2025-05-11 18:24:33
It looks like this, my friends. It looks like this. If there was a doubt that the nastiest people in America have seized control of the Federal government and are going to use it to enrich themselves still further, this should put it to bed.
Students cheating is nothing new. Students using AI to cheat at an industrial scale with little chance of any consequences even if caught? Yeah, that’s new. If you don’t come out of this wonderful long-form piece in New York magazine feeling a little depressed, you probably didn’t read it closely enough.
Part of the problem is that education has come to be seen as transactional, as a golden ticket to a better paid job, rather than as an opportunity to get knowledge and skills. This is especially true in places like the UK, where a university student will leave with nearly £50,000 of debt on average.
So why shouldn’t students do whatever is necessary to get out with a good grade, when their ability to pay back that loan and have a decent income is dependent on it?
For employers, though, this is a potential disaster. Yes, the ability to use AI will be a useful skill to have. But if graduate hires don’t have the kind of critical and creative skills which are vital in business and can only be learned by doing your own work, that means employers will have to teach them.
But there’s a wider question too: in the age of AI, what is education for? When you can ask an AI to research something for you, do you even need research skills of your own? Is the real skill knowing what questions to ask – and how do we teach that?
Rote learning is dead. It caught a cold when Google changed the world, and AI has pushed it into a coffin and buried it.
It looks like the company has quietly sneaked in a clause allowing it to take your creative work and, without giving you a penny, use it to train AI. Now I’m not anti-AI – but I am very much anti-creative-people-not-getting-paid.
Related: how many examples of big platforms shafting people is it going to take before we realise that big platforms can’t be trusted?
You might have noticed that two nuclear-armed states are currently lobbing drones and missiles at each other. I will be very annoyed with Silicon Valley if the first full-scale nuclear war happens because of misinformation and AI-generated footage distributed by social media.
My chum and super-talented individual Matt Gemmell has been on a bit of a journey recently, moving away from the iPad and back to the Mac, and now swapping Ulysses (which is a great writing tool) to… Emacs. Now Emacs isn’t for everyone, but it has the advantage of just working with ordinary text files, which Ulysses does not. He’s documented his thoughts – and some details of his setup – on his blog, and it’s a fascinating read. As Matt says, Emacs isn’t for everyone, but if you’re the kind of person who (1) loves tinkering with software, (2) wants everything in a format which will stand the test of time, and (3) are driven by keyboard shortcuts more than anything else, it’s worth considering.
The wonderful Dr Howard Oakley has written a brief history of the all-in-one Mac, from the original through to the various iMacs. Damn, that first iMac was lovely. Occasionally I get a strong desire to replace my Mac mini with one.
Ahh, NFTs. “Digital goods” which you “own” but which someone else can just accidentally delete by not paying their hosting bill. Whoops.
“It’s only advice for you because it had to be advice for me.” Genius, from a genius.
The answer will shock you! Actually, it won’t – she gets to her desk in her home office at 8.30 every day and just keeps writing. I love these profiles of authors who are nothing like what I want to be.
You know the answer to this (I hope). But interestingly, one of the reasons he chose the name is to honour Pope Leo XIII, who presided over the church at the start of the industrial revolution – and New Leo noted that we currently face“developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.” When you're responsible for an organisation that’s getting on for a couple of thousand years old, you probably have a bit of a different perspective to that of Silicon Valley.
2025-05-03 02:28:23
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth's latest memo on right-to-repair marks a rare moment of clarity amidst his usual utter tomfoolery. The document on "Army Transformation and Acquisition Reform" finally acknowledges what should have been obvious: that corporate intellectual property restrictions have disabled the Army's ability to fix its own kit in the field. While much of the memo retreads familiar ground with predictable Pentagon-speak, this admission of repair constraints signals a potential shift in the military's relationship with its profit-driven suppliers.
An Indian court has blocked the use of Proton Mail, the fully-encrypted email provider, after a local company "alleged that its employees had received emails containing obscene and vulgar content sent via Proton Mail." Additional Solicitor General Aravind Kamath delicately sidestepped governmental responsibility in court. Speaking for the administration, he suggested the government's hands were largely tied regarding the petitioner's grievances, and instead redirecting them toward criminal courts.
These institutions, he claimed, might extract the necessary information from Swiss authorities – effectively transferring the burden of investigation across international boundaries while the petitioner's complaint remains suspended in procedural limbo. And of course the Swiss courts would just have laughed, because the Swiss do not fuck around when it comes to stuff like this.
