Federico Viticci reviews iOS 18 and also writes about how to balance his love of Apple tech and dislike of generative AI:
Technology without people behind it is just an empty chat box. I want to write about the fun, flexible, frequently flawed things humans do with tech, and I want to be remembered for having left something useful behind me.
I love the illustrations by Scout Wilkinson for the review. For me, I don't think AI has to be an all-or-nothing choice. It's a useful tool, but we can also embrace what humans are uniquely good at. This was the thinking behind M.b's audio narration too.
Jason Snell reflects on 10 years since starting Six Colors:
Ten years ago I took a leap into working for myself, not working in corporate media. For most days since, I’ve worked in my garage, writing articles for my site, recording podcasts, and writing the occasional piece for other places (including my former employer, which I couldn’t ever have predicted).
I don't really understand how OpenAI's o1 works, but I found today's Stratechery update helpful, contrasting the approach of o1 compared to other LLMs which can sometimes blindly follow the wrong path:
In summary, there are two important things happening: first, o1 is explicitly trained on how to solve problems, and second, o1 is designed to generate multiple problem-solving streams at inference time, choose the best one, and iterate through each step in the process when it realizes it made a mistake.
Not sure I have a favorite iOS 18 feature yet, but tapbacks with emoji are near the top of the list. Only problem is the fallback experience for iOS 17 and earlier users is bad enough that I don't want to actually send any emoji reactions for a while.
John Gruber’s article about last week’s iPhone event also compares Tim Cook’s Apple with what might’ve been. I agree with this part:
I feel confident that if Steve Jobs were alive and still leading Apple product development, there would have been no iPhone-like mind-blown-the-moment-you-first-saw-it new product in the intervening years.
What we would have is a more interesting Apple. As John says, products that are more quirky, more risky. It’s also a bit tragic that we’ll never know what Steve Jobs would’ve made of AI.
Love this metaphor from Dave Winer about how Micro.blog handles feeds and cross-posting:
It's sort of a Grand Central station for moving stuff around among the twitter-like systems.
I mentioned recently that I was considering removing trial accounts on Micro.blog until after the election, to minimize auto-created junk accounts. I've rolled out the first phase of that with some internal changes, and adjusted the 30-day trial down to 10 days for new accounts.
Teen Accounts on Instagram sounds like a very good change. Of course those of us with kids who were teens years ago were just guinea pigs for social media that prioritized ads over safety, but better late than never.
With a new iPhone coming this week, seems a good time to post my latest home screen. Same layout as before, but now using iOS 18 instead of blank spacer icons. In the dock: Hey, Epilogue, Strata, and Micro.blog.
After I made some Nostr improvements in M.b the other day, I caught up on a few conference videos to see what the community has been up to. Fascinated by this video of Jack explaining Nostr. It's like a reset, going from a powerful social media CEO to just a dude hanging out at conferences again.
On Jack Dorsey's point that in the age of AI, it's important to own your identity and content… For me it goes back to trust, and why personal blogs will be more valuable than algorithmic or retweeted posts from strangers. Lean in to the human voice and relationships with readers.
At first I was surprised that Mozilla.social is shutting down, but Mozilla didn't seem to have a complete strategy for the social web. Running a Mastodon server and investing in Mammoth were good first steps. Missing was anything that tied these efforts back to Firefox, Pocket, or new products.
The new Snap Spectacles are too bulky but they're the first AR glasses that I can actually imagine becoming as convenient as normal glasses. These will be small and great before the Vision Pro is cheap and light. Assuming Snap wants to eventually make a real product, not a dev prototype.
I don't get why people subscribe to a service or newsletter and then mark those emails as spam. You asked for the email! I know everyone is forgetful, but marking as spam doesn't help anyone (and in fact hurts the email sending reputation of small companies like Micro.blog).
I submitted Micro.blog's Threads support to Meta again with a new video demo, and it was rejected again. Will try again later this week. So I guess this feature is still in beta for a while longer.
Pre-ordered Directing at Disney a few months ago and promptly forgot about it until it arrived this week. Looks good just flipping through the pages. 📚
I was hoping adding Bluesky video upload would be a quick win this week, but it's going to take a little longer. The API works differently than photo upload. Need to restructure my code first before I can support it well.
