2026-01-10 10:22:15
Elizabeth Lopatto writing for The Verge: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards
You know what’s “offensive and sexualized,” you worthless fucking cowards? Nonconsensual AI-generated images of women in bikinis spreading their legs, and of children with so-called “donut glaze” on their faces — which, by the way, were being generated at a rate of one per minute. I’d also call that “offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste” and especially “just plain creepy”! Do you need a back brace to stand up straight, buddy? Because at this point, I am certain you haven’t got a single vertebra.
What’s happening on X and Grok is sick, and clearly breaks Apple’s terms. But kicking either off the store would enrage both Musk and Trump. God only knows how many gold offerings and ass kisses it would take to avoid company-and-customer-devastating tariffs after that. Better just let the CSAM flow, it’s not worth the headaches, I guess.
2026-01-10 04:15:41
I was out for a run today and I had an idea for an app. I busted out my own app, Quick Notes, and dictated what I wanted this app to do in detail. When I got home, I created a new project in Xcode, I committed it to GitHub, and then I gave Claude Code on the web those dictated notes and asked it to build that app.
About two minutes later, it was done…and it had a build error. 😅
But it was a simple fix, I fixed it, and the app was running on my phone. And you know what? It worked. The UI wasn't perfect, but it was damn close. And I already had a product that achieved the goal I set out to achieve. All in all, I'd say it was about 10 minutes from idea to functioning MVP (and half of that was finishing my run).
Now, of course, I've already spent another 30 minutes iterating on this initial design, fixing some weird issues I came across and thinking of other logical features to add. But still, we're well less than one hour away from even having the idea, and I have something that I could genuinely use for this purpose on my phone.
There's more work to do, and I don't plan on making this a public app. It's more something that's extremely specific to my needs, but I can't help but start to wonder what the ramifications are in a world where generating software like this is so trivial. Yes, I'm an experienced product and design person with some development skills, and obviously, software development has gotten easier over the years, and I would bet that even before ChatGPT released in 2022, there were more people developing software than there ever had been in the world. But it really feels like this lowers the barrier to entry by an order of magnitude that simply must have ramifications.
As a simple example, it's possible the app that I thought of could already be achieved in some piece of software someone's released on the App Store. Truth be told, I didn't even look, I just knew exactly what I wanted, and I made it happen. This is a quite niche thing to do in 2026, but what if Apple builds something that replicates this workflow and ships it on the iPhone in a couple of years? What if instead of going to the App Store, they tell you to just ask Siri to make you the app that you need? It feels a bit like when Shortcuts came out and tiny utility apps that just did one thing suddenly became less useful because shortcuts could just do that and people could construct their own. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it certainly makes me think about how we're well past the gold rush era of the App Store. I'm also not saying you can't make money with software anymore, but I do think that it's going to take more to stand out from the crowd.
I'm also thinking about the rise of personalized software in general. With the example above, I bet I could find an app that did what I wanted, but I doubt I could find an app that did exactly what I wanted. In general, software developers for the longest time have tried to make software that is flexible enough to satisfy the needs of as wide an audience as possible. If you didn't like a little detail of how an app worked, well, you would just learn to live with it and get used to it. But in a world where you're the one creating the software, you can just change it. You can make exactly what you want. Does this lead to a world where instead of 100,000 people using Things 3 for their task management, there are 100,000 people all with their own task manager that works exactly how they want? Is there a world where Cultured Code releases things to the App Store and everyone gets the same base functionality, but you can use a large language model to modify the app to your needs? It sounds a little crazy, but I don't think it's impossible in the long run.
I'll leave it there, and I don't have some definitive statement on exactly what I think will happen in the future. I genuinely think this is all up in the air, and nobody really knows what's going to happen. I know it's a cliche and you've probably heard it a thousand times, but one of my favorite quotes is, "we are cursed to live in interesting times." I find myself thinking that a lot lately.
2026-01-09 06:00:23
On a recent Vergecast episode, David Pierce, Allison Johnson, and Victoria Song ranked nine of Apple's product categories. The episode is entertaining, although I discovered that while I really like Victoria Song generally, I disagreed with her on almost every single point in this episode. 😅
Specifying the rules for a list's rankings is super important, and here's how they describe the criteria we should be considering:
“best” is defined quite broadly: it includes a product’s inherent quality, the quality of its competition, its cultural and economic relevance, the size of its target market, and many other things. Best is not an exact science.
So basically vibes, and I'm okay with that. My primary consideration will be around how easily I can recommend the product to somebody else and whether I think Apple makes the best version of that product that you can buy. Here's the list of categories:
Respect to the Vision Pro fans out there, but how could it be anything else, right? I do own one myself, but it is the only product category on this list where I would actively warn people not to purchase for themselves. Based on my criteria above, I do think that in some ways it is technically the best product in its category on the market, but I don't think the value it gives most people remotely aligns with the price tag. And if I'm being honest, even if it was one-third the price, I still wouldn't recommend it to most people.
I think the HomePod is a relatively niche product, and the HomePod Mini is probably a bit more mainstream, but I find them to be the least essential of the eight Apple products remaining. If you want a good voice assistant, I don't see why you would get a HomePod outside of being really invested in Apple's ecosystem. If you want a good speaker, it's a better sell, but also only works with Apple's own products, and is hard to recommend over some other options out there.
I was debating whether this or the HomePod should go higher, and I leaned a little more towards the Apple TV hardware because I do find it easier to recommend to people who are thinking about getting one. All of the services you want to use are going to be here, and in general, they're going to have the best experience that you can get from any product. Yes, your TV likely has all of these apps available as well, but except in very rare cases, the experience in the native TV apps is just awful. And no matter which Apple TV you buy, you're at least going to get a fluid experience.
