Some thoughts on Apple Vision Pro (and VR/AR in general)

  • As many people have noted, the ultimate platform for augmented reality is something that is both portable (can be worn all the time) and invisible (not a huge set of goggles which get in the way of your interactions with the world. We are so far away from this in terms of technology that I would be surprised if we even have it in my lifetime (see also: fully autonomous vehicles that you can drive in).
  • The price of Apple Vision is not unreasonable given the technology in it. They are not selling this at a loss, and I would expect the margins on it are similar to other Apple products, but Apple Vision is not something that can currently be made at under $1000, which is probably the sweet spot for this kind of tech.
  • As with the Apple Watch, the company has a set of use cases in mind. As with the Apple Watch, these will almost certainly not be the uses that customers actually find most compelling. Expect the marketing to shift in response to what actually resonates with people.
  • This represents a minor potential issue for Apple. Apple Watch was priced low enough to have quite a wide spread of customers, especially once the cheaper hardware options appeared after a year or two. Apple Vision is priced too high to get a wide range of customer types. The danger is that it will skew too heavily towards highly-affluent customers, and they kinds of uses they make of devices, for Apple to get much insight into what the real uses of Apple Vision are. Apple doesn’t do much testing with real users (even under NDA) before products are released. That means real-world feedback is vital.
  • The criticisms that people have made about the battery life are really not that relevant. No one is going to use this wandering around. You’re going to mostly have your behind in a chair. I’ve done a lot of VR demos when moving and nothing breaks the “reality” of the app you’re using than trying to do much in the physical world. Yes, the passthrough video means you can do this. But trust me, you won’t.
  • It’s a shame that you can’t have multiple Mac “monitors” open at the same time. But you can have multiple apps, so I would guess quite a few of the things you want to keep open on multiple monitors will devolve to native apps.
  • It’s a bigger shame Apple has chosen to only have an App Store model for software. The lack of hackability of the platform won’t matter to most people, but it does matter to me. This isn’t a market of customers who need the same level of “protection” as on a smartphone, so the justification that all apps need to be checked for malware doesn’t exist on this platform. This was a chance for Apple to break with the past. It’s chosen not to do so.
  • I wonder if, strategically, Apple has ended up “skating to where the puck was” rather than where it’s going to be. It’s taken so long to get Apple Vision out – by some reports, perhaps ten years – that the interest in and relevance of VR and AR has died down. VR’s use cases have mostly boiled down to games. AR is still not really a possibility, at least not in its ultimate form.

Some thoughts on Apple's response to the EU DMA

There is always a point in every Robin Hood film where Robin stops robbing the rich to feed the poor and doffs his hat to King Richard, stepping back and allowing the monarch to take his rightful place as “protector of the realm”. In a feudal system, the lord must prevail because the lord is the peasants' only true guarantee of peace.

I have had this in mind since Apple announced its response to the EU's Digital Markets Act. The rules Apple published are constructed precisely to make alternative methods of distributing apps both unattractive to customers and both toxic and unprofitable for developers. Tonally, it's also a big "fuck you I won't do what you tell me to" to the EU, one of the most bitter and resentful public statements I have seen. It reminds me of Bill Gates' sullen deposition to regulators when Microsoft was being investigated back in the 1990s – and we all know how that case ended up.

It amazes me how quickly successful, rich companies and people turn into sulky teenagers the moment even the most minor demand is made of them. Success, it seems, breeds little character of worth and encourages a kind of childishness which most people grow out of by the age of 21. Usually, I would expect that from Elon Musk or Donald Trump, but it seems Tim Cook has had a dose of it too.

Rich people gonna rich. But what amazes me more is how many cheerleaders they have. Now Apple has always had cheerleaders — lord knows, at times I've even been one of them — but the latest wave of online criticism of those of us who would very much like Apple to allow us to use the computers we bought in the way that suits us, rather than the way that suits Apple, strikes me as different. Louder. More vocal. More focused on the idea that not only is wanting this stupid, but that it's somehow a threat to other people's security.

And as we all know, when people feel their security is threatened, they act a little weird. Moral panics, and all that.

