is not any specific aesthetic quality which is disputable but “the fundamental homogeneity, which became more and more entrenched” in otherwise unrelated areas. But this just sounds like it is describing trends accelerated by the web, not necessarily something impressed upon us by what photos are on someone’s social media feed. The world is full of incongruous architectural, language, branding, and fashion choices — but, then again, it has been for a long time before social media or even the internet. I am curious to read how Chayka expands upon this argument.

Later in this excerpt, there is one more thing I found notable. Chayka, regarding businesses’ use of Instagram:

The effect May observed could be called “follower inflation”. High follower numbers correlate less and less to actual engagement over time, as the platform’s priorities change or the same content tricks stop working. It’s a familiar feeling for all of us who have been on Instagram over the past decade. While it might hurt your ego to receive fewer likes on a selfie, it’s a real financial problem when that follower footprint is how a business makes money, whether it’s a cafe attracting visitors or an influencer selling sponsored content.

What is not established in this piece is whether a business being popular on Instagram necessarily correlates with being popular in real life. Photogenic business features and art exhibitions are something I have written about before, and I still think there is lots to be explored therein. I am sure photo walls and brightly-coloured decor is attractive and lures people in. What keeps them coming back and spreading the word, on the other hand, is a place worth visiting beyond the aesthetics. Some of my favourite places to visit in Calgary have terrible social media presence, but they are constantly busy because they are good.

Computers Are Magical; Computers Are Awful

I was reminded of Nikita Prokopov’s classic post today — “People Expect Technology to Suck Because It Actually Sucks” — in much the same way I think of it many days but, and especially, today. These are all things which happened today from when I woke up:

  • I grabbed my phone off my nightstand and launched the CBC News app. A scrolling gesture in the Top Stories feed was misinterpreted as a tap on an ad, which launched Safari. This is a constant problem in many apps but, particularly, in CBC News.

  • Next, I opened the New York Times app. I tapped on a story, then returned to the Today view, which immediately refreshed and showed some different stories.

  • I marked a story within the Times app to read it later. I assumed I would find this in the For You section of the app, but I was wrong. You actually need to be in the Today view and then you must tap the person icon in the upper-right. I am noting this because I will forget it again and refer back to this post.

  • Messaging a friend, I once again noticed that the autocorrect suggestion bubble is sometimes partially obscured by the keyboard. I have predictive text turned off so this is the old-style iOS autocorrect bubble.

  • Partway through my text to my friend, the predictive text bar appears with no particular trigger — for example, I did not type anything like “my address is” — then disappears, then reappears with a button to send money via Apple Pay, which is not supported in Canada.

I brewed some coffee and started my day on my Mac:

  • There was intermittent lag in Bluetooth keyboard entry in MacOS. Running killall Dock seemed to fix it temporarily; connecting my keyboard via a wire and toggling its Bluetooth mode, then disconnecting the wire seems to have corrected it.

  • I was listening to a song in Music, then I paused it to watch a video on YouTube in Safari, then I closed the Safari tab and tapped the play/pause key on my keyboard, which did nothing because it was — according to the audio playback menubar item — still controlling that closed YouTube tab.

  • When performing ripple deletes in a simple Adobe Audition project, there is lag or delay which increases a little bit with each ripple delete. After ten minutes or so of work, it is necessary to restart Audition. I lost an hour today to tracking down and trying to diagnose this problem. It turns out many people have experienced this problem on MacOS and Windows for years, and there does not appear to be a fix.

    Interestingly, Audition does not consume a lot of resources. It uses less than a single CPU core even while doing complex editing, and its RAM consumption is similarly modest. It is just a really, really slow application.

  • OneDrive and fileproviderd put a combined 300% pressure on my CPU while syncing Audition’s temporary files. I do not necessarily need those temporary files to sync, so I pause OneDrive. Then a colleague asks me to share a link to a file and I find that OneDrive cannot generate links while syncing is paused. Resuming syncing causes high CPU consumption for several minutes.

