So much for OpenAI running out of money by the end of the year. nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/openai-and-nvidia-announce-strategic-partnership-to-deploy-10gw-of-nvidia-systems
Video of this episode is up on YouTube:
Hey, look! Breaking Change now has chapter support for each segment! More on how I did that while still upholding my commitment to laziness later.
I didn't get a good job connecting this version's release to what I was referencing, so to be clear I was referring to my heart rate as opposed to any other bodily functions. The other ones are getting up just fine, thank you. Get your head out of the gutter.
Thanks for all the great e-mails the last couple weeks! Throw yours on the pile at podcast@searls.co. Hopefully Fastmail won't lose it.
For the folks who pronounce URLs like Earls:
Use chatbots as tools, not friends. If you use ChatGPT or Claude, turn off memory and the ability to reference past chats. It only wastes context, assuming present-you wants what past-you wants.
Turned it off months ago and responses are way better. When you have memory enabled you effectively never one-shot anything. Every request is inherently multi-shot.
So here's a neat way to magically cut in half the time it takes to transfer to your new iPhone.
Back in 2019, I realized iPhone restores run much faster when the device is kept cold, because thermal throttling—not data transfer rate—is the real bottleneck. The thing is, a fridge isn't quite cold enough and a freezer was way too cold (phones don't work well at below zero temperatures, apparently). So the stopgap solution I initially arrived at was to sandwich the phone between a couple ice packs. Not only did it work great, I was tickled to see a few sites like Cult of Mac publish how-to guides on the technique.
Anyway, figuring out how to best cool my iPhones to expedite a direct transfer restore has become something of an annual tradition in the Searls household. This year, I had the foresight to buy small ice packs and then stick MagSafe-compatible receiver magnets onto them.
If you're interested, here's what you're looking at:
Those are affiliate links, which I feel like I should disclose because this website definitely counts as a journalism.
I now know three people who've decided to return iPhone 17 Pro and buy iPhone Air instead. Love to #influence people. justin.searls.co/posts/why-i-bought-the-iphone-air/
If you read reviews of iPhone Air, you will quickly find that the pundit class has concluded it's a mixed bag. A "compromised" product, even.
For tech reviewers lining up all these phones next to each other and weighing the pros and cons, I can absolutely understand how iPhone Air doesn't seem to earn its spot in the lineup at $999. Just look at all these downsides:
In its preliminary assessment of Apple's offerings, The Accidental Tech podcast went so far as to speculate iPhone Air wouldn't appeal to tech enthusiasts at all, and perhaps will only sell to fashion-conscious consumers who won't know what they're missing.
Indeed, the through-line connecting every review I've read—whether framed positively or negatively in its conclusions—is a struggle to answer the question, "Who is iPhone Air for?"
Well, it's for me. That's who.
Whenever the claim is made that, "nobody is asking for a thinner iPhone," I make a point of piping up. My favorite iPhone of the last decade was easily the iPhone 13 mini, and when I upgraded to iPhone 14 Pro, it was so heavy that I got in the habit of leaving the house with only my cellular Apple Watch Series 8. My favorite Apple computer of all time was the 12" MacBook, and I am perennially disappointed that Apple has deprioritized weight ever since (the lightest Mac currently on offer is the MacBook Air, which is 33% heavier than the decade-old MacBook).
That's why I didn't hesitate to put in an order for the new iPhone Air, downsides and all:
As someone who has been using iOS 26 all summer, there's one more reason I'm glad to be switching to iPhone Air: information density is significantly lower throughout iOS 26, which has a dramatic negative impact on the usability of smaller displays, even the 6.3" iPhone 16 Pro. That's because with the 26 series of releases, the new unified design across Apple's platforms features much more negative space between its controls and views—all in the name of concentricity. As soon as I updated my iPhone 16 Pro to the iOS 26 beta, I was immediately put off by how much less text was being rendered and how much more I was scrolling to get what I needed. By ordering another 6.3" iPhone, I'd be locking in those losses. But iPhone Air's larger 6.6" display claws back just enough additional screen estate to make it a wash. I don't want a bigger screen, I want an OS that doesn't punish smaller screens. And it's nice to want things.
Will iPhone Air sell well? Don't ask me, I'm the guy who just said his favorite iPhone was iPhone 13 mini and favorite Mac was the 12" MacBook—both of which flopped. I'm certainly not arguing this thing is going to light sales charts on fire, simply that it's not entirely irrational to conclude that iPhone Air is the best phone in this year's line up.
Anyway, this is just my take. You do you.
