Joseph Bernstein, New York Times
nearly three-quarters of podcast consumers play podcast videos, even if they minimise them
I dont think this is related to video as much as people seem to think. It may be more related to ease of access. When most people are opening Youtube to listen to music / watch videos for entertainment. It makes perfect sense to use the same website you already have open.
OpenAI reportedly mulls buying Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s AI hardware startup | TechCrunch
OpenAI is said to have discussed acquiring the AI hardware startup that former Apple design lead Jony Ive is building with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
Running out of companies to buy and ruin, billionaires are now acquiring themselves….
Apple-UK data privacy row should not be secret, court rules - BBC News
judge has sided with a coalition of civil liberties groups and news organisations - including the BBC - and ruled a legal row between the UK government and Apple over data privacy cannot be held in secret.
This is fantastic news. Now if we can actually get the public interested in this!
European Commission Orders Apple To Improve Third-Party Device Integration
Today’s decisions wrap us in red tape, slowing down Apple’s ability to innovate for users in Europe and forcing us to give away our new features for free to companies who don’t have to play by the same rules.
Apple crying that they have to allow other things work with their devices, other than more of their devices. Yep more proof of it were need they care about the bottom line not users.
Just slap an LLM on the front end—how hard can it be?
You can’t get there just by LLM-ing harder and faster.
The realisation that you can’t just slap an hallucination machine on something and it power you tech is fast approaching.
Imagine hiring someone and they just make stuff up at the level LLMs do. I get it, they’re useful, I use them loads but I don’t want them powering my device, I wouldn’t trust one to even set my alarm.
Nick Heer in An Age Range API Is Coming to iOS Later This Year
it makes complete sense for age verification to be part of a child’s Apple Account information instead of collected individually by third-party apps.
I can’t understand why this is only now a thing. It’s been right in front of everyone the whole time whilst they’ve been pointing in every other direction.
The Dent in ⭐️ Owning your own space and content is important
Your posts will find a niche, if you want them to, and if not you would have still carved out your own little patch of the internet, ripe for growing something special.
Seeing Andy encourage people to blog is not what I expected from 2025. But I love it!
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Device Timeline: Your Ai Pin will continue to function normally until 12pm PST on February 28, 2025. After this date, it will no longer connect to Humane’s servers, and .Center access will be fully retired.
That timeline is ridiculously short.
They clearly have next to no users.
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Steam does not contain paid advertising, and that advertising-based revenue models are not allowed on the platform. It further states that developers are also prohibited from using advertising as a way to provide value to players, such as giving players an in-game reward for watching or engaging with ads.
This is the way. If only Apple would also follow suit
🔗 How Google turned ‘I’m not a robot’ into a massive surveillance system
By 2025, reCAPTCHA is easily defeated by bots. Yet Google continues to offer it because reCAPTCHA has evolved into a tracking tool that collects user data and generates billions in revenue for Google, according to Chuppl. “Re-captcha takes a pixel by pixel fingerprint of your browser, a realtime map of everything you do on the internet.”
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Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized Instagram competitor. On Facebook, the company is labeling links to Pixelfed.social as “spam” and deleting them immediately.
Straight from the Elmo playbook
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News publishers can choose between the standard YouTube embedded player or a version designed specifically for them, which gives greater control over the ads experience, but removes YouTube branding and links back to YouTube. This version provides publishers greater control over the ads running on their videos, but YouTube doesn’t have visibility into which ads are served.
Am I the only person that things this makes perfect sense to both YouTube and the publisher?
In the US suicide rates among men under 30 have risen by 40 percent since 2010 and are four times higher than among young women.
Male suicide accounts for as many deaths as breast cancer.
~ if you need help or just don’t feel yourself, please please please reach out.
Nick Heer in Google’s iOS App Inserts Its Own Links Into Webpages
For Google to believe it has the right to inject itself into third-party websites is pure arrogance, yet it is nothing new for the company.
The only upside is I doubt many people use this app.
