Linked List: May 24, 2024

Friday, 24 May 2024

New $730 tablet with a sounds-too-good-to-be-true 10.5-inch e-ink-like “e-paper” display that refreshes at 60 fps. Super visible in daylight, amber backlighting at night. Runs a custom version of Android, ships with a stylus, and looks really nice. I jumped on a pre-order.

Om Malik got an early look:

What the company has created is a beautiful tablet — about the size of a normal iPad Air. It is just a “little less than white,” white, with a gorgeous screen. It is very simple, elegant, and lovely. It has an e-ink screen, and the matte monochrome paper-like display is optimized for reading, writing, and note-taking. It refreshes at 60 frames per second, a pretty big deal for e-ink displays. This is much less stressful on the eye and easy to use even in direct sunlight. It has 8 GB memory, about 128 GB in-built storage, an 8-core chip, microphones, speakers, and a powerful battery.

Publishing AI Slop Is a Choice ★

From a New York Times story by Nico Grant, under the headline “Google’s A.I. Search Errors Cause a Furor Online”:

With each mishap, tech industry insiders have criticized the company for dropping the ball. But in interviews, financial analysts said Google needed to move quickly to keep up with its rivals, even if it meant growing pains.

Google “doesn’t have a choice right now,” Thomas Monteiro, a Google analyst at Investing.com, said in an interview. “Companies need to move really fast, even if that includes skipping a few steps along the way. The user experience will just have to catch up.”

That quote is insane. There’s no reason Google had to enable this feature now. None. If their search monopoly has been losing share recently, it’s not because of rivals who are serving up AI-generated slop. It’s because even before this, Google’s search results quality was slipping in obvious ways. This is just making it worse. They’ve turned Google Search — the crown jewel of the company, arguably the greatest consumer product ever made — into the butt of jokes.

LLM-powered search results are a bauble. The trust Google has built with users over the last 25 years is the most valuable asset the company owns. Google most certainly does have a choice, and they’ve chosen to erode that trust just so they can avoid accusations that they’re “behind”.

Behind is where you want to be when those who are ahead are publishing nonsense.

The Talk Show: ‘Canadian Girlfriend Vibes’ ★

Special guest M.G. Siegler returns to the show to talk about the new iPad Pros, the iPadOS/MacOS functional gulf, the OpenAI/Scarlett Johansson controversy, and M.G.’s excellent new blog Spyglass.

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Atari Acquires Intellivision ★

My 7-year-old self would have been very very excited about this news. (Via Paul Thurrott.)

9to5Mac: ‘Apple Elaborates on iOS 17.5 Bug That Resurfaced Deleted Photos’ ★

Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac:

Earlier this week, Apple released iOS 17.5.1 to address a rare problem where deleted photos would reappear on a user’s device after installing iOS 17.5. In the release notes, Apple said this was caused by “database corruption.” The company has now confirmed a few additional details to 9to5Mac to further clarify the situation.

One question many people had is how images from dates as far back as 2010 resurfaced because of this problem. After all, most people aren’t still using the same devices now as they were in 2010. Apple confirmed to me that iCloud Photos is not to be blamed for this. Instead, it all boils to the corrupt database entry that existed on the device’s file system itself.

According to Apple, the photos that did not fully delete from a user’s device were not synced to iCloud Photos. Those files were only on the device itself. However, the files could have persisted from one device to another when restoring from a backup, performing a device-to-device transfer, or when restoring from an iCloud Backup but not using iCloud Photos.

Republican Profiles in Courage ★

Various comments from Nikki Haley regarding Donald Trump, while she was campaigning against him for the Republican nomination:

“If you mock the service of a combat veteran, you don’t deserve a driver’s license, let alone being president of the United States.”
“We can’t have, as Republicans, him as the nominee. He can’t win a general election. That’s the problem. We’ve got to go and have someone who can actually win.”
“This may be his survival mode to pay his legal fees and get out of some sort of legal peril, but this is like suicide for our country.”

