Having finally submitted my macOS difftool to app store review, I prepared to do a nontrivial refactor of a mothballed project, which meant I figured I'd be spending a ton on AI soon. Why not let Gemini talk me out of upgrading from GitHub Copilot Pro to GitHub Copilot Pro+?

(who is in charge of the marketing on these names?)

Apparently paying $39 a month for Pro+ gets me $70 of Copilot AI credits which was starting to look attractive after I keep going over my $15 of "just Pro" AI credits for $10/mth by about $15 for months now. And that's with me being careful.

(who is in charge of the marketing on these "prices"?)

Most disappointing to me: If you don't watch what Copilot is doing closely, it really goes insane, bringing in tons of files for context and making assumptions and changes you in no way implied you wanted when prompting. I usually watch its internal monologue closely and cut it off a few times a day to do some emergency steering, admittedly at risk of wasting good context. It can sometimes get into a frenzied context feeding loop and wipe out your budget in a flash.

Anyhow, Gemini turned me on to Aider, an open source (and apparently non-profit) chat-in-your-terminal alternative that requires you set up your own API key with a supported AI provider. So I finally bit the bullet and paid $5 to sign up directly for my favorite LLM to date from Copilot, Claude Sonnet 5.5. That is, and I know I'm late to the party, Aider is a wrapper for LLM interaction like Copilot was before Microsoft brought Copilot into the Visual Studios [sic] and its own Github Copilot app.

Without getting into the politics of AI, TL;DR: Amazing. Aider makes a repo map of your entire project, which is apparently a list of files/classes and methods so it has a general bird's eye view to begin. Then you have to explicitly add which files will accompany that initial context-setting request with /add commands so 1. you don't have to keep adding files to your request like in Copilot and 2. it doesn't go insane spiraling through more and more unnecessary files as it thinks. It also caches context, so if you keep your chat active you get 90% (afaict) off "resends". I'm suspicious either Copilot doesn't do that well or is sending a LOT more context than it needs too.

I'll consider adding an actual tutorial at some point, but it's pretty easy to get started with Aider. Also good is that it saves your chats right there in the repo in convention-bound locations (like .aider.chat.history.md). Then each time you start a new session, though the context starts over (so you're not wasting tokens up and back with dated conversations) the chat is appended to the old file and all in one place.

Unless you want to file manage! Then you name your chat history file...

aider --model anthropic/claude-sonnet-5-5 --chat-history-file .aider.session-images.md

And start it back up later if that's what suits:

aider --model anthropic/claude-sonnet-5-5 --chat-history-file .aider.session-images.md --restore-chat-history

Anyhow, just to say that with all the pricing sleight of hand by Microsoft I have no idea how much I'm actually saving, but Aider did do a good job on a refactor without spiraling out of control. It certainly cut my token use by, let's nearly randomly say, 25-50%, and the setup feels more mature or at least more dev friendly than Copilot's.

I'd heard Frank and James talk about burning up cash-qua-credits on the terminal, and now I guess I get why. Once spun up, it appears it could be both easier to prompt huge changes and more efficient to code like this than with the hand-holding Microsoft stuff.

Unrelated, wow, James is really into AI-generated artwork now on YouTube, huh? I don't get to see that just listening to the podcast feed. Um, interesting.

Labels: ai, claude, hats o' money, visual studio, vscode

Interesting Apple keynote. Ternus immediately strikes me as a more interesting CEO, if we ignore that our CEO names, to this point, have been Steve, Tim, and John, which are as whitebread as it comes.

(Ooops. I started at The Return. Michael, Mike, John, Michael (I see a trend), Gilbert, then Steve, Tim, and John. Not exactly injera, are they?)

But, unlike wooden -- but otherwise amazingly business-competent -- Cook, I want to ask Ternus questions about what he's presenting. I feel like I might get better than boilerplate answers, which my intuition tells me are all I'd get from Cook. There's a huge gap between buttoned up and effusively proud of what you've done before you get to "That's company IP; I can't tell you". We've at least solved the "Do you seem to care about my phone?" issue. Tentatively.

The only other item of real interest for me -- beyond the reuse of "one more thing", which you could see coming a mile away -- was the one more thing: Duo.

I am the market for this thing, which is to say who the heck is the market?

