Unauthoritative Pronouncements

For a while I’ve been trying to automate some of the annoying little things that I have to do to post to my blog. It’s not exactly a hardship, but if I make certain kinds of typos in the front matter of my posts it can result in the post not appearing (a safety feature!) or appearing with the wrong date and time and littering everyone’s RSS feeds.

You might recall this post from March where I was whining about it.

I got that whole date and time thing working in Shortcuts, eventually, but it only worked as a one-way thing where it would spit out the front matter anew every time. It would delete anything I wanted to keep, like the Title: while updating things that might have gotten stale while I was writing, like Date:.

On my Mac I could automate this however I want to, but I ideally want automation that works on my iPhone so I can post while I’m globe-trotting, or on the living room couch far, far away from my desk in the same room.

This meant it was ideal for automation in Drafts.

Drafts is an indispensable app from Greg Pierce with the tagline “Where Text Starts”. That’s very true, but it’s mostly where text stays for me. I do sometimes write in it instead of iA Writer or ByWord because there’s virtually no friction. Friction means something takes time, and then I don’t end up doing it, or getting it done anywhere close to the time it would have been relevant.

The Drafts actions that you can create are really sophisticated, but also intimidating because it’s in JavaScript.

I hate JavaScript –but not as much as I hate Shortcuts!

The nice thing is that unlike Shortcuts, I can search the internet for actual solutions to problems, or ask an LLM, because it’s all just string operations. (Nothing is ever just a string operation.) I can pull apart and reassemble whatever I need to without worrying about a bunch of invisible connections breaking, or drop it into BBEdit or whatever editor I want to, because it’s all just text.

Here’s a gist of what the current action’s JavaScript does. It’s not special, or even useful for anyone else, but I feel like someone’s going to ask to see it.

Six Colors Cross Posts

One point of friction was creating the link posts whenever I have a new post on Six Colors. That’s all set up now where if I have a Six Colors URL in the clipboard it will grab the title from the page, the publish date and time, the first few paragraphs (I can always delete if I made a really long run on post), and then appends a link at the end to continue reading.

That might not sound like a big deal to you, but that kind of formatting and detail leaves a lot of room for error. Now a computer does it, as God intended.

Generic Links

The other nice thing is that I have it set up to accept any other URL on my clipboard and pull out the title for that, and add the link field to make this a link blog post in the blog engine.

I want the date and time for those to be relative to when I post them, because I will be writing additional text, so that’s different from the Six Colors links where it’s only excerpts of what I had written.

Missing Headline Features

The other thing I want to figure out is something to check title casing of what I’m posting so it’s consistent. I’m not great about it and sometimes I will sanity check it. I know that many sites just don’t do titlecase, like Six Colors, but you could say I’ve put too much capital into it in this case.

I don’t want to use some weird JavaScript library for that. I’d rather have something that can deal with natural language. Writing Tools on my iPhone in iOS 18 can’t deal with titlecase, it just capitalizes everything including articles. That might be different with the foundation models in iOS 26, but that wouldn’t help me with my older Mac that can’t run the models.

Something to keep checking on, and in the meantime I get to unreliably do it myself.

Image Problems

I would like to be able to figure out a good workflow for adding images. I want to have a little staging area I can put the images and still have them correctly render. I can do that with iA Writer, but images don’t live in Drafts as elements. That would also really involve changing the Python script on my server that watches the folders to do something with the images in my Dropbox to put them in the correct spot on the server, and to change the paths in my published post to point to those. The way things are going I’ll get to it in 2030.

Sycophantic Scripting Spirals

As for how I got this Drafts action to do what I wanted I have to say that the effort is evenly split between me, Google Gemini, and a smattering of Stack Exchange posts. It definitely isn’t a situation where I put a prompt into Gemini and it spat out exactly what I wanted.

This isn’t vibe coding. If I vibe coded this it wouldn’t do any of the stuff I wanted it to do. This thing really requires babysitting and specific instructions. Even then, it will hallucinate fixes to buggy code which can just be the same exact code with different variable names, or it’ll add another validation variable that doesn’t do anything.

