stephen.news

From the desk of Stephen Petrey ✷

Topic

Twitter

  • 2022

  • An image generated by DALL-E: "an aerial photo of geometric farmland"

    So long Twitter, hello fediverse

    • For as long as I’ve known the web, I have known the little textarea element. It’s a simple element. In all likelihood, it’s just about as ubiquitous as the input tag on websites. It’s a captivating little thing. Before the modern inventions of React or complex JavaScript libraries, all it ever really contained was text.

    I suppose that’s the case to this today. But, it has long evolved into a springboard for authoring webpages. Modern publication inventions such as tweets, blogs, posts, blocks and countless others all stem from the textarea (sprinkle in some JavaScript magic, some drop zones and you have yourself a little “composer” where you can add images, video and more).

    Looking over the W3C spec for the textarea and looking back on SMS character limits (they were varied to say the least), it doesn’t take much imagination to see why Twitter came about in the first place. It seemed that short-form blogging was always destined to become a thing. Twitter’s success can largely be attributed to the fact that there’s really a lack of competition in the short-form blogging space.

    Tumblr and WordPress have always occupied the space between short and long-form blogging, sure. But, the spiritual successor to status messages (aka away messages)? Twitter has owned that (and marketed themselves as such) ever since it became a mainstream social network.

    While Twitter’s previous management has a long and well-documented history of running this company into the ground, Musk maintains no exception either. He’s nosediving and it’s headed for a calamitous user exodus. With no Trust & Safety board and a hostile CEO at the helm, banning tweets to Mastodon, banning journalists, then re-instating some of them — he’s clearly on a tyrannical, pathetic war path toward creating a platform that benefits Elon, elites and promotes a right-wing stochastic terrorist echo chamber.

    Needless to say, I’m getting the heck out of dodge. Like many others before me, I am kissing my neat little Twitter handle goodbye. Meanwhile, I was enthralled and delighted by Matt Mullenweg’s Decoder interview. There’s a brief point where he discusses what it means to be a good steward of Tumblr and how it has humbled him. Between Automattic’s Tumblr, the fediverse and this blog (which is also powered by WordPress an Automattic invention), I’m absolutely delighted to leave Twitter behind. Not to mention, the kind folks at Tumblr are considering adding ActivityPub support to their network which would effectively make Tumblr that largest Mastodon instance on the fediverse.

    You may be asking, “but, wait — how will I find my friends on Mastodon?!” Well, I have some good news! First off, don’t deactivate your Twitter. Follow these steps to get started with Mastodon

    1. First, join an instance. Doesn’t matter where you join! You can move freely about the fediverse. Think of each instance like an email handle.
    2. Next, add your Mastodon handle to your Twitter profile (this will make it easier for folks to find you in the fediverse).
    3. Finally, go here and sign in with your Twitter creds to find your friends who have also moved to the fediverse: movetodon.org

    With your help Twitter can be given a proper burial. It should go down as one of the worst acquisitions in business history and become the cautionary tale that it deserves. The textarea and microblogging on the other hand is never going away. In fact, I would argue that the slow death of Twitter reveals what we all want deep down — each of us want to own a little piece of web. One step closer to a de-commodified web utopia.

    Update: Elon banned links to Instagram, Mastodon and other social platforms and then reversed that decision. Then ran a poll on wether or not to step down, which ended with 58% in favor of him stepping down. Despite claiming he would abide by the results, there’s been no indication he would do so. Even more concerning, it appears he’s spellbound by the idea of restricting poll voting on Twitter to Blue subscribers. Welcome to hell, Elon.

    If you are so inclined, you can find me in several places on the web now!

    I’m on Tumblr where I may shitpost, share photos, re-blog cool things and whatnot: tumblr.com/petrey

    Elsewhere, on the fediverse I have several handles. However, I’m mostly here with my fellow hackers and unix computer club community: tilde.zone/@petrey

    Follow me wherever you’d like, but wherever you go, this blog remains ✨

  • Rockstar Games hacked, leaked footage of upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 game

    • It was a big weekend with this game leak. GTA 6 peaks and leaks are hyped up so much, they’re about on par with the level of hype Half-Life 3 confirmed memes. It just isn’t going to happen and everyone doubts the claims when users post them on Reddit.

    Until it does. The leaks over the weekend were genuine and bold. High-quality footage of the in-development game were stolen from Rockstar. According to The Verge, over 3GBs of videos were obtained by a hacker.

    On Sunday morning, the hacker posted a 3GB file containing 90 videos of early GTA VI gameplay footage, which aligns with previous reports that indicate the game could feature a female protagonist for the first time.

