2025-10-22 08:28:35
Anil Dash: The Majority AI View
What's amazing is the reality that virtually 100% of tech experts I talk to in the industry feel this way, yet nobody outside of that cohort will mention this reality. What we all want is for people to just treat AI as a "normal technology", as Arvind Naryanan and Sayash Kapoor so perfectly put it. I might be a little more angry and a little less eloquent: stop being so goddamn creepy and weird about the technology! It's just tech, everything doesn't have to become some weird religion that you beat people over the head with, or gamble the entire stock market on.
I said this exact same thing back in April:
This idea that LLMs are just "normal technology" is something I've had simmering in my brain for a while now, and it's becoming more clear to me by the day that this seems to be where we're heading.
LLMs are really remarkable technology, but it's more like other technical advancements we've seen in the past than I think many expected.
This part also stood out to me:
Most people who actually have technical roles within the tech industry, like engineers, product managers, and others who actually make the technologies we all use, are fluent in the latest technologies like LLMs. They aren't the big, loud billionaires that usually get treated as the spokespeople for all of tech.
Ding ding ding! Execs and billionaires who are invested in this shaking things up are over the moon, but people using these tools to do actual work have a more nuanced option because we can't live on hype, we have shit to get done.
2025-10-22 08:13:50
The thing I love about being a developer is that I can identify gaps in my own life and instead of complaining about how annoying they are, I can actually fix them. It's amazing!
As I revealed to More Birchtree subscribers a few days ago, I had a problem where I liked to compose blog posts while I walked my dog, but I found it hard to type while on the go. iOS’s built-in dictation should help me here, but I find it pretty terrible so I don’t like using that. However, Apple just released this really nice, local transcription tool in iOS 26 and I happen to already know how it works due to my Quick Subtitles app. What if I could just dictate a blog post into my phone, get a high quality transcript, and paste that into my writing app? Sure, I'll have to edit it a bit, but I'll be 90% there.
I started coding this app on Friday afternoon and by Saturday morning I had a public beta running. I've been using the app to help write several of the posts I've published since then and it's been an absolute godsend. I don't know how many other people will benefit from this, but I love it so much.
The UI is quite basic, and I'm not sure how much I'm going to stress about making it gorgeous, but here's a couple screenshots of it in action.
I plan on releasing the app for free within the next month, but if you're interested in early access, a reminder that More Birchtree subscribers get TestFlight access to all my apps.
2025-10-22 03:37:48
Back in January, I predicted that OpenAI's next big app would be a web browser. Well, their next big app was actually Sora, which I think sucks, but their browser, Atlas, is here today and I think this is the first AI-powered browser that has any chance of disrupting the Chrome dominance we've had for nearly 2 decades.
As you might expect, this is based on Chromium, and my extensions work great in it.Other than that, it's a pretty basic browser that has quick access to ChatGPT everywhere from an "Ask ChatGPT" button at the top right, just like all other AI browsers and Chrome, and your chat history always accessible from a slide-out sidebar. The new tab page is predictably a text box that intelligently does what you ask it to do, routing your queries to perform web searches, start a standard ChatGPT chat, or simply load a website from your bookmarks or history. You can, of course, also just paste in the URL and go.
The browser UI looks very nice, which is not surprising given the general quality of OpenAI's other apps.There are only top tabs, no side tabs option, which is a bit of a bummer, but something I can live with if the rest of the browsing experience is good enough. And yes, they have implemented command + C to copy the current URL, although there's no UI element telling you it worked, but I have confirmed it is there and works as you'd expect.
There are a couple of other nice features in the app. For example, the bookmarks bar below the address bar is hidden by default, but as soon as you save your first bookmark, it will be shown. You can hide it again if you want, but I think this is a smart way to handle this. There are several features that will reference your ChatGPT chat history as well as your browsing history when searching things in the app, and you're given the option to turn these on or off as you prefer. This is an explicit part of the setup process, so if you have no interest in that, you can simply say no, in which case most of the personalization will be completely off. There are plenty of settings in the app to control this after the fact as well.
In terms of customization, there isn't much here, although they do have a cool accent color picker that also has haptic feedback as you move from one color to the other. All this does is set a subtle hue to the window chrome, so it's not a big deal but is a nice touch. I'm also a big proponent of the "show full URL in address bar" feature in all browsers, and I'm happy to see this is here as well. It's a little thing, but I'm always worried it's on its way out.
