hapticmonkey

If AI takes over the job market, they’ll have to. There won’t be enough humans with income to pay for things. The machines can crank out exponentially more code each day and maybe us silly humans can find something else to do with our time.

Introducing the new BIC Ai SmartPen. Every word you write gets sent back to the BIC data center. Give one to every kid in school!

As an iPhone Air owner here’s my honest take: Build quality, screen, and performance are all fantastic. No compromises there.

Compromises are battery, no additional camera lenses. Single speaker. Some niche USB limits.

Battery life is fine overall but on days of heavy use/travel it’s noticeable. Single camera lens is ok but I do miss the telephoto on occasion. Single speaker gets made fun of online, but for any serious listening you’re going to use headphones anyway.

Charge speed via USB is lower than the pros and you can’t do video-out over USB.

They tried mini iPhones. They didn’t sell well. Unfortunately the market is just not there.

My take is that engineers were hypnotised by the technology (which is incredible) and they ignored the downstream social/political/economic factors until it became too obvious. Like moths to a flame.

We saw this play out with the social media era. Incredible technology but it’s now ossified into deteriorating closed platforms mostly filled with algorithmic, ragebait slop surrounded by ads. Fool me once.

Reminds me of this Kurt Vonnegut quote:

> “(talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope) Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”

Sometimes efficiency is not the point.

This is the administration that got close to getting the Supreme Court overturning the pretty clear wording of the 14th amendment. Do you think they care about the 1st?

But if you just gave customers the video files, they’d get leaked. We can’t have 4K Dolby Vision + Atmos files just floating around for people to pirate!

Oh wait, despite all the DRM we have that anyway. What a huge waste of effort all this protection has been.

Just a reminder to anyone reading that accessibility features are not just for other people but they are for our future selves. Growing old, getting injured etc are things that will happen to us all.

Going to go and give my mum a call now!

They’ve been working towards this since the introduction of ARKit in iOS back in 2016. Maybe even earlier.

They’ve done a very good job at proving the required tech with stuff like putting LiDAR in iPhones which is key to the Vision Pro….which is their AR interaction model testing ground. They are taking a pretty measured approach.

I just don’t think the physical tech is ready for AR glasses that reach a level of polish that Apple would ship mass market. But all the other pieces are there.

Maybe there’s potential here for certain accessibility scenarios for users who would benefit. But otherwise, leave the mouse cursor alone.

Instagram and Facebook both have such features. They’re hidden, though. With Instagram you tap the logo in the top middle of the app and choose “Following”. With Facebook it’s hidden away under the “Feeds” section in the app.

I’d love for there to be an option to have them as default. It’s obvious ($$$) why they won’t do that unless forced to by regulators.

The analogy would hold if there were 2 or 3 calculator companies and all your calculations had to be sent to them.

If local models get good enough, I think it’s a very different scenario than engineers all over the world relying on central entities which have their own motives.

It’s so incredibly frustrating the effort required to keep the site/app from funnelling my kids into low effort slop.

I like to use it with my kids (under age of 6) to search and find interesting videos with them. The algorithm combined with the TV apps’s UX makes it such a frustrating experience.

There is so much potential there, but searching for things like space videos inevitably funnels me into AI generated slop and conspiracies. Searching for upcoming movie trailers funnels me into completely fake trailers. It’s clear the platform is an engagement engine first and a knowledge base second.