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."

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.

  1. The vibe on Medium feels strange. The presence of generative AI often lingers in my mind while reading content there. ↩︎

  2. I aim to focus my creative energy on the right things; doing less often leads to a more sustainable and enjoyable journey. ↩︎

  3. Write.as, Substack were other experiments, too. ↩︎

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.

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.

Referring to an earlier post today, I think I know why I’m publishing less often long articles. Building each newsletter edition takes quite some time and is rather disruptive-I’m constantly on the lookout to find new and interesting stuff to put into each ephemeral scrapbook. Learning to use Elements proved to be more demanding that I thought (but it was worth it!). And more recently, maintaining my visual catalog of Liquid Glass failures also requires some dedication, thank you, Apple.

Liquid Glass disillusioned here: Dear Apple, if an app constantly needs to darken or lighten the background or adjust control transparency for the user interface to be barely usable, perhaps this indicates a flawed approach to user interface design? 😵‍💫