The ‘Twitter Files’ Authors Only Pretend to Care About Power

February 3, 2025 ⌥

Do you remember the “Twitter Files”?

I completely understand if you do not. Announced with great fanfare by Elon Musk after his eager-then-reluctant takeover of the company, writers like Lee Fang, Michael Shellenberger, Rupa Subramanya, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss were permitted access to internal records of historic moderation decisions. Each published long Twitter threads dripping in gravitas about their discoveries.

But after stripping away the breathless commentary and just looking at the documents as presented, Twitter’s actions did not look very evil after all. Clumsy at times, certainly, but not censorial — just normal discussions about moderation. Contrary to Taibbi’s assertions, the “institutional meddling” was research, not suppression.

Now, Musk works for the government’s DOGE temporary organization and has spent the past two weeks — just two weeks — creating chaos with vast powers and questionable legality. But that is just one of his many very real jobs. Another one is his ownership of X where he also has an executive role. Today, he decided to accuse another user of committing a crime, and used his power to suspend their account.

What was their “crime”? They quoted a Wired story naming six very young people who apparently have key roles at DOGE despite their lack of experience. The full tweet read:¹

Here’s a list of techies on the ground helping Musk gaining and using access to the US Treasury payment system.

Akash Bobba

Edward Coristine

Luke Farritor

Gautier Cole Killian

Gavin Kliger

Ethan Shaotran

I wonder if the fired FBI agents may want dox them and maybe pay them a visit.

In the many screenshots I have seen of this tweet, few seem to include the last line as it is cut off by the way X displays it. Clicking “Show more” would have displayed it. It is possible to interpret this as violative of X’s Abuse and Harassment rules, which “prohibit[s] behavior that encourages others to harass or target specific individuals or groups of people with abuse”, including “behavior that urges offline action”.

X, as Twitter before it, enforces these policies haphazardly. The same policy also “prohibit[s] content that denies that mass murder or other mass casualty events took place”, but searching “Sandy Hook” or “Building 7” turns up loads of tweets which would presumably also run afoul. Turns out moderation of a large platform is hard and the people responsible sometimes make mistakes.

But the ugly suggestion made in that user’s post might not rise to the level of a material threat — a “crime”, as it were — and, so, might still be legal speech. Musk’s X also suspended a user who just posted the names of public servants. And Musk is currently a government employee in some capacity. The “Twitter Files” crew, ostensibly concerned about government overreach at social media platforms, should be furious about this dual role and heavy-handed censorship.

It was at this point in drafting this article that Mike Masnick of Techdirt published his impressions much faster than I could turn it around. I have been bamboozled by my day job. Anyway:

Let’s be crystal clear about what just happened: A powerful government official who happens to own a major social media platform (among many other businesses) just declared that naming government employees is criminal (it’s not) and then used his private platform to suppress that information. These aren’t classified operatives — they’re public servants who, theoretically, work for the American people and the Constitution, not Musk’s personal agenda.

This doesn’t just “seem like” a First Amendment issue — it’s a textbook example of what the First Amendment was designed to prevent.

So far, however, we have seen from the vast majority of them no exhausting threads, no demands for public hearings — in fact, barely anything. To his extremely limited credit, Taibbi did acknowledge it is “messed up”, going on to write:

That new-car free speech smell is just about gone now.

“Now”?

Taibbi is the only one of those authors who has written so much as a tweet about Musk’s actions. Everyone else — Fang, Shellenberger, Subramanya, and Weiss — has moved on to unsubstantive commentary about newer and shinier topics.

This is not mere hypocrisy. What Musk is doing is a far more explicit blurring of the lines between government power and platform speech permissions. This could be an interesting topic that a writer on the free speech beat might want to explore. But for a lot of them, it would align them too similarly to mainstream reporting, and their models do not permit that.

It is one of the problems with being a shallow contrarian. Because these writers must position themselves as alternatives to mainstream news coverage — “focus[ing] on stories that are ignored or misconstrued in the service of an ideological narrative”, “for people who dare to think for themselves”. How original. They suggest they cannot cover the same news — or, at least, not from a similar perspective — as in the mainstream. This is not actually true, of course: each of them frequently publishes hot takes about high-profile stories along their particular ideological bent, which often coincide with standard centre-right to right-wing thought. They are not unbiased. Yet this widely covered story has either escaped their attention, or they have mostly decided it is not worth mentioning.

