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The war in Elon’s head

Everybody’s been talking about Elon’s “go fuck yourself” moment from DealBook, and the expletive is what is making most of the headlines. From a distance it could be easy to see this as just a petulant outburst from someone upset with the financial struggles of his company, but considering what he went on to say — and has said in the past — it becomes clear that this is about something else to him.

Elon: What this advertising boycott is gonna do, it’s gonna kill the company. And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company. And we will document it in great detail.

Andrew: But those advertisers, I imagine, are gonna say, “We didn’t kill the company.”

Elon: Oh yeah? Tell it to Earth.

Andrew: But they’re gonna say, Elon, that you killed the company because you said these things and that they were inappropriate things and that they didn’t feel comfortable on the platform.

Elon: And let’s see how Earth responds to that. We’ll both make our cases and we’ll see what the outcome is.

Andrew: What are the economics of that for you? You have enormous resources, so you can actually keep this company going for a very long time. Would you keep it going for a long time if there were no advertising?

Elon: If the company fails because of an advertiser boycott, it will fail because of an advertiser boycott. And that will be what bankrupted the company, and that’s what everybody on Earth will know. Then it’ll be gone. And it’ll be gone because of an advertiser boycott.

Andrew: But you recognize that some of those people are gonna say that they didn’t feel comfortable on the platform. And I just wonder, and ask you, and think about that for a second–

Elon: Tell it to the judge.

Andrew: But the judge is gonna be–

Elon: The judge is the public.

Something really struck me about the language he was using here. “Blackmail”? “Earth”? “We will document it in great detail”? Blackmail him to do what? What does he imagine this is about?

Of course, one way to read this is that he is shifting blame from himself to advertisers for the potential failure of X, and I’m sure that’s part of it. But he also seems to deeply believe that X is a heroic and final bulwark against creeping Orwellianism from politically correct elites.

To him, the disappearance of Twitter is a threat not just to himself or to the satisfied users of the social network, but an existential threat to “Earth.”

The way this plays out in his mind is that advertisers kill X, and because their abandonment of the platform will have been “documented in great detail,” Earth — Earth itself, not just the users of X — will retaliate. “Free speech” will die, there will be no medium left for expressing yourself without censorship, and the societal cost of this will be so great that these advertisers will themselves face extinction.

This hyperbolic view of things has been on display before, as when advertisers started expressing caution when he first took over in November 2022:

“They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.” Note that he doesn’t believe “free speech” will simply be an unfortunate casualty of the passive cowardice of advertisers fleeing X; he believes that advertisers’ fleeing X is a deliberate attempt to “destroy free speech.” They are invested in the death of X so that they can further their agenda. X is a threat to them, and they are trying to end it.

The “blackmail” he referred to at DealBook is, to his mind, blackmail to join their program of speech suppression. The elites want people to feel afraid to say certain things, and they want X and Elon on their team. By denying them this, he is martyring himself for the preservation of intellectual freedom for our entire species.

He has a messiah complex, and curiously it extends beyond his electric cars and plans to colonize Mars. Even a dumb social network is about his role in the fate of the planet.

I’m also amused by — and I haven’t seen any mention of this — the fact that Elon clearly seems to expect some kind of laughter/applause after his “go fuck yourself” line. He sees himself as a populist, and has gotten so used to being constantly fellated by his X subscribers that it shocks and confuses him when he isn’t showered with adulation for his irreverent “antics.”

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The Monetized Web

Nobody loves a paywall, but everybody loves Substack

Increasingly, it feels like paid memberships for web content are not only a viable alternative to surveillance-driven ad revenue, but one that readers are eager to embrace. The success of Substack demonstrates this. This success is often framed as a preference for reading in the inbox rather than on the web, which is some feat considering how much people have come to loathe email in general over the last couple decades.

But I don’t think it’s the inbox per se that people like; it’s that the inbox gives people what the web used to — and no longer does, but could — give them: an ad-free and distraction-free reading experience. Medium was supposed to do this, but has, perhaps predictably, caved and started showing upsell popups and “related content” sidebars all over its article pages to get your money and keep you on the site.

Patreon, like Substack, has seen a lot of success, but for whatever reason isn’t really thought of as a place for longform writing. Its content tends to be audio, video, art, and access to Discord communities.

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Apple’s incomplete pronoun fields

In iOS 17, you are now able to add pronouns to contacts, including your own contact card. This is a good thing, but at least one important pronoun case is missing from the “English” options.

