(In the time it took me to write this, wander off, then check Twitter, the subject of this piece is no longer working at Apple. I don’t think it changes the conclusion, though.)

In a small corner of Twitter, today’s main character was Antonio García Martínez. García Martínez, if you’ve never encountered him, is the kind of glib opportunist who migrated over to tech from finance a decade ago, built a cynical product the world absolutely did not need, and helped make it worse by scaling it to billions. He wrote about all of this in a memoir of sorts called Chaos Monkeys, which apparently chronicles a baroque kind of experience at the dawn of this new gilded age.

The reason García Martínez is “it” is because word started going round that he’d been hired by Apple to help them build their fledgling ad business. Outrage started to simmer on Twitter until it ended, naturally, with a petition from Apple employees asking their senior leadership why they’ve hired a misogynist and racist.

We are deeply concerned about the recent hiring of Antonio García Martínez. His misogynistic statements in his autobiography — such as “Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit” (further quoted below this letter) — directly oppose Apple’s commitment to Inclusion & Diversity. We are profoundly distraught by what this hire means for Apple’s commitment to its inclusion goals, as well as its real and immediate impact on those working near Mr. García Martínez. It calls into question parts of our system of inclusion at Apple, including hiring panels, background checks, and our process to ensure our existing culture of inclusion is strong enough to withstand individuals who don’t share our inclusive values.

The letter contains a dozen or so quotes like this, mostly from the aforementioned memoir, asking (quite naturally) how someone who’d published this could come to work at a place with a very public dedication to diversity and inclusivity. Even taking into account García Martínez’s attempts at explaining away this crass take, it’s hard to square this rather boorish view of the world with a commitment to equality. Personally, I think it’s fine for churls like García Martínez to out themselves by publishing this dreck, but if I were an employee at Apple, I don’t think I’d want to work with them.

Generally, I’m someone who believes in redemption and in giving people the opportunity to prove that they are better than their worst day, or a resurfaced screenshot, if they are committed to changing and improving themselves. That’s true of García Martínez or James Damore or really anyone. I think culturally we struggle with a framework for true redemption, and polarization and online pile-ons have only made that worse. I’m also someone who believes that we should believe people when they show us who they are and García Martínez appears to be completely unrepentant about, well, any of this.

All of which obscures an altogether different issue: why on earth is Apple hiring the type of person who helped build the core of Facebook’s business, the business they’ve spent the past year very publicly decrying? It’s not as if García Martínez is a random UX designer who’d been whittling pixels at Instagram, he literally helped build Facebook’s retargeting platform.

If I’m an Apple employee, I might also want to know: what are we building that led us to hire this guy in the first place? Haven’t we spent years making a very public stand for consumer protection, privacy, and treating our users with respect? Why are we suddenly finding ourselves even recruiting someone who helped build the very business we hold ourselves in direct opposition to?

Can Apple now seriously argue that all the recent privacy moves aren’t a cynical plan to simply corner the mobile advertising market? How long before Mark Zuckerberg starts to ask “if Apple is so committed to user privacy, why are they hiring the people who built Facebook’s ad business”?

García Martínez likes to claim he writes in the mold of a Hunter S. Thompson, which is exactly the kind of excuse disingenuous vulgarians trot out when their odious behavior catches up with them. At my most generous, I might be willing to grant that García Martínez’s unapologetic pulp is a black light on the crime scene of Silicon Valley. Maybe he’s trying to pull off some Andy Kaufman-like reveal, showing the hypocrisy at the heart of all this money.

Apple should take their employees’ concerns seriously, and they should also ask what led them here to begin with.

Shocking no one, the answer is: Las Vegas. And, of course, Facebook.

Eater tracked down some of the white women losing their minds pouring nacho cheese over their kitchen island or filling pre-made pie crusts with Spaghetti-O’s. What connects them is a Vegas magician named Rick Lax. And the reason they keep showing up in your feed is an algorithm left unattended:

It is, at this point, statistically impossible to not half-recognize magician Rick Lax. He is essentially the face of Facebook’s Watch program. Launched in the U.S. in 2017, Watch was meant to be Facebook’s Netflix or YouTube competitor. It hired the former news anchor Campbell Brown as head of news partnerships and convinced outlets like Vox, BuzzFeed, and Fox News to create Facebook-exclusive shows. Watch shows still live on a separate tab called Watch, but in the years since, it has sort of blended back in with the rest of the video content on the app. The only Watch show to really break out has been Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk. But Lax has continued to dominate the Newsfeed, even if you didn’t notice.

