Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appeared on the New York Times’ “Hard Fork” podcast for a discussion about artificial intelligence, election security, TikTok, and more. I have to agree with Aaron Vegh: […] I loved his messaging on Canada’s place in the world, which is prag … | Continue reading
If you had just been looking at the headlines from major research organizations, you would see a lack of confidence from the public in big business, technology companies included. For years, poll after poll from around the world has found high levels of distrust in their influenc … | Continue reading
Joanna Stern, Wall Street Journal: Porn, violent images, illicit drugs. I could see it all by typing a special string of characters into the Safari browser’s address bar. The parental controls I had set via Apple’s Screen Time? Useless. Security researchers reported this particul … | Continue reading
Howard Oakley: Prior to Mac OS X, Adobe Acrobat, both in its free viewer form and a paid-for Pro version, were the de facto standard for reading, printing and working with PDF documents on the Mac. The Preview app had originated in NeXTSTEP in 1989 as its image and PDF viewer, an … | Continue reading
Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica in July 2022 in what I will call “foreshadowing”: Despite all the negative feedback [over then-recent Instagram changes], Meta revealed on an earnings call that it plans to more than double the number of AI-recommended Reels that users … | Continue reading
Kevin Beaumont: At a surface level, it [Recall] is great if you are a manager at a company with too much to do and too little time as you can instantly search what you were doing about a subject a month ago. In practice, that audience’s needs are a very small (tiny, in fact) port … | Continue reading
Liz Reid, head of Google Search, on the predictably bizarre results of rolling out its “A.I. Overviews” feature: One area we identified was our ability to interpret nonsensical queries and satirical content. Let’s take a look at an example: “How many rocks should I eat?” Prior to … | Continue reading
Deviant Ollam gave a brand new talk at CackalackyCon this year about fire safety standards from a pentesting perspective. It is as entertaining as just about anything you may have seen from Ollam, despite being about two hours long. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Caitlin Dewey: In April, Gmail turned 20; the service is two-thirds as old as I am. “We now have a huge accidental archive of our collective past,” wrote the editors at New York, to mark the occasion. […] You have emails like this too, I’d imagine — happy emails and sad ones. Ema … | Continue reading
Drew Harwell, Washington Post: But the extent to which the United States evaluated or disregarded TikTok’s proposal, known as Project Texas, is likely to be a core point of dispute in court, where TikTok and its owner, ByteDance, are challenging the sale-or-ban law as an “unconst … | Continue reading
Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica: But the judge apparently did not find Amazon’s denials completely persuasive. Viewing the FTC’s complaint “in the light most favorable to the FTC,” Judge John Chun concluded that “the allegations sufficiently indicate that Amazon had actual or const … | Continue reading
I have very little to add to Tyler Hall’s idea for revealing per-document settings, other than to say that it is so joyful and it makes complete sense. If you watch one thirty-second design demo today, make it this one. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Jeff Johnson: Yesterday I took the M1 MacBook Pro to my local Apple-authorized service provider that I’ve been going to for many years, who performed all of the work on my Intel MacBook Pro, including the battery replacements and a Staingate screen replacement. This is a third-pa … | Continue reading
Apple finished naming what it — well, its “team of experts alongside a select group of artists […] songwriters, producers, and industry professionals” — believes are the hundred best albums of all time. Like pretty much every list of the type, it is overwhelmingly Anglocentric, t … | Continue reading
Hey, remember that Apple Store I thought Tim Cook would visit in his Southeast Asia tour last month? It is scheduled to open in a few weeks and it looks pretty unique. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Paloma Pacheco, the Narwhal: Just a year after the extreme temperature drop in December 2022, another deep freeze descended on wine growers. For several days in January 2024, temperatures across the Okanagan and Similkameen, as well as in the Thompson Valley to the north, dropped … | Continue reading