But then I remember another characteristic of feudalism: many people are most comfortable when there is a feudal lord to protect them and make decisions for them, and so vociferously attack when anyone suggests that, perhaps, the existing social order needs to change.

That's not simply because they long for the attention of the rich and powerful and see protecting them as a way to gain favour. Feudalism survived by ensuring that the peasants were always helpless, always in need of protection, and of course always threatened. The lord protected you from anarchy. Unable to imagine another world being possible, the peasant can only support the lords' right to rule because to do otherwise would mean either a more cruel lord, or dangerous lawlessness.

As we move into technofeudalism, where instead of owning technology we rent it, those old peasant instincts are resurfacing. There is a big, bad world out there of hackers, thieves, scammers, and other ne'er-do-wells, and only feudal lord Apple can protect us from it.

"But You have to protect people"

I have some sympathy for the argument that people require protecting. We still get, on a weekly basis, scam calls on our landline from people claiming to be from Microsoft, wanting to “sell” my now-departed in-laws protection for their PC. My father-in-law had dementia, used a computer, and managed to sign up to every kind of dubious data gathering exercise known to man. We are on many lists. I have become very used to calmly asking the person at the other end of the line whether their parents know they attempt to steal old, vulnerable peoples' savings for a living.

Having protections available is a good thing. Having them as the default on very widely used devices like smartphones is also a good thing. But having no ability to turn them off, no matter what? Not so good.

Having protections doesn't mean everyone has to use them. Those who want to opt-out should be able to do so. No one is suggesting that the App Store should be closed down, and anyone who wants to be protected by Apple should be able to carry on.

But then there's the protection argument again. If it can be turned off, the argument goes, then bad people will persuade the vulnerable to do just that.

All of which is a good argument for “parental control” systems, which allow the vulnerable to be protected by someone they know, but not a good argument unless you believe that everyone out there is stupid and needs feudal lord Apple to protect them.

Ah.

I'm not going to link to the original post or put a name on it because I know the person who wrote it means well, and they are by no means the only one making much the same argument:

I get what you’re saying and that’s fine for nerds, but the average punter isn’t able to decide that, is terrified of tech, and doesn’t even know what software is. They are the sorts of people who will tell you their password if you tell them it’s for a survey The result of them making such decisions is very predictably going to be like hyenas around a corpse

I fundamentally disagree with this view, which I find exceptionally patronising towards ordinary people, bordering on misanthropic. Back when the iPad was launched, Cory Doctorow wrote eloquently about why he wouldn't be buying one:

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple's model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of "that's too complicated for my mom" (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn't too complicated for their poor old mothers).

Unfortunately, it looks that Apple has been very successful in persuading people that not only is "your mom" too stupid to understand what software is, they've persuaded a lot of them that the non-existent "mom" is actually the majority of people.

But this is also a view of human relationships to technology which is self-perpetuating: if you never bother to teach people how to do something, such as protecting themselves against scams, unsurprisingly they never become particularly good at doing it. Likewise, if you never let your children play outside, guess what happens?

Learned helplessness is a thing, and it always benefits the most powerful.

And, as Dan Moren points out, Apple's dire warnings of terrible consequences should you be foolish enough to allow an application to be installed from any other source than the App Store are pretty hilarious when you consider that they are implementing the same system of notarisation which keeps Mac apps free of malware. Evidently, Apple believes that someone who spends £1000 on a computer is significantly more tech-savvy and able to look after themselves than someone who spends £1100 on a smartphone.

Unless, of course, ultimately Apple believes it's for the best if Macs are as locked down as iOS.

Hmm.

20/20 Hindsight is 20/20

In retrospect, Dan Gillmor was right:

A few months ago, when Apple introduced its iPad Pro, a large tablet with a keyboard, CEO Tim Cook called it the “clearest expression of our vision of the future of personal computing.” That was an uh-oh moment for me. Among other things, in the iOS ecosystem users are obliged to get all their software from Apple’s store, and developers are obliged to sell it in the company store. This may be Apple’s definition of personal computing, but it’s not mine.

At the time, I shrugged off Dan's arguments. Wasn't there room for a powerful computer, but incredibly easy to use? Where there was never going to be a worry about malware? I think I saw the iPad as just a tiny step on from the Mac: the real computer for the rest of us.

