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dorktower_feed
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kottke_org_feedIf Every Congressman Facing Credible Rape Allegations Resigned, We’d Have No One Left to Govern the Country. “It’s naïve to imagine the government can continue to function without the tireless dedication of our best and brightest rapists.”
daringfireball_feedMolly White, at Web3 Is Going Just Great:
After a fake version of the Ledger cryptocurrency wallet app made it onto the normally highly curated Apple App store, customers lost $9.5 million dollars to the malicious product. Believing it was a genuine Ledger product, people entered their seed phrases into the app, then discovered their wallets were immediately drained.
One victim, a musician who goes by G. Love, wrote: “I lost my retirement fund in a hack/Scam when I switched my Ledger over to my new computer and by accident downloaded a malicious ledger app from the Apple store. All my BTC gone in an instant.” According to him, he lost 5.9 BTC (~$445,000).
The legit (if that adjective can be used for cryptocurrency apps) Ledger Live Mac app is only available as a direct download from Ledger’s website. They also do have an app in the App Store, but it’s iPhone-only.
daringfireball_feedTim Hardwick, last week at MacRumors:
Apple’s first foldable iPhone may not carry the speculative media-derived “Fold” branding after all, according to Chinese leaker Digital Chat Station. In a new post on Weibo, the oft-accurate leaker claimed that Apple’s book-style foldable could launch as the “iPhone Ultra.” Meanwhile, domestic Chinese manufacturers are allegedly deciding whether to follow Apple’s lead by tentatively branding their own upcoming foldables as “Ultra” models, but likely with a lighter price tag — Apple’s version is expected to cost between $2,000 and $2,500.
I have no inside knowledge about what Apple plans to name this device, but I’ll eat my proverbial hat if they name it “iPhone Fold”. That name is so dumb it’s what Samsung calls their foldables. You don’t name a device for what it does, you name it for what it connotes. A good name conveys feeling, not just function. “iPhone Ultra” or “iPhone Max” would both work, and Ultra sounds more luxe. So while unsurprising, that’s probably the best bet, even without the reliable word of Mr. Digital Chat Station.
But if you want my take on a wildcard name, one with some history, how about “iPhone Duo”?
daringfireball_feedThe Houston Chronicle:
Kristin Tips, the longtime presiding officer of the embattled Texas Funeral Service Commission, is no longer on the board. “Governor Abbott appreciates Kristin Tips’ service,” Andrew Mahaleris, Abbott’s press secretary, said in an email Tuesday. “An announcement on a replacement will be made at a later date.” [...]
Tips, who has run San Antonio’s prestigious Mission Park Funeral Chapels, Cemeteries & Crematories with her husband, Dick Tips, was appointed to the board by the governor in 2017 and made the presiding officer in May 2024. Tips did not respond to a request for comment.
I don’t have any questions for her, but I have at least one for her husband.
daringfireball_feedRyan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:
On the iPhone and iPad, Apple made the new Creator Studio features available as updates to the existing App Store releases.
On the Mac though, the rollout was a lot more confusing. Apple kept the old iWork apps for Mac available on the App Store and launched entirely separate iWork versions with the Creator Studio features. Starting today, though, that oddity is no more. Per Aaron Perris, Apple has officially removed the old Pages, Keynote, and Numbers apps from the App Store.
If you’ve previously downloaded these apps, you’ll still find them in your download history and can re-download from there. But new users will only see one option on the App Store: the Creator Studio-compatible apps.
