Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

MacStories: Trouble In Apple Pundit Land

Changing, challenging, and sad times.

There’s no question that many of us are facing challenging times these days. On so many fronts. Given how nothing that once seemed remotely stable feels anywhere close to that anymore, I find myself alternating between being angry, sad, and numb with an increasing frequency that tends toward the numb end of the scale.

However, there’s disconcerting news in Apple pundit land that leaves me more sad than numb or angry. MacStories, an Apple-centric blog I’ve followed and subscribed to for a long time is undergoing some changes that rub me the wrong way.

From what I’ve been able to gather from social media, and in a belated explanation post from the blog’s founder, Federico Viticci, several of the team’s members have quit over a recent decision by the organization to resurface the MacStories presence on Elon Musk’s X, which used to be Twitter, and remains nothing short of cesspool of depravity.

To give you an idea of the turmoil this is causing internally for the site that belated explanation post doesn’t appear on MacStories as of this writing, but on Viticci’s own blog. MacStories also didn’t put out its regular end of the week newsletter and several of its podcasts are on hiatus.

I’ll share some links from some of the employees leaving MacStories.

A blog post from Devon Dundee.

A Mastodon post from Jonathan Reed.

A Mastodon post from Niléane.

From the sound of things it sounds like the MacStories decision was made without consulting other team members. That’s never a fun time. I know. I’ve experienced it myself. From both sides of the table.

I can’t and don’t pretend to speak to any more than what I’ve shared above regarding the decision making and the internal machinations. I can say that one of the reasons I’m saddened is that it points to puzzling moment for website that also hosts and generates several podcasts in which its talent feels free to judge and criticize corporate and tech screwups, with at times gleeful abandon. To my mind, this feels like one of those screwups, but who knows?

If I wanted to I guess I could gather some AI generated transcripts from past podcasts and offer some pretty damning quotes about Elon Musk and other tech titans as examples, but I won’t.

I guess this decision proves just how difficult it is to learn from the oft-repeated mistakes of others. At least I hope that’s what it means. Otherwise it borders on hypocrisy.

Perhaps this turnabout shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise. In the early days of this AI boom, MacStories was at the forefront of calling out how the industry was built on the outright theft of intellectual property. Going so far as to writing a letter to U.S. Senators saying that AI needed to be regulated.

MacStories was also quite vocal when it chose to leave Twitter and later Meta. Those choices fit well with the ethos Viticci and his co-editor John Voorhees had established in their writings and podcasts on their way to becoming legitimate superstars in the Apple pundit community. I eagerly anticipated their annual reviews of Apple operating systems, adventures with Shortcuts, coverage of apps that I might find of interest, and their news coverage.

But since those early days of AI skepticism, MacStories has become increasingly known for a site where Viticci and Voorhees have immersed themselves deeply in AI. To say they’re pushing the cutting edge would be accurate, and the website, and some of their other content has increasingly become more about those adventures.

More power to them if that’s where they want to take their endeavors. It’s their website and business. I will say though that this shift for MacStories feels as abrupt and expedient as how the tech bro community switched horses from essentially supporting the Democrats in the U.S to kneeling to Trump before and after his second election.

That said, I’ll admit I do enjoy reading about and listening to their recent AI exploits, even though I’m not directly interested in participating in the way I did with some of their pre-AI days.

I mean, I hate to say it, but this AI-shit on is on us, whether we like it or not, and my interest in listening is that I’d rather understand what it is I don’t like about it than not.

But the sadness I feel about this moment (and I think it will come to be seen as a defining moment in Apple punditry), has to do more with a bigger picture than just a potential shift in Apple tech coverage.

These mid-2020’s going into the 2030’s are going to be defined by and large by the tech oligarch takeover. We can yell all we want to about how corrupt, evil, and incompetent our politicians are, but what I think we’re just coming to realize is that in the end the politicians don’t matter. These new age robber barons have bought all the government(s) they need to essentially do whatever they want. Elon Musk in my view is the worst of the worst. I don’t support anything that supports anything he touches.

