From Matt Birchler:

It’s like Apple Shortcuts for me: it’s not replacing my need to do anything, it’s making some things easier or quicker than they otherwise would be. When I push it to do everything, it falls down.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what exactly AI will turn out to be. Will it create an industry as broadly impactful on daily life as the iPhone did? Will become as ubiquitous yet unexciting as Dropbox? Or, will it, like Silicon Valley would prefer you to believe, be a fundamental paradigm shift for how the whole of human society functions, like the Internet was?

The answer is, of course, somewhere in the middle of that triangle. I’m going to place my bet, and we will see how it ages, on AI ending up like Microsoft Excel.

When Excel hit the market, the financial world erupted in a combination of panic and elation. This tool would fundamentally change how people would do their jobs, and accountants in particular came to fear that the software would entirely replace them¹.

Excel did fundamentally change a vast many jobs and just about anyone with a desk job today uses it in one way or another, but Excel alone didn’t drive droves of people into homelessness. It did, however, make many tedious tasks much more efficient and therefore require fewer people to complete them.

I’m failing to find the source of this, but I read and article some years ago which harkened back to the industrialization of the early 20th century. The masses of workers feared that the efficiencies and automation of the assembly line would replace their labor nearly entirely², while the less exploitative businesspeople heralded the coming of a much shorter work week. Their more exploitative counterparts were able to take advantage of both the new efficiencies these machines offered and the proletariat’s existing willingness to work many hours to extract far greater value than ever seen before.

This same process happened before, during the Industrial Revolution, and after, with computers and the Internet, and I suspect we are witnessing it happen again with AI.

Like before, I expect that AI will have a dramatic effect on the job market, but it will not usher in the an age where humans don’t work. Excel didn’t replace all the accountants, but companies did suddenly need fewer of them. In each of these cycles, workers are forced to adapt to the new environment, and the process gravely harms those who are unable or unwilling to change.

I don’t know if assembly lines or Microsoft or generative AI have been positive for humanity, but we’re stuck with them all now. We should remain wary as we adapt to our new surroundings, since this process has a tendency to funnel wealth upwards while the shit continues to roll downhill.

Jaron Schneider writing for PetaPixel:¹

Affinity was always an alternative, but it never felt like it could really compete. Going free is going to be hugely helpful in convincing users to try it. Affinity needs users in order to drive value, and users are going to be far easier to get when points of friction are removed. The blueprint is already there, thanks to Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve — Canva just needed to copy it, and it did.

Jaron misses a key point here which is the main reason I’m skeptical of this transition to making Affinity free: market share doesn’t on its own equal money.

Blackmagic doesn’t need DaVinci Resolve to make money, they have a robust hardware business. Resolve is a superb and popular video editing tool, but I seriously doubt it makes a dent in Blackmagic’s income statement. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a money-losing endeavor given the robust development support it receives. Resolve has always had the vibe of being a passion project for the company, but one that most importantly feeds into their main business by helping them sell hardware.

Canva, on the other hand, doesn’t have another business — they are all-in on selling subscriptions. In some ways, having a great free product can be a gateway drug to said subscription. If Canva’s AI features can ever rival Adobe’s, the addition of Affinity’s pro-level tools will present serious competition for the software giant.

The reality is that professionals who use this software to make money will gladly pay a subscription for whatever tool helps them get work done faster. That is likely the tool that they are most used to working with, but it might someday be the tool with the best AI features. The latter is the bet that Canva is making here, because there is almost certainly no money in consumer-level editing software.²

This feels like a bet form the bygone venture capital era of the 2010s: Canva is making a great free product to attract a huge amount of users and will likely enshitify it in the coming years. The old adage again rings true: “If the product is free, you are the product.” I can only imagine the creative new ways Canva will devise to extract money from its users.

In the short-term, this looks like a big win for cash-strapped creatives and hobbyists. Affinity’s software has always been great³ and now it’s a whole lot more accessible. Personally, I’m excited to have a great, free, and local way to resize images on all my computers, in addition to the already great Photoshop alternative. In the longer-term, I’m worried that we will look back upon this transition with hearts jaded by a once-great software’s fall from grace.

“On em dashes” - Manuel Moreale

As we descend further into the AI-fueled dystopia, and as it continues to devalue anything created by a living, breathing human — unabated by any meaningful regulation or resistance — we are all desperately clambering for a surefire way to tell if something was created using AI or not.

The latest casualty in that search has been the humble em dash — perhaps my personal favorite form of punctuation. I’ve been warned against them, lest my writing be mistaken for AI slop.¹

It’s unsurprising that AI writing has em dashes abound, since the writing it stole was trained on was mostly journalism, and journalists also love the venerable em dash.

ChatGPT can keep its nasty handses off my precious punctuation! I’m not giving up any form of punctuation because the robot’s shitty writing is gumming up every aspect of life. If creatives bow to the robot overloads, then humanity has truly lost.

Make no mistake — nothing on this site will ever be written be AI². Since AI is being used to make music, I’m sure it’s also being used to write blog posts. What a sad existence it must be to commoditize your own self expression.

