Favorites May 22 2021

Just a two tweets of Apple Testimony follow-up

Marco Arment @marcoarment

This is the entire problem. Apple thinks all commerce on iOS is 100% thanks to them, and we owe them. Reality is more complicated. It’s a symbiotic ecosystem, most of which was going to happen somewhere regardless of their actions, with both sides providing value to each other.

Richard Smith @richard5mith

@marcoarment The worst line from Cook was “We’re creating the entire amount of commerce on the store”. As if all the developers have nothing to do with it. It’s all them.

Marco Arment @marcoarment

Is all online commerce thanks to Netscape and Internet Explorer? Should every website be forced to pay them 30%? Once the scale gets large enough to encompass an entire generation of broad-ranging commerce, arguments like Apple’s here are completely childish and ridiculous.

Marco's generally pretty pro-Apple, but he's definitely mad at them on this issue, although his stance on Apple limits the range of what he can see as acceptable remedies.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

It seems not great that an incredibly popular youth media platform is essentially under the control of the PRC government.

cnn.comThe young CEO who helped make TikTok a global hit is latest Chinese tech entrepreneur to quitZhang Yiming, who founded Tiktok owner ByteDance in Beijing nine years ago, announced that he would transition to a new role at the company at the end of this year. CNN’s Paul R. La Monica reports.

Tik Tok's black box selection of what users see is especially worrying given it's ownership structure.

astrid atkinson @shinynew_oz

I wrote Google's original postmortem policy. It was based on the largest full site outage to date - a single engineer rolling out a DNS change in a way that, in hindsight, wasn't safe. He did make a mistake; the point was that it shouldn't have been able to harm the system.

Senior Oops Engineer @ReinH

how to stop learning from incidents https://t.co/07yRv7HgSq

Perhaps I’m biased, but it’s pretty clear that Salesforce’s decision to fire an employee who did something risky seems pretty dumb. As discussed elsewhere regarding this event, events like this happen because someone was putting pressure on the engineer to go faster.

Jake Blumgart @jblumgart

I wrote a piece about the barriers to upgrading American commuter rail to meet international standards. Most other countries no longer have conductors, for one thing:

governing.comCommuter Rail Reform Faces High Labor, Infrastructure CostsThe pandemic has broken commuter rail’s business model, which relies on boutique services for white collar workers. Fixing it means more trains, better platforms, high-tech fare systems and fewer workers. Can it be done?

Great article, I’m happy that in the Bay Area we’re at least changing things so that boarding can be done at the same height as the train itself. I can’t believe we’re not moving faster to get rid of conductors.

M.G. Siegler @mgsiegler

“A train drops a passenger off and keeps going. A driver drops a car off and keeps going. Thus most trains are mostly moving, while most cars are parked most of the time.” 🚗🚙🚗🚙🚗🚙 theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

If some people don't want to own a car, the city should be doing everything they can to help them out. Requiring them to buy a parking space with their home is the opposite of that.

German Lopez @germanrlopez

If the lottery was working, you'd expect Ohio to pull ahead of the national numbers. I can maybe see Ohio picking up a little bit faster than the rest of the country in this data, but you really have to squint to see it.

Well that's a downer, I was really hoping the lotteries would lead to a big improvement

Turkish Tea, Mountain View, May 2021