John’s Blog

From the Cloudflare blog:

To help preserve a safe Internet for content creators, we’ve just launched a brand new “easy button” to block all AI bots. It’s available for all customers, including those on our free tier. […]

We hear clearly that customers don’t want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do so dishonestly. To help, we’ve added a brand new one-click to block all AI bots. It’s available for all customers, including those on the free tier.

Nice idea, and one that only a company like Cloudflare seems likely to do well. Seems like a no-brainer to implement this if you’re on the fence about AI content scraping.

One of the welcome announcements from WWDC last month was the ability to pause your streak of closing Activity rings for a day or so. This is a long overdue feature that I’m glad to see finally coming to the Watch. It’s not healthy to do the same activities every day with no rest, but there’s also an interesting gamification angle to the product itself.

I used to try and close my rings every day. I did it for about 3 years straight, which at that point became more about keeping the “game” going than fitness. Once I stopped the streak due to an injury I never picked it up again. In fact, I find myself wearing the Apple Watch less and less each week.

I wonder if I would been able to pause my streak then if I would have kept with it and the Watch would still be a valuable product in my life.

On the surface pausing a streak is a great way to keep your fitness progress going. But it’s also a hard push towards keeping your Watch relevant and useful. I bet there’s a lot of people like me that have broken streaks and never gone back, resulting in a much less useful device.

Matt Birchler, writing on the state of the open web and LLMs crawling content without permission:

You could also choose to block my ad or to mess with my CSS. You could choose to read entirely in your RSS reader and never come to the site at all. You can save this to the read later service and read it on their site or in their app. You can download a local copy of anything on the site and do whatever you want with it. Search engines can index it and show my site to people looking stuff up on Google. And yes, LLMs can scrape my site to use it as food for their training.

I bet that everyone reading this was nodding along like, “yes, this is what’s so great about the open web!” up until that last one — then we probably had a split in opinions. […]

I really enjoyed this list of “obvious” travel tips from Dynomight. A few highlights:

1: Mindset matters more than where you go.

2: Who you go with matters more than where you go.

21: Fun gets old surprisingly quickly

22: If you spend a ton of money and stay in very expensive hotels and whatever, you can eliminate almost all of the frustration and uncertainty of travel. But it also feels like you never leave the global capitalist monoculture.

(via Kottke)

Noah Kalina, with a clever photo series capturing all of the whacky ways utility companies will trim trees to save the lines.

The ElevenLabs Reader App lets you listen to any text content, with ElevenLabs voices, on the go. This expands your library of audio content to any article, PDF, ePub, newsletter, or any other text on your phone. And with our expansive, ever growing voice library, you can find a voice to suit any content, mood, or occasion.

ElevenLabs’ audio generation is very good. It’s what I’m using for Air Mail and its APIs have been very nice to work with.

This is a great idea for an app. (App Store Link)

A few years ago I switched to using Spotify full-time instead of Apple Music. I find Apple Music’s interface slow, buggy, and often downright non-functional. Spotify’s interface is fast, its search works every time, and the recommendations engine is far superior.

All of the problems with Apple Music remain, but I’m switching back.

Spotify seems like a mess as a company and it keeps pushing its agenda into my listening. I don’t want to listen to audiobooks, yet I continue to have to pay for them (until this week it looks like). I don’t care for its podcasting efforts, and strongly dislike its decisions around who to give truckloads of money to. I don’t like how Spotify treats or views artists. The list sort of goes on…

From everything that I can find online, Apple Music seems to pay artists better than Spotify. It’s hard to know the specifics of these deals but most reports show Apple Music at almost double the royalty of Spotify. This is great, and likely due to Apple not needing quite as much cash since they have a nice side business. Oh and Spotify’s plan prices are increasing again, for the second time in a year, without any indication that increased revenue will go artists.

So anyways, back to Apple Music.

Interesting news from HBO and NFL Films for this upcoming season. Nick Shook writing at NFL.com:

Hard Knocks is entering new territory in 2024 with plans to document an entire division’s regular-season journey.

For the first time ever, HBO and NFL Films will follow all four teams in the AFC North for their annual Hard Knocks: In Season, aiming to chronicle the inner workings of the rough-and-tumble quartet of squads. The new episodes will feature the Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals, Cleveland Browns and Pittsburgh Steelers, members of the first division to finish with nothing but winning records, achieved in 2023.

