Chris Eaton

Army ants function without a leader and yet accomplish very organized-looking things, such as building bridges across gaps:

Researchers from the Swarm Lab believe they can break down the bridge-building process into a simple, two-rule system. Rule 1: If fellow ants are walking over you, stay put. Rule 2: If the number of ants walking over you isn’t higher than some rate, get moving again.

Full paper here (pdf).

Tags: ants, independence

laughingsquid:

Oasis’ ‘Wonderwall’ Music Video Remade With LEGO

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

• 2 billion: Siri requests per week; 1 trillion: semiconductor unit shipments, 9.1% compound annual growth rate over a 40 year span; 150 million: IPv4 addresses recirculated over 7 years; $100 Billion:  value lost in cryptocurrency markets in 24 hours; $1: microcontroller; 16 Gb/s: GDDR6 SGRAM; 1/3: IPv4 addresses registered to US entities; eight minutes and thirty-five seconds: breath-hold record; $32.32 billion: Google revenue, up 24%; 1.3 billion: active Apple devices, up 30% in 2 years; 500 petabytes: Backblaze; 6th or 7th: HTTP version of hypertex on the internet; $2.1 billion: Amazon's Q4 2017 operating income, up 69%; 45%: jump in Amazon cloud revenue; 9%: global smartphone market drop; 3 billion: photos uploaded to Google on New Year's eve; 1.5 billion: montly YouTube users; $530 million: stolen by hackers in the biggest cryptocurrency theft yet; 9,500: computers forced to be reinstalled by ransomware; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • ARM 2 106: Tell my lord: Your servant Yakim-Addu sends the following message: A short time ago I wrote to my lord as follows: "A lion was caught in the loft of a house in Akkaks. My lord should write me whether this lion should remain in that same loft until the arrival of my lord, or whether I should have borught to my lord." But letters from my lord were slow in coming and the lion has been in the loft for five days.
  • Brice Morrison: I'm predicting by 2020 there will be a billion dollar game where the primary way to play is with your voice. Right now Amazon Alexa and Google Home are simple utilities. The games on each of them are just toys - experiments to round out playing music and turning on smart lightbulbs. But each month signs are growing stronger that voice is becoming the next major growth platform. And as technology goes, games follow.
  • Geoff Huston: The days when the Internet was touted as a poster child of disruption in a deregulated space are long since over, and these days we appear to be increasingly looking further afield for a regulatory and governance framework that can continue to challenge the increasing complacency of the newly-established incumbents. 
  • @jckarter: Reminder: running 32 bit processes on a 64 bit CPU for prolonged periods can lead to burn-in of the unused high bits. Degauss your CPU regularly
  • Ted Nelson~ We had visions of democratization, citizen participation, great vistas of possibily participation for atistic expression in software. Software is an artform, though not generall recognized as such—exactly how you select the keys, exactly how you position things on the screen—has an impact. In the old days there was a greater shared citizen vision of the personal computing movement.
  • @n_srnck: Uber is buying 24,000 cars. Facebook is spending $1 billion on original TV shows. Alibaba is spending $2.6 billion for physical stores. Airbnb is opening branded apartment buildings.
  • @etherealmind: This is a big deal. Open sourcing the SDK changes whitebox market. 
    Link: Broadcom Expands Ethernet Switch Software Suite with Industry’s First Fully Open Source Software Development Kit. Enterprises can now easily develop their own Network Operating System. Open source projects are now free to flourish. Vendors based on open source can easily expand their feature sets. Obviously a reaction to SAI/Sonic. 
  • Geoff Huston: Time and time again we are lectured that NATs are not a good security device, but in practice NATs offer a reasonable front-line defence against network scanning malware, so there may be a larger story behind the use of NATs and device-based networks than just a simple conservative preference to continue to use an IPv4 protocol stack.
  • @Tanvim: This guy has been biking really slow outside the FCC to protest its decision to repeal net neutrality, and charging $5 to have vehicles pass him. Lol.
  • npz: The days of ASICs are long past. I guarantee you that NO ONE in the general community wants to repeat the same mistake bitcoin and subsequently litecoin made. Hence, all coins have been asic resistant since. And some modern coins / blockchain hashing algorithms are even complex enough to give GPUs a hard time, enough to allow CPUs to be competitive like Monero (XMR/cyryptonight). That's why when it comes to Monero, you'll often hear about XMR-"Stacks" because now even the CPU can be used!
  • Philippe Kahn: I met with all of them [Kodak, Polaroid]. Proposed our solution to no avail. They had an established business and thought that it would never go away and they could wait. They totally missed the paradigm shift. Paradigm shifts are challenges for any established player, look at the demise of Nokia for missing the smartphone.
  • Jakob: it would seem that reducing the precision and making timing sources more jittery won’t really help with the core problem. It is probably a good idea to do this in JavaScript to make it harder to do exploits, but it is not a panacea. It appears that in the end, it is the side channels themselves that have to be suppressed. Which is not a particularly appealing statement to make, since side channels by definition are not designed into a system. They are discovered as side-effects of otherwise reasonable decisions. In the end, there is no replacement for an adversarial mind-set, and putting resources into thinking about how things can be broken, not just made to work in the first place.
  • tw1010: There aught to be a name to the tendency that as tools get better and better, the more your time goes from having your mind in technical-space to social and news-space. It's like the authority to create goes from the individual first-principles (by necessity) maker, to the control over development being in the hands of an external group, and then all your time is spent keeping up with what they're doing. A similar thing happened with a lot of javascript frameworks. It also happened with the transition from building servers from the ground up, to it all being managed by AWS.
  • @daveixd: This notion that "it's all just a guess until we ship to production" flies in the face of decades of research in HCI, psych, etc. The point isn't knowing for sure, but increasing confidence as investment increases. Deciding to ignore those opportunities to learn is reckless.
  • @davidgerard: Dr Strangelove is actually a film about why immutable smart contracts that cannot be altered by human agency once they're in motion
  • So many more quotes. Get them while they're hot!