  • I filed a bug report against this with Microsoft. (The relevant Apple one is FB13320112.) The text box was unresponsive, but in a new way compared to the keyboard entry problems I was having earlier.

  • Attempted to launch Audition from Spotlight by typing “aud” which momentarily flashed Audition before changing to Audio MIDI Setup as I hit return.

  • Noticed my free disk space had dropped by over 20 GB in the span of an hour for no clear reason. A brief investigation did not reveal anything immediately, but I got sidetracked by…

  • …a 34 GB folder of cached Apple Music files sitting in a ~/Library/ folder labelled “com.apple.iTunes”. It appears to have been untouched since iTunes became Music but, for some reason, MacOS has not cleared it out.

  • I switched to my laptop to write a post through MarsEdit this evening. There was apparently a configuration change somewhere — probably at my web host — which causes it to return a “403 Forbidden” error when attempting to publish through MarsEdit. I have, as of writing, spent three hours trying to fix this. I finally gave up and asked my web host for help; they fixed it because their support is great.

  • I tried to AirDrop a website from Safari on my iPhone to my wife’s iPhone. It got stuck on “Waiting…”, so I cancelled the AirDrop. Then I navigated away from the page and the AirDrop occurred a beat later.

  • I dismissed a Time Machine notice that my MacBook Pro has not been backed up in about two months. The hard drive attached to my “server” seems to have a problematic connection or board or something else, and it is something I need to fix.

None of the problems above are life-changing, but this list is representative of the kinds of hiccups I experience more-or-less daily. It could be a different mix of things with less or more impact than those above, but these problems often require I spend time trying to diagnose and fix them. Sometimes I can; sometimes, as with the Adobe Audition problem, the tools just suck and I have no recourse.

I know there are real people working on these products, many of whom really do want to make them the very best. I am encouraged by stories like Mark Gurman’s report today in which it seems that Apple has spent a couple of weeks switching from feature development to bug fixing mode for its next major releases. I am grateful for how incredible most of this stuff often is, and I understand things occasionally need fixing. But not like this. The ways in which these things break rob me of confidence in everything I use. I cannot see a good reason I would want to introduce more computers into my life, like with “smart” home devices.

It is amazing what I do every day with the computer on my desk, the one on my lap, and the one in my pocket. But I wish they did everything more reliably, predictably, and consistently. I am prepared to fix things sometimes. I do not understand why I am tending to these things daily like they are made in a shed instead of by some of the world’s most valuable corporations. We, the users, deserve better than this.

A Brief Look at the Specialty Coffee Market Today ⇥ youtube.com

The main thing which struck me when watching this short video about the current specialty coffee market is how the price paid to producers in Kenya, for example, has declined in recent years. It was upsetting to learn that as the consumer price for specialty coffee has gone up pretty dramatically, at least around here. Instead of 340-gram bags, some specialty roasters are switching to 300-gram and even 250-gram bags at the same or higher price points. I can accept the cost increase, but I do so with the assumption producers are receiving a better rate. I welcome greater transparency.

On ‘Good’ Coffee ⇥ meltedcheeseonwhitefish.substack.com

Jason Diamond, the Melt:

That was always my problem with the rise of the coffee snob. And, again, I’m not saying you, the person with all your gadgets at home to make your perfect French press or espresso on your machine. The real-life versions of Ari Spyros from Billions, the compliance officer obsessed with his office setup is, honestly, goals. I wish that I took that much interest in the coffee I make. But I don’t. I do buy certain beans and I researched my grinder and coffee maker, but the truth is that I live in a city with countless options to just walk outside my door and get a coffee from and the idea is that since they all charge the same price that they should all serve good coffee.

And yet, that’s never the case. This is a very arbitrary assessment, but of the six (yes, six (I do live in Brooklyn, remember) places I could count that are all within eight minutes of my home (I timed these and rounded down to eight, I swear I didn’t just pick a number at random) that serve “specialty” coffee from roasters like Sey or Counter Culture, Partners or Intelligentsia, where the average price of a small coffee is four dollars, I’d say that four of those places just aren’t worth the cost. The coffee just isn’t that good. The two-dollar cup I get at the bodega does the trick.