Matt Birchler in The “Bluesky feels like early Twitter!” vibe
In my opinion, Mastodon has leveled out to be a great place to talk with nerdy people (aka my core demographic!), Threads has turned into an engagement bait hell that I don’t enjoy browsing much at all right now, and Bluesky still has that “first week of school” energy.
Yep, I think that’s about right 👌
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X’s former top advertisers including Comcast, IBM, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Lionsgate Entertainment, have resumed ad spending on the platform this year, albeit at much lower rates than before.
I guess if you want to try and avoid new tariffs on your products you have to appease the incoming presidents lap dog.
Dan Moran in Macworld🔒:
Apple can not only afford to be more judicious about how and where it deploys AI, but it also doesn’t have to be as aggressive about selling it to end users
I think Dan hasn’t been paying close enough attention to their advertising. It’s too much, to the point of ridiculousness. It doesn’t tell a tale of a company that hasn’t made an “existential bet-the-company” placement on AI.
Adam Mosseri on Threads:
We are rebalancing ranking to prioritize content from people you follow, which will mean less recommended content from accounts you don’t follow and more posts from the accounts you do starting today
I like the way that Meta can start to implement the things users have been asking for just in time to see a lot of their user base leave. The best part is, I would presume, the users that really benefit from these updates don’t really want to use a Meta platform anyway 👋
The Dent in Echo chamber? You’re damn right!
When I’m chilling in a coffee shop, writing a blog post about echo chambers, I don’t move to the table next to me to listen closer to the muppets there talking about how children shouldn’t be immunised against deadly viruses because Bob down the pub told them about mind controlling nano bots.
A perfect analogy. People act like I have to see all this toxic crap online. Or imply I’m weak because I might get ‘triggered’.
But I just want a nice place to hang out and that shouldn’t be an issue.
Nick Heer in Adam Mosseri Says Threads Will Now Show You More of the Stuff You Have Said You Are Interested in Seeing
These are the people who see social media as a place for furthering their brand. They are not interesting. The only way they are able to grow their audience is by treating a recommendations algorithm as a problem to be solved.
These are people that completely miss the point of social media. These are people that have ruined it for the rest of us. These are people that I don’t want to see in my feed.
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The company plans to introduce the revamped LLM Siri next year and launch it by spring 2026
Companies talk so much about products that don’t exist. Apple say “coming later this year” more than I ever expected. And don’t even get me started on Orion
manuelmoreale.com in An appreciation of the “mark all as read” button
I only open my RSS reader when I want to read something and I have some time to spend reading … just like that, I’m done with my timeline. Isn’t that amazing?
This is why they pretend RSS is dead, because it’s a trick they don’t want you to know.
M.G. Siegler in I’ve Been Here for Years
A lot of what I have written over the two decades – thousands of posts – remains online, but a lot also doesn’t.
I have a lot of words out there from a decade of writing. Some places have closed down, but some are still up but have changed the name next to the words I wrote. Which is inexcusable to be honest.
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Unfortunately, it went on to be yet another one-and-done Apple accessory that was discontinued with the iPhone 15.
Did not realise this was discontinued and it’s weird they didn’t launch an updated version.
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On this day, one year ago, Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI — an event known internally as “The Blip.”
Wait. That was A YEAR ago!!
Matt Birchler in I’ll eat an AirPod if I get this prediction wrong
I would challenge anyone who thinks Apple’s LLM features will be more “mainstream” then ChatGPT “before the end of the year”
I also don’t think people realise how mainstream use of ChatGPT is.
Garbage Day in Bluesky’s the new Twitter probably
a moment at some point in the future where enough people who grew up on a text-based web have died off and taken with them any memory of enjoying reading and writing posts online.
A little over dramatic, sure, but I don’t think it’s far fetched to expect a future where reading is ‘boring’ and therefore bothering to write online becomes less and less popular.
Paul in Khoi Vinh on How His Blog Amplified His Work and Career
Content and writing are not the same thing, at least the way that we’ve come to define them in contemporary society. Content is inherently transactional; its goal is to drive towards some kind of conversion, some kind of exchange of value.
There is a stark difference in writing to engage and writing to influence.