I was wrong. Dan was right. As was Cory Doctorow in 2006. As was Mark Pilgrim the same year.

Apple isn't a bunch of evil geniuses wanting to rule the world. Ultimately, Apple is driven by the same forces as every public company: the demand from “the market” for continual growth. As anyone with a passing interesting in compound growth will tell you, that becomes significantly harder as a company gets bigger. For Apple, 10% revenue growth in 2004 meant adding just $800 million. By 2014, that required an additional $18 billion. In 2024, that will require $38 billion.

There are no more devices as big as the iPhone to be launched, no more hardware markets worth tens of billions of dollars which Apple can magic into existence to keep their share price growing (and no, Apple Vision Pro is not it). So the only way of keeping that revenue growth rolling is to squeeze more from customers, and to ensure that not one cent of current revenue slips from the feudal lord's fingers. And that includes the tens of billions of dollars of revenue it makes from the App Store.

The only way for Apple to keep growing is to not only retain the control — and thus revenue — it has, but to tighten the screws and get more control. To ensure you can't buy an iPhone without also paying them a monthly tithe for storing photos. To ensure that no application gets sold without Apple getting a cut. The role of the feudal lord is one that Apple is choosing to play because it makes more money that way.

Turning points…

I have never been one to entirely excuse Apple its control-freakery, but I've also respected them and liked the products they make. I'm started writing this on an M2 MacBook Air, and it's the best laptop I have ever owned in many ways, not least the battery life. Without Apple's determination to do its own thing, to "own the whole widget" as Steve Jobs would have said, that battery life wouldn't be possible.

But: the Mac model of (relative) openness is not the one which Apple has chosen to pursue. Instead, its focus is on keeping things closed, reducing developers to digital serfs paying a tithe to the feudal lord whose land they are allowed to plough. And of course, ensuring that its customers, who pay a handsome margin to the company simply to buy its products, cannot choose what they do with those expensive devices.

Just as the release of the iPad Pro was a turning point for Dan Gillmor, Apple's response to the Digital Services Act feels like one for me.

I started writing this on the MacBook Air, but I'm finishing it on a ThinkPad X1 Carbon running Fedora 39 Linux. I'm using the same tools to write on both: Obsidian, configured just how I like it, even down to using LanguageTool to proof it.

The MacBook Air will almost certainly be the last Apple product I buy. When the time comes to replace my iPhone, maybe towards the back end of this year, I'll look for something I can install a de-Googled version of Android on.

I've been playing with a Pixel 6 running Graphene, which even lets you install Google's apps on it, but restricts them and prevents them from doing the full range of spying on you. I like that idea: taking a dangerous but handsome animal, and ensuring you can admire its beauty while stopping it biting you.

Perhaps one day Apple might let me do the same with the device I paid them a thousand pounds for. But I'm not going to hold my breath.

And no, I am not switching fealty from the Apple feudal lord to the Google one. I love this, from Dave Megginson:

When Apple fleeced and Google spied,
Where, then, should our loyalty lie?

The answer to that is simple: to people. Not to feudal lords, no matter what colour their flag.

Image by Clickrbee

John Scalzi has a new Mac

John Scalzi has done a terrific overview of the new 16in MacBook Pro (with M3 Max, naturally) that he recently acquired, and I agree with so many of the points in it.

As he says, it is really weird going to a 16in laptop after using a 13in one – I dusted off my 16in 2019 MacBook Pro a couple of days ago to keep it updated and make sure I has all my files on it1 and it makes using the Air feel like you’re using a toy computer. It also reminds me how much better the keyboard on the Air is – the MBP was, I think, part of the last generation of Macs before Apple dropped their terrible switches.

Like John, I also find myself using USB-C to charge the Air rather than the MagSafe port. I don’t get the love for MagSafe. Sure, if you trip over the cable you have a chance with USB-C to remove your laptop from whatever surface it’s on, but on the few occasions I have kicked a cable the USB-C has come out anyway. Maybe other people’s tables are more slippery than mine? And anyway – with battery life like the M-series machines have, my Air mainly gets charged overnight. It’s really rare I bother plugging it in during the day2.

