Martial arts, fitness, Apple, technology, and living and working in Japan.
(Note: I wrote the first draft of this almost exactly a year ago and then got bogged down in attempting to think of positive uses for LLMs/generative “AI” when — from everything I’d seen up to then — the primary uses would be either people trying to use them (mostly unsuccessfully) for something useful, or deliberately using them for massive disinformation campaigns. A conversation with my aunt…
Seth Godin: AI is here now, and the pace is astonishing. So far, I haven’t seen many freelancers or small businesspeople choosing to make an impact by understanding what it can do and selling processes and services to bigger organizations in ways that dramatically change how they do business. Some people are very optimistic about how LLMs 1 can help people do some kinds of work faster or better.…
Side-click pencil mechanisms are mostly an oddity in the mechanical pencil world. The Beginner’s Guide to Mechanical Pencils at renowned writing-geek site Jet Pens only mentions side click mechanisms in passing. Their Best Mechanical Pencils guide barely acknowledges the existence of other mechanisms than end click. Jet Pens carries only one model of the Japanese brand Tombow 1 side click…
Kara Swisher Interviews Mark Zuckerberg John Gruber, at Daring Fireball, from his comment on an extract from the interview: They’re offering a powerful platform that reaches the entire world to lunatics who, in the pre-internet age, were relegated to handing out mimeographs while spouting through a megaphone on a street corner. The internet has been a greatly democratizing force. You can now share…
All the GDPR emails flooding my inbox lately reminded me of a rant I’ve had mouldering in my drafts file for nearly 2 years. Dear Developers, I don’t want to create a fucking account. I don’t want to subscribe to your sync service. I don’t want to choose a user name and password. I just want to start getting something done using your app. I already have two main sync services. One is an upstart…
Michael Tsai - Blog - Fantastical 2.4 for Mac It’s like they read my mind and implemented my four most-wanted features. Great update. Hopefully attachments and travel time will also come to the iOS version soon. Fantastical at this point is simply the best calendar application on both macOS and iOS. It is one of the handful of apps that I absolutely must install right away when I get a new device.…
Prompted in part by Jason Snell’s article, “My iOS writing app of the moment is Editorial” : Though people have raved to me about Bear, I don’t think it’s for me. I can configure it to be a usable text editor, but it really wants me to use its internal tagging and linking system, and that’s not how I want to work. It doesn’t sync with Dropbox and makes some styling choices (like hiding the content…
I don’t usually write about my actual job. I write this blog as a relief-valve from work. I’ve also had delusions of trying to turn it into a side project that might be an escape hatch if everything at my day job goes to shit. [1] This post is going to be an exception to my general policy of separation. A few years ago, I wrote about Japanese working conditions . I deliberately avoided details…
John Gruber in Medium and the Scourge of Persistent Sharing Dickbars : Medium seems to continue to grow in popularity as a publishing platform, and as it does, I’m growing more and more frustrated by their on-screen “engagement” turds. Every Medium site displays an on-screen “sharing” bar that covers the actual content I want to read. This is particularly annoying on the phone, where screen real…
Reuters: “ Exclusive: Japan’s antitrust watchdog considers action against Apple, carriers - sources ” Both the headline and the lede are greatly misleading. The second and third paragraphs contradict the promised premise: In a report published last month, Japan’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said that NTT Docomo, KDDI Corp and Softbank Group were refusing to sell older surplus iPhone models to…
My venerable MacBook Pro has been retired, involuntarily. At first, I thought the intermittent crashes over the period of a couple of weeks were due to a memory module failure, but a thorough memory test and a consistent failure to be able to boot into the hardware test suite in OS X, both at home and at the Genius Bar at my closest Apple Store , led me to believe it was a motherboard problem. If…
Eli Schiff: It was at this point that the troubling nature of the situation became more clear. It is not simply that it is problematic for whites to use the white emoji, but so too is it racist for them to use the brown shades and the yellow default. In sum, it is racist for whites to use any emoji. There are two choices going forward: either white users should refrain from using emoji, or an…
Nakayama Toshihiro for Nippon.com. The title pretty much says it all: Japan and the Next US President: Thinking the Unthinkable My two thoughts on a Trump presidency: I wouldn’t be able to move back to the US anytime soon, because apparently all y’all is #^¢* ing nuts. Staying in Japan might not be a good idea either because, given some of the insane crap Trump has said he would do as President,…
Theodore Gray: Once the tool exists, it will be abused. I really wish I could say otherwise. I wish I lived in a country where law enforcement acted with the square-jawed nobility of a comic book FBI agent. I used to think I did live in such a country, but in recent years I have been forced to realize that I don’t. I think that, in your heart, you know it too. And if you happen to like the party…
Justin O’Beirne did a great in-depth comparison of the different ways Google and Apple approach mapping. From the summary of Part 1: We looked at 54 pairs of maps across three cities (New York, San Francisco, and London) and found several significant differences: Apple Maps, on average, labels more cities than Google at every zoom. Google Maps, on average, labels more roads than Apple on nearly…
This Game Is Forcing Some Players to Be Women, And They’re Freaking Out From Motherboard: It’s been several months since we wrote about how Steam survival hit Rust would soon be implementing a feature that randomly (and permanently) makes your character a man or a woman, and now that feature is here. Players have generally loved the way the game randomizes features for your permanent character…
One of Twitter’s problems is that it’s tilted a little too far towards the vim end of the scale. It looks like a dead-simple service, but those humble 140 characters have been crammed full of features over the years, and the ways they interact aren’t always obvious. There are rules, and the rules generally make sense once you know them, but it’s also really easy to overlook them. I’ve known about…
TextExpander as Subscription Software When Should Software Be a Subscription Service? I don’t contest the fact that developers need income. I have gladly upgraded TextExpander every time there was a new version, even if the changes weren’t important to me. It’s important to support independent developers, to ensure that the Mac and iOS ecosystems have excellent apps. In addition, the…
If You’re House Is Still Available, Send Me an Email: Personality Influences Reactions to Written Errors in Email Messages Interestingly, the headlines overwhelmingly use negative language like “jerk”, “pedant”, “grammar Nazi”, and “snob” to describe the study findings. I guess I’d be considered disagreeable in pointing out the inherent judgment expressed by most of the headline writers…
A month with Apple Watch as my wallet Tom Warren for the Verge: It all started when I left my house without my wallet. I had ventured out to grab some lunch with no cash or cards to pay for it, only my iPhone or Apple Watch. I’ve used Apple Pay on my iPhone and Watch before, but this was the first time it was actually useful. I paid for a sandwich at my local store with my Watch, and thought…