I am not saying this is a conspiracy among these writers, or that they are lackeys for Musk or Trump. What I am saying is that their supposed principles are apparently only worth expressing when they are able to paint them as speaking truth to power, and their concept of power is warped beyond recognition. It goes like this: some misinformation researchers partially funded by government are “power”, but using the richest man in the world as a source is not. It also goes like this: when that same man works for the government in a quasi-official capacity and also owns a major social media platform, it is not worth considering those implications because Rolling Stone already has an article.

They can prove me wrong by dedicating just as much effort to exposing the blurrier-than-ever lines between a social media platform and the U.S. government. Instead, it is busy reposting glowing profiles of now-DOGE staff. They are not interested in standing for specific principles when knee-jerk contrarianism is so much more thrilling.

There are going to be a lot of x.com links in this post, as it is rather unavoidable. ↥︎

February 3, 2025 ⌥

Apple’s 2024 Report Card ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell:

It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment — the “vibe in the room” — regarding the past year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire decade.)

This is the tenth year Snell has run this; the first was for 2015. Over that time — and you can see this reflected in graphs in the 2024 edition — the reputation of Macs and Apple’s services has soared, Home products and software quality continue to be pretty meh, and developer relations and reception of the company’s societal impact has cratered. The vibe in the room is not great.

I continue to be impressed by how much work Snell puts into this every year. There are some changes to the survey and its reporting this time. Notably, the full commentary from all panellists who wanted to be quoted has been published separately. Maybe you think this is a lot of words, but consider how much sixty-ish commentators would write if you gave them an empty text box to rant in, and I think you will agree we all showed admirable restraint.

February 2, 2025 ⌥

The United States Is a Hostile Neighbour ⇥ disconnect.blog

Yesterday, I published a little thing about how Quartz slipped and fell into a toxic stew of A.I. slop. If you have not yet read it, I must say I quite like it. What began as a little link I was going to throw to Riley MacLeod’s article became an exploration of an A.I.-generated article with at least two completely fictional sources, as far as I can tell.

Anyway, that article is still up — unchanged — and it still claims “new tariffs are slated to take effect in early March”.

John Paul Tasker, CBC News:

Trump launched a trade war against Canada earlier Saturday by imposing a 25 per cent tariff on virtually all goods from this country — an unprecedented strike against a long-standing ally that has the potential to throw the economy into a tailspin.

[…]

These potentially devastating tariffs are slated to take effect on Tuesday and remain in place until Trump is satisfied Canada is doing enough to stop the flow of fentanyl into the U.S.

Paul Krugman:

I think you have to see “fentanyl” in this context as the equivalent of “weapons of mass destruction” in the runup to the invasion of Iraq. It’s not the real reason; Canada isn’t even a major source of fentanyl. It’s just a plausible-sounding reason for a president to do what he wanted to do for other reasons — George W. Bush wanted a splendid little war, Donald Trump just wants to impose tariffs and assert dominance.

The president posted today that “Canada should become our Cherished 51st State”, effectively saying the tariffs are part of a hostile takeover strategy. And, sure, maybe he does not mean it; maybe if he gets a series of special edition Trump-branded Timbits, he will call the whole thing off. But we are now on the receiving end of economic warfare from the world’s most powerful nation, and an explicit threat of far worse.

Paris Marx:

The stance of the Trump administration only exacerbates the growing recognition that allowing US companies to dominate the internet economy across much of the world was a terrible mistake. The harms that have come of that model — for workers, users, and the wider society — have already shone a spotlight on the problems of importing poorly regulated internet platforms based on American norms and practices. But now more than ever it’s clear that cannot continue, and traditional allies of the United States need to come together not just to take on its tech industry, but to protect themselves from a declining superpower that’s decided it can do whatever it wants — even to those it recently called friends.

I maintain my disagreement with the U.S. requirement that TikTok divest or be banned, and will continue to do so until there is compelling evidence to reconsider. There is currently nothing of the sort. Meanwhile, U.S. tech companies and executives are aligning themselves with this adversarial administration, some more than others. I am not saying we ought to require Canadian versions of Meta’s apps or X. But can users trust their recommendations systems?

