Netflix deeply regrets accidentally making Netflix a better product for its customers. It temporarily pushed out a change that let people see Netflix shows in the Apple TV app, a change people have been asking for since the debut of the Apple TV app in 2016 with its Up Next queue and content aggregation features. Fortunately, Netflix swiftly corrected the error before too many of its users could experience anything approaching joy, or satisfaction with Netflix. Customers should definitely drop the issue and not press Netflix to turn the feature that certainly exists back on.
They may very well turn it on later, like, let’s say if Apple is actually shipped a tvOS update that completely displaces the old home screen, and reduces visibility of their app at all. However such a move is just as likely to hurt the commercial appeal of the Apple TV for customers that find Netflix’s mediocrity essential. This “error” may never see the light of day again, or it could be flipped back on any minute now.
I was recently in New York City and that meant I was juggling Google Maps and Apple Maps to get around. They’re largely comparable products these days, but there are some strengths and weaknesses that make it worth my time to juggle them. I created a Shortcut to help with that.
Google Maps is where my boyfriend and I go to check location information, and to collaboratively edit the Google Maps List of places we plan on visiting. I have talked about this extensively inmytravelposts. Apple has walking direction previews for the Apple Watch so you can keep your phone in your pocket while you walk around the gray slush of New York City in the winter.
There I was, entering the long name of a place in Apple Maps that I had just entered in Google Maps, with my capacitive-friendly gloves that don’t work well for small tap targets, and it occurred to me that there had to be some way to automate this. That meant my old nemesis, Shortcuts.
Google Maps doesn’t immediately expose a traditional Share Sheet when you share a location. In the upper right corner of the location information is the sharrow which brings up a modal preview card for the location, and three buttons to share this place, copy link, or share as a collaborative list. Sharing this place finally brings up the Share Sheet.
What the app shares is a shortened URL, like this one:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/8YUvDPbQPrasqC528?g_st=ic
Fortunately, Shortcuts has a URL expander. The expansion of that example URL gives us this:
What an ugly, but extremely useful URL. The name of the location is in the URL with + in the place of whitespace. Unfortunately, this meant I needed to use regex, and even worse still, use regex in Shortcuts, which for some reason requires two steps: Match Text (for the regex), and Get Group From Matched Text (because Match Text returns a list, even if it’s only one item).
The one thing LLM’s are good for is writing regex. I asked one to write me some of The Devil’s Language, and I got (?<=q=)([^&]+). I do a simple replace on + to and I have a totally normal location string.
Aux Merveilleux de Fred, 37 8th Ave, New York, NY
This is fed to the the Open in Maps Shortcut block. I have it set to walking directions because that it is my use case, and I wanted to reduce prompts, but it could just as easily ask the user. All I have to do is tap those share buttons, the shortcut, hit “Go” when Apple Maps appears, and then I’m off to the races. No typing things over again.
The shortcut works great, although there’s no easy way to only surface the Shortcut only when the Google Maps Share Sheet is up. Because it’s a URL, any other sharing function that uses a URL will display this. I did build an if statement to make sure the input is the expected URL format, but that’s not the same thing as only showing the button when it’s applicable to do so.
It was a little disappointing that I built this on the very last day I was in New York, but I’ll have it ready for the next time I travel, and you can too.
Jason Snell released his annual Apple Report Card! It’s a bunch of people that talk about Apple for a living, and some other people that are too online, like myself. The full text of the survey responses is available in a separate post, here.
I tried not to be too wordy, but if you’re following this blog I assume it’s because you’d like me to elaborate on my comments, so I shall. The two things I would like to talk more about are the Apple TV, and Apple’s impact on the world, because I feel like I have a little more to say about both.
The full text of what I submitted about the platform:
Apple really isn’t making any progress on tvOS. I use my Apple TV every day, and it is the only set-top box I would recommend to people, but that doesn’t mean Apple perfected the form. Things are more or less in the same state they were in at the end of 2023 when the Home app was updated with that sidebar that mostly can’t be customized. We still don’t have a unified Home and TV app experience. We don’t have anything for live entertainment short of sports notifications. We don’t have any kind of firm policy on pause screen ads (see the YouTube screensaver controversy from 2024). Apple hasn’t enticed anyone new to add support for the jog wheel they introduced on the remote in 2021.
Sometimes people mention me in regards to my critiques of the Apple TV, and tvOS, but I honestly don’t talk about the platform much these days because there’s nothing worth discussing. My last major post about any of it was prior to WWDC 2024 where I talked about all the things that I didn’t think would be announced. It was quite an extensive list of tvOS shortcomings. I don’t see any reason to repost that every time a point update comes out for tvOS merely to say none of it has been accomplished.
It’s the only smart TV I use, or currently recommend, and the only one I would buy if I had a sudden need for coverage in another room with a new TV. I wouldn’t even consider the built-in software from any TV manufacturer. Most of the world is perfectly content to use those built-in options though instead of paying Apple.
Jason Snell announced on Upgrade that he’s doing a deep dive on all the other streaming platforms right now and I look forward to hearing more about his thoughts. I gave up using the Fire TV because they’ve made the home screen experience worse with every software update, but it does have things like a universal live TV guide that Apple doesn’t. Apple skipping live TV continues to be a huge mistake.
This part of the survey is incredibly broad and encompasses many disparate parts of how Apple runs its company. Maybe it really should be four questions about our perception of: company culture (union-busting, return to office, etc.), green initiatives (carbon neutral Apple Watch), geopolitical issues (DMA, China, Trump), and accessibility. I feel like I, and many of the respondents, have conflicting feelings that kind of all cancel each other out when these things are mixed together like various acids and bases. It leaves us with foamy mess.
I’m of two minds when it comes to Apple’s green initiatives. I think they’re great, but they do design systems where the whole thing has to be recycled instead of upgraded or easily repaired. I believe political and policy stances are really where Apple fell short in 2024. Notably with the European Commission and the trials involving the justice department. Like when we all found out how many billion dollars Google pays Apple to be the default search engine. At present, I can’t say I’m optimistic about the direction things are heading in terms of other political and policy decisions.
That’s an uncharacteristically wishy-washy answer from me. In fairness to me, I was treating it like a review of 2024, not everything that bled into January 2025. To quote another response from Philip Michaels:
Given the current state of affairs in our new kleptocracy, I imagine this score will be very different in a year.
Certainly, if I was responding to “Apple’s impact on the world” for January 2025 alone then I would have written a shorter version of my Tim Cook failing us blog post. The survey was completed before that.
Allow me to digress for a moment to address some feedback that I have received along the lines of, “What do you expect? He’s a CEO.” I expect exactly what I wrote: that Tim Cook meets the ideals he expresses.
When people shrug off things like the inauguration it lets the good stuff people say about Apple’s global impact (carbon neutral products, accessibility, etc.) stick to them, but the bad stuff (being associated with the administration erasing of trans people from existence, persecution of immigrants, using the social platform of an unelected private citizen ransacking the government to post about being in a Severance promo, etc.) roll right off.
If there’s nothing that can be said about Apple’s impact on the world to persuade anyone at Apple to pursue a different course then why do we talk about their developer relations, or image playgrounds, or anything else related to Apple? Of course we want them to change what they are doing. When people complain about Tim Cook transacting with Trump, it’s not because they’re naive.
Last week, I asked the hosts of The Rebound podcast a few loaded questions about Tim Cook, and I thought there was a good conversation that ensued from it. Lex Friedman, Dan Moren, and John Moltz all had thoughtful things to say. (No, I didn’t just ask so they’d mention my blog post.)
I hope we can all think more about Apple’s impact on the world, whether or not we participate in this survey specifically. Much like Phil, I imagine the score will be very different next year, it’s already different for January.
I know this is a rather dramatic headline and that some people might incorrectly assume that I’m mad about some particular piece of hardware or software, but it should come as no surprise that I’m hopping mad at Tim Cook for how he’s ingratiating himself to President Trump again. The President has done, and will continue to do, harm to marginalized communities. Harm was a promise of his campaign and underscored by this President’s earlier efforts the last time he was in office. The last time he was in office ended with his supporters storming the Capital Building because he was so desperate to steal the election. There isn’t a “wait and see” or a “maybe he won’t” to excuse investment in this morally-bankrupt, tin-pot dictator.
I don’t have any way of knowing what Tim Cook’s thought process was when he agreed to give a million dollars to the inauguration fund, or to know with any certainty why he agreed to travel to Washington to sit shoulder to shoulder with the other CEOs all vying for preferential treatment from the President.