You might have noticed that Trump administration's "Trump First" agenda has led to Europe looking towards its own solutions for technology amidst a general push for "digital sovereignty". That could be bad news for big technology providers like Microsoft, so it's not that surprising that the company's top legal officer has come out with a lot of belligerent claims about what it would do if Trump wanted to get his hands on European data.
Microsoft's relationship to Trump appears complex. The company switched law firms in a shareholder case, replacing one that had settled with the Trump administration to avoid a punishing executive order with one that is actively fighting the White House over executive orders that stripped their security clearances and restricted their access to government buildings.
Given that the Federal Trade Commission opened a wide-ranging antitrust investigation into Microsoft's business practices just before Trump's second term, creating a situation where the incoming Trump administration must decide whether to continue or abandon the investigation, that's a pretty ballsy move.
A coworking space for chatbots. Sure. Why not?
But ignore the headline. It's actually a really interesting art project based around the loss of creative work to AI.
The right hates education. In particular, it hates education for ordinary people. That’s why the Trump administration (those guys again!) is scrabbling around for ideas on cutting student funding, making sure that degrees are only affordable for the rich.
Of course, this matters a lot to the world of technology companies, which are a major beneficiary of higher education not only in the US but across the world. Big tech has acted like a globalised vacuum cleaner for highly educated young people, lured by great working conditions and career prospects. While Trump has made noises about valuing highly-skilled immigrants, the hardcore MAGA crowd are dead-set against them.
I’ve been writing for a while about how affiliate revenue for publishers is going to tail off because of AI. So I’m not surprised that OpenAI is adding shopping to ChatGPT. It’s just so obviously a better experience for a lot of the kind of research-heavy, high value purchases that publishers have been targeting.
The only future for publishers is high-quality, direct traffic, and direct subscriptions. That’s it.
“Things are weird in Apple-land” is certainly up there. Jason Snell does his usual excellent piece on Apple’s quarterly results, and points out (among many other things) that the company is very much not dead in the water (again). As he notes:
The water is many things. It’s choppy. It’s chilly. There may be blood in it. There might even be sharks swarming. You pick the water metaphors you want, but what Apple’s certainly not is dead in it.
But... the problem with statements like this is that the water looks fine, until the moment it’s not -- and that point often comes quite quickly. Apple has a lot of resilience baked in, thanks to very diversified revenue streams. But even the most resilient companies reach a peak at some point.
Becky Chambers has nearly completed another book. If you haven’t read her works, you really should – some of the best and most gentle science fiction of the last decade.
2025-05-02 21:12:00
A story about Apple? Catnip for me. An antitrust story about Apple? Absolutely gold plated gourmet catnip for me.
The judge in the case is not mincing her words:
Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover-up made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple.
Ouch. It takes quite a lot of effort to rile at judge so much they will start using words like that. Judge Gonzales Rogers is sending a very clear "I am not taking your shit" message.
But does the ruling go too far? Ben Thompson has an interesting take on the case, which suggests that Apple might have the ability to appeal based on a violation of Article 5 of the US Constitution - the so called "Takings Clause", which prevents the government seizing property. But I just don’t buy that there’s a Takings Clause violation here.
The Takings Clause argument assumes that Judge Gonzalez Rogers has effectively seized Apple’s intellectual property without compensation by prohibiting Apple from charging commissions on outside-app purchases. However, this interpretation distorts what’s actually happening.
First, the court isn’t “taking” Apple’s intellectual property - it’s prohibiting Apple from using that property as a tool to suppress competition. Apple still owns and profits from its IP through developer fees, in-app purchases, and the entire iOS ecosystem.
Second, antitrust enforcement has never been considered a “taking” in constitutional jurisprudence, despite several attempts to use it as a defence. When courts restrict anticompetitive behaviours, they’re regulating commerce, not confiscating property. The same principle applies here - Apple isn’t losing its IP; it’s losing the ability to leverage that IP in ways that harm the market.
The judge didn’t arbitrarily decide Apple’s IP is worthless. Rather, she found that Apple’s 27% commission was designed specifically to undermine competition, not to reflect legitimate IP valuation. When given the opportunity to determine a fair value, Apple instead created a post-hoc justification for a pre-determined anticompetitive rate. Apple, as she says, had plenty of chances to work with the court’s ruling to determine the true value of its IP in this context - it not only declined to do so, it deliberately flouted the ruling.