I have a similar number of “good” coffee places within a short walk of my house. As with Diamond’s experience, only a few of these are actually decent. There are many places which have good beans from roasters I trust, made on all the “right” equipment by people who appear to care — and it just comes out all wrong. The atmosphere is wrong, too: one of the places near me has Edison bulbs and reclaimed wood everywhere, and it feels like it came from a kit; another place is a mix of a coffee shop, coworking space, and retail for clothing and knick-knacks. You do not need to be a snob to recognize that beneath the pastiche of specialty coffee is a seeming lack of care from the top down.

Migration Assistant Magic

John Siracusa briefly mentioned something in one of his podcasts that stuck with me and I want to get it in writing for future reference. Ideally, I would like to link back to where I heard this. The problem is that I cannot remember which episode or even which podcast — though I think it was Reconcilable Differences — for full acknowledgement, and neither podcast has a searchable text transcript.

The situation here is that you are moving from an old Mac to a new one, and you have reached the point in Setup Assistant where it asks if you want to transfer data. You agree, it opens Migration Assistant on your new Mac — you open it manually on your old one — and then it runs a few tests in the background to automatically select the fastest transfer method.

In my case, this was peer-to-peer at a painfully slow three-to-six megabytes per second. To move the half-million files from my old Mac, it was looking like a twelve hour operation. But I remembered I had a first-generation Thunderbolt cable laying around and an adaptor — and the tip Siracusa relayed in that podcast episode: Migration Assistant will automatically switch to the fastest method available, even partway through a migration.

So I plugged it in to both Macs and, I kid you not, all my stuff was moved over to the new Mac in the time it took me to boil water and brew a coffee. Remember, this was with a first-generation Thunderbolt connection. Imagine how much faster this could be if you upgrade your Mac more often than I do.

Thanks, John.

Update: The segment where Siracusa discusses this begins around the 32 minute mark in Accidental Tech Podcast episode 485. Thanks to David Anson for pointing me in the right direction.

Rogers Says Services Mostly Restored ⇥ cbc.ca

Pete Evans, CBC News:

Rogers services are back online for most customers after a daylong outage at the telecom giant that left millions of Canadians without internet and cellular service, while also disrupting government services and payment systems.

[…]

Tony Staffieri, chief executive and president of Rogers, said in an open letter that the company apologizes for the service interruption. He gave no explanation for the outage or how many customers were affected.

If Cloudflare’s data is any indication, the answer to the second mystery is pretty much every customer. The amount of Rogers traffic stayed at zero for an entire day. It is awful for everyone affected, but do not worry — Rogers will automatically apply a credit to customers’ accounts. And that is really what this post is about.

Lisa Belmonte, Narcity:

During another big Rogers outage that happened back in April 2021, wireless calls, SMS and data services were down across Canada for almost an entire day because of an issue with a software update.

After it was resolved and service was restored, Rogers issued credits to customers who were impacted by the outage.

A credit equivalent to the wireless service fee from that day was automatically applied to the customer’s bill the next month.

If someone pays Rogers $100 per month for cellular service and another $100 per month for internet — not uncommon rates in this ferociously expensive country — it likely means getting one day’s credit for each, for a total of about $6. That is a slap in the face.

There is a disconnect between how much these services cost to end users and how much they enable. Many people depend on a single company for their connectivity services, as bundle pricing disincentivize us from shopping around. In return, we expect ongoing service, divided into manageable monthly payments. When that fails, it is worth more than a free cup of coffee and an apology.

In fairness to Rogers, it can see itself providing extraordinary value at $3 per day per connection. But we expect far more than that, and it would be obscene for a service provider to begin charging based on how much it enables. Internet access is arguably a human right but its availability, price, and quality is left up to private companies which hate competing. So what would be so wrong with nationalizing internet or cellular service?