    Which of course elicited a response from Rockstar:

    You know you have the Real McCoy when two things happen:

    1. There’s an official Twitter response
    2. Reddit posts start disappearing

    For example, this megathread on r/GTA6 was taken offline sometime last night. But, not before the page was archived.

    Wayback Machine screenshot of the fabled megathread on r/GTA6

    While the gameplay is still in early development, the footage and content looks absolutely fantastic. Game leaks can be a kiss of death from the public. However, support for GTA 6 has been overwhelmingly positive following the leaks. Probably due to the size and variety of what was shared. In previous leaks, such as the Nvidia PC Leak of 2021, not much qualitative data was obtained. This was a gargantuan leak, and according to the hacker, more is yet to come.

    The videos (which have been taken down in most of the links on Twitter and Reddit) were very convincing and very Rockstar-esque. But, I found these two still photos from the deleted megathread to be the most convincing evidence:

    Redwood Cigarettes are a GTA Staple. This is either the most elaborate fake of all time or the real deal
    MAYBE main character with a different hairstyle

    It’s bittersweet that these details were leaked. But, not much can be gleaned from the story from these videos and photos. There’s evidence of a male and female lead (which was previously leaked but these photos suggest a confirmation on the Bonnie and Clyde story mode) — but apart from that, not much else is known.

    What is known, is the hacker that stole the footage and data from Rockstar (which included source code mind you), is in some very hot water.

  • 2020

  • LA Metro Says TAP Transit Cards May Support Apple Pay Later This Year

    • According to this official tweet from LA Metro:

    It’s happening! It’s long been known that LA Metro has been working on upgrading its TAP system, and it’s about time. Contactless payments are clearly the future. New York City has had it for nearly a year (although, not all 472 stations support it yet). I wonder if TAP contactless will be live by the time iOS 14 hits the ground running?

  • New site, who dis

    • I haven’t developed a new WordPress theme for this website (that I really loved) in a long time. So naturally, it was time to re-examine my personal tech stack. If you personally know me, you know I’m a WordPress advocate. Big fan of ol trusty.

    There’s a few problems with WordPress I’ve been hung up on for a while now. It can be a bit slow (sometimes). Media managing can be painful on the front-end. Deployment processes are… all over the place. Historically, I’ve been a huge fan of Trellis from Roots. While we’re at it, I was a big fan of Bedrock too. Finally, I work with React and JavaScript all day long — why can’y my personal website run on a modern tech stack too?

    Well, I came across this post from Chris Coyier, and I was pretty much sold on the JAMStack concept immediately. At work, and at other organizations like Twitter, server-rendered pages are stupid fastest. Heck, they’re typically standard these days for most web apps. Enter the Gatsby + WordPress stack. Why abandon years of publishing paradigms when you can keep them?

    There’s no shortage of tutorials on the Gatsby + WordPress setup. Initially I played around with some starter projects, like this one. I personally started (and later forked) with egghead.io’s starter. It’s pretty spectacular out-of-the-box, and if you enjoy love @emotion theming or styled-components, I think you’ll dig too. But, really Gatsby itself has a lot to love. For example, Gatsby has drop-in support for server-rendering. Super cool stuff. I really enjoyed Juliano Rafael’s (@frontendwizard) notes on this subject:

    Progressive image loading? Inlining of critical CSS? Painless PWA configuration? You name it, Gatsby got you. It is really impressive. Don’t believe me? I encourage you to try it out.

    The solution for images is so good, that is constantly referred as a strong point of Gatsby, even thought it actually is a plugin. All you gotta do is add a couple of plugins into your Gatsby config file and you’re good to go. Your images will be available on the GraphQL API at build time and the image component will handle all the resize, picking the best file format and everything else. You even get a blur up effect to improve the user experience for free.

    That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Seriously. These web apps freakin purr. I’m overdue for writing a full tutorial on this subject, so stay tuned. But, for now I want to share a high-level overview of the technical lift I undertook for my site migration.

    My order of operations (yours might be slightly different):

    Now that we have our API-site prepped for deploy-hooks, exposed the frontpage and menus endpoints — we’re ready to consume the API with our server-rendered React app powered by Gatsby. Here’s a sample of my gatsby-config.js file:

    ...
resolve: `gatsby-source-wordpress`,
options: {
  // Your API WordPress source goes here.
  baseUrl: `example-api.stephen.news`,
  protocol: `https`,
  // Fetches posts, tags, categories, etc from the baseUrl.
  includedRoutes: [
    '**/menus',
    '**/categories',
    '**/frontpage',
    '**/media',
    '**/pages',
    '**/posts',
    '**/tags',
    '**/users'
  ],
  useACF: false,
},
...