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge (which means this post has many more items to read so please keep on reading)...

Bloomberg:

Apple is planning to use its own chips in Mac computers beginning as early as 2020, replacing processors from Intel, according to people familiar with the plans, Bloomberg News’ Ian King and Mark Gurman report.

The initiative, code named Kalamata, is still in the early developmental stages, but comes as part of a larger strategy to make all of Apple’s devices — including Macs, iPhones, and iPads — work more similarly and seamlessly together, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

Hell of a scoop if it pans out. We’ve all been speculating about ARM-based Macs for years. In broad strokes it seems like a rather obvious idea:

• Apple seeks to control its own future. With Intel, Apple has often been stuck waiting for new Intel chips. The update schedule for new Mac hardware is often in Intel’s hands, not Apple’s.
• Apple’s internal chip team has been killing it. They’ve never had a bad year. I think you can argue that they’ve never had anything but a great year. iPhones and iPad Pros have been faster than most MacBooks for years now, and that just seems wrong.

But when you start thinking about the details, this transition would (will?) be very difficult. First, while Apple’s existing A-series chips are better for energy-efficient mobile device use (iPhone, iPad, just-plain MacBook), Apple’s internal team has never made anything to compete with Intel at the high-performance end (MacBook Pros, and especially iMacs and Mac Pros). I’m not saying they can’t. I’m just saying they haven’t shown us anything yet.

And then there’s all sorts of questions about the transition period. Will there be something like Rosetta — an emulator or translator that allows existing x86 Mac software to run on the new ARM-based Macs? How far in advance will Apple announce this, so that developers can adapt their apps? (Apple announced the switch from PowerPC to Intel at WWDC 2005, and started shipping Intel-based MacBook Pros in early 2006.)

