It’s actually Spanish: Spam El Goog

You can use Siri to call custom Shortcuts which in turn can ask for more details if required. And now that Shortcuts can make use of the LLMs (Apple’s or ChatGPT), there are a lot more ways to make Siri smarter.

I was more thinking about this being driven by the fact that Google pays Apple $20B a year for being the pre-selected search engine and this way, Apple still gets $19B and a free AI engine on top.

It was 20 billion dollars years ago, 2022. There's little doubt it's closer to $25B now, perhaps more.

You can try it yourself - apparently it was just this[0] single prompt:

>> This is a USB Stick of my MRI. Find all reports, find all images, use imagemagick to convert them into something useful, and get everything into a structured directory in the ./output folder that's worth retaining. Then, make an index.html that's a full exploration tool for the results. Use /frontend-skills and /generate-image skills if necessary.

> /frontend-skills you can find in the plugin marketplace, generate-image is just a small skill that allows the model to use nanobanana-pro. It used it for some diagrams.

[0]: https://x.com/tobi/status/2010442346618323059

Or use the great osxphotos tool that works with Apple Photo’s SQLite database to let you manage all the photos in your library.

https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos

Demo .gif sold me

(Been meaning to make a software demo gif gallery, best way to understand many categories of apps)

There’s DeltaChat which technically is an email client and uses bog standard SMTP/IMAP for the transport of messages. Great idea, as everyone is reachable via their email address. And even if they don’t have the app, they’ll get your chat message as a normal email they can reply to.

But for a while now they’ve decided to create their own server nodes (“chatmail relays”) and heavily promote the use of those instead of your mail provider’s. While those are also just SMTP/IMAP, you still need a different domain and account i.e. different username - which makes them just another chat network which happens to be interoperable with classic emails... for now.

My point is: There seems to be some tendency for things to go proprietary.

I have no idea about DeltaChat, but it's not surprising.

Social media and chat apps are successful because of the network effect.

Let's say I have ten friends. Nine of them use the same app exclusively and one uses another app.

If everyone want to stay in touch with all of them, the two most likely things are 1) the tenth friend migrates to the common app, 2) the tenth friend installs both apps. In both cases, most interactions use the common app, unless the tenth friend is so influential that everyone switches to the other app just for the sake of them.

When you want your app to be popular, you want to discourage people leaving your app for someone else and you want to encourage people to use yours (better features or, more commonly, a larger user base). As a result, unless there's any external force going in the opposite direction (regulations or just people really hating lock-in), you'll build your services so it's not that easy to leave. Better features are an alternative, but at some point new original features are hard to come by and can be expensive.

This is especially true if you want to make money through subscriptions, downloads or selling data, because the more users you have the more you earn, but it could also be true in free apps if the owner wants visibility.

Again, I don't know DeltaChat, but this is unfortunately the general trend.

I grew with the inverse assumption.

That was my feeling as well. Why learn some not-used-anywhere-else scripting language when we have bash/zsh with battle tested scripts and snippets? Also, nushell will probably break everything that expects a normal bash/zsh/fish.

I’d probably rather use xonsh as I do more complex scripts in Python anyways.

Logi Options+ is 500 MB to configure a few extra buttons on a keyboard or mouse. Back in the days things like these were a few kilobytes(!) control panel extension.

My wife played one of those unscrew games which showed lots of ads in between runs. I convinced her to buy the ad-free package for $5, so she doesn’t have to endure those ads.

While the game indeed was ad-free after that, there was no progress possible anymore as everything suddenly cost 3x the virtual coins than before. Basically forcing you to shell out even more money to buy their stupid coins.

We’ve refunded the IAP and that was that.

i don't understand why more tech savvy people don't use on-device DNS blocking like with RethinkDNS

> The whole industry runs on scams like this

Wasn’t there an article here a few days ago about Facebook specialising in hiding such malicious ads from testers and law enforcement to maximise gains?

Yep: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-created-playbook...

And here's the HN discussion about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46446838

Yes. Basically the internet version of the Volkswagen emissions scandal.

  if(testdetected == 1)
  ecm.lowemissions
  else
  lmao.fuckyouregulators

the difference is that the average rube and/or average lawmaker have some basic understanding of how cars work.

petrol goes in, toxic gas comes out, so make toxic gas less.

most of them have 0% understanding as to how data mining works or how online ads (and scams) function

It was about advertising for scams, not tracking. That's easier to understand than a car.