In absence of knowledge there is supposition. Maybe he’s doing it to persuade certain favorable conditions on tariffs with China? Maybe he wants to the DOJ antitrust litigation to fizzle out, or be undermined? Maybe he wants retaliatory threats against the EU for DMA troubles?
In 2019 we were all treated to the infamous “Tim Apple” sideshow as well as the Mac Pro assembly plant in Texas. Tim Cook debased himself for this publicity stunt about American manufacturing in an attempt to dodge tariffs. Don’t forget that that was while impeachment proceedings were moving forward against the sitting President.
Tim is not subtle about these transactions with Trump. They are transactions where he gives Trump something and he gets something in return. Various pundits might analyze who really got the most out of each of these transactions but Tim certainly isn’t getting something for nothing.
Another charitable reading of Tim Cook’s actions, that I heard put forward by John Siracusa on ATP the other week, is that Tim is minimizing damage that Trump can do. I don’t personally believe that to be the case, since we can easily look back to Tim’s previous transactions with the Trump administration and see they’re primarily about tax avoidance and tariff dodging for Apple specifically. There is no evidence that any damage has been minimized or will be minimized in the future.
One could compartmentalize it and say that Tim has a fiduciary duty to his employees and his shareholders to transact with the President. However, I would counter that Tim has a duty to his employees and shareholders when it comes to protecting their rights and personhood here in America. Something that Trump has sworn to threaten, and has already moved forward with in his executive orders which his cabinet is enacting. Also, don’t forget that between the last time Tim cozied up to Trump and this most recent occasion, there was that whole insurrection. That has to be in the calculus somewhere.
They’re all doing it! I know that, you know that, so why do I care so much about Tim specifically? Tim is a gay man who came out in 2014. It was huge news at the time and even deeply moved me. From Tim in 2014:
Throughout my professional life, I’ve tried to maintain a basic level of privacy. I come from humble roots, and I don’t seek to draw attention to myself. Apple is already one of the most closely watched companies in the world, and I like keeping the focus on our products and the incredible things our customers achieve with them.
At the same time, I believe deeply in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, who said: “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’ ” I often challenge myself with that question, and I’ve come to realize that my desire for personal privacy has been holding me back from doing something more important. That’s what has led me to today.
Gay men, particularly cisgender white gay men, like Tim and I, have an amazing ability to abandon support for everyone else in the LGBTQIA+ community. Tim purports to celebrate and support the entire community.
Being gay has given me a deeper understanding of what it means to be in the minority and provided a window into the challenges that people in other minority groups deal with every day. It’s made me more empathetic, which has led to a richer life. It’s been tough and uncomfortable at times, but it has given me the confidence to be myself, to follow my own path, and to rise above adversity and bigotry. It’s also given me the skin of a rhinoceros, which comes in handy when you’re the CEO of Apple.
How should people reconcile Tim’s explicit support of Trump with his support of trans and enby people working at Apple, buying products from Apple, and attending pride parades with Apple?
For those unfamiliar with the specific language of Trump’s executive order on Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government it is a really thorough dismantling of federal support for trans and enby people through the fun-house mirror of women’s rights. It is a reprehensible piece of work that will be fought in courts that have a lot of Trump appointees in them, especially at the highest level thanks to Mitch McConnell and Trump’s first term appointments.
Back to Tim in 2014:
The world has changed so much since I was a kid. America is moving toward marriage equality, and the public figures who have bravely come out have helped change perceptions and made our culture more tolerant. Still, there are laws on the books in a majority of states that allow employers to fire people based solely on their sexual orientation. There are many places where landlords can evict tenants for being gay, or where we can be barred from visiting sick partners and sharing in their legacies. Countless people, particularly kids, face fear and abuse every day because of their sexual orientation.
I don’t consider myself an activist, but I realize how much I’ve benefited from the sacrifice of others. So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.
Don’t worry though! The San Francisco Pride Parade will be June 28th-29th this year so go to that and watch Tim smile and wave! Don’t forget to buy this year’s hottest new Pride band showing Apple’s support for the community!
Through this Pride Collection, Apple is proud to continue its support of LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations whose efforts are bringing about positive change, including ILGA World, a global federation committed to advancing the rights of LGBTQ+ people worldwide; and the Human Rights Campaign, a global advocacy group working to ensure all LGBTQ+ people are treated as full and equal citizens. Additional advocacy organizations Apple supports include Encircle, Equality North Carolina, Equality Texas, GLSEN, Equality Federation, the National Center for Transgender Equality, PFLAG, SMYAL, and The Trevor Project.
You are better off giving to any or all of those organizations directly in 2025 —you were always better off giving directly, but people also wanted a fun watch band. I don’t see how a new Pride Collection will provide the necessary fascist-neutral offset for Tim Cook.
Sam Altman and Peter Thiel are gay so why don’t I give them a hard time? Because no one expects Sam Altman or Peter Thiel to be good people with any kind of conscience. They don’t pretend to be at all. They are cisgendered homosexual men that insulated from any anti-LGBTQIA+ bullshit by their wealth. Being gay is not something they use to understand others in the world, but a taunt they assert because they have so much money that there’s nothing anyone can do to them.
Tim is also insulated by wealth. The thing about Tim is that he clothes himself in caring about these issues. Merch isn’t caring.
Likewise, we turn to the Republican war on DEI, where they are aggrieved about not being able to get their unqualified white kids into schools as legacy admissions, and handing them jobs, but they frame this as “merit based”. Zuckerberg readily, and quickly complied with dismantling Facebook’s DEI efforts to win favor with Trump.
Again, there’s Tim, figuratively clothing himself in the quotes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Monday. Clothing Apple’s home page in it. Then showing up to Trump’s inauguration like the words of MLK can do the work that he will not.
One of the detainees was a U.S. military veteran “who suffered the indignity of having the legitimacy of his military documentation questioned,” Baraka said in a statement. “Newark will not stand by idly while people are being unlawfully terrorized.”
In response, ICE said, “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement may encounter U.S. citizens while conducting field work and may request identification to establish an individual’s identity.” The agency added that this was the case during the Newark raid.
So yes, I do hold Tim to a higher standard than these other robber barons, but that’s because Tim claims he holds himself to those high standards. I am measuring him against the ruler that he has provided and he comes up short.
I’ve seen people call for Tim Cook to resign. I stop short of that at the moment. While I am pissed off, I am also pragmatic. What would be the result of his resignation? Would someone better equipped to protect Apple’s interests while also protecting Apple’s customers and employees? I’m not so sure there is.
No, what I would like to see is Tim standing up for what he purports to believe in. Not speaking about things that have inspired him, or donating to charities as some kind of fascist-neutral offset, but devising a way to argue for the protection of human dignity for his customers and employees from this federal government. If he can transact a tax holiday, or tariff carve-outs, he can figure out what to wheel and deal to protect people. Many of whom are his employees and customers.
If that is too hard, or he’s worried the board would oust him, then I wonder what the point of his wealth and power is if he will only use it for more wealth and power? It is not easy to stand up for people on a national stage, but it is orders of magnitude easier for him than it is for people down here where we are.
I know that things are tricky internationally. Apple operates in places that have had policies in place for a long time that aren’t like what we have (had) in America, but I would say the distinction is that people had access to things that are being taken away from them now. America is also where Apple is headquartered. Pointing at other, more restrictive countries is not an excuse to stand with Trump.
Tim concluded his 2014 Bloomberg Businessweek column with:
When I arrive in my office each morning, I’m greeted by framed photos of Dr. King and Robert F. Kennedy. I don’t pretend that writing this puts me in their league. All it does is allow me to look at those pictures and know that I’m doing my part, however small, to help others. We pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick. This is my brick.
You can afford more bricks, Tim.
There is, unfortunately, no effective way for us to persuade Tim with anything other than our words of criticism. Because none of these tech CEOs are any better. We can’t take our stuff and go somewhere that’s speaking out to protect us. We can reduce spending, sign up for fewer Apple services, but that’s not going to move the needle. Again, as futile as it sounds, we should rely on accurate, incisive criticism.
I don’t mean name calling, or throwing pies (although pies would be kinda funny), but serious critiques of Tim’s statements and actions, as I did above when pointing out his hypocrisy.
When Tim posts on X Apple bloggers should write about how Tim continues to use Elon Musk’s propaganda machine instead of publishing through other means. Every time he does it. They should not uncritically produce a blog post for their content mills that’s just an exercise in padding out the X post into something they can run some ads against. If you’re writing anyway you can spend that time productively instead of being a passive funnel.
When Tim is in a promo video for Severance - a show about people severing themselves to compartmentalize their work and personal lives — we should be able to say something about how Cook has compartmentalized his belief in equality with his belief in Trump. We can especially do that when all of those things happened in the same week.
