John’s Blog

Nicely produced website and list of the 100 Best Albums. Curated by Apple Music with “the help of artists and experts.”

The list will be complete on May 22nd, so just the bottom 20 are available now. I have many gripes on the ordering of this list so far, but will reserve my judgement until the entire thing is ready. 🤣

(Built in part with Svelte, it appears.)

It’s tech conference season. Yesterday was the main Google I/O keynote and, in case you haven’t heard, Google is working on AI.

As usual, The Verge has a nice video breakdown of the most important announcements. (I find sitting through Google keynotes tedious so this was helpful.)

Just a few overall thoughts from the presentation:

Google Lens gets video. Taking a video of a computer screen of code, and having Google explain the code is very interesting.

The Gemini features within Google Workspace look incredible. Creating sheets from a list of emails and and analyzing data across many sources will be very useful.

So many announcements, naming conventions, and code names. Astra, Veo, Gemma, Gemini, Gems, SynthID, yikes. Hard to decipher and remember what each is for, and what the difference is unless you work at Google on one of these teams.

I find it very interesting to hear the launch timing around each of the announcements. The “later this year” and “in the coming months” timelines really speak to unfinished and potentially reactionary features. The features that are shipping now are the most interesting to me and shows what Google has actually prioritized over the past year.

Nice bit at the end where they use Gemini to count the number of times the word “AI” has occurred in the keynote. (121)

In contrast to the OpenAI Spring Update from Monday, it seems like all of the demos from Google were very scripted and clearly pre-recorded. I understand why given the nature of this tech and its unpredictability, but the pre-recorded demos feel less real and more contrived.

Google has a long history of announcing unfinished work at I/O that often doesn’t even ship to users. I’ll be excited to see which of these announcements make it into shipping products for customers this year. Some very cool ideas and features here, now it’s time to deliver them.

OpenAI announced a few very nice updates during its Spring Update yesterday, most notably including GPT-4o:

GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”) is a step towards much more natural human-computer interaction—it accepts as input any combination of text, audio, and image and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs. It can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, which is similar to human response time(opens in a new window) in a conversation. It matches GPT-4 Turbo performance on text in English and code, with significant improvement on text in non-English languages, while also being much faster and 50% cheaper in the API. GPT-4o is especially better at vision and audio understanding compared to existing models.

The video demo was very interesting regarding the conversation style of GPT-4o. We’ve had text-to-speech capabilities for a long time, but this feels much more conversational and ‘real’. If the product is as good as this demo, it’s going to be really cool. The conversation felt very relaxed and, for lack of a better term, human.

Also announced is a desktop app for macOS, which will be available to Plus users starting today. Very interesting to see a macOS app before a Windows desktop app. Excited to give this a spin.

It’s been a few weeks since these two albums dropped and both have been in steady rotation on my Spotify since. It’s not a fair comparison, because I’ve been a Pearl Jam fan for well over 30 years so I won’t be comparing them. (I absolutely love Dark Matter.)

But what strikes me about both of these albums is some of the hate and rage towards them. Certainly Taylor Swift is going to get more scrutiny than a bunch of old guys, but in both cases I don’t agree.

To be a fan of an artist you don’t have to love every piece of music they release. But what you should want is for them to keep trying new things and releasing work that they love.

I’m so thrilled that these guys keep putting out music that makes them proud and excited to keep playing after so many years. And I love that Taylor keeps pushing herself, even when it’s not for everyone. She’s so incredibly prolific it’s remarkable.

More music from talented people is the goal. Some of it will resonate, some will not. And that’s just fine.

This Audio Academy link from 2019 (via Hacker News) about the Grateful Dead and its sound engineer Owsley “Bear” Stanley is fascinating. Live music amplification is mostly taken for granted these days, but it wasn’t alway the case.

It was a time when live sound problems plagued engineers, bands, and audiences equally. While rock concerts grew in size and scope throughout the 60s, audiences grew larger and louder, without the technical sophistication of amplification ever changing to meet this scenario. Screaming fans meant that low-wattage guitar amps could hardly be heard and without the help of monitoring systems, bands could barely hear themselves play. Things were so bad that the Beatles quit touring in 1966 because they couldn’t hear themselves over the audience. It was after this era that the band, the Grateful Dead, became obsessed with their sound, largely thanks to their eccentric and dedicated sound engineer.

Their solution was the famous “Wall of Sound”:

The mammoth structure was massive, made up of over 600 hi-fidelity speakers that sat behind the band as they played. It used six separate sound systems which were able to isolate eleven separate channels with vocals, rhythm guitar, piano each having their own channel. Another channel each for the bass drum, snare, tom-toms, and cymbals. The bass was transmitted through a quadraphonic encoder, which took a signal from each string and projected it through its own set of speakers. The result of each speaker carrying only one instrument or voice at a time was crystal clear audio, free of intermodulation distortion.