Nick Turner, writing for Bloomberg:

Under Armour Inc., joining a growing list of corporate victims of hacker attacks, said about 150 million user accounts tied to its MyFitnessPal nutrition-tracking app were breached earlier this year.

An unauthorized party stole data from the accounts in late February, Under Armour said on Thursday. It became aware of the breach earlier this week and took steps to alert users about the incident, the company said.

It’s a little scary that this went undetected for a month. Makes me wonder how many of these data breaches are never noticed.

Mozilla:

This extension helps you control more of your web activity from Facebook by isolating your identity into a separate container. This makes it harder for Facebook to track your activity on other websites via third-party cookies.

Rather than stop using a service you find valuable and miss out on those adorable photos of your nephew, we think you should have tools to limit what data others can collect about you. That includes us: Mozilla does not collect data from your use of the Facebook Container extension. We only know the number of times the extension is installed or removed.

In other words, Firefox is now treating Facebook as malware that you need to be protected from.

Rene Chun, writing for The Atlantic:

Dystopia starts with 23.6 inches of toilet paper. That’s how much the dispensers at the entrance of the public restrooms at Beijing’s Temple of Heaven dole out in a program involving facial-recognition scanners — part of the president’s “Toilet Revolution,” which seeks to modernize public toilets. Want more? Forget it. If you go back to the scanner before nine minutes are up, it will recognize you and issue this terse refusal: “Please try again later.”

This sounds like something out of Brazil.

Marco Arment, on Overcast 4.1:

Smart Resume is actually two features:

• It jumps back by up to a few seconds after having been paused to help remind you of the conversation.

• It slightly adjusts resumes and seeks to fall in the silences between spoken words when reasonably possible.

Both are subtle but noticeable benefits (my favorite kind), especially when you’re being interrupted a lot, such as while following turn-by-turn navigation directions.

My favorite type of feature is one that makes you think, “Why did no one think of this years ago?” This is that sort of feature.

Venessa Wong, reporting for BuzzFeed:

Owners of Amazon Echo devices with the voice-enabled assistant Alexa have been pretty much creeped out of their damn minds recently. People are reporting that the bot sometimes spontaneously starts laughing — which is basically a bloodcurdling nightmare.

Everyone who’s on the “No way am I putting one of these listening devices in my house” side of the fence is nodding their head with a smug look on their face right now.

Radiologist Heather Sher, writing for The Atlantic:

In a typical handgun injury that I diagnose almost daily, a bullet leaves a laceration through an organ like the liver. To a radiologist, it appears as a linear, thin, grey bullet track through the organ. There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments.

I was looking at a CT scan of one of the victims of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, with extensive bleeding. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage?

The reaction in the emergency room was the same. One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room, and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle which delivers a devastatingly lethal, high-velocity bullet to the victim. There was nothing left to repair, and utterly, devastatingly, nothing that could be done to fix the problem. The injury was fatal.

Update: Asha Rangappa:

This is a must-read. It illustrates why the NRA is so reluctant to allow the CDC to research gun violence as a public health issue: The facts would be devastating.

In the same way that it is lunacy that the U.S. doesn’t allow the ATF’s gun-tracing division to use computers for searching gun records, it is sheer lunacy that the Center for Disease Control is forbidden to research gun violence. Lunacy.

Charlie Warzel, writing for BuzzFeed:

The companies ask that we take them at their word: We’re trying, but this is hard — we can’t fix this overnight. OK, we get it. But if the tech giants aren’t finding the same misinformation that observers armed with nothing more sophisticated than access to a search bar are in the aftermath of these events, there’s really only one explanation for it: If they can’t see it, they aren’t truly looking.

How hard would it be, for example, to have a team in place reserved exclusively for large-scale breaking news events to do what outside observers have been doing: scan and monitor for clearly misleading conspiratorial content inside its top searches and trending modules?

It’s not a foolproof solution. But it’s something.