For some reason Apple fans are much more comfortable discussing the minutiae of Apple Products than they are discussing Tim’s and Apple’s political maneuvers. I know they are not politically savvy pundits (I include myself in that), and they may not like politics but they’re not AI experts, and that doesn’t stop them from spilling ink about AI.
It is incumbent upon me, and you, and all the other Apple podcastoblogosphere nerds who have read this far to not just take Apple’s press releases and media events as things to cover that exist in a vacuum outside politics, and in isolation of the dignity of the people using the products and services. Particularly when Tim Cook starts to get what he wants from his transactions with Trump. We should ask if it was worth it and remember what Tim has condoned to get it.
The very least that Tim can do is endure valid criticism. He is undeserving of adulation or being placed on a pedestal as a role model to gay men. That is part of the price he is paying here. We will not give him his flowers.
That might seem meager but unlike Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and especially Elon Musk, I believe it is possible Tim Cook does care about how both he, and Apple are perceived. Definitely not as much as he cares about Apple’s finances and ability to exert control, but it’s in there somewhere. That is part of the marketing, after all. If there is no truth in that, and he doesn’t care, then that would be worth knowing as well.
Will anything rise to the level that Tim uses his wealth and power to protect us from the inevitable further erosion of our rights? I don’t know. The one area where it is possible is privacy. Possible, but not guaranteed.
Where’s the line for Tim? I’m not sure Tim knows. We should help point it out to him, because he’s standing on the other side of it.
When you enable notification summaries, iOS 18.3 will make it clearer that the feature – like all Apple Intelligence features – is a beta.
You can now disable notification summaries for an app directly from the Lock Screen or Notification Center by swiping, tapping “Options,” then choosing the “Turn Off Summaries” option.
On the Lock Screen, notification summaries now use italicized text to better distinguish them from normal notifications.
In the Settings app, Apple now warns users that notification summaries “may contain errors.”
Additionally, notification summaries have been temporarily disabled entirely for the News & Entertainment category of apps. Notification summaries will be re-enabled for this category with a future software update as Apple continues to refine the experience.
In my opinion this doesn’t go far enough in addressing the problems that will persist with this headline feature of iOS. Let me run through the bullet points again.
Making it clear that it is a beta is not a solution, but a deflection of blame. As Jason Snell has noted, this is a shipping, heavily advertised feature of iOS and of the iPhone in particular. This is not a feature confined to the beta releases of Apple software where it’s kept until it works. The beta distinction is meaningless, particularly to the general public.
Will Apple go through the effort to explain to the general public that they added an option to disable the summarization per app from a notification? That doesn’t seem particularly discoverable since it didn’t previously exist. Also the ability to turn off summarization for an app does not improve summarization in any way — like reporting an error to humans at Apple would do.
Italicizing the text is drawing a more noticable distinction between the LLM output, and the straight-up notification when placed side-by-side, but how many people will directly connect, “sometimes my notifications are italic” with summaries?
Putting a “may contain errors” warning label in Settings is an ass-covering move and doesn’t do anything to help people make a decision. They don’t articulate anything about error rate, or what inputs might be prone to error. This is as ineffectual as the beta tag, which it is synonymous with.
Speaking of categories of apps: The decision to omit the news and entertainment categories from summarization is an effort to reduce the criticism from news organizations. It doesn’t mean the other categories of apps fare any better at summarization.
Also, it doesn’t help that these notification summary errors have persisted for months and have only received these surface-level adjustments in a developer beta that might not come out for one or two more months to the general public. Despite the heavy coverage that this post from Chance Miller will get, current events are not materially any different for the news organizations like the BBC, or for users.
The 18.3 changes don’t really address the root issue which is not, “how can we use this LLM that summarizes things to reduce notifications?” But rather, “How can we reduce unnecessary and disruptive notifications?” Remember that the software features allegedly exist to solve problems, so we should take a step back and look at the problem before we keep picking apart the solution they shipped.
People receive notifications from apps that are a mix of relevant, and irrelevant. They could be something time-sensitive, or just some idle chatter. Apple makes no real attempt to weight those notifications, other than when it tries to determine if something is time-sensitive (it’s usually because the message has a time or date).
It doesn’t filter anything unless you use the Reduce Interruptions Focus Mode. That doesn’t actually filter or otherwise reduce your notifications, but delay when some notifications are shown to you. This is like having an email client where you can toggle on spam filtering for a bit, but when you toggle it off all the spam just shows up in your inbox. You wouldn’t expect an email service or client to do that, but that’s how Reduce Interruptions works, and you’ll get those notifications poorly summarized to boot!
For example: I, along with almost everyone else in California, got a spam text message from a +63 phone number (that’s the Philippines) that was summarized as “FasTrak Lane fee payment due on January 14, 2025 to avoid late fees and legal action.” The full message included a scam URL and all that, but Apple saved the day by summarizing the scam as if it was genuine. Another iPhone owner in the Six Colors Discord got the same message with tiny all-caps gray text “MAYBE IMPORTANT” at the top.
Thanks to this summary I saved so much time and my focus was 100 percent on things that mattered.
The solution isn’t to summarize the scam. It is not to deliver the scam later based on Focus Mode settings. It is to not deliver scam at all. Even the most basic email spam filters wouldn’t fall for the stuff that Messages passes on. The Messages app knows better and doesn’t make the URL a tappable link, and it has “Report Junk” right there, but Apple can’t connect the dots.
When I wrote about the changes to the Mail app, and it guessing Priority all wrong, it was also for a spam message. Don’t summarize or otherwise lend legitimacy to scams by operating on them as if they were any other input, or worse, getting tricked into thinking there’s something time sensitive about it just because they included a date.
ApplePay was not restricted. This was spam that got through the spam filter and was indiscriminately summarized along with totally normal mail instead of simply not bothering me about it. Apple should have a leg up on scams claiming to be Apple but it's all just input to an LLM.
There’s also spam promotional marketing notifications from apps you have installed on your system. If an app doesn’t have specific settings for specific types of notifications then you get to make the totally binary choice of turning notifications on or off for that app. This is like completely deleting all correspondence from a company, or allowing everything they ever wanted to send you to reach you. Again, Apple doesn’t do anything to help users here. It’ll just summarize all of the notifications without any kind of screening.
In that category of wanted notifications, there’s apps that send quite a few in succession as status changes occur, like Flighty. Summarizing isn’t helpful because the older statuses are no longer relevant or accurate.
The plane for my flight had landed 34 minutes early, then my departure gate assignment was made. My flight had not departed at all, and did not arrive early. I can see how it interpolated all that to make this, but this is garbage.
Attempting to collapse all the old status updates with the current status produces a totally useless summary. I could selectively remove Flighty from summarization, but now we’re back to Apple not solving the problem.
Apple applied every “AI” thing they could to their iOS 18 release cycle, and that included this heavy reliance on summarization as a feature. I really hoped that they wouldn’t, but they did.
Putting warning labels, italicizing, removing news apps, etc. doesn’t solve the problem Apple claims they set out to solve. I don’t suddenly have a bunch of free time because summarization has unburdened me from junk notifications. It hasn’t.
Apple isn’t just attempting to summarize automated messages and scams, but also back-and-forth conversations. It’s about getting a vibe of what’s happening in the conversation and how important it is that you open the app to read what’s going on. The summary will never be able to replace the conversation in total.
For Ivory, my Mastodon client of choice, I have notification summaries enabled. Apple Intelligence has no insight into the conversation at all, or even that there might be concurrent conversations. It can only operate on what comes through as an unread push notification while the app was closed. Ivory helpfully displays the avatar of the user replying, but Apple Intelligence can only condense that down to show the most recent avatar, making it look like Jason Snell said all of this.
I had asked for book recommendations on Mastodon, and Cory recommended The Expanse. I told Cory I read most of it and stopped. I closed the app. Along comes Austin, he recommends The Expanse again, and he says that the “borrow in times” instead of “borrowing times” in Libby are over-inflated. Then he sees what I said to Cory, and replies again to say “nevermind” about The Expanse. Jason Snell separately replied to the original post and recommended Kaiju and Starter Villain by John Scalzi. Apple mushed that all together.
Again, I can see how it happened, and this isn’t even an offensive example of a summary, but it isn’t helpful either. If I had a human assistant to read and summarize these messages the human wouldn’t have mentioned The Expanse at all, and would have corrected “borrow in” to “borrowing” as well as concoct a viable sentence. A human might go a step further to attribute the statements to the different people making them and not displayed the avatar or implied it was all from Jason. For example:
Austin: Borrowing times in Libby are over-inflated.
