Showing all posts tagged: trends
Apple Intelligence, merely smoke and mirrors?
15 March 2025
John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball:
What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis. The Apple that commissioned the futuristic “Knowledge Navigator” concept video in 1987 was the Apple that was on a course to near-bankruptcy a decade later. Modern Apple — the post-NeXT-reunification Apple of the last quarter century — does not publish concept videos. They only demonstrate actual working products and features.
This is heavy duty.
Apple’s AI offering, Apple Intelligence, isn’t even artificial, it is very much non-existent.
RELATED CONTENT
artificial intelligence, technology, trends
Social media is player versus player, IndieWeb is collaboration, support
12 March 2025
Santi Ruiz’s article 50 Thoughts on DOGE, being the Department of Government Efficiency, headed up by Elon Musk in the United States, isn’t usually the sort of material I link to here, but his write-up offers this fascinating insight into social media:
All of the above means that Elon looks into problems that are largely driven by institutional capture, structural incentives, and overregulation, and sees them instead as problems of waste, corruption, and fraud. Again, I don’t think this is about Elon’s personality so much as it is about the way the information he receives is structured. The more time you spend on the PvP platform that is social media, the more you will be primed to see enemies everywhere.
PvP, meaning player versus player, is a term more commonly seen in the realm of interactive gaming, but isn’t a half bad way to summarise the sometimes competitive, cut throat, nature of social media. Not that I’m suggesting blogging is, or was, any better.
Certainly not in the early days, before social media was a thing. But social media did seem to follow a similar trajectory to blogging. In the earliest years, when blogs were still called personal websites, there was an abundance of collaboration and commeradie. While that never completely went away, as blogging matured, it became more of a case of us versus them, or me against you.
We stopped being friends, and became enemies.
Those around in the early days of Twitter, circa 2007, may have noticed the same thing. Much cooperation initially, which eventually gave way to competition. Not wholly, and not everywhere, but overwhelmingly player versus player.
This is not something we see too often in the more supportive IndieWeb/Small Web space, though there are certainly differences in opinion at times. But I’ll take that over a PvP game from which there seems no escape at times.
RELATED CONTENT
IndieWeb, social media, trends
digg, once front page of the internet, slips on AI superpowers for a return
7 March 2025
News aggregator website digg — styled with a lower case d, just like disassociated — was once known as the front page of the internet, before falling on hard times in 2010.
Reddit went onto assume the front page of the internet mantle, but who knows, digg might be about to reclaim the crown. That’s if a comeback, masterminded by original founder Kevin Rose, together with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, gains traction.
A splash page presently declares digg is “the front page of the internet, with superpowers.” The superpowers in question are likely the AI technologies that will play a part in curating content. This I look forward to seeing. A few of my posts made it to digg’s front page way back in the day, which meant traffic spikes for days, and of course, profile.
RELATED CONTENT
Mirrors, not smartphones, driving students to distraction
7 March 2025
An English school principal has had all mirrors removed from school bathrooms, after students took to lingering in large groups in school toilets, to look at their reflections.
Anywhere else, it might be smartphones being blacklisted, but not at the William Farr Church of England Comprehensive School, a high school in the English county of Lincolnshire.
Students were frequently arriving late for classes because they were spending an excess of time gazing into the mirrors. They were also gathering in large numbers, which was making other of their classmates, who only wished to use toilets, uncomfortable.
RELATED CONTENT
Search engines and SEO are still useful for independent self-publishers
4 March 2025
From Joan Westenberg’s recent article: why personal websites matter more than ever.
SEO made it worse. SEO manipulation always favored platforms over individuals.
There’s little doubt rampant SEO manipulation deprived bloggers, independent self-publishers, of many readers in the past, and possibly continues to. But I still see good levels of referrals here via search engines, despite minimal utilisation of SEO. Maybe that’s because, ironically, I’ve always viewed SEO as a waste of time.
Back in the day when blogger in-person gatherings seemed to take place every other week, I took care not to bring SEO into any conversations I had. The dangers of doing so were akin to flying head first into a black hole. As in, sometimes there could be no escape. It seemed to me that if SEO wasn’t a thing, some people would have nothing else to talk about.
