Spelunking Apple’s Open Source | Bitsplitting.org:

Since the earliest days of Mac OS X, Apple has complied with the licenses for the dozens of open source components it includes in the OS by posting (sometimes a little belatedly) updated versions of the source code to its Open Source at Apple web page.

This resource is useful primarily to developers, but may also interest curious technophiles who want to take a peek “behind the curtain” to see how much of the magic just beneath our fingertips is made.

If you visit the page today, you’ll see a new emphasis on Apple’s high-level projects, such as Swift and WebKit. At first glance you might wonder if the extensive list of all the open source projects has been removed from the site.

There’s no need to worry: the whole list, indexed by the pertinent platform and OS release to which they belong, is still available on a separate Releases page. Even better, each of these releases now has a corresponding GitHub repository, hosted in a dedicated organization reserved exclusively for open source distributions.

Daring Fireball: Samsung Responds, Hand-Wavingly, to Fake Moon Photos Controversy:

And that’s my point. What if the moon weren’t the same? What if it gets hit by a large meteor, creating a massive new visible-from-earth crater? Or what if our humble friend Phony Stark blows tens of billions of dollars erecting a giant billboard on the surface of the moon, visible from earth, that reads “@elonmusk”? A photo of the moon taken with one of these Samsung phones wouldn’t show either of those things, yet would appear to capture a detailed image of the moon’s surface. A camera should capture the moon as it is now, and computational photography should help improve the detail of that image of the moon as it appears now. Samsung’s phones are rendering the moon as it was, at some point in the past when this ML model was trained.

Minnesota Senator: “I’m not a historian of Minnesota, but I do understand that the genocides between white people and Indians included several genocides each way.” | Boing Boing:

His attempt at rewriting history involves blocking SF 2442, a bill that aims to teach middle and high school students about the Holocaust and genocides. Drazkowski doesn't let his self-processed ignorance get in the way of spouting ahistorical "both-sides" nonsense about white settlers dying in genocidal slaughters perpetrated by Native Americans.

"You know — and I grew up in Wisconsin, so I'm not a historian of Minnesota," he said on the senate floor, "but I do understand that the genocides between the white people and the Indians going back included, kind of several genocides each way."

J.K. Rowling Compares Trans People to ‘Harry Potter’ Death Eaters, Spectacularly Misunderstands Own Creation | The Mary Sue:

She went on to say she knew that those speaking against her “believed they were fighting for underdogs and difference and fairness,” but then, in a move that’s simultaneously shocking and not surprising at all, she compared trans people to Death Eaters, the fascist and murderous group of “purebloods” Harry Potter and his friends go up against in her books. When Rowling was asked what she would say to people who claimed she had become just like the villains she wrote about, she answered:

I have no interest in ever revisiting the Harry Potter books, but I’m pretty sure I remember why the Death Eaters were living in secret. It wasn’t because they were part of an oppressed group. It was because they chose to hate and hurt people who they saw as “lesser” and were rightfully punished for it. I definitely remember the Death Eaters’ philosophy wasn’t “you disagree with us, you must die.” It was more along the lines of, “You were born a certain way and because of that we want to terrorize you, cast you out of society and ultimately kill you.”

– via Boing Boing

(216) Bono and The Edge: Tiny Desk Concert - YouTube:

It's hard to overstate the kindness and good-natured humor Bono and The Edge brought to the Tiny Desk. When they first arrived at the NPR Music offices, Bono spoke on an imaginary phone, "The talent's here! The talent's coming through," poking fun at their own fame, while carrying The Edge's guitar. (The Edge called Bono the best roadie he's ever had.) The two never stopped beaming, like two overjoyed newcomers thrilled at the chance to play for someone.

The performance was a preview of U2’s new album, Songs Of Surrender, featuring stripped-down versions of songs from across the band’s catalog. To help pull off several reimagined songs from the 2000 album All That You Can’t Leave Behind, Bono and The Edge invited a teen choir from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C., to join them. During rehearsals, Bono told the students to think of “Beautiful Day” as the kind of “post-drinking” singalong you’d bellow with friends after leaving a bar. He then quickly realized none of them are old enough to drink, before feigning a heart attack.