Jason: Kaiju and Starter Villain recommended.
Apple’s less-than-helpful summary is 100 characters and 14 words. My more useful version is 97 characters and 14 words. Why string together everything with semicolons? Go with the full colon, I always say.
The model has no insight into the conversation taking place, like a human observer would, and it can’t omit part of the conversation (The Expanse). It can’t understand that “John Scalzi’s books” is way more than the two Jason singled out, but it knows John Scalzi is an author of books. Thanks? This is stuff Apple could tweak with weights and training data, but it might just result in slightly different mush since there’s no access to the full, and concurrent, conversations. There’s no understanding that this is a conversation and should be treated differently from unassociated notifications from the same app.
Let us not forget that the solution to disable the feature selectively, or whole, just makes people wonder what it even is we’re all doing here? If you turn off every iOS 18 feature that’s Apple Intelligence related (or loosely related like Mail Categories) then what is Apple Intelligence for? What is iOS 18? Where’s the software edge that Apple has to justify their premium pricing?
Maybe the target market is people that don’t notice when things are wrong, and won’t be adversely affected by factually incorrect notifications. I certainly have pretty exacting standards, but not everyone is so fussy. Perhaps we should all lower our standards while Apple slaps “beta” on their headline features? It’s only Apple’s brand on the line, not mine, I can always turn it off. I can always skip buying the next iPhone that has more neural engine cores, because from where I’m sitting they’re not being applied in any way that benefits me.
I’ve been very conscious of how much I use Instagram. I deactivated my Facebook account many years ago, and I don’t use any other Meta products, but for a variety of reasons Instagram’s still there.
It’s the primary venue for finding out about what’s happening in the lives of friends and family —that might sound familiar because that was allegedly what Facebook was for. It’s also a place where I can find relevant information on a business or restaurant —how many other people checked a restaurant’s Instagram to see if they had special holiday hours, or menus for this past holiday season? Most important of all, it’s a place where I can go to see photos of nice architecture, cute dogs, and an algorithmic spray of filler.
I seldom post to Instagram, unless something good, and visually interesting is going on. My Instagram has been private for many years. The prospect of strangers liking a photo I took is less appealing than battling bots and spammers.
The place where I socialize on social media is Mastodon. It used to be Twitter two years ago. I want to figure out what to replace Instagram with, just like I did with Twitter.
Some people socialize through Instagram Stories, but not me. I’ll watch the things to find out what’s happening, but it’s really more of an inbox than an outbox.
Mark Zuckerberg has proven himself, time and time again, to be unscrupulous. He’s got no scruples. Not a single scruple. Scruples see Mark and hide.
He responds to external pressures on his company by complying with what he thinks will make people ease-up, or respond more favorably to the company. There’s no shortage of news about the changes that are being made right now. None of the changes are good, or even neutral.
One thing I didn’t mention above is that Instagram wants ad dollars and engagement (more ads). It profiles users not just to match ads to, but it attempts to match posts, and reels to as well. Any gay man on Instagram has been served up a bevy of thirst traps in sponsored posts, and the Explore tab. Meta is very comfortable monetizing LGBTQ+ users, even though they are quick to sell them out.
The worst outcomes of Zuckerberg’s policy changes won’t be immediate, and other cis, gay men might think they’ll just wait around and see how bad it gets, but we should all have learned a valuable lesson already about these social platforms.
The replacement should be a federated network (likely fediverse) with data portability. I don’t want to invest in a closed social network ever again. That means no Glass, or Retro.
Pixelfed was not something I felt compelled to try previously because it was web-only and felt very much like a Linux app clone of a Windows app. Today, they launched their iOS app so I finally signed up to give it a go.
It has some bugs and isn’t really ready to take on Instagram right this minute. The app flat out ate two posts I tried to make without even serving an error message. The photo selector only lets you pick one photo at a time to attach. It doesn’t faithfully preview the attached images. It doesn’t seem to have any HDR support. The app can’t upload videos, but the web site can. You can’t upload images from your Camera app via a Share Sheet extension.
Some of the bugs, and shortcomings of the new Pixelfed iOS app can be routed around by using Ivory (thanks for the tip). Ivory logs into pixelfed just like a Mastodon account. It can’t attach as many photos to a post as the Pixelfed app or site can, but it worked for posting four photos, and didn’t eat the post like the app and site did.
The biggest problem, as a photo-centric network and app, is that the uploaded photos are low-res and compressed to hell. I know that media storage and bandwidth are expensive, but there isn’t any kind of “pay more for full quality” option like you’d have with Flickr’s freemium model.
To go along with that, it’s got the same problem Mastodon has. The main server, pixelfed.social, is taking the brunt of new sign-ups. Just like mastodon.social takes the brunt of new Mastodon sign-ups. It is extremely unclear which community server to join. When I mentioned this on Mastodon I was chided for not setting up my account on gram.social run by Stux the admin of mstdn.social, but… how could I be expected to know any of that to make a decision about account creation?
The server problem on Mastodon was solved when some of my friends banded together to get managed Mastodon hosting from masto.host. We have duck.haus for our Mastodon server needs, and don’t have to worry about having a second career as a server admin. I don’t see managed hosting options for Pixelfed right now (my duckduckgo search turned up one from elestio, but I didn’t see any other mentions of them so I’m not confident enough to give them a spin).
It also has an issue that’s typical of Mastodon as well. I can’t specify a “close friends” group. I can post something that only followers can see, but then I’m back to individually screening my followers to figure out how much personal information, like photos of family members, I want people I don’t know very well to have access to.
Lastly, Pixelfed.org, and Pixelfed.social are owned by Daniel Supernault, in a very similar way to how WordPress.org and WordPress.com are Matt Mullenweg’s. That gives me pause because Daniel has posted some things that didn’t fill me with confidence about him running a thing I’m investing my time into. There was apparently a dust-up as recently as two weeks ago over Loops (Daniel’s fediverse TikTok clone) that was mostly deleted. Daniel did leave up a poll on Mastodon.
So many ppl want me to quit or otherwise not participate in the fediverse.
Do you agree?
That… is not inspiring.
Like WordPress, if things ever got bad people can take stuff and go, but that portability doesn’t mean that it’s going to be smooth, and drama free —look at Matt again.
While I was able to use Ivory to post to Pixelfed, and while I have managed hosting for Mastodon, Mastodon and Ivory are not made for Image galleries, and their social feeds are not optimized to show you that media exclusively. I’m a big believer in siloing what I’m doing by app.
Having said all of that, Pixelfed is currently the frontrunner, but that’s mostly because there’s not a lot else in this field that I am aware of. I’m hopeful that if someone starts up a dependable, managed-hosting business that it will help. Possibly another iOS app, too.
I’ve been doing a little blog post series on travel that’s mainly focused on the technology side of things. There was France, Japan, Switzerland, and now Hong Kong.
Jason didn’t prepare a detailed itinerary for this trip like we had for the others so there was no Google Sheets document to deal with. I collected names of coffee shops, cafes, etc. as we watched travel vloggers on YouTube by just adding them to notes in Drafts. I used a tag to filter for the notes when it was time to incorporate them into a Google Maps list. Drafts is so nice.
The Lists feature in Google Maps is indispensable at this point. I created a Hong Kong list, where I added the places from my Drafts, or any other place that seemed interesting, along with a note about the place to jog my memory about why it was included. Jason was able to collaborate and view everything in the list, and the way the list is visible on the map as little emoji dots is always helpful to see if something else you wanted to do is nearby.
This isn’t breaking news at this point, but just like before, the Guides feature remains awful. You can’t collaborate, or do anything you can do with Google Maps Lists. The whole thing is still built under the assumption that you’re a publisher arranging a travel brochure.
Also, every time I go to LAX I get a push notification about how I can “Explore a detailed airport map” but the other than zooming and panning the map can’t actually be used for any kind of navigation. Searching for gates does really bizarre stuff, but for some reason you can flip through a list of all gates? I don’t get it. If you can’t tell me how to move from my location to another location inside the airport than this hardly merits buzzing my wrist —once again. Google can’t do walking directions in the airport either, but it doesn’t send me push notifications claiming it can.
LAX is an awful place, but it's not so awful that they would put gate 68B outside of the terminal.
This is a must for any upcoming travel. It’s in my Smart Stack widget on my iPhone and when we start to get close to the travel dates I can see what the weather forecast will be in that other location to begin adjusting my expectations ahead of packing, or other considerations. I prefer Carrot to Mercury for my actual weather, but Carrot doesn’t offer a comparable trip feature.
