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An appreciation for jugaad engineering
Julian Chokkattu writing for Wired: Nothing’s CMF Devices Prove Yet Again Cheap Doesn't Have to Mean Boring
What's most remarkable about these devices is the price. I have tested cheap and flagship smartphones for nearly a decade, and after setting up the CMF Phone 1, I was pretty surprised to
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Another delightful site switches to Ghost
Mike Haynes has moved his crashthearcade blog to Ghost: Ghosting WordPress
The Ghost editor is really an example for WordPress' Gutenberg editor to follow. It functions largely in the same way but doesn't have any of the jank that makes Gutenberg so frustrating to use.
It’s actually amazing that the Gutenberg
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Artistic expression and financial return
Louie Mantia: Qualifying Art
We are all too different from each other and it is not sustainable for every piece of artwork or every product to reach 100% market saturation . Appealing to a global palate is a surefire way to make the blandest art.
Yes, yes, yes! Add this to my general annoyance in people
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The Acolyte is good
Alyssa Mercante for Kotaku: Star Wars: The Acolyte Is Doing a Different Kind of Fan-Service, and It Rocks
The
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Threads turns 1, as federation continues to Mark forward
Casey Newton interviewed Adam Mosseri on the First Year of Threads. He talks about a lot in here, but Adam
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Training bots not welcome
Cloudflare: Declare Your AIndependence: Block AI Bots, Scrapers and Crawlers With a Single Click
We hear clearly that customers don’t want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do so dishonestly. To help, we’ve added a brand new one-click to block all AI bots. It’s available for all customers,
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Mastodon is actively courting journalists
Eugen Rochko on the official Mastodon blog: Highlighting journalism on Mastodon
You will notice that underneath some links shared on Mastodon, the author byline can be clicked to open the author’s associated fediverse account, right in the app. This highlights writers and journalists that are active on the fediverse, and makes it easier than
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