An overall nice bump to the iPad lineup today at Apple’s spring event. It’s surprising that this is the first major refresh of the iPad Pro lineup since 2018!

The new OLED “Retina XDR” screen is going to look amazing. One of the (few) shortcomings of the outgoing generation is the black levels on the LED displays just aren’t great at all. Especially compared to modern OLED TVs, the iPhone, and certainly the Vision Pro. This is a huge step forward. Oh, and the nano texture display option is interesting as well. Excited to see that in person.

The M4 is a nice bump. Although, I don’t hear anyone complaining about the previous CPU performance.

The new “Pencil Pro” with squeeze-ability and haptic feedback is a welcome upgrade. The tap-to-change tools on the current pencil trip me up constantly. I’ve been using the pencil more lately to take notes during meetings, so this one is tempting. The killer feature of this update is the ability to locate your pencil via the Find My app. (Apple, please bring this feature to the TV remote!)

I’m currently using an 11” iPad Pro from 2022 and I don’t really see any reason to upgrade here. There are a few really new hardware features but my shortcomings on iPad have nothing to do with hardware–it’s all about the
software for me.

Speaking of the software, it was very nice to see updated versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. I don’t use either of these on iPad, but I’m really glad they exist and that Apple is pushing them forward. More pro-level iPad software please!

Today gets me excited for WWDC, just around the corner in June.

It was an absolute joy watching Lando Norris win his first F1 race yesterday in Miami. We were on the edges of our seats just hoping he could pull it off and beat the field.

On the cool-down lap it was so fun to see the other drivers pull along side Lando and congratulate him. You can tell this was a big moment for him, and for the sport. What an amazing race weekend.

🏎️🏎️

Happy Saturday, and Happy Star Wars Day to those who celebrate. Catching up on some links of note from the past few weeks…

FTC Bans Non-Compete Agreements

Good move here by the FTC, I think. If an employer can’t keep an employee happy through normal means (compensation, benefits, work arrangements, etc) then they shouldn’t be allowed to keep them around due to ridiculous legal documents.

NASA Repairs Voyager 1 from 15 Billion Miles Away

This is an incredible engineering story! So amazing what this team was able to do. Imagine debugging a software program with a nearly 24-hour delay?!

iA Notebook

I love small teams designing products with incredible precision and care. This notebook looks incredible.

AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?

Molly White’s breakdown of the current state of AI. White has a really thoughtful view of overhyped technologies.

David Pierce Reviews the Rabbit M1

Better than the goofy Humane pin, it seems. But still not quite ready for prime time. I sure do like seeing new consumer hardware companies but they continue to be handicapped by smartphone integration and the infancy of AI-based solutions.

And, a few from the my nerdier archives:

• Microsoft Open Sources MS-DOS 4.0
• The BASIC programming language turns 60
  

Have a great weekend. 🏔️🎸🏎️

It was a big week for us at Air Mail. We officially opened our new newsstand in New York, at 546 Hudson St in the West Village. Almost all of the work I’ve done in my career has been online or in digital form so it’s a rare occurrence for me to have a physical manifestation of an idea or work product. This was a lot of fun and I’m so excited to see the store open to the public.

Lovely coverage of the opening and Graydon’s vision in The New York Times from Friday. Ruth La Ferla writes:

The shop arrived in Manhattan after Air Mail opened others in London and Milan. Its merchandise, like the newsletter it is named after, is meant to appeal to an urbane crowd.

A rigorously edited selection of books and high-end glossies like “The World of Interiors,” “Kinfolk” and “Beauty Papers” is supplemented by various novelties with a statusy, you-can-only-find-it-here appeal. Say, a curly brass shoehorn ($145); a palm-tree-patterned Chez Dede lampshade ($345); old-fashioned typewriter paper ($15); or an Air Mail logo baseball cap ($30) like the one Larry David wears in recent episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

Is Mr. Carter, Vanity Fair’s former editor in chief, adopting a new identity as a shopkeeper? Not quite. But “there is a merchant inside everybody,” he said unflappably.

Love that quote. If you’re in New York, come visit us.

Happy Saturday. It’s a rainy one over here in Texas. A few notes and thoughts from the week that was…

Limitless

The newly announced Limitless Pendant looks really nice. Limitless dubs the device “a personalized AI powered by what you’ve seen, said, or heard”. I’m also going to give the Limitless Meetings feature a spin as well. Overall this launch seems very well done. Considering pre-ordering one of these to try it out. It’s the first AI-device that I’m seeing actually utility for myself with.

