CNBC has another excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk, this one telling the tale of Musk and his cousins moving thousands of servers from a data center in Sacramento to another in Portland:

“You’ll have to hire a contractor to lift the floor panels,” Alex said. “They need to be lifted with suction cups.” Another set of contractors, he said, would then have to go underneath the floor panels and disconnect the electric cables and seismic rods.

Musk turned to his security guard and asked to borrow his pocket knife. Using it, he was able to lift one of the air vents in the floor, which allowed him to pry open the floor panels. He then crawled under the server floor himself, used the knife to jimmy open an electrical cabinet, pulled the server plugs, and waited to see what happened. Nothing exploded. The server was ready to be moved.

“Well that doesn’t seem super hard,” he said as Alex the Uzbek and the rest of the gang stared. Musk was totally jazzed by this point. It was, he said with a loud laugh, like a remake of Mission: Impossible, Sacramento edition.

It’s all a bunch of yucks until it turns to yikes:

The servers had user data on them, and James did not initially realize that, for privacy reasons, they were supposed to be wiped clean before being moved. “By the time we learned this, the servers had already been unplugged and rolled out, so there was no way we would roll them back, plug them in, and then wipe them,” he says. Plus, the wiping software wasn’t working. “Fuck, what do we do?” he asked. Elon recommended that they lock the trucks and track them.

So James sent someone to Home Depot to buy big padlocks, and they sent the combination codes on a spreadsheet to Portland so the trucks could be opened there. “I can’t believe it worked,” James says. “They all made it to Portland safely.”

A profound sense of urgency is beneficial to a leader, up to a point. Despite CNBC’s framing, Musk clearly goes way past that point. This entire endeavor was absurdly and unnecessarily reckless. In addition to the privacy violations, yanking these servers out of Sacramento, against the direct advice of Twitter’s infrastructure team, directly led to months of instability for users.

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

In the battle between iPad and Mac, I’m a longtime member of Team Both — I use my Mac most of the day at my desk, but when I write elsewhere in the house or backyard, I switch to an iPad Pro in the Magic Keyboard case. And that iPad (in a regular case) is my primary computing device when I’m not in work mode.

I’m not at all ready to declare the “use iPad to get work done” experiment dead. With the forthcoming release of iPadOS 17, Stage Manager has thrown in a bunch of improvements that suggest the iPad’s progression to more functional status continues, albeit at a pace that’s a bit too slow for my liking.

But here I sit at my mother’s dining room table, typing on a MacBook Air. Something has changed in my approach to travel, and I’m trying to understand just what it is and what it tells me about the trajectory of the iPad as a productivity tool.

I’ve written at length, multiple times, about my decidedly mixed feelings regarding the iPad — most stridently in January 2020, in a piece titled “The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10”. Stage Manager is the biggest change to the iPad interface since I wrote that, and its existence certainly helps on that “power user” front. (And Stage Manager sees some nice improvements in this year’s iPadOS 17.) But for me personally, I continue to find that I’m most productive when I spend my working time in front of my Mac. Gobs of people thrive using their iPads for writing and other creative endeavors. But I know I’m best off, productivity-wise, using my iPad basically as a single-tasking consumption device for long-form reading and video watching.

The reason this topic remains evergreen is that I want to use my iPad more. There’s something ineffable about it. It’s a thrill when I use my iPad to do something that an iPad is actually best at. I honestly think I’d be more productive if I owned no iPad at all, yet I keep trying to find ways to use it more.

So when I travel, it’s never a question whether I’ll pack my MacBook Pro. Even if I don’t plan or want to work during a particular trip, the one-man-show nature of Daring Fireball means I feel that I need to be able to. (I was on a family vacation, preparing to head to dinner, when this news broke 12 years ago yesterday.) The question is whether I even pack my iPad Pro at all, or just go it alone with iPhone and Mac. When I’m packing, I generally wind up tossing the iPad in my bag, thinking I’ll miss it if I don’t. But when I do just leave the iPad at home, I don’t miss it. It’s confounding, though, because I’m going on a trip next week and I bet I’ll take my damn iPad.

Ioannis Kouvakas, writing for Just Security:

While the proposal does not specify what technical changes would require notification, these may include changes in the architecture of software that would interfere with the U.K.’s current surveillance powers. As a result, an operator of a messaging service wishing to introduce an advanced security feature would now have to first let the Home Office know in advance. Device manufacturers would likely also have to notify the government before making available important security updates that fix known vulnerabilities and keep devices secure. Accordingly, the Secretary of State, upon receiving such an advance notice, could now request operators to, for instance, abstain from patching security gaps to allow the government to maintain access for surveillance purposes.

This is exactly where I’ve thought, for months, that the United Kingdom is heading with this legislation, but it’s still shocking to see it described so starkly. It’s like watching someone drive toward a cliff, and warning people, “Hey, I think these guys are driving right toward that cliff” — and yet I’m still taken aback to see them drive off the cliff.