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Free access to ChatGPT–4o requests resets every 24 hours, and when the limited number of requests are used up, Siri will switch to a more cost effective version of ChatGPT. The free plan limits creation with DALL-E 3 to two images per day.
Wait. People thought this was going to be free?
🔗 Please publish and share more - Jeff Triplett’s Micro.blog
Our posts are done when you say they are. You do not have to fret about sticking to landing and having a perfect conclusion. Your posts, like this post, are done after we stop writing.
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I think were going to add a whole new category of content which is AI generated or AI summarized content, or existing content pulled together by AI in some way
And that was the end of social media dear friends…
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Meta’s X rival Threads is rolling out a new “activity status” feature that will let you see when someone on the social network is online.
What users want: less engagement bait
What they got: a way for people to be creepy
I don’t think Threads have any intention of building a nice place to be.
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Both of us together have followed Silicon Valley’s innovation engine for more than 50 years. We’ve seen a lot. But one observation stands out: The best ideas — the ones that launch meaningful companies - need to seem crazy and stupid at first.
As Arthur C. Clarke once said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. We need more bonkers tech that brings back that feeling of awe.
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159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company
That doesn’t read like a good thing…
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Actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. As soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce [what you’re seeing], and it doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture. You can try to define a real picture by saying, ‘I took that picture’, but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the autofocus, the scene — is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, full stop.
I’m sorry. What gibberish is this?
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took the new iPhone 16 Pro on safari (not the browser)
👏👏👏
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I think the camera control should’ve been lower on the right side, you sorta have to stretch just a little more than is comfortable for the gestures
I was surprised how high it is on the side, feels a little uncomfortable but no doubt it will become natural
🔗 iPhone 16 Pro Camera Review: Kenya — Travel Photographer - Austin Mann
I kind of miss the days of discovering radically new iPhone hardware every couple of years, but I suppose that had to change eventually.
I think pro photographers and filmmakers will really appreciate the upgrades in the last couple of years, but the general user might not notice a difference.
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it seems they’re going to demand Apple offer third-party peripheral makers and software developers the same access to system-level software that Apple’s own first-party peripherals and software have
Seems like a great idea to me
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Industry-wide, data centers demanded upward of 350 TWh of power in 2024, according to a Bloomberg analysis, up substantially from about 100 TWh in 2012.
3.5x power usage increase in 12 years 😲
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we’re now shifting towards the model where devs are instead “AI” wranglers. The web dev of the future will be an underpaid generalist who pokes at chatbot output until it runs without error, pokes at a copilot until it generates tests that pass with some coverage, and ships code that nobody understand and can’t be fixed if something goes wrong.
This is one of the things I fear. That the web will break and no one will know how to fix it.
🔗 The Kobo Libra Colour | The Dent
In just a few days the Kobo has made me fall in love with reading again and I’m really pushing myself to do it more when I have short time slots throughout the day.
Picked one up myself yesterday and I’m also really impressed.
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Uncertainty is uncomfortable. And, for many people, uncertainty not only feels uncomfortable, it feels wrong.
The human brain doesn’t like open loops. It makes every effort to close them, some times making huge logical leaps, for its own good. There’s a skill to becoming comfortable with uncertainty but in some contexts you unfortunately never will.
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I spent an internship in the financial-services industry operating a graphical user interface entirely with keyboard commands, and it was fine.
Anyone that’s worked in a CPW owned company looks back on using PIE fondly, it might even still be in use today.
But learning the secrets was a nightmare. Whereas using a mouse is something seemingly ingrained in everyone - that and swiping a touchscreen.
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Specifically, my goal with my content is to teach people how to use technology to pursue their best lives. Technology can help if used wisely. Social media works against that goal.
It’s true that social media is completely anti social. It appears to work against the great things that technology promises to provide.
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According to some sources, as many as thirty to fifty percent of people process their thoughts with little or no inner monologue
This is fascinating. I thought everyone ‘spoke’ to themselves
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The relentless pursuit of perfection yields diminishing returns, robbing us of progress and joy. It is far better to shed the shackles of perfectionism, embrace good enough, and forge ahead with resolve.
