Category: Tech

Thoughts on gadgets and tech news or some cool new thing I am messing with.

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Thoughts on How to Speak Machine

How to Speak MachinePicked up John Maeda’s How to Speak Machine: Computational Thinking for the Rest of Us and read through it pretty quickly, but I’m not sure it was a worthwhile read for me and I don’t think I’d recommend it for anyone already familiar with modern software design.

Maeda spends the majority of the book’s 200 pages explaining the basics and extolling the value of UX research, product design, agile delivery, and iterative development and comparatively little on the actual premise of the book.

Both Amazon and Maeda frame the book as a way for designers to understand “the complex world of AI and machine learning”, but while it hints at AI’s transformative potential these mentions are more speculative than practical. There really isn’t any actionable insights or detailed explorations of how AI can concretely impact design work today.

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Use AI to highlight and summarize podcasts with Snipd

Been enjoying using Snipd lately for capturing podcast notes/highlights.

Anytime there’s something I want to capture I mark it and their AI generates transcripts & highlights. Those highlights are then automatically exported to my PKM (Obsidian) making it easy find later for future reference. Worth checking out if you listen to a lot of podcasts and especially if you’re already using some sort of system to save the highlights to.

Check out this example of a snippet from a recent episode of Cal Newport’s podcast:

I still use Overcast for all my tech/sports/entertainment podcast listening, but having a separate app for my business/design/productivity shows that helps me remember what I learn has been really useful.

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I wish the future had more buttons

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Carplay Porsche High Res 2048x1152

Apple shows off more of the next generation of CarPlay with Aston Martin and Porsche. I’m still not sure if it will ever actually release in any cars anyone actually owns, but Apple’s Next Generation CarPlay does look pretty cool and also looks like it could desperately use some physical controls.

Crossposted on Mastodon

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Anytype, the everything app

I’m in deep with Obsidian myself, but I found Anytype, “the everything app”, this week on Reddit and it’s super interesting looking. Attempting to be a local-first, open source Notion competitor. Definitely worth a look if you like Notion but don’t want to be locked into VC backed startup.

I personally like that Obsidian is just markdown files on your local machine, but that brings with it a bit of complexity and unfriendliness that some might find intimidating.

Crossposted on Mastodon

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Humane reveals the AI Pin

Humane’s AI Pin tech looks kinda interesting, but mostly pointless. And even worse, in their prerecorded demo they featured multiple factual AI errors. The fact that they didn’t fact check the AI responses and then released their big reveal video with errors in it, seems like a worse sign for the company than making the errors in the first place.

It just seems like all of this will be part of your smartphone well before the mass market is interested in a device like this.

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Zombie TiVo

It’s 2023 and I just got a marketing email from TiVo. Based off a search of my email, the last email I got from them was in 2007.

While I admit I often forget they’re still around, but it certainly can’t be a good sign for them if they’re resurrecting email lists from 16 years ago to try to drum up business. ?‍♂️