This is a neat idea. The in-season version of Hard Knocks hasn’t been as appealing to me as the original pre-season version. Here’s hoping for a fun division race in December so this concept works out. 🏈

The brilliant folks at Sandwich have debuted their new app for immersive video on the Vision Pro: Theater (App Store link). It’s so cool.

What was cooler this week was Sandwich live streaming The Talk Show from WWDC in spatial video. I tuned in for the first half of the show, and it was a stunning experience. I can’t wait to see more of this type of thing in the future.

This is a really nice addition to Apple Pay coming in iOS 18: users will be able to pay with Apple Pay on Windows, and in Chrome browsers. Very nice implementation. Excited to implement this for Air Mail later this year.

A thorough and beautiful post from Louie Mantia about the new “dark mode” icons available in iOS 18.

Some (seemingly) good news after the surprise announcement last week that Alamo was closing its doors here in Dallas. Alamo is such a great place, and I really hope it survives.

Casey Newton, writing at Platformer:

It was a moment that has seemed inevitable since November 2022, when ChatGPT launched and catalyzed global interest in how AI can enhance products. In the 18 months since, impatient investors have worried that Apple might be letting the moment pass it by. Savvier observers have noted that this is how Apple has worked for decades now: approaching new technologies deliberately, and on its own time; developing its distinctive take on the product; and releasing it only when polished to the company’s quality standards.

Judging from the preview, Apple Intelligence was created in just this way. The company took time to develop principles around what AI should do on its devices. It landed on a suite of AI features for the operating system, designed to make its devices more valuable by leveraging the massive amount of personalized data on your devices. (Sensitive to the implications of such an invasive technology, Apple also took pains to develop a more private approach to data processing for AI apps as well.)

The privacy-based approach to AI is such a breath of fresh air in the industry.

The headlining feature of Monday’s WWDC Keynote was clearly the introduction of “Apple Intelligence”, Apple’s newly minted name for all-things-AI at the company.

The first mention of “Artificial Intelligence” by Apple was over an hour into the keynote, when Tim Cook called the company’s initiatives “personal intelligence” and “the next big step for Apple.”

I love the framing of a “personal intelligence system”. It strikes a bold contrast between other AI tools that “use world knowledge” versus something that understands you.

Apple didn’t just roll out a bunch of models and developer jargon– they showed real features that use AI to enhance what you can do by yourself with these devices.

A few of the highlights for me were:

• Rewriting emails in Mail looks really nice. It’s very clever how you can choose from different tones when writing. (Not holding out hope here for a “passive aggressive coworker” tone. 🤣)
• Summarizing of emails in the messages list, instead of just showing the generic subject and pre-header for a mail messages is fantastic.
• “Genmoji” to create your own “emoji”-style images for messages is super cool. This is going to get a ton of usage.
• “Clean up” removes background details and people from photos. A year or so later than Google here, but a welcome addition for Photos.
• The whole concept of Private Cloud Compute is very interesting and perfect for Apple’s brand.
• The ChatGPT integration in Siri is a welcome addition, and will certainly be useful. I love how Apple is very clear before sending any data to OpenAI.

As mentioned in the keynote, I really dig how Apple Intelligence is being framed as an AI assistant that “context and meets you where you are.”

WWDC begins today and the annual keynote featuring new software updates for Apple platforms will inevitably bring a ton of new AI features. I’m sure those will be interesting, but my desires for the platforms are focused elsewhere.

Here are a few other items I’d love to see this year. First a few developer-oriented updates:

An Apple Sports API

Credit to Cihat Gündüz for this idea, but it’s a brilliant one. With Apple’s introduction of a very nice sports app earlier this year it seems that this one is within the realm of possibility. Maybe not this year, but eventually would be amazing. I’d still love to build a purpose-built sports scores app with support for a few niche features for folks like me that constantly are watching games in delay after my kids go to bed. ⚾️

System API for AI Models

Developers should not need to ship their own AI models and optimizations to use them on Apple platforms. Let’s get some first-party support for various AI models for different purposes that can be used with a simple abstracted API.

And some end-user features:

Modernize Mail’s Features

Mail.app is an amazing app, but its features still seem very dated. How about Snoozing, Sending Later, a Screener, and “better” handling of newsletters.