And I entirely agree with him about this, too:

If you’re using your laptop for word processing or spreadsheets, with web browsing and occasional light gaming, and you want a Mac, please for the love of God get a MacBook Air, which is so much cheaper, much lighter, and more than enough for what you’re doing with your computer.
The time was when even non-pros really wanted/“needed” a MacBook Pro. Now, that’s not the case: if (like me) you spend most of your life in ordinary business applications and don’t do professional audio/video editing, an Air will be more than good enough. Even my puny little base model Air (8Gb RAM, 256Gb SSD) is faster than my much more beefy Intel MacBook Pro at video editing. Not that I do a lot, but on the odd occasions when I do, it works.
  1. It’s basically my “reserve” Mac, in case the MacBook Air gets lost/stolen/dies ↩︎
  2. The exception is when it’s on my work desk, where it’s plugged into a USB-C monitor – which has a short cable, so isn’t going to get kicked out. ↩︎

The information grey goo

I’m broadly positive about the future of LLMs and AI, but no one should pretend there will not be difficulties or that the transition to using machines isn’t going to pose plenty of challenges. 

Some scenarios, though, are profoundly dangerous, not just for the publishing and creative industries, but for society as a whole. 

When we discuss the threat of AI, many people imagine rampant machine intelligences with big guns hunting us all down in a post-apocalyptic wasteland (thank you, James Cameron). I doubt that’s likely. But one consequence which I can see use sleepwalking into is the informational equivalent of an apocalypse that dates back over thirty years: the “grey goo” scenario.

“Grey goo” was a concept which emerged when nanotechnology was the hot new thing. First put forward by Eric Drexler in his 1986 book The Engines of Creation, this is the idea that self-replicating nanobots could go out of control and consume all the resources on Earth, turning everything into a grey mass of nanomachines. 

Few people worry about a nanotech apocalypse now, but arguably we should be worried about AI having a very similar effect on the internet. 

Nowhere is safe

Unless you haven’t been paying attention, you will have noticed that the amount of content created by LLMs has been increasing at a vast rate. No one knows how much content is being generated, but SEOs – whose job it is to understand content on the internet – are concerned. Less ethical SEOs have used a combination of scraping and generative AI to quickly create low-quality sites with tens of thousands of pages on them, reaping rewards in traffic from Google over the short term. 

The problem for Google is that creating a site like that is the work of perhaps a week – and probably a lot less if it can be automated – while it takes months for the search engine to spot that it’s a low-quality site. With more automated approaches, it will become trivial to create spammy sites far faster than Google can combat them. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole, where there are moles appearing at an exponential rate. 

And Google isn’t the only platform which AI is threatening to turn to mush. Amazon has a issue with fake reviews generated by AI. And although it claims it is working on solutions, it appears to be incapable of even spotting fake AI-generated product names.

But what about human-to-human social networks? They have already been flooded with AI-generated responses. And it will only get worse, as companies create tools which let brands automatically respond to posts based on keywords using AI-generated text. Sooner or later, saying something which suggests you are in the market for a new car will get you spammed by responses from Ford, Skoda, VW, Tesla, every car dealer in your area, every private second hand seller… you get the picture. Good luck trying to find the real people. 

It is obvious that anywhere content can be created will ultimately be flooded with AI-generated words and pictures. And the pace of this could accelerate over the coming years, as the tools to use LLMs programmatically become more complex. 

For example, think about reviews on Amazon. It will be possible to create a programme which says “Find all my products on Amazon. Where the product rating drops below 5, add unique AI-generated reviews until the rating reaches 5 again. Continue monitoring this and adding reviews.” 

We are already at the point where you can use natural language to create specialist GPTs. The ability to create these kinds of programmes is ultimately going to in the hands of everyone. And this applies to every rating system, all surveys, all polls, all user reviews – and similar approaches can be created for any kind of content. 

Can Google, Amazon and the rest fight back? Yes – but at great cost. And it’s not clear that even the likes of Google has the resources to effectively fight millions of users of AI creating billions of low-quality pages at an accelerating scale.

Model collapse

A side-by-side comparison of content created from the same prompt in ChatGPT 3 versus ChatGPT 4 Turbo will show you the difference. And humans are getting better at writing prompts and giving AI models the information they need to do a better job. So surely, this is just a short-term problem, and AI content will get “good enough” to not flood the internet with crap.

