“With this new capability, users will now get an ‘[Item] Found Moving With You’ alert on their device if an unknown Bluetooth tracking device is seen moving with them over time, regardless of the platform the device is paired with.

…

"If a user gets such an alert on their iOS device, it means that someone else’s AirTag, Find My accessory, or other industry specification-compatible Bluetooth tracker is moving with them.”

I’m happy to see a cross-company effort to make this work for Android users as well as iOS users. Striking the right balance between alerting a user appropriately and sending confusing messages is hard, though. In two recent cases, I saw confusing false positives. In the first, I was staying in a house for a week with a team of co-workers. We all got warnings that each others’ AirTags were seen with us for too long, and some of the less tech savvy members of the team were alerted that unknown AirTags had been near them for too long, which concerned them. Of course it was true: I had AirTags in my own bags (as did others in the group), and we’d all been together for a long enough time to trigger the warning. In the next incident, I was on a long international flight, and personally got over a dozen such notifications, I’m sure triggered by all the fellow passengers who’d put AirTags in their luggage and been traveling near me for hours.

I’m worried that such false positives will lessen the impact of the messages in the case of a real, maliciously planted tracker, but I don’t have a good solution.

David Zipper, writing at Fast Company:

“With the Malibu’s demise, GM will no longer sell any sedans in the U.S. In that regard, it will have plenty of company. Ford stopped producing sedans for the U.S. market in 2018. And it was Sergio Marchionne, the former head of Stellantis, who triggered the headlong retreat in 2016 when he declared that Dodge and Chrysler would stop making sedans.”

So unfortunate that we are now clogging our roads with cumbersome, mostly hideous SUVs.

When asked, automakers are quick to blame the sedan’s decline on shifting consumer preferences. Americans simply want bigger cars, the story goes, and there’s some truth to it. Compared to sedans, many SUV and pickup models provide extra cargo space and give the driver more visibility on the highway. In a crash, those inside a heavier car have a better chance of escaping without injury—although the same can’t be said for pedestrians or those in other vehicles.

As the article points out later: if everyone drives a big SUV, which is pretty much the case these days, no one has “more visibility”, nor do they have a “better chance of escaping without injury”. Now we’re just stuck on a new playing field—one littered with big, inefficient vehicles.

This is an unmitigated disaster. Bigger vehicles have their place: I own a big van, and have owned a large truck; both had their purpose, and that purpose was not regular driving. I harbor no resentment towards those who truly need specialized vehicles. But for those who have them merely because they like to be bigger on the road, we should exact a cost: tax the behemoths for their disproportionate impact to our society. Give people economic disincentives to behave this way, and perhaps people will drive regular-sized cars again, and we won’t have to worry about being the smaller vehicle in a crash.

Apologies for the Apple News link to The Wall Street Journal, but it’s the only way I read the WSJ. This link is worth the effort, as it is a truly charming story of a man who has fought for $3,000 in back pay from the government for over a decade, improbably landing all the way to the Supreme Court. Despite the winding road, it’s filled with optimism and promise.

David Pierce, writing at The Verge

“At 5.3mm thick for the 11-inch model and 5.1mm for the 13-inch tablet, this new iPad is noticeably thinner and lighter than anything the company has made before.”

This looks great! Aside from iPadOS issues, “thinner and lighter” would have been my #1 request for the new iPad Pro, and it looks like they’ve knocked it out of the park. I usually carry my current iPad Pro wrapped in the Magic Keyboard, and that combo is pretty thick and heavy, and this looks to have dramatically reduced that. The improved screen would have been #2 on my list, and it sounds like this new screen is going to be better than the outgoing Pro’s screen, so that’s a solid win as well. The M4 is just icing on the cake as far as I’m concerned.

I do wish they’d come up with a way for the Magic Keyboard to also work with a Vision Pro. If I’m carrying a perfectly good keyboard and trackpad with my iPad, it sure would be nice if it connected to my Vision Pro as well. I know that would have required Bluetooth and power, so it was always unlikely, but it was on my wish list.

The pricing is certainly high enough to give pause. I ordered the 13" Pro with 1TB and cellular, and with the new Magic Keyboard, Pencil Pro, and AppleCare+, it was ~$2600. That’s MacBook Pro territory. That said, I use this as my main portable computer; I have a Mac Studio for my main personal machine. As I’ve said before, having an always-on cellular connection is awesome for a mobile machine—I’m not interested in tethering except under exceptional circumstances. Now that this appears to be in MacBook Air territory in terms of size and weight, but with a significantly better screen, I’m happy.

Now we just need Apple to show some signs of taking iPadOS improvements seriously at WWDC next month.

The latest edition of my favorite style guide introduced some changes that I have mostly adopted in my own writing before now, and agree with wholeheartedly. A selection of favorites:

“An initial The in the title of a newspaper or other periodical that includes one (as on a masthead or cover) will now be retained in running text (The New York Times and The American Naturalist but the Chicago Tribune and the American Journal of Sociology).