The cases included are:

  1. Subjective (“Yesterday, she went outside.”)
  2. Objective (“I went with her.”)
  3. Possessive pronoun (“The idea was hers.”)

These three cases mirror the common “she/her/hers” structure used to communicate pronouns on social platforms like Twitter and Zoom; as such, they may seem complete, but they aren’t.

The missing case is the possessive adjective: “It was her idea.”

This may seem redundant, because in the declension of feminine pronouns, the possessive adjective is the same as the objective: “her.”

But in masculine pronouns, the possessive adjective is the same as the possessive pronoun: “his” (as in, “It was his idea”).

CaseFeminineMasculine
SubjectiveSheHe
ObjectiveHerHim
Possessive pronounHersHis
Possessive adjectiveHerHis

This isn’t a problem when interacting with people — we know how to decline the common feminine and masculine pronouns, so we know which form to use for the possessive adjective.

But because the iOS 17 UI doesn’t have a field for the possessive adjective, the OS and apps that have access to these fields — which have to behave programmatically — can’t know what to use for that case.

If I’m writing an app and I want the UI to say, “Would you like to call her?” in reference to some contact of yours, I can use the objective pronoun field. But if I want the UI to say “Her birthday is coming up” (the possessive adjective), I don’t have the necessary information.

I can try to guess, based on what I know about the declension of these common pronouns. But what about uncommon ones, like Ze or Xe? Anything I want to use will have to be hard-coded.

This is not even to mention the reflexive case — “She was proud of herself” — which is entirely absent.

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MDN’s rogue definitions of <b> and <i>

From 1993 through roughly 2008, the <b> and <i> tags in HTML meant “bold” and “italic,” respectively. Using those tags will still, in 2023, cause most (all?) browsers to render text with either a bold font weight or an italic font style, but the tags no longer “mean” that. It’s now more correct to consider it a coincidence that browsers represent <b> as Bold and <i> as Italic; they may just as well be <y> and <r>.

The emphasis on both (a) semantic HTML and (b) backwards compatibility means that, as stated by the W3C themselves:

The b and i elements are widely used — it is better to give them good default rendering for various media including aural than to try to ban them.

So: What to do with those letters? <b> can’t mean “bold,” and <i> can’t mean “italic.” What do they mean?

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How to get Jetpack’s “Writing Prompts” in WordPress

The WordPress Jetpack plugin recently (and experimentally) added “Writing Prompts” like those seen on WordPress.com-hosted sites since…I wanna say 2020?

I’ve been thinking about getting more into “Personal Blogging” elsewhere, and I figured these would be useful in getting words out.

In order to get these prompts on a self-hosted WordPress site, you need to do three things:

  1. Upgrade to JetPack 11.7 or higher
  2. Add the following line of code to your wp-config.php file:
    define( 'JETPACK_EXPERIMENTAL_BLOCKS', true );
  3. Go to “Settings > Writing” in WordPress admin, and check the box labeled “Show a writing prompt when starting a new post.”

I don’t know when this is supposed to become available without Step (2), but at that point it might be a good idea to turn off Experimental Blocks by removing that line.

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“The Moon” Is Wrong

Three years ago, in December 2019, a tweet went viral posting a link to a YouTube video in which all the lyrics to Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” had been changed to “The moon is right.”

Two days later, another, far more viral tweet joked that the lyrics can be read as the interruption of an act of witchcraft. (This joke has been cribbed in countless subsequent social media posts.)

I was immediately skeptical at the hearing of the lyric as “moon” rather than “mood,” but it was helpfully pointed out to me that the official @PaulMcCartney Twitter account had indeed posted the lyrics as “moon.” (Original tweet link, Wayback archive)

Last year, in December 2021, @PaulMcCartney again tweeted the opening lyrics (backup link), but this time with “mood” rather than “moon.”

I began to hunt more seriously for answers.

That same winter I bought both physical and digital copies of the expanded edition of McCartney II. This album does include the song, but turns out not to have the song’s lyrics in its liner notes.

Unhelpfully, the song was originally released as a 45RPM single, with no printed lyrics.

I discovered that the official Paul McCartney YouTube channel had posted the music video in 2019, and its captions read “The mood is right.”

Liveright published “Paul McCartney: The Lyrics,” a massive two-volume box set of printed lyrics for “154 of his most meaningful songs.” Evidently “Wonderful Christmastime” is not meaningful, as it is not included in this set.

Nevertheless, due to its making much more sense, I had personally concluded that it is, in fact, “mood” (though I never seriously doubted it).