And there is a way back for Apple here. This is an injunction, not a permanent state of affairs. While the immediate injunction forbids Apple from “imposing any commission or any fee on purchases that consumers make outside an app,” this appears to be a response to Apple’s wilful violation rather than a permanent prohibition on any commission whatsoever. The judge’s reasoning focuses on Apple’s failure to justify its rate through legitimate valuation.
Gonzalez Rogers specifically states: “Apple was tasked with valuing its intellectual property, not with reverse engineering a number right under 30% that would allow it to maintain its anticompetitive revenue stream.” This suggests that if Apple had conducted a genuine bottoms-up analysis of the value provided by its platform and services, rather than working backwards from a revenue preservation goal, a commission might be acceptable.
If Apple were to conduct a genuine valuation exercise that wasn’t designed to preserve its anticompetitive revenue stream, the court might be more receptive to a commission structure – and the company could apply to have that injunction lifted. Effectively, Gonzales Rogers ruling is the equivalent of saying "come back to me when you're prepared to act like a grown up."
The irony is this was all so avoidable. As John Gruber notes:
Are the results of this disastrous for Apple’s App Store business? I don’t think so at all. Gonzales Rogers is demanding that Apple ... do what Phil Schiller recommended they do all along, which is to compete fair and square with purchases available on the web.
Apple is -- supposedly -- one of the greatest user experience companies in the world. If it can't make it's native solution for buying apps, installed on every device, better than a solution which will always involve shitty splash screens and more clicks for the user, maybe it doesn't deserve the money anyway?
Some aspects of the App Store experience remain great. It's convenient to have a single place to buy apps. It's great that I can see all my app subscriptions in a single place. But as a discovery mechanism for new apps, it's really just meh. I would still use it for the apps I purchase, but not because it's genuinely great: it's just the easy option.
2025-04-26 03:24:30
Via Phil comes this wonderful beat down on the idea that humans can colonise Mars. Outside of science fiction -- and more on that shortly -- Mars just is not a place amenable to any kind of multicellular life, let alone mammals. And turning it into somewhere that might be would involve so much effort that could be better focused on, you know, just keeping the one planet we know is habitable working as intended.
It's no surprise that Mars colonisation appeals to the same bunch of internet-native rich bores that are obsessed by everything from AGI to life extension. Cory Doctorow has reviewed Adam Becker's book on them and their ideas, and it sounds like an insta-buy to me.
Any article which starts by mentioning Harlan Ellison's second-best story is always going to get my attention, but one which also skewers some specific stupidity or our tech overlords is definitely worth a read. This time it's Eric "grown up in the room" Schmidt who gets the kicking. Schmidt appeared before Congress and sombrely informed them that within a few years AI would be soaking up 99% of all current power generation and, therefore, the US should be racing to build power capacity though "renewable, non-renewable, whatever. It needs to be there, and it needs to be there quickly."
Of course, the AI that Schmidt talks about had better be good at writing its own prompts, because increasing energy generation that much in that short an amount of time would require enough non-renewables to come online to cook the planet. But hey, think of how fast it could generate memes.
I'm not a home SAN kind of guy, but those who are tell me that Synology has always been the best choice for anyone wanting to store a lot of stuff locally rather than leaning too much into the cloud. So when I saw that the company is now insisting that customers should be using its own-brand and approved disks rather than anything they want to use, I let out a big sigh. Why can't we have nice things? Oh yeah, capitalism.
Big golf clap to Automattic, the company that has managed to burn away more goodwill thanks to the antics of its CEO than any other bar Tesla. This time, it’s not attempting to betray the spirit of open source software, or using arbitrary systems to control competitors. No, it’s just watermarking documents in an attempt to find who has been leaking stuff to the press.
Here’s a tip to Matt Mullenweg: if you don’t want people to leak, perhaps you should shut up occasionally yourself?
This is a great article about the internet of slop, but this sentence sums up so much of what’s wrong: “Today’s internet isn’t really designed for us, but rather to elicit certain responses from us, responses which are hostile to human flourishing”
Who could possibly have imagined that there would be a thriving market in hacked internet devices which allow you to stream subscription sports (and other channels) without paying? Apart from everyone who has ever read any cyberpunk novel?
In the UK, this is apparently now so common that the police aren’t even going after low-lever sellers – they’re making the usual song and dance about “going after the big fish” and “connections to organised crime” (hint for plod: sooner or later, all crime has “links to organised crime”)
And boy, was Henry Blodget wrong. Nowadays, he’s reduced to making up fake people for attention.