    I absolutely love this setup.

    All of the un-fun configuration stuff is already handled by the WordPress/WP REST API side, and all of the actually fun conventional interface building is done on the… well, the interface side. A complete separation of church and state, if you will. It’s a thing of beauty. Absolute zen.

  • Rules for writing great Science Fiction scripts

    • I think any genre succeeds from a few of these recommendations. But, a good rule of thumb, constraints are good. Typical creative constraints make you squint your eyes and see the world differently. Think of them as adding or subtracting weight resistance like at the gym. Only instead of working out your body, you’re exercising your brain! Here’s the first tweet in the thread:

    Adrian Bowyer is a retired Mechanical Engineering professor from University of Bath. A careered researcher in computational geometry, geometric modeling, and Biomimetics. According to his website, he is the founder of the RepRap Project, “humanity’s first general-purpose self-replicating manufacturing machine.” Pretty awesome! Sounds like he has some insights we should all hear out.

    Here’s the entire thread (saved from Thread Reader here) in a bullet-list for posterity:

    • The overriding rule, never to be forgotten, is: “Coincidence is a failure of art.” – Tom Stoppard
    • It is easy to blow something up. It is hard to have a character say something original, insightful and clever. But writers are dirt cheap. The ratio of explosions to wit should be 1:10 or less.
    • If at any point a reasonably scientifically informed audience is going to say, “But… PHYSICS?!” do it another way. The same goes for not following Darwinian evolution.
    • If the action is set in the future or the past, go through the script and remove every contemporary informal idiom of speech, where “contemporary” means at least the last fifty years. Replace EVERY cliche with a newly-coined metaphor or phrase.
    • The good guys should not beat the bad guys (if they do) because the bad guys have a system with a single point of failure.
    • Human culture has much more continuity than saltation. Have characters in the future occasionally do something from the past as a hobby – making bread, riding a horse, painting in oils; that sort of thing.
    • Spend money on set dressing. They won’t have oil drums in the future, nor will ship’s containers make it to other worlds.
    • Constraints make things more, not less, interesting. In particular, if something is powerful it should be difficult to use. For example, if someone is capable of telekinesis, then, when they use it, it should cost them a few days bed rest. And so on.
    • The Universe runs on conservation laws (Lagrangian symmetries). To make them more convincing new phenomena should also exhibit conservation laws.
    • Arthur C. Clarke’s “indistinguishable from magic” law is true. But that’s not an excuse to put in any old glowing-orb nonsense when the plot needs a deus ex machina. Go back and rewrite the plot so the deus ex machina isn’t needed.
    •  Faster than light travel makes everything parochial, and therefore less interesting.
    • Bipedal life will be very rare in the universe, as it is on Earth.
    • Artificial gravity is less captivating (!) and less probable than weightlessness.
    • “Go with your gut,” will be just as terrible advice in the future as it is here and now. Plots should reflect this immutable fact.
    • Brainstorm a number of un-commented-on technical innovations and put one in the background of each scene for the audience to notice, or not.

    Give Adrian (@adrianbowyer) a follow on Twitter here.

  • 2019

  • Sonos Speaker

    Sonos is bricking old devices with ‘Recycled Mode’

    • Chris Welch reporting at The Verge writes:

    Late last week, Sonos was called out on Twitter by Devin Wilson for its practices around sustainability. The company drew particular attention for a “Recycle Mode” software feature that, once activated, begins a countdown that eventually renders older Sonos devices basically inoperable. Recycle Mode is part of the trade-up program that Sonos announced back in October, which lets customers get a discount on newer Sonos speakers like the One, Beam, or the Port that Nilay just reviewed.

    At first glance, the Recycle Mode seems like a good idea. Except for this one crucial feature of the Sonos App:

    Recycle Mode is a state your device enters 21 days after recycling confirmation in the Sonos app. In Recycle Mode, all data is erased and the device is permanently deactivated so you can safely and securely dispose of it. Once a device is in Recycle Mode, it cannot be reactivated.

    Wait. What the fuck? This is so fucked. I’m all for reducing, reusing and recycling. But, I prefer to do the reducing and reusing first.

