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Digital price tags are a good thing
Jason Kottke: Walmart Is Switching to Electronic Price Tags
Walmart is switching to electronic price tags that “allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds”. No one wants this!! No one wants surge pricing on ice cream and price increases on items already in your cart.
The tone of this post surprised
Apple
My honest feelings about the Vision Pro after nearly 5 months
I’m closing in on 5 months with the Vision Pro and I thought it was a good time to post an update on how I’m feeling about the product. I know I’ve talked about it on and off since launch, but this is where I left my initial review:
For my part,
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This might be why the Vision Pro doesn’t get Apple Intelligence
John Gruber: WWDC 2024: Apple Intelligence
[A]ccording to well-informed little birdies, Vision Pro is already making significant use of the M2’s Neural Engine to supplement the R1 chip for real-time processing purposes — occlusion and object detection, things like that. With M-series-equipped Macs and iPads, the Neural Engine is basically
How I built one of the biggest BIN lookup sites in the world, and how it was killed
Below is a lightly-edited transcript of a talk I gave recently at work where I walked through the story
Members
How many Mac users use Safari? Diving into the numbers nearly drove me mad. (members post)
It seems like such a simple question, and I thought I had an answer, but I wasn't even close. Today we dive down the rabbit hole and try to get to an answer.
You get the good and the bad
I posted this on Mastodon, showing Perplexity, which is a search engine that says it will browse the web for you and give you the answer, just straight up plagiarizing the first result for the question I asked. And I’m not talking plagiarism like the adamantly anti-LLM crowd thinks everything in LLM does
Members
Incomplete thought: Why “Pixar isn’t good anymore” doesn't vibe with me (members post)
Why does it feel like Pixar movies aren't as significant as they used to feel? Is Pixar just making bad movies, or is something else to blame?
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Apple Podcasts transcriptions rock, and they could rock even harder
Ari Saperstein writing for The Guardian: Accessible and ‘A Pleasure to Read’: How Apple’s Podcast Transcriptions Came to Be
Apple’s podcast app will transcribe every new uploaded episode. “We wanted to do it for all the shows, so it’s not just for like a narrow slice of the catalogue,” says Cave. “It
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We’ve all gotten pretty loose with the term “Sherlocked” these days
Ivan Mehta for TechCrunch: The Apps That Apple Sherlocked at WWDC 2024
In 2002, Apple released Sherlock 3 with features similar to Watson, making Karelia’s app redundant. Since then, people in tech circles have used the term “Sherlocking” whenever they want to refer to a new feature from Apple that does the same thing
Members
Living that beta life (members post)
Why the hell do I do this to myself every year?!
Links
Yes, Apple is also training on public web data
From Apple’s Machine Learning Research blog: Introducing Apple’s on-Device and Server Foundation Models
We train our foundation models on licensed data, including data selected to enhance specific features, as well as publicly available data collected by our web-crawler, AppleBot. Web publishers have the option to opt out of the use of
My (not so) brief thoughts on WWDC 2024, 24 hours later
I’ve had a little time to let the WWDC keynote sink in, and wanted to share my overall feelings on Apple’s big announcements in one post. And yes, I’ve installed the developer betas on every single primary device in my life (Mac, iPad, iPhone, Watch, and Vision Pro), so these opinions also
The compromise of how Android and iOS 18 do themed icons
iOS 18 will add the ability for users to theme their home screen by setting all icons to a custom
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THAT FEATURE IS SO COOL! I’ll never use it, though.
Daryl Baxter writing for iMore: iPadOS 18 Looks Great, but It Still Doesn't Fix the iPad's Biggest Problem
I want to be clear — the features that Calculator brings to the iPad, as well as the Math Notes that you can use with Apple Pencil and Notes are fantastic. Users who struggle
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Who will get your vote in the Miss AI pageant?
Chloe Veltman for NPR: Fake Beauty Queens Charm Judges at the Miss AI Pageant
Models created using generative artificial intelligence
I’m going to have fun at WWDC
The cynic in me knows that WWDC is a corporate event meant to get people excited about what Apple is working on so that people like me buy more products from them. The keynote is a marketing event, I get it.
But also, I don’t really care, and I’m going to enjoy the
How I use YouTube (without the stress it apparently causes other folks)
YouTube might be my favorite website in the world, and apparently that’s at odds with the opinion of many people I see online. People complain about ads, about the UI, and about THE ALGORITHM, but I just don’t have these issues. Today I wanted to quickly give an overview for how I interact
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What happens when you defederate a server
Carl Colglazier, Nathan TeBlunthuis, and Aaron Shaw in their study, The Effects of Group Sanctions on Participation and Toxicity:
In this study, we investigated the effects of defederation events on the activity levels and toxic posting behavior of accounts in the Fediverse. The results indicate that such events produce asymmetric effects on activity for affected