I’ve been saddened by watching more than I thought possible migrate back to X-Twitter after the great migration away from it. I think I’ve been successful in unsubscribing from most publications that still use that platform to promote their material. I’m not going to spend my money for a subscription that will put more pennies into the pocket of a man who thinks allowing the creation of nonconsensual child and other pornography on his website is free speech and not a crime, much less one who revels in the power to destroy anything and everything his drug addled brain takes a fancy to.

I’ve made business decisions in my life I’m not proud of and lived to regret them. We all have choices to make and we’re defined by them. I’d like to say that I try not to judge a person or a business for making one they feel they need to even when those decisions disappoint me. That’s not always true. When a decision is made or being planned under what feels like the cover of darkness, it feels like all that’s being hidden might be their own sadness and guilt. At least I hope so.

So, I’m sad to dissociate myself with MacStories. I wish them well. I also wish good things in the future for those who obviously made the tough decisions to leave the publication in the midst of all of this. I wish more of us had that kind of courage.

All things must pass.

Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to this blog if you care to. You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. This site does not use affilate links.

We’re Going To Need A Bigger Woodshed

Angry thoughts.

“We’re going to need a bigger boat.” I’m reminded of that great moment and line marrying comedy and horror together in the movie Jaws, when Roy Scheider’s hero realizes he and is compatriots are up against a bigger challenge than they thought after seeing the shark up close.

Shutterstock 2567949113. A weathered, ramshackle wooden shed with a corrugated metal and tarp exterior, filled with scrap wood, planks, and discarded building materials, standing in an overgrown field surrounded by dry brush and green trees.

With so many sharks swimming around and feeding freely these day, in my own warped little mind that line twists and turns a bit, when I think of all of the punishment I’d like to see meted out whenever some semblance of sanity returns to the world, if it ever does. Along those twists and turns I imagine taking all of these villains to the woodshed my mother always threatened me that my father was going to take me to when he got home on one of the many days I misbehaved.

What’s funny about that twist is we never had a woodshed. It didn’t matter. Any room or location would do when it came time to teach me a lesson. Yup. It was a different era and that kind of lesson wasn’t frowned on like it is now. We did have an a old out building down the hill in the woods. Until I and my neighbors burned it down playing with matches. Given that my father was the chief of the volunteer fire department you can imagine how the aftermath of that unfolded.

But to the point, we’ve essentially given matches and cans of gasoline to so many prepubescents and adolescents masquerading as adults in so many sectors of our lives and are watching the smoke rise out of the trees down the hill. If not the flames licking at our foundations.

I’m starting to get the sense that even with fresh outrages flaring up each day, with no help from those who seem to know better, that too many are becoming content to let things just burn out, hoping for some sort of regrowth under the ashes.

Call me old fashioned, or just call me old. But either way, most of the damage that’s being done in our political, social, and technological lives seems to be egged on by some who might have profited from a visit to that proverbial woodshed.

Enough trips to the woodshed with enough switches used to somehow flip a switch that changed behavior for enough of us in my generation to make the unconvertible stand out as those you wouldn’t welcome into your life.

Buy, hey. Feelings.

I don’t blame kids for misbehaving badly. I do blame adults. Especially adults who let other adults act out. Frankly, I don’t see a chance for any new undergrowth happening without that bigger woodshed and a line out the door waiting to enter.

(Image by ja-aljona on Shutterstock)

Jason Kelce, Liquid Death, and Garage Beer Want To Send Your Pee To AI Data Centers

“Let’s pee on computers together”

This might actually be an effective ad in the campaign against data centers. It’s certainly a good piece of satire. The makers of Liquid Death and Garage Beer have enlisted former pro-footballer Jason Kelce in as an anti-data center campaign that pisses on the entire concept.

