See you in St. Louis

Siri’s Announce Notifications detects image content in iOS 17.1

Last year, I was featured on the season 1 finale of Matt Swanson's excellent YAGNI podcast. Well, season 2 kicked off yesterday with an interview with Charity Majors and as one of the few programming podcast series I can stand to listen to (high praise, trust me), I recommend you or the programmer in your life consider subscribing!

I'd been thinking about my appearance last year on YAGNI because in his lead-in, Matt joked that he had cajoled me into writing my own test framework as an alternative to RSpec. I have no recollection of this, but he turned out to have succeeded, because 9 months later I indeed published the definitive Ruby testing framework, TLDR.

Using AI to dig up the lede that AI buried

Siri achieves general unintelligence

Remote workers will sign off at 1 pm to participate in a digital rally and picket via Zoom.

That’s sure to get their attention.

In late 2018, Google CEO Sundar Pichai floated a bold idea to Apple CEO Tim Cook. Cook had just told Pichai he wanted to be “deep, deep partners, deeply connected where our services end and yours begin,” according to notes from the meeting. Pichai responded with a proposal: What if Apple preinstalled a Google Search app on every iOS device?

What Pichai heard: deep love as in, “we want to go to market as a dream team, as a package deal.”

What Cook meant: deep down as in, “we don’t want anyone to know Google has anything to do with our products.”

Finally! Some Magic Mouse news for the first time in 8 years:

Apple will likely announce new versions of its Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad for the Mac at its "Scary Fast" event on Monday, October 30, according to a report today from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The updated accessories are expected to be equipped with USB-C ports instead of Lightning ports for charging.

When the original Mac launched in 1984, it pioneered use of a mouse over command line interfaces. A mouse was undoubtedly a much more direct, tactile input than a keyboard. But ever since the release of the iPhone in 2007, it's been clear that Apple believes touch screens and its glass trackpads are more direct inputs than mice and therefore superior. Apple doesn't want you to use a mouse when you could be using one of its trackpads.

(This emphasis on eliminating indirection in how users express their intent clearly energizes Apple's aspirations for visionOS, where the primary interaction metaphor is to "look at a thing" to select it.)

While the Magic Mouse lasts around a month or longer between charges, the position of the Lightning port on the bottom of the mouse has been a meme in the Apple community for many years, as it prevents the mouse from being used while charging. It's unclear if the USB-C port on the new version will be placed in a more convenient location.

I honestly expect them to keep the port on the bottom out of spite.

Alex Heath at the Verge, with yet another internal meeting leak:

Elon Musk wants X to be the center of your financial world, handling anything in your life that deals with money. He expects those features to launch by the end of 2024, he told X employees during an all hands call on Thursday, saying that people will be surprised with “just how powerful it is.”

“When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life,” Musk said, according to audio of the meeting obtained by The Verge. “If it involves money. It’ll be on our platform. Money or securities or whatever. So, it’s not just like send $20 to my friend. I’m talking about, like, you won’t need a bank account.”

This will almost surely be underwritten by a real bank, like Apple Card and Savings accounts are handled by Goldman Sachs, as Musk lacks the discipline to clear the regulatory hurdles to become the actual center of one’s financial life. But if this launches, I fully expect Musk will mandate his employees use this account for direct deposit for their paychecks and may even go further, requiring it of Tesla and SpaceX employees as well.

But the thing I can’t stop imagining is that he might promise social boosting for his mostly red-pilled, socially-disaffected male acolytes who park their money in X’s coffers. Maybe they’ll get a special checkmark or even more prominent placement in people’s timelines and replies.

Hard to see how this doesn’t end in some kind of cross between It’s a Wonderful Life and The Purge when tens of thousands of incredibly online, gun-toting libertarian men realize their life savings have been eradicated following a bank run caused by, surely, some stupid thing Elon will have tweeted.