Death & Magic from OWSLA artist MUSTDIE! is an succinct and exciting “dance” album. Although truth be told, I think only Transformers or robots more generally have got the moves for the searing synths and driving bass that MUST DIE! delivers. The album isn’t tremendously original, but it makes up for this is superb execution. If you’re like me, you need heavy bass music if you’re ever going to write a line of code, and Death & Magic delivers there.
Author: Paul Jones
Deliverance: Culprate Album Review
Culprate’s 2014 Deliverance is a sophisticated, somber, and confusing electronic album. It’s constantly on the verge of throwing you into a classic dubstep “wubby” drop, but Culprate practices restraint while finding other ways to surprise the listener. It’s like dubstep crossed with the elevator music played in a very well-to-do apartment building. The album is at times completely carefree, flouting the need for structure, familiar instruments, or tropes of the electronic genre, but these moments are almost always matched by little snippets of something recognizable. Culprate jumps freely to and from the listener’s comfort zone, soothing them into a comfortable trance only to throw something unexpected at them, but not without tastefully reminding them of the song’s melody soon thereafter. Highly recommended.
Sausage Party Movie Review
Seth Rogen’s latest star-studded comedy is as silly as it is sublime, but it’s a little too ambitious for its own good. The slapstick and and off-color jokes are pretty well-delivered and funny, but a couple times these narratives tried to be critical and edgy, and this fell flat. Specifically, the way the food objects deal with race and religion should have stuck to just getting (admittedly cheap) laughs instead of trying to make a point about the Israel/Palestine conflict. It was also too ambitious with the number of storylines and themes it tried to address: the food-item protagonists explored skepticism, atheism, racism, the forth wall, love, and more, when one of these topics would have done. The consequence of this is there is never a dull moment, but that’s at least in part that you’re trying to make sure you remember which big topic the sausages are now addressing. All-in-all, this was a high-quality stupid movie, and I highly recommend you go see it in a dirty moving theater with stale popcorn for the full cinematic immersion.
The upcoming Apple products
Mark Gurman reporting for Bloomberg reveals (via Katie Floyd) that his sources indicate:
- Dual camera lens on the Plus-sized iPhone;
- A touch-sensitive home button which doesn’t “click”;
- The removal of the headphone jack;
- An industrial design similar to the iPhones from the last two years.
If these are all true, and everything else being equal, I will probably not upgrade my iPhone this year. I have a 6 Plus that’s still going really strong despite constant abuse in the form of not having a case, always using Bluetooth, using a lot of wireless hotspot, lots of graphics-intensive video games (Grand Theft Auto games, mostly), and other demanding uses. For photography I really care about, I tend to use my Nikon D5200, and the iPhone 6 Plus camera is good enough for casual snaps.
I’m ready to be really wowed by Apple’s new Mac offerings however. Also from Mark Gurman (via Michael Tsai via Hacker News):
The most significant addition to the new MacBook Pro is a secondary display above the keyboard that replaces the standard function key row. Instead of physical keys, a strip-like screen will present functions on an as-needed basis that fit the current task or application.
Apple’s learned a lot about how to make a great touch screen, but thought of replacing the power and escape buttons with software is not exactly what I had in mind with new Macs. I was hoping instead for top-of-the-line CPUs, GPUs, and higher default RAM and disk space. Perhaps the strip will have some Force Touch technology built into it that’ll give tactile feedback to those power users expecting to have a key there. I’m also uncertain of the light strip as a user experience considering that I do not look at the keyboard when using a computer, and arguably shouldn’t have to. This discussion does remind me of this classic XKCD:
“Fine, Great” – Modern Baseball (Wolfox cover)
Yesterday my band and I covered “Fine, Great” by Modern Baseball. Wolfox is Connor Kruysman on vocals, Michael Bearce on bass, and myself on guitar and audio production. Let me know what you think!
I use UITextViews infrequently enough to forget about their custom font bug but often enough that I should really never deselect “editable” or “selectable” using the .xib file. And it makes me mad every time!
I use UITextViews infrequently enough to forget about their custom font bug but often enough that I should really never deselect “editable” or “selectable” using the .xib file. And it makes me mad every time!
The ad-block cold war
The web advertising industry is facing an existential threat: ad-blockers. The beauty of browsers is that, for the most part, web pages are still static files that you download and execute locally and safely. You can control everything very precisely, choosing to not download certain IPs, block whole file extensions, or a combination of these two the circumvent any advertisements. This is probably impossible to overcome. Additionally, the people that tend to be ad-block users tend to be future consumers of expensive things like cars, houses, investment products, razors, whatever. And this is only growing, here’s a chart demonstrating this from PageFair:
And this is a pretty serious problem. Some of the most important businesses run on advertisements: search engines, journalism, random web utilities like JSON formatters, etc. Google is used by doctors, mechanics, programmers, almost every professional, to do their job better and faster. Yet people are increasingly saying no to Google’s business model.