A friend of mine recently inherited a large record collection. What does one do when confronted with the influx of over 1,000 records? Start by playing one, surely.

That’s exactly what my friend did, and what she told me about experience was familiar. She had never heard of the band, was only vaguely sure of what genre to expect, but she listened to the record and liked it!

How many of us, when instead confronted with a functionally endless list of records on Apple Music, would bother to listen to any one of them, let alone give it an earnest chance of finding its way into our lives? Personally, when I face an excess of choices, I gravitate to what I already know well.

Older generations love to wax nostalgic about how records were expensive and how that investment and the scarcity it created forced them to develop a greater appreciation for what they might not have enjoyed on first spin.

If it wasn’t the expense, then at least the simple investment of time and intentional effort might be enough to endear you to a record. Skipping tracks is a fiddly and an imprecise endeavor on wax, and something about re-housing a record mid-play to get a new one feels wrong.

Begrudgingly, I’ll admit that the old farts may have a point. Something is lost when the process becomes too easy or disposable.

Digital photography might be the most consequential technological advancement so far this century¹. Having a high-quality camera in our pockets at all times has profoundly changed the way we interact with the world.

A dedicated digital camera still produces far better results than a phone, and I suspect that no amount of software trickery will ever close that gap², but at the same time, the phone’s ubiquity has irreversibly cheapened all photographs. We take pictures of receipts, tracking numbers, shoe sizes that fit, and other mundane things we want to remember — such things that would have never warranted a frame of film in times past.

While the usefulness is unmatched, people have been feeling that cheapness — photographs that are infinite in number and endlessly repeatable are inherently less valuable. Again, when confronted with an effectively endless supply of photographic media to consume, why spend much time on any one photo? Especially true when the oligarch who runs the photo-sharing platform designs the business model of that platform around the photos being both disposable and infinite.

Film, on the other hand, is ruthless. It demands patience, contemplation, persistence, preparation, and practice from the photographer, but it also rewards its adherents with images that have an indefinable quality of specialness. That’s precisely why people have been returning to film for more than a decade now.

Much like digital music is more perfect than vinyl records, digital photographs are far more perfect than film negatives. But humans don’t actually like perfect. We are messy beings who live our lives in messy ways, and film reflects human life in a much more human manner. That imperceptible quality that makes the “film look?” That’s just the imperfection, and it makes our messy monkey brains happy.

Much like my friend who gave her random record a chance, when I shoot a roll of film, I’m far more endeared to each photograph because of the thought and effort I put into it. Even the bad ones take a little more contemplation to dismiss. I often find myself returning to the images every few days to see if my opinions have solidified, in much the same way I do when a new record from a band I follow is released.

Film, like vinyl, will wax and wane over the coming decades, but it won’t fade away entirely³. As so much of the world becomes reduced to buttons on screens, interacting with the physical world in a physical way will always be desirable — at least, to some of us.

If you’ve heard of Star Citizen, you probably either hate to love it or love to hate it. Some say it’s a scam, others say it’s the Second Coming in video game form. The marketing team will tell you it’s the most ambitious video game ever created: a fully functioning sci-fi world where you can be a citizen of the stars. I will tell you that, behind the scummy funding scheme, underneath the towering manure pile of bugs, is something really special.

There is something magical about Star Citizen when it works. When it’s good, there is absolutely nothing else like it. Waking up in a habitation tower, riding public transportation to the spaceport¹, hopping in your ship, and rocketing off to the stars all without a loading screen is an experience unlike anything else.

Some other experiences you won’t find anywhere else:

• Entering an elevator might cause you to glitch through the floor and end up stuck in emptiness, forcing a respawn.
• Running down some stairs might cause spontaneous death.
• Bumping into an NPC or another player might cause spontaneous death.
• Walking up an entrance ramp to your ship might cause spontaneous death and/or the sudden explosion² of said ship.
• Landing your ship on uneven ground may cause it to explode³.

Star Citizen is a game with a tremendous amount of friction between the player and what they want to do. Much of that friction is from the endless supply of bugs and server lag, but much of it is imposed intentionally by the design of the game. Something as simple as moving items between space stations is meant to be difficult — so much so that it’s a viable in-game career. The game is intended to be a full simulation, complete with bodily annoyances such as hunger, thirst, and injury.

In chasing that simulation experience, developer Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) has lost (or maybe more accurately, never created) the video game aspect of it all. There simply isn’t much to do in the amazing world they’ve created. The awe of simply existing in that world is never lost on me, but I’d understand how it might be on many others. It isn’t very clear how to do mission or bounties, or even how to make some money to upgrade your ship. And there certainly isn’t a narrative to speak of.

In many ways, the closest comparison is EvE Online, a game with similar sensibilities in the friction it imposes on its players but with some crucial additions. EvE has a robustness in its systems that gives players the tools to create their own content. EvE has a history rich with politics, backstabbing, undercover spies, and battles at unfathomable scale, and all of it is real in a way that few other games can accomplish. None of those events were planned or scripted, but they arose out of genuine conflict between real people.