The issue is that there is a counterbalancing force at play. As more and more AI-generated content floods the public internet, more and more of that content will end up as training data for AI. Exacerbating this, quality publications are largely blocking AI bots, for entirely understandable reasons, which means less, and less higher-quality content is being used to train the next generation of models.

For example, researchers have noted that the  LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and many other models, already contains synthetic images created by earlier AI models. This is the equivalent of a child learning to draw solely by copying the images made by younger children – not a scenario which is likely to improve quality.

In fact, researchers already have a name for the inevitable bad outcome: “model collapse”. In this case, the content generated by AI’s stops improving, and starts to get worse. 

The Information Grey Goo

This is the AI Grey Goo scenario: an internet choked with low-quality content, which never improves, where it is almost impossible to locate public reliable sources for information because the tools we have been able to rely on in the past – Google, social media – can never keep up with the scale of new content being created. Where the volume of content created overwhelms human or algorithmic abilities to sift through it quickly and find high-quality stuff.

The social and political consequences of this are huge. We have grown so used to information abundance, the greatest gift of the internet, that having that disrupted would be a major upheaval for the whole of society.

It would be a challenge for civic participation and democracy for citizens and activists, who would no longer be able to access online information, opinions, debates, or campaigns about social and political issues. 

With reliable information locked behind paywalls, anyone unwilling or unable to pay will be faced with picking through a rubbish heap of disinformation, scams, and low-quality nonsense. 

In 2022, talking about the retreat behind paywalls, Jeff Jarvis asked “when disinformation is free, how can we restrict quality information to the privileged who choose to afford it?” If the AI-driven information grey goo scenario comes to pass, things would be much, much worse.

Apple's 27 per cent tithe

9to5Mac:

Apple has also confirmed that it will charge a commission on purchases made through alternative payment platforms. This commission will be 12% for developers who are a member of the App Store Small Business Program and 27% for other apps.

The commission will apply to “purchases made within seven days after a user taps on an External Purchase Link and continues from the system disclosure sheet to an external website.”

Apple had a chance to turn a legal defeat into a long-term victory. With Google charging 26% in the same circumstances, the company could have adopted rules which dramatically reduced the levy it wants to take, say to 12% for all developers. This would have gained the company a lot of credibility over the long term.

But no. Instead, it chose to protect short-term revenue, and do something which looks petty, hostile to the developers who have made iOS a successful platform, and which will probably end up in court, again.

When it comes to antitrust, perception matters. And sadly for them, in that area, Apple never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

The continuing challenge of return to office

This is the first post-Substack edition of my newsletter, the first one delivered via WordPress. At some point in the coming days, the Substack version will be going away completely. If you want to know why, then you might want to read my post on Substack and platform risk, and then have a look at Platformer’s post on why it’s leaving Substack.

It’s just over twenty years since the last time I worked completely in an office. In every job, I have had since 2003 when I left MacUser, I have spent at least a day a week working from home. And even before then, working away from the office was so frequent that I doubt there was a week between 1995-2003 when I wasn’t out for at least a day.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I find the apparent desperation to get employees back into offices so strange. According to a survey by ResumeBuilder, 90% of employers plan to return to office by the end of 2024. Over a quarter of them intend to threaten employees who don’t want to return to office with being fired.

But return to office hasn’t been plain sailing. The latest company to come a cropper with its plans is Internet Brands, the parent company of WebMD, which created a video “encouraging” its teams back into the office, ending in a screen – and I am not making this up – which notes “we mean business” and “don’t mess with us”.

Cue much hilarity from the internet. Internet Brands is probably lucky that Twitter isn’t the force it once was because the pre-Musk social network would have run with this one for several weeks. Now, it’ll get buried under an avalanche of rubbish on Threads after a couple of days, or be seen by the couple of million users on Bluesky.

But I digress.

There are many arguments over the effectiveness of remote working vs in-office, some good and some bad. Having a separation between home and work is a good thing, for one, and although older employees tend to have plenty of space to make that work, younger ones in shared accommodation or living with parents often don’t. And younger employees also benefit from working closely with colleagues, who can mentor them informally much more easily when physically present.