One reason — perhaps the reason? — this was necessarily more complex on MacOS is that the iWork apps used to have different bundle identifiers on iOS and Mac. On the Mac, the old (classic?) version of Keynote has the bundle identifier com.apple.iWork.Keynote. On iOS, it was always just com.apple.Keynote, without the iWork part. To make the single-subscription bundle work across both platforms, Apple seemingly needed to unify the bundle IDs, and they unified them using the iOS versions, sans the iWork part. The new Creator Studio versions of the Mac apps now have the same bundle IDs as the iOS versions. You can see this using Terminal, if, like me, you currently have both versions of these apps installed side-by-side:
% mdls -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier -r \
/Applications/Numbers.app
Result: com.apple.iWork.Numbers
% mdls -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier -r \
/Applications/Numbers\ Creator\ Studio.app
Result: com.apple.Numbers
You can also see from the above that while the display names for the new versions remain just “Keynote”, “Numbers”, and “Pages”, the actual names of the .app bundles in the file system are now “Keynote Creator Studio.app”, “Numbers Creator Studio.app”, and “Pages Creator Studio.app”. That’s how two apps that both appear to have the same name can exist next to each other in the same Applications folder.
I’ll leave the final word to Basic Apple Guy:
Goodbye Keynote, Numbers, and Pages, and long live Keynote: Design Presentations, Numbers: Make Spreadsheets, and Pages: Create Documents
kottke_org_feed
You know who else wanted to construct gaudy buildings in his own image? Here’s Timothy Ryback on Adolf Hitler’s obsession “with adding an expensive new wing to the Reich chancellery”.
The new annex, connected to the chancellery by a marble corridor hung with crystal chandeliers, was part of Hitler’s ambitious plans to align the Berlin cityscape with his vision for the future of the country. Hitler wanted a Triumphbogen, a triumphal arch, twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He wanted an “Avenue of Splendor” for military parades. “The Champs-Élysées is a hundred meters wide,” Hitler told Speer. “We will make our avenue twenty meters wider.” A planned Volkshalle was to accommodate 180,000. The Eiffel Tower could fit beneath its cupola. This “Hall of the People” was to be topped by the largest swastika on Earth. Berlin itself was to be rechristened as Weltstadt Germania, “Capital of the World.”
Ryback is the author of several books on Hitler and the Nazis, including his forthcoming 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy, which sounds like a must-read to me.
I’ve been enjoying the series of articles he’s been doing at The Atlantic about the parallels between Hitler and the dangers of Trump’s authoritarianism without ever explicitly mentioning Trump. In addition to the above piece about architecture, he’s written about Hitler’s Greenland Obsession, What Happened When Hitler Took On Germany’s Central Banker, Hitler Used a Bogus Crisis of ‘Public Order’ to Make Himself Dictator, Hitler’s Terrible Tariffs, and The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler. If it looks like a duck…
Tags: Adolf Hitler · architecture · Donald Trump · politics · Timothy Ryback
daringfireball_feedGoogle, on their Search Central Blog:
Today, we are expanding our spam policies to address a deceptive practice known as “back button hijacking”, which will become an explicit violation of the “malicious practices” of spam policies, leading to potential spam actions.
What is back button hijacking?
When a user clicks the “back” button in the browser, they have a clear expectation: they want to return to the previous page. Back button hijacking breaks this fundamental expectation. It occurs when a site interferes with a user’s browser navigation and prevents them from using their back button to immediately get back to the page they came from. Instead, users might be sent to pages they never visited before, be presented with unsolicited recommendations or ads, or are otherwise just prevented from normally browsing the web.Why are we taking action?
We believe that the user experience comes first. Back button hijacking interferes with the browser’s functionality, breaks the expected user journey, and results in user frustration.
Good for Google to penalize sites playing such dirty tricks, but, if they believe the user experience comes first, why are they only addressing this now in 2026? Here’s a Reddit thread from 15 years ago: “Why the fuck do websites hijack the back button? Its fucking annoying”. And why are they waiting until June to enforce it? Penalize these dickheads now.
I don’t see much back-button hijacking personally, perhaps because I don’t visit sketchy websites, but this entire issue only exists because of JavaScript. If web pages were documents, this wouldn’t even be possible.
kottke_org_feedThis looks interesting: Quiche is a highly customizable but simple browser for iOS.
daringfireball_feedAmazon:
Today Amazon.com, Inc. and Globalstar, Inc. announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire Globalstar, enabling Amazon Leo to add direct-to-device (D2D) services to its low Earth orbit satellite network and extend cellular coverage to customers beyond the reach of terrestrial networks. In addition, Amazon and Apple announced an agreement for Amazon Leo to power satellite services for iPhone and Apple Watch, including Emergency SOS via satellite. [...]