In a way, I think Star Citizen is meant to be a fuller realization of the dream of EvE, albeit on a far smaller scale, at least, in a physical sense. To take all of what makes EvE special and bring it down to the human scale while also adding in the complexities of being human is an incredibly compelling concept. But it’s also one of, if not the most ambitious video game ever created. The scope of that ambition is its undoing.

After crowdfunding $800 million and spending 13 years in development, Star Citizen is not much closer to release now than it was five years ago. CIG continues to stubbornly focus on adding esoteric item handling and bodily injury mechanics instead of making an actually playable video game. Clearly, people at CIG are getting fabulously wealthy keeping things as they are.

I’ve pledged maybe $120 over the years, starting about a decade ago. When I gave my first dollars, I believed that this might be the greatest video game ever made. Ten years later, I still think that, if it ever exists in a truly playable state, Star Citizen will be a tremendously important game in the history of the medium. But as time goes by, it looks more and more like CIG has become complacent in the face of its steady funding and has little incentive to actually finish this thing. It’s a lot easier to sell the idea of something ambitious than it is to realize that ambition⁴.

I still check in on the game from time-to-time, and I’m still in awe of its beauty (and its trains). It still feels amazing to walk about on my ship and fly it from place to place, sensing that I might actually be inhabiting this world. But, after a couple hours, my curiosity is satiated and it once again becomes clear that ultimate freedom doesn’t mean much without purpose.

In the second block of this episode of The Vergecast, David Pierce and Casey Johnston speak about Casey’s journey to spend less time on her phone, and the various schemes she develops to do so. An admirable goal, indeed.

Whenever this type of conversation arises, I’m interested in the why — why do we spend too much time on our phones? I don’t feel as if I have a consistently unhealthy relationship with my phone, but we all fall into the trap sometimes¹.

What I hear most people say is that they pick up their phone for one purpose and end up dragged into the abyss of apps whose livelihood depends on trapping us in an attention spiral. The most effective way to set that trap is through notifications, and that is precisely why I don’t seem to fall into this trap as often as others. You see, I hate notifications. My default answer to any app that wants to send them is “no.” Only after a compelling reason is presented will I allow any app to buzz my phone².

It’s not often fun or easy to set up — particularly with Meta apps who want to send dozens of types of notifications and bury those settings in byzantine menus. But, iOS gives us a few tools to make this better. I set the vast majority of notifications I do allow to deliver silently and not badge the app icon. I’m the type of person who likes to keep my home screen free of badged app icons, so I can count on myself to check any app with a badge at least daily³. From there, I’m even more selective about apps that can deliver a banner notification or vibrate my phone and/or watch⁴ — primarily messaging apps that might require my attention presently.

This system has worked well for me for years. It ensures that I’m picking my phone up less and I don’t get bombarded with useless notifications⁵. It’s a bit of set-up work, but combined with an intentionally designed home screen that removes apps I might be tempted by, I’ve never felt the need to regress to a less capable device or somehow artificially limit my phone in any way.

Matt Birchler on Birchtree (emphasis mine):

To be clear, I think it’s fine if private companies like Intuit and Square continue to make tax software and compete on delivering the best experience at the best value to consumers. Despite all my complaints with how we got here, I genuinely do think these companies make great products that do deliver a simpler, faster experience than we had years ago. I just think there should be a free option managed by the government to file your taxes as well.

I want to go a step further because I’ve personally used both TurboTax and the IRS’s Direct File. Let me be abundantly clear: Direct File is better than TurboTax.

Part of the propaganda machine that companies like Intuit have run is the idea that the government can’t do anything well and that whatever they come up with would be much more difficult to use than the privately-made alternative. Let’s not forget that Intuit is infamous for misleading marketing and anti-consumer behavior.

Turns out, that’s not the case. Using Direct File is almost identical to using TurboTax, except it’s not constantly trying to upcharge you for services you don’t need. I found Direct File’s explanations of exactly what each item is and who needs to fill it out to be far less confusing, to boot.

The fact that many Americans are happy to pay money in order to file their taxes is the product of a decades-long effort by private industry to convince us there is no alternative. I’m of the opinion that taxes shouldn’t be so complex as to require third-party software but, since that’s a pipe dream in America, so I’d settle for what Matt talks about above: private industry competing to provide a better service than the government benchmark.

Direct File has significant limitations: you need to have a relatively simple tax return and live in a state without state income tax. However, the IRS has proven that it’s capable of making a great product — as evidenced by just how desperately Intuit and others are trying to undermine it. Filing taxes is indeed far easier than it used to be but, if the government is able to develop Direct File into the fully-featured system it was envisioned to be, filing with Uncle Sam will be even easier and cheaper.

About a year ago, I wrote about giving myself the permission to abandon things in my life that weren’t hitting right. Many months later, I’m still struggling.

Reading

With books, it’s been a productive experience. If a book isn’t clicking with me, I’ve had an easy time putting it aside and leaving open the option to revisit it later. As a result, I’ve read more books and had a better time because of it. Go figure!

I think the reason for this is twofold. First, I couldn’t possibly hope to read every book that interests me in a lifetime. The breadth of available content is so vast and daunting that it’s a fool’s errand to even try. That impossibility is the license I’ve needed to cast aside something that isn’t working — indeed, I’ll have to cast aside the vast majority of books in order to read any at all.

