JB

I Built the Perfect AI Robot. Then I Pulled the Plug - MacSparky:

That’s when it hit me. I’m not a security expert. If I can find these holes, imagine what someone who actually knows what they’re doing could exploit. The fundamental problem is that AI agents need access to work. You have to open doors. But 30 years of computer security has been about keeping those doors locked.

I am a security expert, and this is a time bomb. I'm not sure if they'll ever be trustworthy enough for me to allow them to go rifling through my personal and work data.

Sometimes it takes big organizations to do big things.

Apple exerts its power on it’s entire supply line to ensure that they are using renewable energy and environmentally sound principles. Additionally, they forward to after the sale and are committing to accounting for all of the power that their devices use once they are in the hands of their customers. Neither one of those things, looking back at their supply chain, and forward at their customers, is something that Apple has to do. But as one of those customers, I’m glad they are doing it.

Of course, not everyone sees things the same way. Cory Doctoro is a smart guy and a fun writer. I enjoy his podcast, and I’ve read a few of his books. There’s enough of a streak of rebellion in me that I find his worldview and calls for action particularly appealing. One area where I partially disagree with him though is his call to move away from Amercian tech. While I think it’s a no-brainer for foreign governments (or anyone else for that matter) to stop using Microsoft Office, I wouldn’t extend this idea to adopting European laptop vendors. At least not how they currently exist.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft have all committed to meeting certain environmental goals by 2030. In the case of Apple, their commitment is to be entirely carbon neutral. Microsoft’s commitment is to be “carbon negative, water positive, zero waste, and protect more land than we use.” Likewise, Google is pursuing “net-zero emissions across all of our operations and value chain by 2030, supported by a goal to run on 24/7 CFE on every grid where we operate.” I’m not a big fan of Microsoft or Google, but I have been following Apple as a hobby for over 20 years now. To be completely transparent, I find Apple’s commitment to and execution on their environmental goals to be astonishing.

Let’s get the caveats out of the way first. Yes, there are many, many things that Apple needs to do better at. Yes, they don’t need to be quite as big as they are. Yes, they need to treat developers better. And for the love of God yes, they need new leadership at the top, the Trump bootlicking and ring-kissing has to stop. But today I’d like to focus on what Apple is doing right, and what I hope they continue to do right.

A nerdy way to get an idea of how important a topic is to a big organization like Apple is to see how deeply they bury that topic in their information hierarchy of their homepage. For Apple, at the bottom of every page is heading titled “Values”, and under that is a link to “Environment”. I think it’s telling that the link points to https://www.apple.com/environment/, a top-level folder of their domain. A few bullet points from Apple:

• 21.8M metric tons of CO₂e emissions avoided
• 24% of materials shipped in our products came from recycled or renewable sources in 2024.
• 99% recycled cobalt in all Apple‑designed batteries.
• 3.6M metric tons of supplier facility waste diverted from landfills through our Zero Waste Program.
• 150,000 acres of sustainably certified forests restored
• 100,000 acres of native ecosystems protected through the Restore Fund.
• 14 billion gallons of freshwater savings through our Supplier Clean Water Program in 2024.
• Mac Mini manufactured with electricity sourced from 100% renewables.
• Mac enclosures made with 100% recycled aluminum.

One could argue that the metrics listed here are misleading, or that this is greenwashing and Apple is no more responsible than any other tech giant. There may be some truth to that, but I think overall Apple’s commitment to environmentally sound manufacturing and recycling principles is real. And, not only good for everyone in general, it’s good for their business. They could make their lower-end machines like the Mini or the Air out of cheap plastic. They could not be doing any of the things that they are doing, but it would cost them in raw materials, and it would cost them in reputation.

One argument I’ve seen from Doctoro is that Apple’s recycling program prevents good parts from entering the third-party market, which gives Apple more power because then only Apple can be the supplier of repair parts for their products. Fair enough, with a company the size and scope of Apple, there are a number of different lenses to look at any given topic through. I’m fully on board with making machines that are easy to repair. But I’m also fully on board with making sure e-waste stays out of landfills and dangerous third-world smelting factories.

Looking at Apple’s products purely through a repairability lense often leads to considering Framework. Framework is intentionally built with repairability in mind, every component in the machine can be easily ripped out and replaced with a new one, from the screen to the motherboard. My concern with Framework’s model is what happens to the components that are replaced? And how often are they being replaced? If we are honest about the consumption habits of most Americans, and probably most Europeans as well, those replaced parts will wind up in the trash. So… if the Framework model becomes widespread and commonplace, e-waste from replaceable Framework components grows exponentially.

Ok, so if we don’t want a world full of junk Framework components, and we want to get off American tech in general anyway, where do we go? There are a few small European laptop vendors making Linux laptops, like Germany’s Tuxedo, and Spain’s Slimbook. These vendors offer a seamless experience of Linux pre-installed on their machines, with all the components guaranteed to work, and even an extended warranty available to purchase. So far so good, but there is no environmental impact statement for these companies, because they don’t actually make the laptop. In general, these companies are white-labeling laptops from a Chinese manufacturer named Clevo, an ODM (Original Design Manufacturer).

Clevo, somewhat surprisingly, has an environmental report similar to Apple or Microsoft’s, but reading the report shows that the company is doing the minimum it can get away with, along with some very modest goals. A brief rundown:

• Apple achieved 60% carbon reduction since 2015, Clevo’s goal is 5% by 2030.
• Apple currently uses 100% renewable energy for it’s own operating, and is pushing suppliers to 100% by 2040, Clevo uses 12.85% with no supplier requirements.
• Apple has invested billions in renewable energy and recycling, Clevo does not disclose it’s investments.