1. I love small phones.
2. I hate Face ID.
   • Enough that I skipped the iPhone 12.
3. My favorite Apple device is my iPad mini.
   • (I have a 6th gen. Battery kinda stinks. I've kept on iOS 18 because 26 killed my SE 3's performance. I want a new one.)
   • But, honestly, if I could only have one Apple device, the mini is it.

Imagine an iPad mini in your pocket. This is my dream!

Well, you had me in the first half; not going to lie. It's a dream, but not at $2200.^* Is this for Apple Watch Edition owners only? Or at least Hermes watch owners, I guess. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that.

Yet for that price, I can buy a Fairphone 6+ ($650), a Garmin Instinct Solar that "never" needs charging ($350, $1k running total), and a new mini ($700 once 8th gen is out?, $1700 total), pocket $500 and say forget the Duo.

Except that 8th gen mini won't fit in my pocket. Decisions, decisions.

IP68?!!

Now admittedly part of me doesn't trust the IP68 rating Apple claims for the Duo.

iPhone Duo is splash, water, and dust resistant and was tested under controlled laboratory conditions with a rating of IP68 under IEC standard 60529 (maximum depth of 6 meters up to 30 minutes). Splash, water, and dust resistance are not permanent conditions. Resistance might decrease as a result of normal wear. Do not attempt to charge a wet iPhone; refer to the user guide for cleaning and drying instructions. Liquid damage not covered under warranty.

Frankly, that's amazing. A 6 for dust means, "No ingress of dust; complete protection against contact (dust-tight). A vacuum must be applied. Test duration of up to 8 hours based on airflow." Really? Again, amazing.

The Galaxy Z Fold 8 that iFixit recently showed still gets sand crackle is only IP48.

Still, "Resistance might decrease as a result of normal wear" and "dust resistance [is] not a permanent condition" is doing a lot of work in that blurb.

That is, I still wouldn't want to take a Duo to the beach, and I'd probably want to drop another $200 for at least a year of AppleCare.

But, man, that SE 3 is getting slow. It stinks that if I don't order Friday I probably wouldn't get a new phone delivered until the 18e is out. This is definitely a see-it-first type of purchase. And probably a wait for version 2, see how long IP68 lasts, and hope it still has Touch ID next year thing for me.

^*The storage trap/lock-in

Why $2200 for me to buy a Duo? Because there's another bit of lock-in I'm experiencing: I've got too danged much on my phone.

My main SE 3 has 256 gigs, and it's still to the point that I'm constantly unloading apps and whacking music off of it to keep it running quickly. I bought a back-up SE 3 a while back with 64 gigs of space and, well, it's a pita to set up if you don't just say, "Forget it, don't restore from backup after all." But then you lose health, etc, right? Is there a clever way to do this other than...

1. Back up your well-storaged phone completely to your Mac with password protection.
2. Toss everything off of your main until you're under the storage of the poorly-storaged phone.
3. Make another backup of your main, now with waaaay less storage use so it fits on the new one, and ensure you don't accidentally erase that previous backup when saving it.
4. Install Backup 2 on poorly-storaged phone.
5. Install Backup 1 on well-storaged phone.

That's crazy. So I have to buy an even better-storaged phone not to go mad during my transfer.

That puts me at $2200.

Labels: apple, cook, fairphone, garmin, hats o' money, iphone, ternus, Touch ID

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is so much better than GPT-5 mini that I figured I'd look up how much it'd cost to swap. Right now, for $10 a month, GitHub Copilot will let you use GPT-5 mini forever, no limit. Sonnet, however, was sucking down my monthly allocation of "premium requests" so fast (it's the end of the month, so I usually splurge on the model) I was scared to look at what it'd cost.

Well be even more scared. Come June 1st, everyone gets to pay no matter which model you use. No more infinite GPT mini. And Sonnet's multiplier is jumping from 1x to 9x!!

Look, there's also something on the page about going "from request-based billing to usage-based billing". I don't think this model multiplier multiplier [sic] is effected by that distinction, however. Maybe? I think it's the same charges as now, just 9x as quick. Looks like I get 300 credits now and could get five times as many for $40. That's still not much, and I just use Copilot to pair program sometimes. Well, daily, but not agentic. Five times more and nine times as fast equals lots more than $40 a month.

I'd predicted prices for AI assisted coding would go waaaaay up soon. Well, I was right, though now, wondering how long this page about charges changing has existed, I might should've know a month ago it wasn't really a prediction.

