Podcast

Battery Life, Network Tweaks, and Cool Stuff Found — Mac Geek Gab 836

John F. Braun · · Add Comment

Has iOS 14.0.1 hurt your battery life? We might have a fix for you. Networking is always top-of-mind, and your two favorite geeks share some answers to your related questions. Then it’s Cool Stuff Found, where John and Dave share all the cool things you and they have discovered in the past week. Press play and enjoy learning five new things, folks!

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Facebook Doesn’t Like Netflix Documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’

Andrew Orr ·

Facebook has published criticism of “The Social Dilemma” a Netflix documentary that reveals how social platforms use algorithms as addiction.

“Rather than offer a nuanced look at technology, it gives a distorted view of how social media platforms work to create a convenient scapegoat for what are difficult and complex societal problems,” Facebook said.

However, one issued raised in the movie is that Facebook’s algorithms learn more specific things about users, like their preferred political party, and shows them news it think they will agree with. That problem doesn’t happen on the services Facebook compares itself to.

Difficult and complex societal problems that you monetize.

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Sci-Fi Authors Comment on Apple TV+ Series ‘Foundation’

Andrew Orr ·

Although “Foundation” won’t appear on Apple TV+ until 2021, science fiction authors Anthony Ha, Abby Goldsmith, and John Kessel talk about the books behind the series from author Isaac Asimov. John Kessel on psychohistory:

[Asimov is] basically saying if you have enough human beings—you have 100 million worlds, all inhabited by human beings—that psychohistory can predict the mass behavior of human beings, without being able to predict any individual human being’s behavior. That’s a cool idea.

I can’t wait until for the Apple TV+ series.

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YouTube Restores iOS 14 Picture in Picture to Mobile Website

Charlotte Henry ·

YouTube initially blocked iOS 14’s picture in picture function on its mobile website. However, Macrumors reported that the capability has now returned.

This is an apparent reversal of a change that YouTube explicitly made following the release of ‌iOS 14‌ which blocked such behavior. At that time, YouTube would only allow that capability for users with Premium accounts. Tonight’s change means that any YouTube visitor can use Picture in Picture in Safari. ‌iOS 14‌ introduced native Picture in Picture capability to the iPhone for the first time, however, apps have to explicitly support the feature. YouTube’s native app has never supported Picture in Picture for any of its users even though iPadOS has offered the capability for some time. There have been reports that YouTube has been testing this feature, but there have been no announcements.

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Some Historians Don't Like Digital Upscalers Making History 4K

Charlotte Henry ·

So-called ‘digital upscalers’ have turned grainy footage from bygone eras into high-quality 4k clips. However, Wired reported, some historians are not very happy about it.

Digital upscalers and the millions who’ve watched their work on YouTube say they’re making the past relatable for viewers in 2020, but for some historians of art and image-making, modernising century-old archives brings a host of problems. Even adding colour to black and white photographs is hotly contested. “The problem with colourisation is it leads people to just think about photographs as a kind of uncomplicated window onto the past, and that’s not what photographs are,” says Emily Mark-FitzGerald, Associate Professor at University College Dublin’s School of Art History and Cultural Policy.