Gotta appreciate ingenuity on the platforms when you see it. Because this Amazon Seller's name is "Shopping cart", it means that what a user sees before adding an item to their cart is:

Ships from Amazon
Sold by Shopping cart

Almost got me.

Your new Mac comes with an Accessory Kit

This is worth a read. If you've been harboring any illusions that machine learning and AI are cleanroom scientific breakthroughs, this should dispel it.

There are people classifying the emotional content of TikTok videos, new variants of email spam, and the precise sexual provocativeness of online ads. Others are looking at credit-card transactions and figuring out what sort of purchase they relate to or checking e-commerce recommendations and deciding whether that shirt is really something you might like after buying that other shirt. Humans are correcting customer-service chatbots, listening to Alexa requests, and categorizing the emotions of people on video calls. They are labeling food so that smart refrigerators don’t get confused by new packaging, checking automated security cameras before sounding alarms, and identifying corn for baffled autonomous tractors.

If you sit with the thought that AI models are only valuable when they're provided painstaking and voluminous feedback from poorly-paid workers, the associated "intelligence" begins to evoke thoughts of the mechanical Turk (the one from history, not the Amazon product).

Wow they're really not kidding around with that Last of Us haunted house Universal announced yesterday.

Your Microsoft Memories on This Day

TODO: insert "when did they start?" joke here.

iCloud is still syncing with iCloud

It's better to fix the root cause of software problems, but seeing as Bethesda has chosen to continue using their in-house, 26-year-old Gamebryo engine—which is famous for literally nothing other than its signature "Bethesda jank" flavor of bugginess—I guess Phil Spencer and Microsoft have made the calculated decision to send wave after wave of QA employees until the NPCs reach their internal jank limit:

I’ve trained GitHub Copilot on my salty comments

You can either read (NYT Paywall) or listen (in a brisk, 18-minute podcast rendition), but whichever you choose, this piece feels like a triumphant synthesis of several ideas Ezra Klein has been slow-cooking over hours upon hours of interviews on the various podcasts he's hosted over the last decade. If you have an Internet connection or participate in an economy, I strongly recommend you read and reflect on this column.

Many of the themes Ezra hits on are things that I've felt compelled to write about here, even back in the mid-2010s when I only blogged semi-annually. Like the "mysterious" reason that productivity is flat despite so many breakthroughs in information technology. Or my various exhortations that the best thing Apple could do for humanity is help users save themselves from notification hell. And more recently, the kinds of work that AI will both replace and create for us.

Anyway, Ezra's diagnosis is bang on and I'm in such violent agreement with his take here that I struggle to even imagine a counter argument. It seems to me the reason why such a profound and clear truth can fail to take the world by storm is that these are mostly systemic issues that represent collective action problems. After all, if your boss wants you to reply to e-mails within 5 minutes, or if your coworkers will judge you for not being a green bubble in Slack all day, what can you really do to reclaim your individual ability to focus?

Still, we probably each have more control over how much of our focus we cede to technology than we probably admit to ourselves. Always worth taking a moment to think about.

This may be a humble forum post, but it's a great example of the sort of entertainment that:

1. Would be greatly enhanced by immersive visuals and audio
2. Would leverage Apple's dominant position in the music industry
3. Hasn't really been done before

Apple gave up on trying to host in-person iTunes/Apple Music Festivals, but they never really made sense for any other reason than strengthening ties with the recording industry. Something like this makes more sense. More intimate. Easier to manage. Cross-sells their headset by leveraging their platforms and services in a way "only Apple could do".

Neat idea. Wouldn't be surprised to hear something like this tomorrow.

Becky and I often debate what I'll really be like in retirement. How I picture myself in retirement sure sounds a lot like how it seems to be going for John Calhoun.

One thing I've been thinking about for a while is the ability of LLMs to generate convincing-enough-for-somebody-to-run fake leaks, so I decided to try my hand at creating a fake Apple leak.

I'm too cheap to pay for ChatGPT+ and I'm too lazy to have done this via OpenAI's GPT-4 API, so I used Bing Chat to take a crack at generating the Apple Newsroom article that we'll see go up on June 5th after Apple announces its headset. I figured that there was so many recent rumor round-ups and so much prior art of Apple Newsroom articles that it'd probably do a halfway decent job of this.

Here was my prompt:

Write me a press release in the style of an Apple Newsroom story announcing the new Apple Reality Pro headset that's based on only the most recent set of Rumors from Mark Gurman and MacRumors

I thought its response wasn't half-bad:

Spoiler alert: there's more to this…

When I first pitched doing a RubyKaigi "Field Report" summary for Test Double, my wonderful and benevolent boss Cathy Colliver suggested that I make a short video explaining how I pack so light for each trip. It took me a few weeks to get around to it, but here it is!

I've been living with this setup for about 6 years now and have barely changed a thing. If there's a headline to be had here, it's that the less you carry, the less you have to worry about.

If you'd like to try out this lifestyle, here are some links of stuff in the video:

What happens next will shock you…

Over the last three weeks, I've been playing with Bing Chat as a sort of international travel and language advisor, and I've learned a few interesting things along the way that may help others get more creative with how they use AI.

There are three main categories where I've found Bing Chat helpful:

• Generating ideas of where to go and what to do next
• Translating phrases that straddle nuanced cultural differences dictionaries and translation software can
• Answering "why" questions that would normally require a human

There's also one "gotcha" that's particularly interesting, but I'll cover that at the end.

And before you knew it…