Greg Joswiak, quoted in Amazon’s press release:
“Apple and Amazon have a long and proven track record of working together through Amazon’s core infrastructure services, and we look forward to building on that collaboration with Amazon Leo. This ensures our users will continue to have access to the vital satellite features they have come to rely on, including Emergency SOS, Messages, Find My, and Roadside Assistance via satellite, so they can stay safe and connected while off the grid.”
The Verge’s headline catches my initial reaction: “Apple and Amazon Are Teaming Up to Challenge Starlink’s Smartphone Ambitions”. Apple owned a 20 percent stake in Globalstar, so they were more than a bystander. But I think the deal speaks to the fact that amongst the tech titans, Apple and Amazon are more allies than rivals.
daringfireball_feedSpeaking of John Calhoun, he chimed in on a Hacker News thread last month regarding his experience working with Steve Lemay at Apple:
I think Steve Lemay is a good guy. I kind of fought with him when I was an engineer, he was a young, new designer (at Apple). But I always respected his point of view — even when we argued.
When Jobs came back to Apple in the latter 1990’s “Design” slowly came to have an outsized role. I was one half of the engineering team that owned Preview (the application) when Steve Lemay became a seemingly regular presence in the hallway. As the new “Aqua” UI elements arrived in the OS like the “drawer” and toolbar, Steve and his boss (forgetting his name right now — Greg Somebody?) were often making calls about our UI implementation.
I guarantee that was Greg Christie, who is in my opinion the least-known-but-most-missed person at Apple.
Steve Lemay insisted the drawer live on the right side of the window. This was inexplicable to me. I saw the layout of Preview as hierarchical: the left side of the content driving the right side. You click a thumbnail on the left (in the drawer) the window content on the right changes to reflect the thumbnail clicked on.
Steve said, no, drawer on the right.
“Why? Why the hell would we do that?”
Steve was quick: “The Preview app is about the content. The content is king.”
I admit that I still disagreed with him after the exchange, but I had a new respect for him as a designer because he was able to articulate a rationale for his decision. I suppose I was prejudiced to expect hand-waving from designers.
It’s a good sign when you lose an argument but gain respect for those arguing the opposing side. (And, Calhoun notes, the Preview sidebar eventually did move to the left, after split views replaced drawers in AppKit.)
(Addendum: Steve also invented the early Safari URL text field that also doubled as a progress bar. Instant hate from me when I saw it: it was as if the text of the URL you entered was being selected as the page loaded. So I’m old-school and Steve had some new ideas…)
I had the same reaction as Calhoun when I first wrote about Safari, two days after it was announced and released as a public beta at Macworld Expo in January 2003. (That was a year before I created Markdown, so I had to edit raw HTML just now to update a few broken links to working versions at the Internet Archive.) I wrote then:
Progress Bar Behind Location Field
Hideous. It looks like partially-selected text. Please scrap it.
But by 2009, reviewing the public beta of Safari 4, I had changed my mind, and admitted I was wrong in my initial assessment of the progress-bar-in-location-field combo control:
But I quickly grew accustomed to it, and soon grew to miss it when using other browsers. It was, I soon decided, a damn clever way to show progress in a way that was prominent while the page was actually loading, and without taking up any additional space on the screen after loading was complete.
That innovation is a nice feather in Lemay’s cap.
kottke_org_feed“The internet known within China is a very different internet to the one known by the world at large. It is censored, regulated and structured quite differently. It is controlled and managed, rather than organic and sprawling.”
askamanager_feedLast month we talked about times when you said the exact wrong thing at work, and here are 20 (!) of my favorite stories you shared. There are also many not included below but which you’ll be seeing in Mortification Week later this year.
1. The insult
I once worked as an editor and I told an author that if they tried a certain method to make a certain change to their paper, it “might be worth a shit.” Shot. I meant shot. And I did not catch it before hitting send.