I think this is particularly true for the creative industries. Creative people typically like to think of themselves as the definitive solo fliers, coming up with great ideas and then hammering them into shape, before having them ruined by an editor.

But the reality is that creative work is always collaborative. For example, in digital publishing, your content teams and audience development people need to mesh and work as one team; otherwise they can make the human equivalent of the sound gears make when grinding against each other.

And that is why broad directives about the amount of time which people spend face-to-face vs remote are damaging not only to the people involved, who inevitably feel robbed of autonomy and disempowered, but also to a creative business.

To find the most workable approach, leaders should focus on four factors: the needs of the work, the needs of the people, how work gets done, and the new managerial muscle required to manage a hybrid workforce.

Broad, uniform directives can only be effective if all work is identical and performed by a uniform workforce, which is not the case in the creative industries, and not true for most others. Rather than imposing directives, CEOs should empower their managers, particularly those at the front line, to develop a comprehensive understanding of their team's work, the working styles of their team members, and the most effective ways to accomplish their tasks.

Of course that depends on having empowered, well-trained leadership down to the small team level – but you are already doing that, aren’t you?

Finally, A Grocery Cart That Can Save Me From The Horror Of An Ad-Free Moment Of Existence

Finally, A Grocery Cart That Can Save Me From The Horror Of An Ad-Free Moment Of Existence | Defector:

This is one of those new technologies that’s useful primarily as a viewfinder on a dismal present and a future determined to be even more miserable. Nobody anywhere will like the smart carts. Nobody, anywhere, will find them not-obnoxious. Everybody who does more than a couple of moments of thinking about it will be horrified by the idea of humanity digging gigantic devastating holes in the ailing planet and mining out its contents for the purpose of putting tablet computers onto grocery carts so that they can perform a service repulsive to literally everyone. Nobody—nobody nobody nobody!—wants to live in a society characterized by inescapable omnipresent advertising for consumer products; no one yet born has yearned to have video advertisements take up ever more of their field of vision.

This is one of those paragraphs that I wish I had written

Pluralistic “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

Pluralistic: “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing” (08 Dec 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow:

In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they’ve been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves

If you ever needed to see an example of quite how insane the “IP protection” laws are, this is probably it.

Open extensions on Firefox for Android debut December 14 (but you can get a sneak peek today) | Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog

Open extensions on Firefox for Android debut December 14 (but you can get a sneak peek today):

Starting December 14, 2023, extensions marked as Android compatible on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) will be openly available to Firefox for Android users.

But not of course for iOS, because Apple doesn’t allow companies to use any rendering engine other than Safari’s webview. And Apple also hates the idea of extensions that aren’t themselves applications, so don’t expect them to make the lives of extension developers easy once the EU forces them to open things up a little. 

John G on Monica Chin's review of the Surface Laptop Go 3

Daring Fireball: Monica Chin on the Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 3: ‘Why Does This Exist?':

A $999 laptop that maxes out at 256 GB of storage and has a 1536 × 1024 display — yeah, I’m wondering why this exists in 2023, too. And I’m no longer wondering why Panos Panay left Microsoft for Amazon.

The $999 MacBook Air has 256Gb of storage, 8Gb of RAM, and a three year old processor. I’m kind of wondering why that exists in 2023, too.

Not to say that the Surface Laptop 3 is any good – it isn’t – but Microsoft isn’t the only company that has some bizarre pricing at the “low” end of its laptop range.

Importing Apple Notes into Obsidian is now easy

Obsidian’s Importer Plugin Lets You Move Your Apple Notes to Any Note-Taking App That Supports Markdown - MacStories:

Apple Notes doesn’t have an export option. Instead, as Obsidian’s blog post on the Importer plugin update explains, it stores your notes in a local SQLite database. The format isn’t documented, but the developers of the plugin were able to reverse-engineer it to allow users to move notes and their attachments out of Notes and into two folders: one with Markdown versions of your notes and the other with the files attached to your notes. The folder with your notes includes subfolders that match any folders you set up in Notes, too.

This is just outstanding work from the Obsidian team. There are a couple of limitations, mostly that it can’t import password protected notes (obviously), but I’ve tested it and it worked well.

