A few things I hope to see this year at WWDC: A general theme on speed and reliability at the OS and app level. Especially Mail and Music. iPadOS battery management (charge to 80% and hold) Siri audiobook integration. My kids have Alexa devices in their rooms and I’d love to upgrade them to HomePod […]
Continue reading →On the importance of just showing up when building habits.
Continue reading →From Spencer Kornhaber at The Atlantic:
The National and Taylor Swift have become one of the unlikeliest and most productive synergies in contemporary music—the cross-pollination of a gloomy indie-rock fraternity and proudly sentimental, stadium-charming pop.
This relationship has been fascinating over the past few years. Swift and The National (and Big Red Machine) have all been cross-pollinating and I think it’s made all parties better as a result.
From Adam Engst at Tidbits:
Why does Arc deserve this spot? Arc’s designers have taken the Chromium engine and created a Mac-native app that improves on the standard Web browser interface in four conceptual areas: context, persistence, visibility, and refinement. Each plays a vital role in why I describe Arc as transformative. In the sections below, I’ll explain how its unique features—or at least unique combinations of features—make it stand out.
Adam covers a ton of ground here, and provides a solid overview of what makes Arc a really compelling browser. I’ve been using it on and off for about 6 months now and it’s the first non-Safari browser I really like.
Arc tries to be your hub for the web and it does quite a good job of being a beautiful app that happens to also be great tool for power users. It’s rare to see something so customizable have the level of detail and whimsy that Arc brings to the table. Power users expect to have multiple profiles, keyboard shortcuts and tools for screencaps, notes and more. The command palette is super powerful, so you really can accomplish nearly everything with a few keystrokes. What you often don’t get when you try something with those features is the polish, beauty and attention to detail that you seem in Arc.
Still, I’d say that Arc is trying to do a bit too much – Easels and Notes are cool but not something I even remember exist most of the time. In addition, the power user features add a bit of cognitive load to doing basics. In an effort to make the most of the tab Spaces feature, I’m constantly making sure pages I’m viewing are in the correct location instead of just using the browser. There are also some small UI glitches, but for a beta, it’s quite impressive.
I likely need a little more time to figure out how to make things work perfectly for me, but the fact that it’s been about 6 months and I still feel that way says that it’s too complex in some ways.
If you’re on the lookout for an invite, ping me on Mastodon and I’ll get you set up.
From AP News:
Electricity generated from renewables surpassed coal in the United States for the first time in 2022, the U.S. Energy Information Administration announced Monday.
Renewables also surpassed nuclear generation in 2022 after first doing so last year.
Growth in wind and solar significantly drove the increase in renewable energy and contributed 14% of the electricity produced domestically in 2022.
A huge milestone, but a long ways to go. The part that stuck out to me the most was the economic argument:
Over the past decade, the levelized cost of wind energy declined by 70 percent, while the levelized cost of solar power has declined by an even more impressive 90 percent.
That’s a remarkable drop in just 10 years. As it becomes more affordable than coal, we should see even wider adoption.
From WordPress.com:
We’re excited to announce that Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, has acquired the popular WordPress plugin ActivityPub.
This innovative plugin brings a whole new level of social networking to your website by integrating it with the wider federated social web. When installed, the plugin allows you to easily share your content and interact with users on Mastodon and other platforms that also support the ActivityPub protocol.
Just as Automattic aims to do with all of our products, this plugin helps to decentralize the web, break down silos, and foster a more connected online ecosystem.
This is a great start and I love the idea of allowing you to not only publish easily to ActivityPub networks like Mastodon, but also allow comments to your posts to show on your site. I hope that eventually we could see more bidirectional sync. I had mentioned this a while back on Mastodon, and would love this plugin to eventually evolve into a space where I could do the following:
Fingers crossed we see continued innovation in this space.
From Clive Thompson:
But during COVID, while my socializing was purely online, it was broader. I spent time hanging out with far-flung peers, like my friends in Canada who I don’t see nearly often enough. Or, after my mother passed away in the summer of 2020, her side of the family held a 2021 memorial online, and it was amazing to see all my oodles of cousins, many of whom I haven’t been in the same room with for years and years.
I can relate to this. My social network was briefly much broader and had more frequent interactions than it does now that things are back to normal. Almost nightly I’d play games online with friends, hop on zoom parties to watch movies we’ve seen a hundred times, or simply happy hours.
If I’m being honest, the part I don’t miss is the work-mandated ones. I feel like tons of leaders did the bare minimum to set up something “fun” to check the box and it was nothing more than a distraction.