2. The inexplicable sneer
I had a phone screening for a job many years ago. There was a particular way of doing a standard task that I used more as a freelancer than in my current job because my boss at my job thought that method was inferior to another way. So of course they asked about it, and — even though I actually disagreed with my boss! — what came out of my mouth was, “Well, we don’t do that at Current Company” in the most contemptuous tone possible. It was like I’d suddenly channeled my boss.
I tried to immediately correct by saying I used the skill in freelance work and I disagreed with Current Job’s position but you will not be surprised to hear I did not get any further in that hiring process.
3. The memory
I told a room full of people living with dementia that I had “the world’s worst memory.” Do I? Do I really?
4. The criticism
I’m a marketing copywriter. At a job several years ago, the creative director was showing me a print mail flyer that she wanted to work with me on updating. As she was going over the changes she wanted to make to the design, I nodded in agreement and said, “Oh that sounds amazing! And good thing, this current design is awful. Who designed this?” She waited a beat before saying, “I did.” I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.
5. The poster
A coworker made a poster describing the work her church’s mission group did overseas, which included some health care/education outreach activities not routinely available for women in remote areas of that country. Under the accomplishments section, the poster read: “WE TOUCHED 75 WOMEN IN THEIR HOMES!”
That was over 10 years ago and I still use that phrase as a writing example where meaning has completely changed without key details.
6. The compliment
My boss had a meeting with local donors and the CEO happened to be present as well. In an effort to try and give a compliment about the size of the company’s current endowment, my boss instead said to the donor, “Have you met my CEO? He’s very well-endowed.”
7. The right hand
I was once being interviewed for a job by a man with one arm. I assured him before I left his office that he could count on me to be his right hand.
8. The brains
One Halloween, I dressed like a zombie at work. My boss let me know that he was heading out to lunch so I responded with, “Get some brains while you’re out!” After I said it I was like oh well … I’m a zombie, never mind, but luckily he had a sense of humor.
9. The bad example
I used to use the phrase “in case you get hit by a bus” as an example of why documented procedures were important. Not long after I started my current job, one of my colleagues kindly let me know that a very beloved member of another team had actually been hit by a bus, so I might want to use different wording.
10. The children’s librarian
Children’s librarian: I have put my foot in my mouth many a time during storytime. Once I implied that we should appreciate how cute the kids were because we weren’t sure if they would be here next year — then tried to overexplain while parents stared at me with jaws agape. Another time I complimented the kids on their blowing skills. My dad was in the audience with my niece that day as a bonus. We were pretending to blow out candles. It might not have raised any eyebrows if I hadn’t turned bright red and started laughing maniacally. I’m usually very good at storytime.
11. The interview
I work in HR and when this happened I was applying for an HR manager role and had over 10 years of experience. I was meeting with several people one after the other and when one asked me to come to her side of the desk so she could share information on her computer, I said, “Sure, you’re already harassing me so why not?” Why and how this came out of my mouth was a mystery then and still is 10 years later.
12. The microbiologist
Oh man, I work in Microbiology.
“I think I have gonorrhea.”
Or any other number of things.
Usually followed by, “I don’t have gonorrhea, I have gonorrhea.”
13. The client service
I was following up with a client who hadn’t responded when I realized I ended my email with, “If you have any questions, don’t call me!”
14. The question
I’m in OB-GYN. Many years ago I had a patient who was here for an abortion. I noticed she was holding some stuff in her hands, as we talked, and she seemed to be annoyed to be dealing with it. I encouraged her to set the things down on the desk.
“Thanks,” she said. “I don’t know why but my husband wanted me to hold his wallet for him.”
“Can’t he keep it in his pants?” I asked the patient. Who was there for a pregnancy she didn’t want.
We both recognized what I’d said at the same time. Fortunately she thought it was hilarious. I hope I brought some light to her on a rough day.
15. The poor choice
I walked to our print room and saw two of the accountants pulling apart a printer to find a jam. I laughed and said, “What, is the printer guy dead?”
Yes. Yes he was.