It’s the same reason why Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are overrun with state-backed troll accounts from Russia. Engagement leads to growth, growth is all that matters, and if the trolls and fake news are engaging, better not to look for them. The oft-quoted Upton Sinclair quote fits perfectly: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

The Onion posts the same headline after every mass shooting in the U.S., and every time they do it, it’s more apt than ever.

That’s the shot. Here’s the chaser: “Gorilla Sales Skyrocket After Latest Gorilla Attack”.

Walt Mossberg:

A footnote on @apple and tablets: the iPad alone brought in nearly $6 billion in the holiday quarter, and unit sales were up very slightly at over 13 million. Most companies would kill for a single product with those kinds of numbers, even if they’re well down from the peak.

Steven Sinofsky, in the same thread:

@waltmossberg @Apple Also, worldwide 2017 there were perhaps 100 million consumer laptops sold. iPads selling at ~half that puts the number in context, especially considering the price, durability, and lifespan of an iPad compared to PC laptop.

In short, iPad sales are way down from their peak, but amount to a unit sales market half the size of the entire consumer PC laptop market. And iPads tend to last longer.

Apple:

“We’re thrilled to report the biggest quarter in Apple’s history, with broad-based growth that included the highest revenue ever from a new iPhone lineup. iPhone X surpassed our expectations and has been our top-selling iPhone every week since it shipped in November,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO.

So that whole narrative about iPhone X being less popular than expected? Never mind.

Jason Snell has done his usual sorcery to get Apple’s numbers into charts. On the iPhone, unit sales were down about 1 percent year-over-year, but revenue was up about 6 percent. And this year’s holiday quarter was one week shorter than last years — and the much-anticipated iPhone X didn’t get into customers’ hands until November 3, over a month into the quarter. The average selling price for all iPhones went up $102 year-over-year. Seems like proof that the iPhone X strategy is working.

Tom Warren, writing for The Verge:

Some owners have even started freezing their tablets to stop the screen flickering temporarily. “I get about half an hour’s use out of it after ten minutes in the freezer,” says one owner. Another user posted a video showing how the flickering stops as soon as the Surface Pro 4 is placed in a freezer. The Verge understands that the screen flickering problem is a hardware issue that Microsoft won’t be able to fix with a software update. It’s currently affecting less than 1 percent of all Surface Pro 4 devices.

1. This is not a “fix”.
2. This sounds like a bad idea even as a temporary salve. Condensation is a thing.

Bethany Bongiorno recently left Apple after a long stint, including work on the original iPad. She tweeted some terrific stories, including this one:

At one point Steve wanted to turn UIKit elements orange. Not just any orange, he wanted a particular orange from the button on a certain old Sony remote. We got a bunch of remotes from Sony with orange buttons to try and find the right one. In the end, Steve hated it.

I retweeted it with the comment that this is as Steve Jobs-y as any Steve Jobs story gets. No detail too small. Strong opinions loosely held.

Speaking of iCloud storage limits, Joanna Stern’s column (and clever video) this week is devoted to iCloud’s storage limits:

Here’s the big catch, though: Apple offers only 5 gigabytes of free iCloud storage space. That’s like offering a Siberian tiger a Tic Tac for dinner. With the amount of photos and videos we take today, it’s not enough. For a company with about $270 billion in the bank, I’d expect it to at least match Google’s 15GB of free cloud storage — or beat it. Do I hear 20GB?

5 GB seems ridiculous when the company is selling $999 iPhones with 64 GB of storage.

Think about it. Everyone should back up their phones. The best way to back up your iPhone — and the way Apple wants you to do it — is through iCloud. But 5 GB isn’t enough for most people, so they get these warning messages, which sound scary and which they don’t understand.

Brad Ellis:

When the iPhone X launched, a lot of designers were put off about the screen shape. Those complaints have mostly died down, but I haven’t seen much design-nerd talk about cool corner treatment details. Fortunately, deep nerd shit is my specialty.

What a stupid, silly idea. I love it.

