Nobody Needs To Know How Many People Are Playing A Singleplayer Video Game. Nobody!

If the number of people playing a game is ever found to be an unacceptable number, then I'm afraid that's it. That game is in trouble. Maybe even dead.

Wed Aug 14 2024

Every time Google dinged Apple during its Pixel 9 launch event

[Sameer Samat, the president of the Android ecosystem at Google] mentioned that “Gemini is available around the world right now, far beyond English speakers and a single market.” That final clarification seems to be a direct shot at Apple Intelligence, which isn’t widely rolled out yet and will only be available to English speakers in the US once it launches this fall.

Weird to see them bragging that you can get hallucinogenic, incorrect, and sometimes dangerous answers to your questions in over 200 countries. Google's own employees had little faith in Gemini (or Bard as it was called at the time) when Google rushed its half-baked AI out the door, leading to glue on pizza, telling people to jump off bridges, etc. Considering how terrible Gemini and Google AI answers have been, I appreciate Apple’s cautious approach. Samat’s comments come across as avoidant and out-of-touch.

As an aside, hardware events like this from Google and others often feel very unsurprising. When announcing new devices, I’d hope that their brand-new Pixels can outperform the iPhone I’ve had for 11 months. If not, what are we even doing here?

Tue Jul 23 2024

Paul Mann

Fri Jun 14 2024

WWDC24 and Apple Intelligence

I found WWDC24 to be a bit of a mixed bag.

I’m excited for the quality of life updates across Mac and iPhone, including the new Passwords app, updates to Mail, and the continuity stuff from the phone to the computer. I’m also interested but cautious about some of the intelligence stuff Apple showed off.

I’m terribly disorganized when it comes to the things on my phone and computers (ex: I have documents spread across 3-4 different apps) so having a more personalized (and private) “assistant” on my phone could be really beneficial. I like the ability to teach Siri how to use apps to automate repetitive tasks, sort of like what Rabbit was promising for the R1. Lastly, our household uses Siri a lot via the HomePod in our living area so the improvements there will be nice.

On the flip side, the image generation stuff looked awful and the whole idea felt very un-Apple to me. I honestly believe the presentation would have been better received without any of that included. I think it’s also a shame to see these sorts of features announced without any mention of how this impacts Apple’s environmental efforts.

Above all, it’s nice to see that Apple will be rolling this out in stages, as a beta, rather than forcing all sorts of half baked “updates” like we’ve seen from Microsoft and Google.