Second, the barrier to entry for reading is low. eBooks (my preferred format) are a relatively cheap form of entertainment, only $10, maybe $15 a piece. That means I don’t have much in the way of sunk costs keeping me invested, and grabbing a new book is easy and inexpensive (free with a library card of course!).

By focusing only on what I’m invested in and not forcing myself to finish books that aren’t my jam, I’ve developed a far healthier relationship with the medium and reading as a whole. My goal has been to be excited any time I’m able to read for a bit, and I’ve largely succeeded.

Gaming

Video games are a lot tougher. I’ve been playing Dragon Age: The Veilgaurd for the better part of six months, and I’m still not very close to finishing it. In fact, I’ve found myself seeking out just about any excuse to not play it: a quick detour here, a promising Pokémon rom hack, maybe a retro classic for good measure.

That’s a painfully obvious sign that I should abandon the game. This was my first Dragon Age game, so don’t have much attachment to the world or inertia from previous investment that might have kept me going. But there have been a few parts of the game that held my interest just enough that I wanted to see it through. I quite like Rook as a character and I’ve enjoyed watching her grow, I want to see what finally becomes of Solas, and I admire the way the game handles its trans and non-binary characters (I chose to play Rook as a trans woman for this reason).

Unlike books, I probably could play every game that I’d like to in my life. It’s a new enough medium and my interests within are narrow enough that I’m able to curate a relatively small catalog of must-play games. Here we have a possible task, so abandoning one of the steps along the way feels terrible. That, and feeling like I didn’t get my $70 worth.

I’ve had a fraught relationship with this game for several months and, as of this writing, I’ve finally decided to put it aside and move on. I fully intend to revisit it someday, but there are many other games that will come first.

Watching

TV and movies are a little more complicated, since my partner and I do most of our TV watching together. So, we tend to focus on show we both enjoy and leave anything else to our own time. Since I’d usually tend to fill my own time with games as opposed to TV or movies, I don’t do a lot of watching outside of what we watch together.

There are some notable exceptions: anything Star Wars (especially Andor) and Star Trek (especially Strange New Worlds). I’ll always make time for these and, fortunately, my partner will often join me.

So, I’ve abandoned most things I might have otherwise watched, mostly in a nest of my own making, and therefore I don’t feel much of a relationship to film or TV content. It’s how my partner and I wind down after our days and not that much more. For now, I’m content with that, but I’d like to find a way to fit a little bit more of this type on content into my routine.

What I didn’t expect after writing that first post is how difficult abandonment might be. Sometimes it’s a book that everyone else seems to like, other times its a game that most people don’t, and often, it’s a reality of limited time each day. It’s a difficult balance, too, since being to quick to abandon risks eschewing content that starts slow. I suspect this will be an ongoing struggle, but a worthwhile one.

I personally never jived with the OG Switch, though I do understand why most of the world adores it.

I’ve never found the Switch comfortable in handheld mode — the awkward joystick placement always makes my hands cramp after a few minutes — so mine has been mostly relegated to dock duty. As a home console, the Switch is simply bad. It’s not set up to be a good experience on a 4k TV, and while that was obvious from the get-go, it’s no less disappointing.

The OG Switch had a key advantage, however: it could undercut just about every competitor on price. For access to one an extraordinary game library, $300 was a small price to pay. Within some lucky kids' Christmas budgets, and otherwise one of the cheapest entry points to modern gaming, the Switch sold fantastically thanks in part to being inexpensive.

The Switch 2 arrives in a radically different reality than 2017. It’s looking like a far better home console than portable device, which is an interesting pivot for Nintendo. Early reports show potentially worse battery life, they didn’t bother to fix the joy-cons, an LCD screen, and the ergonomics look just as bad as the original (I really wish Nintendo had taken some notes from the Steam Deck here).

But, priced higher than a base PS5 and Steam Deck, and within spitting distance of the increasingly irrelevant Xbox Series X, the Switch 2 sits in an uncomfortable spot. The people that buy Nintendo consoles clearly don’t care about 4k or 120FPS. While myself and the rest of the enthusiast crowd celebrate their inclusion (120hz! From Nintendo! Apple has no excuse now), these features are more for folks like me who want a great experience on a fancy TV, and less relevant to Nintendo’s core customer base.

This pivot to a more traditional home console makes sense in the context of the Switch 2’s development which, as Richard Lawler noted on this week’s Vergecast, was mostly during the pandemic. For casual gamers in the post-COVID world, handheld is increasingly the way of the market. I doubt that this will add up to a big miss on Nintendo’s part, and the inevitable Switch 2 OLED will surely fix any issues with handheld mode, but it will make the new console a tough upgrade sell.

That’s the trouble that Nintendo runs into here. The Switch has such a vast install base that most people who might have the propensity to buy one have already done so. The Switch 2’s whole thing is “The Switch, but better.” Better in that context is hard to communicate - it looks about the same, plays many of the same games, includes a bunch of esoteric upgrades that don’t amount to a radically different experience, and carries a far higher cost.

