Sunday, February 2, 2025
A little over a week ago I reluctantly paid $200 last week to try out OpenAI’s new Operator web app designed to allow you to automate complex tasks. The tool, a new website included in the ChatGPT Pro subscription offering, lets you command a virtual machine to go out and complete requests via a browser. It’s similar to what Rabbit created for their LAM feature for the R1 gadget, if you’re familiar with that.
Sunday, February 2, 2025
I’ve used nearly all of the premium AI subscription services, but none of them come close to offering the value that Perplexity Pro does. Despite the company’s contentious relationship with publishers, I’ve continued to believe it is one of the best-positioned startups in the space. After the emergence of DeepSeek, my lack of usage of Sora or Operator, and realizing my primary use case is almost always search, I moved on from services offered directly by the LLM providers.
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
Let’s be clear, Bluesky has handily defeated Mastodon to be the main alternative to the big microblogging networks. It may be smaller than Threads or X, but it’s still far larger than the platform named after the long extinct prehistoric creature. Mastodon currently has around 9 million users, while Bluesky has just broken 30 million. Recall that Mastodon has been around for almost a decade, while Bluesky really only launched about two years ago.
Monday, January 27, 2025
It’s lunch o’clock, so it’s time to finish this blog post. Fifteen years ago today, I was sitting in my sixth grade classroom when my teacher called me over to her desk to show me what I had been waiting for Apple to unveil: the iPad. There it was on the screen, the first photo I had seen of Apple’s tablet that had been long rumored and which at the time was traditionally referred to as a “slate.
Sunday, January 26, 2025
Last week Perplexity launched their latest product: Perplexity Assistant for Android. I’ve been a big fan of Perplexity for a long time. Despite its often contentious relationship with publishers, they make a spectacularly good tool. I love them, if only for the fact that they’re the first search engine to give Google a run for its money in years. But this isn’t about the search engine game or the AI search race.
Sunday, January 26, 2025
If you haven’t tried DeepSeek yet, go do it right now. The app, which is a Chinese-owned AI tool designed to compete with the likes of ChatGPT, Gemini, Llama and Grok, has rocketed to the top of the App Store charts recently and for good reason. DeepSeek is special, not for its user interface or general experience, but because it shows you how it “thinks.” The company trained its model differently; frankly, I don’t fully understand how, but I trust that they did so in a way that makes it better than many other open-source models.
Wednesday, January 22, 2025
Samsung held their annual Unpacked event today to formally take the wraps off of their next generation flagship phones. The Galaxy S25, Galaxy S25+, and Galaxy S25 Ultra are exactly what anyone who follows this industry expected. Minor hardware upgrades with a boatload of AI features that may or may not actually be useful. While these were the real entrée of today’s event, there was a fourth S25 model presented at the very end of the show.
Sunday, January 19, 2025
There have been 10 major entries in the Mario Kart series since 1992, with the most recent entries being Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Mario Kart Tour. They are excellent games. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe may be the best racing game ever made, with gorgeous courses, delightful characters, and music that can send you into nostalgia overdrive. When Nintendo unveiled the Switch 2 a few days ago, they also previewed the next Mario Kart title.
Sunday, January 19, 2025
It’s no secret that podcasts have become an increasingly popular medium over the past decade. However, many have also become more political and polarizing. Now, one may have expected this from business or news-focused shows, but this has also become an issue with Apple podcasts. To be clear, I am not talking about the Apple Podcast app but podcasts about Apple. And I am not limiting my use of the term “political” to consternation about the American government; I am also referring to the pessimism directed at new foundational technologies like artificial intelligence.
Thursday, January 16, 2025
Around lunchtime on Tuesday, I heard that Apple had started to set up an elaborate Lumon office space inside Grand Central Terminal to promote the return of Severance. Thankfully, I don’t work too far from one of the largest train stations in the country, so I wandered over to see what they’d built. Upon arrival, I was immediately in awe of the Lumon computers and keyboards that us nerds have been drooling over ever since they first graced our screens a few years ago.
Saturday, October 5, 2024
On October 5th 2011, I’d spent the day shadowing my older cousin at his high school. I remember talking with his friends at lunch about how amazing Siri looked on the iPhone 4s and getting home in the afternoon, absolutely exhausted by the prospect of high school. I really only remember this day as vividly as I do for one reason. Later that evening, I was watching tv when my iPhone buzzed.