16. The battle against the aged
I used to do charity collecting with friends at university, for a different charity each week. So, one week the patter was, “Could you spare any change to help fight cancer?” and the next was, “Could you spare any change for [UK charity] Help the Aged?”
Looked over during the second week’s session to see some passersby in absolute hysterics because my friend had asked them for change “to help fight the aged.”
17. The pic
At my previous job, I was in charge of onboarding all new hires. We used the DISC (I know, I know) and hung up each person’s profile with a picture of them near their desk. Usually, I would say, “Can you please send me your DISC pic?” but once, to a male new hire, I said, “Can you please send me your dick pic?” I quickly corrected myself, turned eight shades of red, and then chose to rephrase my statement moving forward. I still cringe when I think about it.
18. The swinging grannies
I work in the performing arts, and at one interview for an adult education role I expressed my desire to extend community aerial circus workshops to older people by declaring, “I want to get grannies swinging!’’ Cue irrecoverable giggles from the panel.
19. The fashion
There was this person in my office who always had the BEST outfits — super well-fitting, super put-together yet fun, made animal prints (something that’s not always my thing) look super cool … Aaand for whatever reason, anytime I wanted to complement her, my brain decided to tell her how “fun” her outfits looked. Which, like, you can get away with once or twice, but I said this so often she must have thought I was determined to passive-aggressively insult her fashion sense.
We also worked on different teams, so this was probably 70% of my interactions with this person. I genuinely thought she was very cool and wanted to be work friends, but I guess my brain was intent on sabotoging me.
20. The father
About 20 years ago, I worked in a group of mostly under 25-year-olds in a call center. We were a high-spirited bunch new-ish to the working world and not particularly serious. There was a lunchroom with a big TV where we would eat in shifts, chit chat and watch junk TV programs, including one where the host would announce “You ARE” or You ARE NOT” the father after a mother’s paternity test.
One time at a meeting right after lunch, our boss announced she would be taking time off because she was pregnant. Out of my mouth flew these words: “Congratulations! Do you know who the father is?”
The post swinging grannies, the misdirected critique, and other times you said the exact wrong thing at work appeared first on Ask a Manager.
jwz_org_feedGuess what, they completely failed at their one job. The orders would actually show up in the POS about one time in four, and they could not fix it.
Also we averaged $38 in online sales per week, which is like... a rounding error.
If you haven't read my long post about the absolute apocalypse that has been visited upon those of us who would like to deliver food to people in this modern world, maybe today's a good day to do that.
unsung_feedWakamaifondue is a web tool to inspect font contents, and it starts by you dropping a font file (.ttf, .otf, or .woff) into a browser.
It handles file dropping so thoughtfully, it’s worth pausing and recognizing it:
Here’s what’s great about it:
Why is all this important? Because dropping a file into a browser is a notoriously frustrating experience. If the tab doesn’t claim the file, left to its own devices the browser will do anything from replacing the current tab with the contents of the file, through opening a new tab, to… starting to download the file you just dropped and ask you for its new location!
It is frustrating when a failure more of an action is not just that action failing – already here, repeating a drag is more work than e.g. repeating a keystroke – but also you having to do extra clean-up steps.
Wakamaifondue gets this right, and allowing to drop a file on any screen in particular is very thoughtful. Your cursor holding a file indicates your intentions rather strongly – when you see a person wearing a wedding dress, you don’t think “I wonder what they’re up to today?” – so there should be no need to switch to a certain mode or to navigate to an “import screen” beforehand.
kottke_org_feed
For decades, a guy named Aadam Jacobs has been recording live music shows. His collection of over 10,000 shows since 1984 feature the likes of Nirvana, R.E.M., The Pixies, Björk, Depeche Mode, Liz Phair, Sonic Youth, The Cure, Phish, Fugazi, and so many more. With the help of archivists, the entire collection is making its way onto The Internet Archive.
The growing Aadam Jacobs Collection is an internet treasure trove for music lovers, especially for fans of indie and punk rock during the 1980s through the early 2000s, when the scene blossomed and became mainstream. The collection features early-in-their-career performances from alternative and experimental artists like R.E.M., The Cure, The Pixies, The Replacements, Depeche Mode, Stereolab, Sonic Youth and Björk.