Starting April 20, 2026, new sign-ups for Copilot Pro, Copilot Pro+, and student plans are temporarily paused.

Oh. Oh wow. We're in trouble.

Labels: ai, copilot, development, hats o' money

I've talked about how great it is to have a store in my pocket for 15 years. And I've often lamented how this -- the ubiquitous store -- seems to be the end game of the digital age.

Remember when Windows tested advertisements in Windows Explorer? Well, here's Microsoft's user friendly (?) alternative that did get released: Begging you not to leave Edge for Chrome with Edge playing the part of a jilted lover.

No, not joking. Edge even tells you (no, literally it does!) that it loves you to make you stay.

From The Verge

:

Labels: advertising, edge, hats o' money, windows

Amazingly (or perhaps not), Firefox (macOS 106.0.1 (64-bit)) slammed me back to using Google as its  toolbar search engine. I had been using DuckDuckGo for years.

Luckily Firefox had a pop-up telling me as much, actually bragging about it, so I knew to set it back. But I did test it once before swapping, and this was not a drill. The update to Firefox wasn't showing me the wrong dialog; it had slammed me back to Google.

/sigh

Profiteering weirds the internet.

Labels: firefox, Google, hats o' money

Labels: AirPods, apple, hats o' money

From pcgamer.com on the ad in Windows Explorer:

Update: In a statement to The Verge, senior Windows program manager Brandon LeBlanc said "This was an experimental banner that was not intended to be published externally and was turned off.” So it looks like the addition of ads at this point was unintentional.

You don't need to read more to know the key phrase here is "at this point".

I've complained a bit that the store is taking over Windows and iOS, heck, even Firefox:

From techcrunch.com late last year:

What’s maybe most important, though, is that Mozilla’s new products like its Mozilla VPN service, Firefox Relay Premium, Pocket and other commercial initiatives are slowly but surely starting to pay off.  As Mozilla executive VP Angela Plohman and CFO Eric Muhlheim noted in today’s announcement, revenue from new product offerings will grow 150% this year and account for 14% of the organization’s revenue in 2021. The Mozilla VPN service saw a revenue increase of 450% from 2020 to 2021.

Windows shows me advertisements for Edge, and Edge tries to tell me that there are better deals on what I'm trying to buy on Amazon. It's a slippery slope.

Anyone who thinks that this ad from Windows Explorer was a "mistake" is fooling themselves.

But in the same vein as my, "Someday, we'll be more worried when everyone can't see our location all the time" argument, it's not like ads are inherently evil. It's just that the ones that fill the internet now stink out loud. That is, if you sold me something I wanted with amazing accuracy and kept the info about me on my box, I'd probably be impressed.

There are useful ways to present ads. Asking if you want to autowrite your way to success is not one of them.

Labels: advertising, hats o' money, windows

Remember in April when I complained about how hard Apple is selling me services, and how it made it sound like I would lose email?

Guess who else is selling me services? You got it. Google. Well, specifically Gmail.

 

 

Let's give that a shot.

Wait, okay, that's actually kind of helpful! has:attachment larger:10M is a neat search suggestion to get rid of some oversized emails.

Unfortunately I only have 125 that match. That's not nothing -- 125 at even just 10 megs each is well over a gigabyte, giving me nearly 8% of my 15 gigs of free space back and hopefully silencing this message for a while.

But what really hits me is the coincidence that Apple and Google are both yelling at me to pay something [or pay more in Apple's case] at the same time. 

Interestingly, Outlook seems to hard cap at 50 gigs even when you're paying $70 a year (includes 1 tb OneDrive). Google offers 100 gigs in gmail for $20 a year. Apple lets you lump email in with your iCloud, so potentially 2 terabytes (!??!), but that's shared with your iCloud backups, messages, and pictures, and runs $10 a month, so... Fastmail charges $5 a month for 30 gigs and $9 for 100, which seems to be obviously too much until you recall they aren't profiting on what's in your emails.

Regardless, what getting caught on both ends with "upgrade now!!1!" adverts tells me is that companies aren't scaling storage over time, as it becomes cheaper for them. And storage isn't being updated year over year because having people run out of storage is a profit center.

Not crazy, but not coincidental either. This is a decided, "let's all charge for services" play by all the companies. There's money in them thar hills.

