1. How do you tell an AR product doesn’t have a mass market application?
When people start talking about how good it is for use in surgery. Don’t believe me? Here’s a Microsoft piece from 2018 talking about surgeons were using HoloLens. These kinds of applications are as old as AR itself, and they represent the kind of niches which are the most obvious business-side areas for using the tech. Industrial applications are exactly what Microsoft spent a decade trying to push for HoloLens. It didn’t work. It won’t work for Apple, either.
2. Reach in the gutter, not the stars
Dave Lee, who knows a thing or two, sums it up nicely: “When Reach goes out of business it’ll blame AI or Big Tech or the BBC or the TikTok generation or literally anything that allows the bosses to avoid admitting they forced their employees to publish complete shit”.
And of course when complaining about the BBC, they won’t mention the £8m a year that the BBC puts into funding more than 150 local reporters. Some of whom work at titles owned by, erm, Reach.
3. The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily you friend
You might have noted that Penguin Random House came out strongly against AI software makers lifting their books for profit. But as Cory Doctorow points out, that doesn’t mean one of the most rapacious groups in publishing has suddenly gained a moral compass. Instead, it just wants to make sure that it gets some money from any AI-related work using “its” content:
This is a pretty naive take. What’s far more likely is that PRH will use whatever legal rights it has to insist that AI companies pay it for the right to train chatbots on the books we write. It is vanishingly unlikely that PRH will share that license money with the writers whose books are then shoveled into the bot’s training-hopper. It’s also extremely likely that PRH will try to use the output of chatbots to erode our wages, or fire us altogether and replace our work with AI slop.
4. All WordPress, all the time
WordPress.com, the organization which believes trademarks are a vital weapon to defend their business, are routinely misusing other companies’ trademarks by republishing plugins on a private repo for their customers. We are very much at “you couldn’t make it up” now.
5. What’s the deal, Dale?
Why is the owner of “Britain’s greenest energy supplier” so against heat pumps? The cynical bones in me want to say that the interests of an energy supplier definitely don’t align with the idea of using less electricity.
6. The deeply disappointing iPad mini
You know how in bad science fiction there’s a moment when someone defeats an invasion of killer robots by asking a question which ties them in knots by making no sense?
“Why is a mouse when it spins?”
“Because… BZZZZT… DAMN… YOU… PUNY… HUMAN.. .BZZZT”
Cue triumph of humanity..
You can get a similar effect from me by asking “hey Ian what’s your favourite iPad?” I’m typing this on an M4 11in iPad Pro and it’s gorgeous. That screen! That speed! That pencil! OK maybe not so much that pencil. On the other hand, the iPad mini. The size! The lovely compactness! The USB-C! The pencil! OK, maybe not the pencil either.
The problem is that Apple does not love the mini as much as its users do, which is why this review of the latest version rings true to me. The one quibble I have is with the placement of the camera – if my use is anything to go by, having the camera at the top in portrait makes sense for the mini where it doesn’t for everything bigger.
7. Everything you ever wanted to know about Mac firmware (but were afraid to ask)
As always, the irrepressible Howard Oakley will be your guide. I love Howard’s in-depth technical work. Those of us who worked with him on MacUser knew he was brilliant, but I didn’t know he was this brilliant.
8. An interview with Iain Banks
Iain Banks was a genius writer, and one of the things which I love most about his is how his literary touchpoints are so similar to mine: M John Harrison, Barrington Bailey, and John Sladek are the ones he lists in this interview, but there are many others.
9. Apple Intelligence gets closer and closer
A lot of people are underwhelmed by Apple Intelligence, which is finally getting closer to officially rolling out in the UK. Personally I have found things like email summarization useful, but not game changing – and that’s OK. I would rather generative AI happens on-device, where I have more control over what data leaks out, and be a little underwhelmed.
10. The great awake
When I was twenty-seven, my Sleep stepped out of me like a passenger from a train carriage, looked around my room for several seconds, then sat down in the chair beside my bed.
If that first line doesn’t get you reading there’s no hope for you.