Oppenheimer (Universal Pictures)

Indifferent to the Barbenheimer hype, I went to see Oppenheimer because I was near a movie theater and had some time to kill after a short Friday at work. I can’t say I was blown away by the movie, but it was engaging enough that I felt the time passed quickly despite its long duration of three hours. The cast and acting was great, as it was to be expected from such a wide selection of famous actors – I spent a good bit of time trying to piece together in the back of my head who the actors onscreen were and where had I seen them before.

Reuters: “Tesla’s secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints”

Tesla years ago began exaggerating its vehicles’ potential driving distance – by rigging their range-estimating software. The company decided about a decade ago, for marketing purposes, to write algorithms for its range meter that would show drivers “rosy” projections for the distance it could travel on a full battery, according to a person familiar with an early design of the software for its in-dash readouts.

Then, when the battery fell below 50% of its maximum charge, the algorithm would show drivers more realistic projections for their remaining driving range, this person said. To prevent drivers from getting stranded as their predicted range started declining more quickly, Teslas were designed with a “safety buffer”, allowing about 15 miles (24 km) of additional range even after the dash readout showed an empty battery, the source said.

The directive to present the optimistic range estimates came from Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, this person said.

Elon wanted to show good range numbers when fully charged, the person said, adding: When you buy a car off the lot seeing 350-mile, 400-mile range, it makes you feel good.

Steve Stecklow & Norihiko Shirouzu

I would totally trust this Musk guy to safely land people on Mars!

XDA: “Facebook Messenger widget makes its debut in latest Windows 11 preview”

It’s been a long time coming, but the first non-Microsoft widget to appear on Windows 11 is finally here — as long as you’re a Windows Insider, at least. Microsoft is rolling out Windows 11 build 25284 to Insiders in the Dev channel, and with it comes a widget for Facebook Messenger, the first third-party widget to ever grace the OS.

Microsoft enabled support for third-party widgets a few months ago with an earlier build, and then updated the Windows App SDK to allow these widgets to be developed. Now, we’re seeing the first results of that. The Messenger widget will make your most recent messages easily available on the Widgets board, so it’s easier to get to your recent conversations.

João Carrasqueira

I recently noticed and added the new Messenger widget as well, so it’s safe to assume this update has been rolled out to the Windows 11 stable channel. A couple of other apps have widgets available, though the selection remains tiny; for now Facebook and Spotify seem to be the only non-Microsoft companies to have opted in.

Politico: “French hit job: How Macron took down an American in Europe”

In a matter of mere days, the selection of U.S. antitrust expert Fiona Scott Morton as the EU’s top competition economist has snowballed into a major geopolitical faux-pas that saw France launch a rearguard action against the EU and challenged the stature of one of Brussels’ highest-profile figures, Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager.

On Wednesday, France won. After a week of campaigning, including a blistering public rebuke from President Emmanuel Macron, Scott Morton preemptively resigned.

The climbdown marks a victory for Paris — and a steely reminder of the formidable power France wields within the EU.

It also represents a potentially damaging setback for Vestager. Her ill-fated move to install Scott Morton comes as she is trying to win political support to become head of the European Investment Bank, the EU's lending arm. While France doesn’t have veto power over the job, its support is typically crucial.

Suzanne Lynch & Elisa Braun

I’m not entirely comfortable linking to Politico (more on that in a future post, but the use of ‘hit job’ in this article’s title might offer a hint), but in this case it’s indicative of the biased tone of this debate, which raged on for days on Twitter – one of the few moments when Twitter felt like its old, vibrant self.

Wired: “Forget New Twitter—Retro is a New Instagram”

It’s fitting, then, that just as Twitter is getting a rethink, a new app is emerging to challenge Instagram. The app’s founders won’t say that’s what they’re doing, but they left Meta last spring to incubate a bunch of products that would actually bring family and friends back into your social photo feed, instead of brand marketers and celebrity reels. The result is Retro.

Retro is a new, photo-focused mobile app rolling out to Apple’s App Store today. Like other newer photo-sharing apps—BeReal comes to mind—Retro uses specific constraints to differentiate itself. It’s private by default; people must request to follow (and ultimately co-follow) each other. Users are prompted to first share select photos from their phone’s camera roll in order to view others’ photos.

Your photo albums are then grouped week by week, going back as many weeks as your native camera roll exists. Any photos from earlier than four weeks ago are locked, and your friends need a private key to view them. There are no photo filters in Retro, at least not yet, and video clips are capped at 60 seconds. If Instagram is now a publicly performative photo app, and your private messages are a messy mix of text, tapbacks, and the occasional photo, Retro is trying to thread the space between the two.