Tim Hortons App Found to Have Illegally Collected Location Data ⇥ theglobeandmail.com

Susan Krashinsky Robertson and Colin Freeze, the Globe and Mail:

Canada’s largest fast-food chain violated privacy laws by tracking people who used its app, gathering their location data hundreds of times a day — even when the app was not in use.

That is the result of a joint investigation by Canadian privacy officials into Tim Hortons’ surveillance of customers through an app installed on millions of mobile phones in this country. But while the coffee-and-doughnuts chain owned by Toronto-based Restaurant Brands International Inc. will have to make changes to its privacy practices, it faces no fines or financial penalties for the breach.

This is the most Canadian story imaginable. Tim Hortons, our crappy coffee franchise that has somehow usurped any semblance of national identity, collected the location information of millions of the country’s most committed customers every few minutes, and its penalty is to say sorry. Embarrassing.

Today’s Claim That Tesla Is on the Verge of Producing a Humanoid Robot, as Viewed From the Year 2032 ⇥ cnbc.com

Sam Shead, writing for CNBC in April 2022:

Tesla may start production of a humanoid robot known as Optimus as early as next year, CEO Elon Musk said Thursday.

[…]

“We have a shot of being in production for version one of Optimus hopefully next year,” Musk said Thursday at the opening of Tesla’s new vehicle assembly plant in Austin, Texas, where he appeared on stage — in a cowboy hat and sunglasses — to Dr. Dre’s “Still D.R.E.”

Musk was, at best, spitballing with little more than a hope and a prayer. But this statement was similar to many of his previous claims which hid truth behind sensationalism. This tactic worked as a public relations strategy, creating years of breathless press coverage for Musk’s scarcely developed ideas and musings, but it repeatedly landed him in hot water with regulators.

Tesla has yet to reveal a working prototype of the robot, however, and it’s unclear how sophisticated Optimus is at this stage.

Tesla later pushed prototyping this robot years into the future as it sorted out a backlog of other promised products, including a pickup truck, a semi truck, and a sports car. Current prototypes cannot carry a mug of coffee without spilling it and tear clothing to shreds while attempting to fold it, and some have even played anti-union audio recordings on loop without any apparent way of shutting it off.

Musk has once again said a version of this robot will be delivered to customers next year, but researchers and other experts are skeptical anything like the version first shown in 2021 is around the corner.

When Musk first announced Tesla’s robot, he said it will be based on the same chips and sensors that the company’s cars use for self-driving features. […]

At the same media event, Musk also said a work-in-progress “beta” version of what the company then branded “Full Self Driving” would expand to all customers the same year. At the time, it was marketed as a level two system. This was a regression from years of assurance that level five autonomy would be delivered soon, something which has not yet been achieved. Empty promises like these coupled with the expensive Full Self Driving option pack led to numerous lawsuits and, ultimately, shareholders’ loss of confidence in Musk’s ability to deliver.

When reached for comment, Musk, now living on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, said he was starting a new company to turn cattle’s markings into mobile solar panels.

There Is a Way to Restore Wider Alerts in MacOS Big Sur and Monterey ⇥ twitter.com

I have my gripes with the current generation of the MacOS visual design language that used to be called Aqua. There are several things I hope to see changed, and many of those things are more evolutionary updates. But if I were in Alan Dye’s shoes, I know the first thing I would change on my first day: I would have alert panels reverted to their previous and far superior presentation.

Happily, that is possible today, thanks to a tip from Léo Natan (via Michael Tsai):

Do you prefer the old style macOS alerts? There is a way to get them globally for AppKit in Big Sur and Monterey:

defaults write -g NSAlertMetricsGatheringEnabled -bool false

I applied this immediately, restarted an app I was using, triggered an alert — and everything is suddenly better. The clouds parted, sun rays danced in my office, my coffee tasted just a little bit sweeter. There is still work to do on things like buttons, which remain a barely-differentiated grey blob resting on the grey background of the dialog, but it is an undeniable upgrade.

