What Tesla’s union-busting trial means for the rest of Silicon Valley

In some sense Tesla’s union question is an existential one: is Tesla a tech company or a car company? Car companies tend to have strong unions, while tech companies do not.
Musk runs Tesla like a tech company. Tesla’s done a top-to-bottom redesign of cars, and of the factory workflow. There are sudden pivots, and plenty of investment, despite a lack of profit — so far, so tech. Then you have the cars themselves: have to charge their batteries, the company can push over-the-air software updates to your car and totally change how it works, and uh they’re hackable. But they’re still cars: they go on roads, you drive them, and in most states you are legally compelled to buy car insurance for them.
Unions do exist in tech, though mostly among contract workers — the drivers of tech company employee shuttles have one, for instance. But Silicon Valley, the tech epicenter, exists in part because of opposition to unions, according to Alex Press. That’s how California beat out Boston in the post-World War II boom.

Password Autofill in iOS 12 now works with 1Password, Dashlane, and LastPass

Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 12, was released to the public earlier today, and that means it’s a great time to get well acquainted with some of its more useful new features. One of those is Password Autofill, a password manager tool that lets you store login credentials for the dozens of apps and services you likely access more on mobile today than ever before.
Even better: Apple will let you import password data from third-party providers so you don’t have to solely use its existing iCloud Keychain feature or give up using a trusted extension. Starting today with iOS 12’s release, multiple services have released mobile updates that allow you to set them as Password Autofill’s designated provider. Among the more popular services to support the feature are 1Password, Dashlane, and LastPass, all of which now support the autofill feature by authenticating your identity using Face ID, Touch ID, or a separate pin code.

This tilting kettle will make your coffee-loving friends livid

I’m a geek about a whole bunch of things, though coffee isn’t one of them. But, boy, do passions run hot when coffee preparation becomes the subject of a discussion. Take this recent Kickstarter, called The Automatica, as a good example. What I see is a cute gadget with a really appealing promo video. Set to a minimalist soundtrack of guitar strumming and engine rumbling, the video treats us to a view of the Salt Lake City skyline at sunset before moving on to pleasing closeups of bubbles foaming up as the coffee is filtered through the machine. The narration is calming and friendly. I kind of want to hang out with the makers of this gadget, they seem like good, chilled-out people.

Coffee-loving gadget nerds, though, they see through all of this facade and ask, “wait, isn’t this just a kettle that tilts?” To which the brief answer is “yes.” The longer answer, as per the Kickstarter pitch, is that the Automatica “controls temperature, flow rate, volume, pour pattern, and time so you don’t have to.” My colleagues are in uproar over this completely unnecessary design — engineered solutions for automated pour over coffee already exist and they’re self-contained little boxes — but, in all honesty, I like it exactly because it’s unnecessary. The tipping motion is like a one-step Rube Goldberg machine, and for me it triggers childhood memories of quirky inventions I’ve seen in comics and animated movies where the human is replaced by a clumsy mechanical concoction.