It is folly for me, an idiot, to offer geopolitical analysis, so I will anyway. There are a handful of world powers worth worrying about: Russia, and its territorial expansion; China, and its manufacturing dominance combined with human rights abuses. The U.S. has long been on that list for anyone living in Southeast Asia, and Central and South America, formerly, and then the Middle East, and Africa now, too. But those of us in developed nations or who have been allies have had it easy; we have only needed to worry about its potential for demonstrating its power. Now, it has. Yet we are all reading about it using devices running U.S. software. I do not like thinking in these terms — the internet was supposed to be a grand unifier — but here we are.

Quartz’s A.I. Slop

February 1, 2025 ⌥

The downfall of Quartz is really something to behold. It was launched in 2012 as a digital-only offshoot of the Atlantic specifically intended for business and economic news. It compared itself to esteemed publications like the Economist and Financial Times, and had a clever-for-early-2010s URL.¹ It had an iPad-first layout. Six years later, it and “its own bot studio” were sold to Uzabase for a decent sum. But the good times did not last, and Quartz was eventually sold to G/O Media.

Riley MacLeod, Aftermath:

As of publishing, the “Quartz Intelligence Newsroom” has written 22 articles today, running the gamut from earnings reports to Reddit communities banning Twitter posts to the Sackler settlement to, delightfully, a couple articles about how much AI sucks. Quartz has been running AI-generated articles for months, but prior to yesterday, they appear to have been limited to summaries of earnings reports rather than news articles. Boilerplate at the bottom of these articles notes that “This is the first phase of an experimental new version of reporting. While we strive for accuracy and timeliness, due to the experimental nature of this technology we cannot guarantee that we’ll always be successful in that regard.”

MacLeod published this story last week, and I thought it would be a good time to check in on how it is going. So I opened the latest article from the “Quartz Intelligence Newsroom”, “Expected new tariffs will mean rising costs for everyday items”. It was published earlier today, and says at the top it “incorporates reporting from Yahoo, NBC Chicago and The Wall Street Journal on MSN.com”. The “Yahoo” story is actually a syndicated video from NBC’s Today Show, so that is not a great start as far as crediting sources goes.

Let us tediously dissect this article, beginning with the first paragraph:

As new tariffs are slated to take effect in early March, consumers in the U.S. can expect price increases on a variety of everyday items. These tariffs, imposed in a series of trade policy shifts, are anticipated to affect numerous sectors of the economy. The direct cost of these tariffs is likely to be passed on to consumers, resulting in higher prices for goods ranging from electronics to household items.

The very first sentence of this article appears to be wrong. The tariffs in question are supposed to be announced today, as stated in that Today Show clip, and none of the cited articles say anything about March. While a Reuters “exclusive” yesterday specified a March 1 enforcement date, the White House denied that report, with the president saying oil and gas tariffs would begin “around the 18 of February”.

To be fair to the robot writing the Quartz article, the president does not know what he is talking about. You could also see how a similar mistake could be made by a human being who read the Reuters story or has sources saying something similar. But the Quartz article does not cite Reuters — it, in fact, contains no links aside from those in the disclaimer quoted above — nor does it claim to have any basis for saying March.

The next paragraph is where things take a sloppier turn; see if you can spot it:

Data from recent analyses indicate that electronics, such as smartphones and laptops, will be among the most impacted by the new tariffs. Importers of these goods face increased costs, which they are poised to transfer to consumers. A report by the U.K.-based research firm Tech Analytics suggests that consumers might see price hikes of up to 15% on popular smartphone models and up to 10% on laptops. These increases are expected to influence consumer purchasing decisions, possibly leading to a decrease in sales volume.

If you are wondering why an article about U.S. tariffs published by a U.S. website is citing a U.K. source, you got the same weird vibe as I did. So I looked it up. And, as best I can tell, there is no U.K. research organization called “Tech Analytics” — none at all. There used to be and, because it was only dissolved in October, it is possible Tech Analytics could be a report from around then based on the president’s campaign statements. But I cannot find any record of Tech Analytics publishing anything whatsoever, or being cited in any news stories. This report does not exist.

I also could not find any source for the figures in this paragraph. Last month, the U.S. Consumer Technology Association published a report (PDF) exploring the effects of these tariffs on U.S. consumer goods. Analysis by Trade Partnership Worldwide indicated the proposed tariffs would raise the price of smartphones by 26–37%, and laptops by 46–68%. These figures assumed a rate of 70–100% on goods from China because that is what the president said he would do. He more recently said 10% tariffs should be expected, and that could mean smartphone prices really do increase by the amount in the Quartz article. However, there is again no (real) source or citation for those numbers.