Lauren Goode

Another month, another photo sharing app thinking it can take on Instagram. While not as constraining as BeReal, nothing in this description strikes me as instantly compelling. It’s iOS only at launch, a major flaw for an app launching in 2023. That aside, I also don’t like that you must first share some of your photos in order to participate, it reminds me of Snapchat’s Streak.

The Daily Beast: “It’s Nuts to Send Cluster Bombs to Ukraine”

At some point, basic questions have to be asked about what costs—in money that could be spent on domestic social programs, in human life on both sides of the war, in dangerously escalating superpower tensions, and now in weakening the global consensus against the use of cluster munitions—we’re willing to pay for the sake of making whatever final settlement sets the exact border between Russia and Ukraine in the Donbas slightly more favorable to the Ukrainian side.

Why is continuing this particular counteroffensive worth tearing apart the bodies of Ukrainian civilians with cluster munitions, not just in 2023, but for years or even decades after the fighting is over? Why not publicly invite Zelensky and Putin to Camp David for peace talks instead? Or why not endorse China’s ceasefire plan from several months ago?

We’re often told that “the Ukrainians” are the ones fighting and dying and that their judgment must be deferred to in all cases. Who are we to question “the Ukrainians” as they fight for their country?

But to talk this way is to treat a nation of 44 million people as a hive mind. The truth is that most ordinary people in any country have little say over foreign policy. Most civilians are just trying to live their lives. And they’re the ones whose children are going to be blown up by these munitions.

Ben Burgis

The fierce debate around the US decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine for its counteroffensive bears many of the hallmarks of past talking points about this war, from thinly veiled hypocrisies to avoiding hard questions about a possible end state by hiding behind the facile justification that it’s Ukraine’s decision to make. The quoted article is a good summary of many of the contradictions:

The New York Times: “To ease Global Warming, the Whitest of Paints”

In 2020, Dr. Ruan and his team unveiled their creation: a type of white paint that can act as a reflector, bouncing 95 percent of the sun’s rays away from the Earth’s surface, up through the atmosphere and into deep space. A few months later, they announced an even more potent formulation that increased sunlight reflection to 98 percent.

The paint’s properties are almost superheroic. It can make surfaces as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit cooler than ambient air temperatures at midday, and up to 19 degrees cooler at night, reducing temperatures inside buildings and decreasing air-conditioning needs by as much as 40 percent. It is cool to the touch, even under a blazing sun, Dr. Ruan said. Unlike air-conditioners, the paint doesn’t need any energy to work, and it doesn’t warm the outside air.

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While humans in such hot and picturesque places as Santorini and the aptly named Casablanca have long used white paint to cool dwellings, and municipalities are increasingly looking to paint rooftops white, Dr. Ruan said commercial white paints generally reflect 80 percent to 90 percent of sunlight. This means they still absorb 10 percent to 20 percent of the heat, which in turn warms surfaces and the ambient air. The Purdue paint, by comparison, absorbs so much less solar heat and radiates so much more heat into deep space that it cools surfaces to below-ambient temperatures.

Cara Buckley

Besides the obvious issue of sourcing large quantities of the ingredients necessary for this ultra-reflective paint, another disadvantage comes to mind: I assume coating buildings in this white paint would cool them all year long, so during colder winter months as well, when buildings draw energy from the sun for passive heating. At least in temperate regions with large temperature swings between summer and winter, this solution might have the adverse effect of requiring more heating in cold weather, thus contributing to climate change by burning more fuels. Unless you somehow change this coating throughout the seasons – with mobile panels perhaps? – but that seems like an unfeasible complication…

Google Saved items–and where to find them

After I’ve updated my smartphone earlier this year, I started casually using a new built-in feature on the Home Screen to read various news and articles. It's apparently called Google Discover, after going through various iterations, like many other Google products, and it presents a feed of articles pulled from the web that might interest you. The algorithm relies rather heavily on your past Google search and YouTube watch history. I was never particularly impressed with the selection, it tends to surface a high mix of low quality posts, or headlines I’ve already seen, and seems fairly redundant if you’re already reading Google News, which surfaces a much better selection of content in my experience.

Occasionally I did came across some articles of interest; when you open the links, there’s a button on the top to ‘Save’ them, so over the months I collected a number of articles there. But this presented a dilemma: where could I find these saved links later?

Where’s Your Ed At: “The End of the Honest Internet”

Threads lacks any of the magic of a new social network because it already built its own caste system. If you had a big Instagram following, it automatically guaranteed you a big Threads following, except the biggest accounts on Instagram do not produce the kind of content that makes a network like Threads interesting to use. Twitter’s value was that your thoughts could theoretically stand toe-to-toe with a celebrity or influencer’s. By cramming popular accounts into the network from day one, Meta has decided who will be popular.

