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The Positive-Reinforcement Edition Monday, July 28, 2025

'This Feature Is Just Getting Started': Apple Talks What's Next For The Apple Watch's New AI Workout Buddy, by Matt Evans, TechRadar

Caldbeck says that when designing the feature, they took "a similar approach to what we’ve done with the Activity app and our health features like sleep tracking. We tend not to send you a notification if you didn’t meet your sleep goals. But if you did meet your sleep goals, you’ll hear from the watch to give you that positive reinforcement. We’ll work to find moments that are positive.

"The power of workout buddy is that because it’s generative and because it draws on years of sweat equity, there are motivational moments in there that the feature will find and deliver to you. All the other features in the workout app coexist with Workout Buddy, so your pace alert will tell you if you’re falling below a set pace, you can still have those types of features that will push you towards a goal you’re trying to reach. However, we wanted to keep Workout Buddy motivational and inspiring."

Why Some Koreans Considered iPhone ‘Half-baked’ Until It Could Replace Their Wallet And Record Calls, by Moon Joon-hyun, Korea Herald

While there has been no official survey or data on how many iPhone users in Korea viewed the device as incomplete, the frustration was very real, and very specific for some.

The iPhone has always been premium, but wasn't 'Korean' enough.

Stuff

This Simple App Could Be The Key To Conquering Un-bear-able Stress, by Paul Hatton, TechRadar

It’s a neat little app that delivers a range of science-based practices, including breathing, tapping, humming, affirmation, micro-meditations, therapeutic soundscapes, and more. The combination of these is designed to support you before, during, and after moments of stress.

Benchmarking Macs: 3DMark And Other Testing Tools That Make It Easy To Test Your Apple Mac’s Performance, by Cliff Joseph, TechRadar

There was, however, one important games-related announcement during WWDC that might have gone a little bit under the radar. The announcement came from UL Solutions, with the launch of a new Mac version of its 3DMark benchmarking app.

This is an important development for Mac gamers, as 3DMark is one of the most popular tools used to test the graphics performance of gaming PCs - and its arrival on the Mac reflects the fact that Macs are finally being taken seriously as a gaming platform. With that in mind, I'd like to take some time to discuss how exactly you can go about benchmarking the best MacBooks and Macs.

Notes

VPN Use Surges In UK As New Online Safety Rules Kick In, by Tim Bradshaw, Financial Times

Apps offering virtual private networks — which route a smartphone or PC’s internet traffic to another country, bypassing local network providers — made up half of the top 10 most popular free apps on the UK’s App Store for iOS this weekend, according to Apple’s rankings.

Programmers Aren’t So Humble Anymore—Maybe Because Nobody Codes In Perl, by Samuel Arbesman, Wired

There is an amalgamated mashup nature to Perl, all in service of its motto: “There’s More Than One Way to Do It.” Just as there are synonyms in English, Perl has a variety of approaches to writing the same thing. While this is a common feature of programming languages to a certain degree, Perl seems to want to knock you over the head with it. There are multiple ways, for example, of writing conditional statements, from using the traditional “if” to “unless”; to writing an if statement backward in a single line; to even a three-part operator that involves a question mark and a colon. I have a distinct memory, in the early 2000s, of writing code in Perl one day, and the next day not understanding what I had written.

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I am just grateful we don't have to write Java applets anymore. :-)

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Thanks for reading.