As far as I can tell, Quartz, a business and financial news website, published a made-up source and some numbers in an article about a high-profile story. If a real person reviewed this story before publication, their work is not evident. Why should a reader trust anything from Quartz ever again?

Let us continue a couple of paragraphs later:

The automotive sector is also preparing for the impact of increased tariffs. Car manufacturers and parts suppliers are bracing for higher production costs as tariffs on imported steel and aluminum take hold. According to a February report from the Automobile Manufacturers Association of the U.S., vehicle prices might go up by an average of $1,500. This increase stems from the higher costs of materials that are critical to vehicle manufacturing and assembly.

Does the phrase “according to a February report” sound weird to you on the first of February? It does to me, too. Would it surprise you if I told you the “Automobile Manufacturers Association of the U.S.” does not exist? There was a U.S. trade group by the name of “Automobile Manufacturers Association” until 1999, according to Stan Luger in “Corporate Power, American Democracy, and the Automobile Industry”.² There are also several current industry groups, none of which are named anything similar. This organization and its report do not exist. If they do, please tell me, but I found nothing relevant.

What about the figure itself, though — “vehicle prices might go up by an average of $1,500”? Again, I cannot find any supporting evidence. None of the sources cited in this article contain this number. A November Bloomberg story cites a Wolfe Research note in reporting new cars will be about $3,000 more expensive, not $1,500, at the same proposed rate as the White House is expected to announce today.

Again, I have to ask why anyone should trust Quartz with their financial news. I know A.I. makes mistakes and, as MacLeod quotes them saying, Quartz does too: “[w]hile we strive for accuracy and timeliness, due to the experimental nature of this technology we cannot guarantee that we’ll always be successful in that regard”.

This is the first article I checked, and I gave up after the fourth paragraph and two entirely fictional sources of information. Maybe the rest of the Quartz Intelligence Newsroom’s output is spotless and I got unlucky.

But — what a downfall for Quartz. Once positioning itself as the Economist for the 2010s, it is now publishing stuff that is made up by a machine and, apparently, is passed unchecked to the web for other A.I. scrapers to aggregate. G/O Media says it publishes “editorial content and conduct[s its] day-to-day business activities with the UTMOST INTEGRITY”. I disagree. I think we will struggle to understand for a long time how far and how fast standards have fallen. This is trash.

Do not look at your address bar right now. ↥︎
Yes, it is the citation on Wikipedia, but I looked it up for myself and confirmed it with a copy of the book. Pages 155–156. ↥︎

January 31, 2025 ⌥

Rest of World’s 2024 Photography Contest ⇥ restofworld.org

Munira Mutaher, Rest of World:

The 227 entries we received from contestants — including from Mongolia, the Philippines, Argentina, and Jordan — not only celebrate these stories but reaffirm our commitment at Rest of World to challenge stereotypes about how people use technology in their daily lives.

A whirlwind of emotions here in just nine selected images. Tremendous documentary work.

January 30, 2025 ⌥

Ground Control to Myspace Tom ⇥ linksiwouldgchatyou.substack.com

Caitlin Dewey:

“For the longest time I’ve been satisfied and chill,” he [Tom Anderson] later wrote on IG. “Just at peace with how I am and how the world is.”

In comments like these, I see the enduring appeal of Myspace Tom. Today’s tech founders live largely to extract and hoard: more profits, more influence, more data. I think of the image of Musk, Zuckerberg and others at Trump’s recent inauguration. I think, too, of the billionaire investor Marc Andreessen’s claim that mega-successful entrepreneurs are also entitled to public adulation. Nothing is ever quite enough for these people; the trend line must always go up. That Myspace Tom defied that mandate and fucked off to Hawaii feels unusually decent, if not straight-up heroic.

It was a mistake for us to indulge the business leaders craving celebrity despite also having lots of money and lots of power. Perhaps you do not believe they ought to be considered enemies — though there is a strong case to be made for that — but they are assuredly not our friends. Their ruthless behaviour is not aspirational.