Baldur Bjarnason: But instead we’re all-in on deskilling the industry. Not content with removing CSS and HTML almost entirely from the job market, we’re now shifting towards the model where devs are instead “AI” wranglers. The web dev of the future will be an underpaid generalist … | Continue reading
Rand Fishkin, writing on the SparkToro blog: On Sunday, May 5th, I received an email from a person claiming to have access to a massive leak of API documentation from inside Google’s Search division. The email further claimed that these leaked documents were confirmed as authenti … | Continue reading
Louise Matsakis, Big Technology: Shein and Temu’s users aren’t just browsing. Shein reportedly earned roughly $45 billion last year, and is currently trying to go public. PDD Holdings, Temu’s Chinese parent company, reported earlier this week that its revenue surged more than 130 … | Continue reading
Jason Koebler, 404 Media: The complete destruction of Google Search via forced AI adoption and the carnage it is wreaking on the internet is deeply depressing, but there are bright spots. For example, as the prophecy foretold, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit … | Continue reading
The bad news: Apple shipped an alarming bug in iOS 17.5 which sometimes revealed photos previously deleted by the user and, in the process, created a reason for users to mistrust how their data is handled. This was made especially confusing by Apple’s lack of commentary. The good … | Continue reading
Finally. The government of the United States finally passed a law that would allow it to force the sale of, or ban, software and websites from specific countries of concern. The target is obviously TikTok — it says so right in its text — but crafty lawmakers have tried to add eno … | Continue reading
Kelsey Piper, Vox: Questions arose immediately [over the resignations of key OpenAI staff]: Were they forced out? Is this delayed fallout of Altman’s brief firing last fall? Are they resigning in protest of some secret and dangerous new OpenAI project? Speculation filled the void … | Continue reading
Yusuf Mehdi of Microsoft: Now with Recall, you can access virtually what you have seen or done on your PC in a way that feels like having photographic memory. Copilot+ PCs organize information like we do – based on relationships and associations unique to each of our individual e … | Continue reading
Joanna Stern, Wall Street Journal: [Apple vice president of iPad and Mac product marketing Tom] remained firm: iPads are for touch, Macs are not. “MacOS is for a very different paradigm of computing,” he said. He explained that many customers have both types of devices and think … | Continue reading
Bobby Allyn, NPR: Lawyers for Scarlett Johansson are demanding that OpenAI disclose how it developed an AI personal assistant voice that the actress says sounds uncannily similar to her own. […] Johansson said that nine months ago [Sam] Altman approached her proposing that she al … | Continue reading
Apple issued an update today which, it says, ought to patch a bug which resurfaced old and deleted photos: This update provides important bug fixes and addresses a rare issue where photos that experienced database corruption could reappear in the Photos library even if they were … | Continue reading
Corey Quinn: I’m sorry Slack, you’re doing fucking WHAT with user DMs, messages, files, etc? I’m positive I’m not reading this correctly. [Screenshot of the opt out portion of Slack’s “privacy principles”: Contact us to opt out. If you want to exclude your Customer Data from Slac … | Continue reading
Over the past week, several threads have been posted on Reddit claiming photos deleted years ago are reappearing in their libraries, and in those of sold and wiped devices. Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: There are a number of reports of similar situations in the thread on Reddit. Some u … | Continue reading
Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac? Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you. It’s easy to setup, doubles the speed at which Safari loads and blocks all YouTube ads. Magic Lasso is an efficient, high performance … | Continue reading
In a video on Threads, Quinn Nelson shows how the Apple Pencil casts a tool-specific faux shadow on the surface of the page. I love this sort of thing — a detail like this that, once you notice it, brings a little joy to whatever you are doing, whether that is creating art or jus … | Continue reading
Albert Burneko, Defector: “If the ChatGPT demos were accurate,” [Kevin] Roose writes, about latency, in the article in which he credits OpenAI with having developed playful intelligence and emotional intuition in a chatbot—in which he suggests ChatGPT represents the realization o … | Continue reading