Myself and many others are simply excited for the thing that will play the next Mario, Zelda, Pokémon, and Metroid. Nintendo can usually get away with a lot by virtue of their legacy and the quality of those tentpole franchises, but I reckon the Switch 2 will have a hard time. And, the Orange Man’s bullshit is about to make things even worse.

I don’t expect a full-on Wii U situation, but Nintendo does have a tradition of fumbling the followup to a smash hit.

I never thought I’d see the day! My friends and I loved Kirby Air Ride as kids, particularly the demolition derby mode, so I couldn’t be more excited for this sequel.

Sega, surely this means it’s time to revisit Sonic Riders?

Every once in a while, I’ll stumble upon a piece of media that I’m in awe of. This episode of Twenty Thousand Hertz is a masterful telling of a touching, heartbreaking, and heroic story about two young men and their love of video games.

Recently, I bought a new (to me) vehicle. I wanted something bigger and higher off the ground than my Honda Civic, which was difficult for my aging parents and in-laws to get into and uncomfortable for them to ride in. It also didn’t handle blizzards very well. A last-generation Hyundai Santa Fe fit the bill quite nicely — bigger, more comfortable, loaded with tech, and with tons of space for transporting bikes and other cargo.

Where I live, ICE cars are still the default. In what I like to call “the square states in the middle bit of the country,” EVs are increasingly common, particularly among the affluent, but the adoption is far slower than on the coasts.

Now, with my ICE Santa Fe, I stop at a gas station two blocks from my apartment every couple weeks or so, spend about ten minutes there, and then go about my life, feeling a numb guilt for the pollution spewing out behind me.

Would I have preferred to buy an Ioniq 5? Absolutely! Most examples were stretching the budget a bit, but I would love to pass by gas stations with an idle chuckle.

However, as I mentioned, my apartment is two blocks from a gas station. I am extraordinarily fortunate to have a garage that my partner and I share. And that garage has a singular power outlet (for the opener) that I could probably trickle charge an EV with, but I suspect that landlord would not take kindly to the increased electric bill.

In my small city, there are a couple dozen charging stations. Most of the car dealerships have one or two for charging the small number of EVs on their lots. There are roughly a dozen Tesla Superchargers, eight of which are at a grocery store across town from my place and the rest reside at a Super 8 Motel. Chargers with CCS ports are dotted around the city, never more than two in one place, usually at condo buildings and a handful of businesses who have EV-loving executives.

Exactly one charger is anywhere near my daily life: a lone CCS-equipped station outside a luxury condo building about a block from where I work. That charger is almost always in use when I drive by.

My in-laws, who now comfortably ride in the cavernous back seat of my Santa Fe, live 460 miles away — a 7-hour drive that we make several times a year. That drive requires one 10-minute fuel stop if the wind isn’t too bad. Just like cold, wind is a very different story on the Great Plains than on the coasts.

The aforementioned road trip in an Ioniq 5 long-range AWD would require two charging stops of 30 and 45 minutes, adding more than an hour to an already long road trip, assuming the chargers work and are available. From what I gather, small-town Electrify America stations are unreliable at best.

I would love nothing more than to own an EV, and if I owned a house or even simply had a reliable place to charge, I might make the other sacrifices required of me to do so. For folks who live in dense areas and have family close by, those sacrifices are likely pretty manageable.

There’s a gap where EVs are considered as the ultimate next-generation form of transportation that currently leaves out people like myself. Don’t get me wrong: EVs absolutely are the ultimate next-generation form of transportation, but it’s not a given that they work in every situation. They currently only work well in dense urban environments or in countries (and even states!) less short-sighted than my own.

The US needs to get its act together to support the inevitable proliferation of EVs. Sadly, that is on the long list of public goods that almost certainly won’t be happening anytime soon.

But it could have been a lot better.

A Star Wars show set in the High Republic era that stars not only strong female leads, but a Dark Side Force user? Sign me up! Sadly, The Acolyte ended up with a lot of wasted potential.

Let's get some of my favorite points out of the way.

• The strong female leads and emphasis on people of color are both great assets to the franchise.
• The witch coven is freaking cool, and I'd love to see a lot more about their crazy force magic, their origins, etc. Are they what eventually become the Nightsisters?
• Manny Jacinto absolutely slaying every scene he's in.
• The lightsaber-whip that Master Vernestra uses for about three seconds.
• Wookie Jedi!
• Kylo Ren wishes his helmet was half as cool as Qimir's.
• Actual stakes! Characters you like are going to die.

Some really great casting and acting held up by above-average (for Star Wars, at least) writing makes for something that puts the most thought into the nature of the Force since The Last Jedi. However, this show does absolutely nothing with the High Republic era, squandering a huge amount of potential.

Wacky locales, cities the size of planets, massive spaceships, the overwhelming sense of scale — these are what has always made Star Wars unique. This franchise is at its best when its teeming with life and new ideas. George Lucas understood this, creating Mos Eisley Cantina, Jabba's wacky cast of underlings, and countless other iconic weirdos. The Acolyte pushes for a darker tone and more real stakes, but it loses sight of what makes the world of Star Wars feel lived in.