Tim Stevens, writing for CNet:

Instead of a one-time, $300 fee, starting on 2019 models BMW will charge $80 annually for the privilege of accessing Apple’s otherwise totally free CarPlay service. You do get the first year free, much like your friendly neighborhood dealer of another sort, but after that it’s pay up or have your Lightning cable metaphorically snipped.

On the surface this is pretty offensive, and it seemed like something must be driving this. The official word from BMW is that this is a change that will save many (perhaps most) BMW owners money. Indeed, the vehicle segments where BMW plays are notorious for short-term leases, and those owning the car for only a few years will save money over that one-time $300. But still, the notion of paying annually for something that’s free rubbed me the wrong way. And, based on the feedback we saw from the article, it rubbed a lot of you the wrong way, too.

It’s patently offensive. If BMW goes through with this, you can never truly own one of their cars. $80/year isn’t much compared to the price of the car, but on general principle this is way out there in Fuck You territory.

We bought an Acura back in 2006, paid it off within a few years, and haven’t sent a single penny to the Honda Motor Company since. Not one penny. And the car is still running great — with every single function working just as well as it did the day we drove it off the lot. The fact that everything still works well speaks to Honda’s reliability. The fact that we haven’t had to send them a money is because, you know, we own the goddamn thing.

Stevens:

In speaking with multiple sources at various manufacturers who offer cars with Apple CarPlay and/or Android Auto, I was quickly able to confirm that such fees, at least right now, do not exist. CarPlay and Android Auto, which are free for we consumers to use, are also provided for free for manufacturers to embed into their cars.

CarPlay isn’t entirely free, however. As Markdown inventor and Apple guru John Gruber pointed out on Twitter, car manufacturers who wish to officially support Apple products must pay a licensing fee to enter Apple’s Made for iPhone (MFi) program, just like any other licensed accessory maker. As Gruber was able to confirm, however (and I was able to verify), this is a one-time fee. And, while I could not get anyone to disclose the exact fees entailed, it’s quite clear that there’s no additional fee for CarPlay on top of the base MFi license.

Update, 23 January 2018: I’ve now received the following clarification from Apple:

• There is no fee for OEMs for either MFi or CarPlay integration. There never has been, and to my knowledge there are no plans for this to change.

• There are no royalty costs or ongoing costs. The only costs to automakers are those necessary to create the hardware (this includes an authentication chip).

No fees, no royalties, no ongoing costs. Apple’s goal is to get more cars on the road that are CarPlay-enabled, not to make money from CarPlay-enabled cars.

Pali Bhat, writing on the official Google blog:

Today, we’re excited to announce we’ll be bringing together all the different ways to pay with Google, including Android Pay and Google Wallet, into a single brand: Google Pay.

This makes sense. Or better said, I don’t think Android Pay ever made sense as a brand from Google’s perspective. “Google Pay” works as a brand anywhere, on any device.

It seems to me that Google is stepping away from promoting Android as a brand, period. Take a look at the web page for the Pixel 2 phones and search for “Android”. I see one match, and it’s a small print footnote.

At this point Uber should best be described not as a business or startup, but as a racket, a criminal enterprise.

Andrew Martonik, writing for Android Central two weeks ago:

It all starts with just general app instability. Apps crash — a lot. More than I’ve experienced on any other phone. They freeze, stutter, lock up and force close. Sometimes you tap an app to open it, and nothing happens for multiple seconds. When an app calls up another one through a share action, it takes the same egregious delay. Sometimes apps open and switch just fine, but then randomly slow down to a crawl with inordinately long splash screens or loading animations. And it isn’t tied to just one app, it’s all apps.

