"I really believe that design and craft are the differentiator that makes a product and a brand stand out. Can you vibe code or hack your way towards something that makes money? Absolutely. But is it going to be an enduring product? For that, if you have any level of competition, you need to have really good design, a point of view, a great user experience, and a great brand. If you think about all the context that humans have that a LLM does not, I don’t see it being the case that models will get you there all the way."
"If I were to critique those years, I think perhaps we didn't make the right level of investment in the platform software of Sonos. And in a way, the attempt to re-architect the mobile experience was meant to be a remedy for that. But as we've described, we made some mistakes along the way. And so part of the reason that I can speak with some confidence about the progress we've made is that we have a really strong quantitative understanding of how the software platform is performing today relative to the previous generation software. Across dozens of metrics, the platform performs better than the software that it replaced."
Meme culture thrives on exaggerated content, and depth or restraint is often an afterthought. The viral "What I See vs. What I Take" trend is different. It's recently filled Instagram feeds with before-and-after images. The trend showcases the cluttered, everyday scenes a photographer encounters, followed by the tightly framed, intentional image they ultimately create. When executed properly, it's a solid lesson in composition.
While you're typing, predictive text (in gray) appears to the right of your cursor, no matter what application you're using. You can hit "Tab" to accept everything suggested or "`" (the key right above Tab) to accept the next word. The idea is that the AI makes writing faster by suggesting words you were going to type anyway—accept the words you wanted and ignore the ones you didn't. Gräfe calls this kind of writing "dancing with the AI," which is a romantic notion.
When you're planning a trip with friends, there's a good chance your group chat will be full of links to and screenshots of places you want to visit or cafés you want to hit.
To help you keep track of all that, Google is now rolling out a new feature to add multiple locations to a Google Maps list for you using screenshots. This feature scans your phone and uses Gemini AI to work out the places mentioned in your screenshots.
Apple acquired Canadian startup Mayday Labs in April 2024, according to a European Commission listing, spotted by French blog MacGeneration. The acquisition had not received widespread attention from tech publications until now.
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Mayday Labs had developed an AI-powered calendar, task manager, and scheduling assistant for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The all-in-one app used AI to automatically schedule your events and tasks at ideal times, and it could learn your scheduling preferences and daily patterns over time to further optimize your calendar.
Danish engineers are drawing up plans to connect an Apple datacentre to a district heating network in Denmark that will use its waste energy to heat homes and provide hot water.
This comes a decade after the US phone giant announced plans to build one capable of community integration, and five years after it started operating.
Apple, as embodied by its leadership’s decisions over the past decade or more, no longer seems primarily motivated by the creation of great products. Time and time again, its policies have made its products worse for customers in exchange for more power, control, and, yes, money for Apple.
I think AI may be useful if the generated results go through real human beings for review and approval first. AI may never be good enough if we are expected to just trust and believe and use whatever it spits out.
Which is probably why I don't have high hopes for a better Siri this year or next.
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Thanks for reading.