George Black

[George Black @georgeblackm]

@GrantSlatton @Cloudflare @threepointone Let me know if you see any issues!

[George Black @georgeblackm]

@GrantSlatton @Cloudflare @threepointone Hey Grant, we added dark mode to the Access login page! This has been on my list for a while, this tweet was the push I needed. 😅

Just clear your custom background color to see it kick in. (Custom background colors keep the page in light mode.)

[George Black @georgeblackm]

@koby_pierce Love it, hope you’re able to find a more efficient way to automate it! There are supposedly some holes in the Austin service area I’m curious about.

[George Black @georgeblackm]

@JoannaStern @gmail Gmail lost the race to… Ford

[Jim Farley @jimfarley98]

Our team has updated the @Ford app to work with Apple iPhone Duo. Looks great! especially the open view. If you have the Duo, update the app and let me know what you think.

[George Black @georgeblackm]

@Cartidise https://t.co/ue3JtuIw9f

[George Black @georgeblackm]

@FutureIsOrangeX @johnternus https://t.co/ue3JtuIw9f

[Johnnie Manzari @johnnie]

Portrait mode launched 10 years ago today.

I think it resonated with people because it didn’t feel digital. It felt analog. And this was likely because the inspiration behind its technique went all the way back to oil painting. Sometimes pure math isn’t enough; you need to combine it with insights from the liberal arts.

If you recall Portrait mode shipped a month after the iPhone did. This was because this insight about oil painting took a while to figure out.

Initially, Portrait mode was seen as a giant math problem. You’d do disparity calculations on the two sensors and output a depth map. The problem was this approach feels and looks digital; it feels fake. In areas without texture, it’s impossible to do this calculation. In areas with ultra fine detail, a lower resolution depth map leads to terrible transitions and a full resolution depth map takes forever to compute. One solution would be to reduce the amount of bokeh so the issues are not as obvious. But then you lose the whole point of the feature, which was to make it look like you had a large, wide-open lens.

The solution to this conundrum—the tradeoff between artifacts and the amount of blur— was quite elegant, but it took a while to stumble across. There’s a saying in painting that if you get the eyes right, nothing else matters. Inspired by this principle from oil painting, the idea was to make sure we never got the eyes wrong. We brought in a machine learning block to find the eyes, and draw a mask layer that protected them, then paired that with the disparity depth map. Counterintuitively, the solution was not to decrease the amount of blur, it was to increase it. The additional blur that we could add once the eyes were protected allowed us to hide the artifacts that were create by bad depth calculation. We let the ears go soft, let the nose go a bit soft. This is that wide open look that people loved, even if people didn’t realize that the ears going soft was why.

I was thinking about this recently with regard to AI. We’ll be able to do more amazing things… we just need to study the masters who came before us.

[George Black @georgeblackm]

@jimfarley98 @Ford Ford app updating for Duo before Google apps was not on my bingo card

[George Black @georgeblackm]

@Cigna Sent!

[George Black @georgeblackm]

Dear @Cigna you might have a z-index issue, I can't see the dropdown menu. This is in Safari on macOS Tahoe.

[George Black @georgeblackm]

@jessesingal I don’t think she was pretending, I think she genuinely didn’t understand. I’ve met people with this same kind of “aloofness”, if you will.

[George Black @georgeblackm]

@philipwalford @Technovangelist @Airbnb Cooked ‘em

[George Black @georgeblackm]

@AustinAirport @ryantsonnenberg @LoewyLawFirm Hell yeah, thank you

[George Black @georgeblackm]

@chan_k GOAT

[Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota]

Some stats on #php2shell. In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the @Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.

[George Black @georgeblackm]

Damn, Gruber is such a good writer. Now I’m insatiably curious to see if iPadOS adopts any Duo-isms in the next year.

[John Gruber @gruber]

It's been a lot of fun trying the Duo out for a week, but it feels like I've gotten to use an extraordinarily polished prototype — not a finished product that I'd want to buy and carry.
https://t.co/hvffMiZPqm

[Antonio Cavedoni @verbosus]

HomeView: really happy we kerned lowercase with uppercase (eV) when we designed San Francisco many years ago. I understand why most fonts don't do it, but it made sense for Apple. You'd be surprised how many little details like that are in SF, never mentioned. Still proud of it!

[Parker Ortolani @ParkerOrtolani]

so we have computers that think, cars that fly, phones that fold, gadgets with eyes and ears, robots that can interact with our world and YOU’RE BORED WITH TECHNOLOGY?!

[Tesla @Tesla]

Holy smokes

[Kyle Conner @itskyleconner]

INSANE