Instant AirDrop

AirDrop is great, when it works. Which is a rare thing for me. And even when it does work it’s incredibly slow, even for devices that are within inches of each other. I’d love to see AirDrop capable of sending a link or photo between devices within seconds, not minutes.

Working Screen Time

As noted last week, let’s focus on a Screen Time feature that actually does what it says. Or at a minimum, doesn’t allow kids to easily bypass.

Messages++

“Messages” is a great app, but compared to its modern competitors (WhatsApp, et al) it’s too simplistic. More filters, better support for SMS and green-bubble group chats would be welcome additions. How about a way to filter all of the 2FA and confirmation codes out of the conversations flow? Group chats that can be summarized by AI. Delayed sending of messages, so I don’t bother people in other time zones late at night. Drafts syncing. Typing indicators for group chats. Expiring “secure” thread. Lots of opportunity here.

Oh Siri

Siri needs a complete reboot, if not a complete rebrand too. It’s so bad, I almost never use it. And when I do and hope for the best, it rarely succeeds. Siri needs a new (likely AI/LLM-based) engine. It’s time.

Vision Pro Next Steps

I’m not sure where to go with the Vision Pro, but I’m hoping for a very nice 2.0 on visionOS.

→ See also, Michael Tsai’s excellent roundup of WWDC wish lists. I agree with all of Ryan Jones’ ideas for control center:

Hopes for a better Control Center:

1. Big clear single tap audio output
2. Pick home controls
3. Any shortcut
4. Hide less in long presses
5. Rotation lock except video
6. All buttons are customizable
7. No double button in Focus Modes
8. Mini TV Remote at first level

Looking forward to watching the keynote later today. I’ve avoided the spoilers and I’m just looking forward to enjoying the presentation.

Speaking of cool new devices, the Daylight DC-1 looks very cool as well.

Nice new app from Leica (App Store Link) with lens simulation styles. A few that are free, and a few more for an upgrade.

Transform your Apple Watch into a playful, functional handheld device that provides connectivity without distraction, encouraging you to leave your phone at home.

I don’t quite get it, but I love it. More cool hardware devices coming soon..

Joanna Stern, with another excellent piece for the Wall Street Journal. (Apple News+) This time about Apple’s Screen Time, which I’ve been trying to use successfully for years. Glad I’m not alone in this thinking.

Stern’s tweet:

Apple’s Screen Time parental controls are broken, and it feels like an afterthought for the company.

The latest example? Two security researchers have been reporting a bug to Apple since 2021 that lets kids visit blocked sites.

Only after I called did Apple say it would be fixed in the next software update.

These seem like more substantial bugs that can be easily fixed in the “next software update.”

Nick Heer summarizes the problem perfectly:

One could reasonably argue nobody should entirely depend on software to determine how devices are used by themselves or their children, but I do not think many people realistically do. It is part of a combination of factors. Screen Time should at perform the baseline functions it promises. It sucks how common problems are basically ignored until Stern writes about them.

Sean Hollister, writing at The Verge:

Before he brought VR headsets out of the dark ages with Oculus, before he got fired by Facebook following his confusing and controversial political donations, before he went on to found a defense contractor named Anduril that builds lethal drones (!), Palmer Luckey was a Nintendo Game Boy modder.

It’s true. There’s photo evidence — and today, he’s revealing his own take on the ultimate cartridge-playing Nintendo Game Boy, one that you can actually buy for $199.

This thing looks really cool. $199, and shipping by Christmas. I love the resurgence of niche and creative hardware products.

Yesterday, current and former members of OpenAI and Google posted an open letter about the risks of AI and the companies developing it:

We are current and former employees at frontier AI companies, and we believe in the potential of AI technology to deliver unprecedented benefits to humanity.

We also understand the serious risks posed by these technologies. These risks range from the further entrenchment of existing inequalities, to manipulation and misinformation, to the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction. […]

That escalated quickly.

AI companies possess substantial non-public information about the capabilities and limitations of their systems, the adequacy of their protective measures, and the risk levels of different kinds of harm. However, they currently have only weak obligations to share some of this information with governments, and none with civil society. We do not think they can all be relied upon to share it voluntarily.

So long as there is no effective government oversight of these corporations, current and former employees are among the few people who can hold them accountable to the public.

Holding out hope that the government, especially here in the US, is going to sweep in and do a great job regulating this industry seems like a fools errand. What in our recent history shows that the government would be able to do this?

