Bleached Bits

In memoriam of Bill Atkinson, when Steve Jobs asked him to invent rounded rectangles for QuickDraw, where he leveraged some clever programming to draw circles and ovals incredibly quickly.

Then Jobs wasn't impressed — he wanted rounded rectangles.

Mia Sato, writing for The Verge:

“I would never use an AI for an article that’s being written by me giving people advice,” Dziura says.

But for the online store, AI-generated text weaves in and out of shoppers’ perception. Recently, she demonstrated updating the page for a cannabis-themed apron and using the Shopify AI text generator for help. She added keywords like “pot lover,” “funny gift,” “men or women,” and “smoking marijuana gift” to the prompt. She then instructed the AI tool to use a “supportive” tone of voice and to add a few emoji into the description.

“Gift the pot lover in your life this funny cooking and BBQ apron,” the resulting text read. “The perfect gift for the chef who loves a good smoke sesh, this apron comes in sizes for both men and women and will make them laugh every time they grill or cook! 🤣🤪” Dziura tweaked an error inserted by the AI system — the apron is one size — and pushed it live to the site. It was good enough to do the trick.

Have you ever wondered how photographs were transmitted to newsrooms before modern tech? This is a wonderful video on the process of how photographs were transmitted "by wire" in the 1930s.

Ben Thompson for the always-excellent Stratechery:

Just a wonderful story.

Niek Hilkmann & Thomas Walskaar:

I've used and enjoyed BetterTouchTool for the better part of a decade. The developer, Andreas Hegenberg, always updates BTT to keep pace and take advantage of the latest features on MacOS.

With Monterey, the story is no different. The latest version of MacOS brings the powerful Shortcuts app for the first time, enabling all sorts of powerful automations that were previously only possible on the prohibitively complex Automator, as well as plenty more third-party app integrations.

Just a superb achievement all around.

We’ve all heard this riddle: if you dig down deep enough in Windows 10, you’ll find elements that date from Windows 3.x days. But is it actually true? In this article we’ll discover just how many UI layers are in Windows and when they were first introduced.

I wrote a quick how-to coding article over on Medium.

Most of this went over my head, but it's a terrific explanation of RNA and RNA-based vaccines

So what does that code DO?

The idea of a vaccine is to teach our immune system how to fight a pathogen, without us actually getting ill. Historically this has been done by injecting a weakened or incapacitated (attenuated) virus, plus an ‘adjuvant’ to scare our immune system into action. This was a decidedly analogue technique involving billions of eggs (or insects). It also required a lot of luck and loads of time. Sometimes a different (unrelated) virus was also used.

An mRNA vaccine achieves the same thing (‘educate our immune system’) but in a laser like way. And I mean this in both senses - very narrow but also very powerful.

So here is how it works. The injection contains volatile genetic material that describes the famous SARS-CoV-2 ‘Spike’ protein. Through clever chemical means, the vaccine manages to get this genetic material into some of our cells.

These then dutifully start producing SARS-CoV-2 Spike proteins in large enough quantities that our immune system springs into action. Confronted with Spike proteins, and (importantly) tell-tale signs that cells have been taken over, our immune system develops a powerful response against multiple aspects of the Spike protein AND the production process.

A lot has been written about Apple's M1 SoC. We've all seen video after video showing the M1 soundly beating much more power-hungry Intel CPUs. What we haven't got a lot of, is why.

Erik Engheim explains.