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I don’t have strong opinions about a product I haven’t used
Joe Rossignol for MacRumors: iPhone Was Missing These 10 Essential Features When Unveiled in 2007
Today marks the 17th anniversary of the late Steve Jobs unveiling the original iPhone at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco. While the device was significantly more advanced than any other smartphone on the market at the time, the iPhone
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Who’s ready for Walmart to decide what food you buy?
David Pierce for The Verge: Walmart’s AI Search Makes Shopping Faster, and Its AI Delivery Makes It Invisible
The future of grocery shopping is no grocery shopping at all. It’s your fridge just being full, always, automatically.
A couple things on this one…
First, for many people, you don’t buy as much
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Substack wants to have its cake and eat it too
Casey Newton: Substack Says It Will Remove Nazi Publications From the Platform
over the past couple years Substack has come to more closely resemble the social networks it often criticizes. Each week, Substack sends users a personalized, algorithmically ranked digest of posts from writers they don’t yet follow — a feature that can help fringe
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How we can maybe explain the rumored upcoming very expensive iPads
Tim Hardwick: OLED iPad Pro Prices to Start From $1,500, Rising to as Much as $2,000
Apple's upcoming OLED iPad Pro will start at $1,500, rising to between $1,800 and $2,000 depending on size and configuration, representing a major increase in prices compared to Apple's current
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2023 didn’t just break the iPad’s streak (“wah!”)
Zack Zwiezen: 2023 Was the First Waluigi-Less Year Since 2000
As seen on the extensive fan wiki, Waluigi has
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A splash of color
Chris Nicholas: A new blog for 2024
It’s been a long time since I’ve published a blog post, two whole years. Part of the reason is that it took too much effort to create posts for my previous blog. I needed better DX. A few nights ago, feeling inspired after reading articles by
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Nintendo is Nintendo
Keza MacDonald: Nintendo’s Design Guru Shigeru Miyamoto: ‘I Wanted to Make Something Weird’
Miyamoto is often called the Spielberg of games and Nintendo dubbed gaming’s Pixar, but he doesn’t like those comparisons. “Miyamoto is Miyamoto and Nintendo is Nintendo,” was how he put it in an interview in February 2023.
I strongly
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Reasons to be optimistic
Nick Heer: How to Be Optimistic About Technology Now
When I was much younger, I assumed people who were optimistic must have misplaced confidence. How anyone could see a future so bright was a complete mystery when, I reasoned, when what we are exposed to is a series of mistakes and then attempts at correction
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The future of LLMs is local
I saw this post over on json.blog, OpenAI Is Just Uber, which sounds like it makes sense, but I think is drawing the wrong conclusions on a couple fronts.
A decade later, ride-sharing hasn’t evolved significantly since its launch. Costs have risen as consumers now pay the actual marginal cost of their
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Walking away and feeling great about it
Ben Werdmuller: Leaving the Nazi Bar
If I find that the owner of the living room allows people who make me or my friends feel unsafe — or, as is true in this case, pays them to hang out there, and makes money from their presence — I can use the law of two feet to leave.
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2023 was a big year for the fediverse. 2024 could be even bigger
David Pierce for The Verge, 2023 in Social Media: The Case for the Fediverse
It doesn’t make sense that we have a dozen usernames, a dozen profiles, a dozen sets of fans and friends. All that stuff should belong to me, and I should be able to access it and interact with it anywhere
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Swing back to the blog
Chris McLeod, Blogging is where it's at, again
Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but stumbling into such a trove of active blogs has enthused me about blogging as a medium again. It’s sparked a thought that through a combination of increased blogging activity, declining platforms, and increasing adoption of
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That time Microsoft blew it with Xbox
Steven Asarch for Kotaku, Xbox’s Biggest Flop Was a Decade Ahead of Its Time
Microsoft’s follow-up was the Xbox One, the always-online console bundled with the much-maligned motion control accessory known as the Kinect. To be blunt, the console’s introduction was a bit of a clusterfuck.
It may be
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It’s not a problem, it’s an opportunity!
I wrote a little about this already, but I also wanted to link to Ken White’s Substack Has a Nazi Opportunity because it makes a few points very well and is worth a read.
I dislike McKenzie’s apologia for Substack’s policy and for Richard Hanania because it has a sort of detached,
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I’m always happy I use Ghost and not Substack, but I’m extra happy today
Hamish McKenzie in a note on Substack:
We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power. We are committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts.
Here’s what I’ll say for myself,
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The surprising challenge to run the best web apps locally
Tim Bradshaw for the Financial Times: Apple Wants AI to Run Directly on Its Hardware Instead of in the Cloud
While Microsoft and Google have largely focused on delivering chatbots and other generative AI services over the Internet from their vast cloud computing platforms, Apple’s research suggests that it will instead focus on AI
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Pedestrian deaths have been rising for a decade. Mostly in America, and mostly at night. Why?
Emily Badger, Ben Blatt, Josh Katz for the New York Times: Why Are So Many American Pedestrians Dying at Night?
What’s even more perplexing: Nothing resembling this pattern has occurred in other comparably wealthy countries. In places like Canada and Australia, a much lower share of pedestrian fatalities occurs at night, and those fatalities
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The Beeper Mini saga
Beeper: Beeper Mini Is Back
In the first 48 hours, it was downloaded by more than 100,000 people. The reason for its success is clear: Android and iPhone customers desperately want to be able to chat together with high quality images/video, encryption, emojis, typing status, read receipts, and all modern chat features. We