This commentary comes on the heels of Facebook’s ongoing cat-and-mouse game with AdBlock Plus. Here’s TechCrunch’s report:
Adblock Plus launched a workaround to Facebook’s adblock bypass today that ham-handedly removes posts from friends and Pages, not just ads, according to a statement provided by Facebook to TechCrunch.
I think everyone here is at fault. Facebook is releasing thousands of lines of user-hostile source code, putting tremendous effort into continuing to go against their users wishes. Meanwhile, AdBlock Plus claims no moral high ground, as they’re not really protecting people from advertisements and tracking, their protecting users against the advertisements and tracking that doesn’t pay AdBlock Plus to be white-listed, according to the Wall Street Journal:
Eyeo GmbH, the company behind popular desktop ad-blocking tool Adblock Plus, now accepts payment from around 70 companies in exchange for letting their ads through its filter. Eyeo stipulates that they must comply with its “acceptable ads” policy, meaning their ads aren’t too disruptive or intrusive to users.
That is Facebook’s hard-earned money, but that doesn’t mean I’m either removing my ad-blocker or ecstatic to use Facebook’s product, rather just that the web advertising industry is morally bankrupt and soon to be actually bankrupt. And this is not a good thing for all of us who rely on actually important ad-supported businesses like the Wall Street Journal and Google. I implore you: if you find something that’s critical to your day-to-day life like software, information, or anything digital: find out how to pay them money so that your both on the same team. Today, doctors are using a product that’s funded in part by pharmaceutical companies showing ads to them. Journalists are paid by the same companies that are polluting the earth, building defective products, or other scandals that need to be investigated by journalists.
Which makes the inevitability of the demise of digital advertising on the web so scary and exciting.
Vote your conscience
If you’re a liberal and you oppose the TPP, this is the worst election cycle. If you vote for Hillary Clinton, you’ll likely be voting for TPP. If the issue is important enough to sway you away from the Democrats, you’re voting for Donald Trump, who apart from having some objectionable soundbites, is not at all liberal. Despite Bernie Sanders significant victories in changing the Democratic platform, Hillary Clinton is still at best a moderate corporatist verging on being indistinguishable from the moderate right. As evidence, consider what the Kochs think about this election:
Representatives of Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists who helped to bankroll the rise of the tea party, warned the brothers could sit out the presidential campaign entirely — or even back Hillary Clinton.
When I express these concerns to fellow liberals, there’s this narrative that leftists need to “bite the bullet” and vote for Clinton in fear of a Trump presidency. Here’s RMS’s take on this attitude:
As happens every four years, plutcratist democrats are saying that we have to vote for their Republican-in-Democrat’s-clothing or else a worse Republican will win.
If we listen to them, we will never get anything better than plutocratists.
I encourage everyone to vote as though everyone was going to vote the way you do. Vote for the candidate you want to win, not the candidate everyone tells you to vote for, for any reason, including “your vote for a third-party is a vote for the major party candidate you oppose” (which is simply false), “he/she is the worst because of [scandal]!” (mostly propaganda), and “I agree with you, but you have to be practical” (there’s nothing wrong with being idealistic).
Instagram adds Snapchat features
Something I’ve wanted to say for a long time but never found an opportunity is that the term “social media” doesn’t describe the phenomena well. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and co. are all distant forms of socialization and as “media” it’s quite difficult to hold Tweets or Stories in comparison with, say, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy or the 24 hour news cycle. The term “social media” is the cleaned up version for job titles and business plans. Networks is much better. With that introduction, consider this exposition of changes to Instagram from Caitlin McGarry of MacWorld:
Instagram carries a pressure that other social networks don’t. Every photo must be perfectly composed, your feed artfully curated, otherwise you won’t rack up double-digit likes. Quelle horreur! (But seriously, it’s depressing when only a couple followers like your carefully crafted image.) It’s not uncommon for people to use high-end photo-editing apps to add gloss to their images before sharing them to Instagram.
There’s a grand irony in Instagram, that is was created and to make sharing photos easy and painless, and now it’s become difficult (because of their new “Stories” feature) and “depressing” (her words). I encourage everyone to reconsider whether social media is worth the price, which of course isn’t monetary, but in submitting your intellectual property and becoming addicted to their social currency.