The B-plot of Master Vernestra tying to thwart a plan to create more government oversight of the Jedi could have been the secret ingredient. But, much like the Master herself, the show stubbornly plows through all the inherent intricacies and fails to create a compelling story out of it. This plot needed a lot more screen time to work, and I would have been so here for it. Learning more about the political machinations of Master Vernestra's position could have been an excellent foil to our merry band of consistently overreacting Jedi, and it could have given The Acolyte the special sauce it sorely needed.

Two or three more episodes would have done a lot of good here. We could have witnessed more of the awesome space witches, had a coherent political plot, and given Manny Jacinto some more screen time. Instead, despite being set in a universe that has always strived to feel expansive, The Acolyte ends up feeling small and limited.

During this episode of Search Engine, PJ and Casey kept coming back to the idea that Google thinks browsing the web is a chore, hence why they want to let AI do it for you. They, and much of the internet, seems to think that google is wrong here and, to their credit, Google is wrong about most things these days. But, in 2024, browsing the web certainly is a chore. It sucks!

Unless you spend the time to carefully curate an RSS feed or a list of bookmarks to regularly check up on^[1], browsing the web is quite terrible. The infamous personal essays that preclude what could have been simple recipes, the almost useless "Can Pikachu be Shiny in Pokemon GO?" articles, those horrible product spec sheet comparison sites, and immeasurable amounts of other detritus have mucked up the internet such that it takes a great force of will to get any value out of it.

Let me be abundantly clear: the answer to this problem is definitely not AI. Google is definitely wrong about that part. However, at least part of the solution has to be taking the profit out of “What time is the Super Bowl?" posts and putting into good content.

Google incentivized the SEO chum to take over the web and got rich doing it, but publishers played the same game. Much like tech companies during the pandemic, they were either so naive as to not see the end state of their actions or, more likely, simply didn't care about anything beyond next quarter's financials. Together, the likes of Conde Nast, Google, and countless others destroyed everything great that any of them created.

And now, Google is poised to eat its own tail. The media industry is currently in shambles because Google finally realized that people don't like SEO slop, and the companies that got fat on making it no longer have any idea how to make money without their favorite crutch. Journalists are being laid off in droves while Google tells us to put glue on pizza. At this rate, there will soon be no content left to shovel into the gaping maw of the LLMs.

Maybe, as Casey suggests in the episode, the Fediverse is the answer. Maybe email newsletters will save us. But, it took more than Google to ruin the internet.

Nathan Grayson, for Aftermath: Big Video Game Publishers Like Microsoft Are Paving Their Own Path To Irrelevance - Aftermath

“So in a few years when there’s a massive gap in the industry from all the games that were never made by the people who got laid off at the studios that were shuttered, who’s going to make your games?” wrote JC Lau, game developer at ProbablyMonsters. “Where’s ‘shareholder value’ going to come from when you’ve cut to the bone?”

Big companies in all industries (but especially video games right now), constantly chasing the almighty Bigger Numbers, fail to see (or to care about) the consequences of their actions beyond the next payday. This is how capitalism has always worked, but it feels particularly pronounced in this moment. Things like this are usually cyclical, so I'm sure someone more well-versed could point to a part of history we are repeating, but it also feels like it shouldn't have to be this way.

It wouldn't take but a little bit of foresight to see the folly in the recent run of layoffs and studio closures. And if Microsoft, Embracer, EA, and many others, cared even for a moment about making good video games, they would behave in a fundamentally different manner.

These companies will surely be husks of their former selves in just a few years, but the C-suite will just as surely float down under their golden parachutes, shouting "That's the next guy's problem!"

I recently acquired one of the most advanced pieces of modern gaming technology^[1], and what was the first thing I did with it? Play a nearly 30-year old game. Hell yeah.

Much like with Shōgun, I don't have the depth of understanding, nor the force of will, to commit myself to having useful, novel thoughts about the game that defined a generation. But again, like Shōgun, I can simply strongly recommend Final Fantasy VII.

Personally, I've been playing through the original in preparation for the current-generation remakes. Games that I think might define this generation, if the general sentiment around Rebirth is anything to go by.

What an experience it must have been to play this game in your formative years. I was barely crawling in 1997, so I never had that experience, but I can confirm that there is something special here that far exceeds nostalgia.

I can't pretend to fully grasp all the machinations and mysteries within this show — my general ignorance of Japanese culture surely contributing — but I do know that I enjoyed every second of it. I haven't had my eyes glued to a TV like this since The Expanse.

I'll spare you what would surely be a clumsy attempt at a review and simply strongly recommend Shōgun. It's not only one of the most visually stunning pieces of cinema I've seen, but it's also a spectacle for the mind. Once you're done, I'd point you to this interview in Slate to gain a deeper understanding.

The Humane AI Pin is bad. The writing was always on the wall for this one. Any product whose core promise builds on the current state of generative AI is going to be bad. And it's going to stay that way until we can trust the robots to not lie to us.

Not to mention, you have to clip the freakin' thing to your shirt.