In particular, there was the logic for the Date: YAML where it wouldn’t handle situations with incomplete or invalid field data. Like if I had deleted everything in that field and wanted it to spit out something fresh. It would push that Date: down into the body text and also append a fresh Date: with the date info after it in the YAML.

Pointing this out to Gemini caused it to go into a spiral. It would provide a sycophantic response that I was right, and that the Date: slipping into the body was a sign it wasn’t working, then it would print out a block of code, which it would add a big comment header to. I would tell it that it didn’t work, and it would do it again, and again. I won’t copy and paste the whole exchange, but here are the headers for each “fix” that didn’t fix anything in chronological order:

• CHECK EXISTING YAML (FIXED TO EXCLUDE ALL YAML LINES FROM BODY)
• CHECK EXISTING YAML (FINAL FIX)
• CHECK EXISTING YAML (FINAL, ROBUST VERSION)

This is when it told me, after providing “FINAL, ROBUST VERSION” that this “is becoming too brittle.” Invalidating what it had just output. It then continued:

• CHECK EXISTING YAML (STRICTEST FINAL FIX)

I pointed out that this, and all the code under it, had gotten very convoluted, and reiterated where I thought the problem was (the function that validates the date format passes null which is used for other logic checks).

• CHECK EXISTING YAML (FINAL ROBUST FIX)

It then spat out one last attempt at a fix, but didn’t redo the section header, alas, so I just have to imagine that it also called that the final fix. Unfortunately, it didn’t fix anything, so I just made some changes myself until it did what I wanted.

While I wouldn’t have been able to create this automation completely on my own (the REGEX alone, oy vey) I don’t think there’s a being of pure logic, or otherworldly magic, driving this system, and it is instead a very eager (too eager) autocomplete.

Joey Longcuts

Shortcuts defenders would likely point out that nothing in my Drafts action is outside of the realm of possibility in Shortcuts. However, I don’t have a Shortcuts expert on staff here, and I’m not going to read extensively about Shortcuts so I can know how to apply the mostly undocumented functions of Shortcuts actions when there’s simply way more flexibility with text.

If I make a change in Shortcuts sometimes it breaks things that are working. It has almost no debugging assistance whatsoever. There’s no way to temporarily mute or bypass a section of code, which is an absolute travesty when compared to just commenting out a variable to check something.

So that’s that. Insert that XKCD comic about automation saving time here.

One of the things that I think about from time to time is Apple’s collection of apps. Some are the crown jewels, like Apple’s pro apps, and others help an everyday consumer to tackle their iLife. All are pretty starved for attention and resources, outside of infrequent updates aligned with showing off the native power of Apple Silicon, Apple Intelligence, or demos of platform integration that never quite get all the way there.

Three things really brought this up to the surface for me recently: The neglect of Clips and iMovie, the radio silence regarding Pixelmator/Photomator, and Final Cut Pro being trotted out for demos but not shipping appropriate updates.

Continue reading on Six Colors ►

General Motors CEO Mary Barra and Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson were on The Verge’s Decoder podcast with Nilay Patel. Nilay has talked to every automotive CEO that’s been on Decoder about CarPlay, and it’s no surprise he discussed it with Mary and Sterling.

If you want to skip to the start of the transcript that’s about CarPlay it begins with a kind of rambling question about Google Assistant here.

The big decision there, and I know you know this question is coming, is that you bet against putting smartphone projection in your EVs: there’s no Apple CarPlay or Android Autos in the EVs, but the gas cars still have it. How did you make that decision?

MB: It’s really a question of timing as we look at that, because — and I want to make sure that we get Sterling’s input on this as well — as we looked at it and as we made that decision, we were getting a lot of feedback from customers that it was very clunky moving back. It wasn’t seamless, and frankly, in some cases, it could be distracting to move back and forth if you were doing something that you could do on a phone projection type of system versus if you needed to do something in the vehicle.

We also know that’s only going to increase when you look at some of the things we’re going to talk about that can make your life better and assist you as we move forward. We’re at the very, very early stages of services we can have on a vehicle to improve the overall customer experience and make the journey smoother.

We looked at that and we decided that we needed to have a great system in the vehicle that allowed people to have one system, and we’re going to continue to make that better and add new features.