Alive With The Glory of Love – Say Anything (Wolfox Cover)
After 2 hours in my basement with Mike Bearce on bass, Connor Kruysman on vox, and myself programming drums and playing guitar, a cover of a definitive song, “Alive with the Glory of Love”, from one of my favorite bands, Say Anything, came to be. We did this cover live, all playing at the same time, in a single play through. Check it out and let me know what you think!
Metrik’s remix of Subfocus’ “Turn Back Time” is one of the greatest drum’n’bass songs, take a listen.
Metrik’s remix of Subfocus’ “Turn Back Time” is one of the greatest drum’n’bass songs, take a listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsrEH3U03fY
Oliver Stone on Pokemon GO and surveillance capitalism
[…] Once the government had been hounded by Snowden, of course the corporations went into encryption, because they had to for survival, right? But the search for profits is enormous. Nobody has ever seen, in the history of the world, something like Google, ever. It’s the fastest-growing business ever, and they have invested huge amounts of money into what surveillance is, which is data-mining. They’re data-mining every person in this room for information as to what you’re buying, what it is you like, and above all, your behavior. Pokémon Go kicks into that. It’s everywhere. It’s what some people call surveillance capitalism. It’s the newest stage.
Event: ProtoHack New York City
I’ve been to ProtoHack events in the past and they’re brilliant: there’s great speakers, it’s a friendly and collaborative community, and they’re very well run. It’s particularly useful for engineers that want to enhance their prototyping skills. There’s a new ProtoHack event coming up, here are the details:
ProtoHack is the code-free hackathon for aspiring entrepreneurs, business people, and designers. Either flying solo or in a team (up to 4), you’ll go from an idea to an interactive prototype in one day.
ProtoHack exists to show non-coders that they can create something amazing from nothing. We empower and enable the non-technical community with the tools, knowledge and connections that will help bring their idea to life and visually communicate it through prototyping. You have 9 hours to prototype your idea and then present it on stage to a panel of expert judges.
James Bond: Spectre Movie Review
Spectre is as absurd as it is enjoyable, even given the high standard that everyone holds James Bond movies to. The cinematography goes to new heights, featuring bigger explosions and wilder stunts than ever before. The native marketing does too, where every scene plugs some alcohol, watch, car, exotic destination, or clothing. Further, there’s the more subliminal message that it’s plausible to do any of the things Bond does while intoxicated, motion-limited by tight (and expensive) clothes, in extreme weather, in old and unreliable cars, et cetera. The storyline also tries its hand at one-upmanship, attempting to weave together the disparate prior plots of Daniel Craig’s James Bond. In doing so, Spectre positions itself as the magnum opus of the era and maximally silly: that in the whole life of a psychopathic spy, in the background has been a would-be brother plotting to both make Bond suffer as much as possible and run a supranational surveillance program (all without thinking maybe you could just kill James Bond). Having said that, the plot is virtuous in that it makes a villain out of the globalist surveillance state. Spectre has all the right elements in all the right doses, but the genre needs to go deeper than the whole “James Bond is an outdated view on the world” self-referential plot. Rather than espionage and villains being outdated, it’s the campy and sexist antics of the 60s that are outdated. The James Bond franchise blew the potential of a dark, gritty reboot, analyzing the ethics of espionage and depicting a plausible version of Ian Flemings character. Maybe I’m being too harsh, because I enjoyed almost every minute of Spectre.
The Avalanches: Wildflower Album Review
The Avalanches finally released a new album, Wildflower, and it is flagrantly weird while ceaselessly captivating. Every track is a melodic hodgepodge of samples, beats, raps, singing, odd instrumentation, and sonic experimentation. Sometimes it makes you bob your head, other times it makes you dance, and much of the time you’re not exactly sure what you’re listening to: but it’s always a lot of fun. Wildflower is evocative of Daft Punk, The Beatles’ deeper cuts on The White Album, and even Jay Z/Kanye style soul beats, all while retaining that goofy charm from The Avalanches’ first album, “Since I Left You.” The album’s tone is silly and serious, pointless yet hints at a meaning, often familiar but still so foreign: it’s a celebratory, self-aware musical enigma.
“Because I’m Me” is the first full song on the album, and it’s a strut-worthy hip-hop track with catchy horns and am excitingly trippy chorus. But the straightforwardness doesn’t last long, as the ensuing song, “Frankie Sinatra”, immediately throws you right into the deep end, indicative of their track “Frontier Psychologist”, with stream-of-consciousness vocals over a Sgt. Peppers horn beat. It only gets weirder from there, and by the time you reach “The Noisy Eater”, you realize the bizarre genius of the album. It’s has an overall childish atmosphere, yet it’s occasionally performed on Baroque instruments, like sonic graffiti. In the end, while you’re listening to “Saturday Night Inside Out”, you’ll have enjoyed yourself, but have some elusive discomfort. The Avalanches took their successes from the first album and distilled them into extremely listenable and equally alien sophomore success: go listen to Wildflower.
