ldstephens

I’ve been keeping my journal in Day One since 2016 with over 600 entries.

The one feature that keeps me hooked on Day One is “On This Day a built-in memory machine for my journal. It automatically surfaces entries I’ve added on the current date in past years, taking me on a journey down memory lane every morning.

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Walmart

BENTONVILLE, Ark., March 15, 2024 — Walmart will begin selling MacBook Air with the M1 chip – continuing to deliver premium quality and unmatched affordability for customers. MacBook Air features amazing performance and a long battery life in its thin and light design. This is the first time customers can purchase a Mac directly from Walmart. The MacBook Air with the M1 chip is now available on Walmart.com and will soon be available in select Walmart stores for only $699.

John Gruber: “This is a big deal. When the M3 MacBook Airs arrived last week, Apple dropped the M1 Air from its lineup and moved the M2 Air to the magic $999 spot in the lineup. But it looks like Apple is going to keep producing the M1 MacBook Air for this deal with Walmart. These aren’t refurbs, or leftover stock (Apple hasn’t kept excess stock in inventory for bestselling products for decades — keeping inventory low is one of the hallmarks of Apple’s operations in the Cook era).”

I’m writing this very post on a M1 Air. It’s a great machine and I love it. It does everything that I need it to do.

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As many creators know, the future of TikTok in the US hangs in the balance. A recent bill passed the House, requiring TikTok to sever ties with its parent company, ByteDance, or face a ban. This situation highlights a crucial lesson for all content creators: Don’t put your fucking livelihood on a platform you don't control!

Taylor Lorenz reporting for the The Washington Post: TikTok creators, advocates slam House bill, citing damage to the economy “If the bill passes the Senate and becomes law, “I will lose my biggest platform as a content creator, stripped from me with no recompense or compensation,” she said.”

When you build your career on someone else's platform like TikTok, Facebook, or YouTube, you expose yourself to several risks:

These platforms hold immense power. They can change algorithms, restrict content, or even shut down entirely, jeopardizing your success and income. You're essentially building on someone else's land, and they can change the rules at any time. In this case, the government is in the process of changing the rules for TikTok.

John Gruber “Remember too: China itself bans all foreign social networks. Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Twitter/X, Pinterest — none of them are available in mainland China. It’s bananas that we allow an algorithmically-driven social media app controlled by China here.”

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AirPods Pro are rumored to receive a hearing-aid function in iOS 18, arriving this fall and likely to be announced at a Worldwide Developers Conference in June. Since my own hearing aids, bought in 2017, failed a couple of years ago, I've been hoping AirPods would be a viable alternative. This news sounds promising!

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In a major shift, Apple will allow iOS developers in the EU to distribute apps from the web, rather than via its App Store. The option, which it says will be made available to qualifying developers “later this Spring”, is being offered in response to the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) which puts obligations on how Apple can operate the App Store and iOS, which are designated as “core platform services” under the law.

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For years, I've wrestled with the iPad. Remember the dark days of Apple neglecting MacBooks in favor of tablets and introducing that shitty butter-fly keyboard? Like many during that time, I kept trying (and failing) to make the iPad my primary device.

But the truth is, I'm a desktop/laptop guy at heart. Over 40 years of ingrained habits are hard to break! Plus, I'm a die-hard Mac user – always have been, always will be.

So, in the spirit of simplifying my life, I decided to ditch the iPads now there is no more internal struggle about underutilizing them. I traded them in for an iPhone 15 Pro Max, joining my trusty M1 MacBook Air. With Apple silicon Macs everything changed for me. They are a game changer!

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I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. It's clear that social media has become deeply embedded in American society, influencing how we connect and share information. However, the algorithms that personalize our feeds create isolated echo chambers, reinforcing existing beliefs and hindering constructive conversations. This, coupled with the rampant spread of misinformation and disinformation, erodes trust in institutions and fuels confusion around important issues.

I recently started reading Kara Swisher's new book titled Burn Book and the prologue delves extensively into this very subject.

Facebook was supposed to be a tool to create “stronger relationships with those you love, a stronger economy with more opportunities, and a stronger society that reflects all of our values.”

All these companies began with a gauzy credo to change the world. And they had indeed done that, but in ways they hadn’t imagined at the start, increasingly with troubling consequences from a flood of misinformation to a society becoming isolated and addicted to its gadgets. […] “Facebook, as well as Twitter and Google’s YouTube and the rest, have become the digital arms dealers of the modern age,” I wrote in one of my first columns after I joined the New York Times as a columnist in 2018. “They have mutated human communication, so that connecting people has too often become about pitting them against one another and turbocharged that discord to an unprecedented and damaging volume. They have weaponized the First Amendment. They have weaponized civic discourse. And they have weaponized, most of all, politics.” […] Most of all, they often dismissed any weaponization as “unintended consequences.” […] Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.”

Let me be clear: Hitler didn’t need Instagram. Mussolini didn’t need to tweet. Murderous autocrats did not need to Snapchat their way to infamy. But just imagine if they’d had those supercharged tools. Well, Trump did, and he won the election, thanks in large part to social media. […] And Trump didn’t do it alone. Purveyors of propaganda, both foreign and domestic, saw an opportunity to spread lies and misinformation. Today, malevolent actors continue to game the platforms, and there’s still no real solution in sight, because these powerful platforms are doing exactly what they were designed to do. […] I love tech, I breathe tech. And I believe in tech. But for tech to fulfill its promise, founders and executives who ran their creations needed to put more safety tools in place. They needed to anticipate consequences more. Or at all. They needed to acknowledge that online rage might extend into the real world in increasingly scary ways.