Watch this get ripped out of the next major version.

Also, what is up with the name of this preference key? What does it mean that I am disabling alert metrics gathering?

Update: Ben Sargent has a strong theory:

If I had to guess: NSAlert (the dialog) Metrics (size of the dialog) GatheringEnabled (gather the content into a hideous vertical silo)

Makes sense to me.

Wordle’s Vibe Shift ⇥ embedded.substack.com

Kate Lindsay:

Suddenly, the vibe shifted. The homegrown, humble game of Wordle receiving the backing of a corporate owner was like watching your favorite indie band get big and do a Doritos commercial. Rather than the story being “Wordle creator unexpectedly gets a ton of money for making something nice” we all saw it the same way: Wordle had sold out, and now we hate it.

For what it is worth, I did not feel like Joshua Wardle “sold out” by selling Wordle. Some people have a coffee and a cigarette every morning; since December, my daily routine has started with a coffee and this one puzzle.

But I love the association between Wordle and that vibe shift article that has been going around Twitter. It does not necessarily surprise me how some people have latched onto the virtually non-existent changes made by the New York Times as evidence the game does not feel the same as it did. But I think we should be honest: the only thing the Times made worse is jamming it full of tracking scripts.

Meta Launders Its Reputation Through Small Businesses

Jeran Wittenstein, Bloomberg:

Meta Platforms Inc. has tumbled out of the world’s 10 largest companies by market value, hammered by its worst monthly stock decline ever.

Once the world’s sixth largest company with a valuation in excess of $1 trillion, the Facebook parent closed on Thursday with a value of $565 billion, placing it in 11th place behind Tencent Holdings Ltd., according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Please accept my condolences.

Huge changes in market value like Meta is currently experiencing can partly be attributed to the massive market capitalization reflected in today’s top ten. The Economic Research Council published a chart in 2019 showing the ten most valuable publicly traded companies for twenty years prior and, as recently as 2014, only one was worth more than a trillion dollars. That is not the world we live in any more. Even normal day-to-day fluctuations reflect billions of dollars that ostensibly reflect investors’ confidence.

But there is also an undeniable loss of confidence in Meta’s ability to maintain the success of its core product — targeted advertising — in the face of increasing regulatory scrutiny, and changes made by operating system vendors. Meta’s virtual reality efforts, with which it is hoping to become an operating system owner itself, are still far away, and I do not think the company has yet demonstrated a compelling case for its existence.

For now, it has ads to sell across its platforms, and that is getting harder as public pressure mounts against its business practices. Unfortunately, as Meta’s empire is increasingly scrutinized, small businesses that depend on it are feeling the squeeze.

Suzanne Vranica, Patience Haggin, and Salvador Rodriguez, Wall Street Journal:

Martha Krueger, who runs a gift-basket business called Giften Market, used to spend her entire advertising budget on Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook and Instagram. She picked up a new customer for every $14 she spent.

When Apple Inc. introduced a privacy feature for mobile devices last year that restricts user tracking, she said, her costs to acquire such customers rose 10-fold. In October, she shifted her whole ad budget to search ads on Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

I empathize with the owners and marketers who work with businesses like these, which have depended on precisely targeting advertising to lower their marketing costs and get more customers. However, I think we have lost sight of how Meta was able to be so successful in the first place: it tracked users’ behaviour without their explicit consent or knowledge. What I find so frustrating about this is how Meta defends its practices by invoking the trust these businesses have placed in it:

Meta said in a written statement that it has more than 10 million advertisers. “Apple’s harmful policy is making it harder and more expensive for businesses of all sizes to reach their customers,” it said. “We believe Facebook and Instagram remain the best platforms for businesses to grow and connect with people, and we’ll always keep working to improve performance and measurement.”

Meta constructed a fundamentally unethical business model that allowed it to offer cheap ads, and it is laundering that scummy behaviour through the much better reputation of coffee shops, and florists, and travel agents, and other small business owners. Entrepreneurs should not be blamed for taking advantage of the marketing opportunities available to them.