Called We Want Your Pee the clever ad offers a satirical take on how to deal with the voluminous cooling requirements these data centers require by mailing your pee to the data center near you. Given the anti-data center outrage that still seems to be growing, it certainly can’t hurt to use add a little vulgar humor into the mix. I can imagine the lyric, let’s pee on computers together catching on.

While I’m sure some may find it vulgar, it certainly isn’t any more vulgar than the way these companies and politicians are trying to visit these monstrosities on communities. For my money we could certainly use a lot more of this kind of ad making taking the piss on all sorts of topics and tech and political personalities in the days ahead.

The only thing is, I’m sort of surprised some tech bro or financial guru hasn’t already thought of this. Here’s hoping it doesn’t give them any ideas.

You can watch the video below.

Throwing Rocks At The Internet

Eventually, someone breaks a window.

The Internet was never perfect. It was always a work in progress. That’s usually considered a phrase with a good connotation. But that depends on the side of the coin you’re looking at. It always begs the question, progress for whom?

A young boy getting ready to toss a rock

Calling it enhshittification is apt, but it’s also an insufficient description. It implies that the mess can be cleaned up. I don’t think that’s the case. We’re too deep in the shit.

Implementing Artificial Intelligence into everything has mucked up most things the same way that inserting ad-tech into everything did back in the early days of that craze. I’d wager that in the days of the ad-tech explosion 8 times out of 10 most of the updates we downloaded or were subjected to dealt more with ad-tech than “bug fixes and improving reliability.”

It reminds me of the early days of DRM when there was a constant wack-a-mole game, trying to maintain and protect media copy protection schemes. I want to think that it cost more to keep fixing things than it ever yielded in profits, but that’s obviously naive on my part.

We’re currently seeing the same with AI. The models are changing so rapidly that today’s new release or bug fix is probably outdated by the time it reaches most computers or smartphones. The pace is maddening and the disruptions for every day users even more so, including those who don’t even use the stuff.

Given how things are going I don’t think even the purveyors of AI know what they are actually releasing. They feel like little kids trying to see who can throw a rock the farthest. Eventually, someone breaks a window.

We really never know when a web service chooses to update, things just break. (Looking at you WordPress.) We rarely know what most updates to apps really mean. It’s becoming a rare thing to see a real list of bug fixes published alongside a release. The developers who do so deserve your business.

The difference in this rock throwing frenzy is that many of the geeks who in the past worked hard to defeat copy protection and ad-tech are only too eager to help the AI purveyors throw their rocks further. There’s a lot of would be Oppenheimers out there.

Set aside the potential dangers of using this tech for military use and malicious attacks. For everyday users of the Internet, the bitch of it is many of the AI changes we’re starting to see and those we will certainly see more of the in the future will be to further serve ad-tech as the AI industry inevitably pours that on to try and recoup some of its out of control costs.

That’s an incestuous marriage that I’m not looking forward to seeing the rock throwing delinquents it spawns.

(Image from on Kristine Jones on Shutterstock)

Sunday Morning Reading

A moment to breathe differently

The road to our time at the family lake house is a mile long and a bumpy washboard filled with twists and turns. Arriving after shaking out a filling or two, there’s a leveling out that leads to a sort of peace, even if only for a few days. I’m not sure I leveled out fully this weekend, but the moments to breathe differently sure helped. Even if the weather only cooperated for a few hours.

Thanks to science, apparently the human origin story is being rewritten according to Ross Anderson in The Human-Origin Story Is Being Radically Revised. Probably a good thing given that today’s story tellers keep rewriting recent history. So it begs the question as to who might listen to any new version science rewrites.

Speaking of science, and also how we might define the human story and its origins, Claire L. Evans takes a look at the creation of brains in labs in AI Is Dead. Organoids Are Alive.

Whatever the twists and turns, bumps and bruises of history, science, and the stories that make up different versions of our lives, I happen to agree with Lauren Leek that everything is being flattened to feel all the same. Check out Temperature Zero For Culture: Why Everything Is Starting To Look The Same.