No, not the cephalopod, but the Hong Kong transit card. Like the transit cards in Japan, you can load up a transit card with money and then use it for everything from transportation to vending machines, or even restaurants. In fact, several restaurants we ended up going to would only take cash or Octopus.
Unlike Japan, you can’t simply add an Octopus card to your Apple Wallet and fill it up with money via ApplePay. Well, Apple has instructions that say you can, but Octopus requires a Hong Kong issued credit card for that. It has the most confusing error if you try to do this without a HK credit card in your Wallet because it says you need to add a credit card. I do have credit cards, of course, so this was a pretty bad error that the documentation doesn’t make very clear.
There is an Octopus for Tourists app — no, that’s really what it’s called. That app can be used with international credit cards to load up an Octopus card and then add that to your Apple Wallet, which you can then transfer to your Apple Watch. Remember that these cards have the ridiculous restriction of only being on one of your devices.
I used the Octopus for Tourists app, and I wasn’t phished, which was great. Jason, however, couldn’t get it to work for him with any of his credit cards. The Ocotopus for Tourists app has a pretty low rating in the App Store with many reviewers running into this, or other, issues.
We were a little concerned that only one of us had an Octopus card before the trip, but we were hopeful that he would be able to at least get a physical one when we got there.
Turns out, that we never did, because some of the turnstiles (all of the Star Ferry ones, and a couple per MTR station) take tap-to-pay international credit cards for fares. That would have been really useful to know before we messed with Octopus for Tourists, etc. I’m imparting this knowledge to you, dear reader. Just know that if you don’t get an Octopus card that you should plan on withdrawing some Hong Kong dollars to use on your trip for certain restaurants, etc.
All the flights go in Flighty. We were flying United, and United has done a pretty good job with Live Activities in their app. So much so that it’s not worth keeping both the Flighty Live Activity and the United Live Activity going at the same time. Each one does the silly thing were it counts down the flight time to the second. Sure.
I still wish that the Apple Watch had some understanding of the flight I was on. For the full duration of the flight it thinks I’m in Los Angeles, which is just absurd. On this trip I decided it would be best to set the Watch to Do Not Disturb and put it in Theater mode so I wouldn’t see the watch face. I wanted it to record data, but the notifications for standing reminders never come through at a good time, so why buzz my wrist for them?
I’m still roaming when I travel. I’m too spooked to use eSIMs. Sorry if you think I should, or just want me to write about it, but I’ll continue to just pay a ton of money to not deal with it.
Google still beats out Apple for us, most of the time, but I still give Apple Maps a try periodically while traveling. Having all the data in Google Maps because I used Lists for planning, means I’m more likely to use Google Maps.
Both Apple and Google provide adequate walking directions in Hong Kong, but they could both be better about pedestrian bridges. Hong Kong Island has a ton of pedestrian bridges and in some cases they are the only way to cross at an intersection. Both maps apps show little stair step things and mention going up or down, but they draw the route as if it was a flat line, and a flat walk. This tripped us up a few times where we’d look at an intersection in a map app and then get there to find out we had passed the staircase entrance for the pedestrian bridge.
It was good that we were never truly lost, or stuck anywhere, but this could be better. My favorite shot classification in VFX is CBB - could be better. It’s good enough to be final if we can’t get something else in time. That’s certainly what both feel like when it comes to pedestrian bridges.
The Star Ferry operates out of Tsim Sha Tsui on the Kowloon Peninsula and either takes you to Central or Wan Chai on Hong Kong Island.
Huh.
A curiosity of both Apple and Google Maps apps is that the Star Ferry is considered walking directions, not transit. If you put in a destination on one side of Victoria Harbor and starting point on the other, then both apps will show you walking across the harbor along a Star Ferry route. If you pick transit, both apps will show the subway (MTR) routes only.
The only other times I’ve taken a ferry have all been about getting to a ferry terminal and waiting, as if it was a train station or airport, so I’ve never seem it used like this. I couldn’t say if this was typical but it certainly wasn’t my expectation when I was wondering why the Star Ferry wasn’t showing up for routing in transit.
Because this counts as walking, it also doesn’t describe anything about the ferry fares in the app. Not that it should really expect anyone who thought they were going to walk across water that they needed to pay for that, but it’s just odd.
The metro subway system in Hong Kong is very, very busy –especially the Island Line— and the facilities are all much more like my experience in Tokyo than Paris, London, or New York.
Above ground, you have multiple entrances and exits that have an assigned letter and number. Every subway station has two kinds of turnstiles. Both types accept the aforementioned Octopus travel card (or virtual Octopus card), but there are usually only a couple that can accept tap to pay credit cards.
Because I had an Octopus card in my Apple Wallet on my Watch, I was able to use any turnstile. Unfortunately, because Jason didn’t have an Octopus card he always needed to look for the specific tap-to-pay turnstiles which were sometimes around a corner. Not a big problem, just something to be aware of when you’re in a big crowd of people rushing through the station.
There are numbered gates for entry and exit from the subway cars. Everything is very clearly labeled inside the station.
I definitely appreciate Google's additional information over Apple's spartan directions.
Google Maps still offers an advantage over Apple Maps where it says how crowded the trains are expected to be. Unlike Tokyo, Apple doesn’t integrate with the transit card to tell me about my card’s balance. A feature Google can’t compete with, but since it’s absent, it’s a win for Google.
Apple and Google still have the weirdest system for walking directions to and from transit stations. I really wish that it treated the train station interiors, and the walking direction portions, like it treats those types of directions in the walking mode. In transit mode it’ll show a path and say walk to the station. Simply walk to the station!
It’s a baffling choice, in all cities. On a few occasions I’ve set the destination as the train station for walking directions, then switched to transit directions once I got there, and back to walking directions when I exited the station. It should really be a seamless experience.
This is still a major point of contention between me and Apple Maps fanboys. I prefer to use Apple Maps for CarPlay, and it’s great for walking directions on my Apple Watch, but when it comes to accessible location information while I’m traveling, Google Maps trumps it every time. It’s a good thing that Apple works with local providers, when available, to surface local review web sites. In Hong Kong, Apple works with OpenRice, and that’s a good thing for Hong Kong residents with iPhones.
I was determined to use Apple Maps to get a coffee. How hard could that be? Many of the coffee shops listed are restaurants or cafes. My sorting options were Best Match or Distance. Not even by rating, or 'open now'.
There's no shop photos or anything in Apple Maps. The reviews are not accessible to me. There are more photos on Open Rice that aren't used here, and plenty in Google Maps, that would have told me this was a restaurant that happens to serve coffee. Not what I was looking for.
However, I am traveling, and there is a language barrier to reading OpenRice reviews that I can not easily get around. Just like I said in the Tokyo blog post. Unfortunately, it seems that because of something about how the OpenRice pages are encoded, I can’t translate the web page like I was able to do in Japan. OpenRice also has a very junky site full of pop-over web ads so it’s no fun to navigate around on either.
Apple still doesn’t offer the ability to translate a review inside of the Apple Maps app, despite showcasing that possibility in a demo app in the Translation API video from this past year’s WWDC. It’s a real shame.
Google, however, has a very accessible set of reviews for every location. Reviews aren’t just if a place is “good” or “bad”. I don’t watch movies based on their Rotten Tomatoes score.
I didn’t come across a single place that uses Apple’s absurd Ratings system in Apple Maps. In Switzerland that was infrequently, and unreliably used. If Apple is accumulating any kind of useful information from Ratings, I don’t know what it is, or what it will ever be used for. Maybe they can average the scores for entire cities, or just average out all those thumbs up and thumbs down for a rating of Earth.
We took the ferry to Macau and experienced some oddities that we didn’t encounter while we had been in Hong Kong. Both are special administrative regions that have (theoretically) their own government systems, but they are separate from one another as well. When we arrived in Macau and left Hong Kong data behind, I got an error message from Apple Maps that my offline map for “Los Angeles” is not available in this region. Weird!
Uh…
My offline map data for the Hong Kong and Macau region was available to me in Google Maps, but I neglected to set up offline maps in Apple Maps for the area. It was a good thing I had the Google ones, because despite having that roaming cellular reception, we couldn’t get either Maps app to work with live maps data, like to pull up reviews, or business hours. We did at least have addresses and our Google Maps Lists. Neither of us had ever experienced this before, but the second the ferry got back into range of Hong Kong cell towers everything was back to normal.
I’m convinced that Disney’s international apps are bad on purpose to make the US ones seem good in comparison. The Tokyo Disneyland app is terrible, even though Tokyo Disneyland isn’t run by Disney. The HK Disneyland app is bad even though Disney theoretically has ownership. The HK Disneyland app requires setting up a separate Hong Kong Disneyland account. It also uses Baidu for the interactive map of the park, so you either agree to let Baidu have access to your location data, or you don’t get the map. I elected not to get the map.
