Members
I've completely changed my read later workflow (members post)
I'm experimenting with a brand-new app for saving things to read later. I don't know if it's going to stick, but today we're going to see if the grass is actually greener on the other side.
Stop calling the robots “smart”
There is a 1895 French short film called L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station in English) where a stationary camera was set up on a tripod and filmed a train, well, coming into the station. The story goes that some
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The hype cycle running face-first into reality
Jonathan Maze writing for Restaurant Business: McDonald's Is Ending Its Drive-Thru AI Test
McDonald’s is ending its two-year-old test of drive-thru, automated order taking (AOT) that it has conducted with IBM and plans to remove the technology from the more than 100 restaurants that have been using it.
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Microsoft vs. their robot on what “freeware” is
Sean Endicott: Ever Put Content on the Web? Microsoft Says That It's Okay for Them to Steal It Because It's 'Freeware.'
"With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use.
The empowering nature of a general interface
There's been some chatter for a while that the chatbot interfaces we have for LLMs today are not that useful for most people and that the real solution everyone wants is for these tools to be integrated into more traditional user interfaces. While I do agree that many use cases are better solved
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Get wrecked, Perplexity
Elizabeth Lopatto writing for The Verge: Perplexity’s Grand Theft AI (emphasis mine):
“Someone else did it” is a fine argument for a five-year-old. And consider the response further. If Srinivas wanted to be ethical, he had some options here. Option one is to terminate the contract with the third-party scraper. Option
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A couple reasons I think big games on iPads and iPhones aren't setting the world on fire
Malcolm Owen for AppleInsider: Why AAA Games Promoted by Apple Flop in the App Store
Assassin's Creed Mirage was downloaded approximately 123,000 times since June 6, Appfigures says. However, it has only managed gross revenue of $138,000.
The report believes that the revenue level indicates that fewer than 3,000 people
The public web and consent
This blog exists on the public web, and that means you as a user have a lot of control over both how you consume my work and what you can do with it. I publish to the web, so I suppose the canonical way of reading my work is to do it in a web
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RCS is rolling out to iOS 18 beta users (as long as you’re on a major carrier)
Filipe Espósito writing for 9to5Mac: US carriers enabling RCS for iPhone users running iOS 18 beta 2
Now it seems that these carriers have flipped the switch and are now enabling RCS for users running the latest iOS 18 beta.
Amazing! I can’t wait to text full-size photos to my brother on Android!
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Preparing for the Era of Orchestrated Apps
Jason Snell on Six Colors: Preparing for the Era of Orchestrated Apps
When everything is orchestrated properly, all the capabilities of all your apps are put into a big soup, and the AI system at the heart of your device can choose the right capabilities to do what you need it to do—without you
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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