It’s a complete fantasy that E2EE can be toggled like a light switch and still allow messages to be delivered. The end-to-end encryption isn’t a sugar coating, some sort of extra layer of protection — it’s fundamental to the messaging protocols themselves. It has to be, when you think about it. If it were possible for, say, Signal, to silently disable E2EE but still have messages go through, how could users ever trust the service? You could neither trust that what you were sending would be delivered securely, nor that what you received wasn’t intercepted by an interloper. There’s an explicit guarantee with all of these E2EE messaging platforms that messages can only go through securely. Removing E2EE wouldn’t require some mere tweak to the protocols, it would require replacing the protocols entirely (with inherently insecure ones).

And the notion that security updates, for every user in the world, would need the approval of the U.K. Home Office just to make sure the patches weren’t closing vulnerabilities that the government itself is exploiting — it boggles the mind. Even if the U.K. were the only country in the world to pass such a law, it would be madness, but what happens when other countries follow?

As I see it, the most likely outcome is that the U.K. passes the law, thinking that the grave concerns conveyed to them by the messaging services are overblown. That the platform providers are saying they can’t comply but they really just mean they don’t want to comply because it’s just difficult, not impossible. And when it becomes law, the platforms will hand it off to the nerds, the nerds will nerd harder, and boom, the platforms will fall into compliance with this law. That’s what they think will happen. What will actually happen, I believe, is that E2EE messaging platforms like WhatsApp (overwhelmingly popular in the U.K.), Signal, and iMessage will stop working and be pulled from app stores in the U.K., full stop. The U.K. seems to think it’s a bluff; I don’t.

Perhaps the argument — as made by Kouvakas — that these changes would run afoul of international law will resonate with the U.K. in a way that technical arguments, thus far, have not.

The BSA’s 2023 National Annual Meeting was all about how Scouting is moving forward. In addition to reinforcing its commitment to safety, the BSA also announced a new option for family dens.

Below is the official announcement:

Effective June 1, 2023, family packs that serve both girls and boys may now form dens with both girls and boys in kindergarten (Lion), first grade (Tiger), second grade (Wolf), third grade (Bear) and fourth-grade Webelos dens. Fifth-grade Cub Scouts are to remain in gender-specific dens to prepare them for joining a gender-specific Scouts BSA Troop.

How did the BSA come to this decision?

If I’ve learned anything from working with both the professionals and volunteers who determine the rules and policies of the Cub Scout program, it’s that they don’t make decisions like these based on hunches and feelings.

They make them based on research and data.

During the 2022-23 program year, 150 councils and more than 2,000 Cub Scout packs participated in a pilot program where dens of kindergarten through fourth-grade Cub Scouts were formed as family dens with both boys and girls. The pilot was an overwhelming success, with participating packs recruiting more girls and boys in the fall, ending the year with higher membership growth and significantly higher satisfaction among parents and leaders than non-participating packs.

Do Cub Scout family dens run a different program than single-gender dens?

No.

There is no change in the program. All current barriers-to-abuse policies apply.

The family den option allows family packs to form family dens. The BSA will be providing more marketing resources for fall 2023 (and beyond) recruitment with boys and girls in the same image. Program resources and position-specific training modules are currently being updated to reflect the family den option.

If one of the dens in my pack is a family den, do they all have to be family dens?

No.

The BSA offers lots of flexibility in forming dens. All of the dens in the pack do not have to be the same.  The BSA still believes that ideal dens are formed by grade and rank with 8-10 Cub Scouts per den, but the BSA also recognizes that in some situations, it doesn’t always work out that way.

The bottom line is, dens should be formed in a way that best meets the needs of the families the pack is seeking to serve. For example, packs could have a den of boys, a den of girls, a family den, a multi-rank den and any combination of different den types.

What is a multi-rank den?

Multi-rank dens are dens that have more than one rank of Cub Scouts. For example, a pack may have two kindergarteners (Lions) and three first-graders (Tigers) in the same den, with those five Cub Scouts each still working toward their grade-specific badge of rank.

Why can’t fifth-grade Arrow of Light dens be family dens?

The primary purpose of Arrow of Light dens is to prepare Cub Scouts for the kinds of experiences they’ll have in Scouts BSA. Since Scouts BSA troops remain single gender, it was decided that AOL dens should be single gender, too.

Does my pack have to offer family dens?

No.

If your chartering organization and pack committee feel like you can best serve your families by only offering single-gender dens, then you can continue doing so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVMspcLxtaA

Bloonface, in a thoughtful post regarding the stagnation in growth in the Fediverse:

Mastodon is at risk of falling into the trap that a lot of free/open source software does, where the idea of the software being “free as in speech” is expected to outweigh or explain away deficiencies in its usefulness. However, this ignores three salient facts:

• Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared;

• Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software, and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them; and

• When given the choice between a tool which is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint, and a tool which is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former.

After Elon Musk took the helm at Twitter there was an initial burst of new users and increased usage on Mastodon (and the rest of the Fediverse, but mostly this is about Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter). And then it flattened, and perhaps has even declined.

I would like to see Mastodon thrive. But the platform’s ideological zealotry is obviously holding it back and seemingly isn’t going to change. That’s why I’m much more optimistic about Bluesky’s long-term prospects. Six weeks later and I feel stronger than ever about this quip I posted in early May:

Bluesky: “If you liked Twitter, you’ll love Bluesky.”

Mastodon: “If you hated Twitter, you’ll like Mastodon.”

Hundreds of millions of people liked what Twitter once was, and what it aspired to be. Bluesky might be that.