This is a complex problem with a simple root: in a more just world, where the privacy of individuals is truly respected, Meta would never have offered these kinds of ads in the first place. But the company recognized that it was on legally firm ground to follow users’ activity across the web and through third-party apps, and it built its entire business around milking that strategy for everything it could give. It gave small business owners the ability to buy better advertising at lower rates, but has cost all of us our privacy online with little in the way of notice, consent, or control.

So that is how we got into this mess, and lawmakers in many regions around the world are trying various ways of getting us out of it. But Apple, having a business model more conducive to privacy and being an operating system vendor, realized it could also do something about tracking without due consent. It asks a simple question when apps want to track a user: do you want to permit this? Most people answer in the negative.

This naturally leads to the question of what business it is of Apple’s to have a say in other companies’ practices. It has a long history of doing so and a familiar future ahead. That is a discussion way too long for a single post, especially one I am publishing on a Friday evening. But there is one argument I think can be addressed in short order: all Apple did to push Meta’s buttons is that it now requires explicit consent for tracking. If Meta’s business model cannot handle a simple question of permissions, that is a pretty crappy business model. It should have been better prepared for a day when lawmakers started asking questions. But it was not. Meta’s best move has been to use the plight of small businesses, lured by its short-term promises, to excuse its unethical practices. Shame.

James Hoffmann’s New Series Is About the Bialetti Moka Express ⇥ youtube.com

James Hoffmann’s coffee videos have been a truly excellent way for me to pass the time this year. Weirdly, they have sometimes paralleled what has been going on in my life. Last month, just after I got back from a vacation where I used Nespresso machines for the first time, Hoffmann tried every pod for that machine.

Now, shortly after I was given a Bialetti Moka, Hoffmann has decided to do a thoughtful episodic look at the brewer and its history. This first episode has me looking forward to my next cup of Moka-brewed coffee as I worry about Bialetti’s future.

See Also: Earlier this year, I linked to Hoffmann’s series about the AeroPress.

Boston Startup Develops Worst Imaginable Way to Get a Cup of Coffee ⇥ defector.com

Albert Burneko, Defector:

In other words, just to get to the point at which your freezer has a Cometeer-brand flash-frozen puck of concentrated brewed coffee in it, some number of coffee beans must be subjected to the absolute most sophisticated, technologized, circuitous, wasteful process for making coffee in the entire history of life of earth. More experience and equipment are required to create a cup of Cometeer coffee than any other halfway plausible cup of coffee, literally ever. (You can tell the MIT, Apple, and Tesla scientists and Princeton-educated coffee-masters did a good job of brewing your coffee with proprietary machinery in Gloucester, Mass., flash-freezing it in liquid nitrogen, packing it in dry ice, and shipping it to your home for you to store in your freezer, because it tastes like you spent five minutes making it yourself using techniques that predate the advent of antibiotics.)

This process makes Keurig — also rightly criticized by Burneko — look like an environmental dream. What is wrong with the myriad methods of brewing coffee today that requires a ground-up reinvention? Sometimes, it is worth trying new things; other times, you end up pitching the virtues of a cryogenic brick of coffee.

Gorge

While many news organizations were satisfied with covering today’s launch of App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14.5 as a feature that, at most, illustrates a key difference between Apple and Facebook, for example, Mike Isaac and Jack Nicas of the New York Times decided to write a parallel article about the apparently fractured relationship between the companies’ CEOs. And it is a doozy.

I do not like these kinds of articles at the best of times. Regardless of how closely executives are tied to the companies they are involved with, I do not think there is much value in seeing them as inextricably linked. I do not think we can extrapolate personal animosity from competitiveness, and I think the CEO-as-celebrity narrative is a worrisome premise.

