Kev Quirk writing in Three Years With My M1 MacBook Air

Question is, will I upgrade? Well, no. Not any time soon anyway. The M1 Air still does everything I need it to extremely well. So why upgrade? Why drop another £1,000 or so on the latest version of the Air? Because it looks a little nicer? Because it comes in blue? Because the chipset is 2 increments better? Nah, I’ll stick with this workhorse until it dies.

I’m not sure if it is them M1 chip, but around this time my motivation to upgrade so often seems to have disappeared. It was such a revolution in power and efficiency that the following iterations do not receive anywhere near the attention—which is great.

I’d love to see Apple do something more with their laptop and push the design forward. Perhaps a really thin and light device for ultra portability because to be honest, the battery life of MacBooks is a little insane now!

Zach Seward being clear that AI is not like you and me:

Aristotle, who had a few things to say about human nature, once declared, “The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor,” but academics studying the personification of tech have long observed that metaphor can just as easily command us. Metaphors shape how we think about a new technology, how we feel about it, what we expect of it, and ultimately, how we use it.

I highlighted a lot of this article to save for leather musing, but it got me thinking about things immediately. I’d recommend reading the entire post if you are even remotely interested in AI as it’s pretty eye-opening, well written and diligently researched.

The decisions made by the creators of technology and particularly AI dictate a lot of the things we think about it. What’s more is most people will not even be aware of the effects of portraying your product as if it were a person. The fact is, we give AI much more slack than we would with other things because it is portrayed with a friendly, eager to help tone and that’s by design.

LLMS don’t just spurt back walls of text, they portray the answers in conversational styles, leading to increased levels of trust. Because you can’t be mad at something that apologises for being wrong so provocatively. Spurring in us a forgiving nature as if they were our friend. Artificial Intelligence doesn’t get things spectacularly wrong after all, they simply “hallucinate”.

As Zack puts it brilliantly, “AI isn’t doing shit. It is not thinking, let alone plotting. It has no aspirations. It isn’t even an it so much as a wide-ranging set of methods for pattern recognition”. Imagine if you looked up a topic in an encyclopaedia, only for it to be entirely wrong and reference things that don’t exist, you wouldn’t tolerate it. Yet Search GPT is already getting things wrong, and that’s OK because it is portrayed as being just like us. Well, it’s not.

Karissa Bell for Engadget:

Zuckerberg then launched into a lengthy rant about his frustrations with “closed” ecosystems like Apple’s App Store. None of that is particularly new, as the Meta founder has been feuding with Apple for years. But then Zuckerberg, who is usually quite controlled in his public appearances, revealed just how frustrated he is, telling Huang that his reaction to being told “no” is “fuck that.”

I’m conflicted when Zuckerberg says anything that I agree with. On the one hand, it is great news for the web. Zuckerberg hates closed platforms and is working to open up Threads to the open web, yet I can’t shake the thought that most of this is simple theatre.

Of course, Zuck hates Apple’s closed system…because he wants access to all the date from users. It’s not his good nature that leads him to open up Threads, it is the fact that it helps with all the things that Facebook is criticised for. He can simply point to the fact that users are free to move, and then continue to do what he wants on ‘his’ platform.

But there’s this little part of me that wants to believe. That after years of “oh we didn’t mean to do that” when they break things, Meta is becoming a good-natured company.

John Gruber joining two unconnected things together and predictably developing from it a pro apple stance (via Birchtree):

But the argument against RCS is strong and simple: it doesn’t support end-to-end encryption. The only new messaging platforms that should gain any traction are those that not only support E2EE, but that require it. Messaging and audio/video calls should only work through E2EE. That’s true for iMessage and FaceTime.

I try not to read, nor comment on, Daring Fireball things any more because the take from them is so clouded in pro-Apple rhetoric that it’s often difficult to see the wood for the trees. However, after Matts post about the article, I decided to read it for myself and boy what a weird take.

RCS is merely a step forward for SMS and MMS, it never promised encryption, and I have my doubts that any carrier would support it even if it did. Apple presently sticks to routing RCS through carrier defaults. Google offers encryption over RCS by turning them into Google Messages, meaning “your chat conversations automatically upgrade to end-to-end encryption”. I am sure that Apple could offer something similar, but considering their RCS implementation is essentially an FU to the EU, they chose not to.

However, we are going off-topic a little. Whilst I agree with John’s opinion that any new implementation of messaging should be e2e encrypted, he completely skirts around the fact that Apple could offer this because it doesn’t fit into his narrative. Instead, he suggests sending all of your messaging through a third-party close system — mentioning WhatsApp specifically. Taking such a positive stance on privacy and then suggesting the use of Meta products is more than a little strange.

Christopher Lawley got to talk to Jenny Chen and Ty Jordan about iPad note-taking and specifically math notes.

Whilst it is predictably a very reserved, PR focused chat, Chris always manages to demonstrate his excitement for iPad features and does an excellent job of walking through the features with them. The video is worth watching if you’re interested in the iPad or Apple at all, it almost gets me interested in the iPad again… almost.