This one has always bothered me. If it’s in the masthead, it should be in the citation!

"The first word of a grammatically complete sentence following a colon will now get an initial capital.

Finally!

"The terms ebook and esports will join email as exceptions to the rule for hyphenating e-terms.

I wonder when "ebike” will follow. I still use “e-bike”, but can see the argument for eliminating the hyphen.

“We’ll clarify our rules relative to compound modifiers that follow a noun to allow for certain hyphenated exceptions. For example, though a well-read student is well read (no change to our current rules), a first-rate editor will remain first-rate after the noun. We’ll also clarify our rules for compound modifiers that may remain open before a noun, as the term guest room in guest room access.

I generally find this better fits real-world usage.

"The generic singular they will now be considered acceptable even in formal writing—for example, when the antecedent is an indefinite pronoun (someone forgot their coat) or when referring to a person whose gender is unknown or irrelevant (will the driver of the yellow sedan please move their car) or whose identity must be concealed (the author wants their privacy protected). These generic uses complement the referential singular they, which we covered for the first time in the last edition relative to people who identify with they/them pronouns.”

Good. Catching up with the times.

Madilynne Medina, at SFGate:

“Drivers of cars with a Clean Air Vehicle decal issued by the state have enjoyed the privilege of using an HOV lane without the required number of passengers since 2005 thanks to a federal transportation bill. But unless Congress renews the program through new legislation, it’s set to expire Sept. 30, 2025.

"But Goodwin [a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission] isn’t optimistic that clean air vehicle drivers will get an extension. He told SFGATE he believes the program could disappear for good after its expiration.”

Letting this expire feels premature to me. While we don’t currently have an electric vehicle, we used to. That access was a big reason for buying it, as well as for getting rid of it at the end of the lease when we no longer had the long commutes. Given the price premium that electric vehicles still largely demand, and that we in the Bay Area have so many HOV lanes that are relatively unused, I think this incentive should be renewed.

Gail Sherman, writing at Boing Boing:

“When the Writers Guild of America went on strike, Jeopardy producers decided to continue the show – without writers. […] A seemingly never-ending series of tournaments followed….”

No kidding! It was tournament after tournament for months. I liked the Second Chance tournaments, but it definitely got to be too much. Funnily enough, the level of play was so high with champions (or near champions) competing against each other every day that it was jarring to go back to—dare I say?—ordinary players. But I’m glad that we’re back to regular play.

I never watched The Chase, so I was unfamiliar with Victoria Groce. Watching her take the Jeopardy Invitational Tournament win was fun; she was great. It’s rare to see someone still have what it takes to compete at the highest levels well over a decade since her first appearance.

Speaking of “recombobulate”, Wiktionary has the first citation as being from Piers Anthony in the book Night Mare in 1987: “They never touched living creatures directly, however; contact with warm flesh discombobulated them, and it took them a long time to get recombobulated.” Who knew?

Benjamin Schneider, at FastCompany:

“Of course, the biggest barrier to bike or e-bike adoption is street safety. But the best way to build a constituency for bikeable streets is to flood the zone with bikes, creating a virtuous cycle where more cyclists vividly justify the need for better bike infrastructure. That’s what New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and San Francisco have done through their popular bikeshare programs. Scooter share services have had a similar, albeit somewhat lesser, effect in smaller cities across the country.”

Where we live, bike access on our main corridor is spotty at best, and there are a couple of intersections that are downright scary. That said, there are a lot more people on e-bikes these days, and I love the idea of “flooding the zone” to motivate our local governments to enhance infrastructure.

On top of road infrastructure, I think that supermarkets and other shopping destinations could differentiate themselves in a positive—and I’d bet financially meaningful—way by creating first-class, secure parking for e-bikes.

“Poor infrastructure notwithstanding, e-bikes are popular: Americans purchased more e-bikes than cars in 2022. And e-bike subsidy programs are a hit wherever they’ve been offered. Connecticut’s program was oversubscribed in three days. Tampa received five times more applications than it could afford. Denver’s program was so inundated by applications when it opened that it needed to be paused.”

2022 was under the extreme influence of the pandemic, including the very high price of cars at the time, but this is still a great stat.

Mike Johnston, at The Online Photographer:

“The signs (and the word) were the brainchild of Barry Bateman, the Director of Mitchell Airport. Harold Mester, Mitchell Airport’s Public Relations Manager, said, "Whether it’s a word or not, I think we can all agree we all feel discombobulated after going through a security checkpoint and need a minute to recombobulate.” According to an article in OnMilwaukee.com, not a single grammarian complained. The word was named the most creative word of the year by the American Dialect Society in 2009. It’s a fun word because discombobulate is a fun word.“

I love it. I’ve never flown through Milwaukee nor seen the sign, but it’s perfect.