Traveling without bassist Adam Clayton or drummer Larry Mullen Jr., Bono and The Edge made the trip from Ireland to the States specifically for the Tiny Desk, arriving in D.C. after five days of rehearsals at Bono’s New York apartment. When they settled in for the performance, they treated the office to four songs, including a deeply emotional version of “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of,” written for the late INXS singer Michael Hutchence, and a reworked version of “Walk On,” which Bono said was inspired by and dedicated to the people of Ukraine.

Less than thrilled by callout to a transhopic stand-up comic, but it’s the only nit I’d pick.

– via Boing Boing

Sony Group Portal - Gallery | Sony Design | History of Sony Design:

On this page you can see a wide range of products and services created by Sony designers. Please take a look at the history of Sony Design.

One item I’d never seen before is the HB-101, which was actually a pretty sexy looking MSX1 Compatible home computer that never went anywhere.

– via Daring Fireball

Woody Guthrie posthumously teams up with Dropkick Murphys for an anti-Tory anthem | Boing Boing:

The Murphys released their first Guthrie-penned album, This Machine Still Kills Fascists, back in September 2022, with another follow-up, Okemah Rising, due in May. That first collection of songs includes a rollicking union anthem called "All You Fonies." But on the band's recent European tour, the song took on a new life as an anti-Tory anthem. So they just released a new, live recording of the song, reworked as "All You Tories" — once again proving that Woody Guthrie's songs remain painfully relevant.

Solidarity

Ron DeSantis' “Stop Woke” act is stopped by Florida judge: “Positively dystopian” | Boing Boing:

"Our professors are critical to a healthy democracy, and the State of Florida's decision to choose which viewpoints are worthy of illumination and which must remain in the shadows has implications for us all," said Walker. "If our 'priests of democracy' are not allowed to shed light on challenging ideas, then democracy will die in darkness."

As part of Walker’s ruling, he used part of a George Orwell quote from the dystopian classic, 1984, to illustrate Dictator DeSantis’s version of Oceania: “‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,’ and the powers in charge of Florida’s public university system have declared the State has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of ‘freedom.'"

Ben Stein is sick of “colored” people complaining: they have “every chance at a good life” | Boing Boing:

Stein is a sad reminder that there are still plenty of people in this country who think that racism is a thing of the past, or that it's not really that big of a deal, or that Black people should just "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" if they want to succeed. And they're more than happy to spout off about it in public, because the MAGA party has opened the Overton Window to this kind of willfully ignorant rhetoric.

Sigh.

Axios Fires Reporter for Calling out Ron DeSantis Event as “Propaganda”:

Sooner or later, the elite political press is going to run headlong into this pack of hyenas. It's going to be interesting to see who has learned to stand up for themselves in the years since 2016. This episode is not promising. In addition, more than a few people—and not all of them Democrats—have begun to wonder if DeSantis is getting soft treatment because he's seen as a failsafe option against a third candidacy from El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago without being truly opposed to him.

Framing Funnies: “Culture Wars” | Jen Sorensen:

The term “culture wars” is used by many well-meaning people, including many progressive writers and activists I admire. It’s a convenient way to refer to a number of issues. But in this current political moment, I think it’s a highly misleading euphemism. What we are experiencing in America right now is an asymmetrical attack on basic freedoms — a fascist movement that thrives on targeting certain groups, erasing history, and spreading dangerous falsehoods through a vast media apparatus. To call this a “culture war” is to legitimize the contemporary GOP and its extremist counterparts as a coherent and authentic “culture” worthy of respect. This is a misuse of the concept of culture, creating a false equivalence between marginalized groups and those who would harm or eliminate them in a quest for ever more power.

– Via kottke.org, which recently celebrated 25 years online.

Anti-woke author struggles to define woke on TV appearance | Boing Boing:

Bethany Mandel, co-author of a book decrying "the current woke indoctrination happening in politics, education, medicine, mental health, entertainment, and culture" struggled to define "woke" when asked to on a recent television appearance to promote her book.

Trump’s Truth Social under investigation for laundering loans connected to Putin | Boing Boing:

"Truth Social," the media venture launched by the notorious Trump family, is being investigated for possible money laundering violations. The company received $8 million in loans from two Caribbean entities suspected to be linked to an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Surprised? I’m certainly not.

50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World - IEEE Spectrum:

As should now be apparent, how the Alto came to shape our lives with computers a half century later isn’t the story of any one individual. In our culture, however, the history of technology is habitually presented as a sequence of remarkable individual achievements. But this is wrong. Innovation is the work of groups, of communities. These provide the context and the medium for the actions of the individual. Leadership is a meaningless concept outside of a group.