Labels: apple, cloud, gmail, Google, hats o' money, icloud, outlook

Here's a post I put onto the story posted at StackOverflow regarding its sale to Prosus. As of this morning, it's been a day or two and it still hasn't passed moderation. I mean, that's their right, but let's say it doesn't speak well for their willingness to listen. Makes you wonder how many more critical comments are in moderation limbo.

Once this acquisition is complete, we will have more resources and support to grow our public platform and paid products, and we can accelerate our global impact tremendously.

But what ways are you unable to impact the globe now? That is, shouldn't I substitute "impact" with "financial growth" to decode this sentence?

My guess is that StackOverflow is doing exactly what we appreciate it doing right now. That is, THE GROWTH IS OVER. I couldn't care less if you spin out opportunities based on the same codebase in some wholly owned subsidiary that chases cash, but within stackoverflow.com? I can't recall anything changing over the last almost 10 years that's a knock it out of the park, revolutionary advance. And I don't need one!

There are some interesting problems that could use solving at stackoverflow.com, certainly. How do you keep answers fresh when the answers to questions change over time, and old accepts are now objectively wrong? How do you manage moderation to ensure it's not tone deaf (or worse) at times? Maybe even, "How can I pay to get an answer to my question beyond simple point bounties?" That last one is the only one I can think of quickly that increases revenue (and only as a middle banker, not as the primary entity paid) and usefulness of the site.

But growth? What growth? Are the servers crumbling over the load? No. Are there too many low quality answers? Maybe, but it's been reasonably easy to get past the chaff. Do you need a better mobile app for countries with less infrastructure? Well, actually, yes. Yes you do. But beyond that...

Convince me this isn't about the money, or -- and I'll give you a softball here -- even primarily about the money. What is this "impact" primarily about that's not income?

Labels: fail, hats o' money, stackoverflow

From The Verge on the Epic vs. Apple suit:

[Cook] was also, however, a little blunter about Apple’s own interests. “IAP helps Apple efficiently collect a commission” — for payment processing, but also customer service and the use of Apple’s intellectual property. Without in-app purchases, “we would have to come up with another system to invoice developers, which I think would be a mess.” If Apple let developers tell users about other payment methods, Cook said later, “we would in essence give up our total return on our IP.”

That's... interesting. It suggests free app authors are freeloaders, and that high revenue apps are paying a disproportionate amount of the "total return on our IP" -- which, again, includes "customer service and the use of [iOS]". That without the largesse of Clash of Clans, freeware apps would need to pay more than their annual $100 developer fee to keep iOS, well, if not afloat, then profitable.

Though you can't sell the hardware without iOS either, can you? Is the IP all of iOS or just the App Store? Do you have iOS without the Store? Do you have the same success selling your phones with these apps? Of course not. It cuts both ways, doesn't it? Whose IP is driving revenue for whom?

Is the insinuation, then, that Apple Hardware, Inc needs Apple Software, Inc's^* IAP to be profitable? I doubt it. iPhone would be profitable without the IAP revenue. Cook's statement is within the specific context of growing services revenue to, in turn, grow the stock price. That is, losing the revenue from IAP doesn't make Apple unprofitable. They'd still get a return on their IP. It's reduced growth, aka missed growth targets, a relative loss, not an absolute one, that keeps Cook working at night -- and preparing like mad (as he should) for his court appearences.

Which makes this another example of how Apple is no longer leaving the money on the table to allow it to concentrate on its strengths. It is now primarily motivated by company growth, not producing the "best" products. Sure, it's long-term, sustained growth, which is a much more mature approach than, to hyperbolize, Enron's, but its motivation is still growth. That's a change from "the Jobs years" (or at least Steve managed to fool me into thinking so).

^* I've got a drafted post somewhere about the distinction between Apple Software, Inc and Apple Hardware, Inc. In a nutshell, I'm worried Apple Software, Inc needs to split off from Hardware, Inc if we don't want to keep seeing complaints like Epic's.

Because Epic's complaint should have some weight with Apple Arcade competing with it. Spotify has an even better case. Netflix too, thanks to Apple TV. Amazon has several, not least the Kindle vs. Apple Books' store arena.

