Review: Afterglow

Every once in awhile something comes along that is completely unnecessary, accomplishes nothing, but is too delightful to not check out. Since the earliest builds of Mac OS X, modern macOS has featured built-in screen savers and there are plenty of excellent ones (I prefer Flurry myself.) In the days of classic Mac OS, there wasn’t a built-in option and After Dark by Berkeley Systems was a popular choice with numerous sequels, spin-offs, and reboots. Jeff Halter found a way to bridge the gap with Afterglow, a free app and screen saver that lets you run old After Dark modules on modern Macs…

Snippet: Walmart, Sam’s Club to Accept Contactless Payments ☇

Walmart PR:

We want customers and members to have choice in how they pay, so they can check out in the way that works best for them. Now, beginning Aug. 24, we will be adding Tap to Pay to our payment options at select Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations, with plans to roll it out to all U.S. stores and clubs by the end of 2026 and to fuel stations by mid-2027.

Tap to Pay gives customers and members another familiar and convenient way to pay at checkout using contactless payment methods. Whether picking up groceries, gifts or everyday essentials, they can check out using eligible contactless card, phone, or smartwatch. Customers and members can also add their eligible Walmart, Sam’s Club and OnePay cards to their digital wallets, giving them another convenient way to use their cards.

Better late than never?

Snippet: MacStories is Back on X?! ☇

John Voorhees for MacStories on December 16, 2022:

We’re not closing down our Twitter accounts (yet), but as you may have noticed, they haven’t been active lately and won’t be going forward. That’s because we’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with the direction the company is heading. If you’ve been keeping up with the news, you know what I mean. If you haven’t, I highly recommend Casey Newton’s recent piece on Platformer. Casey’s perspective and reasons for winding down his personal and business presence on Twitter are very close to our own.

Federico Viticci on X earlier this week:

Hi! It’s been a while.

Over the last two years, I’ve fundamentally changed as a creator. I’m still a writer and podcaster, but I guess I’m also a new kind of “builder”. Today, I need to find new readers, listeners, and developers, wherever they may be…

I know there are times where I probably end up playing the role of curmudgeon—I try to have principles and while nothing is perfectly ethical, there are plenty of instances where things cross a certain threshold for me. I won’t go near Meta products, but I also don’t want to be that person who scolds family/friends about it all the time. I got off of Twitter X when the direction it was going was clear and stand by that.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, there was an exodus because many people started to realize that maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t a visionary genius and a nerd’s nerd. Musk seemed to relish the cruelty of the initial layoffs. The tone shifted when he unbanned problematic accounts. Users stuck around because it was still a place where something familiar existed, be it friends, celebrities, journalists, sports, and so on. Plenty of people use X every day for small communities of things they love and don’t think twice about who owns and controls the venue. Can one supply content and give attention to a place, yet still ignore the misogyny, racism, fascism, transphobia, and any other combination of ‑isms or ‑phobias? In at least a small way, participating is still co-signing that behavior, as attention makes the service money. Paying for X Premium makes it worse.

MacStories left the site before advertisers got sued, before whatever Musk’s involvement was in the 2024 election, before the DOGE circus, before the xAI data center saga in Memphis, and before Grok undressed people. With the misadventures of the man behind it during the last four years, it doesn’t seem like the direction of X has gone in a more comfortable direction.

Everyone talks about hating on the various Musk-associated properties, but too many times I’ve heard someone make an exception somewhere. There’s no other EV quite like a Tesla! Starlink is the only viable ISP option in rural areas! AI is the future and as such, we need to be familiar with Grok! We can’t leave X because people won’t be able to find us! I get it, we all have lines in the sand and if you cut out everything that is slimy in some way, you might as well go live in a cabin in the woods. I get that’s not feasible for most, especially with so many industries consolidating down to two or three major players. Perhaps we should reject the worst offenders or at the very least work on an exit strategy? You can’t get rid of everything, but how about less? Drop some completely and reduce others.

I let this post sit for the past couple of days, mulling over if I should hit publish. I didn’t want it to turn into personal attacks or cheap shots. However, the initial situation didn’t sit well with me and it seems like I wasn’t the only one. I respect the work that the MacStories crew has done over the years and want to believe they’re decent people just trying to keep doing what they love, but made some questionable judgment calls. Still, it’s disappointing to see them proclaim that they’re leaving a toxic platform and then quietly come back when the platform really hasn’t gotten any less toxic.

Update: On Friday, August 21, Viticci posted “An Explanation” separate from MacStories. For me, it’s not just that they went back to X, but how everything transpired and the cowardice that the explanation can’t even be found on the site. It feels like an attempt to mollify critics, yet I’m not quite sure one can really separate X from Musk.

Snippet: We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility ☇

Emmanuel Maiberg for 404 Media:

A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.

That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands. […]

We first learned that AI companies wanted to scan millions of books for training data because of a lawsuit from book authors against Anthropic, which revealed Anthropic’s “Project Panama.” The goal of the project was to acquire books from commercial bookselling marketplaces, cut the spines off the books, and scan them. It’s possible to scan books without destroying them, but cutting the spine makes it cheaper and faster. Additionally, the judge in the lawsuit ruled it was fair use and not a copyright violation for Anthropic to scan a book for training data in part because it destroyed the original, printed copy. Essentially, it’s the customer’s right to take physical media and store it digitally, and destroying the original copy means that copy isn’t duplicated and resold, and isn’t cutting into the publisher’s business. 

There are plenty of books that are considered rare, but are unremarkable and monetarily not worth much. Few are probably interested in having a copy of The Big Mac Book from 1989 (I pick on it because it’s sitting on my shelf), but destroying books for the sake of helping your plagiarism machine just feels wrong. It’s taking books out of circulation that someone somewhere would appreciate and for what? Even if you take feelings out of the equation, those are their books that they rightfully purchased, so they can do whatever with them. However, the training and profiting off the training adds an icky layer. They could scan the books and preserve them, too, but that costs more. Nonetheless, this is yet another reason the world of AI is built on a lack of care.

Snippet: Apple’s Camera-Equipped AirPods Confirmed: See Them in Action ☇

Juli Clover for MacRumors:

Apple is working on camera-equipped AirPods that appear to be nearly ready to launch, based on a video MacRumors found in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate.

In a short demo, a man holds a book up so the camera in the AirPods can see the title. “With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later,” says the voiceover text.

Glancing at reactions, it seems people are either really into the idea of these or have significant concerns. We don’t know if these can take pictures or video beyond Visual Intelligence. Cameras in this form factor make me uncomfortable for a few reasons—even if Apple finds ways to make these less creepy from a technical standpoint, that’s not to stop copycats that just create wearable cameras that sit on your ears.

There are a lot of places you cannot have a camera out, but headphones are fine. I’d argue that most people at a gym wouldn’t exactly want someone filming them, especially without their consent. A phone is quite obvious, devices like this are not. In that case, just like the people who call Facebook’s Meta’s Ray Ban smart glasses “pervert glasses”, are AirPods going to lose their appeal? These are similar enough to current AirPods that now you’ll have to look closely to determine which model someone is wearing. I think many will opt for something else to signal “not a creep!”

In addition to this, it just seems like we’re getting more and more desensitized to the idea of cameras everywhere. Security and traffic cameras have existed for a long time, so there isn’t always the expectation of privacy in public. This brings it into other places and is way more subtle than someone trying to conceal a phone or even a GoPro.