Given the intermittent rain storms, it was a battle to keep most of us away from our phones this weekend. Neil Steinberg suggests maybe adults need to adopt the practice of some schools in Maybe Adults Should Follow Students In Setting Down Our Phones.

Natasha MH takes a look at crippling anxiety is Sunshine After The Rain. Be the sunshine.

Dealing with anxiety can be painful. Lots of that to go around these days. David Todd McCarty examines The Upside Of Pain.

Disunion by Kurt Anderson is a terrific short story. It may be speculative fiction, but it feels all too real. I don’t know why, but reading this does not make me feel anxious or cause me pain.

With things flattening out, I believe the extreme edges are where things always matter. Robin Ince writes How I Became An Extremist.

Using quotes from throughout history, literary and otherwise, Jordan Dworkin built a fascinating webpage that tours through the ordinary things of an apartment, reminding us that the things we take for granted were once new and invented somewhere along the line and that “we remain restless in the midst of progress,” and our lives today are “a gallery of past generations’ heroic efforts to do the same.” Check out Ordinary Abundance. It’s a lovely piece and worth your time. I wish I felt the same about the things we’re trying to create today.

(Photo by the author)

Thanks for reading. Feel free to subscribe if you want. It’s free. If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. This site does not use affilate links.

Stillness.

Necessary calm.

There’s something about the early morning stillness at the lake.

I’m an early riser and always the first up when we visit. Early morning visits to the lake slow things down before the day begins for everyone else, with only the sound of the occasional fish jumping for their breakfast and breaking the calm.

I need more of this.

Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to this blog if you care to. You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. This site does not use affilate links.

Rough Perpetual Beta Season

Nothing is just local anymore.

The way tech happens these days it seems like things are always in beta. Even if you’re not running beta software.

I haven’t run betas the last few years, and so far this year I haven’t either. I did pick up a MacBook Neo to perhaps give macOS Golden Gate a try. Following my own advice to never install new software, especially betas, if you’re traveling (and I’ve been traveling a lot) so far I’m still beta free, though I have been touched by some issues relating to the betas.

These days, not running the betas doesn’t keep Apple users from suffering some of the headaches that can come during beta season for those who do. Several things are at play.

First, as Apple is rolling out betas for testing on devices, it’s also making changes behind the scenes with iCloud. Since just about everything touches iCloud in one way or the other, strange things can happen.

Second, developers are busy trying to further their apps along to be ready for the fall release. At times that leads to time and resource conflicts when it comes to maintaining existing software for prior releases.

Third, Apple might make a major change that affects an entire class of software. Menu Bar managers, the software some use to keep track of apps that offer functionality from clicking on an icon in the Menu Bar, took a big hit last year with Tahoe that never really got solved. From what I hear that continues with the Golden Gate betas as well.

It’s one thing to chalk things up to it being beta season. It’s another for those who aren’t really technically inclined to find software they are comfortable with not working, seemingly out of the blue.

I’ve been saying that we’re living in the land of perpetual beta software for some time now. Beta season used to be a window of time during the summer months and through the first point release of Apple’s new operating systems in the fall. I could usually count on things being relatively solid from about December through May each year. But that window is opening wider given the pace of things and that wider window continues to let in a lot of bugs that can’t seem to be swatted away.

At this point, we’re close enough to the official release of Apple’s new operating systems that I’ll most likely remain beta free. I doubt the Menu Bar issue will get resolved before the official release happens, so I imagine Menu Bar users will be dealing with those issues throughout the fall and into next summer, if not longer. I’ve also experienced issues with some Shortcuts that I rely on and that continues to be the case.

One other interesting note on this year’s beta season. Apple’s operating systems ending in OS 26.6 apparently included a head start on indexing users’ devices to prepare for Apple Intelligence and Siri AI in the fall. I, and several of the users I support, saw some weirdness during that indexing period following those 26.6 updates in Mail, Photos, and Messages. Mail, messages, and photos seemed to disappear or not load. That weirdness seemed to have worked out after the indexing concluded, but it did cause some consternation among several of the users I support.

