This week, I had a conversation about genAI with my youngest son, who’s 21 and just completed his bachelor’s degree in communication. He shared that he was relieved to be finishing his studies at a time when students are increasingly turning to these tools—sometimes appropriately, sometimes not—for their coursework and assignments. He also felt that many of his professors were unprepared for the changes AI is bringing to education. I completely understand his perspective. We live in a fascinating but scary times.

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. 🤷🏻‍♂️

HELP! I can’t redownload a specific app from the MAS! Other apps are downloading fine. How can I fix this? Was testing a TestFlight version of Craft, now I want to download the official release from the MAS. Tried deleting the app and rebooting, re-logging to the MAS, no avail. Running macOS Tahoe, both beta4 and beta5 experienced the same thing.

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…

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. ↩︎