I have to confess that not so long ago I was a little obsessed with smart devices. That’s why virtually every bulb in my house is smart. Look! I can turn them off and on without leaving the sofa! From my PHONE!
And then one day you wake up and you realise that your bedroom light is coming on randomly at 4am and you can’t work out which of the many doohickies in the house or cloud are doing it.
And then the next day, you realise that your thermostat has stopped working despite only being eleven years old, because Google has decided to not bother with it anymore.
And that is why I no longer buy smart anything.
2025-04-18 22:54:44
You know the Macalope, right? The legendary "part man, part Mac, part antelope" of Mac punditry? You don't? Honestly, I think less of you.
Anyway, I don't want to get all judgy about this. But you should read The Macalope's recent column both for its critique of AI and for an addendum to Betteridge's Law of Headlines which I support: "the answer to any Trip Mickle article about Apple is 'NO.', whether the headline is phrased as a question or not."
I'm not ignoring the news that a US judge has found Google has a monopoly on some areas of online advertising, although I will not that taking longer than five minutes to work this out bamboozles the brain. Neither will I focus on the absurd idea that simply because Instagram "was what it was in 2020 because of the investments that Facebook made in the intervening years" made the ownership of Instagram (and WhatsApp!) by Meta any less of a competition issue. "I bought up all the potential competition but hey I didn't just shut it down so that's OK" is quite the viewpoint.
No, what I love the way that Meta has decided that the solution to Facebook's decline -- driven entirely by its own avarice which has degraded the quality of the feed for years -- is to reintroduce, erm, a feed that's just your friends. I mean, sure, that's better than the utter useless hellscape of AI slop, random "recommended" pages and posts and ads (oh so many ads) that we have now. But does anyone believe that in the year of our lord twenty twenty five the best Facebook can do is go back 20 years? Seriously?
Facebook's problem is simple, and it can be summed up in two words: Mark Zuckerberg. A man notably low on empathy who sees the internet as a way to move every stray dollar, pound, euro and yen from your pocket into his pocket, Zuckerberg decided long ago that no one other than him would be allowed any real power the change the company. He's a perfect example of why the theory of the "benevolent dictator for life" in leadership is utter bunk.
A BDFL can work, but not when when that dictator is a billionaire with zero empathy. As Robert Shaw might have put it, "you know the thing about a billionaire is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’…"
What was the golden age of blogs? I would always argue it really got fun sometime around 2005, although I have friends who would say that was when it all went horribly wrong. What's certain is that by 2010 there were a lot of really good, interesting blogs around which created amazing and original posts on just about any topic you wanted to read about.
One of my favourites was Another Nickel in the Machine, a blog which told stories about London's history. It petered out in around 2017, but there are a tonne of great articles on there. One of my favourites was the story of Warren Street, just off Euston Road and a place that will be familiar either because you know the name of the tube station, or you have used it as a cut through to get someone more interesting.
I used to walk down Warren Street every day when I worked at Dennis Publishing, getting out of the tube and walking round to first Bolsover Street then Cleveland Street. When I first started working there, in 1995, Warren Street still had the last remnants of what used to be its main business, buying and selling used cars. There was, I think, one garage still working, and if you looked carefully you could see the semi-hidden frontages of others.
What I didn't know was quite how shady this business had been in the 1950s -- until I read the story of Warren Street and the murder of Stan "The Spiv" Shetty. I think you might enjoy it too.
And it also reminded me of the internet we have lost. Today, if you wanted to create something like this and find an audience, where would you do it? Instagram? TikTok? Another platform full of AI-generated crap and clickbait? The web and blogging democratised publishing. Sadly, the platforms made sure they took back control.
Whether it's deliberate or these little boys are just incredibly stupid, the security damage this is causing will take decades to unpick. At this point, if I was any intelligence agency working with the US, I would regard it as completely compromised.
It’s a pretty astounding statistic, and one that I felt I had to check, but it’s true: the average age of Apple’s board is 68 years old. The youngest member is 63, and well-off enough to have already retired.
This can’t be good for the company, but it’s not telling the whole story. This, after all, is the board of directors and what DHH seems to want to ignore is that, in a company like Apple, the board isn’t making operational decisions and definitely isn’t developing new products. Apart from in exceptional circumstances, the full board only meets four times a year (the independent directors have to meet an additional four times a year without management present.)