Alleged iPhone 7 leak has no headphone jack and a big camera
It’s a very grainy, short video, but MacRumors discovered a video purporting to display the iPhone 7. Here’s the big camera:
And here’s the lack of a headphone jack:
This runs against the speculation that there’d be two camera sensors, however I imagine it is possible that this leak could be of the regular instead of the Plus size, which could be different.
This also suggests to me that if Apple do not ship with a headphone jack, they’ll ship with an in-the-box alternative. There’s no way consumers are going to be satisfied with a $700 device which doesn’t have headphones in the box. However, as a user of the tremendous Bose QC-35s, which are wireless and noise canceling, I can attest that Bluetooth is firmly “good enough” now, much like WiFi was when it achieved critical mass.
Allo goodbye – why you shouldn’t use Google’s new messenger app
At their respective yearly developer conferences, Apple and Google both announced changes to their messaging platforms that compete with Facebook Messenger and Snapchat. All of these services now have features like stickers, photo editing, wacky themes, zany message styles, and other fun features. Under this glossy veneer of oversized emoji lies some serious privacy considerations, however. The security risks of Messenger and Snapchat are well–documented, but given that Google have announced a new app, it warrants further investigation.
Consider that Google makes money when you engage with an advertisement. In order to increase their chances of you doing this they develop free services like Gmail and Search. They take this opportunity to serve you those targeted ads, but also to collect metrics on your behavior, which in turn improves targeting. I suspect that the reason that Allo is not encrypted by default is that Google is analyzing your messages to further build out a profile on you, determine what type of ads you’re likely to click on, and serve them to you from the highest bidder. This profile will include products your considering buying, health conditions you mention, plans you have for the future, and more. Google “knows” these facts about you and uses that knowledge to sell advertisements. This would not be possible if the messages were encrypted end-to-end, because only the sender and receiver would have the digital keys required to see the contents of the messages.
If it were the government or someone you knew that intercepted your communications to pry into your business or secrets, it’d be rightly called unwarranted surveillance or just plain creepy. Consider that the analog equivalent of this behavior may be, say, reading your post-office delivered mail, which is a federal crime finable of up to $5,000 and punishable up to 5 years in jail. The turn of phrase at the start of this paragraph, to “pry into the business or secrets of another”, is exactly the wording of federal law 18 U.S. Code § 1702, and yet it seems that this is exactly what technology companies have convinced their users to be complacent with. There will be some that respond to this with, “I have nothing to hide.” Perhaps this is the case for some that make this claim, but if asked, I doubt most people would allow anyone to download their search history in full, forward all of their emails to somebody, or have their recent text messages read aloud in a public place (even if it was done anonymously, I suspect). Further, the mere existence of an incognito mode in Allo admits that there are messages that users do not want to share with Google and be profiled for.
This is a concession, a compromise. It’s because Google, like Facebook, realizes that consumers are wising up about the importance of privacy, and they are attempting to appeal to them. But it’s not a compromise that you have to make considering competing end-to-end encrypted chat services like WhatsApp or iMessage. A much stronger rebuttal to my claim that Allo is surveillance and creepy is that Google’s server do not in fact store the chat logs (it does, however, “read” them). Among other reasons, storing these messages is a liability they must manage with law enforcement agencies (remember Apple vs. the FBI?). As evidence of this, here’s Dieter Bohn from the Verge interviewing Google executives on the launch of Allo:
[Messages sent with Allo] are read by Google’s servers, but Kay assures me that the data is stored “transiently,” which is to say that Google doesn’t keep your chat logs around to be subpoenaed. And Fulay adds that Google doesn’t assign identity to the chat logs on those servers even then.
On storing messages “transiently”, this is not re-assuring. To re-use the previous metaphor: it’s akin to someone reading all of your mail, storing copious notes on the contents, and referring to those notes later to take guesses at your future behavior. Considering that in that period of time the message are stored on Google’s servers, they are run through the world’s most sophisticated machine learning algorithms to glean information from them. The reason they don’t store them is not to protect your privacy, it’s because they’re finished harvesting information from the message. And with regards to Google “not assigning identity ” to messages, the process of “de-anonmyizing” data has been well-documented at MIT and the Universitè Catholique de Louvain. The way it works is cross-referencing “anonymous” data with publicly available or leaked information. Not only that, but the data isn’t much use to Google unless they can use it to target ads to individuals, which makes me skeptical of this claim. Perhaps Google today is secure, both from external hackers and internal leakers, but there’s no guarantee that this will always be the case. Quite the contrary, the recent purchase of LinkedIn by Microsoft and LinkedIn’s frequent leaks show that your data can end up in different hands than you anticipated (though the terms of service users “agreed” to allows it).