That’s the thing in our always tethered to the cloud tech lifestyles. You never know what might happen on your local device when someone flips a switch to “fix bugs and improve reliability” on the backend.

What Does It Mean To Live A Good Life?

Intersecting, connecting, and missing the dots.

The title of this post is actually a quote from an excellent post by Elizabeth Lopatto on The Verge. I’ll get to that in a minute. You should read it.

I read Lopatto’s article this morning, the morning after we said goodbye to my step-father-in-law, James Bach, at a lovely memorial service. He passed earlier this summer after a long battle with Alzheimers. Because his life intersected and touched so many different worlds it took what seemed like a Herculean effort to find a day that lined up with the schedules for those who populate those different worlds, allowing them to gather together to say their goodbyes.

It was a lovely day, a lovely event, and a lovely send off for a good man who led a good life.

Recovering from it all as I read the aforementioned article this morning, it got me wondering. Lopatto, leaping off from Zuckerberg’s recent manifesto that seems to offer something approaching a better approach to AI than the one all the AI gurus initially pitched that pissed off just about anyone other than their co-religionists, quotes the following:

Everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about. Your agent will work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more.

That begs the question, what happens to those personal agents when you die?

Do they gather and reminisce and celebrate the life that’s gone? Do they summarize it, write and send out the obituary to your contacts? Order your favorite flowers? Put together the slide shows? Order the food? Do they keep on keeping on, doing your thing after you’ve shuffled off the mortal coil? Does someone just flip a switch? Does it tally a score and measure the goodness (or the badness)?

Jim and I shared many a deep discussion about topics like this, and this is one I wish we’d had the time to share with before the disease came into his life almost a decade ago. I’m sure he’d have had plenty of thoughts on the matter.

Now I know a part of all of this is that some of the AI is everything crowd hopes it will lead to a future that lets them live in their bunkers or float on their yachts forever. I pity those that think that way.

Certainly I’m in a moment when emotions are still a bit raw. Even so, as I think back on yesterday when I watched family, friends, acquaintances, some of whom hadn’t seen each other in years, some of whom had never met, come together in a room and embrace their connections, listen to remembrances they knew they shared and discover similar ones they never knew they had in common, all made possible by the life of one good man, it makes me shake my head in wonder how intelligent individuals trying to paint our futures completely miss the point of it all.

Quoting Lopatto again:

Is the point of life merely to stockpile accomplishments? If that is what Silicon Valley believes, no wonder all the billionaires seem so unhappy all the time! They have traded experience for accomplishment, and cheated themselves out of their own lives in the process.

Cheat away on your own behalf. The rest of us will continue to experience the ups and downs that make life worth living, sharing, and remembering. Try as you might, that’s something you can’t quantify.

Sunday Morning Reading

Where does it begin? Where does it end?

Origin stories. Crazy stuff sometimes. Living in a world when we can make up, massage, or hallucinate just about anything, it’s no wonder that origin stories captivate and often capture us in our quest for meaning. Perhaps so we can have disagreements over them. I wonder what the origin of that is all about? This week’s Sunday Morning Reading touches on origin stories as well as some of the usual topics that I find of interest and worth sharing.

A typewriter with a page inserted with the sentence "In The Beginning" Getty images c O6QssKbtI unsplash.

Ross Anderson tells us The Human-Origin Story Is Being Radically Revised. Even if we discovered that this is all a simulation, I’m sure it would be debated, monetized, summarized, and bastardized into meaninglessness somehow.

No origin story is complete without some sort of religious or spiritual interpretation. Even Artificial Intelligence isn’t immune to that human phenomenon. Hayden Field explores How AI Bots Started A Religion — Humans Immediately Followed.

Everybody makes mistakes. Neil Steinberg suggests we might be getting too comfortable with that fact and a writer’s duty is to aim higher for accuracy, while admitting our flaws in To Write Is Too Err.