In all four, Apple's own options for games and music and TV shows and books have the obvious benefit that they get to avoid the 15-30% surcharge everyone else has to pay. Apple's products can be that much worse than the competition and still "win" simply because they avoid their own "IP" tax.

It's not wholly unlike Amazon Basics Limp Bizkiting a number of products others sell on the site.

A store abuses its power when it also becomes the seller. These are not simple generic brands; these are competitors, equals.

If Hardware Inc. kept the payment processing and IAP profits, but Music, TV, Arcade, and Books had to compete as Software Inc., a favorite third party, but a third party nonetheless, what would the market look like?

Labels: app store econ, apple, hats o' money

How big is the market for AR glasses? You probably have no idea.

Imagine this. I need glasses. I can't find them. I can't see clearly more than a few feet in front of my face. I can find my phone. I turn on its camera. I can see the world, suddenly in focus, using my phone's screen.

AR glasses can, without lenses, completely replace "lens-based" glasses. And make the current state of the art in progressive lenses look like madhuman-inventor-in-their-basement wastes of time.

And let's return to Apple AirPods Pro's and Max' (and Beats Solo Pro's) Transparency Mode. It's taking what's in your world, reducing unimportant sounds (leaf blower) and increasing important ones (human voice).  

That's AR. That's your world, programmatically mediated for improved interaction.

But don't stop there. Now add GUIs -- let's call them HUDs to be kewl -- in the corners, voice assistants in my ears, highlighted pieces of interest in my field of view, reminders, the whole "Predator sight" nine yards.

That's what AR is. It's perfect senses. You can see perfectly, hear perfectly, well beyond even the best human can now, missing nothing. Baby crying? Never miss it. See the baby camera immediately without reaching for your monitor. Calls from your mother when she's worried? Patched through no matter what. Calls from someone you gave your number to in a bar but shouldn't have (do we still go to bars?) who won't stop hounding you? Never makes it past the CPU, if that's what you want. Fakes that the number is dead.

Not awake in time for a meeting? Forgot that you're out of milk on the way home? Did you mention to a friend that you'd see them at 7:30 tonight and it's 7:10? Instant recall without the mediation of looking at your phone; now it's in your ear, politely, or the corner of your eye without your having ever made an entry in your calendar or reminders.

AR is coming. Not VR, not a world to replace "reality". AR qua Reality++. It is coming, eventually. It's already hear, quietly. And just like a smartphone, everyone will eventually pay for the hardware... and the subscriptions that hardware will all but require.

Every capitalist dollar with an iota of brains wants in on this. I wonder when we'll hit the tipping point where those dollars finally start to reproduce like jackrabbits.

Labels: augmented reality, hats o' money

I've always wondered why Nationals Park doesn't face the Anacostia River, which it sits right beside.

You've seen the Pirates' new stadium, right? It's beautiful. I want to go, even though I live nowhere close to Pittsburgh and the team's, um, not great right now.

Every time I watch a game at Nationals Park I spend at least a few minutes lamenting that I don't have a view anywhere close to as beautiful as the Pirates' even though one is waiting for me behind first base.

Luckily this time googling around I found an answer for this incomprehensible situation at Sports Illustrated.

Spoiler: The answer to all of your questions is money.

During the design phase, the prevailing thought was to face the 41,500-seat stadium — situated on 25 acres in Southeast Washington adjacent to the Navy Yard — toward the Anacostia River​. But Joe Spear, Populous architect and designer of Nationals Park, told SI.com that for Nationals Park to become a success, the neighborhood about three-quarters of a mile from the Capitol needed to be let in.

“The site was selected by the mayor’s office to add value and create value in that neighborhood,” Spear said. “It was a pretty sketchy part of D.C., and they knew (the park) would attract development.”

Spear, having designed Petco Park in San Diego, also knew that the more neighbors were able to see into a ballpark, the more value was being created. Spear told a story of hosting a D.C. contingent in San Diego to meet with then-Padres owner John Moores, who offered up a tour of the stadium, including its view of the surrounding neighborhood.

“The owner of the Padres said, ‘See those buildings? If they can see even a quarter of the playing field, they can add value,’” Spear said. “That was a pretty effective answer to which way we should orient the ballpark.”

[emphasis mine -mfn]

Ugh. So the outfield faces away from the river so that the high rises that have finally been built there would be worth more. 

Who does that benefit? The folks that own the construction companies and the real estate, that's who. Maybe DC if they charge property tax fairly.