From Elissaveta M. Brandon at Fast Company:
For now, the browser extension focuses on physical disabilities, but the team is also working on a prototype that takes into consideration people with cognitive disabilities, including dyslexia. The ultimate goal is for all of the web to be accessible, so that anybody can navigate a website, regardless of their physical or cognitive ability. “There’s no such thing as 100% accessibility,” says Noone. “But there is such a thing as continual integration of accessibility, and that’s what we aim for.”
One of the biggest challenges for folks who care about accessibility but aren’t deep into best practices is a lack of easy-to-use tools to help make small but meaningful improvements. This seems like a great step in the right direction.
I’m happy to see their extension and tools available for a ton of platform and browsers as well. Oddly, the entire article doesn’t actually link to the extension. Here it is.
Last week, some interesting news broke about Google and Mozilla prepping versions of their iOS browsers to use their own rendering engines rather than simply being a wrapper around Webkit, Apple’s rendering engine. If you aren’t familiar, iOS has rules that prevent browser makers like Google and Mozilla from embedding the engine that handles layout […]
Continue reading →From Jesus Diaz, Fast Company:
After a decade of being the only game in town, Tesla is entering a new era of the EV wars, which started in earnest in 2022 but will only intensify in 2023. Tesla still dominates the EV market in the U.S. today, but its lead has consistently dropped—and is expected to quickly dwindle—as legacy automakers roll out their own electric models.
Tesla’s rise to fame has been nothing short of impressive, but in a competitive market like the automotive industry their regression to the mean was inevitable. As a Tesla Model 3 LR owner, I can say that while I am happy with my car, I wouldn’t buy a Tesla for my next vehicle.
The early decision to start from the top and working your way down the price ladder was something that set them apart and helped drive the “cool” factor despite the car not being premium in ways folks paying $60–100k for a car would normally expect. They used the early dominance to build a charging network that is still unrivaled, and the battery life for their long range models is still better than most of the competition. The ongoing software update model aligned with consumer expectations in the iPhone era and was fairly unique in the indsutry. Combine that with Musk’s larger that life personality (and expectations about self driving that he’s been promising since 2014), the company earned a lot of fans (myself included!) for accelerating the move away from ICE vehicles by making something cool, approachable and futuristic. But the cracks that have always existed are much more apparent now that the rest of the indsutry is getting into the game.
Teslas are notorious for questionable build quality, which is not at the level of other $50–70k cars that I’ve driven. Personally, I haven’t had many issues on my end but I’ve experienced a few unsatisfying noises from time to time, the feel of closing doors and windows isn’t satisfying, and I wish the road noise was a bit quieter. Additionally, the company’s insistence on cramming everything into one touchscreen is a weak point, and their insistence on building every single app for their touchscreen in-house means they’re always playing catch up when it comes to other infotainment systems. Tesla’s refusal to integrate with Carplay and Android Auto, likely due to their view of those platforms as competitors, is super frustrating. And then, there’s the elephant in the room – Elon Musk. While his outspoken nature and leadership of Tesla and SpaceX was once seen as a competitive advantage, it has now become a distraction.
While Tesla’s Full Self Driving (FSD) technology has been highly anticipated for a decade now, I don’t believe anyone will be able to deliver on it within the next 15–20 years. FSD is at level 2 or 3 out of 5 right now, and haven’t made a ton of progress. The standard “Autopilot” feature, which is basically variable cruise control and lane assistance, is quite good for level 1. Highway driving on long road trips is way better with this tech. But the rest of it? Way too many edge cases for me to be interested in trying out. Like most software, that last 20% is hard to iron out, but in this case we’re dealing with 500k beta testers playing with human life. No thanks.
To keep a market share close to what they have now, Tesla needs to scale up, fix the quality issues they have and convince nearly every current Tesla owner to buy a second vehicle when they’re ready to buy. They also can’t rely on consumers paying premium prices for EVs forever. Delivering on a true mass-market EV in the $30k range will help them maintain a lead. Oh, and crack Level 4–5 autonomy to differentiate themselves from the rest of the market. Hard to see that happening with all of the great options coming out from established automakers.
It’s far easier for traditional automakers to figure out how to transition their fleet from ICE to EV than it is for Tesla to become a big automaker and solve for all of the small but significant headwinds they’re facing. That doesn’t mean Tesla is going out of business or doomed to fail. What it does mean is that capitalizing on the first mover advantage in an industry without strong network effects is hard to do for long. I don’t think many automakers could have maintained Tesla’s lead for long, but it seems like Musk and Tesla are squandering it even more quickly.
Bonus reading: https://www.wired.com/story/teslas-problems-elon-musk-twitter/