Yesterday, the Pew Research Center released a new report on public attitudes toward legal abortion. The Report (full text) is titled Broad Public Support for Legal Abortion Persists 2 Years After Dobbs. The Center's Summary of the Report says in part:

About six-in-ten (63%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. This share has grown 4 percentage points since 2021 – the year prior to the 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe....

A narrow majority of Americans (54%) say the statement “the decision about whether to have an abortion should belong solely to the pregnant woman” describes their views extremely or very well. Another 19% say it describes their views somewhat well, and 26% say it does not describe their views well.

... About a third of Americans (35%) say the statement “human life begins at conception, so an embryo is a person with rights” describes their views extremely or very well, while 45% say it does not describe their views well....

Americans say medication abortion should be legal rather than illegal by a margin of more than two-to-one (54% vs. 20%). A quarter say they are not sure.

A second report concludes:

Seven-in-ten adults say IVF access is a good thing. Just 8% say it is a bad thing, while 22% are unsure.

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced new accessibility features coming later this year, including Eye Tracking, a way for users with physical disabilities to control iPad or iPhone with their eyes. Additionally, Music Haptics will offer a new way for users who are deaf or hard of hearing to experience music using the Taptic Engine in iPhone; Vocal Shortcuts will allow users to perform tasks by making a custom sound; Vehicle Motion Cues can help reduce motion sickness when using iPhone or iPad in a moving vehicle; and more accessibility features will come to visionOS. These features combine the power of Apple hardware and software, harnessing Apple silicon, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to further Apple’s decades-long commitment to designing products for everyone.

The timing of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (tomorrow) has turned this into a nice little tradition: each May, Apple gets to sort of unofficially kick off “WWDC season” with these announcements of upcoming accessibility features.

It has been obvious to anyone paying attention that the reason Dorsey founded and funded Bluesky was with the end goal of enabling Twitter to go [Spider-Man Pointing dot GIF] any time an actual Nazi showed up, because moderation was not their problem, they just outsourced it to a series of nested shell companies (that they fund) who act as reputation laundries and liability crumple zones.

Now he pouts and says the quiet part out loud.

David Gerard:

Dorsey got Bluesky started, originally as the reference implementation for a distributed protocol to serve as a new backend for Twitter. He supplied a pile of cash and hired the original team.

The thing that really upset Dorsey: Bluesky users demanded moderation and Bluesky put it into place. Yeah, that was the whole issue. [...]

Dorsey took care to hire on for the Bluesky staff a collection of LessWrong rationalists, neoreactionaries, VibeCamp anti-wokeist race scientists and crypto developers. And Bluesky still had to asymptotically approach a tolerable degree of moderation and -- eventually, despite the CEO and several devs being followers of the test case offender -- ban the Nazis.

There is not a single mention in that Dorsey interview of what the real-world market of people who want to socially interact might want from a site that exists for social interaction. There are only Dorsey's hypothetical ideas for a perfectly spherical social network in a vacuum. [...]

These guys only care about their assumed right to force people who aren't interested to listen. "Free speech" is when they can say awful stuff and you can't answer back. When Dorsey calls Twitter -- Twitter! -- "freedom technology," that's the freedom he means. They can't live without unwilling ears to bash.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

McSweeney's:

Veruca Salt: Like Captain Ahab, you are defined by an all-absorbing monomaniacal obsession: to find comfortable shoes that aren't hideous.

Nine Inch Nails: You're learning to pretend that gardening is an adequate replacement for the sexual adventures of your youth.

Eve 6: You go to PTA meetings just so you can whisper "critical race theory" into the microphone and then slip out the back door amid the pandemonium.

Bikini Kill: You talk about your produce choices way too much, and now your friends' secret nickname for you is "manic organic dream girl."

Garbage: You tell yourself you're microdosing shrooms for creativity and productivity benefits, but in reality it's the only way you can deal with the other moms at the playground.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

Now that Android – since version 13 – ships with the Android Virtualisation Framework, Google can start doing interesting things with it. It turns out the first interesting thing Google wants do with it is run Chrome OS inside of it.

Even though AVF was initially designed around running small workloads in a highly stripped-down build of Android loaded in an isolated virtual machine, there’s technically no reason it can’t be used to run other operating systems. As a matter of fact, this was demonstrated already when developer Danny Lin got Windows 11 running on an Android phone back in 2022. Google itself never officially provided support for running anything other than its custom build of Android called “microdroid” in AVF, but that’s no longer the case. The company has started to offer official support for running Chromium OS, the open-source version of Chrome OS, on Android phones through AVF, and it has even been privately demoing this to other companies.

At a privately held event, Google recently demonstrated a special build of Chromium OS — code-named “ferrochrome” — running in a virtual machine on a Pixel 8. However, Chromium OS wasn’t shown running on the phone’s screen itself. Rather, it was projected to an external display, which is possible because Google recently enabled display output on its Pixel 8 series. Time will tell if Google is thinking of positioning Chrome OS as a platform for its desktop mode ambitions and Samsung DeX rival.

↫ Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority

It seems that Google is in the phase of exploring if there are any OEMs interested in allowing users to plug their Android phone into an external display and input devices and run Chrome OS on it. This sounds like an interesting approach to the longstanding dream of convergence – one device for all your computing needs – but at the same time, it feels quite convoluted to have your Android device emulate an entire Chrome OS installation.

What a damning condemnation of Android as a platform that despite years of trying, Google just can’t seem to make Android and its applications work in a desktop form factor. I’ve tried to shoehorn Android into a desktop workflow, and it’s quite hard, despite third parties having made some interesting tools to help you along. It really seems Android just does not want to be anywhere else but on a mobile touch display.

Absolutely scathing dissection of what’s gone wrong at Google Search, by Ed Zitron for his newsletter/blog:

In an interview with FastCompany’s Harry McCracken from 2018, Gomes framed Google’s challenge as “taking [the PageRank algorithm] from one machine to a whole bunch of machines, and they weren’t very good machines at the time.” Despite his impact and tenure, Gomes had only been made Head of Search in the middle of 2018 after John Giannandrea moved to Apple to work on its machine learning and AI strategy. Gomes had been described as Google’s “search czar,” beloved for his ability to communicate across departments.

Every single article I’ve read about Gomes’ tenure at Google spoke of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation of one of the most important technologies ever made, who had dedicated decades to maintaining a product with a — to quote Gomes himself — “guiding light of serving the user and using technology to do that.” And when finally given the keys to the kingdom — the ability to elevate Google Search even further — he was ratfucked by a series of rotten careerists trying to please Wall Street, led by Prabhakar Raghavan.

Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently destroying search, did before his job at Google?

He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 — a tumultuous period that cemented its terminal decline, and effectively saw the company bow out of the search market altogether. His responsibilities? Research and development for Yahoo’s search and ads products.

Long story short, Ben Gomes was a search guy who’d been at Google since 1999, before they even had any ads in search results. He was replaced by Prabhakar Raghavan, who previously was Head of Ads at the company. So instead of there being any sort of firewall between search and ads, search became a subsidiary of ads.

Zitron’s compelling narrative is largely gleaned through emails released as part of the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google. Is the story really that simple? That around 2019 or so Google Search’s institutional priorities flipped from quality-first/revenue-second, to revenue-first/quality-second? It might be more complicated than that, but the timeline sure does add up.

And as a truism this feels right: if content reports to ads, content will go to hell. Publications, TV networks, operating systems, search engines — no matter the medium, you can’t let the advertising sales inmates run the asylum.