    Forcing customers to brick their devices, to force them to recycle is not ideal. In fact, forcing consumers to brick their devices should be illegal. It turns out that recycling isn’t even the most effective way to recover materials. Simply put, shipping our recyclables to China (or elsewhere) for processing isn’t working. As a result, many cities are moving away from recycle programs. In fact, many are forced to recover energy from plastics and trash by burning it in furnaces, and in many cases this is the most green scenario. So, why on Earth is Sonos doing this? To edge up profits in this fierce smart-speaker market of course.

  • Behind-the-scene Production Details in Knives Out

    • I came across these wonderful, wonderful little production details for the 2019 Rian Johnson film, Knives Out. Thanks to the incredible tweets from Steve Yedlin (@steveyedlin), a seasoned cinematographer — he shared some sweet behind-the-scenes production details about the movie:

    That’s some very serious attention to details. These little details really add a phenomenal level of depth and substance to the interview scenes.

    The contribution of the Key Grip is absolutely paramount to achieving successful photography in films. For those who are unaware, the Key Grip often reports directly to the Director of Photography. Often they determine, plan and produce the necessary tools or equipment that production assistants and the rest of the crew may need for shoots.

    In case you are interested, I would suggest perusing Steve’s excellent collection/list of #NerdyFilmTechStuff on his website. The hashtag is equally valuable to poke around on Twitter, but his website has some of the best all in one place.

    Here’s the images of the custom lighting diffuser rigs from Steve’s tweets for posterity:

  • The Silver Lining of Climate Change

    • It’s pretty rare to come across shards of optimism nowadays. The internet has made me (and probably you too) quite the skeptic. However, this quick-cut of audio lifted from the After On podcast, features an interesting take on climate change from Stewart Brand, Editor of the Whole Earth Catalog.

    The theory goes: if it wasn’t for climate change, we, as in the entire planet, would not be discovering our shared humanity and climate change might be the catharsis for planetary unity. I’m not convinced that level of realization will happen over night, but I am hopeful that it could happen in our lifetime. We’ll see…

  • Peeling Off 20 Years Worth of Subway Ads

    • Twitter surfaces some of the strangest things. Behold, the original movie poster for Road Trip emerging like Han Solo from carbonite. 20 years of subway ads, rail dust and grime.

  • Mount Fuji Cutting Through the Clouds

    • Just unbelievably beautiful.

  • On Dark DIY Videos

    • Have you seen this video? Or, perhaps something, like this before?

    Yeah, same. Feel kinda weird, huh? Does it feel familiar? That’s Dark DIY for ya. It’s exploiting a familiar and common video format. Max Read for New York Magazine explains:

    How does that video make you feel? It makes me feel … baffled? Unsettled? Unsure? Why cut your hair like that? Who needs a homemade makeup brush? What am I watching?

    What you are watching is YouTube. The video platform is an enormous, and enormously strange place, but we are familiar in the broad sense with how it works. The audience uses it as a portal for entertainment and information; and YouTube uses its ad partnerships program to incentivize the production of videos to satisfy its understanding of audience needs. Producers thus line up to meet the audience’s desires — as indicated, of course, by search-engine inputs and related-video click-throughs.

    DIY is a lucrative category of video; “lifehack” a popular search keyword; and so people around the world hustle to create videos that satisfy the needs expressed by viewers, as interpreted by YouTube’s system of recommendation and sorting. Of course, you can’t explain “desire” to a sorting system — you can only click things until it makes guesses reasonably close to what you want. You want DIY? Here are 60,000 videos that may or may not be what you’re looking for. The video creators compete with one another: This thumbnail is brighter and shows more skin, so more people click. Is that what they want? That headline is more urgent and aggressive, so more people click. Is that what they want?

    Are you surprised? YouTube’s algorithmic feed is a catalyst for the strange, the outlier, the bizarre and worst of all, it surfaces the worst. Dark DIY shares a common thread with YouTube Kids — they’re chasing after the same thing: a video that is bizarre enough, a thumbnail bright enough, a title just mouthwateringly interesting. It’s all a rouse to intrigue you just enough to let it autoplay after your last video. YouTube’s biggest invention, biggest growth machine: the autoplay, breeds the worst content ever produced. All in pursuit of that sweet sweet play count.

  • General Magic – Trailer

    • General Magic was probably the single-most important project of the 20th century. Originally spun out of an internal Apple project. The at-the-time CEO, John Sculley later joined the board of General Magic and despite Apple’s minority stake in General Magic, attempted to cannibalize their research and neuter their products:

    Even though the company folded shortly after the dot-com bust in 2004, the spoils of their research and development gave us Palm’s Pilot, RIM’s BlackBerry, Apple’s iPhone, and countless other products that we now collectively call: the smartphones. Veterans of General Magic are, to say the least, numerous:

    But wait, there’s more:

  • Heuristics to Generate Startup Ideas

    • Initially came across this fun list via Twitter:

    His actual post, is embedded in his Tweet, but you can visit the list here. But in particular I enjoyed #8:

    Turn open source projects in to SAAS businesses — Find open source projects that are very popular and turn these in to out of the box services for enterprises, e.g. PagerDuty is like Nagios.

