Apple works very hard to try and manage the massive preorder demand for day-one iPhone deliveries every year.¹ Apple originally allowed members of the iPhone Upgrade Program customers to set their orders up in advance, but eventually allowed everyone to pre-configure their phones before the official order time, leaving only the matter of the financial transaction to that Friday.…

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John Gruber:

Dithering is a new podcast from yours truly and Ben Thompson. Three episodes per week, 15 minutes per episode. Not a minute less, not a minute more.

It’s a subscription: $5/month or $50/year.

[…]

Dithering is subscription-only but it is entirely built on plain-old wide-open RSS, and is designed to work with any and all podcast players. There is no Dithering app and never will be. […] Episodes exist only in the feed, and thus, from a listener’s perspective, only in their podcast player.

Some great anecdotes here, but it breaks my heart that he posted them on Facebook, of all places.

Barack Obama, writing for Time magazine’s “Most Influential People of 2018” on Parkland, Florida students Cameron Kasky, Jaclyn Corin, David Hogg, Emma González, and Alex Wind:

America’s response to mass shootings has long followed a predictable pattern. We mourn. Offer thoughts and prayers. Speculate about the motives. And then — even as no developed country endures a homicide rate like ours, a difference explained largely by pervasive accessibility to guns; even as the majority of gun owners support commonsense reforms — the political debate spirals into acrimony and paralysis.

This time, something different is happening. This time, our children are calling us to account.

The Parkland, Fla., students don’t have the kind of lobbyists or big budgets for attack ads that their opponents do. Most of them can’t even vote yet.

But they have the power so often inherent in youth: to see the world anew; to reject the old constraints, outdated conventions and cowardice too often dressed up as wisdom.

The power to insist that America can be better.

He has such a distinct writing style — I can hear his voice as I read his words.

The platformization of the web has claimed many victims, RSS readers included. Google Reader's 2013 demise was a major blow; the company offed it in favor of "products to address each user's interest with the right information at the right time via the most appropriate means," as it Google executive Richard Gingras put it at the time. In other words, letting Google Now decide what you want. And the popular Digg Reader, which was born in response to that shuttering, closed its doors this week after a nearly four-year run.

Despite those setbacks, though, RSS has persisted. "I can't really explain it, I would have thought given all the abuse it's taken over the years that it would be stumbling a lot worse," says programmer Dave Winer, who helped create RSS.

I enjoyed this story on the state of RSS by Wired's Brian Barrett because it resonates with a trend I've also noticed in the past couple of years. Many of us have often praised social networks as "winners" in the battle against pure old RSS feeds, but the reality is that RSS is here to say. Perhaps, like rock and roll, RSS can never truly die.

What's even more interesting is that, beyond RSS as a protocol, RSS services and clients (web backends and apps) are improving and growing more powerful on a weekly basis now. Barrett mentioned Feedly, The Old Reader, and Inoreader (which I've been using since 2016 and offers terrific power user features); I would also add NewsBlur and Feedbin – two services that have relentlessly iterated on the RSS experience since Google Reader's demise. Just in the past few months, for instance, NewsBlur launched infrequent site stories to fix the very problem of subscribing to too many feeds, and Feedbin rolled out support for Twitter subscriptions. Both are genuine innovations that help people who want to get their news directly from the sources they choose. And if we look at the iOS side of this, apps like Fiery Feeds and lire are rethinking what advanced RSS readers for iPhone and iPad should be capable of. We wanted to do an RSS-focused episode of AppStories, and we ended up producing two of them (you can listen here and here) because there was just so much to talk about.

While millions of people may be happy getting their news from Facebook or an aggregator like Apple News (which I also use, occasionally, for more mainstream headlines), the resiliency of RSS makes me happy. There was a time when I thought all my news could come from social feeds and timelines; today, I'm more comfortable knowing that I – not a questionable and morally corrupt algorithm – fully control hundreds of sources I read each day.

→ Source: wired.com

Pr0 gam3r D.Va is the most-played Overwatch character at almost all levels of play, according to data released yesterday by game director Jeff Kaplan. To aid arguments about which characters are or aren’t balanced or popular at different skill levels, he dumped a big list of the most-played across all matchmaking tiers. Atop all but one bracket sits the Dorito-munching gremlin, with Mercy, Genji, and Roadhog well-represented at all levels of play too. My faker’s guide to being an Overwatch pr0 would say: play Winston, who’s only really common at the highest levels. (more…)