It’s obviously far from the worst of Facebook’s many, many, many crimes but it does show how their negligence twists culture and rewards humanity at its most base.

Viewed within the context of Lax’s main Facebook page, these videos sort of make sense. Videos that do well on Facebook tend to have some kind of payoff. Which plays off why we watch cooking videos to begin with. There’s a recipe that’s easy to follow, and you know that at the end you’ll see whatever’s been cooked. Prank videos work the same way. The prank is established, and then you wait to see what happens when it’s finally triggered. Lax and his collaborators have combined a prank video and a cooking video into something that people really can’t look away from, the culinary equivalent of a zit extraction.

It’s worth remembering Facebook’s infamous “pivot to video” was a disastrous move for actual news organizations, but at least there’s a lifetime of food porn by way of Jackass now.

Apple blogger Kirk McElhearn decided to see what would happen if he dropped an Airtag in an envelope and sent it on a 100-mile or so journey across England.

Turns out, it does pretty much what you’d expect, periodically updating its location whenever it was in range of an iPhone with FindMy enabled:

AirTags aren’t designed to track something in movement; this isn’t like a Tom Cruise movie, where spies track a car in a city, seeing exactly where it is in real time. They are meant to be used to find lost keys, luggage, or other objects. But my experiment shows that you can track these devices to a certain extent.

The reason for this is the sheer size of the network of iOS devices that can locate AirTags. Apple says that there are nearly one billion iOS devices around the world that participate in this network, and that ensures that you can locate AirTags in most situations.

I don’t know if any of the truck drivers carrying the mail didn’t have iPhones. Even if they didn’t, it’s possible that if someone in a car driving next to the truck has an iPhone, then it would be spotted. Since AirTags use Bluetooth 5, the range is around 100m, but that depends on such things as interference, walls, and other obstacles, and testing would need to be done to find how efficient they are in motion.

Unfortunately, it didn’t all go according to plan. Airtags are supposed to have a privacy feature built-in that alerts anyone with an iPhone in range that there is an Airtag far from home, in order to prevent them from being used as surreptitious tracking devices. Apparently, the notification never came, no jailbreaking required.

The network of iPhones effect has a bit of a Dark Knight kind of utility/creepiness. I like the idea of Airtags a lot and, once I’m leaving the house more than once a week and traveling again, can see myself using them. That the built-in privacy protection seemed to fail here doesn’t bode well when millions of these are out in the wild.

Earlier today, my dad texted to ask if I’d filled up my car recently. As luck would have it, I filled up yesterday on the way home from a Mother’s Day hike.

Lines were forming at gas stations this afternoon as the Colonial Pipeline, which carries millions of refined fuel between the Gulf Coast and northeastern United States, was shut down due to a cyberattack.

DarkSide, the group that cybersecurity pros believe is behind the ransomware attack, is apparently a pretty sophisticated group:

DarkSide is one of a number of increasingly professionalized groups of digital extortionists, with a mailing list, a press center, a victim hotline and even a supposed code of conduct intended to spin the group as reliable, if ruthless, business partners.

Experts like Div said DarkSide was likely composed of ransomware veterans and that it came out of nowhere in the middle of last year and immediately unleashed a digital crimewave.

A code of conduct for your cybercrimes gang.

Given how much of our infrastructure is susceptible to these kinds of attacks, and how easy it is to completely disrupt billion-dollar businesses with fairly straightforward tools, this is clearly going to become the kind of story that ends up being mundane.

Securing these systems is obviously important and could easily be the work of a government funded, civilian cyber-corps (or something less awfully named). But more importantly, we need to do the work of decoupling the hyperconnected systems we built over the past century. Power grids that are local and regionalized and run on a combination of solar, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear energy could be built today and would prove much more resilient than a single pipeline that powers half of the country.