So this is the kind of article that I am going to approach with trepidation. Sure enough, it is chock full of anecdotes that do not simply portray Apple and Facebook as two companies that have some competitive overlap and very different approaches to privacy, but an “all-out war” between two bitter enemies in Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg. I did not learn much but, as I re-read the article, a single paragraph stuck out:

Those contrasts have widened with their deeply divergent visions for the digital future. Mr. Cook wants people to pay a premium — often to Apple — for a safer, more private version of the internet. It is a strategy that keeps Apple firmly in control. But Mr. Zuckerberg champions an “open” internet where services like Facebook are effectively free. In that scenario, advertisers foot the bill.

This reads like a Facebook PR person has spun it already, since it is the distillation of the company’s false compromise between privacy and revenue. It also misrepresents how lock-in and opt-in work on the internet.

If you want to talk about control over the internet, you really have to start with Facebook, Google — and, to a lesser extent, Amazon. All three companies insidiously lock people into their data-mining platforms without presenting a real means of consent or opting out. In addition to being de facto infrastructure, these companies never really stop tracking you. They can stop showing you ads based on the personalized data they have collected, but they may continue to slurp up behavioural information anyhow. And that’s only the three biggest companies in this space; there are thousands of other ad tech businesses and data brokers gorging themselves on data you never meaningfully consented to sharing.

Apple’s apparent control over the internet is comparatively meagre. If you rid yourself of all Apple hardware and software, you quit using its services, and you delete your iCloud account, you have zero affiliation with Apple. As far as it knows, you no longer exist. This is undoubtably a tedious, time-consuming, and expensive thing to do — but you can entirely opt out of Apple’s ecosystem. I know many people who have.

It is hard to see how Apple’s greater emphasis on privacy enables it to have more control over the internet in the long run. You would have to be a deeply cynical person who believes Apple would oppose a strict national privacy law — something Cook has repeatedly called for — because it creates a market for Apple’s more privacy-friendly products, and you would have to ignore the overwhelming majority of people who demand greater privacy online for that to be true. Of course Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, would rather you buy your technology products from Apple, but this company policy is not mere veneer. It is a longstanding commitment — though it is imperfect and has its limits — as is the company’s stance towards an open internet.1

But an open internet does not mean one in which all advertising is individually targeted using data farmed through independent apps and websites that serve as proxies for the surveillance practices of Facebook and Google. In the history of advertising, the privacy-hostile premise that these companies are selling is fairly recent. Shooting for pinpoint relevancy is a waste of time and privacy when relevant enough ads can be targeted to someone browsing a list of coffee cake recipes, an article about wedding locations, or a local news story. Mediocre ad targeting was good enough to buy an entire Batmobile.

Forget the apparent “war” between Cook and Zuckerberg personally, or even between the companies they chair. Both Apple and Facebook believe that many users, when presented with the option of whether to allow third parties to track their activity, will say no. But the new thing is not the tracking, it is the request for explicit permission — and Facebook appears to think that it will struggle to convince people it should be allowed to strip-mine their behaviour. We ought to be asking whether this was ever ethical. It seems most people would disagree.

Ads can keep funding the internet; Apple is not eradicating advertising from its platform. It is only requiring that users give consent to how much they would like to be surveilled. It speaks volumes about Facebook that it believes those are necessarily the same thing.

  1. A non-exhaustive list of privacy commitments: device encryption; masking Bluetooth and MAC addresses; Safari’s tracking prevention mechanisms, including ITP and share button tracking; local categorization of images in Photos; privacy labels in the App Store; non-specific location data in apps; and background location notifications. Many of these features are not recent. For example, since the mid-2000s, Safari defaulted to allowing only first-party cookies and cookies from websites you visited. ↥︎

James Hoffman’s AeroPress Technique ⇥ youtube.com

Tony Konecny, formerly of Tonx and now at Yes Plz, in a lengthy and entertaining thread about coffee brewing techniques [sic]:

And I of course love the Chemex. The heavier filters are very forgiving of grind size/quality. It’s hard to fuck up.

It’s an elegant brewer when you’re serving multiple people and one of the few pieces of coffee gear that looks good left on the countertop.

and an Aeropress looks like a something you keep hidden in the nightstand.