January 29, 2025 ⌥

Google Maps Users in U.S. Will See Renamed Gulf of Mexico and Denali ⇥ cbsnews.com

Emily Mae Czachor, CBS News:

Google Maps users in the United States can expect to see the body of water known for centuries as the Gulf of Mexico renamed the Gulf of America, aligning with the terms of President Trump’s controversial executive order. Google also said Denali, a mountain in southern Alaska and North America’s tallest peak, is going to be called Mount McKinley on its maps for those same users, reflecting the presidential mandate.

It does not matter how idiotic this renaming is, it makes sense for Google — and Apple — to follow official local naming conventions. Disputed territories are common and there are exceptions to this rule, as I wrote in a terrible 2019 article that still has some good points, and I do not think U.S. tech companies should be arbiters of these political disputes. It is the renaming itself which ought to be ridiculed.

However, it is pretty rich to think of Google as particularly concerned about the accuracy of names on its maps. It routinely invents names of neighbourhoods.

See Also: The U.S. National Park Service had a good article about Denali and why it was renamed. It was online as of yesterday, but has just been removed.

January 29, 2025 ⌥

The Surprising Truth About ‘Brain Rot’ ⇥ theguardian.com

Amy Fleming, the Guardian:

The “study” that spearheaded this cascade of concern in 2005, and is still quoted in the press today, claimed that using email lowered IQ more than cannabis. But Shane O’Mara, a professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin, smelled a rat when he couldn’t find the original paper. It turns out there never was one – it was just a press release. That finding was the result of one day’s consultancy that a psychologist did for Hewlett Packard. He would later state that the exaggerated presentation of this work became the bane of his life.

Alongside a survey on email usage, the psychologist conducted a one-day lab experiment in which eight subjects were shown to have reduced problem-solving abilities when email alerts appeared on their screens and their phones were ringing. He later wrote: “This is a temporary distraction effect – not a permanent loss of IQ. The equivalences with smoking pot and losing sleep were made by others, against my counsel.”

A little detail I appreciate in online news is noticing where the links are pointed. Most often, publishers love to cite their own past work to establish their credibility, keep people within the same website, and for search optimization reasons. But what happens when they want to point out a previous error? One option is to also keep that link in-house — a bold move but one that, I think, also reinforces readers’ trust. A sassier option is to link to a competitor, as the Guardian did here linking to the BBC. But the Guardian also uncritically covered this 2005 survey, albeit referring to it not as a “study” but as a series of “clinical trials”. It carries no correction notice or update.

Fleming’s article is quite good, however. It is a necessary correction to several widespread myths about the effects of technology on our brains. I am reminded of Clive Thompson’s “Smarter Than You Think”, which I intend to revisit. That is not to say new technologies do not have any negative effects, but let us not repeat the same old moral panics.

January 28, 2025 ⌥

Uber Files Complaint About Calgary Trip Location Data Requirement ⇥ calgaryherald.com

Scott Strasser, Calgary Herald:

The complaint [by Uber] was issued shortly before council voted 11–3 to approve a suite of changes to the livery and transport bylaw on Tuesday. Among the changes is a requirement for Uber and other ride-booking companies to provide the city with exact geolocation data for each trip down to five decimal places, including trips that start or end outside of Calgary’s boundaries.

[…]

Cory Porter, deputy chief of vehicle for hire with public vehicle standards, noted that Calgary’s taxi and rides-booking regulations already require the longitude and latitude of a driver’s licensed vehicle. He said the city has been collecting vehicle-for-hire data since 2015 and that taxi companies already provide geolocation data accuracy within six to eight decimal points, whereas TNCs [Transportation Network Companies like Uber] provide accuracy within three to five decimal points.

Porter says this data is used to allow drivers to more accurately find a ride hailer in crowded environments and, naturally, it can also be shared with law enforcement.

I had no idea taxicabs record precise location data every two minutes and automatically submit it to the city daily — and have apparently done so since 2014 (PDF). This is information about the car and its driver — not the location of individual passengers. Uber told the Herald these changes will make passengers identifiable to a greater extent than the three decimal places they currently report to, as it increases the precision from about one hundred metres to just one metre. I do not see that in the proposed amendments (PDF), which seem to make the reporting from ride sharing drivers match that of taxi drivers.

I feel like I should be opposed to this on the basis that it records trips with surprising granularity, and that it brings this data uncomfortably close to law enforcement access. The city, for its part, appears to have been a decent steward of the taxi data it has already collected. Also, Uber itself collects location data of riders and drivers for safety and marketing reasons, and shares it with advertisers. The city’s collection may be uncomfortable, but at least it is bound by stricter privacy laws than Uber.