In 2017, a twenty-year-old man was driving recklessly at speeds in excess of 120 miles per hour when he crashed his car, killing himself and his two teenage passengers. Two of the victim’s parents claimed Snapchat’s speed filter, which displays a speedometer overlaid on a video, encouraged this kind of behavior and the company should be held liable. The case was initially dismissed, saying essentially that the company can’t be held liable for user generated content, roughly in line with the kinds of protections social media companies have held under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has now overruled that first decision, saying Section 230 doesn’t apply in this case because the flaw isn’t in the content that was uploaded to the social network but the design of the app itself. Adi Robertson, reporting for The Verge:

The parents claimed many teenagers believed — and that Snap knew they believed — they’d get a secret achievement for hitting speeds of 100 miles per hour. Snap countered that no such achievement existed and that it was just providing a tool for users to post their own content, an action mostly shielded under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The Ninth Circuit didn’t rule on whether Snap was liable. But it concluded that it wasn’t protected here by Section 230, which prevents sites and apps from being sued over what users post. Instead, it said the lawsuit “presents a clear example of a claim that simply does not rest on third-party content.” The company “indisputably designed” the reward system and speed filter, which allegedly created a defective product. “In short, Snap, Inc. was sued for the predictable consequences of designing Snapchat in such a way that it allegedly encouraged dangerous behavior.”

The distinction here is subtle but important and I think it’s a good sign that the government is finally starting to add some nuance and a more sophisticated understanding of how technology is actually used and shapes our everyday lives. This case in particular is a good distinction between the kind of protection Section 230 is meant to provide and the responsibility we should expect from tech companies. Snap’s absurd defense that it was providing a speedometer tool is laughable to anyone who considers how Snapchat is actually used.

Social media, as we broadly understand it, has been with us for a decade-and-a-half now and it’s clear we’re living with a tyranny of what Gianpiero Petriglieri calls the “unprepared overachiever”.

Unlike the insecure overachievers that corporations favor, unprepared overachievers have no patience to ponder the implications of their work. Whereas the former long for approval and try to be perfect, the latter favor data and do not hesitate to try things out. They move fast and break things, and if what they broke turns out to be of value, they apologize and pledge to do better next time. Failure, after all, is learning in disguise. Isn’t it?

These unprepared overachievers, which is really just another way of saying high-functioning sociopaths, include not just executives like Snap’s Evan Spiegel, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, or Twitter’s Jack Dorsey but VCs like Paul Graham, Marc Andreessen, and Peter Thiel, who fuel this limitless ambition, damning all consequences.

For years, preternaturally young tech moguls, brimming with an unchecked faith in their own naive view of the world, built unimaginable fortunes and seemingly unassailable influence with basically zero pushback from their peers, government, media, or users. That tide may finally be slowly turning.

News from the pasta world continues to delight and intrigue, this time with a bit less drama.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have created a “dynamic noodle” that actually changes shape, from flat to three-dimensional, as it cooks.

Each new pasta design starts out flat and unassuming, but bounces and swells into three dimensions when boiled. In a paper published Wednesday in Science Advances, the researchers say the flat-to-plump pasta is not only fun to make, but uses less packaging, has a smaller carbon footprint and cooks faster than traditional dried pasta.

Rather than extrude the pasta through a die, it’s first flattened out and then stamped with strategic patterns that cause the shape to transform as it cooks. There’s some theorizing about how the more efficient pasta could be used in emergency situations or in the space station, but really it’s just cool to make flat things not flat.

The nerds at Carnegie Mellon aren’t the only ones having fun with semolina. Dan Pashman, host of the Sporkful podcast spent three years developing a new pasta shape that could be speared with a fork and also effectively hold on to sauce. The result is cascatelli (inspired by the Italian word for waterfall), which America’s Test Kitchen writer Kate Bernot says helped her reconsider her relationship with pasta more generally:

Cascatelli’s true culinary contribution is that it has spurred home cooks — myself included — to think differently, and more deeply, about pasta.

Despite pasta’s ubiquity, most of us don’t think critically about which shapes we like best and why.

“When we talk on The Sporkful about a food in great detail, one of my favorite reactions that I’ll get is people will say, ‘I never knew I had such strong opinions about that,’” Pashman says. “When cascatelli came out, it caused people to interrogate their own opinions and experiences with pasta shapes and to start to realize like, ‘Oh my God, yes, spaghetti does suck.’”

