“HBO’s next year will be ‘like childbirth,’ AT&T media CEO tells employees”

Oh, this sounds awesome. :\

Update from Engadget:

“The network’s one great skill is curation. If you’re an HBO subscriber, you know that its shows will be lavish, well-made and well-written. Even if you’re not a fan, it’s likely that the HBO association alone will encourage you to try it because it does only a handful of shows a year. Even a mediocre HBO show like, er, Westworld, is must-watch TV for big chunks of the audience. This trust would be undermined by Stankey’s "more is more” plan, and with it, the whole point of HBO.“

Exactly.

“Apple to deploy 1Password to all 123,000 employees, acquisition talks underway”

While I like the idea of better integration of 1password into Apple’s operating systems—I’ve been a user of the password manager for many years—I’m a little uneasy with this news. One reason I use a third-party password manager is that I do have occasional work to do on Windows machines, and like having a client there. Would Apple continue to maintain the Windows version if they acquired AgileBits? Hard to say, but it’s by no means guaranteed.

Update: 1password says it’s staying independent.

Ant-Man and the Wasp

★★★☆☆

Of the MCU movies, I might like Ant-Man the least. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it, but it felt like it didn’t have much behind the laughs to build on. In the comics, Hank Pym is one of the great minds of the Marvel Universe—a founding Avenger and the man who created Ultron. In the movies, there’s no room for great minds other than Tony Stark. Pym has one trick—size control—and so his legacy is well-contained away from the main line of heroes. Pym isn’t even Ant-Man: he’s an old man who might have been Ant-Man when he was younger, if there had been an MCU then.

Ant-Man and the Wasp improves on its predecessor in that it does a better job of weaving its comedy into a well-executed action movie, while establishing a more solid niche in the wider MCU. It rolls together a few moderately interesting plot lines and staffs them with good, funny actors and makes a movie that’s entertaining and exciting.

Evangeline Lily’s Hope Van Dyne is a nice addition to the MCU roster—she was in the first Ant Man movie, but comes in to her own as the Wasp in this sequel. She’s a trained scientist and fighter, the daughter of two heroes who raised her to be a hero in her own right and the rightful heir of the Pym legacy. This is quite a reversal from the comics, where she started as a socialite and Hank Pym’s love interest, who owed him most of her seat at the Avengers’ table. In that sense, this movie could well have been called “The Wasp and Ant-Man”, since Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man is her opposite and inferior in most ways, owing his seat in the MCU to Hope and her father. Her opening scene is a well-executed and exciting fight scene, featuring someone who’s trained to use her shrinking powers in concert with martial arts. It’s a great scene that sort of overshadows a lot of the later scenes.

Paul Rudd continues to be charming and funny, especially with his on-screen daughter (Cassie Lang, played by Abby Ryder Fortson). His chemistry with Lily and Michael Douglas’s Hank Pym is strong, and it’s hard to ask for more.

After enduring the weight of Avengers: Infinity War earlier this year, fans of the MCU deserved a break. Ant-Man and the Wasp succeeds in not only in delivering a lighthearted, action-filled romp that filled that need, but also in following its well-received predecessor—and in many ways besting it.

Update–July 7, 2018:

Vanity Fair has published a video with director Peyton Reed breaking down the Wasp’s kitchen fight scene described above. Spoiler Alert: While it doesn’t really give anything away, I wouldn’t watch that video until you’ve seen it in context.

Update–July 9, 2019:

The Verge has a fairly long piece with director Peyton Reed about the movie. I thought the bits about directing the physical comedy was interesting.

Update–July 16, 2018:

Bryan Bishop has followed up with notes on the credits scene from the movie for The Verge.

Can’t Debug In RubyMine After Update?

I found that an issue in Bootsnap conflicting with ruby-debug-ide (and others). The solution is to not enable Bootsnap during debugging. You can either comment out require "bootsnap/setup" in Boot.rb, or replace it with this line from the link:

require "bootsnap/setup" unless ENV["RUBYLIB"]&.match?(/ruby-debug-ide/).

“America’s biggest RV manufacturer warns tariffs are already raising costs”

Thor Industries is Airstream’s parent company. Now that iconic American companies including Harley-Davidson, GM, and now Airstream have all said they’re being hurt by Trump’s tariffs, how much longer are people going to believe that Trump is “for” them?

“President Donald Trump unveiled a 25 percent charge on steel imports and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum in March. Last week, the U.S. slapped those tariffs on Mexico, the European Union and Canada, three key trade partners that had been previously exempt.”

Apple Maps vs. Waze

Matthew Panzarino is this week’s guest on The Talk Show, and the article he wrote about Apple Maps I linked to earlier is the main subject. Panzarino mentioned that Apple feels that its new traffic data is going to “do a better job than Waze, or just as good”.

Again, the reason people use Waze isn’t just that its routing information is different (arguably better) that Google Maps, but that it also allows users to tag accidents, police, and other ephemeral on-road events. That’s what they need to aim for, but I doubt that they will. Apple tends to want its apps to be as simple to use as possible, and there’s no doubt that this kind of reporting makes things more complicated. Unless they let you just say, “Hey Siri, there’s a cop”, I can’t see this being in the app.

They might be inclined to figure out how to route you based on what kind of vehicle you’re driving, such as one that’s allowed in the HOV lane, or a motorcycle, for instance.