There’s also a smattering of hip-hop, including a 1988 concert by rap pioneers Boogie Down Productions. Devotees of Phish were thrilled to discover that a previously uncirculated 1990 show by the jam band is included. And there are hundreds of sets by smaller artists who are unlikely to be known to even fans with the most obscure tastes.
All of it is slowly becoming available for streaming and free download at the nonprofit online repository Internet Archive, including that nascent Nirvana show recording, with the audio from Jacobs’ cassette recorder cleaned up.
Some of the shows, like this pre-Dave Grohl one from Nirvana, were recorded before the bands hit it big. It’s wild to hear their performance of About a Girl get about three claps from the audience.
Tags: Aadam Jacobs · Internet Archive · music
kottke_org_feedOn the network effect of the weekend: “The essential characteristic of the weekend is not just the having of a day off, but rather that other people have the day off.”
deusexmachinatio_feedThis post is part of a series currently in progress. We’ll add links and probably adjust titles as we go.
Why AI Sucks and You Shouldn’t Use It
AI is Fundamentally Bad for Most Tasks
AI is Destroying the Economy, Part I
AI is Destroying the Economy, Part II
AI is Morally Bankrupt
AI is Making You More Stupider
That Original Bluesky Thread About Art
Apologies for the longish break between posts — I was dealing with my newsletter email service last week and wound up migrating elsewhere. And yet again, I’m finding I have too much to say so I’m splitting a post into subtopics.
Moving ahead: All right, let’s assume that AI works perfectly and we’ll invent some magic energy source that creates no heat and magically deploy it instantly around the globe, so climate change isn’t a worry anymore.
We’re still left with some pretty serious economic problems — problems we’re facing right now, and problems that are growing in the background waiting for the moment the bill comes due.
Let’s just take a minute to note that “economy” is a word many of us understand only vaguely. Depending on who’s talking, it can mean “inflation,” it can mean “how high is the stock market,” or it can mean “can I afford to pay for health insurance.”
One thing everyone agrees a part of “the economy” is jobs. Jobs are good! We want more jobs for humans! Ideally one good job for everybody who wants one. But one of the promises of AI is that we can automate a lot of jobs — especially low-level clerical jobs — and then employers won’t have to pay for those employees anymore.
AI is killing about 16,000 jobs a month right now, we think. There’s a tracker that records layoffs that specifically cite AI as a factor, and as of this writing, it’s 125,648 jobs lost to AI.
But that’s not going to include the ad agencies that have quietly fired a few junior staff, the small importer that cuts loose their long-time freelance translator, the programmers that are simply never hired in the first place. The jobs that go away, but nobody sends out a press release or reports it to local government.
A thorough analysis suggests the real number is more like 200,000-300,000, and we’re just getting started. I’m seeing forecasts like 6% of the US workforce in the next four years. Maybe up to 30% of jobs will be automatable by the mid 2030s. This in a climate where 2025 saw 1.28 million fewer new hires than there were in 2024.
For context, the unemployment rate was 25% during the Great Depression. And these numbers will be in addition to existing unemployment that exists for non-AI reasons, which from 1948 to 2015 averaged at about 5.8%.
But AI is going to create jobs, too, right? Yeah, it sure is. Building more data centers.
Artists, writers, translators were all hit by the axe very early. It turns out a lot of businesses don’t care about quality as long as it’s dirt cheap. The apocalypse has already impacted many of my friends. Hell, it’s impacted me. I’ve looked around for copywriting or games writing jobs over the last couple of years, and the suitable listings that I find are all “AI Trainer,” or prominently mention working with AI in the job description.
So in the short term, it’s clear that the boot of AI is crushing human employment for now. But there are longer-term problems we haven’t faced yet, because this AI boot isn’t stomping out jobs for humans evenly. Most of the jobs being lost to AI right now are entry-level.