Soulver 3 for iPhone

I am an avid daily user of Soulver on the Mac. It’s nice to see the app coming to the iPhone as well. Soulver is such a better way to do quick calculations and formulas than having Excel open all day.

Delta Game Emulator (App Store Link)

Now that Apple allows “retro game emulators” in the App Store, a few have started to appear. The best and most notable example seems to be Delta, by Riley Testut. The app used to require side-loading with AltStore, but now it’s in the App Store proper.

Oh the Humanity

Ben Sandofsky has a great piece on “Why You Can’t Build Apple with Venture Capital” and the Humane launch.

MKBHD’s Review of the Humane Pin

Speaking of Humane, MKBHD’s review seems to put the nail in the coffin of this device. Brownlee faced some odd criticism of this review, which seemed very honest to me. Ben Thompson, as usual, has a great take which I 100% agree with regarding content creators and integrity.

Meta.ai

A new “AI Assistant” launch by Meta, based on the Lllama 3 LLM. Meta has a solid approach to rolling out these AI features. Yes, they’re publishing cool tech and AI ideas, but they’re also actually making products out of them and enhancing existing products. Microsoft and Google are doing the same. Apple needs to show work in this space soon to keep up.

A Glimpse Into Modern News Consumption

The Trump hush-money trial begins, and M.G. Siegler has a very interesting breakdown of where the jurors claim they get their news. Sure, it’s a New York jury pool, but interesting to see how many of the jurors get their news primarily from The New York Times.

Have a great weekend. ⛈️

Excellent post on iteration by Justin Jackson:

Your ability to launch a successful business depends on the accumulation of experiences, connections, skills, resources, experiments you’ve run, and insights you’ve gathered.

Today, ConvertKit’s mission is to “help creators earn a living online.” [Nathan Barry] and his team design and build the product with intuitions about what creators want and need. How did they develop those intuitions? Nathan developed his intuitions through his time being a creator. His experience writing and launching multiple apps, books, and courses from 2011-2013 informs his work today.

As an indie entrepreneur, you want to maximize every advantage you have. Most good markets are competitive, so you can’t just show up with a “good product;” you need an edge. Your competitive advantage should be that you understand the customer (and what they want) better than anyone else.

Happy Friday. It’s been a few busy weeks of work for me, so I’m catching up on some interesting links..

Microsoft researcher discovers backdoor in xz Utils library

This entire story is crazy, like out of a movie. It’s incredible how much of the computing world is dependent on small libraries like this run by volunteers.

Open Source Quality Institutes

Tim Bray suggests a new government organization to maintain, support, and protect our most crucial open source infrastructure. Open source maintenance is a thankless and mostly zero-revenue job, but so important to modern tech life. This is a really thoughtful and nice idea, that’ll likely never happen.

Yahoo acquires Artifact

It’s only been a few months since Artifact announced it would wind down, but apparently Yahoo still wants in.

Threads API is coming soon

Very nice looking API docs and specs for the new Threads API. It’s in testing with a few partners now, and rolling out later this year. I’ll be interested to see how this takes off.

Beeper is joining Automattic

Beeper, mostly known for its battles with Apple over iMessage for Android, has been acquired by Automattic. This seems like a strange partnership on the surface, but I didn’t realize Beeper has a messaging app for multiple services. And apparently so does Automattic, in the form of recently acquired Texts.com. I’m not in the market for an app like this myself, but I’m glad it exists and will continue to get support.

Have a great weekend. ⚾️

Today’s eclipse was incredible. Here in Texas, we were in the line of totality so were able to see the full eclipse in all of its glory. At first it just seemed like it was about to storm: getting slightly darker every few minutes. The moon slowly rotated in front of the sun until everything was dark. The birds were acting strange and dogs were barking in the neighborhood. And for a few minutes it was nighttime again. Then it was all over. Incredible. So cool.

The series finale for Curb Your Enthusiasm last night was perfection. It’s so rare that a finale for a series this popular gets it right. Loved all of the cameos and flashbacks to the idiotic moments throughout this great show. Curb has been my favorite show on TV for years, and it’ll be missed.

Happy Opening Day for the MLB. I’ve missed baseball so much this winter, and I’m very much looking forward to this season.

My beloved Orioles kick off the season with a series against the Angels today at Camden Yards. The Orioles’ new ownership group and David Rubenstein sure have given us more reasons to cheer this year. It’s going to be tough to follow up last year’s amazing season, but things are looking up for this club.

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Let’s go ⚾️