AirTags are the sort of product you buy and, best case scenario, never have to use. That's kind of the opposite of every other product on this list, which makes them a little hard to judge, but I think they have real utility, are quite reliable, and in the rare instances I've relied on them, they've done great.
By the criteria of this list, I think there's an argument to be made that the Apple Watch should be one position higher, but I just can't put it any higher than this. I think the Apple Watch is fantastic, and while it's not as exciting as it used to be, it's a product that is exceptionally popular among a wide swath of people. Some people buy it for the fitness tracking. Some people buy it for the notifications. Others buy it just because that's just what a watch is in 2025.
This is lower on the list than you expected, huh?
I've got the iPhone 17 Pro in my pocket now, and it's my daily driver. I'm in the envious position of being able to choose between this, an iPhone Air, a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, and a Pixel 10, and for me, the best phone is the iPhone 17 Pro.
That said, I don't think it's as clean a sweep as it once was. The rest of the market has really caught up, and I'm a big fan of the Galaxy S25 Ultra myself, but other phones from Google, OnePlus, and a few Chinese manufacturers are pushing further than Apple in ways that I think real people actually like. I do think that Apple makes the best all-around phone, and they sweat the details on several things that other companies don't, but I would not feel bad at all about recommending someone buy a Galaxy or Pixel phone either. In fact, if they're already using an Android phone and are happy with it, those might be better options for them.
To be clear, the iPhone is still great, and I still think it is the best phone for most people, but the gap is not what it once was.
I think if you're looking for a laptop computer, then the Mac is unquestionably the best product on the market today. When you look at the combination of build quality, performance, and even price, I simply don't think anything else can match it. Even if you're someone who's used Windows your entire life, I would still suggest you look at a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro before committing to another Windows computer.
Oh, and if you just like macOS more than Windows, there's never been a better time to be a Mac fan. We're eating good in the Apple silicon era.
That said, I can't ignore desktop computers, which, while I think Apple satisfies most people's needs with the Mac Mini and Mac Studio, there are higher-end needs as well as the entire gaming market that are underserved or completely unserved by Apple's offerings. The Mac is still outrageously good, but I do think if you're looking for a desktop computer, or a convertible computer for that matter, I do have a few questions to ask you before wholeheartedly endorsing a Mac.
AirPods, on the other hand, are for everyone, as long as they want wireless earbuds. They're the default choice for iPhone users, and I know numerous Android phone users who buy AirPods because they're, "obviously the best." There's not much more to say. The AirPods Pro especially are beloved, and I know that if you, dear reader, had your AirPods fall into the garbage disposal and get shredded into a million little pieces, within five minutes you'd be putting in a pickup order to get a new pair today.
Well, well, well, what do we have here? The guy who is frustrated by the iPad puts the iPad at number one!
Well, if we look at the criteria, which is mainly on whether Apple makes the best product in a category, I don't think there's a single product on this list that Apple leads more comprehensively in than the iPad. The product simply dominates the tablet market, a market that many companies have tried to compete in and simply haven't come close. Whether it being developer support or user adoption, the iPad is leaving the competition completely in the dust.
No, it's not a good full-time computer for most adults, but it serves so many use cases nicely. Whether you have a Mac, a Windows computer, an iPhone, or an Android phone, it doesn't matter. Having an iPad around is nice, and if given the choice between an iPad and any other tablet on the market, there's absolutely no question you're getting the iPad.
In a way, I think this is both a compliment and an insult to the iPad. It's obviously a compliment if I think it's number one on this list because it absolutely demolishes the competition. However, the only reason it does that is because I'm considering the competition to be cheap Amazon Fire tablets and whatever Samsung and Google are trying these days to make work with software that simply was never meant to run in a tablet form factor. I'm not considering this in the same category as a Mac or a Windows computer or even a Microsoft Surface.
So that's that! I'd love to hear if you agree or disagree with me. If you disagree, the best way to respond would be with a blog post of your own! Tell me what I got wrong!
2026-01-09 02:00:58
2026-01-08 22:38:36
Here's some news from our latest occupation:
U.S. President is reaffirming the American commitment to keeping American troops in the country even after the country returns to self-rule, now expected by the middle of next year.
The President says next year's formal end to the U.S. occupation of the country will not amount to an exit strategy. Nor, he said, will it mean the end of the U.S. military presence in the country.
Oh wait, this is a slightly tweaked version of a report from 2003 when the US invaded Iraq for falsified reasons, forced a leadership change, and initially swore it would be fast and easy. Cut to today:
“Only time will tell,” he said, when asked how long the administration will demand direct oversight of the South American nation, with the hovering threat of American military action from an armada just off shore.
“We will rebuild it in a very profitable way,” Mr. Trump said during a nearly two-hour interview. “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil. We’re getting oil prices down, and we’re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need.”
Also, shout out to the people in my DMs telling me this wasn't at all about oil when I wrote about it last week. You nailed it! Not about oil at all 😵💫
2026-01-08 21:00:00
I took a look through NVIDIA's last 4 years of financial reports with a goal of understanding how much of their business was from gaming and how that's changed in recent years.
In short, gaming revenue has bounced back from the COVID bump and is on a constant rise. If this was any company's revenue over the last 4 years, they'd be pretty pleased.
But now let's look at NVIDIA's overall revenue over that same time period:
That's a heck of a line, huh? Finally, let's show what percentage of their revenue came from gaming over this time period:
It gets harder to do apples-to-apples comparisons to their financials before 2023, but in Q4 2021, gaming made up over 50% of their revenue, and they were best know for their graphics cards shipping to consumers. 5 years later and they're unquestionably an AI company who happens to make awesome GPUs for personal computers (gaming makes up less than 10% of their revenue today). Wild times.