The app issues seem to come as a result of general system instability that I haven’t seen in a high-end phone in years. Touch response is very slow, making everything simply feel sluggish as you tap and scroll around every day. The phone will often struggle to open or close the camera and can fail to save photos if you close the camera too quickly. I’ve had the entire phone go unresponsive for several minutes and require a force reboot (hold the power button for ~15 seconds) multiple times. […]

The camera app is slow and unstable and lacks basic features like viewfinder grid lines or any sort of customization or “pro” mode. HDR mode doesn’t really seem to do anything but take photos slower, and toggling it on still inexplicably turns the flash to “auto” mode. The slow performance directly contributes to missing shots, and the fundamentals of a small sensor with no OIS mean you get grainy and blurry low-light shots regularly. The Essential Phone’s camera is still so far from the competition.

In short, the Essential phone is a disaster.

(Yet oddly it has the same score from The Verge — 8/10 — as the iPhone 8.)

David Heinemeier Hansson:

We don’t actually have anyone who lives in San Francisco, but now everyone is being paid as though they did. Whatever an employee pockets in the difference in cost of living between where they are and the sky-high prices in San Francisco is theirs to keep.

This is not how companies normally do their thing. I’ve been listening to Adam Smith’s 1776 classic The Wealth of Nations, and just passed through the chapter on how the market is set by masters trying to get away with paying the least possible, and workers trying to press for the maximum possible. An antagonistic struggle, surely.

It doesn’t need to be like that. Especially in software, which is a profitable business when run with restraint and sold to businesses.

Sapna Maheshwari, reporting for The New York Times:

The apps use software from Alphonso, a start-up that collects TV-viewing data for advertisers. Using a smartphone’s microphone, Alphonso’s software can detail what people watch by identifying audio signals in TV ads and shows, sometimes even matching that information with the places people visit and the movies they see. The information can then be used to target ads more precisely and to try to analyze things like which ads prompted a person to go to a car dealership.

More than 250 games that use Alphonso software are available in the Google Play store; some are also available in Apple’s app store.

Some of the tracking is taking place through gaming apps that do not otherwise involve a smartphone’s microphone, including some apps that are geared toward children. The software can also detect sounds even when a phone is in a pocket if the apps are running in the background.

The Times provides the above link to the games in the Google Play store with this code, but no such link for affected games in the iOS App Store. Would be nice to see a list of the games on iOS. The good news is you have to approve microphone access for these games, on both platforms, but who knows how many people approve it without thinking about it? I don’t care what these apps disclose in the privacy policies — everyone knows nobody reads privacy policies. This is malware.

Gunes Acar, Steven Englehardt, and Arvind Narayanan:

First, a user fills out a login form on the page and asks the browser to save the login. The tracking script is not present on the login page [1]. Then, the user visits another page on the same website which includes the third-party tracking script. The tracking script inserts an invisible login form, which is automatically filled in by the browser’s login manager. The third-party script retrieves the user’s email address by reading the populated form and sends the email hashes to third-party servers.

You can test the attack yourself on our live demo page.

Once again I say: the web would be better off if browsers had never added support for scripting. Many of the ads you see on legitimate websites today are effectively malware.

Rick Tetzeli has a good feature for Fortune on the state of Apple’s design, with a wide range of sources (including yours truly):

For many Apple critics, the story ends right here. Siri’s not great, the Touch Bar’s kind of a mess, the operating systems are pretty but somewhat confusing, and the reassuring Home button has been killed … the list goes on. Apple’s far from perfect. Point made.

But here’s the thing: Pick just about any time in Apple’s history, and you’ll find a similar set of worrying choices and seeming failures — even during those halcyon days of Steve Jobs’ triumphant second tenure at the company. 1998: that beautiful, bulbous, Bondi Blue iMac is actually an underpowered computer with an unreliable mouse and a CD slot that few consumers could use productively. 2000: The Power Mac G4 Cube, so gorgeous it becomes part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, doesn’t deliver the power and features heavy users demand. 2001: The first iPod is released, but it’s not really ready for primetime, since the scroll wheel is clunky and the device works only with Macs, which account for just 2.6% of worldwide PC sales. 2005: Apple’s in the phone business! With something called the Rokr, a kludgy music player/cell phone that the company developed with Motorola. 2007: The iPhone is introduced, with few applications and poor connectivity. 2011: The iPad is introduced, and, as my brother-in-law Mark told me at the time, “I can’t imagine anyone ever using this for anything interesting.” (He’s bought four since then.)

