Breaking Change is a lot of things, but likely to be replaced by an AI podslop factory isn't one of them thewrap.com/ai-podcasts-hosts-inception-point-ai/
Breaking Change is a lot of things, but likely to be replaced by an AI podslop factory isn't one of them thewrap.com/ai-podcasts-hosts-inception-point-ai/
I've wanted to start listening to books for Japanese practice in addition to just reading them, but the lack of an easy way to quickly understand a particular word always limited my ability to understand and enjoy it.
With iOS 26, the Live Captions Accessibility feature can be set to a number of languages (including Japanese) and routed to the system audio instead of the microphone. So while Amazon would be happy to sell you a "Whisper" license for both audiobook and ebook in order to get a less useful version of this functionality, your iOS device can just passively be building a transcript of the book for you to review as you listen. There's even a "Copy Transcript" button in the top right corner of the expanded view!
This is a great example of leveraging advancements in OS-level AI features to accomplish language learning objectives that would have been a fantasy just a few years ago.
Fun little demo of this weekend's project. I recently shipped Becky a way to ship auto-expiring stories from Beckygram that would in turn syndicate to Instagram via POSSE Party, which was pretty straightforward since her site is an actual honest-to-god Rails app. But justin.searls.co is a static site with no backend component. I accomplished the same thing by creating a new media type for the blog called "wisps".
What you're looking at in this demo:
Extremely fun long weekend project, and would not have been possible without the acceleration of coding agents. In fact, Codex CLI wrote 100% of this code, which took me about 4 days and ~20 hours.
I've never been a fan of the story format because of the sick and twisted way it devolves into the "who watched my stories" meta by exposing so many metrics to users, but this way I don't have to engage with that to share shit. Hopefully this means I'll be able to better stay in touch with friends and loved ones when traveling and moving about. And if you, like me are not an Instagram person, now you have an excuse to visit my actual website from time to time!
Codex CLI and I invented a full client-side CMS for the blog using the GitHub and S3 APIs, then I wired up a new "wisp" media type to syndicate Instagram stories. See the top of justin.searls.co/
If Ed Zitron ends up being proven correct about everything he's reported out about OpenAI, he'll deserve a Peabody for having pantsed the global financial press for multiple years running. wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/
What are the odds?*
*The odds are 1 in 1.7 million
Apple is finally selling PSVR2 controllers for use with VIsion Pro… for $249.
I bought a barely-used PSVR 2 headset + controllers for $170 off eBay a couple months ago apple.com/xc/product/HS8H2ZM/A
Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu say we'll have to wait to see a sequel to iPhone Air, but The Information provides literally nothing beyond this headline outside their paywall:
Apple Delays Release of Next iPhone Air Amid Weak Sales
But does one truly need to fork over $399 to know exactly what the body of the article is going to say?
All you need to know is that Justin Searls loving an Apple product is effectively the kiss of death in the Tim Cook era:
2015: 12" MacBook, my all-time favorite Mac, cancelled after two revisions
2018: HomePod, of which I bought six at launch, never sold through its initial manufacturing run
2020: iPhone mini, my all-time favorite iPhone, cancelled after one revision
2024: Vision Pro, which I rely on daily, received one revision under duress
2025: iPhone Air, which is exactly what I asked for, had even its one revision cancelled
I don't know what I'm doing wrong here.
I've been using Tahoe since July and I've really, really tried to like the new Spotlight because I'm encouraged by the direction it's taking, but I'm giving up and going back to Raycast. It's just WAY TOO SLOW.
If you set up quick keys and then type them "too fast," it'll always do something else instead. Same goes for launching apps by name. Just typed "1p", but Spotlight spent 3 seconds assuming that meant I wanted to open a product page for a Ring camera in Safari.
Video of this episode is up on YouTube:
I'm back and I'm angry. My power went out, which caused my Internet to go down, which broke my favorite mug. And that's just the shit that happened before 7 AM. By 9 AM my doorbell was continuously chiming for no fucking reason.
Join me in the struggle. We shall persevere. Tell me how your morning went by writing in to: podcast@searls.co.
Here 4 U:
I can confirm that visionOS 26 and the new 20 Gbps Developer Strap supports network connections via USB-C ethernet adapters—very cool! amazon.com/dp/B08HQBC678?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_dt_b_fed_asin_title_14&th=1
My grandpa left me a tiny 1-inch portable TV growing up. It felt like you were watching TV… until you put it next to the real thing.
Sandwich's new ad gave me the same feeling—seeing it in the context of immersive video is an incredible experience. sixcolors.com/post/2025/10/hello-robot-sandwich-launches-immersive-commercial/
Fantastic write-up by Nowfal comparing AI's current moment to the Internet's dial-up era. This bit in particular points to a cleavage that far too few people understand:
Software presents an even more interesting question. How many apps do you need? What about software that generates applications on demand, that creates entire software ecosystems autonomously? Until now, handcrafted software was the constraint. Expensive software engineers and
theirour labor costs limited what companies could afford to build. Automation changes this equation by making those engineers far more productive. Both consumer and enterprise software markets suggest significant unmet demand because businesses have consistently left projects unbuilt. They couldn't justify the development costs or had to allocate limited resources to their top priority projects. I saw this firsthand at Amazon. Thousands of ideas went unfunded not because they lacked business value, but because of the lack of engineering resources to build them. If AI can produce software at a fraction of the cost, that unleashes enormous latent demand. The key question then is if and when that demand will saturate.
Two things are simultaneously true:
It's long been my view that the appropriate response to the current moment is to ride this walrus and leverage coding agents to increase the scope of our ambitions. By the time software demand has been saturated and put us out of jobs, the supply of programmers will already have tapered off as the next generation sees the inflection point coming.
In the short term, the only programmers actually losing their jobs to "AI" are those who refuse to engage with the technology. Using coding agents effectively is a learned skill like any other—and if you don't keep your skills current, fewer people will want to hire you.
The single most destructive metric is a key performance indicator that improves for reasons the business doesn't understand. When it inevitably goes back down, people panic because nobody understands why it went up in the first place. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45807775
Watching Becky explore the world of bodybuilding, all I know is I would really struggle with my body being scrutinized by others. Surprisingly, though, I'm actually most impressed with the vegan bodybuilders—somehow they all seem to maintain a really healthy self-esteem. Maybe it's because they never whey themselves.