Hopefully the band attachment remains the same turns out to be true. I don’t relish having to ditch my existing band collection.

The band system is really one my favourite features of the Apple Watch line. Very quick to change but still perfectly physically secure - which I doubt any magnetic system will ever match.

The window tiling and new continuity features like iPhone Mirroring and drag and drop look useful.

Some of the AI stuff seems to be have limited geographic availability.

Shareholders?

Some of it looks maybe useful. Other parts look gimmicky. The image generation stuff could be a powderkeg moment with creatives after the hydraulic press ad.

Ofc, Apple being Apple, I wouldn’t put it past them to artificially “break” things or arbitrarily introduce limits between RCS and iMessage

I’m guessing RCS support will be as barebones as possible while still technically functioning. All of the fancy bells and whistles will remain exclusive to iMessage.

Some iMessage features might not be possible to implement with RCS I suppose. Maybe RCS messages will get a different colour. All Apple said in the WWDC keynote was RCS would be supported, they didn’t elaborate any further.

The content is being uploaded to Adobe’s servers, they likely have the right and may even be legally required to moderate it to some degree.

This yet another reminder that the cloud is just somebody else’s computer. Somebody who might want to impose some degree of control with what is done with their computer, for whatever reason.

A lot of open source graphics software is made by programmers who also need to edit images sometimes. Both the lack of UI polish and featureset choices make more sense when looked at from that angle.

However, a lot of the criticism that gets thrown at these programs is also a bit unfounded. I regularly see people dunking on GIMP for not being a pixel-perfect clone of Photoshop for free. There is more than one way to design an image editor, and inability of some to learn another is really a user issue. GIMP could be better, but it still can and should be GIMP.

I’d say it’s more that parents (companies) should be more responsible about what they tell their kids (customers).

Because right now the companies have a new toy (AI) that they keep telling their customers can make thunder from clapping. But in reality the claps sometimes make thunder but are also likely to make farts. Occasionally some incredibly noxious ones too.

The toy might one day make earth-rumbling thunder reliably, but right now it can’t get close and saying otherwise is what’s irresponsible.

Generally you want to the reference material used to improve that first version to be correct though. Otherwise it’s just swapping one problem for another.

I wouldn’t use a textbook that was 52% incorrect, the same should apply to a chatbot.

Seems a hard sell to go subscription on such a niche platform. I wish anyone luck that could challenge the Apple/Android duopoly though.

As an aside, can we get back into desktop cubes again? With all the upheaval in Windows land it’s the sort of eye candy that can win over new Linux users.

Any distro should be fairly stable and supported on an older Thinkpad.

I’m currently using Debian stable on my X220 and it’s rock solid.

I think it’s becoming fair to label a lot of commercial AI “scams” at this point, considering the huge gulf between the hype and the end results.

Open source projects are different due to their lack of commercialisation.

2018 according to Wikipedia, so 6 years ago!

There was a similar thing done as an art installation between London and New York called the Telectroscope in 2008. Apparently it was the site of a few marriage proposals.

Look how far we’ve come…

Platforms like Facebook have an incredible hold on some people. I remember a few years ago when the “Momo” hoax happened, an older coworker arrived at the office and started warning us about the danger of “Momo” they’d seen on Facebook. I’d already heard about the hoax (and was aware of the original creepyasta origins), and brought up a few news articles explaining it, including an official statement from the police. Everyone seemed satisfied by the truth, except for the Facebook addict. They just gave me a blank stare, and a few hours later I heard them telling another group of colleagues to beware of “Momo” getting to their children.

I have family members and longstanding family friends who have succumbed to this. Interestingly almost all of them were decrying the internet as something that couldn’t be trusted before the age of social media.

Well it’s a step forward for efficiency at least. Now I can see the LLM generated crap straight it in the search page, rather than having to click through to an automated blogspam page.

If they are really going all-in on this, it almost feels like Google admitting defeat on search, having now been drown by the (partially self inflicted) deluges of SEO and now “AI”.

macOS is really not optimised for touch though. macOS on a 13 inch iPad with a keyboard and trackpad attached would probably be usable, albeit with limited IO. But trying to use macOS with just fingers isn’t going to be much fun, especially for more complicated software.

Personally I’d rather see Apple further develop iPadOS as a touch first productivity OS, and leave macOS for the Mac.

Maybe if Apple opens up the App Store rules (willingly or not) more eventually virtualisation will be possible on an iPad, allowing people to DIY a macOS-on-iPad setup if they really wanted to.

iPadOS feels like a real bottleneck for the iPad Pro line now. All that horsepower but limited room to gallop.

I’m not an advocate of putting macOS on iPads, but iPadOS really needs to expand more, especially for things like file management and multitasking. Multiple audio channels when?

I’ve seen some people speculating based on the new Magic Keyboard having an Esc key that something dev friendly is coming so who knows.

There’s satisfaction to be found when labour results in a tangible and lasting result.

Some of the people I know who quit the IT industry did so because they felt all of the effort they put in never seemed to achieve anything. Too many jobs at startups who exist only to be bought and shut down by bigger fish for some IP etc.

For some work is not just about wages or challenges, it’s about building something useful and meaningful, whether figuratively or literally.

I’ve still got a 3310 in a drawer, it still turns on, and if I had a SIM card for it would be fully working as the UK still operates a 2G network (for now at least).

There’s even removable fascia plates still for sale on eBay.