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I am curious to explore other providers of generative artificial intelligence services. I am a paying subscriber to ChatGPT, but I haven’t seriously explored other alternatives yet, though I plan to do so. I fear missing things out if I ever leave OpenAI behind. I tested Perplexity, but I don’t believe in their business model. I think Claude from Anthropic seems to be the most interesting candidate. They have an iPhone and iPad app, just like OpenAI. From now on, I will systematically query both ChatGPT and Claude for my research needs and compare their performance.
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I started documenting before-and-after comparisons of different betas of Apple Liquid Glass. Search for “beforeandafter” in the document to locate those comparisons. Honestly, things are improving. That wasn’t expected.
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Discovered a fun Easter egg in iPadOS 26 beta6 Preview.app. It’s documented as exhibit #50 right here.
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A Strange & Frustrating Mac App Store Issue
Here’s a strange and frustrating issue with the Mac App Store on macOS Tahoe: I cannot re-download an app after testing it through TestFlight. This first occurred with Craft, which I tested this summer. When the version I was testing became official, I tried to download it, but the download froze at the end. Quitting the Mac App Store and rebooting my machine did not resolve the problem. Now, I am facing the same issue with Reeder. I tested the beta a few months ago, only to discover that the developer removed the build from TestFlight. When I went to the Mac App Store to download the official version, the download froze again and never completed. Now I’m unable to use an app for which I’m paying for. Submitted a feedback to Apple. Beta6 doesn’t fix the issue. I’m really hoping for a fix soon. See the behavior here.
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Am I starting to like Liquid Glass for the good and the bad things? Like they say: with beta6, it might be growing on me.
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People are excited with generative AI and this is legitimate but this excitement overshadow a question we should ask more often about genAI (and about any new tech trends): what do we lose in return? My guess is that we lose a lot but we’re not sure what exactly. When we start to learn about the losses through experience and studies, we will question, hopefully, our use of AI in general. That’s my hope.
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In my opinion, the best place for Liquid Glass is on the Apple Watch, because the overall graphic content is much more standardized and controlled. You rarely get weird backgrounds under UI elements.
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Updated my “Remembering The Story Behind Every Apple Computers I Ever Owned” page with more up-to-date info.
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I see a big increase in subscribers to my blog on Ghost since Ghost 6 was released this week. I don’t know if that will last, but hey, I’ll take it!
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Looking at the latest dev diary video from The Realmac software company, Elements CMS is progressing well, in my opinion. I can’t wait to try it out on Who Is Numeric Citizen website. But before that, I’ll have some more work to do, particularly on the highlights section that will be broken up in a few subsections. Stay tuned.
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Yesterday I showed my iPhone running iOS 26 to my son. I was scrolling through my notifications on the lock screen. The first thing he said was: woah… that is so… much harder to read.
Not cool. Not impressed. Just harder to read. He is 21. 🤷🏻♂️
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Please Apple, do me a favor, and ship beta5 today because I want to see the light but not through this Liquid Glass.
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I wrote these articles on Medium under the Numeric Citizen Journey in the last year and I wonder how different my readership would have been if I wrote these articles on Substack. Substack isn’t having a great time these days…
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Here’s the latest edition of the Ephemeral Scrapbook newsletter. About this edition: “Amid Apple Intelligence delays, Apple still makes money, a lot of it. Doomsayers will have to wait. This edition isn’t AI-news free. Sorry."
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Bye Bye (Again) Medium
My Medium membership is up for renewal on August 17th. I returned to Medium last year to share a special set of articles about my potential career pivot to freelancing. I wrote over a dozen articles on this topic, believing Medium was a suitable platform for personal and career-focused content. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Despite following all the SEO tricks, I earned only $1.64 in revenue, which I won’t receive since the minimum payout is $10. 😳 I expected my earnings to at least cover the cost of my Medium membership, but that didn’t happen. I also intended to read more content on the platform, but I didn’t. I thought I would gain more followers, but that didn’t occur either. I understand now that I need to move on1, 2.
Goodbye, Medium. It was one of my numerous experiments3. I’ll keep my account active but won’t write or share anything further.
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Some are doing vibe coding but me, I’m having a good vibe because of the view. 😬😜
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Using an external display with iPadOS 26 beta4 is still very problematic, especially when invoking the Control Center, the Notifications Center and dragging windows from the iPad to the external display.
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Still no clear effects of Apple Intelligence delays on Apple’s bottom line, apparently. Apple is not doomed, just yet.
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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.
