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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • I’ve presented a few WWDC sessions including two video sessions, though nothing as huge as the keynote or platform state of the union. I can answer most questions you have about the process.

    The screens shown in WWDC sessions are usually screen captures from real devices. Development of the slide decks starts with a template deck that has the styles, fonts, and color themes for that year’s sessions. It includes slides that look like the latest devices, with precise rectangles the right size where screen captures will fit. As people develop their sessions they use these slides as placeholders for screenshots, animations and videos.

    During development of the OSes the code branches for what will become the first developer seed. Before WWDC, one of the builds of this branch gets marked as ready for final screenshots/videos. The idea is that the UI is close enough to what will ship in the first developer seed that the OS and sessions will match.

    Once that build is marked, the presenters take their screenshots and those get incorporated into the slides.

    You wrote “It wasn’t just a screen recorder thing”. What makes you say that?

    You asked about specialized software. Apple OS engineers have to use what are called “internal variants” of the OSes during development. These have special controls for all sorts of things. One fun thing to look for in WWDC sessions: the status bar almost always has the same details, with the same time, battery level, Wi-Fi signal strength, etc. These are real screenshots, but the people taking the videos used special overrides in the internal variants to force the status bar to show those values rather than the actual values. That makes things consistent. I think it avoids weird things like viewers being distracted by a demo device with a low battery.







  • What the Time Cube is this nonsense?

    I derive this conclusion from planetary phase shift theory, my systems framework for understanding the life-cycle of human civilisation in terms of energy, information, and organisation.

    Planetary phase shift theory draws on C.S. Holling’s adaptive cycle model, which describes four phases to the life-cycle of any living system: a growth and accumulation phase, a conservation/stability phase, a release (collapse) phase, and a reorganisation (renewal) phase which is the creative incubator for a new life-cycle.


  • The original paper about microplastics in the brain seems to have a serious methodological flaw that undermines the conclusion that our brains are swimming in microplastics.

    “False positives of microplastics are common to almost all methods of detecting them,” Jones says. “This is quite a serious issue in microplastics work.”

    Brain tissue contains a large amount of lipids, some of which have similar mass spectra as the plastic polyethylene, Wagner says. “Most of the presumed plastic they found is polyethylene, which to me really indicates that they didn’t really clean up their samples properly.” Jones says he shares these concerns.

    This is from other microplastics researchers. See this article. So before we panic about this, let’s wait for some independent replication and more agreement in the scientific community.

    Microplastics are a serious concern, and we need to deal with plastic pollution. Let’s just stick to high quality science while we do that.






  • So even with BFU, does the iPhone not connect to the internet? I guess i hadn’t noticed it doesn’t.

    Well, it’s complicated. Most of these topics are. In BFU state, an iPhone (or iPad with cellular) with an active SIM and active data plan will connect to the Internet. It won’t connect to Wi-Fi at all. If you have USB restricted mode disabled and the right accessory connected it will connect to an Ethernet network, but that may fail if the network requires 802.1x and the credential is not available in BFU state. Similarly if USB restricted mode is disabled you can use tethering to a Mac to share its network.

    For location, there’s two mechanisms. One mechanism relies on directly communicating with the device, which only works if the device has network.

    The other mechanism is the “FindMy network” which uses a Bluetooth low energy (BTLE) beacon to let other nearby devices detect it, and they report that to FindMy. It’s a great technology. The way it uses rotating IDs preserves your privacy while still letting you locate your devices. I know that this works when a device is powered off but the battery is not completely dead. I’m not sure if it works in BFU state… my guess it that it does work. But this is not networking. It’s just a tiny Bluetooth signal broadcasting a rotating ID, so it’s one-way communication.

    Other than that, I’m not as sure how things work. I believe Bluetooth is disabled by default in BFU state, but I suspect users can choose to re-enable Bluetooth in BFU state to connect to accessibility accessories. I’m not sure about the new emergency satellite communication.

    But one thing I know for sure is that Apple has world class security engineers, and one area they work hard to secure is devices in BFU state.