This week, I programmed for many, many hours. Often when I do this, while I wait for builds to complete or unit tests to execute, I pick up my Rubik’s Cube and solve it (or scramble it, if it is already solved). For the past three days, I could not solve my Rubik’s Cube anymore. I couldn’t remember how to do it, and I kept making mistakes even in the earlier portions of my solve. I worried that I had forgotten how to do it overnight, and the implications of that scared me.

Fortunately, I solved the cube again today again without an issue. It was a great relief. I think that I was so deep into technical problems for so long that I lost the plasticity of mind I usually have.

The latest episode of Accidental Tech Podcast has a great discussion about lossless music, which is coming to Apple Music next month.

I am a little too excited to be getting Office 365 installed on my work laptop tomorrow. I have been on Office 2016 for so long it is absurd.

I am going to try to not do any programming today. It has been a huge part of my job lately, and I enjoy getting in the zone when I do it, but it has taken a toll on my body. I have spent way too much time typing, and I feel it in my wrists, forearms, and even my shoulders.

This morning I decided to add one more feature to the app I’m developing for work. Twelve hours of coding later, I have rewritten the entire app, and am just now getting to test if that one new feature is working right. 😅

Google wants to build a useful quantum computer by 2029. If it does, I’m sure it will cancel the project by 2030.

I look forward to reading the 2021 M1 iMac reviews later, even though I will likely never buy that computer. It’s the sort of thing I would want if my family were structured more around, say, a central computing location in the family room or something. We all have iPads instead.

A software update at work pushed out the virtual backgrounds feature for WebEx. Since my home office—at least the part of it that is behind me and not under my control— is a mess, I enabled it.

Sadly, it looks pretty awful. The background mostly leaves a halo around me un-obscured; sometimes it clips portions of my face or shoulder off. I have a very high-end laptop and a “very good” Logitech webcam (all webcams are terrible, I think), so I have concluded that WebEx’s technology is way behind Zoom’s, which does the virtual backgrounds flawlessly. I think I will leave virtual backgrounds on, for privacy reasons, and hope no one minds the weird visual side effects.

I’m up late coding. I have been up late coding many nights in a row now. I’m trying to get some of my projects completed (as much as software can be completed). I feel like I am inching uphill day after day. It’s not a bad feeling, though. I feel peculiarly tenacious lately.

I did not have to wait long for the Apple Music announcement to drop.

Apple Music can release its rumored lossless tier any minute now. I’m waiting with my best headphones. I don’t care at all about spatial audio or Dolby Atmos, though, so I hope that isn’t the only kind of thing coming.

Phew! I finally fixed a bug that bedeviled me for days. (Well, nights, because it is in my hobby project.) The fix was adding two lines of very basic code to a function that hasn’t been touched in years. I think the Swift compiler changed something about implicit protocol compliance, and it caused the function to stop processing the intended read/write logic for one of my protocol data types. I’m rewriting that library to not need that function anymore, and must code some better tests for it than I did before.

Now I can go back to writing the fun, new library that will make my code much easier to deal with going forward.

My daughter and I made some flower cookies to celebrate the lovely spring day.

I hope so. I am a sucker for lossless codecs, even though I probably can’t hear the difference between them and AAC-256.

I think that Apple is going to lose whatever antitrust cases are eventually brought against it in the EU and in the US. I don’t actually think Apple should lose, because I don’t think it is correct to call Apple a monopoly.

The general antitrust argument against Apple is that its App Store platform is too locked down, and that is unfair because Apple is a monopoly (insert eye roll here) of its own platform. App is a platform owner. Of course it has a “monopoly” over the platform it owns. That doesn’t make it a monopoly in the overall marketplace. Moreover, while iOS is undoubtedly popular, it is a minority smartphone platform, which in the broadest legal terms that I understand, makes monopoly-related antitrust law not apply to them.

App developers have to accept Apple’s terms, and pay a pretty large commission to Apple, to distribute apps in the store or to take in-app purchases. That may not feel fair to developers, but I can’t take seriously the arguments that it is illegal. It is the same way that game consoles work. Will we go after Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft next? Shouldn’t they open up their game consoles to alternative payment systems and alternate app stores, too? I have heard of no one seriously arguing this.

The most compelling argument against Apple’s App Store requirements is that Apple demands too much money from developers for distribution and payment solutions that other companies now offer at lower prices. I am sympathetic to this argument because I too think Apple should have lowered its commission over the years, as marginal costs for these technologies and services have declined. However, the size of Apple’s cut is not really at issue here. Apple, rather clumsily, lowered its commission for a majority of its developers to 15%, starting in January 2021, but the antitrust talk just keeps rolling on.

