Will it be Oratok or Tikacle?

🕺 ByteDance turned down Microsoft’s proposal to buy TikTok’s US operations. I guess that means that we won’t be seeing the TikTok Teams Enterprise 2020 Edition with the bonus 1980s Flight Simulator Filter Pack anytime soon. Thank goodness. It’s for the best, really.

👍 Codespaces will be exclusive to GitHub instead of being part a GitHub and Visual Studio offerings: “We believe that by consolidating the current Codespaces experiences into one, we can eliminate confusion, simplify the experience for everyone, and make more rapid progress to address customer feedback.” Having tested (and been really stoked by) both, I’m glad to see this consolidation. There’s a lot of potential in Codespaces and taking some complexity out of both building and explaining it is a net positive.

😷 I’ve long been fascinated with the differences in the crossing points between the US and Canada border. Going north has always been pleasant and going south, well, not so pleasant. David Frum’s story of crossing the US-Canada border twice in two months during the pandemic is a sad study in the contrast between a government that’s paying attention to the right priorities, and one that isn’t.

🦍 There’s a new grocery delivery service startup in Berlin called Gorillas that delivers in 10 minutes if you live near one of their bases. They’ve got quite a nice selection of things, including our family favorite Oatly. And, in a huge bonus for Berlin, they deliver on Sunday.

🔔 I might just have to build one of Aaron Patterson’s analog terminal bells. The video explaining it is pure gold.

🤣 Update: So much for the OraTok joke. Turns out neither Microsoft nor Oracle get to buy TikTok. This whole thing has been looney tunes from the start and it’s just getting sillier by the day.