This is all immaterial though because nothing actually uses the app. Everything is done with QR codes. Your ticket, and any additional passes you purchase, are in PDFs. Every ticket taker and ride employee scans the various QR codes that you have. I couldn’t perceive any benefit to using the HK Disneyland app, or even bothering to download it. You might as well not have it.
We didn’t even need to know the ride wait times because nothing ever got busier than 35 minutes, and the park is so small you can easily do everything once in the morning before things even get that busy.
Jason had booked early entry for the park, so we did the ride that seemed like would get the most crowded later first, the Frozen ride. There is a nice little drop in the water boat thing, and they take a picture. Not a foreign concept to theme park attendees at this point. They have a video wall where they show the photos of people from the ride, and you can pay extra for a photo pass. We made several incorrect assumptions that lead me to purchase the pass. We thought that other rides took photos —none did, not even the roller coaster. The only other use for the photo pass was to line up to take photos with characters, or to line up to take photos with the castle, or the Christmas tree. We didn’t want to do any of that so I really overpaid for one photo.
The other thing to know is that you have to download the HK PhotoPass app, and create another account. None of this stuff is linked! Fortunately, I’m using Hide My Email for all of it, but it’s really sloppy.
Both Apple’s Translate app, and Google’s app with its camera translation worked just fine. In contrast to the Japan trip, the translations from Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese, both worked fine whenever either or both were present. We didn’t seem to have any peculiar idioms or expressions. This was, of course, probably aided by us not needing to rely on translation as much as we did Japan. It’s a former British colony so English is pretty pervasive in signage, and menus.
I still have a slight preference for Google’s app over Apple’s, but that’s a very unscientific preference. I do wish both saved their results to the camera roll though instead of needing to screenshot the translation I was seeing. Especially when you tap that “shutter” button.
Apple and Google also default to the text based Translation view when I open the app, even if I was last in the Camera view. If either remembered what I was doing the last time I used the app then I’d award 10 points for that.
iOS 18.2 wasn’t released until weeks after my trip, but I’m glad I didn’t install the beta expecting Visual Intelligence to do anything translation related, because it doesn’t.
I’m still taking my Sony a6400 with me, and my Sigma 18-50mm lens, along with Rokinnon 12mm. I only really used the Sigma on this trip. The big thing that’s different is that I had an iPhone 16 Pro this time. That changed my photography quite a bit from the prior trips that all used my iPhone 13 Pro.
Camera Control had no impact on this trip, or how I use my iPhone whatsoever, but the ability to edit photographic styles after I take a photo did make a big difference. The iPhone’s default settings are too aggressive at tone mapping and evening things out. I have found that I generally prefer Amber, with a lower tone setting, but that’s not always true, and I don’t want to fiddle around with it while I’m take a photo.
I mostly didn’t care about HDR output before the iPhone 16 Pro because everything was so even the highlights didn’t pop. You just had a generally bright image with more bright stuff. Bright with extra bright. Since I can get more contrast through the tone controls, and adjusting the various color settings, I can get more of a “pop” in HDR now with the iPhone 16 Pro than I felt like I was able to get previously.
Instagram also supports importing HEIC files, and if you mix and match HDR HEIC files with SDR files then you get odd-looking results.
This made me try to get HDR output from Lightroom again. Lightroom has supported HDR editing for a while, but the formats you can export to are not ones Instagram is friendly with. It can’t export to HEIC, but will export to tone mapped JPEG, JPEG-XL, and AVIF. I can get something exactly like I like it with HDR editing but then export it to (non-HEIC HDR Format Here) and Instagram will read it as if it was SDR. Which is better than what it used to do when it would render JPEG-XL and AVIF files as green and magenta streaks. Progress.
I’m not quite sure what to do about that because I do like to edit my photos in Lightroom’s iOS app. That’s not just out of habit, it really is actually a good editor. I even bought a USB-C to SD Card adapter to replace my Lightning one for this purpose.
This is a strange time to get on the Photomator bandwagon, what with Apple recently acquiring it and all. It’s future as anything like the current app seems uncertain. However, I had downloaded it for the Clean Up comparison test video I made, and found myself giving it another try.
I’m a big fan of siloing things for different purposes, and I liked having my heavy camera raw files somewhere else (CreativeCloud Storage) instead of in my iCloud storage, mixed in with all my other photos of receipts and grocery store shelves.
This time around I found that I liked the iOS app more than the Mac app, once I figured out that there was a toggle to get it to handle HDR. This meant I could edit iPhone 16 Pro HEIC files with more precision than the Photos app without having to send them to Lightroom, and then back to my Camera Roll in a totally different format. It also meant when I uploaded them places it would be treated like the rest of the iPhone HDR photos.
I feel pretty certain that Apple will keep a standalone pro-editor of some sort that’s outside of Photos. It can do so much more than what people need (like the subject masks). I definitely see a case for selectively taking features and putting them in the Photos editor instead of what’s there now, but it would be overkill to do all of this.
I am a huge fan of James Thomson’s PCalc, but there’s a new trick in the Calculator app I didn’t know about. It can handle currency conversion. I hadn’t heard anyone mention this in the Apple podcastoblogosphere, but my boyfriend told me about it because he saw it in an Instagram Reel. This was a huge help in Hong Kong because currency conversion is not the kind of thing I can do in my head easily, and I didn’t want to memorize the rate.
I didn’t actually use the Calculator app to calculate anything. It just sits in currency conversion mode now. That’s more use than the Calculator app’s seen in years from me.
I’m always pretty anxious about traveling, but I do like to experience being somewhere new. I am greatly appreciative of any technological advances that alleviate some of the stresses travel can bring me. I look forward to doing more travel in the future.
I wrote about my building frustrations with Mail for Six Colors. I knew my draft was way too long before I turned it in, and apologized to Jason Snell. Instead of having a bee in my bonnet about Mail, I had a whole bee hive. The post on Six Colors is a much more focused, and more relatable, blog post that went right into the problems with Categories. That’s why Jason’s a great editor, folks. I’ll include the less interesting parts here as a “bonus” for people that like to read about my frustrations.
Since iOS 18.0 I have been experiencing an issue where I will receive a Mail notification for a new email, but when I open the Mail app it hasn’t fetched the message. It’ll take 30 or so seconds for it to connect to the mail servers and fetch them. I have no idea why I have a notification, with part of the message text, for mail that I don’t have in hand.
This didn’t appear to be widespread, so I thought it might just be server hiccups. Then my boyfriend started complaining about the same issue with his Gmail in Mail, which isn’t the same service I was having a problem with, and our accounts are not shared.
While he was still on 18.1 last week he had a day where he wondered why he hadn’t gotten any emails, or notifications. He opened Mail and it downloaded 28 unread messages.
Both of us have our email accounts set to fetch every 15 minutes. I have no explanation for why it wouldn’t have downloaded messages from hours ago, nor an explanation for why it would have notifications that it would summarize but no mail downloaded for it.
I kept thinking that the updates that would roll out this fall would just iron it out, but they haven’t. In fact, my friend Ry complained that Mail in 18.2 was failing to fetch his Mail until he opened the app too, and that was working for him prior to 18.2.
Before complaining about my new woes in iOS 18.2, it’s worth remembering that because of the rush to release the promised Apple Intelligence features iOS 18.1 dropped with email preview summaries, notification summaries, and an Apple Intelligence Priority feature that would highlight important messages you should read first.
The notification summarization was typically pointless for me, but harmless. I left it on out of curiosity, and it never did anything too weird. Huge win.
However, the Priority feature spectacularly malfunctioned on its first run and picked The Most Obvious Spam Email That Ever Existed to highlight as a Priority.
What was this trained on, exactly?
It’s a bummer that this spam got through the spam filters to make it to my inbox, but the decision to put it in the limelight wasn’t helpful. Bestowing Priority status to spam is an egregious error because in less-completely-obvious circumstances it makes it appear as if Apple is vouching for the credibility of the email.
We can argue about semantics, because Mail isn’t saying the message is Verified, Certified, Official, or anything of the sort. Apple is merely saying it’s Priority, which implies importance only in the order you deal with your mail. However, I would definitely argue that declaring it Priority is an endorsement of the message and the sender, because the opposite of Priority is the stuff in my Junk folder, which the system does not notify me about in the slightest, and it is where this message should be. Elevating it in any way is wrong, and potentially harmful over leaving it as a peer with other unread mail.
