This is a copy of the Searls of Wisdom newsletter delivered to subscribers on November 1, 2023.
This month in Disney World living, my brother Jeremy and I got to meet Aaron Paul and Brian Cranston at an event promoting their Dos Hombres mezcal:
A frustration I have with how articles are written in this era is that the lede is necessarily buried in order to keep time-on-page stats high enough for the content to perform as chum in the advertising market.
So I thought it'd be interesting to use the Copilot sidebar to summarize articles for me, rather than me waste my time scrolling down four paragraphs to figure out whatever the headline is teasing. A more general purpose prompt could probably get me the answer I really want when I see headlines like this: "is there actually any news here or is this just content for content's sake?"
Can't wait for the natural endgame:
Great job, everyone.
A lot of people knock Siri's implementation as more or less a dialog tree of magic phrases one can utter to achieve a discrete set of tasks, but one that I just can't get my head around is Announce Notifications. You can tell it to stop announcing, to start announcing, and to pause/mute them for an hour or for the day. But in my most recent thirty attempts, Siri only successfully muted announcements for an hour one time. Usually it mutes my phone or, more recently, does nothing at all.
Every time my ears are inundated with text messages and calendar events I don't care about, I try my damndest to remember what it is I said to get Siri to temporarily back off, but I'll be shocked if there's a consistently correct answer. Ask the same thing five times and get five different results.
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.
Instead of my usual tradition of making predictable predictions before Apple Events, I'm going to go on the record saying I'd pay $10,000 for a 12" MacBook Pro that weighed 2 pounds or less.
Won't happen, but should. Especially with the Vision Pro, developers are going to want as small a Mac as possible to screen share from when they travel.
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."
This weekend, I decided to grow my POSSE by creating what essentially amounts to feed2toot for Instagram. It's called feed2gram — check it out! 📸 github.com/searls/feed2gram
I don't know why it took me so long to think to do this, but I finally started a playlist of some of my favorite TV theme songs and title tracks. Too bad how many aren't available on streaming services at all. Apple Music: music.apple.com/us/playlist/theme-songs/pl.u-e2RvqtVKP3B
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.
Raycast's AI assistant is such a low-friction operation (command-space, type a thing, then hit tab), I've gotten in the habit of asking for keyboard shortcuts.
It's so much faster and clearer than Googling that I do this several times per day and have gotten way faster at using the apps I depend on. raycast.com/pro
My name is Justin and I'm a Timeline Addict. Give me a pull-to-refresh UI and I'll pull it all day long in the hopes of one more like or reply. I've tried moderating, but at the end of the day… the juice just ain't worth the squeeze.
Instead of posting to Twitter-like services, I'm going to post to my blog and syndicate elsewhere. Want me to see your reply? Email me! ✉️ justin@searls.co
As a fan of saunas and steam rooms generally, I'd always kind of wanted one for use at home. Now that we have the space on our pool deck, I finally (ahem) took the plunge and bought one from SalusHeat (though our model is in cedar).
A bunch of people had told me that infrared saunas confer certain therapeutic medical benefits, but it all struck me as a typical Internet wellness marketing scam. In particular, most of what I read was about near infrared (the light closer to the visible spectrum), but—being a cheapskate—most of the saunas in my price range (including the one we bought) emit far infrared, which penetrates the body more deeply.
Anyway, now that we have had it for a couple days, I have two major takeaways:
A max temp of 65ºC seemed really low compared to traditional saunas, but it turns out you're basically being microwaved, so even if the air temp isn't 95º, you'll sweat and feel as if it is
Holy cow is this effective treating deep muscle pain and soreness. Between lifting weights and riding roller coasters, I occassionally find myself with pretty severe neck and back soreness, and nothing I try really helps much. 40 minutes in this thing punctuated by a couple cold plunges into my pool? Total game changer
Anyway, if you're sauna curious, I figured I'd feed Google something about these infrared ones because they appear to not be marketing bullshit. It may separately be the case that I'm gonna be absolutely riddled with cancer from whatever EMF this thing is emitting, but at least I won't be sore!
I love writing scripts against the ChatGPT API that are intentionally constrained to particular input and output formats. Here's one I wrote this morning to help me write spreadsheets with a REPL-like interface to continuously improve the output until I'm happy with it.
I was wondering if I should keep dragging my hacky little OpenAI API wrapper class from script to script, so:
chat_gpt described as "This is OpenAI's ChatGPT API wrapper for Ruby"Great job, everyone.
MacRumors, based on forum and social media posts:
Over the past week, some BMW owners have complained that their iPhone 15's NFC chip no longer works after charging the device with their vehicle's wireless charging pad, according to comments shared on the MacRumors Forums and X, formerly known as Twitter. Affected customers say the iPhone goes into a data recovery mode with a white screen, and the NFC chip is no longer functional after the device reboots.
Apparently it wasn't enough for BMWs to damage themselves during normal use.
This is a copy of the Searls of Wisdom newsletter delivered to subscribers on October 1, 2023.
Wow, September came and went in a hurry.