One Big Regret of My Digital Life

One of the things I regret the most is not having had the idea of creating a blog in the 90s (and keeping it until today). Surprisingly, I learned about HTML, web servers like Apache and Netscape when it became popular1. I didn’t click with the idea of owning a small portion of the Internet to share what I was becoming at that time. What a missed opportunity.

  1. It’s not exactly true. I used to have and maintain a website about a subject that I still find fascinating: meteorology, circa 1994. ↩︎

For Micro.blog lovers and enthusiasts, I made a video summarizing February improvements and additions. Enjoy.

I made a big cleanup in my Shortcuts this morning. Boy, do I feel this app needs so much more work to be enjoyable to use. Can Apple fix this mess? Editing a long shortcut is not optimal. There should be a compressed or text-only mode with inline hyperlinks for variables and actions. Syncing is broken—no debugging option. There should be a way to turn off a shortcut so it doesn’t appear in places like share sheets. I wish Apple spent more time on Shortcuts than they do on Swift Playground. Oh, is Apple going to enable creating Shortcuts using GenAI? That would be really cool. 👀🤔

On Single-Purpose Device Attractiveness

This week during a work meeting with my office colleagues, one of them was using a “remarkable” tablet to take notes. I was sitting right next to him and could see the tablet in action. I must say I was impressed. It’s certain that a “remarkable” tablet offers very limited functionality compared to an iPad, but it raises the following question: Should Apple consider going back to creating single-purpose devices? For example, the iPhone killed the iPod, but I think if Apple re-entered the market with a new line of iPods, it would be very popular. And I think the same would be true for a note-taking tablet.

Lots of meetings today at the office. Used my iPad Pro all the time for note-taking. It’s such a wonderful and mighty device for that purpose. Even with iPadOS limitations. I’m excited for the next iteration. I can’t wait to see what’s coming next to this platform.

Yesterday, while writing and editing a report for one of our clients, I used ChatGPT for two different use cases. One use case was to ask for a summarization of what “firmware” is and how critical it is. The second use case is to define the pillars of a data management and governance policy in the enterprise. On that one, I asked for more details about managing unstructured data. The ChatGPT results were mind-blowing. I know a lot about this specific IT field, and I could validate the correctness of the answers. I saved a lot of time because of ChatGPT.

But what about my ethics?

Should I write a disclaimer in this report that says GenAI was used to put together some portions of this report? Is the client ready and mature enough to read this disclaimer? Will he understand that ChatGPT is in fact like an assistant to whom I asked to summarize what a data governance policy is? How do I cite my sources?

Today is the kind of day where I feel that I’m in a constantly moving mode: from Craft to Micro.blog or Bear 2. Closing this subscription, starting a new one. And all this for what? Content preservation? Data silos fighting? It’s exhausting.

On Apple Car Project Cancellation - It Did Make Any Sense Anyway

This whole Apple Car didn’t make any sense to me. It’s not Apple. A car is not a personal device. A personal device is a phone. A computer. Or a bike. One positive byproduct of this car journey is probably the birth of CarPlay 2.0, which was probably worked within the Apple Car project. But then, what else? AI? Maybe. I’m reading that the AI portion of the project will be folded into the other AI team(s) within Apple. It’s good because Apple needs all it can get in AI to stay relevant in that field and imagine the future beyond Siri.