Look, I should not tell you to choose my caption as the winner for this New Yorker cartoon. All I can tell you is that I have small, silly dreams and winning this thing is one of them. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink | Continue reading
Paul Ford, Wired: What I love, more than anything, is the quality that makes AI such a disaster: If it sees a space, it will fill it — with nonsense, with imagined fact, with links to fake websites. It possesses an absolute willingness to spout foolishness, balanced only by its c … | Continue reading
Molly White: I, like many others who have experimented with or adopted these products, have found that these tools actually can be pretty useful for some tasks. Though AI companies are prone to making overblown promises that the tools will shortly be able to replace your content … | Continue reading
Liz Reid, head of Google Search: People have already used AI Overviews billions of times through our experiment in Search Labs. They like that they can get both a quick overview of a topic and links to learn more. We’ve found that with AI Overviews, people use Search more, and ar … | Continue reading
Samuel Axon, Ars Technica: The new iPad Pro is a technical marvel, with one of the best screens I’ve ever seen, performance that few other machines can touch, and a new, thinner design that no one expected. It’s a prime example of Apple flexing its engineering and design muscles … | Continue reading
Zoe Kleinman, BBC: It [GPT-4o] is faster than earlier models and has been programmed to sound chatty and sometimes even flirtatious in its responses to prompts. The new version can read and discuss images, translate languages, and identify emotions from visual expressions. There … | Continue reading
Matt Sephton: At this point, I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing because I was under the impression that the first emoji were created by an anonymous designer at SoftBank in 1997, and the most famous emoji were created by Shigetaka Kurita at NTT DoCoMo in 1999. But the Sha … | Continue reading
Ina Fried, Axios: OpenAI Monday announced a new flagship model, dubbed GPT-4o, that brings more powerful capabilities to all its customers, including smarter, faster real-time voice interactions. The presentation was broadcast live and it is worth watching, particularly the last … | Continue reading
Apple is spending the next two weeks trickling out what its “team of experts alongside a select group of artists” think are the one hundred best albums of all time. Sure, add another to the pile, I do not care. However, unlike Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, Apple has a whole music … | Continue reading
Do you want an to try an ad blocker that’s easy to setup, easy to keep up to date and with pro features available when you need them? Then download Magic Lasso Adblock — the ad blocker designed for you. Magic Lasso Adblock is an efficient and high performance ad blocker for your … | Continue reading
From Lucy Pham, a collection of abandoned blogs — exactly what it says on the tin. This reminds me of a really wonderful piece of net art from probably fifteen years ago — maybe more — which was a series of quotes from people apologizing for not posting in a while, or something s … | Continue reading
Justin Ling: [Philip] Zimmermann is a bit of a hero of mine. (I tried to hide my gushing while we spoke.) I’m particularly fond of him because of the broad, complicated, messy coalition he helped usher in to continue advocating for this open internet: Anarchists, libertarians, pa … | Continue reading
Experience your favourite articles as podcasts. Simply email Listen Later a link, a PDF, or a newsletter, and our A.I. — featuring remarkably human-like narration — will transform it into a podcast episode. Delivered straight to your preferred podcast app. Start listening for fre … | Continue reading
Reddit: Our policy outlines the information partners can access via a public-content licensing agreement as well as the commitments we make to users about usage of this content. It takes into account feedback from a group of moderators we consulted when developing it: We require … | Continue reading
Stu Maschwitz: After Apple released a behind-the-scenes video about the production of “Scary Fast,” the Internet did its internet thing and questioned the “Shot on iPhone” claim, as if “Shot on iPhone” inherently means “shot with zero other gear besides an iPhone.” These takes we … | Continue reading
“Gabe” on Twitter [sic]: it’s cool how every google search now starts with a wall of LLM slop that is completely useless and takes up half the screen Via Simon Willison: Not all promotional content is spam, and not all AI-generated content is slop. But if it’s mindlessly generate … | Continue reading