So what about Apple’s senior leadership team? After a bit of digging, it looks like the average age of them is around 58 – by coincidence, the same age as me. By comparison, Meta is about 44. For transparency’s sake, DHH and Jason Fried are 45 and 51 respectively, making 37signals somewhere between Meta and Apple.
All of which proves, I think, precisely nothing apart from DHH is happy to cherry pick data when it suits him.
I found myself waxing lyrical the other day about the hyphen, em-dash and en-dash and realised that I sounded like a dinosaur. But apparently their use has been widely claimed to be a “tell” that text is written by AI rather than a human.
And it is true that LLMs love an em-dash, almost as much as they love a bullet point. And boy do they love a bullet point.
But it’s also true that people like me -- who grew up with proper typography -- also love them. Sometimes I’m sloppy and use hyphens or em-dashes or en-dashes interchangeably, but I use them a lot and I can assure that you I am, in fact, human.
Remember when VW got caught cheating on its emissions tests by intentionally programming its diesel engines to activate emissions controls only during laboratory testing, so that it appeared to meet government standards without the pesky process of, you know, actually meeting government standards?
In a case of “hold my beer” it turns out that Tesla has been using similar sneaky tactics to avoid having to meet its warranty commitments. The company is accused of updating the software in its cars to artificially inflate mileage, thus cutting off the 50,000 mile warranty before owners have actually reached 50,000 miles.
Of course, Tesla is ripping off customers directly rather than ripping off governments, so it probably won’t get anything like the $30bn of fines globally that VW was hit with. But it should be. Oh, it really should be.
Once again, the rumours are swirling around that the this year the iPad will get an operating system that doesn’t hobble anyone who wants to do serious work with it or use it as their only computer.
Forgive me if, like Stephen Hackett, I’m sceptical. In fact I would go further: I’m jaded. Maybe Apple will pull a rabbit out of the hat, or maybe it won’t, but I always end up thinking the company has ended up in a situation where it just doesn’t have to try. The iPad is the only game in town if you want a tablet (come on Google and Samsung, you know you’re not kidding anyone). Android on tablet is a joke. It just doesn’t need to do much more than incremental improvements to keep selling iPads by the container load.
I’ve spent a lifetime not only buying but also promoting the new shiny hotness, whatever that was at the time. I’ve written many reviews encouraging people to spend their cash on this year’s Mac, the latest watch, or even that throw-away printer that’s so cheap you might as well dump it rather than get new ink.
For which, of course, I am profoundly sorry.
Perhaps I’m coming to this -- or rediscovering it -- late in life but I love repair culture now, and that’s why I really enjoyed this article about the “frankenlaptops” made by Indian repair technicians. The tide on repairability was turning, but I am afraid legal efforts in the US to force manufacturers to make products easier to fix and update are likely to stall with the Great Orange Tyrant in power. So I guess it’s up to us now.
2025-04-12 20:49:55
You might have noticed that it's been the 50th anniversary of Microsoft, and the company held an event which was interrupted by protests from the company's own employees about its involvement in selling tech to Israel. Actually, you might not have noticed that because an awful lot of sites chose not to cover it, or chose to minimise it to a couple of lines.
I've never seen a protest like that at an event, which probably indicates quite how much we are living in interesting times. But while the times are different, so are the companies themselves. Paul Thurrott wrote a good article about how the Microsoft of today is not the same as the Microsoft of the past, but the same is true of Apple. Even a company that has always been fairly obviously odious – Facebook, I'm looking at you – used to be relatively benign in its impact. Now, it's killing kids and not bothering too much about it.
Perhaps that's always been more obvious in Europe, which has had some long-standing beefs with the big tech companies. But Europe has also always been fairly content with the status quo of the US having effective control over the technology platforms that we all use. The European Union has been happy enough to try and reign in what big tech does, without challenging the American monopolies with actual products.
The radical randomness of Donald Trump's policies seem to have undermined that delicate balance, and now we have a situation where as well as the potential for a trade war, we have a tech war brewing too. Many people here are asking if "Europe’s reliance on American tech not just a competitiveness problem but a critical national security vulnerability?" As Henry Farrell writes, the dependence of Starlink for defence is the most obvious thing, but there are others. When every copy of Windows requires that you have a Microsoft account, the potential for a malicious US to cause tech chaos for the rest of the world is huge. That's not to say that Microsoft itself would cause issues, but it's an American company, and we have seen this year just how vulnerable American democracy really is.