Who loses? Everyone who rents in the neighborhood and everyone watching a game, in the park or on TV. The DC area as a whole. The Nats as an organization. Everyone but the real estate big wigs. I've never enjoyed looking at the car park and high rises in the outfield. There's zero DC character there.

I wish there was some way to convince them to poke a hole in the first base line through to the river. It wouldn't be that hard to take out a few seats and expose a beautiful, iconic view. Hire some avant garde architect and tell them to get creative with sections 131-134 and 223-227 (even and odd). I bet we can have view and a good percentage of seats in an unforgettable piece of architecture.

Heck, just take out section 132. I'd rather you take out about three times as much, but let's start small.

There's already an entryway there. Minimal disruption, maximum reward. Heck, some of the high rises would suddenly have a river view too! Market value up! Win-win!

It would turn a concrete monster where you can just barely see the Capitol if you're high enough up in the cheap seats into something that really is a memorable site. You'd lose some great seats, sure, and seats behind the home dugout, but you'd be giving back to everyone else in the stadium.

It's so close.

Labels: DC, fail, hats o' money, nats, Other Stuff

I liked it when Apple was a hardware company. Sure, as a stockholder, the services income is great. That's where the growth is. As a user, I hate Apple's services push.

Here's one small example: I have the 200 gig iCloud service that runs $3 a month. I have members of my Apple Family using it too. For some reason, two members have used craploads of iCloud space in the last month. We're nearly out.

Do I get a warning that "A & B's use of iCloud has jumped 400% in the last month [bonus if it says "mostly edited video"]. You might request that they check if the usage is required"?

No, no I get this:

macOS

That's a notification on my Mac. Apparently iCloud is going to go away. This implies I can't even use it, though of course all the stuff I have in iCloud continues to work now. I'm just headed to the state where I can't add anything new until something is deleted. But why be measured when you can yell the sky is falling?

Update: Had a reason to open System Preferences later on today. Was greeted with this screen.

Mail

This is from iOS' Mail app. Nevermind that I don't even really use my iCloud email account. This little red warning stares at me every time I open Mail. The clear implication is that all of my email is about to go kaput. 

Spoiler: With the exception of the @me.com or whatever account I have, my email is not under attack. Gmail, Outlook, personal webservers, whatever, they're all still good, and good in iOS Mail, regardless of my iCloud storage space situation. I'd say 50+% of iPhone users wouldn't be savvy enough to understand that right off.

That "Learn More..." link leads you to this overlay. Dark pattern alert: Note how the auto-renew warning is partially obscured by default on my SE2 screen. (I've scrolled in the second.) You can say that's minor, but so would making the "Add more storage..." font a bit smaller. Priorities.

The message is clear. Pay to play or your email goes away.

iCloud online/through a browser

The least offensive by a mile is the one from iCloud online.

That's a nice, measured, informative description. You haven't run out of space yet. If you do, you'll still have photos, video, and docs; they just can't be updated. Add a, "You might want to clean up your existing files or purchase more space; here's how" and it's perfect.

The best part is that its "Learn More" link goes here, which is a website that includes an entire section on "Make more space available in iCloud". But guess what's above that nice, reasoned section of true information?

That's right: Buy More Services!!1!!!?!?!

It's subtle, but subtle pushes make millions at Apple's scale. 

Aside: Though probably not at macOS scale. This page is a place where they could afford to leave the services money on the table. 

And that's probably what drives me crazy. Apple used to be the "leave money on the table company". Remember "We don't think you need a larger phone"? The slightly larger 5 size was "good enough" for a while. They could've made a larger phone sooner, but didn't until they were ready, not when the market was ready.

It's a horrible trope, but let's use it. Can you see Jobs saying, "And if you want to keep using your email, you just need to pay us an extra $7 a month above the $3 you're already paying us." This, the guy who wanted to sell you albums of music without DRM. He's going to hold your email hostage?

As a whole, these seem like horribly unpolished, crass, rushed, used-car lot sales techniques. If you haven't seen it, you should take a look at the YouTube video that's made the rounds recently (though it's from October), embedded below, about the embarrassing state of the macOS Music app. The dude narrating obviously plays dumb several times to expose poor design choices that might not actually stymie him, but someone is hitting them without the expertise and savviness to get out.