Allow me to summarize this: Mary really wants to sell services, or have recurring revenue from partnerships and deals with companies in services to earn money over the lifespan of the vehicle. She cites how disorienting it is to jump in and out of CarPlay, but that’s hardly a hurdle that justifies the development work they’re putting into not supporting CarPlay and Android Auto projection systems.

SA: What we’re talking about is the inevitable performance degradation when jumping between S-curves. The first of those S-curves was, for some time, that you and others got attached to phone projection applications largely because the in-vehicle HMI was pretty bad. Your opportunity for doing some of the things was better when you were using that. You’re driving a Vistiq, I understand; you’ve got Dolby surround audio, you’ve got giant screens, you’ve got giant displays. The analog I would use here is we’re on this new S-curve, where there is inevitably a jump that has to happen for you to get over to it. That’s uncomfortable for many.

But frankly, it’s a very Jobsian approach to things. The removal of the disk drive, nobody liked that, everybody on the forums and Facebook was complaining about it, but to that he said, “Look, guys, flash storage really is the future. Get on board, you’ll see that.” That’s kind of what we’re saying here, in fact that’s exactly what we’re saying.

Unbelievable. Sterling continues but I want to stop here for a moment and point out that it is probably one of the worst comparisons anyone’s ever made to something Steve Jobs has done to justify some silly thing that they are currently doing. Also the analogy of the disk drives doesn’t work, because that was the iMac, which did not move to flash storage, it moved to USB where people who needed drives bought them, and eventually included disc burners.

This isn’t about time marching on and replacing projection systems with a superior alternative, but I’ll continue that point in a bit. Let’s go back to Sterling:

Say you’re talking to me about CarPlay. You’ve certainly got an iPhone, you’ve probably got a MacBook, and you have the opportunity to use phone projection on your MacBook, a phone mirroring application. How many of you are accessing online services like email, social media, and otherwise through the phone projection app in your laptop? Almost none of them do. Why? Because you’ve got a much larger screen on your laptop, you’ve got a much more convenient HMI via the keyboard, you’ve got better speakers.

Now, take that same analog to the car and ask the same question. Is it in a car that has not only just laptop speakers, not only a laptop screen, but something better that can move you, and that can integrate with charging infrastructure, with Super Cruise availability on your maps, all of these other things? You are in a much more immersive environment that can do so many more things; why would you use the equivalent of a phone mirroring application on a laptop in your car? So we said, “We’re taking out the disk drive, guys; get on board with flash storage, that’s where the future is.”

Again, it wasn’t flash storage, but that’s not important. The only salient point he raises is that there are features of the car that do not currently integrate with CarPlay, or CarPlay Ultra. It can’t do anything with Super Cruise. Apple, as far as I know, has no real plans for integrating Maps on a phone with any kind of assisted driving, or autonomous technology. I hope that they are working on something for that.

I’m unconvinced that assisted driving and autonomous driving are used more often then the other features of a navigation stack. Like having a device that has your calendar appointment locations, your contacts’ addresses, your recent location searches, etc. Something that is secure on your person and portable with you.

Nilay does push back on this projection analogy and points out that people can switch between computer and phone easily, but they can’t do that while they are driving.

He also mentions that a concern his readers have is being able to use their collection of very niche media apps while they are driving, apps that might not ever be supported by GM’s system. Then he mentions his own, not-so-niche app, Apple Music.

For example, yes, my car has Dolby Atmos in it, the number one provider of Atmos tracks in this industry is Apple Music, and Apple Music will not have an app on your phone, because I’m confident that Apple wants you to have CarPlay, and that is a business dealing that the consumer demand cannot affect. That’s kind of the shape of the puzzle, right?

MB: I would say we have a good relationship with Apple. I mean at the most senior level with Apple, with Google, with all of the tech companies. We’re bringing Apple Wallet. We’ll be announcing that shortly, that we’ll have that and have the ability to do some of the vehicle functions through that. So we’re having continual conversations with Apple, and I would say we’re talking about the opportunity and looking for win-wins. We also have a very good relationship with Google and we don’t enable Android Auto either. So I would say you’re talking about a moment in time versus where the industry is heading from Dolby Atmos and the relationship that we have with Apple. I wouldn’t make some of the broad-based assumptions you’re making.

