Building a 'Relationship' With Corporations

I tend to be super loyal. I’ve been an Apple fan forever (read “The Roots of my Passion for Apple”), even though there are things that put me off (too many to list here). The same is slowly happening with OpenAI. I’ve tested alternative services but always come back to OpenAI’s offerings. They’re far from perfect—just like Apple—both from a corporate point of view and in terms of products and services. And yet, I’m increasingly hooked on ChatGPT, Atlas, and their LLM “personality.” The conversation memory in ChatGPT and the browser memories are helping build this relationship on the knowledge OpenAI is slowly building on me. It’s scary.

John Gruber is asking:

But even if Apple is correct about that, at some point, after being handed loss after loss in rulings from courts and regulatory bodies around the globe, shouldn’t they change their strategy and start trying to offer their own concessions, rather than wait for bureaucrat-designed concessions to be forced upon them?

I’m glad he is asking this question. If Gruber is fed up with this attitude, I guess it’s time to think differently, Apple.

I’m reading some pushback against ChatGPT Atlas — or, more generally, against browsers that aren’t really web browsers but skins on top of Chromium that enable user behaviour and data collection in novel ways. I’m not sure how I feel about these opinions. For now, the way I’m using ChatGPT Atlas is like ChatGPT client. I don’t use agents. I never will. It’s mostly about content summarization and analysis.

Existential question: I follow a very popular author who writes constantly about Apple. I know he uses a lot of AI-generated artwork. One caught my attention today. Since he didn’t create this artwork himself, am I entitled to copy it and use it without permission? 👀

Why All This?

Read later services (Readwise, Pocket, Readwise, Inoreader, etc.), bookmarking apps and services (Anybox, Raindrop, etc.), downloading, summarizing, and tagging—whether used together or separately—the issue remains the same: I rarely revisit content. Content quickly becomes outdated and loses relevance. This pattern reflects a common challenge in digital content management. Despite the ease of saving and organizing information for future reference, the practical use of these saved digital tidbits often diminishes over time. As new information emerges and contexts change, what once seemed valuable or interesting can fade into obscurity, making the effort of saving feel less worthwhile. This raises questions about the effectiveness of these tools and whether they truly serve my long-term informational needs.

I’m spending a lot of time online and on my computer each week for my blogs, probably around 10 to 25 hours. I wonder how skilled I could become if I dedicated those hours to learning a new field like psychology or music.

Om Malik’s analysis on recent corporate memo from Zuckerberg at Meta:

There is about 25 percent genuine strategic content, the rest is aspirational marketing and corporate positioning. For instance, infrastructure commitments and device strategy show the seriousness of the effort. However, claims about superintelligence being “in sight” are inflated for competitive reasons.

Me: This is how a tech bubble is inflated, until it blows up. Wait for it.