The poor, half-arsed design choices he points out in Music reminds me of the ham-handed services advertisements, above. Lots of verbiage that isn't perfectly clear. UI is not deliberately designed. Each, with the possible exception of iCloud online, refuse to do a respectful job thinking through all the likely use cases at each step. 

Each Apple UI in these cases has a single goal, a happy-path-or-no-path mentality. In Music, it seems it's a very junior programmer fulfilling some acceptance criteria to the letter, and nothing more.

Above, with iCloud, that single use case is, clearly, PUSH SERVICES REVENUE, and do it under the guise of serving the customer.

NOTE: Language in the video is VERY NSFW.

Labels: apple, apple fail, happy-path-or-no-path, hats o' money, UI

With all this autocomplete in Gmail and Outlook, do you suspect it's mining my composition to suggest completions for me? For others? If I tab, is that a training point?

(That one's pretty innocuous, but I complained in Outlook that the suggestions were so long it was slowing me down... I was composing as I typed and reading through the suggestions to see if they were better. They weren't. They only wasted my time.)

I mean, of course they're stealing our labor, right? Even though I'm just a coder, my English degree doesn't appreciate what this blog called [in this case talking about captchas and Street View ids for Google]...

... yet another ruse devised by Google to make you train their robots for free

I recently bought a domain for personal email and was going to try it out with Fastmail as the host. This kinda pushes up the timetable on that experiment [he said as he typed into his Google-hosted blog].

Edit: This one's a little better example of robo-suggesting (and is actually what I was going to write), though still not nearly as bad as what I got in Outlook, which was nearly writing my email itself.

Labels: ai, Google, hats o' money, labor, outlook

Labels: apple, apple car, hats o' money

I mean, I've talked about how the great advance of the iPhone was to put a store in our pocket. And I've felt that, at least since we've put our computers on a network essentially 24/7, that we lost control of them. They're ecosystems supporting different, competing programs now, some waring with the OS, some in mutual symbiosis, but all scraping a living in an ecosystem, passively waring with each other.

I think the BMG rootkit from 2005 is one of the clearest examples and it didn't even use a network. You put in media. The media [trivially but importantly] rewrote a portion of your OS. And that media was ostensibly just music! (The Night mp3s Became Sentient...)

I still believe both -- that are computers are biomes for software growth and that their seeding is powered through making our private spaces into public stores -- though I have to admit I didn't comprehend fully in 2008 how phones would become not a but the storefront (fronts?) for us all just over a decade later.

But the commercials still surprise me. Here's one that I received recently upon opening Amazon Music. (I'm a Prime subscriber and get Prime streaming, though I'm also bought into the ecosystem (see?) fully enough that most of my albums are purchased on Amazon, as that means I know I can stream those purchases without worrying if they're in the Prime library this month.)

Looks at how unrelated the items are that come together to make that advertisement. The most galling is that there's no obvious synergy above and beyond simply flexing what they know about you without you ever opting in for sharing it.

1. That I'm listening to Amazon Music.
2. That I'm using it on a Lenovo.
3. That these two things somehow mean I'm more likely to take a deal that's been offered before when I'm not on a Lenovo?

Nothing crazy sensitive there, but... why? Why pretend this is special deal? Why would this combination of facts make me more susceptible to the marketing? "I know I've been holding off on getting a subscription before, but if you're doing it because I like ThinkPads, well, let's make a deal!"

Look, I still think we should give up on most of this privacy stuff. Kids in 50 years will be scared when everyone doesn't know their exact location and what they're buying and will expect that information to be shared passively, without any action on their part. 

For most of us, the VAST majority of us, nobody will ever care about our specifics. Even our most secret thoughts don't make for a hill of beans (unless you're Bush's and competitors) to the companies. Unless someone is looking to have a beef (Hormel?) with a group and actively oppress them (a real consideration, as the last few years have shown us), who cares? You can tease out the NFL teams I follow, what sorts of novels I enjoy, my political persuasion, when I'm likely to buy a car... but so what? Most companies have zero reason to make any of that more actionable than targeting (read "spend more on presenting") a few extra commercials towards me.

It's really seeing how badly companies bungle the information they have that confounds me and gives me some comfort. It's clear many, and by many I mean "most", have no clue what they're doing.

Labels: advertising, amazon music, business, hats o' money, lenovo, privacy