Rich Stroffolino

I don’t need a phone to be exciting. I use an iPhone because it’s the Toyota Camry of phones. But foldables are getting to the point where they look freaking nice, sort of practical, and only at a slight price premium. I think seeing the Honor Magic V2 put me over.

Just installed the watchOS beta and I’m shocked how much the Snoopy watch face delights me.

Archive.org is an amazing resource. I recently found a collection of old arcade posters. Included is one for the game Thunder Jaws, an Atari game I’ve never heard of. The poster itself is exceptional: It includes this amazing copy:

If one Great White lurking in the waters can become a smash hit, imagine the feeding frenzy when you have giant cybernetic sharks!

Just got a notice from Teenage Engineering that they restocked some of their Pocket Operator models, including their chiptune synth, the PO-20 Arcade. I thought they had just stopped production on all by their PO-33, so glad to see fresh stock (even if they are all $100 now).

White Hats Love Them Some Chatbots

An interesting study on how generative AI tools are being used in security research:

Many of the respondents are already using generative AI in their work, including in automating tasks (50%), analyzing data (48%), identifying vulnerabilities (36%), validating findings (35%) and conducting reconnaissance (35%). The report noted a trend of hackers using AI chatbots to help write reports, with the initial text generated by AI “a good jumping off point.”

Interestingly, researchers are doing this with off-the-shelf chatbots, overwhelmingly ChatGPT. What’s interesting is that Microsoft offers its own Security Copilot model for these types of tasks. Obviously the interest in using these tools is outpacing the speed that organizations can validate them (or at least the more specialized ones). Justin Robert Young made this point on Daily Tech News Show this week, even if chatbots aren’t “cleared” for a given use case, people are already using them.

The Threads app is a week old and Meta is still on version 1.0 on iOS. Like I don’t expect feature updates, but on a device used by over 100 million people, I’d expect a bug fix by now. Not sure if that means the team is still fairly small or they are waiting to push out new features.

I can’t tell you how much you messed up when the open source community is using Oracle as a favorable comparison. Full details on RHEL drama here.

This whole thing has become such a mess that even Oracle, which hasn’t always been seen as a champion of open source and which bases its Oracle Linux on RHEL, is coming out of this looking pretty good.

Adding “Snapchat share sheet” to my list of tech tongue twisters.

Tech forward e-bike maker VanMoof hits the breaks

VanMoof tried to best the Apple of e-bikes. They were pretty, had a nice minimalist design, and bucked the trend of building a bike on readily available components. They counted on their style and tech stack to stand out. But we’ve seen the e-bike market explode with innovative products across the price spectrum in the last two years. Now it’s reported they don’t have a CEO and are trying to get funding to stay afloat.

VanMoof’s approach has been highly verticalized to date: It has designed the bike itself as well as the integrated app that controls it. It also has eschewed using off-the-shelf components in the building of the bike — a very common aspect of how bikes are made and fixed generally — opting instead to work with suppliers to manufacture custom components.

No Dignity in Journalism

I’m assuming Martin Pengelly went to a good school, studied hard, worked his way up through newsrooms to get to be the breaking news editor for The Guardian. Then he found himself writing this:

Twitter owner calls Facebook founder a ‘cuck’ as rancour grows over launch of Threads, a competitor to Musk’s network

Twitter owner Elon Musk has suggested he and Mark Zuckerberg should have “a literal dick-measuring contest” in the latest broadside aimed at his rival billionaire.

In a message inspired by the Meta chief executive’s launch last week of Threads, a Twitter competitor, Musk added a ruler emoji.

Using a slang word for “cuckold”, popular in rightwing circles as a term of derision, he also wrote: “Zuck is a cuck.”

Threads is a legitimately interesting development. Any platform that grows to 100 million users in a week in a gigantic story. But now we get the pabulum always associated with Musk. Somehow this makes him challenging Zuck to a fight quaint in comparison.

Testing out micro.blog. I evidently signed up for it a while ago but never posted anything. Now I have posted something.