I brew a cup or two of Chemex when I am feeling fancy and want something to clean afterwards, but I make most of my coffee with an AeroPress despite its looks. It is a resoundingly utilitarian brewer with seemingly a many variables and, depending on how fussy you want to be, a challenge to use consistently. But it has many passionate fans for two good reasons: it is very simple, and it requires very little effort to make good coffee.

James Hoffman made three videos about the AeroPress that are worth checking out:

If you’re short on time, you can just watch the last video, but I highly recommend all three. The intro on the first one is a lovely piece of filmmaking, and Hoffman’s dedication to trying different techniques in the second is admirable.

These three videos got me to try a different technique than my go-to recipe. For years, I have used a cheap kitchen scale and the AeroPress Timer app — which is, simultaneously, the best-designed and least-beautiful app I use regularly — to brew 18 grams of coffee with 200 millilitres of water in about a minute and a half, which is the Blue Bottle recipe. It is a little anal retentive, but it sure produces more reliable results than my previous technique of guesswork.

But Hoffman’s recipe uses just 11 grams of coffee and takes two and a half minutes, with a finer grind than I typically use. It is a noticeably different cup and I cannot work out if I like it more or less, but it is worth exploring. If you have an AeroPress, I think Hoffman’s video series is an entertaining and informative way to spend about an hour, and I think the AeroPress Timer app is also worth giving a shot.

Spotify Continues to Remove Episodes of Joe Rogan’s Podcast ⇥ digitalmusicnews.com

Paul Resnikoff, Digital Media News:

Just last week, Digital Music News first reported that 40 different Joe Rogan Experience podcast episodes were found missing from Spotify, now the exclusive platform for the show. Now, that number has quickly grown to 42, with potentially more shows quietly getting removed from the catalog.

Among the newly-missing is an episode (#411) with Bulletproof Coffee founder Dave Asprey, a frequent guest on The Joe Rogan Experience. Strangely, Spotify has deleted three total episodes with Asprey for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.

You may remember Asprey from his many years of bullshit.

It is worth reading this article alongside something like Ben Thompson’s piece about sovereign writers, and considering the balance of editorial control and independence against guaranteed income.

I am not a fan of Rogan’s podcast; I think it sounds like if you grafted a mouth onto a lifted Dodge Ram covered in Punisher decals. I also think that it is probably a good thing for the world that Spotify can exercise some control over a popular but obsequious host. But I have to wonder how comfortable Rogan is with sharing his fame with Spotify while letting it meddle with his show. Spotify surely benefits from the exclusivity of his show and being associated with one of the world’s most popular podcasts; Rogan benefits because he is a hundred million dollars richer, which is a galling amount of money for Joe Rogan’s HGH and PCP power hour. Spotify apparently has little editorial control, but it now has control and responsibility over distributing an exclusive show that it paid, again, a hundred million dollars for. Rogan’s name may be on the show, but it is Spotify’s reputation that is on the line.

Bloomberg: Apple Is Working on a New TV Product With HomePod and Videoconferencing Capabilities ⇥ bloomberg.com

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

The company is working on a product that would combine an Apple TV set-top box with a HomePod speaker and include a camera for video conferencing through a connected TV and other smart-home functions, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters.

Gurman says that this product is “still in the early stages” which, if you want to be a bit cynical, gives this report enough wiggle room to never pan out.

But it is intriguing, isn’t it? I know that it is something I would have loved to own this past year. Over Christmastime, I used AirPlay to place a FaceTime window onto the television and set my MacBook Air on the coffee table so that we could spend time with family in a more immersive way. It was a pretty nice, albeit janky, setup.

The obvious question about something like this is where a camera would be mounted, given that some people probably do not put their Apple TV out in the open or adjacent to their television screen. The other question is whether we can expect a new remote, something that for years I have been hearing is in the works, yet somehow never arrives. The Apple TV appears to be on the development cycle usually reserved for new kinds of water.