Another thing I learned from digging around for the bylaw amendments is that the city of Calgary has just 1,882 taxi plates (PDF) for a population of over 1.3 million people. There are also over sixteen thousand ride sharing drivers.

On the Undesign of Apple Intelligence Features

January 28, 2025 ⌥

With this week’s public release of Apple’s operating system updates comes Apple Intelligence now on by default. More users will be discovering its “beta” features and Apple will, in theory, be collecting even more feedback about their quality. There are certainly issues with the output of Notification Summaries, Siri, and more.¹ The flaws in results from Apple Intelligence’s many features are correctly scrutinized. Because of that, I think some people have overlooked the questionable user interface choices.

Not one of the features so far available through Apple Intelligence is particularly newsworthy from a user’s perspective. There are plenty of image generators, automatic summaries, and contextual response suggestions in other software. Apple is not breaking new ground in features, nor is it strategically. It is rarely first to do anything. What it excels at is implementation. Apple often makes some feature or product, however time-worn by others, feel so well-considered it has reached its inevitable form. That is why it is so baffling to me to use features in the Apple Intelligence suite and feel like they are half-baked.

Consider, for example, Writing Tools. This is a set of features available on text in almost any application to proofread it, summarize it, and rewrite it in different styles. You may have seen it advertised. While its name implies the source text is editable, these tools will work on pretty much any non-U.I. text — it works on webpages and in PDF files, but I was not able to make it work with text detected in PNG screenshots.

What this looks like on my Mac, sometimes, is as a blue button beside text I have highlighted. This is not consistent — this button appears in MarsEdit but not Pages; TextEdit but not BBEdit. These tools are also available from a contextual menu, which is the correct place in MacOS for taking actions upon a selection.

In any case, Writing Tools materializes in a popover. Despite my enabling of Reduce Transparency across the system, it launches with a subtle Apple Intelligence gradient background that makes it look translucent before it fades out. This popover works a little bit like a contextual menu and a little like a panel while doing the job of neither very successfully. Any action taken from this popover will spawn another popover. For example, selecting “Proofread” will close the Writing Tools popover and open a new, slightly wider one. After some calculation, the proofread selection will appear alongside buttons for “Replace”, “Copy”, and providing feedback. (I anticipate the latter is a function of the “beta” caveat and will eventually be removed.)

There are several problems with this, beginning with the choice to present this as a series of popovers. It is not entirely inappropriate; Apple says “[i]f you need content only temporarily, displaying it in a popover can help streamline your interface”. However, because popovers are intended for only brief interactions, they are designed to be easily dismissed, something Apple also acknowledges in its documentation. Popovers disappear if you click outside their bounds, if you switch to another window, or if you try to take an action after scrolling the highlighted text out of view. Apple has also made the choice to not cache the results of one of these tools on a passage of selected text. What can easily happen, therefore, is a user will select some text, run Proofread on it, and then — quite understandably — try to make edits to the text or perhaps switch to a different application, only to find that the writing tool has disappeared, and that opening it again will necessitate processing the text again. A user must select the resulting text in the popover or use the “Replace” or “Copy” buttons.

Unlike some other popovers in MacOS — like when you edit an event in Calendar — Writing Tools cannot exist as a floating, disconnected panel. It remains stubbornly attached to the selected text.

As noted, the Writing Tools popover is not the same width as the other popovers it will spawn. By sheer luck, I had one of my test windows positioned in such a way that the Writing Tools popover had enough space to display on the lefthand side of the window, but the popovers it launched appeared on the right because they are a bit wider. This made for a confusing and discordant experience.

Choice of component aside, the way the results of Writing Tools are displayed is so obviously lacklustre I am surprised it shipped in its current state. Two of the features I assumed I would find useful — as I am one person shy of an editor — are “Proofread” and “Rewrite”. But they both have a critical flaw: neither shows the differences between the original text and the changed version. For very short passages, this is not much of a problem, but a tool like “Proofread” implies use on more substantial chunks, or even a whole document. A user must carefully review the rewritten text to discover what changes were made, or place their faith in Apple and click the “Replace” button hoping all is well.