Pashman’s opposition to spaghetti comes from its slipperiness, the difficulty of saucing it well and getting it onto your fork — he thinks most people would agree spaghetti is a suboptimal shape, if only we thought about it.

I’m pretty sure I spied a bite of cascatelli in the first episode Waffles and Mochi, but don’t start planning a cascatelli party just yet: shipping times for the new shape are currently twelve weeks.

Ordinarily, a former president deciding to take up blogging wouldn’t exactly be news, or it might be as an addendum to an announcement of an outreach strategy coinciding with a new foundation or some other meaningful form of post-presidential statesmanship.

Of course, Trump was never much of a statesman and his long-promised media network has now started to materialize in the form of a completely generic web page styled to look like a 2009-era also-ran social network, if it were designed by a fresh-faced Liberty University grad. Ever since Trump was neutered by Facebook, Twitter, et al there’s been an ongoing guess as to what his outlet of choice might look like, whether it would be working himself up into a soaked lather with the My Pillow guy on OANN or joining his fellow racists over at Gab. Paying his failed campaign manager millions of dollars for the equivalent of a Wordpress theme built by fiverr is, like so many things Trump, shocking but not surprising. Hilariously, and also not surprisingly, are the nearly two months of pathetic id-posting already seeded to the site. (One can’t help but wonder if anyone actually told the big guy the site wasn’t yet public when he started proto-tweeting back in March).

Trump’s blog is, one’s gotta admit, a platonic ideal for such a soulless creature, a gaping maw for his unedited bile that ends, naturally, with a call to sign up to once again get scammed, shamelessly.

For a while now, there’s been a meme about the dynamics of the Republican party orienting itself towards “an audience of one” — whether it’s supplicants praising dear leader on Fox News or the state of Arizona’s pathetic recount efforts. The entire goal, it seemed, was to be granted the gift of a single tweet that could change fortunes and make — or destroy — political careers. It’s a testament to many things (a plurality of Americans’ commitment to white supremacy among them), primarily Trump’s limitless ego and constitutional lack of shame.

For wrangling the internet in ways they never could, the media anointed Trump as some kind of savant, but his real power was much more atavistic. Less wunderkind than carnival shrieker, Trump used social networks to create a funhouse mirror that reflected back on himself.

The tech companies that comprise social media, after helping to put him in the White House and spread his dangerous and hateful lies for years, finally took away his ability to manipulate the endless panopticon of obsequious asskissers vying to play to that singular audience; now the reward isn’t a tweet that will be breathlessly reported on but a memo DICTATED BUT NOT READ, texted to the loyal faithful. He’s back in the only way he could be.

The saga of Nuzzel comes to its inevitable conclusion: getting built into Twitter proper. I was genuinely surprised to see media people lamenting this as I thought it had happened years ago (Nuzzel had earlier been acquired by newsfeed app Scroll, which is the company that Twitter is scooping up).

I was an early fan of Nuzzel and, for certain stretches of time, it was the primary way I navigated Twitter. Mostly, it was a personal revolt against Twitter’s algorithmic timeline, something I still lament but have ultimately given in to. For a certain generation of Twitter user who didn’t care about Twitter’s goals of increasing engagement, a combination of using lists of followers plus an app like Nuzzel was a way to keep what was good without fully succumbing to Twitter’s black box.

If you never tried Nuzzel out, the ingenious bit was it generated a feed comprised solely of links from the people you followed. By default, a link had to appear from multiple followees in order to show up in your feed and, unlike the algorithms that drive social media, you could tweak those to your own personal liking.

Media people loved it and Nuzzle was able to build topic-driven reports as well as a newsletter curation product. Obviously, that level of nuance and fiddling makes for much more of a niche product than the sort of general purpose news firehose that Twitter provides, but it’s always been a solid, well-thought out product. I’m glad to hear there are plans to keep the ideas that Nuzzel germinated in place, post-acquisition.

It sounds like Nuzzel will get integrated into Twitter’s plans for subscription newsletters, which seems like an ideal fit. A “Nuzzel signal” built into a newsreader that highlights posts from people you follow or links that have been surfaced by your curated lists would be really useful and a welcome alternative to the opaque algorithmic feed.