The app does not have an agent mode as of yet, but it sounds like that will be coming in the relatively near future. My experience with these modes in other browsers has been a major letdown, so we'll see if OpenAI can do any better, but I'm not holding my breath here.
Atlas is currently available for the Mac, and you can download it for use with your ChatGPT account (no paid plan required).
Side note, the announcement video for this had someone screen sharing with a pending update. Honestly, the most authentic thing I've seen in a company demo video recently.
2025-10-21 23:26:05
I think it's fair to say nerds on the iOS betas this summer had feelings about Liquid Glass, ranging from love to absolute disdain. The question was how the general public would react to the interface material. My position was that I fundamentally didn't like it and was already tired of it by the time the public release happened, but I wasn't convinced regular people would revolt when they saw it. I didn't think they would love it, but I didn't think they would be as noisy as they were about something like the Photos app redesign last year.
Apple's never going to put out a press release that says we fucked up. So you have to look at their actions to see when they have made a miscalculation. For the Photos app, that meant seeing the company effectively completely revert the redesign from iOS 18 in iOS 26, and in the case of liquid glass, it's seeing this new setting coming just weeks after the public got their hands on the new UI element.
From what I've seen online and in my personal life, I have not seen a Photos-esque revolt from users, but there has been some frustration. Of course, my anecdotal data isn't much more relevant than your anecdotal data, we know something's gone wrong when Apple does something. I have no idea what the scale of the user frustration was, but clearly there was some, otherwise they won't have made this affordance.
This new liquid glass setting is available on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS in Settings (Appearance page on the Mac and Display & Brightness page on iPhone and iPad). I've enabled it across all my devices and I do prefer it on the whole. Notifications in light mode are very bright and opaque, but everything is more reliably legible, which is a win in my book.
I'm adding right here that my wish/prediction is that "liquid glass" is the first of several materials that can exist in the new, unified Apple design system. Clear liquid glass is the default right now, tinted liquid glass is the second one, and I think there's a good argument to be made that liquid metal is another material that would make a lot of sense.
I first started thinking about this after a few weeks of using watchOS 26 on my Apple Watch Ultra. There's a bit of a disconnect, in my opinion, going from the stark utilitarian physical design of the Apple Watch Ultra to the liquid glass design of watchOS 26. I also think there's a bit of a disconnect on the iPhone 17 Pro, as well as pro apps on the Mac, which we haven't seen get a liquid glass redesign yet. Having a liquid metal UI would allow for developers to use standard system components, but would make their better UIs suit their application (not all apps are content browsing experiences, which is what liquid glass seems to be exclusively optimized for). I'd love it to be a system-level option as well so that people who want a more utilitarian look to match their hardware would have a good option.
This isn't completely unheard of in Apple's history either. Apple has long had custom versions of AppKit that only worked in Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Aperture.
2025-10-21 07:00:39
I'm just not so sure the iPhone Air to iPhone X comparison is all it's cracked up to be.
2025-10-21 06:30:00
Over 1 billion people around the world use an iPhone, but despite that enormous user base, it seems like if we simplify things down to general groups, there are four types of new iPhone buyers.
The first group is served by the regular iPhone. The second group will upgrade to the iPhone Pro. The 3rd group can drop an enormous amount of cash on the Pro Max. And those who want a cheaper phone, but still new in-box, can choose between the iPhone 16E and last year's iPhone for a little cheaper. Yet, since 2020's iPhone 12 lineup, there has been one other iPhone in the lineup that can't seem to get any love.
The iPhone mini was created to serve people who wanted a smaller iPhone, but that only lasted two years before being unceremoniously canceled. It was replaced by the iPhone Plus, which lived for three years, and aimed to satisfy the needs of people who just wanted a normal iPhone, but with a bigger screen. And now we're just a month into the iPhone Air, which aims to serve those who want the thinnest phone possible, features be damned. The jury's still out of this one, and while early reports indicate it's selling better than the Plus did, we also have reports that Apple has reduced their forecasts for this device (while the rest of the 17 lineup is over performing expectations).
If I could Monday morning quarterback this, I have a few ideas why these phones missed the mark.
So will the iPhone Air break the curse? I don't know, and I think it's gonna be a little while until anyone can answer that question with confidence. A few years ago, it made all the sense in the world that a larger regular iPhone would sell like gangbusters, but here we are.