Another thing that the current crisis has illustrated is how far out of their depth technology leaders when it comes to politics. They expected their support for Trump to buy them something, whether that support was the hundreds of millions which Elon Musk poured in to the Orange Dictator's campaign or the million dollar donations they put into this inauguration.
Instead, they have got tariffs which will impact hardware makers like Apple directly and induce a recession. The uncertainty created by Trump's constant flip-flops mean that businesses will be cautious about spending money, hurting advertising-driven companies like Google and Facebook.
There are two kinds of extortionist: the ones that keep to their word, and the ones that don't. Tech leaders are quickly finding out that Trump falls into the latter camp. While I love the schadenfreude involved, I don't think the price was worth paying.
You can bet that quite a few of the PayPal Mafia, for example, are now waiting for Trump to keel over from the inevitable heart attack and get their boy Vance on the throne. The problem with electing someone who wants to be king is, well, kings are never predictable.
How could they have been so blind and stupid? It's worth remembering that the techbro worldview is shaped by two tenets:
Except that when you back and elect someone who believes "l'etat, c'est moi", and is prepared simply to ignore the law to do what he wants, neither of those things can or will be true. Zero interest rates are not coming back if Trump succeeds in his grand project of deglobalisation, and it turns out that state power wielded by a king has a lot of impact. The likes of Peter Thiel should have known this, but what they didn't realise is in Trump's world, there is only room for one king: King Donald.
Of course, the economic theory which underlies Trump's tariffs is less a theory than a fantasy. It's a view of America straight out of a Normal Rockwell painting, a longing for a world which hasn't existed for forty years or more. You can see this when you look at what manufacturing something like an iPhone in the US would actually involve. It's not just that it would cost twice as much: it's that it's just not really possible.
The iPhone, like many tech products, can only really exist in a globalised world with few trade barriers. You can shift where things are assembled around, but no single country has the economic capability to design and construct something so complex, with such diverse parts, all by themselves. As Apple's supply chain web page notes, its products are “Designed by Apple in California. Made by people everywhere.”
We're all, though, guilty of trying to recreate a semi-mythical past and I think to a certain degree developers are guilty of taking that view when comparing how they interacted with Apple in the past versus the present. Apple was always a bit of a shit to deal with, but it was also exciting. Hitching your wagon to Apple platforms – particularly, of course, the iPhone – meant you had the chance to reach users who were both high spending and appreciated good design. What did it matter if sometimes someone got Sherlocked?
That said, Matthew Bickham's essay about the increasingly hostile way that Apple interacts with developers is well worth a read. Apple may have occasionally shanked some poor programmer to build a feature into the Mac, but the company no longer really needs developers at all. And certainly, it doesn't need the kind of companies who only work on the Mac, taking full advantage of their platforms' capabilities. They would rather have a ChatGPT or TikTok than an OmniFocus or Magic Lasso. Apple is too big to fail, which means it's too big to care.
Perhaps the company will learn the lesson that it can't make everything itself from its struggles with Siri. In some ways, it's the perfect example of what happens when a company no longer has to really care about the user experience of its applications. Siri is bad. But no third party can sweep in and replace it on everyone's iPhones. You can't, say, switch to Google's Gemini. So why care that Siri is bad? There's no real cost to Apple, and no real benefit to getting it right.
Some time this summer, BBC Radio 4 will cease transmitting on long wave. For some people – me included – this will be a minor blip, accompanied by a little bit of nostalgia for a childhood which involved late night secretive radio listening under the bed covers.
But for about 600,000 homes around the UK, it also means something slightly different: electricity meters will, which no longer work. The Radio Teleswitch Service (RTS) runs over long wave, and effectively tells hundreds of thousands of meters when to change from one tariff to another. It's a simple and incredibly reliable system -- unlike smart meters, which use the internet instead and are liable to things like random charging errors.
How many times do we hear about a simple, resilient system being replaced by something which doesn't work as well, but which offers more commercial opportunities. All the time, my friends. All the time.
Higher education in the UK is in what you might call "a bit of a state". But the problems for higher education globally go deeper. Lack of reading and writing skills. Using ChatGPT, not just as a tool to help research and interrogate ideas, but just to do the work. Chronic absenteeism from classes, with the expectation that lecturers will spoon-feed them. It's a mess.
Patti Smith, writing in 2017 about the death of her friend Sam Shepard. I wish I could write this well.
Have a splendid week, lovely people.