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Threads isn’t built for you to talk to other people — it’s built to inject insipid “content” into your life and interfere with as much of the human experience as possible. Perhaps it’s because Zuckerberg already saw how unprofitable Twitter is and decided the only way to do this would be to make a significantly worse experience.

More fundamentally, Threads isn’t a social network. It’s a marketing channel for the least-interesting people on Earth. It’s exactly what you’d expect of a text-based Instagram — a mediocre algorithmic nightmare of content slop that barely resembles entertainment.

Ed Zitron

Harsh words for a product that’s barely a week old – a reflection of current times when people are treated to more engagement for quick and radical takes. To include Twitter in some idealized ‘honest internet’ is a gross exaggeration – people may be more authentic there, but there’s no shortage of self-promotion, propaganda, and misinformation, just like elsewhere. I think we can acknowledge the unique Twitter culture pre-Musk without placing it on a pedestal that it never earned.

Independent.ie: “No Instagram Threads app in the EU”

Sources close to Meta said that the tech giant has refrained from rolling the service out in the EU because of what the company believes is a lack of clarity contained in the EU’s Digital Markets Act. Under the Act, companies such as Meta become “gatekeepers”, with restrictions on how they mingle users’ personal data.

The new Threads platform is designed to import data from Instagram, including behavioural and advertising information.

In its US format, the platform tells users that it will collect a wide variety of data from users, including health, financial information, browsing histories, location, purchases, contacts, search history and sensitive information.

In the EU, Meta has been prevented from launching advertising services on Whatsapp that uses data from Facebook or Instagram. The tech giant is allowed to mingle the two data streams in the US, which has weaker privacy laws.

Adrian Weckler

As expected, Meta’s Twitter replica launched last week to a fulminant start, reaching 70 million signups in a single day (although 95 million posts and 190 million likes as it reached 30 million sign-ups doesn’t seem that impressive when you consider it translates into an average of 3 posts and 6 likes per user). A less expected aspect of this launch: how the app was missing for the entire European Union…

Discomfort zone: “(Un-)Russian Revolutions?”

So why have mass street protests in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia resulted in a change of government, while comparatively massive and determined protest movements in other post-Soviet states left ruling powers intact?

The following is necessarily a condensed version of protests, uprisings and “revolutions” in the post-Soviet space since 1991, but it goes something like that:

1. these revolutions have succeeded only where political power is fragmented or distributed, where there are well-established, competing political camps of significant power
2. security and law enforcement services aren’t defeated or scattered in these revolutions, they just choose to switch their allegiances, to one of those alternative well-established political camps of point 1.

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Ordinary Russians aren’t rising up in large numbers, because none of the usual conditions that trigger such events are present. (No, waging a war of aggression isn’t one of those conditions.)

The hyper-mobilized underground of routine protesters and the anti-war movement have been lying low in recent months, because they know there is no theory of change that ends with Putin no longer in charge. They are choosing self-preservation, although from what I can see, it’s not so much a choice as being forced onto them.

Almut Rochowanski

Thoughtful criticism of some popular talking points about Russia, questions endlessly repeated on Twitter about why Russians aren’t out in the streets protesting the war and overthrowing their government, inevitably arriving at the conclusion that they’re lazy, apathetic, cowardly, disorganized and incompetent. The actual reason, as laid out here and elsewhere, is how Putin systematically dismantled or coopted competing political camps to remove any viable alternative to his regime. Similar conditions explain the failure of protests against Lukashenko in Belarus in the summer of 2020. And while recurring mass movements in Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine have successfully toppled governments, they didn’t achieve core goals of greater social and economic justice.

Café Lob-On: “Why did the #TwitterMigration fail?”

Mastodon is at risk of falling into the trap that a lot of free/open source software does, where the idea of the software being “free as in speech” is expected to outweigh or explain away deficiencies in its usefulness. However, this ignores three salient facts:

• Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared;
• Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software, and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them; and
• When given the choice between a tool which is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint, and a tool which is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former.

Bloonface

The (now imminent) launch of Meta’s newest Twitter-like product based on the decentralized protocol ActivityPub has sparked a weirdly virulent reaction among some Mastodon instances, the other network built on the protocol and moonlighting as a Twitter alternative. The instances decided to pre-emptively block Meta’s new entry; this would prevent Threads – and by association Meta – from accessing posts on these instances, but is also effectively shutting these communities off from this newcomer with a great potential to scale.