What iPhone owners loves their iPhone so much they’ll use it to unlock their car but hates to use their iPhone for navigation and audio?

I do think Mary Barra would love to cut a deal with Apple to have Apple Music as an app on their own platform. Apple currently offers Apple Music apps for Tesla and Rivian and neither has ever supported CarPlay, because it is far more important to Apple to get the recurring services revenue than it is for them to use Apple Music as some kind of wedge issue for car shoppers.

Do you think I’m going to get the Apple Music app in my Cadillac?

SA: We don’t have anything to share on that right now, but your first comment really struck at the HMI, the ease of use, and [whether] you have to log into each of these different services and applications in your car. Because if you do, you get some breakage. Some people just will never do that, it’s a pain. We’re looking at that as well. What can we do about federated IDs? What can we do to eliminate that friction of you engaging with your car? I’m not sure I quite follow the whole “it’s illegal to use your phone when you’re driving and not when you’re on your laptop.” I think that cuts against your argument a little bit because–

Emphasis mine. What can we do about federated IDs, Sterling? If the problem is friction then the solution is allowing people to connect to the device that has all of their platform credentials securely and portably saved, which is their phone.

Let me return to the point I was making earlier and that the most secure and portable form of your credentials, media, and information is the device that has all of those things. Building a separate login infrastructure that goes through GM isn’t a simple on-device proposition of just connecting your phone.

I wish Nilay had mentioned this, but I understand that in the moment it can be hard, and it’s probably something he wished he pushed back on after the call rather than having to dwell on projection app experience analogies with Sterling.

After that exchange, Nilay asks Mary again about combustion vehicles being immune to all these shenanigans and she, unfortunately, says that we should all expect major model refreshes for internal combustion vehicles to also ditch CarPlay going forward.

Obviously, I disagree with Mary and Sterling. I don’t think that this improves their products. Much of the interview is spent on rising costs, tariffs, subsidies, consumer demand for inexpensive vehicles, etc. Their solution of owning the platform for services more closely aligns with the direction that TV manufacturers have gone in to try and make money off of buyers after the hardware is sold, rather than just from the sale of the hardware itself. Look no further than their partner, Google, their partner for Android Automotive and for their voice assistant and AI efforts with Gemini.

Naturally, while I wish CarPlay was better, and I am pretty sure CarPlay Ultra has been a colossal waste of everyone’s time and effort, I would want any car I purchase or rent to have CarPlay support.

I have no plan to purchase a GM vehicle, but I do rent cars. GM makes up a sizable portion of rental car fleets. At some point in the future those cars will no longer support CarPlay. I’m not going to sign up for a GM federated ID that stores my login credentials in their cloud. I’m not going to individually sign into apps in the car like Google Maps with my Google ID that I use for way more than just navigation. There’s no chain of trust with me and this random car from GM. No convenience that is achieved in exchange for increased exposure risk for storing my sensitive data in a car I don’t own.

Do enough consumers care that this alters individual sales or rental car fleet composition? I’d say probably not, because the TV market is an excellent example of consumer behavior gravitating towards what’s inexpensive at the expense of personal privacy.

The release of the Sora slop-feed monstrosity has really done some shock and awe on the general public and on the press. People are wowed by the fidelity and the stability of the product, especially when compared to what previous iterations of Sora, and models like it, have been able to generate. This fidelity has also lead more people to ask questions than they were initially when it was mushy/sliding/morphing junk.

It’s still a stock footage generator, but it’s trained on a significantly larger corpus of video. Video OpenAI does not actually own any rights to. This increase in volume and diversity means there are fewer situations where the model creates something that has an obvious malfunction in those 10 second windows.

There is no logical reasoning or thinking component. No creativity, experience, or crew that went to go shoot something special just for you. This is reconstituted from bits and pieces. The seams may be unrecognizable to most viewers, but the content of the video is always a reworking of something else based on probability.

No better place is that illustrated than the disastrous deal with Runway and Legendary. They’re limited by the model, and their inputs, thus producing nothing but problems.