Apple might be accused of greenwashing, but this report from Clevo actually is greenwashing. Among other things, it emphasizes replacing LED bulbs for Christ’s sake, but avoids making hard commitments to real environmental protection.

This is all to say that while it may feel good to support a small, European Linux vendor, the environmental impact of that choice is far from neutral. I’d be all for manufacturers in Europe to start building their own computers from scratch that were easily repairable, easily recyclable, and used environmentally friendly processes, but as far as I can tell that doesn’t exist. Not yet anyway. Maybe this current moment we are in can jumpstart the effort.

Apple is too big. Tim Cook needs to go. They have focused too much on profit and not enough on developer relations, code quality, and user experience design. I mean, good grief, have you looked at Apple News+ lately? Embarrassing. But give credit where due, Apple’s environmental efforts are second to none, and that’s partially because they decided to use their strength to push the industry in a more sustainable, cleaner, and greener direction. I think the world would be a better place if everyone else would follow suit.

American - kieranhealy.org:

It perfectly expressed the principle, the claim, the myth—as you please—that America is an idea. That it does not matter where you are from. That, in fact, America will in this moment explicitly and proudly acknowledge the sheer variety of places you are all from. That built in to the heart of the United States is the republican ideal not just that anyone can become an American, but that this possibility is what makes the country what it is.

It's easy to get lost in the events of the day and forget that the worst of us, even though they hold power right now, are not the most of us. To forget that what we are going through as a country right now will not last. I believe that our American experiment will continue, and that starting this Fall we will reject authoritarianism and start restoring decency and dignity to our government.

Sierra Hull – Mad World (Tears For Fears) | DelFest (2022) – Rhoneisms:

Beautiful.

Write about the future you want - daverupert.com:

There’s a lot that’s not going well; politics, tech bubbles, the economy, and so on. I spend most of my day reading angry tweets and blog posts. There’s a lot to be upset about, so that’s understandable. But in the interest of fostering better discourse, I’d like to offer a challenge that I think the world desperately needs right now: It’s cheap and easy to complain and say “[Thing] is bad”, but it’s also free to share what you think would be better.

This is the challenge we need. Enough complaining, start dreaming of something better, then go build it.

Liberty as Resistance — Matt Gemmell:

Then there are the services and subscriptions. We use the iCloud family features, and so we pay for additional iCloud storage. Our photos are in iCloud, automatically shared between my wife and I, and we have a couple of AppleCare warranty plans. We currently subscribe to the Apple TV streaming service, and I use a few subscription-based third-party apps which are of course billed through the App Store. Even without money being a factor, we have shared folders of household documents in iCloud, shared notes for shopping lists and such, shared passwords for relevant sites and services, shared calendars and reminders, and we all use Messages and FaceTime extensively. I look at it all with despair.

Matt and I are in the same boat.

The Dangers of “Vibe Reporting” About AI - Cal Newport:

Both of these articles cover the same announcement, but they produce two very different impressions. The Quartz article strongly implies that Amazon is firing people because it can now offload their work to AI. (I mean: look at the Andy Jassey quote they included in the sub-head, they clearly wanted readers to believe AI caused these job losses.)

The CNBC article, by contrast, makes it clear that the connection between AI and these layoffs is more coincident than causal.

It's increasingly important to understand if the article you're reading is trying to convince you of something, trying to anger you, or actually trying to inform you.

Fantastic video. Long, but worth it. Make some popcorn and learn a thing or two.

Chris Siebenmann wrote a nice article explaining some of the early reasoning behind Linux package managers:

The abstract way to describe why is to say that Linux distributions had to assemble a whole thing from separate pieces; the kernel came from one place, libc from another, coreutils from a third, and so on. The concrete version is to think about what problems you’d have without a package manager. Suppose that you assembled a directory tree of all of the source code of the kernel, libc, coreutils, GCC, and so on. Now you need to build all of these things (or rebuild, let’s ignore bootstrapping for the moment).

Building everything is complicated partly because everything goes about it differently. The kernel has its own configuration and build system, a variety of things use autoconf but not necessarily with the same set of options to control things like features, GCC has a multi-stage build process, Perl has its own configuration and bootstrapping process, X is frankly weird and vaguely terrifying, and so on. Then not everyone uses ‘make install’ to actually install their software, so you have another set of variations for all of this.

This is good, but it does miss the biggest reason package managers exist: dependency hell. In short, imagine you’re installing a Linux system in the late 90’s or early 2000’s. You’d like to play music from your CD player, so you download a package and try to compile it, but realize that it’s missing a library. So you download the missing library and realize that to compile the library, you’ll have to upgrade an existing library in your system, so you upgrade, compile the library, and compile the music player application. Great, now you’ve got your music playing in the background, but now your web browser won’t launch because it depended on a specific version of the library you upgraded.

I’ve had this happen, and it was maddening. Having a centralized place that manages all the dependencies of a system was a godsend.

On another note, Chris' blog is excellent, I’ve been following it for a while. But the styling is so minimal it almost looks like there’s no css at all. In fact, I had to right-click and view source to verify. Turns out, Chris is using his own publishing system he calls “Dinky Wiki”, which I quite like.

The Boss.