    Great entrepreneurial advice, and easily serves as a fun jumping-off point for any viable hack-a-thon. Any hacker or eager founder can find some amazing open-source projects and inspiration on Github.

    My personal favorite startup adage, for any would-be-founder is, be the arms dealer.

  • An Improved and Definitive Texas City Emoji Guide

    • Growing up in Fort Worth, having lived in Denton, Dallas and Arlington, having visited (frequently all the cities within DFW and) Houston, Galveston, Corpus Christie, Padre Island, Brownsville, Austin, Bee Cave, Grandbury, Stephenville, Plano, Amarillo, Wichita Falls, San Marcos, Tyler, Weatherford, Longview, Waco and (of course) Texarkansas — each city sets itself apart from the rest. The sum of its parts, is what makes Texas such a great state.

    I’ve never known another state to have such a vast, rivalrous, chivalrous, friendly but at times fiendish mythology of the neighboring cities within itself. Perhaps, I’ve never really known another state like Texas. Or maybe, I’ve never really looked hard enough, because — well… I’m from Texas.

    Anyways, without further ado, enjoy the emoji Texan-take tweets from Bobby Blanchard (@bobbycblanchard) of The Texas Tribune:

    God I love it, all of it. My only critique is that Denton’s emoji should be a Saxophone although an Eagle is fitting 🙂

  • 2017

  • Twitter and The Transparency Center

    • Marty Swant of Adweek:

    In the next few weeks, the company will begin showing its users more information about who is advertising on Twitter and what those ads entail. The additional disclosures will include all ads running on Twitter, how long they’ve been running, the creative for a campaign and information about why a user is targeted with an ad.

    The tool will be called the Transparency Center. According to the report, certain information will be made public such as: the organizations that buy political ads, the target demographical data, ad spending for a candidate per advertiser and more.

    This tool, has likely been under construction for a while now but the announcement timing was pretty coincidental. The Honest Ads Act was introduced to The House only 6 days ago.

    Personally I’m glad to see Twitter doing this. Glad to see it setting an example for others to follow. While, Facebook on the other hand has been pretty lukewarm to the problem (and solution).

  • 2016

  • A Familiar Face Returns to Twitter

    • When Standard Oil began vertically and horizontally integrating sections of industry into its’ grasp, people got pretty upset. Ultimately, it led to The Department of Justice suing the company in 1911 under federal law and allegations of anti-trust. The Rockefeller’s vision for the planet, was bleak and self-serving. Apparently, vertically and horizontally integrating businesses can get you into a big heap of trouble. Is there an exception? What about Google and Apple’s integrations into production and telecoms?

    If Twitter integrates micro-payments via a new Square API, is that integration or is it really just a small innovation? Is it incestuous if Dorsey decides the next big feature at Twitter is one that hinges on his other company, Square? Sending payments with a Tweet doesn’t sound all that bad. Maybe this is less about self-serving his two companies, and more about making things work together. I think we’ve graduated into a new era. Silicon Valley moves fast—like really fast. In comparison to the early 1900’s, it’s unbelievably fast. Business decisions happen at light speed now. Mistakes can be mended and resolved with an email. Customer services and user documentation are moving to public sectors like Twitter and Facebook. Look at how Elon Musk, manages Tesla and SpaceX while simultaneously serving on the board at SolarCity; he’s also the a former co-founder of PayPal.

    All of his companies have come into founding in the last 15 years, with his leadership help and direction at some point. Absolutely incredible, and insanely fast. Elon wants a more effective, smarter planet. Howard Schultz transformed Starbucks when he returned in 2008. He slashed budgets, and projects and closed a ton of stores. Moved cash to projects that mattered, and reinvigorated culture, invested in coffee plantations, and breathed new life into new products and fresher foods. Schultz has a vision of variety, culture and coffee for a greater, smarter world. I think Dorsey is a fine leader at Square, and it will be good to see him back at the helm at Twitter. He said he is focusing on three things at Twitter: simplifying the product, discipline, and communicating value to the current user base. If Musk can tango with two companies, and Schultz fixed Starbucks—I have an inclination Dorsey can transform Twitter into what it needs.