I continue to be impressed with Bluesky's growth. From Last Week in the ATmosphere, covering the 10 million users milestone with 5.5 million monthly active users:
User retention after this new signup wave is also notably high, with daily active users peaking at 1.91 million, and staying at 1.57 million some two weeks later.
I hope the uppercase "AT" can be dropped over time, though. 🙂 Just "Atmosphere" is nice.
I blogged when the JD Vance couch joke started making the rounds that we should avoid disinformation even when it's funny. So perhaps there's a bit of karma with the fake Springfield, OH story. Trump would make up racist things about immigrants no matter what, of course! Our standard is higher. 🇺🇸
Letting the Republicans say "well, Democrats make up facts too" is an unforced error. We do not make things up. We do not knowingly spread misinformation. Policy is rooted in what's really happening and a desire to make people's lives better. 🇺🇸
Dan Moren writing at Macworld:
Look, I’m not ungrateful. But the truth remains that nothing stokes the imagination of what Apple could do with its products more than the release of its latest hardware and software. As iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and all the other latest OSes arrive, we not only end up picking through all of the new features and capabilities to see what’s new but also coming to grips with what’s not there and the limitations of what is.
This is so true. Software developers know that when you release feature A, people will ask why not feature B too. 🙂
Here’s the video for my demo at FediForum. It shows Micro.blog posting, cross-posting services, and an experiment with Ice Cubes. Still not sure if the Mastodon API support will ship or in what form.
Earlier this year I took a photo of the demolition of the Frank Erwin Center. Today I took another photo. It’s just a huge field of dirt and grass, no sign that anything was ever here.
Just posted Core Intuition 613 with our discussion of the iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia releases, changes that might affect our apps, and the new limitations on control key shortcuts.
Wayward Coffee. ☕️
Frilly's Seafood Bayou Kitchen, in Denton.
Special shout-out to the UPS driver who delivered my new iPhone while I was out of town for a day. Not only did they hide the box on our porch, they moved a potted plant in front of it to make it even harder to see.
The iPhone Pro 16 Max is my first "huge" iPhone. So far I'm liking the size. It's a little awkward but doesn't feel too big. I wanted to try this size as a sort of very, very small iPad, for reading and (sometimes) actual work.
Finished watching the WordCamp Q&A from Matt Mullenweg. Very unique this year, largely dedicated to calling out WP Engine as taking more from the WordPress community than they're giving back, based on Matt's blog post here. I don't have strong opinions on this, but it'll be something to follow.
This story about Microsoft and nuclear power underscores how big a deal AI is:
If approved by regulators, Three Mile Island would provide Microsoft with the energy equivalent it takes to power 800,000 homes, or 835 megawatts. Never before has a U.S. nuclear plant come back into service after being decommissioned, and never before has all of a single commercial nuclear power plant’s output been allocated to a single customer.
Love it or hate it, AI is not just a new feature, like a revamped Clippy. It’s going to have a profound impact on computing.
From Mark Gurman’s latest, the AI rollout still feels haphazard. ChatGPT may come as soon as 18.2:
Looking further ahead, Apple is already racing to complete a major iOS 18.2 upgrade, which will include features like Genmoji, ChatGPT integration and the Image Playground app. The company is looking to get that release down to zero-bug status in early November so it can ship it by December.
But the new Siri will apparently be later, maybe spread across 18.3 and 18.4 next year.
After reading Matt Mullenweg's posts about WP Engine, I looked into pricing for WP Engine and a few other popular WordPress hosting services. Most are really scammy, with deceptive intro prices and lots of upsells. Haven't found any that are as simple and transparent as Micro.blog: $5 or $10. Easy.
Following up on Three Mile Island, good point from Ben Thompson today:
…nuclear energy and data centers are a perfect match for two reasons. The most obvious one is that data centers need power 24/7, which nuclear provides. The less obvious one is that nuclear power needs to be delivering power 24/7; it doesn’t scale down. Data centers, though, are a perfectly predictable consumer of power.