Also Haley, this week: “I will be voting for Trump.”

Here’s hoping Trump gives her the Bill Barr treatment. Barr, who wrote in his own 2022 book that Trump has “shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed,” recently said he’d be voting for him anyway.

In a sign of appreciation for his own former attorney general’s support, Trump posted this nice note on Truth Social:

Wow! Former A.G. Bill Barr, who let a lot of great people down by not investigating Voter Fraud in our Country, has just Endorsed me for President despite the fact that I called him “Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy” (New York Post!). Based on the fact that I greatly appreciate his wholehearted Endorsement, I am removing the word “Lethargic” from my statement. Thank you Bill. MAGA2024!

All class.

TinyPod: Upcoming Case Turns an Apple Watch Into a Click-Wheel Phone ★

Ryan Christoffel, writing at 9to5Mac:

17 years after the iPhone’s launch, that idea of an iPod-inspired phone has not been forgotten. In fact, there’s a company teasing that it has created one … kind of.

Say hello to the tinyPod. [...]

tinyPod is essentially a case for the core Apple Watch hardware that takes inspiration from the iPod to turn your Watch into something of a tiny phone. Oh, and instead of using your Digital Crown to navigate watchOS, you’ll use the included iPod-like click wheel.

Clever idea! It’s largely overlooked just how powerful a computer a modern Apple Watch is.

Humane Is for Sale, But Who Would Buy Them? ★

Liana Baker, Mark Gurman, Shirin Ghaffary, and Katie Roof, reporting for Bloomberg:^*

Artificial intelligence startup Humane Inc. has been seeking a buyer for its business, according to people familiar with the matter, just weeks after the company’s closely watched wearable AI device had a rocky public launch. [...] Humane is seeking a price of between $750 million and $1 billion in a sale, one person said. The process is still early and may not result in a deal.

Last year it was valued by investors at $850 million, according to tech news site the Information. The company has raised $230 million to date from a roster of high-profile investors including OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman.

I suspect they’ll sell for a pittance — way less than the $230 million they’ve raised. I just don’t see what they have to offer. Humane doesn’t own the AI that powers the AI Pin — that comes from OpenAI, which seemingly not only doesn’t want to buy Humane, but is supposedly in exploratory talks with Jony Ive’s LoveFrom to design and build their own AI devices. The laser projector idea seems to be a bust, and the hardware’s battery life is measured in hours between battery pack swaps.

Off the top of my head, the only company that could afford a $1 billion-ish price for Humane and is dumb enough to do it is HP.

* Bloomberg, of course, is the publication that published “The Big Hack” in October 2018 — a sensational story alleging that data centers of Apple, Amazon, and dozens of other companies were compromised by China’s intelligence services. The story presented no confirmable evidence at all, was vehemently denied by all companies involved, has not been confirmed by a single other publication (despite much effort to do so), and has been largely discredited by one of Bloomberg’s own sources. By all appearances “The Big Hack” was complete bullshit. Yet Bloomberg has issued no correction or retraction, and their only ostensibly substantial follow-up contained not one shred of evidence to back up their allegations. Bloomberg seemingly hopes we’ll all just forget about it. I say we do not just forget about it. Everything they publish should be treated with skepticism until they retract “The Big Hack” or provide evidence that any of it was true.

‘Jerky, 7-Fingered Scarlett Johansson Appears in Video to Express Full-Fledged Approval of OpenAI’ ★

The Onion:

In response to allegations that the artificial intelligence research organization used the actress’s voice without consent, a jerky, seven-fingered Scarlett Johansson appeared in a video Thursday to express her full-fledged approval of OpenAI. “It is me, Scar Johnson, to express to the internet that everything about OpenAI is a-okay to me, thank you,” said the shaky, stuttering Johansson, pausing to give several three-foot-long thumbs-ups before explaining that OpenAI has all legal rights over her name, image, and likeness.

Coming soon to Google search results near you.