🙌
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At its core, generative AI cannot distinguish original journalism from any other bit of writing; to the machine, it’s all slop pushed through the pipes and splattered out the other end.
Ai trained on any of my drivel is going to suck, big time.
🔗 The Imperfectionist: You can’t hoard life
we make ourselves miserable, not just by railing against bad experiences, or craving experiences we aren’t having, but by trying too hard to hold onto the good experiences we are currently having.
🔗 You are more interesting than you think.
The trust was always about the person behind the index.html file, not the information itself. We gave that up in the years since. We put our trust in algorithms. Look how they’ve paid us back.
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I realise that for many, a reduction of this size will feel surprisingly large given the recent positive earnings report and our performance
But we’ve decided we want to make more profit next year.
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Do I want to be a blogger? Am I already a blogger? Why can’t I seem to spell simple words correctly? Do others worry about the amount of things I worry about?
I still think about these things. I feel like reverting back to a blank page and a free ‘blog’. Everything else seems pointless.
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According to a report from TechRadar, Apple won’t adopt proprietary extensions like the one made by Google that adds end-to-end encryption to RCS. Instead, Apple intends to work with the GSMA to add encryption to the RCS Universal Profile.
RCS is already a fragmented mess.
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employees stressed to me the convenience of not having to dig a device out of their pocket to perform quick tasks. The pin has a speaker of its own and connects to headphones and earbuds via Bluetooth, making it an ideal computer for bike rides or just walking around town, they told me.
Just like… a smartwatch?
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I know for a fact that to do well on algorithmic platforms you have to make content in the particular way a platform wants you to. And I like what I do here in Garbage Day and I like how I do it. I don’t particularly want to eat ice cream out of a toilet bowl for views.
That what I said!
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I’m sick of everything having to be a hustle now, even something personal like sharing our ramblings with strangers on the internet.
The second Amen of the day 🙌
🔗 Apple events, SEO, and other fights
read the comments from the Angry SEO people, because the comments are some of the best formatted. If they could have put H2s in the comments for better search discoverability, they would have…The funniest thing about this whole situation is the SEO professionals being mad at us, but doing perfect SEO by instinct in all of the places where they’re yelling at us.
I laughed so hard at this bit 😂
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Seriously. The idea of a “blog” needs to get over itself. Everybody is treating writing as a “content marketing strategy” and using it to “build a personal brand” which leads to the fundamental flawed idea that everything you post has to be polished to perfection and ready to be consumed.
Amen 🙌
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the M3 Pro 14% faster in single-core and 5% faster in multi-core.
Am I the only one that thinks 14% and 5% is still a good improvement?
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it was under the power button on the other side
This is where it in on Xperia phones and it’s the perfect place.
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My best guess as to what’s happened in the past 4-5 years is that fewer people are casually reading blogs or seeking out new ones
Great to see Matt be open about everything, and I think he’s dead right - but that time is changing and I think it’s time he got an ActivityPub blog!
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The true end goal should be that readers can get whatever they want wherever they want, regardless of what writers do and do not set up on various platforms.
There are some thoughts trying to from in my head about this but I don’t think simply cross posting is enough. There’s to much onus to check in and create accounts all over the place.
🔗 Into the Personal-Website-Verse
Now imagine, for a moment, an environment where a decentralized fabric of connected personal sites allows everyone to publish their own content but also enables each individual to engage in an open discussion – answering, challenging, and acknowledging the ideas of others through this universe of personal sites.
🔗 The Algorithmic Diet for Your Mind
I’ve been there, stuffing YouTube junk food into my brain and actual junk food into my mouth at 1 AM, watching some idiot react to another idiot’s reaction to more idiots. And that’s fine, sometimes.
🔗 Shot on iPhone Controversy | Chris Hannah
To think that using an iPhone to film a video suddenly mean a camera dolly isn’t needed, or that an iPhone torch can replace flood lights, is pretty stupid.
This guy gets it!
🔗 Oh God, It’s Raining Newsletters — by Craig Mod
social networks seem more and more to say: You don’t know what you want, but we do.
The iPhone 15 Pro and the iPhone 15 Pro Max also has slightly larger battery capacity than their predessor