Apple could correct for all of these issues. It could display Writing Tools in a panel instead of a popover or, at least, make it possible to disconnect the popover from the selected and transform it into a panel. It should also make every popover the same width or require enough clearance for the widest popover spawned by Writing Tools so that they always open on the same side. It could bring to MacOS the same way of displaying differences in rewritten text as already exists on iOS but, for some reason, is not part of the Mac version. It could cache results so, if the text is unchanged, invoking the same tool again does not need to redo a successful action.

Writing Tools on MacOS is the most obviously flawed of the Apple Intelligence features suffering from weak implementation or questionable U.I. choices, but there are other examples, too. Some quick hits:

I could not figure out how to get Image Playground to generate an illustration of my dog, something I know is possible. On my iPhone, the toolbar in Image Playground shows a box to “describe an image”, a “People” button, and a plus button. The “People” button is limited to human beings detected in your photo library, even though Photos groups “People & Pets” together. Describing an image using my dog’s name also does not work. The way to do it is to tap the plus button — which contains a “Style” selector and buttons to choose or take a photo — then select “Choose Photo” to pick something from your library as a reference.

This is somewhat more obvious in the Mac version because the toolbar is wide enough to fit the “Style” selector and, therefore, the plus button is labelled with a photo icon.
Also in Image Playground, I find the try-and-see approach as much fun as it is with Siri. I typed my dog’s breed into the image prompt, and it said it does not support the language. I then picked one photo of my dog from my photo library and it said it was “unable to use that description”. I wish the photo picker would not have shown me an option it was unable to use.
Automatic replies in Messages are unhelpful and, on MacOS, cannot be turned off without turning off Apple Intelligence altogether.
The settings for Apple Intelligence features are, by and large, not shown in the Apple Intelligence panel in Settings. That panel only contains a toggle for Apple Intelligence as a whole, a section for managing extensions — like ChatGPT — and Siri controls. Settings for individual features are instead placed in different parts of Settings or in individual apps.

I think this is the correct choice overall, but it is peculiar to have everything Apple Intelligence branded across the system with its logo and gradient — and to advertise Apple Intelligence as its own software — only to have to find the menu in Notification settings for toggling summarization in different apps.

You will note that not a single one of these criticisms is related to the output of Apple Intelligence or a complaint about its limitations. These are all user interaction problems I have experienced. Perhaps this is the best Apple is able to do right now; perhaps it considered and rejected putting Writing Tools in a panel on MacOS for a good reason.

It is unfortunate these features feel almost undesigned — like engineers were responsible for building them, and then someone with human interface knowledge was brought in to add some design. There are plenty of things that are more visually appealing and consistent with platform expectations, like Priority Inbox in Mail. Many of the features seem more polished for iOS compared to MacOS.

Writing Tools, in particular, can and should be better. I write a little on my iPhone, but I write a lot on my Mac — not just posts here, but also emails, messages, and social media posts. A more advanced spelling and grammar checker that has at least some contextual awareness sounds very appealing to me. This is a letdown, and because of so many basic reasons. I do not need Apple Intelligence to be the apex of current technology. What I do expect, at the very least, is that it is user-friendly and feels at home on Apple’s own platforms. It needs work.

In the public version of iOS 18.3, summaries are unavailable for apps from the News and Entertainment categories. ↥︎

January 27, 2025 ⌥

The Global Struggle Over How to Regulate A.I. ⇥ restofworld.org

Katie Mcque, Laís Martins, Ananya Bhattacharya, and Carien Du Plessis, Rest of World:

Brazil’s AI bill is one window into a global effort to define the role that artificial intelligence will play in democratic societies. Large Silicon Valley companies involved in AI software — including Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon Web Services, and OpenAI — have mounted pushback to proposals for comprehensive AI regulation in the EU, Canada, and California.

Hany Farid, former dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information and a prominent regulation advocate who often testifies at government hearings on the tech sector, told Rest of World that lobbying by big U.S. companies over AI in Western nations has been intense. “They are trying to kill every [piece of] legislation or write it in their favor,” he said. “It’s fierce.”

Meanwhile, outside the West, where AI regulations are often more nascent, these same companies have received a red-carpet welcome from many politicians eager for investment. As Aakrit Vaish, an adviser to the Indian government’s AI initiative, told Rest of World: “Regulation is actually not even a conversation.”

It sure seems as though competition is so intense among the biggest players that concerns about risk have been suspended. It is an unfortunate reality that business friendliness is code for a lax regulatory environment since we all have to endure the products of these corporations. It is not as though Europe and Canada have not produced successful A.I. companies, either.