OpenAI is pulling this off because of a three-prong strategy:

1. Tell the rights-holders that stealing everything is inevitable, so it’s a good thing OpenAI did it first because they have tools for you to ask them politely to have rights and likenesses excluded from output not excluded from training.
2. Generate demand with the public through apps like Sora where people can make brand-safe videos of themselves with corporate characters. You can see it in the name cameo (which I am sure Cameo loves). No marketing team can ever do that without building and troubleshooting their own model.
3. Invite rights-holders to see how they could use the tool to quickly produce “content” or marketing materials without having to pay for employees. Just pay OpenAI where the value is in the model that has stolen the rights.

It’s brilliant in a super-villain kind of way. Like Mr. Burns blotting out the sun.

Sam Altman, on his blog:

First, we will give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls.

We are hearing from a lot of rightsholders who are very excited for this new kind of “interactive fan fiction” and think this new kind of engagement will accrue a lot of value to them, but want the ability to specify how their characters can be used (including not at all). We assume different people will try very different approaches and will figure out what works for them. But we want to apply the same standard towards everyone, and let rightsholders decide how to proceed (our aim of course is to make it so compelling that many people want to). There may be some edge cases of generations that get through that shouldn’t, and getting our stack to work well will take some iteration.

Second, we are going to have to somehow make money for video generation. People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences. We are going to try sharing some of this revenue with rightsholders who want their characters generated by users. The exact model will take some trial and error to figure out, but we plan to start very soon. Our hope is that the new kind of engagement is even more valuable than the revenue share, but of course we we [sic] want both to be valuable.

Hayden Field, writing for The Verge, about a Q&A event with Sam Altman:

He positioned the launch’s speed bumps as learning opportunities. “Not for much longer will we have the only good video model out there, and there’s going to be a ton of videos with none of our safeguards, and that’s fine, that’s the way the world works,” Altman said, adding, “We can use this window to get society to really understand, ‘Hey, the playing field changed, we can generate almost indistinguishable video in some cases now, and you’ve got to be ready for that.’“

Altman said he feels that people don’t pay attention to OpenAI’s technology when people at the company talk about it, only when they release it. “We’ve got to have … this sort of technological and societal co-evolution,” Altman said. “I believe that works, and I actually don’t know anything else that works. There are clearly going to be challenges for society contending with this quality, and what will get much better, with the video generation. But the only way that we know of to help mitigate it is to get the world to experience it and figure out how that’s going to go.”

Inevitability is a terrible justification for anything. It’s a fantastic way to drive a wedge between different stakeholders though! “Oh well if it’s going to happen no matter what then I have to be on top…”

We took all of your control away from you, and we will let you have some of it back, if you agree not to fight us.

Even if rights-holders were to capitulate completely and sell out their intellectual property for access to their intellectual property with fewer employees, then there’s still the question about what value the general public assigns to this slop and the users of it?

In my previous posts on this subject I’ve pointed out that the general public doesn’t especially care for anything that seems artificial. That’s very true of movies where even blockbuster film franchises will talk about trying to get something in-camera, or building all the sets and costumes, even if it’s not entirely true, because it’s just better marketing.

You’re standing next to a person in a Pikachu costume, you pose for a photo, and you have that photo of you with “Pikachu” but now you can have a video of you with cartoon-perfect Pikachu that you don’t need to even record. Instead of a memory of something janky that can only ever be so real, you have a high-fidelity non-memory of an unreality.

I assume Altman is banking on just overwhelming the public consciousness through brute force with these slop videos to the point where the public’s sense of what’s human-made is so unreliable that there can’t be any kind of pushback.

This is a great video —and it has Todd Vaziri! Todd is a smart, talented guy who is very aware of common misconceptions that most people have about what VFX is. People think they see “CGI” when there’s some fantastical element on screen, but they really don’t comprehend the extent to which modern filmmaking —and television— augment photography.

As someone who is intimately familiar with audience misconceptions, it’s heartening to see Vanity Fair take an interest in providing Todd with a venue to impart this information.

From Todd’s short blog post on the video:

I want to thank everyone at Vanity Fair for making me feel so welcome and comfortable, especially director Adam Lance Garcia, editor Matthew Colby and everyone at ILM PR for this opportunity.

In the visual effects world, we frequently gripe about the prevalence of misinformation in the public discourse about “CGI” and the role of visual effects in Hollywood, but rarely do any of us tell our own stories about innovation, creativity, problem solving and teamwork to the general public. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to tell some of our stories about what we do.