MindNode founder and developer Markus Müller-Simhofer reported that he’s getting Priority fraudulent email in the macOS 15.2 version of Mail, which didn’t get the same alterations as iOS 18.2 so who can tell if this feature is even in sync across Apple’s platforms? As Craig Hockenberry notes, “Apple is adding legitimacy where there is none.”
I haven’t received another Priority scam email in iOS 18.1, or 18.2. Mostly it highlighted routine emails that were of no importance, but harmless. Its performance as both unimpressive, and unreliable means I’ll always hesitate over anything this system declares as a Priority.
If only there had been some kind of beta program that this thing could go through until it was ready for release. Not simply until an arbitrary, calendar-based goal for “good enough” was hit. More on that in a second…
I am watching films that were made for TCL, the largest TV manufacturer on Earth as part of a pilot program designed to normalize AI movies and TV shows for an audience that it plans to monetize explicitly with targeted advertising and whose internal data suggests that the people who watch its free television streaming network are too lazy to change the channel. I know this is the plan because TCL’s executives just told the audience that this is the plan.
This is, of course, related to what I wrote about yesterday. TCL is not using Sora and Veo to achieve their goals, but a mix of generative AI tools piped through other generative AI tools by people to achieve a final output.
You can check out the credits on the YouTube videos to see how many people worked on it, and their roles. Times are tough, and I know we all have to find work where we can, even if it’s this stuff.
As Jason notes, the level and degree of involvement of human beings is not guaranteed, and this must be the bare minimum TCL execs felt they could get away with. The shorts largely contain mostly static or movement that I would describe as sliding/warping. They take advantage of output that is generic, mushed together from other imagery. Like when that disturbing girl in “Sun Day” looks at her swole father slowly drift towards her and only his mouth warps to give the semblance of a lip-synced performance.
I will not mince words in my thoughts about the final pieces produced: They’re vile, lifeless things. They illustrate exactly the shortcomings of this approach, and the bankrupt motivations behind it.
Not to get too personal, but based solely on Chris Regina’s words in this piece, I’m not a big fan of Chris Regina.
A few weeks after the screening, I called Chris Regina, TCL’s chief content officer for North America to talk more about TCL’s plan. I told him specifically that I felt a lot of the continuity errors were distracting, and I wondered how TCL is navigating the AI backlash in Hollywood and among the public more broadly.
“There is definitely a hyper focused critical eye that goes to AI for a variety of different reasons where some people are just averse to it because they don’t want to embrace the technology and they don’t like potentially where it’s going or how it might impact the [movie] business,” he said. “But there are just as many continuity errors in major live action film productions as there are in AI, and it’s probably easier to fix in AI than live action … whether you’re making AI or doing live action, you still have to have enough eyeballs on it to catch the errors and to think through it and make those corrections. Whether it’s an AI mistake or a human mistake, the continuity issues become laughter for social media.”
Chris, and his fellow TCL employees, are aligned in what I can only describe as career motivated delusion. They believe people want the TCL TV to be on, producing motion and sound of indeterminate quality or meaning. They picked some numbers that show that. There’s no commitment to make anything good, as much as there is to make the minimum viable product they can use with advertising. Many advertisers, of course, would like to pay for placement in things that have personal appeal to a specific audience, so I don’t understand why TCL execs are so excited that their TVs are used so indiscriminately.
As for the obviously terrible quality, Jason brings up the ol’ “this is the worst it will ever be” chestnut, and Chris agrees, and elaborates. What’s left unsaid with TCL’s approach is that this is the best the TCL Channel will ever be, because it’s optimizing for this quality level. They’re setting this as the bar. If Chris is to be believed, and that TCL will always employ roughly this same number of people to make something, then that would indicate to me that they’ll simply be able to make more videos of this quality, not the same number of videos at a higher quality.
We’ll have to check back in on this prediction of mine, but nothing TCL is putting out there tells me that their ambition exceeds the minimum effort.
Yesterday marked the “public release” of Sora, OpenAI’s video generator. Of course they had to almost immediately shutdown signups so was it released? We’ll need a team of philosophers to weigh in on that.
The release was also five days after Google made their video generator, Veo, “available” by launching a private preview. I thought it was already privately previewed for Donald Glover who they said was making something with it at Google I/O.
Hilariously, The Verge published this waaaaay back last week:
With Google’s video model now in the wild, OpenAI is notably behind its competitors and running out of time to make good on its promise to release Sora by the end of 2024. We’re already seeing AI-generated content appearing in ads like Coca-Cola’s recent holiday campaign, and companies have an incentive not to wait around for Sora – according to Google, 86 percent of organizations already using generative AI are seeing an increase in revenue.
Oh no! Everyone who can’t be in the Veo preview, or missed the ability to sign up for the few minutes Sora was available is missing out on the random factoid of an 86% increase in revenue! That’s a big percentage of things that are definitely related!
I’m concerned with the breathless way that people discuss these products. That the application of these technologies themselves will have a positive monetary impact, and that there is a race where people are already behind in doing that. This kind of talk pushes the people involved with the money-side of things (like producers) to consider these unreliable tools as replacements for shooting video, or doing effects work. Like we’ve seen in that awful Toys”R”Us videomade of lies with Sora and visual effects, and the recent Coca-Cola ad.
These things make stock footage from other stock footage and whatever other material they scraped, licensed, or were fed. The models didn’t go to film school, they don’t have conflicted feelings about Steven Spielberg’s later career, they can’t go shoot their first movie with a 27mm lens, they just mush stock footage together to make new stock footage.
The ad spots (with VFX intervention) still look like sizzle reels for a pitch, and not a finished product. Even that Coca-Cola one, which was based on a previous ad, but now with random moments inserted.
There’s nothing wrong with stock footage, but you have to be pretty incompetent to assume that Sora and Veo are currently replacements for material shot for a particular purpose any more than stock footage is. You use stock footage as supplementary assets, not the whole enchilada.
Morally and creatively bankrupt people might excuse these stock footage montages by saying that the public doesn’t mind them, and can’t tell what’s real and what’s not. That critics are looking for faults (Disclosure: I’m absolutely looking for faults, but I don’t have to look very hard). They might correctly surmise that the tools will improve, like all “AI” tools have improved, and will require less artist intervention. However, that improvement is in temporal stability, or weights on physics, not in creativity or originality.
The final result of this endeavor is not merely flooding the market with very similar, and indistinct, ads of slow-motion smiles.
Marques Brownlee has a YouTube video where he posts about his thoughts, and notes the areas where he feels it performs well, and doesn’t (like the leg swapping thing still happening, and object permanence). He is somehow wowed by the garbled footage of two news anchors discussing a “TRAVEL ADDIAVISTOfRIEY” for “CARA NEWS NEWS” but … I don’t know why? From his Threads thread:
This video has a bunch of garbled text, the telltale signs of AI generated videos. But the cutaways, the moving text ticker, the news-style shots… those were all things SORA decided to do on its own, and those news anchors looked very… real
Sora didn’t decide to do them, the footage Sora sourced news anchors from likely had those elements. It’s pattern matching and those things are part of the pattern. You’re unlikely to ever reverse engineer exactly what material went into making the Sora news anchor video, but ask yourself why it’s better than the stock footage of news anchors from iStock or Shutterstock? You can even get those with assets to make your own specific pieces if you needed it for storytelling. Like if you needed specific text or the client wanted to change the color of the graphics. Is Sora better because it’s technology?
Remember that this kind of news stock footage is the stuff that goes in an out-of-focus TV in the background of a shot, or tiled in some TV wall with the audio muted. We’ve all seen that sort of thing used on TV and film mixed in with news stuff that was shot specifically for the story being told. Something fun, like the intro to a dystopia, or what have you.
These kinds of stock elements cost $60, and you can have them in any resolution you like without having to wait for anything other than a download. AI isn’t really saving money, and all those graphics need to be replaced so it’s not like it made something uniquely suited to your needs.
Potentially, in the future there will be audio synced to synthetic voices, it will have non-garbled text that can exactly match the prompt, and then it wouldn’t be used as stock footage. That future, purpose-built performance will be in place of news anchors that would have been filmed specifically for a project, and motion graphics put together by an artist. It also assumes a whole other level of this technology that is not being shown at all, and has many other ramifications I’ll discuss later.
Right now, when tech reporters and finance journalists write about the impact of video generators, it’s as if we’re in a mad rush to get to that state of labor-less money-generation. That the end goal is replacing actors with smiling simulacra. A grinning kid assembled from the finest training data from other grinning kids that they would have ordinarily had to pay.
The reality is that this is a race to make more expensive stock footage that might malfunction and need to be repaired under time and budgetary constraints dictated by what someone reckoned the technology could do. Then the money people will need to find money in their project budgeted for Sora to have very expensive last minute work under a time crunch.