The Verge is included in Apple News+, so if you're an Apple One subscriber (as I imagine, many Verge readers are), whenever you hit the paywall in your browser you can—at least from Safari's Share Sheet—very easily open the same article in the News app and avoid the paywall.
I bought The Iconfactory's Tot app years ago when it first released, but found I didn't really have a need for a semi-ephemeral, intentionally finite scratchpad.
That changed this summer! Why? Because in this nascent era of terminal-based coding agents, I have found a semi-ephemeral, intentionally finite scratchpad to be invaluable.
Use cases include:
As I type this I'm sitting in my Vision Pro with the hilariously-wide Ultrawide Mac Virtual Display and literally running four top-to-bottom terminals, each cranking on separate projects simultaneously. Tot has become integral to my workflow as I spend more and more time playing whackamole to feed each agent work.
(While the agents are all humming along, I typically use that time reviewing each project's current changesets in Fork—another excellent Mac app—to identify what I need the agent to do next.)
My iPhone Air MagSafe Battery came in the mail today, and it was the first time I've ever seen this ridiculous sticker.
Does this mean the product can't be taken on passenger planes? Because the only risk factor other than the product the battery itself in the box is a few layers of cardboard.
Quick impressions on the product:
My coding agent started stopping to tell me to run the tests instead of running them itself. Kept happening. Got mad. Replaced my 800-word AGENTS.md with "I'm not your mom."
It started running the tests.
Generative AI is like the "Draw the Rest of the Owl" meme. Before, I'd draw two circles and give up. Now, I draw the two circles and it can get me something I can iterate on and ship.
The hard part shifts from drawing the owl to getting the two circles right—success depends on the quality of the foundation you lay for it.
For a real weird time, get yourself an MRI of your thumb.
Seeing a lot of Fractional CTOs and CFOs out there, but limiting your market to people who understand fractions is foolish. That's why I'm a Decimal CTO.
TFW a virtually identical app to the one you've been working on for months was basically already created by someone else. gg echofeed.app
Easiest smell test of AI features in software:
If it's not one of those, it was probably shoehorned in because somebody was told to go do an AI.
This post by Danny Bolella perfectly captures my reasoning for getting started as an Apple developer ini 2025: after 10+ years of transition, you can finally build things without leaving one foot behind in the old world: captainswiftui.substack.com/p/the-great-shift-in-apple-development
Smart change Apple Software Update: if you were subscribed to the OS 26 public beta, you have been automatically unenrolled now that it's out. In past years, users would (usually unwittingly) remain on the public beta channel for every point release forever.
Less great: a bug preventing those devices to enroll in developer betas. 🤦♂️
James O'Sullivan has a banger of an editorial on the "late attention economy", including this bit illustrating the various platforms' pivot from active participation to passive absorption:
While content proliferates, engagement is evaporating. Average interaction rates across major platforms are declining fast: Facebook and X posts now scrape an average 0.15% engagement, while Instagram has dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau. People aren't connecting or conversing on social media like they used to; they're just wading through slop, that is, low-effort, low-quality content produced at scale, often with AI, for engagement.
I'm grateful to be living a timeline-free life for the most part, but on the rare occasion I log in and catch myself scrolling, this haunting characterization resonates:
The timeline is no longer a source of information or social presence, but more of a mood-regulation device, endlessly replenishing itself with just enough novelty to suppress the anxiety of stopping. Scrolling has become a form of ambient dissociation, half-conscious, half-compulsive, closer to scratching an itch than seeking anything in particular. People know the feed is fake, they just don't care.
I suspect many of you reading this continue to use social media apps because you were around back when they were social networking apps and are having a hard time accepting the fact that isn't what they are anymore. Likewise, many businesses are still earnestly crafting useful blog posts, only to optimize them for search engines and social platforms that will only ignore them—they should probably figure out a new racket, too.
Playing Super Mario Odyssey and just realized you collect moons because in Sunshine you collected suns.
The cowards at Nintendo should have called it Super Mario Moonshine.
Whenever I need to verify a network connection with a remote LLM, I always ask it 1+1. I'm sure it'll still raise the ocean level by a millimeter, but it seems less bad than a more complex query.
I forgot I had unhidden chain-of-thought reasoning, so I chuckled when I got this:
Sure thing! The task is straightforward: I just need to respond to "1+1" with "2." It's a simple calculation, so I won't overthink it. There's no need to use any tools for this, and I know the guidelines about "Destructive Deletions" and "No Comments by Default" don't really apply here. I'll just keep it short and clear, and the answer will simply be "2."
At least it didn't overthink it.