Studios have marketing departments that do their very best to minimize discussion about VFX because they know that audiences react poorly to the notion that something isn’t real. They go so far as to despill bluescreen and greenscreen behind-the-scenes photography (look for gray backdrops in BTS stills and photos, it wasn’t gray). I don’t know why there’s a public fascination with the talented deception of “is it cake?” but an aversion to discussing set extensions.

It’s also important to remind moviegoers that there are people —just like Todd— who’s experience and ingenuity solve problems. When people think that it’s all just computers that do this then they think that the creativity is synthetic. It’s not adding and removing things based on probability, but on multi-layered storytelling.

My two favorite parts of the video were things that I didn’t know before, and would have never discovered, if it wasn’t for Todd telling us, and that’s the reconstruction of Sophia Lillis’s performance for a camera move, and the addition of rope in Skeleton Crew.

I’ve had to do similar things with retiming performances for storytelling purposes, and like Todd’s work, no one would ever know about it. Low-tech solutions like the rope are also things that are impossible to convey to the audience even though there’s a huge endorphin rush when you execute it.

Todd also touches on a common lament of film “fans” where they point at Jurassic Park and Transformers and say that things used to look more realistic than they do now. Todd gently bursts that thought bubble by talking about how creating a plan, and sticking to it, have a huge impact.

VFX artists don’t get a special merit badge for doing things that are very difficult, but don’t end up looking great. That happens a lot. We especially don’t get a merit badge for all the invisible work we do on projects great, and small. Kudos to Todd, and Vanity Fair.

As I have written about previously, I have been trying to read more often to avoid filling my time entirely with social media, or entirely with the deluge of awful news that makes my anxiety spike. I suppose if those weren’t things that concerned you then you could just read for “fun” or something.

Scott McNulty does an excellent monthly round-up of books he’s read, and I like to refer to it for some guidance on books I might like to pick up. This is sort of like that.

