Category: Uncategorized

Apple’s Ground Floor

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Macbook Neo

The “Apple tax” isn’t gone. The XDR display exists, after all. But the ground floor has moved considerably, and Apple has managed to do it without reaching for cheap materials or cutting corners on what actually matters to everyday use.

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Mastodon is for the people

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From Hannah Aubury at Mastodon:

For now, we want to run some onboarding experiments to test our ideas and learn what can work for us and for everyone on the network. Our first experiment is Default Server Recommendations. (If you were at FOSDEM or following along at home, you may have seen Andy Piper and I announce this or post about it!). Practically, we will replace the “join mastodon.social” button with a button that recommends a server from an opt-in pool that we will be hand selecting to start.

Good to see.

The email analogy (“choosing a server is like choosing an email provider”) has always been a solid go-to explanation, and it works reasonably well if you already understand why you might want your own email domain. That works great for a certain kind of person and lands with a thud for everyone else. Federation is genuinely a foreign concept for most new users, and no amount of clever copy fixes that. The real question is whether Mastodon can make the choice feel low-stakes enough that people stop worrying about it entirely and just … join somewhere.

This experiment feels like a step in that direction. Hope it fuels additional growth.

Apple Music Introduces AI Transparency Tags

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From Stereogum:

Apple Music won't prevent you from streaming AI slop, but it'll at least let you know that you're streaming AI slop. According to the Music Business Worldwide newsletter, the biggest non-Spotify streaming service is launching a new feature that it calls Transparency Tags. It's a set of metadata disclosure requirements that'll flag music that used generative AI on a "material portion" of four elements: the track itself, the lyrics, the artwork, and the music video.

Glad to see Apple is doing this, but I wish it wasn’t “opt-in” for the labels. According to the article, Deezer has their own AI detection software that augments any self-reporting in an effort to be more comprehensive.

Why Have You Started This War, Mr. President?

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From The New York Times:

That Mr. Trump declared the Iranian nuclear program “obliterated” by the strike in June — a claim belied by both U.S. intelligence and this new attack — underscores how little regard Mr. Trump has for his duty to tell the truth when committing American armed forces to battle. It also shows how little faith American citizens should place in his assurances about the goals and results of his growing list of military adventures.

Two things can be true at once: Iran’s leadership is genuinely awful, and it is not the United States’ legal or moral prerogative to remove them by force. Sovereignty isn’t a courtesy we extend to governments we like. It’s the foundational principle of international law, and unilaterally deciding to bomb a country into regime change violates it regardless of how “evil” that regime is.

The case for this attack has never cleared that bar. The stated justifications – to the extent they exist at all – range from strategically dubious to shifting like sand to justify the argument of the day. Whether the bombing campaign succeeds or fails, the cascading consequences – regional destabilization, retaliatory escalation, a power vacuum with no clear successor – are problems the U.S. has neither the plan nor the capacity to manage. This is a war of choice, launched without legal authority, against a country that did not attack us.

Opposing it doesn’t require sympathy for the Iranian regime. It requires recognizing that “they’re bad” has never been a sufficient justification for war.

Defense secretary Pete Hegseth designates Anthropic a supply chain risk

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From The Verge:

Nearly two hours after President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he was banning Anthropic products from the federal government, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth took it one step further and announced that he was now designating the AI company as a “supply-chain risk”. The decision could immediately impact numerous major tech companies that use Claude in their line of work for the Pentagon, including Palantir and AWS. It is not immediately clear to what extent the Pentagon may blacklist companies that contract with Claude for other services outside of national security.

Good for Anthropic. It’s a shame that the other AI companies aren’t lining up behind them.

Makes me happy that I’m a subscriber to Claude, relatively speaking.

Introducing Acme Weather

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From Introducing Acme Weather:

Fifteen years ago, we started work on the Dark Sky weather app. Over the years it went through numerous iterations — including more than one major redesign — as we worked our way through the process of learning what makes a great weather app. Eventually, in time, it was acquired by Apple, where the forecast and some core features were incorporated into Apple Weather. We enjoyed our time at Apple. So why did we leave to start another weather company? It’s simple: when looking at the landscape of the countless weather apps out there, many of them lovely, we found ourselves feeling unsatisfied. The more we spoke to friends and family, the more we heard that many of them did too. And, of course, we missed those days as a small scrappy shop. So let’s try this again…
Acme Weather App

This is a really great looking app from the developers of Dark Sky before they were acquired by Apple. It’s super glancebale, has great typography, and nearly perfect information density.

I’ll likely give it a shot to see if it can dethrone Carrot Weather, the gold standard in my opinion.

The only downside I see thus far is the icon. As long as there’s a decent home screen widget it’s not a dealbreaker, though.

Pentagon Used Anthropic’s Claude in Maduro Venezuela Raid

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From The Wall Street Journal:

“Anthropic’s artificial-intelligence tool Claude was used in the U.S. military’s operation to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, highlighting how AI models are gaining traction in the Pentagon, according to people familiar with the matter. The mission to capture Maduro and his wife included bombing several sites in Caracas last month. Anthropic’s usage guidelines prohibit Claude from being used to facilitate violence, develop weapons or conduct surveillance.”

Apple News+ Link

Not great, bob.

Apple Should Rethink Face ID Settings for our Current Era

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From Phillip Michaels at Six Colors:

The central role that phones play in our lives coupled with uncertain times at home and abroad have people rethinking how they should approach Face ID. Apple needs to be doing the same.

One thing I’ve always appreciated about Android is how many automation apps exist that let you configure settings much closer to the metal than iOS Shortcuts allows. Tasker was my go-to for this back in the day. It could set DND based on calendar events, change deep settings based on location or WiFi network amongst other things. This allowed me to me keep my phone unlocked at home while requiring fingerprint authentication everywhere else.

I love Shortcuts and have a ridiculous number of automations set up myself, but there’s a handful of things I genuinely need to automate that Apple simply won’t let me touch. The most glaring one? Location-based security policies. You could imagine a world where users choose between no barriers at home, biometrics when out and about, and a long password at protests or border crossings. It’s not a wild ask. It’s just basic threat modeling.

Apple could open up APIs to make this possible via Shortcuts automations. In addition, they could create sensible defaults and ask users about their preferences when upgrading to a new OS. I know there are complexity costs and geolocation is only so reliable so there are risks involved. But the risks of imperfect geolocation seem a lot more acceptable than the alternative: leaving users vulnerable to compelled unlocking at protests, airports, or anywhere else someone with a badge decides your face is the key to your entire digital life.

Apple has built its recent brand on privacy. They run TV spots about keeping your browsing data safe. They’ve position themselves as the antidote to Big Tech surveillance. And yet, when it comes to giving users the tools to actually protect themselves from state-level threats, Apple’s response is basically “hold down some buttons and hope for the best.” They could do better. If Apple genuinely believes privacy is a human right, exposing more control here could go a long way to walking that walk.