The remarkable story of the Alto is the story of such communities. It is a story of how a broad research community developed a shared vision for interactive, networked, graphical, personal computing. It is a story of how a smaller group of talented individuals came together in a new laboratory to realize that vision and to experiment with it. And it is a story of this group moving on, finding new colleagues and organizations in the rapidly expanding personal computer industry, and working for decades to bring the Alto way of computing to the world.

This is a under-recognized part of the history of the tech we use… Xerox and Bell Labs gave a lot of people room to play and figure out much of the foundations of what we see around us, but also didn’t know what to do with any of it until the right people took those balls and ran.

Why Is There an Empty Picture Frame in Joe Biden’s Oval Office?:

Fascinating - but the real tidbit I didn’t realize was that President Biden has a bust of Caesar Chavez in the Oval Office…

Daring Fireball: Noam Chomsky: ‘The False Promise of ChatGPT’:

Donald Trump says the Capitol attack is Mike Pence’s fault | Boing Boing:

Donald Trump blamed the Jan. 6 riots on former vice president Mike Pence, saying that the Capitol insurrection could have been avoided if his sidekick would have just helped him overturn the election.

Does it actually surprise anyone Lord Dampnut would blame a victim for not just going along with things? That actually seems pretty on-brand.

Daring Fireball: Reddit Post Seemingly Proves That Samsung’s Galaxy S-Series ‘Moon Photos’ Are Fake, and They’ve Been Blatantly Lying About Them:

Anything Samsung ever claims that seems too good to be true should be assumed to be a blatant lie.

Let me fix that: Anything Samsung ever claims should be assumed to be a blatant lie.

Daring Fireball: Facebook Is Working on a Twitter Competitor Codenamed ‘P92’ That Will Be Interoperable With Mastodon:

No sarcasm intended: I love this idea. Federate with Mastodon via ActivityPub and let people do it using their existing Instagram IDs. Keep it clean and simple and destroy what’s left of Twitter.

I agree - I love this idea. I just hope it holds out longer than facebook messenger federating with XMPP, which I think was the last time I remember a Meta platform interoperating with open protocols.

Meet the ‘Ghost’ Woman Fox Relied on for Voter Fraud Claims:

But the strangest revelation so far from the Dominion Voting Systems case against the cable channel may be the alleged source of the voter-fraud claims that sparked the lawsuit: a single email from a previously unknown woman who was convinced, among other things, that late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered while being hunted for sport.

Wow. Have to read the whole thing to really grasp the crazy.

Topol, star of “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Flash Gordon,” RIP | Boing Boing:

Topol—the mononymous Israeli actor who played Tevye in "Fiddler on the Roof" (1971), Dr. Hans Zarkov in "Flash Gordon" (1980), and countless other roles—has died at age 87.

Daring Fireball: ‘Finally’ Indeed:

I hope you’re well-stocked with popcorn, because you’re going to need a lot of it. Dominion Voting Systems, opening its reply brief in support of its motion for a summary judgment against Fox “News” (PDF):

Author of Missouri’s anti-LGBT school bill isn’t sure what her bill means | Boing Boing:

Missouri State Rep. Ann Kelley (R) has difficulty explaining to her gay colleague Phil Christofanelli (R) why her anti-LGBT school bill would allow teachers to say that George Washington was married to Martha.

Make people explain their “logic” - Push it, make them spell out what they mean, until it’s clear they’re hypocrites.

Eddie Izzard announces new name:

“I’m Eddie. There’s another name I’m going to add in as well, which is Suzy, which is what I wanted to be since I was 10,” The Independent quoted Izzard as saying, “I’m going to be Suzy Eddie Izzard.”

• via boingboing

Daring Fireball: Phony Stark Picks on the Wrong Guy, Attempting (and of Course Botching) an HR Exit Interview Live on Twitter:

If you’ve been staying away from Twitter, you’re smarter than me, but you might have missed this saga, and it is, I promise you, worth your attention.

1. I like Phony Stark as a nickname for the Austin Powers villian who owns Tesla and Twitter.
2. The facts said owner threw out in the public twitter stream in this conversation may well put him in a LOT of hot water.