On the other hand, I don’t entirely want to bag out SEO either. Like it or lump it, SEO has a role, albeit a small role, in the work of independent self-publishers. Say what you will about search engines, and I know there’s strong opinions on the topic, but they still help people discover content and information, and reach this website. Even in the age of Google Zero.
And when it comes to content promotion, albeit passive promotion, search engines are far less effort than social media channels. For a long while social media channels were my main method of promoting content, but I was never fully comfortable doing things that way. I often felt I was foisting stuff upon people. Even though they had chosen to follow me.
Plus social media channels always felt like a distraction to what was really important: my website. Leaving the task of spreading word about my work to the search engines seems like a better idea, while allowing me to dispense with the socials. It’s truly a set and forget process. All I need do is publish, and move on to something else. The search engines do the rest.
Of course, that’s not the way anyone attempting to manipulate, or whatever they call it, the rankings, the SERPs, I think it is, see things. But the search engines are not oblivious to this activity, as much as an overstatement of the obvious that may sound. Because if SEO manipulation was truly excessive, surely anything I publish would go unnoticed by search engines, as it would be crowded out.
But that doesn’t seem to be the case. The search engines referrals may be modest, but deliver more than the socials ever did. Perhaps we can still dare to imagine that content remains paramount. Despite on-going SEO manipulation and, of course, ever present algorithms.
RELATED CONTENT
blogs, self publishing, social media, trends
How many people will Oscar winners thank? How long will they speak for?
3 March 2025
A forty-five second limit for Oscar acceptance speeches was introduced in 2010, but that doesn’t always stop the motivated. Or those who feel they need to acknowledge everyone who contributed to their award. Back in the day — seventy plus years ago — acceptances were usually only a few words long. But a decade ago, they were pushing three-hundred words, says Stephen Follows:
Acceptance speeches in the middle of the 20th century were exactly that, a chance to accept the award and say thank you. Over time, they have evolved into a platform to express opinions, share emotions, and highlight personal journeys.
Why the increase? Having the undivided attention of what was once a large, captive audience, might have been something to do with it. Today, of course, Oscar recipients have the social media platforms, offering a continuous outlet, not just forty-five seconds of television.
On the subject of social media platforms, the size of Oscar television audiences has, overall, been in decline — at least in the United States — plunging to a nadir of about ten million viewers in 2021. What’s going on there? Were people keeping tabs on the Oscar’s ceremony through the likes of TikTok and Instagram, or has there been a general loss of interest in the awards?
RELATED CONTENT
awards, entertainment, film, Oscars, trends
Drop the S, add a 16, the iPhone SE is now the 16e
28 February 2025
Aside from a two-year gap, from 2018 to 2020, I’ve had one or other of the iPhone SE handsets since 2016. A distinct feature of the SE models was their size. They were generally smaller than the other handsets in the iPhone range. I have big hands, prompting people to say to me, why the f**k did you choose an SE? I selected the SE precisely for its size. It fits perfectly into my back pocket. I also figured that the smaller size might deter me from using the device too often.
Well, that was back in 2016. The big hands, small handset combination meant — to my mind at least — the device would be that little bit more difficult to use. This especially while I was out and about, forcing me to wait until I was back at my laptop to do any heavy-duty sort of work tasks. That was partly successful at first, but given my phone also doubles as a watch, hands-off time was actually pretty low. Yes, I know: what ever was I thinking.
But now the SE is no more. The range has been superseded by the 16e. This name has been the subject of much conjecture, if that’s any surprise. Dropping the S, but keeping the E, means it is different from the old SE range, but only sort of. Adopting the 16 title is seen by some as bringing Apple’s SE-type handset offering into the annual handset update, meaning there will be a 17e next year. The SE-type handsets will no come along on a now-and-then basis.