• On Vicious Worlds (The Kindom Trilogy #2) by Bethany Jacobs ★★★★★ (Read on Jan 02, 2025) — This is an exceptionally weird space opera. Not weird because of sci-fi stuff, but weird because of the interpersonal relationships. I read These Burning Stars last November, and the third book comes out this December. I’m definitely onboard for it, but I’m not sure it’s everyone’s cup of tea.
• The Mercy of Gods (The Captive’s War #1) by James S.A. Corey ★★★★☆ (Read on Feb 05, 2025) — I was on the fence about this one because everyone in The Incomparable book club said it was kind of a downer, but it’s an interesting downer. I don’t care about any of the characters except The Swarm. The alienness of everything makes it interesting. Obviously the title “(Captive’s War #1)” gives away that there won’t be a satisfying end to the book, and I can confirm that after having read it.
• Architects of Memory (The Memory War #1) by Karen Osborne ★★★★☆ (Read on March 1, 2025) — The Company situation borders on parody -if not for the reality we already live in that also borders on parody. The Vai are interesting, but implausible. Fortunately, most of the story is about these greedy, needy humans. It’s worth mentioned that I tried to pick up the second book in the series, but I did not like point of view character and stopped.
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin ★★★★★ (Read on Feb 22, 2025) — I got around to reading a classic, and what can I say? It’s a classic. We get a real sense of an alien world that is distinctly human. Sure, the way gender is used in language is not really how we use gender in language today, but you can map it to what we would say these days and it is very modern.
• Moonbound by Robin Sloan ★★★★★ (Read on March 5, 2025) — I couldn’t put this book down. I’m glad I also got to go on a podcast to talk about how much I like it, because it’s my favorite book that I’ve read so far this year, just as Service Model was my favorite book I read last year. They are very different books. Moonbound is much more of a fairy tale with a far-future framework and Service Model is satire. I don’t love how Moonbound concludes, but the journey is certainly worth taking. It’s like Thundarr the Barbarian meets Ursula K. Le Guin.
• The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. Le Guin ★★★★☆ (Read on April 16, 2025) — This is a very provocative book, but several sections were difficult for me to read because I dislike the protagonist (notably the party when the stuff happened that I won’t get into). I do appreciate that “utopia” is “ambiguous” but that also means the end of the book just kind sputters out after many dramatic situations have occurred. There is nothing to say about the outcome of the decisions, just that they have occurred.
• Not Till We Are Lost (Bobiverse #5) by Dennis Taylor ★★★☆☆ (Read on Jul 09, 2025) — These are very light, easy-to-read books where Dennis Taylor just spins out some weird idea and puts a lot of cringeworthy nerd humor around it. This was not a particularly strong entry.
• The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton ★★★★☆ (Read on Jul 19, 2025) — This is a solid book with a lot of interesting things going on. Our main character doesn’t seem very… bright, but he does have his moments. I like the politics and world/universe building that we witness here.
• Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky ★★★☆☆ (Read on Aug 18, 2025) — Unfortunately, this isn’t my favorite. The alien planet is innovative and intriguing, but the protagonist’s internal monologue is dull. So much of the book is taken up with it. The “Darkness” sections and the “Interludes” deflate some of the tension, because they turn it into a comedy of errors. Misunderstood communications in a farce, but farce isn’t the tone. This doesn’t possess the satirical humor of Service Model, despite how cartoonish The Concern is. It would make it more alien to not have access to Darkness and Interlude sections. Though, that would sadly leave us with more of the main character. This just isn’t my favorite Tchaikovsky novel.
• Human Resources by Adrian Tchaikovsky ★★★★★ (Read Jul 20, 2025) — This is thin, and light. Nothing will shock or surprise, but it was a good palette cleanser when it became available on Libby right after finishing Shroud.
• In the Lives of Puppets by T.J. Klune ★★★★☆ (Read on Jul 27, 2025) — There are some things you just have to go with because they are poetic - not because they really make sense. If you’re going to get hung up on wooden, mechanical hearts, or the function of blood and memory, you’re not going to enjoy the witty banter between the robots, or the touching and tender moments between Vic and those around him. The overall plot does fall apart about 80% of the way into the book when a plan is revealed during a dramatic moment and that reveal really comes out of nowhere. It all came from “off screen” events we should have been witness to.
• Recursion by Blake Crouch ★★★★★ (Read on Aug 6, 2025) — Brilliantly plotted with rich, sorrowful, hopeful characters. The less you know about the book before you read it the better. It’s a twisty thriller with great characters, and that’s all you need to know.
• Murder by Memory (Dorothy Gentleman #1) by Olivia Waite ★★★★★ (Read on Aug 11, 2025) — This was a fun, little detective story on a spaceship.
• Finder (Finder Chronicles #1) by Suzanne Palmer ★★★★★ (Read on Aug 24, 2025) — I loved this fun sort of detective/heist story with the implausibly named Fergus Ferguson. The world/universe building is rich, and also funny. Having just recently read all of them in the series, I would say that the first book remains my favorite.
• Driving the Deep (Finder Chronicles #2) by Suzanne Palmer ★★★★★ (Read on Aug 20, 2025) — If you need all the characters to carry forward from the previous book to the next, this is not the book series for you. Fergus Ferguson is back for another detective/heist story in a very isolated setting.
• The Scavenger Door (Finder Chronicles #3) by Suzanne Palmer ★★★★☆ (Read on Sep 6, 2025) — The previous book was a very isolated, narrow environment for Fergus to operate in, and this book is expansive with a series of ingenious mini-heists. Once all the heists are over the story is less interesting, despite the scale of the problem facing Fergus.
• Ghostdrift (Finder Chronicles #4) by Suzanne Palmer ★★★★☆ (Read on Sep 9, 2025) — More trouble for the trouble magnet. This book has a slow start, and space pirates that talk like the stereotypical seafaring variety are not the most interesting to me, but there’s a shift in locale that makes everything pretty interesting. Particularly the last third of this book. The final resolution doesn’t feel particularly final. I hope there’s more.

I’m currently catching up on some of Dan Moren’s Galactic Cold War short stories that I had bought and downloaded, but somehow never read. Shame on me. Then I got sidetracked when 1984 by George Orwell became available in Libby and now I get to wind down from the stress of the day by reading about that wacky Winston.