Instead, far too many of these founders and innovators were careless, an attitude best summarized by the ethos on early Facebook office posters: “Move fast and break things.” I know it’s a software slogan and it would later change (Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg jokingly changed it to “Move fast with stable infra,” as in infrastructure, in 2014), but I still think it reflects a deep-seated childishness. Children like to break things. I’d have initially preferred “Move fast and change things.” Or, even more adult, “Move fast and fix things.” But they decided to start with “break,” and such carelessness has led to damage around the globe that, in turn, helped me understand what was happening to our own country. In August of 2016, investigative journalist Maria Ressa gave Facebook alarming data about people in the Philippines who were being targeted for graphic online abuse after criticizing President Duterte’s drug war. Facebook did not take down the pages until two years after her report. […] Each year since has brought bigger and fresher tech messes. Twitter, stupidly renamed X, has mutated into a platform where the richest man in the world offers his retweet support to racist, sexist, and homophobic conspiracies. AI’s deep fakes and misinformation open a virtual Pandora’s box, with the potential to unleash troubles to plague humankind faster than any actual plague. Chinese-owned TikTok makes parents feel better by employing safety features for teens, while the site could be extending the Communist Party’s surveillance state across the globe, according to increasing numbers of government officials I have interviewed around the world. 

Over time, I’ve come to settle on a theory that tech people embrace one of two pop culture visions of the future. First, there’s the “Star Wars” view, which pits the forces of good against the Dark Side. And, as we know, the Dark Side puts up a disturbingly good fight. While the Death Star gets destroyed, heroes die and then it inevitably gets rebuilt. Evil, in fact, does tend to prevail.

Then there’s the “Star Trek” view, where a crew works together to travel to distant worlds like an interstellar Benetton commercial, promoting tolerance and convincing villains not to be villains. It often works. I am, no surprise, a Trekkie, and I am not alone. At a 2007 AllThingsD conference well-known tech columnist Walt Mossberg and I hosted, Apple legend Steve Jobs appeared onstage and said: “I like Star Trek. I want Star Trek.” 

Now Jobs is long dead, and the “Star Wars” version seems to have won. Even if it was never the intention, tech companies became key players in killing our comity and stymieing our politics, our government, our social fabric, and most of all, our minds, by seeding isolation, outrage, and addictive behavior. Innocuous boy-kings who wanted to make the world a better place and ended up cosplaying Darth Vader feels like science fiction.

Burn Book, part memoir and part tech industry history, dives into the rise of Silicon Valley's titans and the impact of their creations.

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Nicolas Magand “The other day, I was getting frustrated with the iCloud sync of my RSS feeds in NetNewsWire. It works OK. It syncs between my phone and my computer, what else could I want? Well, it was a bit too slow for my taste, and not 100% reliable, so I subscribed to Feedbin just to make it smoother. It was not about convenience or efficiency, really; it was just about the details.”

Just yesterday I subscribed to Feedbin for the same reason. Besides offering a smoother experience, Feedbin keeps everything in sync across different apps. This means I can use Feedbin with NetNewsWire on my MacBook and Reeder on my iPhone and iPad, and my feed will always be up-to-date.

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Victoria Song, The Verge

I had mixed feelings when Apple did away with the wedge in favor of a more traditional shape for the M2 MacBook Air. Did it feel a bit like sacrilege? Sure, but at least the wedge wasn’t gone gone. There was still the M1 Air. Except now that the M3 Air is here, it’s been discontinued. Now, it really is the end of the wedge era and I can’t help but feel bereft.

[…]

But I also have an M1 MacBook Air that I use for work. Recently, jumping back and forth between the two, I’ve come to appreciate the wedge more than I thought I would. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but I find it easier to type on. When I’m writing a draft, the sloped edge is more comfortable under my palms. When I tuck it under my arm while walking through the office, it just feels better. […] But looking back, a wedge-shaped Air was present during some of the most momentous parts of my life and career. Now that I can’t get another one? I’m going to hold onto this M1 Air for as long as I can.

The other day I wrote that I was going to get a new M3 MacBook Air. Then I read this. My M1 wedge MacBook Air does everything I ask of it. There is absolutely no reason that I need an M3 Air. What I have is good enough. But, you never know? Apple's trade-in prices are pretty good right now.

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Nicolas Magand

I realised that Things was one of the best apps I had ever used. It’s well-made, good-looking, it motivates to be more organised, and I enjoy using the app, even to manage the most boring work projects. The Quick Entry shortcut? Incredibly good. The Quick Entry with Autofill shortcut? Even better. The Shortcuts integration? One of the best. Heck, even the note-taking part of this modest to-do app is better than half of the Markdown apps I have been testing. At one point, I had to accept the idea that Things was not only a truly delightful software experience, but Things made Reminders look like a piece of crap.

I like Reminders. It has good and useful features. Its design is more than adequate. It works great with Siri. I can share some lists with my wife, and everything just works. But using it after spending the day on Things really makes it look like a baby app, like an Electron-packaged web app made by people who haven’t smiled in decades.

Several months ago, I made the switch from Things to Reminders with GoodTask. However, after reading Nicolas' post, I realized how much I missed Things.

What I miss most are the UI layout, Quick Entry, and especially Quick Entry with Autofill on the Mac. Quick Entry is a convenient feature that allows you to add tasks quickly without opening the entire app. It's activated using a keyboard shortcut, after which a small window pops up for you to type in your task details.

Quick Entry with Autofill takes this feature a step further. While browsing a webpage or using another app like Apple Mail, you can leverage Autofill to automatically pull relevant information like the title and URL directly into your task. This feature is activated via a keyboard shortcut, with Things 3 handling the rest.

Having considered this, I spent the morning updating all my tasks back into Things.

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