Then, earlier this week, the author of the witchcraft tweet followed up with a notice that @PaulMcCartney has since deleted its 2019 “moon” tweet, and that McCartney himself has addressed the controversy in a recent interview:

No, it’s ‘the mood’. And you know what, I’m thinking about Liverpool Christmas parties, that’s really all I’m doing with that song. “The mood is right, let’s raise a glass, the spirit’s up” – you know, all the stuff you do at Christmas.

Thanks, Paul.

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Generating editor snippets from SassDoc

I’ve always loved SassDoc, and I’ve always loved editor snippets, but as a Vim and Neosnippets user, (a) other people’s (VSCode) snippets weren’t useful to me, and (b) my (Neosnippet) snippets weren’t useful to anybody else.

At some point it would be great to build a tool that can convert snippets of one format to any other format (IntelliJ? Atom?), but in the meantime I thought, “Where do we get snippets from to begin with?” Authoring them in the first place is a pain.

So after encountering a massive (massive) Sass library last week, one that was thoroughly marked up with comprehensive SassDoc comments, I realized the machine-readability of SassDoc makes it perfect for generating Sass snippets from.

So I made sassdoc-to-snippets, a command-line (or Gulp-compatible) tool for taking a directory or file of SassDoc-commented Sass and turning it into snippets files, for either VSCode or Neosnippet (and with other syntaces easily added).

Please try it out! Test it, bang on it, kick it, see what breaks it or how it could be improved and please let me know in a PR or Issue on GitHub.

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Third-party gyroscopic head tracking is not “Spatial Audio”: the Anker soundcore Liberty 4

From a credulous 9to5Mac review of some new Anker earbuds:

Arriving with active noise cancellation, Anker also backs its Liberty 4 with Spatial Audio support, thanks to the internal gyroscope that helps immerse you in the sound.

From the description on the Amazon product page, titled “soundcore by Anker Liberty 4, Noise Cancelling Earbuds, True Wireless Earbuds with ACAA 3.0, Dual Dynamic Drivers for Hi-Res Premium Sound, Spatial Audio with Dual Modes, All-New Heart Rate Sensor”:

360° Immersive Spatial Audio: As you listen to music and watch movies, the built-in gyroscope and spatial audio algorithm track your head movements to always keep you at the heart of the sound for a completely immersive experience.

From the FAQ on Anker’s product website:

How do I enable Spatial Audio?

  1. Wear the earbuds.
  2. Enter the soundcore app and connect Liberty 4.
  3. Select Spatial Audio. 
  4. Spatial Audio cannot be turned on while sound effects are turned on. 
  5. Select Movie or Music mode to adjust the sense of distance while listening to different types of audio content.

Spatial Audio — the Apple feature — is an OS-level capability for taking true many-channel audio and “shaping” it to mimic the effect that the contours of your ears have on physical sound waves when they reach your head. Thus a sound in a movie that would be directed to the rear right speaker in a theater or surround sound system will sound like it is coming from behind and to the right of you when you are wearing compatible headphone hardware.

In other words, if you wear the Anker soundcore Liberty 4 earbuds, connect them to your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple TV, and watch a movie that contains Dolby Atmos audio — you will not be hearing that movie in Spatial Audio. You will be hearing it in stereo, with the Liberty earbuds (on platforms where the app is available) shaping the waveforms so that they sound like they are originating from a space in front of you rather than the center of your head. No sounds will appear to come from behind you with this technology, as they can with true Spatial Audio.

Dynamic Head Tracking — the Apple feature — is a joining of hardware and software, whereby the source of your audio (your iPhone or iPad) is “aware” of its spatial relation to your headphones. Thus if you turn your head, the audio will continue to sound as though it’s coming from the device, rather than in the direction you’re facing; similarly, if you move the device around your head, the perceived locus of the audio will follow the device.

If you wear the Anker soundcore Liberty 4 earbuds and listen to music on your iPhone or iPad, even with the soundcore app, the experience is less clear to me. I believe that the app may ask permission to read your device’s motion sensors, giving it enough data to cause the audio to always follow the device, but I can’t be sure. In any case, this will not be the system-level Dynamic Head Tracking that is only possible with iOS 15+ and compatible Apple headphones.

It bears repeating that Spatial Audio and Dynamic Head Tracking are two separate things, but now it seems necessary to add that there is no Spatial Audio without Apple hardware, period.

There’s no technical reason that Apple couldn’t make this kind of third-party Spatial Audio compatibility possible, as far as I can tell, but as of yet, they haven’t done so.

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