The trade-offs involved with using Google’s Allo messaging service are not worth the value they provide. In particular, Allo’s off-by-default end-to-end encryption policy makes it inconvenient to secure your conversations, Google’s motives to profit is opposed to their user’s best interests, and the engineering countermeasures to limit the scope of this are at least unknown, perhaps superficial, and definitely not required considering the competition. However, there are number of really great ideas in Allo that are very popular amongst users of trendier messenger apps like WhatsApp, WeChat, and Facebook Messenger. (For the record, WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted by default, it doesn’t seem to like WeChat even uses over-the-wire encryption, and Facebook stores all of your messages.) If you’re an Android user, stick with another chat service that encrypts by default like WhatsApp or Signal. If you’re an iOS user, many of the features from Allo were announced to be coming to iMessage, which is encrypted end-to-end, in the Fall.
Pokemon Go, Nintendo’s market value, and intellectual property
Like seemingly everyone near my age and many people below and above it, I’ve been playing Pokemon Go. It’s fun, and the nostalgia is palpable. It isn’t particularly well-done, however, the most innovative products perhaps necessarily rushed, and so, my criticisms:
- I hate having to give access to my full Google account to some shady subdivision without the public oversight and reputation of Google proper;
- It makes me sad to throw out Pokemon I trained since the beginning or caught in meaningful locations for much more powerful and otherwise identical Pokemon I find on my commute;
- It destroys battery (but to be fair, the GameBoy was pretty awful at that too).
The news of Pokemon Go made it to Wall Street, and Pavel Alpeyev and Yuji Nakamura (via John Gruber) report for Bloomberg that they like what they see:
The company has added more than $7 billion in market value since last week’s debut of a new smartphone app for its Pokemon fantasy monster character franchise. The game, which lets users track down virtual monsters in their vicinity, has topped the free-to-download app charts for Apple in the U.S. and Australia since its release on July 7, according to market researcher App Annie.
Nintendo’s shares responded with their biggest intraday jump since at least 1983, when the stock started trading in Tokyo, climbing as much as 25 percent on Monday. Investors are taking Pokemon’s early success as a sign of things to come for a company that has yet to commit the most popular characters from its Mario or Zelda franchises to mobile gaming apps.
The lesson I see here is not necessarily that this is a tipping point for AR/VR but rather that it’s still exceedingly good business to be in intellectual property. Consider that Niantec released an AR app before this that was met with a whimper, but when some IP from 1999 is added, a whole generation loses their collective mind and goes outside. The success of Pokemon Go is a powerful reminder of why companies like Marvel, Games Workshop, and Nintendo defend their IP so fervently: it can add $7 billion to your market value even 10 years after its inception.
I also caught an Electabuzz I’m quite proud of, and have a viciously high-level Pinsir.
Spotify launch new radio stations
Music is an art, a commodity, a lifestyle, a business, and more recently, an app. People used to pay for physical media in a way they didn’t pay for digital music, probably because it doesn’t feel like you’re receiving “a thing” when you download a file. As an alternative, music businesses developed around streaming, either on-demand or as “radio” (programmatic content). The way this was monetized was with advertisements and paying to remove them. This was to the benefit of the companies that were first in music streaming to generate the large scale required to be very profitable, and to the detriment of content producers that couldn’t generate that scale. Up to this point, I understand completely, armed with the amazing power of hindsight. But when Apple announced Beats 1, I was stupefied. When we have all the music we want available for immediate play, why would anyone want to go back to the Byzantine distribution method of programmed radio?
Perhaps it’s a significant differentiator, however, because here’s Rich McCormick from the Verge:
Swedish streaming service Spotify is launching two new radio shows today, both of which feature musicians talking about the kind of music that they like listening to while they’re making their art. The first, AM/PM, will feature artists like electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre and Terry Hall of ska icons The Specials talking about the music they listen to in the mornings before work, and in the evenings after a day spent creating. The second, Secret Genius, speaks to the songwriters and producers behind major songs, and features the actually-pretty-well-known James Blake, among others.
Perhaps it will be clear in time, but I don’t know what the appeal of this is when we have all the music available (almost) all the time.
Views from Independence Day in New York City
