FeedCity

My thanks to Clerk for sponsoring last week at DF. Integrate authentication and user management services with applications made for the Apple ecosystem with Clerk’s iOS SDK. Built with Swift, Clerk’s SDK adheres to modern standards, delivering the idiomatic and consistent developer experience you expect from Clerk.

Clerk’s iOS SDK makes use of the latest in Swift networking, allowing your code to be as readable and expressive as possible. Authenticate with your favorite social providers in just a few lines of code. Let the iOS SDK take care of managing your users’ authentication state so you can get back to building your app.

If you’re a developer looking for a modern, full-fledged user management and authentication SDK, check out Clerk.

Link: go.clerk.com/2n40MWr

Alan Siegel at The Ringer:

Ahead of ‘SNL50,’ we asked Amy Poehler, Seth Meyers, Bill Hader, and more to tell us which of their sketches they hold closest to their hearts. [...]

There’s no magic formula, but the most transcendent sketches — the ones we reference and quote, even years later — often share two traits. Just ask Seth Meyers, the show’s head writer and “Weekend Update” anchor for a decade. “A lot of great SNL sketches are both obvious and unexpected,” he says. “You have to combine the two to make it rise above what, you know, could be a very good sketch.”

Fun read with some great video clips. Really looking forward to the SNL50 special tonight.

Link: theringer.com/2025/02/13/tv/best-snl-sketches-cast-member…

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc.’s long-promised overhaul for the Siri digital assistant is facing engineering problems and software bugs, threatening to postpone or limit its release, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Shocker.

Link: bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-14/apple-s-long…

New research published from Apple machine learning researchers Yuhan Hu, Peide Huang, Mouli Sivapurapu, Jian Zhang: Nonverbal behaviors such as posture, gestures, and gaze are essential for conveying internal states, both consciously and unconsciously, in human interacti...

The Evolution of Electronic Music (1929-2019). Interesting that it took so long for electronic music to creep into pop music and now you can barely find any music that doesn’t have electronic music in it.

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Cool thing that I did not notice about The Wild Robot: at first the robot was computer-generated but gets more and more hand-painted throughout the film. “She literally begins to fuse with the island as she adapts and becomes a resident.”

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Sad news, posted to his Mastodon account:

Martin passed away yesterday, peacefully in his sleep. He was a true fighter until the bitter end but he is now pain free and at peace.

He’d been remarkably open about his battle against cancer, including the fact that he knew the end was near.

I linked to his software and writing several times over the years. He was a Mac developer’s Mac developer, with an eye for details, and his own work was infused with fine craftsmanship. His “Xcode 4: The Super Mega Awesome Review” back in 2011 was a genuine work of art and service to the community (linked with brief commentary), and he rightfully skewered Apple’s Catalyst Mac port of the Developer app in 2020 (linked with significant commentary).

Rest in peace, and my best and warmest thoughts to his friends and family.

Link: mastodon.social/@pilky/114008572002612525

New Evidence Suggests Humans Developed Written Language To Avoid Breaking Up In Person. “Early Mesopotamians created the first cuneiform tablets in 3200 BCE because they couldn’t bear the idea of looking their partner in the eye…”

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Joe Rosensteel: Netflix deeply regrets accidentally making Netflix a better product for its customers. It temporarily pushed out a change that let people see Netflix shows in the Apple TV app, a change people have been asking for since the debut of the Apple TV app in 20...

Guy Chazan, Amanda Chu, and Joshua Franklin, reporting for the Financial Times (left-wing anti-capitalist fake-news ideologues): In private conversations, some Wall Street executives go much further. One senior investment banker says the disorder and unpredictability of ...

Many Tricks:

Key Codes displays information about the characters you type, as you type them into the log window. For each key, you’ll see its Unicode value, key code, and any modifiers.

Unless you’re a developer or script/macro tinkerer, you probably don’t need Key Codes. But when you do need it, it’s a godsend. There’s nothing else like it (anymore). Just a perfect little utility that the clever folks at Many Tricks have made available free of charge for a long time. (Available in the Mac App Store, too.)

Link: manytricks.com/keycodes/help/

Hey look at this, a media diet post that’s not months and months since the last one! Phew, it’s a been a long-ass six weeks since the beginning of the year, hasn’t it? Here’s a list of what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing to help get me through t...

Nathan Zed argues that a lack of effort and vulnerability has made art, media, design, music, and architecture boring — that everything has the “soulless, monotonous no-personality vibe”. But artists like Tyler, the Creator; Chappell Roan; Doechii; and Kendrick Lamar are making trying cool again.

It has become uncool to just try. Like, just to put in some effort. Don’t do too much, okay, it’s embarrassing — just be nonchalant, be cool, be effortless. This has made everything boring! Everyone is too scared to try because that would be vulnerable. I feel like only now are we seeing a shift back to people putting in effort and being rewarded for it.

Tags: music · Nathan Zed · video

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Ken Burns’ Criterion Closet Picks include Seven Samurai, a Fellini box set, and Wim Wenders’ Pina.

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Thought-provoking musings on AI from Robin Sloan. “The language model reads Everything, and leaves Everything untouched — yet suddenly this new thing exists, with strange and formidable powers. Is that okay?”

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This is lovely:

man the crazy thing about babies is that like, some people would think that reading a baby a book about farm animals is teaching them about farm animals, but really it’s teaching them about the concept of a book and how there’s new information on each page of a single object, but really, beyond that, it’s teaching them how language works, and beyond that it’s really actually teaching them about human interaction, and really really it’s them learning about existing in a three-dimensional space and how they can navigate that space, but actually, above all it is teaching them that mama loves them.

Tags: books · parenting

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Girls Who Code’s “Five by Five” strategic plan is “reaching 5 million girls, women, and nonbinary individuals by 2030” with their programs designed to educate girls, women, and NB folks for careers in technology.

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I love this week-by-week map of Gina Trapani’s life. “This is a map of my life, where each week I’ve been alive is a little box. Tap a box to see what I was doing where that week.”

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Allegra Goodman writes about the “life-saving power” of listing to audiobooks (Austen, Caro, Dumas, Voltaire) with her son. “We spent hundreds of hours together and had a respite from each other too.” I *love* listening to audiobooks w/ my kids.

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Wes Anderson’s next movie is called The Phoenician Scheme, an “espionage comedy-drama thriller” that will be released in US theaters in May 2025. Stars Benicio del Toro, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, ScarJo, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willen Dafoe, etc.

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