The second most compelling argument against Apple is that it uses its platform-owner advantage to position its own software and services over third-party competitors. Again, I sympathize. Apple Sherlocks developers sometimes, and can position its own software and services over anyone else’s. So does Microsoft (ever use Windows?). Amazon exercises a tremendous advantage over third party sellers in its online marketplace.

I could argue that even Linux vendors, such as Ubuntu, position their own, preferred software over that of third-party developers. Software platform owners always have advantages over third parties that operate on their platform. Extracting as much value from that as is possible is the entire point of creating and owning a platform. I think it only becomes an antitrust problem when a company has majority market share, which Apple does not have.

If developers can’t accept Apple’s terms, then they shouldn’t. They should develop for Android instead, which has the majority market share anyway, or create progressive web apps. (Remember, the web is an app platform, too, not just a way to collect credit card payments for software.) If developers “need” to develop for iOS because iOS users, on average, spend way more money on apps than Android users, then that just shows the value Apple’s marketplace has, and is worth paying for.

Despite my views, I still think Apple is poised to lose any legal actions about them regarding monopoly. It won’t lose based on the merits of whatever case is brought against it; it will lose because enough political sentiment is against Apple, at least in this area, and that is all that matters. Perhaps all the tech giants will fall under this scrutiny, and all will be forced to open up their platforms more widely, and will be forced to renounce their first-party advantage when distributing applications and features. I just don’t see that actually happening, and if it does happen, I don’t think it will benefit anybody in the way government regulators would expect. It could even stifle the development of the next generation of technology platforms.

I have been using SQL for 25 years and I just learned today that SELECT [...] FROM Table1, Table2 is called a “cross join” an can also be expressed as SELECT [...] FROM Table1 CROSS JOIN Table2. 🤦 In my defense, I must say that I have only had to use a cross join a few times in my entire career.

I unblocked Reddit.com earlier this week because the domain keeps coming up in tech question-related search results. After only a few days, I’m back looking at mechanical keyboards and expensive headphones on Reddit like an addict. I just blocked the domain again.

To my complete surprise, I discovered today that Durgod released an update to their keyboard configuration: Durgod Zeus Engine. The interface looks a lot better, and it is a little easier to use. They didn’t change the keyboard hardware driver to support function layers, which is unfortunately. I really want that. (Honestly, what I want is the ObinsKit software that powers the Anne Pro 2 to apply work on it.)

I set up a new RGB color scheme and remapped my CapsLock to Control, saved them to the keyboard’s local profile, and (out of habit) configured the Zeus Engine to not start every time I log on. I plugged my keyboard into my USB hub and will keep my fingers crossed that it will work reliably now.

Napier Lopez reports in The Next Web:

Apple only just released its new iMacs featuring the acclaimed M1 ARM-based processor, but according to a report from Nikkei, the company plans to launch M2 as soon as July.

I don’t know anything in particular about Apple’s plans, but it seems crazy to me to expect a faster chip at this time. What I would expect is more I/O, driven by more cores and supported by more RAM. Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe Apple can overvolt the M1 to get more speed out of it, and will call it by another name.

I am very conservative about cities re-opening too soon, considering the pandemic has not ended. But NYC reopening on July 1 almost seems reasonable to me. Time will tell.

🎵 I’m going to lean into my New Jersey-ness today and listen to a ton of Bruce Springsteen. First album up: The Wild, The Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle. This is one of Springsteen’s records that I never think to listen to, but, of course, it’s great. It was made back when Springsteen still wrote songs with a torrent of stream-of-consciousness-style lyrics like a verbose street poet.

I did really well at my presentation today. Practicing over and over definitely paid off. The talk I ended up with was almost completely different than the one I started with, even though my slideshow stayed the same.

Per Tom Warren In The Verge:

Microsoft is changing its default Office font next year and wants everyone to help pick the new default. While there are more than 700 font options in Word, Microsoft has commissioned five new custom fonts for Office, in a move away from the Calibri font that has been the default in Microsoft Office for nearly 15 years.

I am unusually attached to Calibri so I am not looking forward to this change. Then again, at work I often have to publish using Arial Narrow, which I think is objectively awful in terms of aesthetics and legibility, so it probably won’t affect me too much.

I’m rehearsing for an online presentation to my entire company later this morning. I feel good about this one.

🎵 I think it is cool that Counting Crows is releasing a new album next month. It has been seven years since their last one, and I honestly thought they had given up writing new material.