Related: undocumented SQLite databases should not be the way that a multi-gazillion dollar corporation is storing valuable data.

Who would have thought Amazon would behave like this?

Amazon deliberately deleted messages to hide dodgy business practices:

The FTC also alleges that Amazon tried to impede its investigation into the company’s business practices. “Amazon executives systematically and intentionally deleted internal communications using the ‘disappearing message’ feature of the Signal messaging app. Amazon prejudicially destroyed more than two years’ worth of such communications—from June 2019 to at least early 2022—despite Plaintiffs’ instructing Amazon not to do so.”

And the answer to the headline is, of course, “anyone that’s been paying attention.

DOJ probing Tesla’s EV range cheating

DOJ probing Tesla’s EV range after reports of exaggerated numbers - The Verge:

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) is investigating the range of Tesla’s electric vehicles after reports surfaced that the company was relying on exaggerated numbers.

In documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Tesla said that it had “received requests for information, including subpoenas from the DOJ, regarding certain matters associated with personal benefits, related parties, vehicle range and personnel decisions.”

This follows on from a Reuters' report earlier this year, which found Tesla was getting so many complaints about range it was cancelling appointments with its service centres for customers with the problem:

According to Reuters, there was nothing actually wrong with the vehicle’s battery. Rather, Tesla had allegedly created software to rig its driving range estimates to show a rosier picture. This led to thousands of customers seeking service appointments to figure out what was wrong with their vehicles. But because the vehicle was working as intended, Tesla’s diversion team simply canceled all the appointments.

So Tesla created software which gave a false reading of battery range, then when people spotted it, they just canceled any service to them.

It’s worth noting that when VW was caught cheating on its emissions tests by using a device to check when it was being tested and artificially improving results, it ended up being fined tens of billions of dollars.

This isn’t on quite that scale, but regulators tend to take a very dim view of cheating customers. It’s quite possible this will cost Tesla billions.

Anyone willing to bet that it will turn out this was done at Elon Musk’s insistence? And will that be the final nail in the coffin of his reputation?

China launches investigation into iPhone maker Foxconn, says state media

China launches investigation into iPhone maker Foxconn, says state media:

China has launched an investigation into Apple iPhone maker Foxconn over tax and land use, Chinese state media reported on Sunday. The Global Times, citing anonymous sources, said tax authorities inspected Foxconn’s sites in the provinces of Guangdong and Jiangsu and natural resources officials had inspected sites in Henan and Hubei… The Global Times article quoted an expert saying “Taiwan-funded enterprises, including Foxconn . . . should also assume corresponding social responsibilities and play a positive role in promoting the peaceful development of cross-strait relations”.

This is a very big deal and should be keeping Tim Cook awake at night. Effectively, it’s a small shot across the bows for Foxconn, a reminder that without the good graces of the Chinese government, it can’t exist.

The new Apple Pencil

Apple has released a new Pencil for iPad and it’s weird. It looks like the Second Generation Pencil (the one which charges by sticking to the side of the iPad Pro or current Air). And it will attach there. But it won’t charge if you do – it charges through a hidden USB-C port via a cable.

Oh and it’s not pressure sensitive, which makes it worse for drawing than the old Pencil which charged via Lightning.

It is, though, £79 rather than the ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY NINE POUNDS the second generation Pencil will cost. So that’s one thing.

Marc Andreessen's manifesto

It would take a far, far longer post than I’m prepared to spend my time writing to go through Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” paragraph by awful paragraph, but a few points probably won’t go amiss. - If you’re going to approvingly paraphrase “a manifesto of a different time and place”, you might want to check that said manifesto’s author wasn’t an early member of Mussolini’s fascist party.

- Writing “we believe technology is universalist. Technology doesn’t care about your ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, political views,” and then, two paragraphs later “We believe America and her allies should be strong and not weak” either shows you have no idea how to write, are being entirely disingenuous, or simply too stupid to think except in blocks of 240 characters. Either way, get an editor to help.

- If you are going to talk about the Greek notion of arete then having an understanding of its relationship to class in Greek society might be a good idea, too. Aristocrats were assumed, by definition, to be exemplars of arete. It wasn’t something that thetes like me would have.