The problem with voice assistants in general is that there is no way to know for sure if they did what you asked without checking for yourself. Once you go through the effort to double check, you could have simply done the task on your own. While you can generally predict the way that Siri or Google Assistant will fail (usually by simply not completing the task), AI throws a massive wrench into that problem since it will fail in strange new ways and act upon false information.

John Gruber on Daring Fireball:

I don’t know where Humane goes from here but this might be impossible to recover from reputationally. It seems borderline criminal that they shipped it in this state.

Humane massively overpromised and underdelivered here, and this whole thing had a Kickstarter-scam vibe from the very beginning. We learned over the last decade or so that startups with big ambitions are generally not to be expected to deliver. Media in general is far too bullish on AI, but tech media should have known better than to hype this launch to the levels they did.

It's not clear to me that Humane's ideal AI Pin is a genuinely useful thing, and the pin in its current state is clearly a shell of that potential. Last year, when the pin was revealed, we didn't know the extent of the train wreck that this launch would be, but the warning signs were there.

David Pierce, writing for The Verge:

Aboard is just one of a new class of AI companies, the ones that won’t try to build Yet Another Large Language Model but will instead try to build new things to do with those models and new ways to interact with them. The Aboard founders say they ultimately plan to connect to lots of models as those models become, in some cases, more specialized and, in others, more commoditized. In Aboard’s case, they want to use AI not as an answer machine but as something like a software generator. “We still want you to go to the web,” Ford says. “We want to guide you a bit and maybe kickstart you, but we’re software people — and we think the ability to get going really quickly is really, really interesting.” The Aboard founders want AI to do the work about the work, so you can just get to work.

Since it was featured in the Installer newsletter last year, Aboard has quickly become one of my favorite apps.^[1] Now, I'm deeply worried about its future.

In short, the Aboard app consists of multiple boards that can each house cards. Cards can then be further organized using stacks (folders) and tags. It excels when using the browser extension to clip web pages into cards, where it pulls relevant information such as an image, price, brand, or genre.

For me, this has manifested in the app being a truly excellent way to keep track of interesting products. I use only one board, but I have tags for things such as accessories for my mountain bike, a wish list for my ever growing collection of bags, and a list of clothing items I might want to buy. My board is like a big Amazon wish list that can contain anything on the internet. It works perfectly for someone who, like me, accumulates things they want much faster than disposable income.^[2]

Recently, Aboard announced it's march into becoming an AI-based software.^[3] In my experience, this type of announcement usually signals the death of the support for my simple and specialized use case. This AI foray means that you can now ask ChatGPT to create a board for you — for example, Best Picture nominees. You could then sort that board into stacks such as "To Watch" and "Finished" and create tags to rate them. Of course, the AI often makes an incorrect or incomplete board.

This method flies in the face of exactly what I liked so much about Aboard in the first place: curation. My Aboard database is carefully curated collection of objects that I find interesting or compelling, and I'm realizing that I'm quite attached to it. I'm somewhat conflicted about that attachment since it's deeply rooted in consumerism, but that discussion is outside of the scope of this post for now.

If it were only about AI features that are useless to me, then I could live with that as long as my use case remains intact. But this whole thing smells like a larger pivot — they are starting to monetize, and creators Paul Ford and Rich Ziade are explicit about focusing on the workplace market over personal users. The free tier, which used to to be quite generous, now offers just 50 cards per board, with a maximum of three boards. I believe that good software should cost money, but $12 a month is quite steep for AI hype.

This monetization strategy feels bad because it doesn't charge for the expensive part. Data is cheap, and I don't think that users having too many cards and boards is what's going to hurt Aboard's bottom line. The API fees for accessing LLMs are the costly part, but instead of monetizing that alone, Aboard is forcing users to upgrade in order to bypass arbitrary caps on storage. Presumably, this is because they know that the AI isn't very useful yet but they need to start showing cash flow somehow.

Again, good software should cost money, but paying for additional features is a lot easier to swallow than paying to bypass an artificial limit.

Aboard is a cool idea and I hope they find a niche. But I don't think that I'm alone in growing tired of seeing AI features crop up in every app I use. For now, I'm going to test out Raindrop as a promising alternative and, sadly, bid adieu to Aboard.^[4]

The narrative follows Valere and Zale, two Solstice Warriors with a special affinity with lunar and solar magic, respectively. They are among generations of warriors trained form birth to cleanse the world of the evil Feshmancer's (gross) minions. It's a straightforward story with just enough world building and unexpected turns to keep things interesting, but where Sea of Stars really shines is in its characters.

I was fully invested in the merry band of travelers that Valere and Zale amassed, caring enough about each of them to fully experience the few gut-punches that the narrative had in store. With such rich characters and a genuinely interesting world, I was disappointed that the ending fell a bit flat. It just... ended. There wasn't much fanfare beyond the final boss fight, and then I was dropped back at the pre-boss save point^[1].

The turn-based combat remained engaging throughout my 20 hours with the game. Unfortunately, there isn't much in the way of character progression or any customization to speak of, so I wouldn't want to spend too much more time with this combat system, but it services just fine for the game's runtime.

