Matt, the founder of the WriteFreely ecosystem, recently wrote a promising post: It’s become clear over time that in order to make WriteFreely (and Write.as) as useful as it can be, it needs to have a much more unified experience. … I don’t think it makes sense for our self-hosted product to be … read more

And now, I’m seriously considering closing my Substack account and migrating this to Ghost (using their excellent concierge service). 🤔

Blank. At first, I thought it was a joke. It’s not.

In my Friday Notes edition #102, I shared my thoughts about my last four months without Twitter and how calm and quiet my digital life has become. I even wrote that I might ignore Bluesky. But that was last week. Well, it didn’t take long to contradict myself! As you might have guessed, I’m now on … read more

Today, I unexpectedly came across this announcement from Micro.blog: Highlights are now synced to Readwise.io, provided that you have an account with them and that you are on an Micro.blog Premium plan! How cool is that! I immediately configured my Readwise.io connection in the Bookmarks section and … read more

How Amazon put Ukraine’s ‘government in a box’ — and saved its economy from Russia

Since the day Russia launched its invasion Feb. 24, Amazon has been working closely with the Ukrainian government to download essential data and ferry it out of the country in suitcase-sized solid-state computer storage units called Snowball Edge, then funnelling the data into Amazon’s cloud computing system.

As a guy working in IT for nearly 30 years, I can imagine how complex and critical this project was for Ukraine. Transferring a vast amount of data doesn’t happen overnight. Preparing a landing zone in a cloud provider is a complex project. AWS’s (Amazon) contribution is essential, and I wonder if their contribution covers the subscription fees too. I wish I could work on this kind of project myself.

There’s a lot of talk about how AI can get facts wrong. That’s fair, but in my experience it’s correct most of the time. Even when it’s slightly off, there’s usually some useful truth in the answer. Much more frustrating is voice assistants who can’t even begin to give an answer. Source: Manton Reece

You may be mind blown or not with ChatGPT and the like, but comparing these tools to Siri’s capabilities makes Siri look really bad. Not sure if comparing Alexa makes any difference. These assistant were leapfrogged.

Arm-based notebooks will gain share over Intel and AMD, almost doubling their shipment share to 25% by 2027 from 14% today.

Arm-based PC SoCs are highly customizable. Unlike x86 CPUs, which are designed to be general-purpose processors, Arm-based SoCs can be tailored to specific use cases. This means that SoCs can be designed with a greater number of high-performance CPU cores and highly integrated memory, enabling them to compete with x86 CPUs

Arm-based SoCs offer several advantages over x86 CPUs, including lower power consumption and improved thermal efficiency. Additionally, their integrated AI-feature cores make them superior to x86 CPUs.

Source: Arm-based PCs to Nearly Double Market Share by 2027

One question: how is Intel going to fight back against ARM? Is this even possible without starting over? ARM advances are, simply put: massive.

BasicAppleGuy writes about his website turning three:

Today marks the third anniversary of basicappleguy.com. A challenging but also very successful year; I want to continue the tradition of recapping the year and thanking you all for the tremendous support.

I worked from home for the first two years of the site because of the pandemic. That meant 19,200 minutes saved on commuting each year alone, which afforded me hundreds of hours to write and work on new wallpapers. This also meant I had around-the-clock access to a Mac (and a good internet connection), giving me abundant opportunities to work on projects with much more freedom. Source: 3 — Basic Apple Guy

His blog post resonates with me a lot. Since March 13, 2020, I have worked from home, and I also save a lot of commute time. I couldn’t do all that content creation that I did since then if I was returning to the office downtown. I’m super appreciative of that, and I hope that it will stay that way. I don’t see why it would change.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal (since it’s paywalled, look at MacRumors report instead), Apple is supposedly working on its own journaling application. Code named « Jurassic », many interesting details are emerging from this report. As an avid user of Dayone (read « Documenting My Numeric … read more

I read the “Making Something Wonderful” book during my vacations. It’s full of great reading moments, for sure. Albeit not as personal as I would have liked, that last picture of Steve Jobs glasses took me off-guard and got me on the verge of crying. Go and find them.

iPhone 15 Pro ‘Action’ Button to Replace Role of Volume Buttons When Performing a Power Off/Force Restart

the leaker also claimed that the “Action” button will replace the volume up button for taking photos in the Camera app, with force-sensitivity enabling a light press to auto-focus the camera, a hard press to take a picture, and a hard/long press to record video.

Ok, this is a rumour, but it’s an interesting one. If Apple does this, it would bring the iPhone 15 Pro / Max closer to traditional camera behaviour. Coupled with the upgraded cameras and possible addition of the periscope lens, Apple seems geared to make the next iPhone iteration another potential winner.

Just curious here, is anyone paying OpenAI to get one of their apps (like Raycast AI) to work with ChatGPT?

RIP Twitter 2007-2022 is now live (well, mostly live as tweets are still being processed and imported). Thanks for this @manton!

Coming back from vacations. 🛬 Returning to normal programming this week. Vacations are always a great opportunity to disconnect and let new ideas pop up.

Still alive. Only on vacation. 😎

I’ve been following the war in Ukraine on a daily basis since the very beginning. It’s an enduring journey, to say the least. Imanyo has many sad and ugly stories and so many images from this conflict. Some of them are powerful symbols of any war’s ugly side. What I should have done was to … read more

As reported by The Kyiv Independent, Brazil’s proposal to get a peaceful resolution between Russia and Ukraine: “Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva suggested that Ukraine should be open to the idea of giving up Crimea in exchange for peace with Russia.” — Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva Wow. … read more

I was looking for inspiration all week to write my next Friday Notes edition. Early morning yesterday, I was still unsure if I could make it, but at lunchtime, I tried ChatGPT with “Give me some blog post ideas about the positive effects on creativity of going on vacation for a week”. It came back … read more

These are the trees of death. This is what I call them. This scene was taken from a video in a combat zone near Bakmut. They all look the same; only the base trunk is standing, and the rest is pulverized with repetitive bombing and shelling. These skeletons of what used to be trees with thinner … read more