This creates some massive looming questions that urgently need answers. One is: what happens to the large proportion of young people who can’t find jobs? What happens to the society they live in? What happens to the economy they aren’t participating in?
This doesn’t have to be a problem! This could actually be great for humanity as a whole! But we’d have to commit to restructuring our society to distribute resources in a very different way than we do now. The solution is instituting a universal basic income, which topic I’ll write more about another time.
Unfortunately, there’s no such simple solution for the other looming question: once AI has pretty much done away with entry-level work, where exactly will new senior-level employees come from?
Experience is a great teacher, and in some cases, there’s no substitute for it. You can’t become a great writer without actually writing, you can’t become a great teacher without setting foot in a classroom, you can’t become a great doctor without seeing patients. You can probably apply this to your own field; who’s going to be better at doing something, the one with one year of experience or the one with five, or with fifteen?
But if we’re using AI for all of the jobs easy enough for an early-career programmer, or writer, or designer, then new people aren’t getting any professional experience at all. And business as it’s done now isn’t going to be hiring young people to do two, three, five years of additional training before they start to perform better than the chatbot does.
Ha ha, joke’s on you, the entry-level employees can do better than the chatbot already, but many, many employers don’t care, because AI is so much cheaper. (…For now, but we’ll get to that next time.) We’re already living through one part of that: the frustrating hellscape of terrible customer service where there’s no way to talk to a human being and your problem is too complicated for the chatbot to fix. Imagine that, but for… everything.
Jobs lost to a technological innovation is by no means a new phenomenon. Often, innovation births entirely new industries, it’s true. But when we move from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles, all of those extra horses get turned into glue. And AI’s explicit promise is to turn us into a bunch of horses.
The Luddites, long maligned in popular memory, were fighting the industrialization of the textiles industry — not because they hated and feared technology for its own sake, but because they were seeking protections against lower wages and poor-quality output.
Hmm, that sounds awfully timely right now.
supergiantgames_feedHades II for Xbox and PlayStation is finally here! You can get it right now on Xbox Series X|S, including on Game Pass, and on PlayStation 5. May moonlight guide you as you battle beyond the Underworld in the bewitching sequel to our godlike roguelike dungeon crawler!
These latest versions of Hades II are possibly the best ones yet, thanks to ultrafast 120 frames-per-second performance on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, plus some newly added bonus content and quality-of-life improvements we've been working on. These extras are now available in all versions of Hades II in our latest patch. Check the full patch notes on Steam for the details!
If you're unfamiliar with Hades II, it's a rogue-like dungeon crawler in which you'll battle beyond the Underworld of Greek myth using dark sorcery to take on the sinister Titan of Time. Our studio's first-ever sequel builds on the best aspects of the award-winning original in an all-new, action-packed, endlessly replayable experience rooted in the Underworld of Greek myth and its deep connections to the dawn of witchcraft.
As the immortal Princess of the Underworld, you'll explore a bigger, deeper mythic world, vanquishing the forces of the Titan of Time with the full might of Olympus behind you, in a sweeping story that continually unfolds through your every setback and accomplishment. New locations, challenges, upgrade systems, and surprises await as you delve into the ever-shifting Underworld again and again. For more information, check our Hades II FAQ.
askamanager_feedA reader writes:
My company has a habit of recruiting and hiring a replacement for fired employees before the person has actually been fired. The replacement doesn’t start work until after the original employee is gone, but the company is recruiting and interviewing before they’ve told the person they will be out of a job (and the person has no idea the company is actively interviewing for their spot).
I suppose that this is … practical? But it feels so slimy! They’ve done this secret recruitment, not advertising the position in their normal ways so no one sees that it’s open and figures out what’s happening. It also prevents anyone internally from applying for these positions because they obviously don’t advertise them internally so the person being fired doesn’t find out.
It all feels sneaky and gross to me, and makes me think I would have no idea if my job were in jeopardy (since the people who were fired were blindsided, no PIP, performance conversations, etc, which is another bad practice of course). Am I overreacting?
I answer this question — and two others — over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.
Other questions I’m answering there today include:
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