The stunningly beautiful pixel art feels special, set against a backdrop of memorable music. Each frame is intricately designed and bursting with color in a way that feels uncommon today. There are plenty of quirky locations to explore (the swamp with singing mushrooms being a real standout) and funky characters to meet, each rendered with apparent care.

Sea of Stars is also uncommon in that it simply gets to the point. Each location is relatively bite-sized, making hour-ish long play sessions feel great, and the story doesn't suffer from added bloat or filler. This game knows what's important to it and doesn't waste much time on much else.

I've started to truly appreciate media that has a narrow scope. Put another way, media that has a certain economy to it, presenting only what is strictly necessary. As a younger person, I hungered for an all-consuming world that I could sink countless hours into. While that's still a real treat, more often I find myself taking joy in smaller experiences such as Sea of Stars.

But not for the reason you might think.

Matt Birchler: Browse for me gets a big 🤨 from me (birchtree. Me)

Since receiving my iPhone 15 Pro, by Action Button has pretty much been only one thing: open the Google app. I like to keep the dozens of disposable Google searches I do every day separate from the Safari tabs I keep open to annoy myself into getting things done. Having that functionality conveniently tucked away in the action button has been surprisingly useful.

After downloading Arc Search, I immediately swapped my Action Button to open it. Now, to be clear, I don't make regular use of the Browse for Me button. In fact, I've only used it once or twice. The reason I use Arc Search on my action button is because it has cleared the very low bar of being better than the Google app^[1].

It opens the keyboard automatically, keeps old tabs easily accessible, looks nice, and breaks webpages far less often than Google's app. I've ended up with a common workflow of searching in Google and then having to open the link in Safari because the Google app can't display the page properly, or some functionality breaks. Arc Search, so far, has necessitated this workflow far less.

In the beginning, I experimented with using the Action Button to open Safari or use a shortcut to automatically search Google, but those solutions were always slow and clunky, and I always ended up with a bunch of useless Safari tabs open. It's unfortunate since Safari is by far the best way to browse the web on iOS. Arc Search has solidifed itself as second best in my book.

The Browser Company continues to inject some intrigue into a market that's been stale for more than 15 years, and I have to applaud them for that. However, I'm not the first to point out that the Browse for Me button is probably an existential crisis for the internet as we know it. Given the current state of AI, it's currently little more than a fun novelty to mess with, but I expect it to advance rapidly.

This leaves Arc Search is a weird spot. For me, it's a more pleasant way to do Google searches. But that isn't going to bring many others to the app, and it certainly won't make The Browser Company any money. Its hard to figure out what the endgame is here. The Browser Company makes a product for browsing the web (Arc), and then made another product that lets an AI do all the browsing for you. I'm interested to see how they reconcile this space.

All that said, just over the horizon is a wild new frontier of browser apps, after Apple opens up iOS to non-WebKit browsers. A new frontier that those of us who do not live in the EU will sadly only get to salivate over.

I tend toward being somewhat of a completionist. Not in the realm of getting all the achievements or reading every footnote, but in the sense of, once I start something, I want to see it to its Natural End. And, until recently, that Natural End did not include the idea of abandonment.

For years, I'd force myself to muddle through books I ended up hating, games I found boring, or podcasts that didn't click, constantly looking for the part where it gets good. And never finding it.

That is, until recently. David Pierce's excellent Installer newsletter at The Verge introduced me to a lovely app called Sequel. It's a relatively simple tracker for video games, books, movies, and TV series. A content consumption organizer, if you will. And I do love me some organization. I subscribed to the premium tier shortly after downloading the app, and I've been using it frequently for the past few months.

The app allows me to collect the things which I wish to consume in categories and lists, and I can assign a status to each one. In the example of video games: Wishlist, Backlog, Playing, Played, and Abandoned (We'll get back to that last one). It also keeps track of release dates where relevant and, perhaps my favorite feature, integrates with howlongtobeat to show an estimated time of how long it might take to finish that particular game.

Let's take a closer look at the Abandoned status. At first, I thought of it as a curiosity, something that's meant to be used infrequently when I get distracted by something else, or life gets in the way. But, slowly, I started taking it as a license to abandon finishing things. Keeping with the video games example, when I started to lose interest in Starfield, I decided rather quickly to move it to the Abandoned category and move on to something I'd enjoy more.

As I started to do this more and more, I found myself being much more interested with the content that I was following through on, since I can now know that I'm really into it. I've started to realize that free time is far too precious to waste it on things I'm not fully committed to. And, the beauty of this organization system is, I can catalog all the things I've abandoned and revisit them at some point in the future. Or perhaps never. It's the cataloging of these items that sets me free to forget about them.

The final piece to fall into place was a line in Citizen Sleeper that resonated with me. During one conversation, Castor says to the player, "It is the nature of life to leave things unfinished." That line coalesced all these thoughts for me and solidified that license to abandon. Mandating that I finish anything I start goes against the nature of life itself.

Consider this your license to abandon that game that didn't as good as you thought it would be, that book that isn't clicking, or that TV series that doesn't "get good" until season four. Stick with the things that are working for you, and abandon the things that aren't.