A journal of my understanding of the world.
Spotify recently announced an AI chatbot, called " Talk to Spotify ", that does what you'd expect. Users can ask questions in natural language and it answers. I admit I have not tried it, but reading the announcement made me groan more than excited. This is my way of putting that groan into words. At the bottom of the article there is a disclaimer saying, "...the responses won't always be…
There seem to be more and more services popping up that let you generate fake vacation pictures with AI, as covered by The Verge here . At first I thought, "why would anyone want to use this?" But then when I saw Adam Mosseri's end-of-year thoughts about Instagram (also summarized by PetaPixel ), it made sense to me. In this post, I want to go through the things I agree with Adam about, and one…
Photo by Yuma Nozaki on Unsplash I thought it might be fun to jot down a few features I wish AI chatbots had, things that fit better with the way I think and use them. I'm keeping this as a living scorecard to see what I get right vs. what actually ships. Also, it just so happens that towards the end of 2025, Your Year with ChatGPT told me I was in the top 1% of users by usage. Obviously, given…
The iPhone design cycle seemed to have shifted from two years to three in the recent years. But with the 17 Pro, Apple has completely redesigned the chassis and used a new material, after a brief two year stint with titanium. Is this an intentional move to switch back to a two year design cycle as Ben Thompson speculates ? Or did something else cause this change? A bit of context for those that…
While strides are being made in model efficiency, model complexity is outpacing efficiency gains. Recent comments by industry leaders suggest that this is going to be the status quo for the time being. Newer models, with o3, o4-mini, 2.5 Pro are getting smarter, and handling increasingly complex tasks (Deep Research, agentic workflows, etc.). That means charging $20/mo even with usage limits does…
Podcasts have exploded in popularity ( About half of Americans have listened to a podcast in the past year ). What started as a niche medium has become a platform for everyone from celebrities to politicians to business leaders. We're even seeing podcasts dig into deep technical content, including scientific papers. Recently, we have seen tools such as NotebookLM and Eleven Labs Reader that let…
Apple's ads have a storied history of excellent branding and messaging, which made their latest Apple Intelligence ads feel strangely off to me. These ads, when contrasted with their older ones, reveal a kind of cognitive dissonance. Apple, a company known for its deliberate and thoughtful storytelling, seems to be rushing into this huge category – a decades-long arc according to them . This haste…
Last month, Meta showed off Orion , which I can only describe as a concept car version of augmented reality (AR) glasses. Orion is a pair of AR glasses that come with a compute puck, that is wirelessly connected to the glasses, and a neural wristband that tracks hand movements. Orion, or some future version of it, is purported to be the device/platform that will replace smartphones. The idea of…