Oh the director wanted to change the color of something which made the model associate it with a different colored object that it was trained on, and they don’t like the new shape of the stuff in the output even though it’s the right color?
There’s no file to open and edit. All the work has to be done on top of the Sora output as if it was photography, or as a total replacement. Maybe they can extract and change the color from the prior version.
How could anyone have foreseen difficulty in making a blackbox product spit out final imagery to exact specifications? No one could have known! They watched that MKBHD video where he added a golf course to the cliffs, and that worked in that instance.
From my prior Sora post:
OpenAI and Google are both selling these video generators as technological breakthroughs in filmmaking. The reality is that it’s artifacting stock footage.
Bad clients, and bad producers will tell their editors to put Sora or Veo output in to the initial edit, then they’ll turn to a VFX house and say that the shots are “90% there” and they “just need someone to take it across the finish line.”
How do I know this? Because that happens with stock footage and weird composites and retimes that editors make in Avid when clients want to have something in the edit so they can figure it out. Even if the client agrees to replace it, they can get married to how the stock footage or temp looked, or how it was timed (remember that playback speed is a factor).
Ill-conceived ideas about what this technology is currently capable of based on news coverage, or the financier messing around with Sora for a few minutes, is not only a threat to the people that work on film, TV, and commercials, but a threat to those very bozos that want to push hard into these tools as total replacements.
I would implore the bozos to look no further than how the majority of the movie-making industry (and self-proclaimed “film nerd” dipshits with social media accounts) have trained the public to devalue “CGI” (ironically, computer generated imagery is generated by people).
Herculean effort has gone into marketing materials about how a movie really built (1/4) of the set, and even the silly things that they do like turn bluescreen and greenscreen gray in those marketing materials to try and obfuscate anything artificial (great job with that, by the way).
From that ridiculous Guardian piece last year, “‘It’s exactly as they’d have done it in the 1910s’: how Barbenheimer is leading the anti-CGI backlash”. The one that opens with a bluescreen photo:
For the past 12 months, Hollywood has been facing a serious case of CGI fatigue, with critics tearing into would-be blockbusters for their over-reliance on it. In the New Yorker, Richard Brody wrote that heavy effects work in Ant-Man 3 “instead of endowing the inanimate with life, subtract it”, while Ellen E Jones wrote in the Guardianthat Little Mermaid was “rendered lifeless” by CGI. The Netflix rom-com You People, starring Jonah Hill, made headlines when it was revealed that the final kiss in the film was done with CGI and the actor Christian Bale didn’t mince words when he said working exclusively in front of green screens on Thor: Love & Thunder was “the definition of monotony”.
As if in response, 2023 has delivered a buffet of practical-effects-driven films to the multiplex. Greta Gerwig used techniques dating back to silent film and soundstage musicals to bring her fantastical, hot-pink vision of Barbieland to life, Christopher Nolan reconstructed Oppenheimer’s Trinity test using miniatures, and Christopher McQuarrie hoisted a train carriage 80ft into the air in order to film Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’sstomach-churning final stunt. Indie films have been getting in on the fun, too: Wes Anderson turned a piece of Spanish farmland into a real town, complete with plumbing and electricity, for Asteroid City; the “penis monster” in Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid was made entirely with prosthetics; and the buzzy horror film Talk to Me has been praised for its gory and “disturbingly real” prosthetics.
Never mind that there’s VFX used in every one of those movies (you can check the credits if you don’t believe me) the backlash in public perception is real. The ability to leverage that “discerning” moviegoer to your own project’s benefit has been deemed valuable.
If there’s ever a perfectly stable, perfectly editable, perfectly lip-synced synthetic performance —instead of mushy stock footage— why would the public embrace such a thing when they won’t embrace CGI?
Riddle me this, bozos: What advantage could synthetic performances have in any form of movie marketing, or in winning any awards which are often about knowledge of the actor outside of their performance, or appearance, in the specific project they worked on?
Andy Serkis, who is definitely a real person, has been after an Oscar for years in his “motion capture” roles and no one can stomach the thought of it.
Humans want to see humans perform. They want them to do well. They want to be attracted, or repulsed by them. All our stars start with small roles, and if those small roles are synthetic, how can we have stars? Do the bozos want to market synthetic stars? Good luck. The same goes for TV, and there’s never been more crossover between TV and film than there’s been in the last few years.
I don’t think the public is willing to go along with a sea of ads that are all like the Toys”R”Us and Coca-Cola commercials —that are brand marketing montages with a music bed. However, if this gets super-duper stable, and editable then the place I see it most likely being used is endorsements from dead celebrities.
Not living celebrities, mind you, but people who no longer have control over their own image. Here’s a local Fox station talking about the Audrey Hepburn Dove chocolate commercial 10 years ago:
They really capture the full spectrum of responses in that local news coverage, don’t they?
What if it was really cheap to make those ads with Sora or Veo, and didn’t require shooting anything? It was just the generative fees and the licensing rights to the cash-strapped heirs. All the booing and hissing from the people that think it’s creepy won’t really matter. It’ll be “worth a shot” because the barrier to entry will be so low, and if people hate it at least they’ll circulate it widely on social media. What’s the worst that can happen? Free publicity?
People would probably either ignore influencers, or place them at the bottom of the stack under brand marketing as the most replaceable form of video, but that’s not true at all. If anything influencers are the hardest thing to replace since their whole business proposition is their “authentic selves” as a brand. They live a life beyond any particular brand endorsement which they either perform for their audience, or maybe they’re a comedian with a schtick and they pick brands that align with that.
There’s a more direct retail side of things with accounts that chop up videos from other influencers, rip some product photography, and make scammy sites to sell drop-shipped items. These are run by people that are not influencers but take advantage of the theft of their image. They have no issue with acquiring the likeness, or being generally duplicitous, with today’s technology. They don’t even need Sora or Veo — but think about how they could more precisely tailor their duplicity.
Safiya Nygaard has a good video on this that I’m embedding below because I really think you should watch and it, and not dismiss it out of hand. Influencers are the best at critiquing this kind of commerce.
Platforms are disincentivized to sniff out scams because the scammers pay them, and the people who have been wronged don’t. It seems like the perfect place to apply complex pattern matching software instead of turning a blind eye to collect money from sponsored placements.
Will Sora and Veo make a big difference here? The ability to scam people with copied work hinges on what was copied seeming somewhat authentic, because they are stealing that. Sora and Veo can’t generate authenticity, but they could be used to obfuscate where video clips are sourced from, because they are designed to obfuscate their sources. The over-all quality of the video spots from fake influencers is certainly of very little consequence if they can make sales to a certain level with the rubbish they already use.
OpenAI has a bunch of checkboxes where you agree you have rights to use what they’re uploading, but unless they’re trying to run a scam on intellectual property from a large company then there’s no way to catch it. Finger printing the output would also require the social networks care about those finger prints. It really is mostly the honor system, and would benefit a fly-by-night company if they decided they wanted to take advantage of these tools.
It remains to be seen if the level of work required to to mush together stuff from Sora or Veo is less effort than the current way that they exploit the system.
There’s also the possibility that these “legit” tech companies will fully integrate the falsified shopping experience into their system under some kind of safe harbor excuse.
One of the things to come out of Google I/O 2024 was Product Studio. They show off online merchants generating product photography, videos, 3D assets, and linking to relevant social accounts. From Google’s blog post in May:
Product Studio will also give you the ability to generate videos from just one photo. So, with just the click of a button, you can animate components of still product images to create short videos or playful product GIFs for social media. Product Studio is now available in Australia, Canada, U.K. and U.S. in Merchant Center Next and the Google & YouTube app on Shopify and coming to India and Japan in the next few weeks.
Yay, (awkward laugh) the future we’ve all dreamed of.
Eliminate the labor from entertainment. Eliminate the labor from commerce. Eliminate the labor from lifestyle as entertainment and commerce. Let’s try to slim down the pipeline to just be people with a twinkle in their eye, and a scheme in their hearts.
Those are the three things that I see bozos using Sora and Veo for to generate entire videos when the technology gets stable enough. Stock footage montages, dead celebrities, and masquerading as a real retail company.
There are many other applications for AI in video, and just like I wrote about before, it’s far more attractive when it’s applied as a step in a process that can be adjusted instead of as a final result. Where I really think the AI bubble is in that misconception that executives can sit in offices and just dash off a prompt to make an ad then go grab some lunch. It appalls me that people want a way to optimize our whole world for “idea guys”.
We’ll just need to continue our breathless coverage of how behind everyone is in getting to these unpalatable futures geared solely towards bozos.
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