January 27, 2025 ⌥

Inside Canadian Tech’s Shift to the Right ⇥ thelogic.co

Catherine McIntyre, Laura Osman, and Murad Hemmadi, the Logic:

In a WhatsApp group named Build Canada, some of the country’s most prominent technology leaders, including Shopify executives Tobi Lütke, Daniel Debow and Kaz Nejatian, as well as investor John Ruffolo, are developing a vision for where they think the country should go next.

[…]

While the members of the Build Canada WhatsApp group are saying little, elsewhere Canada’s tech sector and the Conservative party have gone public with their commitment to each other, frequently singing each others’ praises on social media.

I am fascinated to think about who would have leaked the existence of this WhatsApp group, which goes unmentioned in the article after the quotes above. There is no indication of how large it is, nor are any discussions disclosed. Whichever participants leaked it are seemingly okay with public knowledge of its existence but nothing more than that. Maybe it is an uninteresting chat among the investor class.

Another thing: the populist rhetoric of the Conservative Party is clearly fake. As in the U.S., the moneyed interests are simply aligning themselves with who will benefit them as the tide is turning. They had to have known the parties more amenable to regulation would propose legislation in response to corporate interests. The Conservatives are only too happy to give large corporations an easier time.

January 26, 2025 ⌥

PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory ⇥ hallofdreams.org

“David and Felipe”, Hall of Impossible Dreams:

At first glance, ravenprp is a very impressive user, writing 2,891 posts in a mere seven-month span (from September 2006 to April 2007) for average of more than thirteen posts per day. […]

Impressively, these posts span from three years before the account was created to a year after the account was last logged into. And, as the icing on the cake, ravenprp is prescient enough that he can joke about being a language model developed by OpenAI, seven years before OpenAI was even founded; evidently he should have joined PsychicsForums instead.

Not just a story about an increasingly poisoned web, but also one about identity. For future reference, I will note X, with its integrated LLM, claims ownership of users’ accounts and has not been shy to steal usernames for its own purposes.

January 25, 2025 ⌥

Century-Scale Storage ⇥ lil.law.harvard.edu

Maxwell Neely-Cohen, writing for Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab:

This piece looks at a single question. If you, right now, had the goal of digitally storing something for 100 years, how should you even begin to think about making that happen? How should the bits in your stewardship be stored with such a target in mind? How do our methods and platforms look when considered under the harsh unknowns of a century? There are plenty of worthy related subjects and discourses that this piece does not touch at all. This is not a piece about the sheer volume of data we are creating each day, and how we might store all of it. Nor is it a piece about the extremely tough curatorial process of deciding what is and isn’t worth preserving and storing. It is about longevity, about the potential methods of preserving what we make for future generations, about how we make bits endure. If you had to store something for 100 years, how would you do it? That’s it.

This was published in December but I only read it today. Here is the thing: I am going to read a lot of stuff this year, but I already know this is going to be one of my favourite essays. Well told and beautifully designed. Make the time for this thoughtful work.

January 24, 2025 ⌥

Cacio e Pepe e Corn Starch ⇥ nytimes.com

Alexander Nazaryan, New York Times:

A group of Italian physicists has dared to tinker with the traditional recipe for cacio e pepe, the challenging Roman dish consisting of pasta, pecorino cheese and black pepper. In a new study, the scientists claim to have “scientifically optimized” the recipe by adding an ingredient: cornstarch.

For some reason I cannot explain, the related paper was already in my history. It is an interesting read — no joke.

I am fascinated by the number of ways this simple recipe has been explored, from using two pans to incorporating cold water. I am not opposed to any of them on principle — I am not Italian, and anything that gets me closer to a perfectly smooth pasta-and-cheese snack is welcome — but there is something that feels a little perverse about an additional starch. Even though these science-backed techniques are tremendous, there is something very special about getting this emulsion just right without any real tricks.

January 24, 2025 ⌥

X Is Barely Getting By ⇥ wsj.com

Justin Baer, Alexander Saeedy, and Alexa Corse, Wall Street Journal:

In a January email to staff, Musk pointed to the company’s growing influence and power, but said the finances remain problematic.

“Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even,” he said in the email, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

“Barely breaking even” would have been an improvement for most of Twitter’s life. Given this fascist’s predilection for dishonesty, I would be surprised if this is an accurate reflection of the current state of X.