when i think of what people love about chatgpt, i think it's that people are aware that the promise of natural language input is secretly the ability to bypass applications altogether but still retain all 'the good parts' (search, queryable data, etc). and you can see this in lots of the openai demos: chatbots as agents to do tasks in existing applications, often in concert across multiple applications.

but what does this say about the applications and their providers? beyond the marketing hype from openai, is the fervor for these demos a signal that application ui as we know it has failed? and to that end, what is the benefit of those embodied applications existing at all and not just being a series of apis.

to continue this thread, i think people understand intuitively that there’s a serious benefit to not using an app for many things.

that said, we have contorted our existence around a series of applications and workflows in order to, broadly speaking, be able to Search everything. We understand Search is something obviously useful that our computers can do for us, so we prefer systems that enable Search even if we know them to be ineffective compared to the alternative (i.e. writing something down on paper is a lot faster than opening and using a todo list app generally).

it sounds very Conspiracy Theory, but every time i see a bunch of adjacent confounding business decisions that happen at the end of q1/q2/q3/q4 or h1/h2, it makes me wonder if there's a whole cohort of doomer/prepper execs that have some pathological need to cash out in order to retreat to their death cult's bunkers.

everyone will tell you that it's a fool's errand to make your own todo app, or to make any app for yourself, it's just too expensive when you can get a 'better' one 'off the shelf' or when you can get equivalent functionality from separate tools. i think this is probably technically true for the food i make as well, but the deltas in time required are so different. Even a really talented developer can only get so far in an afternoon or day and the alternatives to diy'ing are so much more compelling: a todo list on paper, the system reminders app, whatever. I know that the adages are as much about cost effectiveness as they are balancing technical skill and executive function, but it's also weird that we tell people: this skill you have honed, save that for the office, amigx.

i keep harping on this point because it feels frustrating to me: i can and will routinely make something like mayonnaise/bearnaise/holladaise for a nice breakfast, i'll spend an afternoon making pasta, or a whole day (or more) preparing some makhni or daal or birria. these are valorized as perhaps extreme, but like, totally normal activities—it's normal to make a fancy weekend meal, and even if people aren't expected to do this, it's not beyond the pale to routinely spend a day cooking some elaborate food for the week or whatever.

@pg i’m playing a video game right now where it has a record of the last six notifications you received in the pause menu and i have to imagine this was just somebody’s personal crusade that manifested in a star wars game of all places

@pg the mental model btw is the same if you have a phone in your hand but your laptop in the other room is open to a messages conversation, your phone may not get a notification for it, but also a siri initiated timer on your phone may not be reflected on your laptop when you return to it. the watch is just the next Frontmost Device as far as i can tell.

@scientiffic did you catch the new broadcast demos as well? https://open.spotify.com/album/5kKCZmfiHpIEIiWntTIGP7

My thoughts and prayers go out to #voyager1, which after journeying for half a century to reach interstellar space is still expected to answer fucking work emails

@mathowie i used to get this with photos i'd edit in darkroom that i shot on my mirrorless as 10bit hfs and imported onto my phone. the editing workflow would first try to expand the photo into the display p3 color space (the brightly saturated flash) and then when it would get saved, you'd have these errors that would cause them to look exactly like the photo you uploaded when they were re-shared via icloud or whatever as heifs because there were slight incompatibilities between how i assume some color data was re-mapped when re-saving (darkroom fixed this eventually). some old ones still show up messed up when resized down, but if you view them full size they show up ok.

also, just while i'm here, it's ridiculous that the author complains about caBLE, the hybrid passkey implementation that lets you auth with your phone by pointing at a qr code: if you have onboarded a new machine or have tried accessing a passkey protected account on somebody else's computer, it's wildly more convenient to use that than typing out some high entropy passphrase.

the dude ranting about passkeys mentions twice that apple keychain on multiple occasions nuked a bunch of passkeys and presumably the entire keychain while i don't doubt this happened, it seems like a separate issue from "passkeys are bad." if 1p or anything else did this, you'd complain about 1p, the problem with keychain is that it's deeply embedded in the os, but apple's sync'd passkey implementation is objectively the most polished of the bunch. it's telling that everyone yes-and'ing the post is running android or using chrome (which has inconsistent sync'd passkey support)

finally restocked my diamond crystal kosher salt supply after a long dry spell of it being out of stock everywhere

@waldoj i use dynadot, you can set your account to use yubikeys but they’re not set by default. their prices are fair but they don’t support the more esoteric tlds, their customers are mostly it seems people who buy tens of domains at a time, so lots of bulk registration deals that don’t make sense for me but i think i’ve been using them for nearly 20 years now 😅😬💀

to the tune of human league's (keep feeling) fascination "🎶 he's wearing kuhl kollusion 🎶"

big fan of the kuhl items i own but jfc their names are extremely awkward to actually say aloud "oh these pants, they're kuhl deceptrs, the jacket—a kollusion!"

@scientiffic oh that’s awesome, didn’t realize people were selling translated copies. i would totally play it on the pocket too, i just had some weird issues when i first tried loading a rom on it

@scientiffic !!! does it run on the gba or snes core??? does it support save states?

this game, man, finally rolled credits after ~60 hrs, what a ride. it’s got the heat

gonna have to wait for some other year for totality but even this was pretty cool