- Believing that techno-optimism “is a material philosophy, not a political philosophy” while giving many repeated examples of what even a first year philosophy undergraduate which know was a political philosophy does not make you look smart.

I could go on – the whole thing is riddled with howlers – but really is there much point?

Thirty years ago, in a different life, I was a philosophy postgraduate student and taught first year undergraduates their introduction to metaphysics and ethics. In the first time, every time, someone would turn in an essay which read like this, and you would have to patiently explain to them they were going to have to rewrite it or fail, because philosophy does not mean writing down all the random thoughts you had when smoking that bundle of weed the night before the deadline.

This is the manifesto of an emotionally insecure man having a mid-life crisis as he realises that his life’s work is meaningless and all the gold and treasure he has accumulated will never make him happy. Mid-life crises in men are often surprisingly redolent of the emotional outpouring of pseudo-intellectual silliness that accompany late teenage, that first period of life when boys start to realise they are not the centre of the world and lash out at the injustice of it all.

Perhaps, then it’s no surprise this reads like it was written by a 14 year old and put on Pastebin. That it was written by a 52 year old with billions of dollars at his disposal says more about the failure of capitalism to imbue life with meaning than Andreessen could possibly imagine.

EDIT: The first draft of this contained something about A16Z’s investment in Uber. In fact, they passed on Uber. But as if to make the point about the kind of technology which Andreessen believes will save the world as long as we never question it, let’s ask an AI...

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Publishers need to wake up to the truth about Google traffic

Google-Extended does not stop Google Search Generative Experience from using your site’s content (searchengineland.com)

Google explained that SGE is part of the Google Search experience; it is a search feature and thus it should work as how normal search directives work. “The context is that AI is built into Search, not bolted on, and integral to how Search functions, which is why robots.txt is the control to give web publishers the option to manage access to how their sites are crawled,” Google told us.

I’ve been using both Bard and Bing CoPilot a lot lately and the direction is clear: while AI-driven search will link to original sources as references, they are not going to send much traffic your way. The aim is to provide the answer to any query on the results page, not one more click away.

This has massive implications for publisher traffic, particular for reviews and answers pages which I think are most vulnerable to AI-driven answers. I’ve been using CoPilot for purchasing research and it’s great. I can start by asking it for, say, laptops under £1000 with good battery life. I can then have a conversation to interrogate more about each product. It’s a superior experience to any web page I have ever used for that kind of product research.

Is it 100% accurate? No – but neither are a lot of reviews, particularly the kind of “best laptop for…” top tens that are written to hit the top of product searches on Google.

But it’s not just affiliate: search provides between 40-80% of publisher site traffic. And we have already seen Facebook traffic, the other biggest referrer, die off.

Publishers can no longer rely on Facebook and Google for the bulk of their traffic. The time has past when content strategies should focus on them. Instead, they need to focus on getting a loyal audience which they have direct relationships with. The SEO era is coming to an end, at least for large chunks of traffic.

GitHub Copilot costs more per user than it charges

Big Tech Struggles to Turn AI Hype Into Profits - WSJ:

Individuals pay $10 a month for the AI assistant. In the first few months of this year, the company was losing on average more than $20 a month per user, according to a person familiar with the figures, who said some users were costing the company as much as $80 a month.

The first stage of the enshittification cycle is often to charge customers less than it costs to run the service, in order to acquire and lock in as many as possible. After that, at some point, you dump on them from a great height.

The good use of ChatGPT for factual writing

I’m not a huge fan of using ChatGPT for writing, because even leaving aside issues of accuracy, its style is stilted and just the wrong side of formulaic. But there’s one area where it really works as a writing assistant: giving you an outline on a topic as a starting point.

Tell it what you want and what to include, and it will come back with an outline of everything you should cover. It won’t be your final structure, but as a place to start and especially if you’re a bit stuck and need something to bounce around to fine-tune your idea, it’s a really good assistant.

I’ve been thinking a lot about large language models as assistants for human creativity lately, in the context of Steve Jobs' old view of computers as “a bicycle for the mind” and also the Knowledge Navigator video which came later on – John Sculley’s vision of the future of computing. More to come on that…