Just got back from a lovely in-person meeting with my marketing colleagues in Louisville. Last night I said, "what a great on-site," before remembering the term is actually "off-site." But I contend that word no longer makes any sense when everyone is remote and there is no permanent office site! The off-site is as on-site as things get!

In a brief one-day visit to St. Louis, I didn't get much chance to see the sights but I did have a pretty impressive array of craft cocktails

I didn't see this reported elsewhere, but it's pretty impressive that Siri is now doing realtime recognition of the contents photos (and in this case, animated GIFs!) when announcing messages to your AirPods or via CarPlay.

Genuinely impressive, even if it's still rudimentary at this point.

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:

1. Publishers use AI to write articles designed to perform well as advertising inventory
2. Advertisers use AI to place the best ads alongside that content
3. Readers use AI to bypass all of the above and extract the small morsel of valuable information the article contains, if any

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.

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:

1. 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

2. 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 was wondering if I should keep dragging my hacky little OpenAI API wrapper class from script to script, so:

1. Search rubygems.org for "gpt"
2. Find one called chat_gpt described as "This is OpenAI's ChatGPT API wrapper for Ruby"
3. Click the "Homepage" link
4. The code repository is archived and contains the disclaimer "NOTE this code was written by ChatGPT and may not work"

Great job, everyone.

I'm as excited for using Vision Pro as a remote display for my Mac as anybody, but the fact that neither of my brand new, clean install Macs can initiate screen sharing reliably doesn't bode well that it'll somehow work better in a VR headset.

Every time I unlock my phone I'm greeted with an oddball memory. If you don't have the Photos widget on your first homescreen, you really should.

UPDATE: A few folks told me that WD-40 works to resolve this and… they were kind of right! Just buy a pen applicator and dab it on.

Years ago, I unpacked an old PS3 and was disgusted to realize that the controllers' analog sticks had all melted into gooey, sticky black blobs. I wondered if they'd gotten too hot at some point, somehow, but it turns out that the low-grade rubber and oil Sony used just inevitably denatures over time. I figured they'd have fixed this in later generations, but it turns out they haven't! Both my PS5 controllers are now completely unusable after sitting idle for six months.

Entropy always wins… neat!

Neat when a messaging app incorporates a payment system. What could go wrong.

If you've been ordering Macs online since 2004 like I have, the lineage of technical and marketing decisions behind what's going on in Apple's store makes this make sense.

Back in the day, Macs actually came with a handful of necessary accessories.My G4 iBook came with a handful of things, I think. I know I had to install the Airport Express card under the keyboard myself, for some reason.

But the Mac Studio's "Accessory Kit" is literally a power cable. That might be a little generous.

It's true, that was a pretty special moment.

Setting up a new M2 Ultra Mac Studio (review: it is nice) has revealed a whole new crop of WTFs in the onboarding process (Setup Assistant no longer encourages enabling FileVault? What?) and offboarding process (this screen has been sitting here for hours as I wait to wipe my previous Mac).

Super neat experience so far.

UPDATE: two more neat screenshots. Free of charge.

After fighting to learn Sorbet in order to release a type-safe version of Mocktail, it seems that my energy has rubbed off on my AI copilot a bit.

I mean, just look at this screenshot. I can confidently take a photo of a friend's hand-written note, search for one Japanese word that I knew was written on it to find it, then select the text and paste it into a translation app, maps, etc.

In Japan, it's customary to use a coin locker at a train station to store your bags, so that you can spend time visiting a place without lugging all your stuff everywhere.

Unfortunately, this coin locker only takes five ¥100 coins (I've been spoiled by newer ones in Tokyo and Osaka that take IC cards like Suica) and I only had a single ¥100 coin on me.

So I went to a 7-Eleven to change a ¥1000 bill to coins and the attendant told me that they can no longer break change. So then I bought a bottle of tea in cash, but because these days you pay with cash using an automatic machine mounted in front of the register, it gave me back one ¥500 coin and three ¥100 coins. So I still only had four ¥100 coins when I needed five to use the locker.

So then I turned around and bought a donut with the ¥500 coin in order to break change again and this time I received three more ¥100 coins.

All so that I could pay ¥500 to use a coin locker… always an adventure!

Lots of good convenience store discoveries this week!

• A pizza sandwich filled with wieners and taco meat.
• Bread-flavored gummies.
• Fried and seasoned chicken skin, closely resembling the bottom of a KFC bucket
• A canned whiskey that comes pre-mixed with water.
• Individually-packaged cups of orange jelly housed in a larger cup
• Sparkling water that's been fortified with… a lot of fiber?
• Tangerine-flavored gummies designed to look like little popsicles
• Frozen chocolate banana chunks made with otherwise-wasted bananas

So much innovation!

Had a great half day in Kanazawa, even though it wound up being a bit of a speed run. Omicho fish market and Kenrokuen garden are both popular tourist spots, but I found the local restaurants and bars to be really exceptional, both in service and food quality. If you like fresh fish, you really must visit someday!