I agree with Casey Newton, on Mastodon:

There’s yet another open letter from the AI safety crowd. If they want more people to take them seriously, they need to get more specific

Rand Fishkin writing at the SparkToro Blog with a bombshell leak of policies from Google on how its search algorithm works:

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 authentic by ex-Google employees, and that those ex-employees and others had shared additional, private information about Google’s search operations.

Many of their claims directly contradict public statements made by Googlers over the years, in particular the company’s repeated denial that click-centric user signals are employed, denial that subdomains are considered separately in rankings, denials of a sandbox for newer websites, denials that a domain’s age is collected or considered, and more.

These documents are really sending the SEO industry into a tailspin this week. This is a fascinating look into one of the most closely guarded secrets in tech.

Mike King also received the documents and has a great breakdown on iPullRank:

I have reviewed the API reference docs and contextualized them with some other previous Google leaks and the DOJ antitrust testimony. […]

You’d be tempted to broadly call these “ranking factors,” but that would be imprecise. Many, even most, of them are ranking factors, but many are not. What I’ll do here is contextualize some of the most interesting ranking systems and features (at least, those I was able to find in the first few hours of reviewing this massive leak) based on my extensive research and things that Google has told/lied to us about over the years.

“Lied” is harsh, but it’s the only accurate word to use here. While I don’t necessarily fault Google’s public representatives for protecting their proprietary information, I do take issue with their efforts to actively discredit people in the marketing, tech, and journalism worlds who have presented reproducible discoveries.

At first, there was silence from Google on this leak. Yesterday, The Verge received email confirmation with a statement:

“We would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about Search based on out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information,” Google spokesperson Davis Thompson told The Verge in an email. “We’ve shared extensive information about how Search works and the types of factors that our systems weigh, while also working to protect the integrity of our results from manipulation.”

Sara Fischer writing for Axios:

The Atlantic, one of the oldest magazines in the U.S., and Vox Media, one of the nation’s largest digital media holding companies, have both inked separate licensing and product deals with ChatGPT parent OpenAI. […]

The deals give OpenAI added momentum in its quest for credible content to train its algorithms and inform its chatbots — and could also protect the Microsoft-backed company further from future copyright liability. […]

Deal terms weren’t disclosed, but it’s safe to assume both publishers are being compensated for their content — that’s how previous deals between publishers and OpenAI have been structured.

The land grab for licensed content to feed into AI continues.

Also interesting:

Internally, Vox will leverage OpenAI’s tech for its first party data platform, Forte, to bolster advertising creative optimization and audience targeting capabilities.

The Vox Media Union’s response:

Today, members of the Vox Media Union, Thrillist Union, and The Dodo Union were informed without warning that Vox Media entered into a “strategic content and product partnership” with OpenAl. As both journalists and workers, we have serious concerns about this partnership, which we believe could adversely impact members of our union, not to mention the well-documented ethical and environmental concerns surrounding the use of generative Al. We demand that Vox Media engage with us on this issue transparently - and address our many unanswered questions about this partnership — instead of continuing to fail to include our voices in decisions like these. We know that Al is already having a monumental impact on our work, and we demand a seat at the table in discussions about its future at Vox Media.

Nilay Patel, Editor in Chief of The Verge, responds on Threads:

I don’t have a lot to say about this – our newsroom is independent of the company’s business dealings as it’s always been. We’ll figure out some disclosure language and do a disclosure when it’s appropriate, we are pretty good at those ;)

[…]

To me it’s the same as anything – there is a firewall between editorial and the commercial side of the business. They don’t get to tell us what to do, and we don’t get involved in how they generate revenue

It’s been a wild week here in Dallas. From the Dallas Morning News:

Ferocious winds and heavy rain swept through North Texas early Tuesday, flooding roads, downing trees and power lines and knocking out power for hundreds of thousands of people.

Many in the Dallas area woke to the wail of tornado sirens when the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning.

“Take cover now!” the weather service in Fort Worth said at 6:13 a.m. on X. The storm packed nearly 80 mph winds, golf ball-sized hail and the threat of flash floods.

Dallas County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins issued an emergency declaration and warned some residents will be without power for days. At a news conference Tuesday, Lewis Jenkins said the extent of the damage and number of people affected make this storm unusual, and he urged patience in the days ahead.

This is the worst storm I’ve been a part of since living here. No power for us still, but hopefully by end of week. Stay safe out there.