Stephen Robles has a good run through of all the new features in tvOS 26 on YouTube. I don’t have the energy, or enthusiasm to detail these features, so please refer to his fine work.

I will never, ever, ever have as much to say about the Apple TV Sing app as Stephen Robles. That’s a promise. It’s a specific piece of nerdy corporate synergy (singergy?) I’m not even sure people will remember the app exists in a few years.

However, astute Apple TV owners will notice this screen when they start up their newly-updated tvOS 26 boxes:

These features are not about improving the TV and movie viewing experience. The “Liquid Glass” updates to design were initially awful, but have been pulled back to the point where you wouldn’t really even register anything beyond some drawn-on highlight edges to things. Strangely, this “did they change anything?” is actually a good thing compared to the first stab Apple took.

The “New” Apple TV App Design doesn’t do anything to fix any of the problems with the “old” TV app design. They made the thumbnails into “cinematic” movie posters, which have lower information density and clarity when compared to the thumbnails that had separate text.

The Profiles don’t do anything useful because how can they? No apps tie into them, and as Dan Moren pointed out they don’t even do anything for siloing off parental controls.

For me, Apple TV is first and foremost a platform for viewing TV and movies. We just passed the 10th anniversary of tvOS, which I will probably write about in another post if I feel motivated enough. A lot of stuff has changed with tvOS, but not the mechanics of how you watch TV.

This is particularly irritating when how we view TV isn’t even the same as it was 10 years ago. There are a lot of FAST channels, and other linear and live TV streams, but tvOS has no awareness of them beyond sporting events.

The strengths of the Apple TV, and tvOS, are that there isn’t generic advertising in the interface. Apple does a ton of irritating self promotion, but it’s very different from what Amazon and Roku do.

It’s still the box I recomend for anyone that wants to stream TV (which is almost everyone) but it’s hard to sell people on the virtues of the Apple TV, especially when it seems like such a listless product.

None of the changes that Apple actually shipped with tvOS 26 (with the exception of the posters) worsened tvOS over the previous version, but they were also a lot of work expended on things that are not the primary focus of the device.

Of course major changes to tvOS seem to align with new models shipping, and if the Apple rumor sites are to be believed a new Apple TV model is right around the corner (or at least they post about it being right around the corner every month so they’ll inevitably get it right). Perhaps the “good” TV app will ship with new hardware, or we’ll get a more integrated live TV experience then?

I’m not going to hold my breath. I’m too busy singing.

I had a thought while I was watching the latest iPhone launch event—other than, “This is what I’m doing with my free time?”—and it’s that iPhones are basically cars. It finally did it. The real Project Titan was the iPhones Apple made along the way.

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I appreciate what Adobe is doing with Project Indigo. It’s a free iOS camera app, but it is heavily disclaimed as being experimental with unique features you can’t find in other apps. But Adobe also says they’re targeting “casual” photographers, which seems misguided.

A few people I know have even been evangelizing Project Indigo because they love it so much, especially when they compare it to photos from Apple’s Camera app. My enthusiasm for this product doesn’t match their own. It’s neat but it’s not great.

It isn’t all-purpose (it can only take still photos), and it can’t do panoramas or portrait mode. It doesn’t have the compressed storage of the editable HEIC files Apple introduced with the iPhone 16 Pro, or the new photographic styles pipeline that lets a user control tone mapping and certain processing, both before the photo is taken and after the fact.

There are still a few noteworthy tricks it pulls off that are worth a look.

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Apple Maps navigation might be on par with Google’s these days, but Apple’s location data is not. Google offers broad coverage for many points of interest, while Apple’s data has mostly relied on knitting together bits from competing business partners. This attempts to mimic Google’s comprehensive coverage without Apple having to do the foundational work itself.

Apple recently announced it would integrate data from Michelin Guide (prestigious/exacting), The Infatuation (trendy/young), and Golf Digest (retirees/executives/awful world leaders). While initial partnerships seemed shrewd for bootstrapping Maps data, Apple now appears content to make the entire platform out of boot straps.

This approach layers on top of existing partners like Yelp, OpenTable, TripAdvisor, and Foursquare, not to mention numerous international partners. Let’s focus on restaurants, the core of the Michelin Guide’s focus.

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