That’s what some people are speculating anyway. What Apple ends up doing with the e range, remains to be seen. The 16e is a little bigger than the SE 2 — good, it’ll still slide nicely in a back pocket — and is the lowest priced handset in the 16 range. The camera remains similar to the SE’s, meaning I’ll still be unable to take high-definition video photos of the full Moon.
Not that’ll be switching over just yet, even though the 16e becomes available in Australia today, I think my old SE still a little bit of life left in it. From what I can tell, reviews of the 16e have been somewhat mixed, with some writers saying something like, “it’s good, but…”, while others are unsure why Apple even released the model. John Gruber meanwhile, describes the 16e as an iPhone for people who don’t want to think much about their phone.
That pretty summed up what I liked about the old SE range.
RELATED CONTENT
smartphones, technology, trends
Combating food waste with restaurant doggy bags
25 February 2025
Being able to take the left-overs of a restaurant meal home seems like a sensible idea all around. Aside from dishes that, for whatever reason, may not be safe to eat later on, or the next day. While some dining establishments are averse to the practice, we’ve seldom had any problems.
One place doggy bags are direly needed are in food court situations in shopping malls. Here, much food is served as if it were a restaurant, and only sometimes in take-away cartons. We eat regularly at a place near where we live, and the food waste — plates of sometimes barely touched meals — defy belief. It makes me wonder why people ordered the food in the first place. But, if a way to take those left-overs home was an option, maybe not all of it all would go to waste.
RELATED CONTENT
Next up: the James Bond sequel trilogy and Bond villain origin stories
24 February 2025
Long time producers of the James Bond films, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, have agreed to sell the decades old film franchise to Amazon. The new arrangement gives the tech giant full creative control, and Amazon has already indicated they intend to “move beyond the franchise of the James Bond movies”.
Who knows exactly what that means at this stage, but looking at what happened to Star Wars, after series creator George Lucas sold the sci-fi saga to Disney in 2012, probably gives us a pretty good idea of what to expect.
Good luck 007.
I gave up on the Bond films years ago. I think 2012’s Skyfall was the last one I went to a cinema to see. I never made it to No Time to Die, the Daniel Craig finale, which was released in 2021.
But Bond had stopped being Bond a long time ago. Indeed, the entire premise belonged to a bygone era. The barely plausible Bond had ceased to be relevant. Even Roger Moore, who portrayed the fictional British intelligence agent seven times between 1972 and 1985, once told late Irish–British broadcaster Terry Wogan, he thought the character was ridiculous:
“Bond films are so outrageous, the stunts are so outrageous,” Moore told Wogan. “Everything is beyond belief.”
In a way though, the slapstick nature of the earlier films was a big part of their allure. The stories were a bit of light-hearted, if fast paced, escapism. Efforts in recent decades to make the series darker, and grittier, to appeal to a new, and wider audience, seemed futile to me. Why not retire the James Bond films all together, and create a brand new character, and story arc, instead of rehashing something that’s decades old? But this is a point I’ve made before.
It’s not like there’s a shortage of new stories to bring to the big screen. That, however, is clearly not the way Amazon sees the situation. As with Star Wars, they know there’s a ready, nostalgia craving audience, waiting to see whatever new Bond offerings are forthcoming.
I take Amazon’s desire to “move beyond” will see movies, TV shows, video games, and graphic novels, among other things, based on other characters — from what will no doubt become the Bond universe — assuming centre stage in stories of their own. With nary a glimpse of Bond in sight. I don’t know, some of this stuff might be ok, but maybe it won’t.
Good luck 007 fans.
RELATED CONTENT
How would you like to go without technology for twenty-hours?
18 February 2025
This fund raising event, taking place in Perth, Australia, on Monday 29 March 2025, has been popping up in my news feeds in recent weeks.
Two hundred and fifty participants will spend twenty-hours in a space just two metres square, sans screens and devices. Talking is also out of the question. Instead, those taking part will write their thoughts in a journal. The goal is to raise a quarter of a million dollars to create two thousand and one hundred Mental Health Maintenance scholarships for young adults.
Twenty-hours without screens, devices, and talking? This sounds like an opportunity some people would want to jump at…
RELATED CONTENT