The problem with the Touch Bar, to my mind, is not that it’s a bad idea that Apple should abandon. It’s that the first version isn’t good enough. The Apple approach to dealing with the mixed (at best) reaction to the Touch Bar should be to go back to the drawing board and make it better. Keep what’s good and interesting about what it is now, and fix the issues people are complaining about.

(Also, a personal niggle: I don’t think there was anything “clunky” about the original iPod scroll wheel. In fact, I liked the original iPod’s mechanical scroll wheel, which physically spun, better than the capacitive touch scroll wheel that replaced it. From a Mac user’s perspective, the original iPod was an amazing device. If you want something from iPod history to cite as an example of questionable Apple design, I suggest either the 2007 “Fat” Nano or the 2009 iPod Shuffle that literally had no playback buttons at all.)

Ashley Southall, reporting for The New York Times:

It would have seemed unbelievable in 1990, when there were 2,245 killings in New York City, but as of Wednesday there have been just 286 in the city this year — the lowest since reliable records have been kept.

In fact, crime has fallen in New York City in each of the major felony categories — murder and manslaughter, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, grand larceny, and car thefts — to a total of 94,806 as of Sunday, well below the previous record low of 101,716 set last year.

If the trend holds just a few more days, this year’s homicide total will be under the city’s previous low of 333 in 2014, and crime will have declined for 27 straight years, to levels that police officials have said are the lowest since the 1950s. The numbers, when taken together, portray a city of 8.5 million people growing safer even as the police, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, use less deadly force, make fewer arrests and scale back controversial practices like stopping and frisking thousands of people on the streets.

Amazing, really. When I was growing up, New York’s image was that of a quasi-post-apocalyptic hellhole. John Carpenter’s Escape From New York didn’t seem like an outlandish vision of where things were heading.

The bottom line: being smart on crime works better than being “tough” on crime.

Apple: “A Message to Our Customers About iPhone Batteries and Performance”:

We’ve been hearing feedback from our customers about the way we handle performance for iPhones with older batteries and how we have communicated that process. We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down. We apologize. There’s been a lot of misunderstanding about this issue, so we would like to clarify and let you know about some changes we’re making.

First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades. Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that. […]

To address our customers’ concerns, to recognize their loyalty and to regain the trust of anyone who may have doubted Apple’s intentions, we’ve decided to take the following steps:

• Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29 — for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018. Details will be provided soon on apple.com.

• Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.

This is a terrific response, both in terms of explaining what has actually been going on, and in terms of the steps they’re taking going forward. Reducing the price of authorized battery replacements to $29 is really great.

The upcoming update to iOS 11 with more information on the state of the device’s battery is good news too. Right now, the Battery section inside the Settings app will warn you about the state of your battery — but only if the battery is in truly dire condition. What iOS should do — and it sounds to me like this is what Apple plans to do — is tell you about the state of your battery as soon as its condition drops beneath the threshold at which the performance throttling features kick in.

The funny thing about Apple is that their communication problems tend to happen only when they don’t communicate at all. This whole iPhone battery controversy erupted only because Apple had never explained what was going on, which opened them up to accusations of nefarious intent. When they do communicate, they do so with clarity, plain language, and honesty. And, when called for — as in this case — humility.

Justin O’Beirne has written a series of extraordinary essays over the past few years on maps, focusing particularly on Google Maps and Apple Maps. His latest is my favorite yet, attempting to answer the question “How far ahead of Apple Maps is Google Maps?”

It’s a fascinating, insightful read, and the work O’Beirne has put into collecting and assembling his comparative illustrations — most of them animated — is simply staggering. As icing on the cake, even the typography is gorgeous.