On a political front, everyone seems mired in a mud fight about how the Democrats might be unable to reconcile their progressive and moderate wings. Jay Caspian King takes a look at Subaru Socialists And The Great Disappointed, trying to figure out what’s behind some of the millennial thinking these days, as well as that of the generation that followed them, which he labels “The Great Disappointed.” Life is disappointment. Living is how you deal with it.

Meanwhile, David Todd McCarty asks What Does It Mean To Be A Moderate? I don’t have the answer to that. Frankly, given that everyone is so pissed off I don’t think it matters. That said, while how we insist on defining ourselves might help talk about political life, it sure isn’t helping cure what ails us.

Apparently the one thing that all flavors of the political spectrum can agree on is that data centers are not a good thing. Except those who make the policy and accept the bribes to allow data center construction in my backyard or yours. Molly Taft looks at How Data Centers Broke American Politics. I might argue that they revealed rather than broke. Because the bagmen got too clumsy.

I’ve been following the goings on at Google for most of the summer because the goings on are going to change things. In my view, not for the better. Like Donald Trump, Google hasn’t been shy about saying it’s going to screw things up. (My words, not theirs.) This week there was a shakeup among Google’s AI hierarchy that suggests the screws on the screw up are tightening down in what seems like a rush to productize too soon. Hayden Field gets into The Messy Politics Behind Google’s Big AI Shakeup.

Every origin story is one that also reaches an end. I commented on the passing of Om Malik several Sunday’s ago. Thanks to John Gruber for linking to Om’s final blog post, something I somehow missed. It’s about so much more than the headline suggests. But that’s what Om Malik was about. So much more. Check out The Myth, The Mythos and the Man. I’ll close with this quote from his post:

The sophist is selecting, sequencing, and presenting in ways that produce belief without requiring the audience to do the work. Mythos, for Plato, was the domain of poets and myth-makers. Useful for educating the young, dangerous when deployed as a substitute for rigorous argument among adults.

(Image licensed from Getty Images for Unsplash+)

Too Many Frankensteins

There’s a reason they call it science FICTION.

Why does no one ever read the end of the story? Or if they do, why don’t they pay attention?

Ever since Mary Shelley gave us Frankenstein, laying out a moral of a story proving that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should, there seems to be a preponderance of ignorance running alongside the obvious capabilities our current day Dr. Frankensteins possess. It feels like the story is playing on an endless Youtube Short or TikTok or Reel without ever reaching the end and the story’s point. The only thing coming close to the volume of ignorance is the overdose of hubris that someone must be selling somewhere on some street corner. Or maybe it’s testosterone injections.

Whatever it is, whether in tech and AI, politics, sports, media, or fill in the blank for any field that can issue a press release and attract attention like flies to rotting flesh, it’s past the epidemic stage and has spread like a plague.

The fever stokes flames on Wall Street, which seems content to fuel them further until it all melts down. As long as they make their fees. Makes one wonder how the prediction markets on any number of popping bubbles are doing?

Between AI companies climbing over each other to fight over which model can cause more damage when they break free, companies creating horror movie-like robots to do damage control in dangerous circumstances, companies working to create AI powered glasses that will be used for mass surveillance — much less trouble making privacy violations, the tech sector seems to be outrunning the rest when it comes to the mad scientist wannabe game.

Politicians aren’t far behind, lagging only by their inability to keep up with and understand the changes happening around them as they count the cash being stuffed in their pockets. Sports teams intent on winning today don’t seem to care that they may be permanently damaging their game.

And there’s a media that doesn’t actually care who wins and who loses as long as they have access to the story of the rise and the story of the fall. Imagine if today’s media had covered Dr. Frankenstein’s efforts the way they cover Musk, Altman, Zuckerberg, or any of the others.

It’s too broad a generalization to say these stories never end well, even though many fail whether the consequences are intended or not. But in a world seemingly being driven by a bunch of geeks who profess a love for science fiction, and those who can’t help but take their money to drive their own ambitions, you’d think someone along the way would understand that they don’t get to write the end.

But that would require more than reading a summary.