If the world wasn’t chaotic enough, get ready for an invasion of the home humanoid robots. My cynical side predicts mechanical Turks, or rather Cambodians and Vietnamese, controlling these remotely as a service that is not (yet) subject to tariffs.

Big news: DEVONthink 4 is almost out as a public beta. A Reddit user got an early look at the announcement and a few things stick out:

• As expected (and hoped for), AI features prominently, with options to integrate your preferred online model
• There now seems to be built-in version control
• Purchase (or upgrade from v3) gets you updates for a year, after that you pay for continuous updates

I wish AI integration was on-device only as online integration will limit the types of data I can use it on, but still, sign me up! (↬r/devonthink)

Listening to the most recent episode of ATP, I learned a surprising fact about how Apple developers see their user statistics: the number of people who opt out of sharing is not available, and the only statistics developers get is about the users who opted in. This may make naïve sense — hey, they don’t want you to know about them so we’ll erase them from existence Soviet-style — but is in fact statistical malpractice. The numbers Apple does share are only a sample of the total user base, which is fine as long as you know or can estimate the size of the population you are sampling. Without a way to estimate the denominator, the numbers are meaningless.

The bare minimum that Apple could and should do, without breaking any privacy rules, is to share the number of people who opted out. With this number in hand, a developer would be able to project worst-case scenarios and likely ranges for each statistic of interest. If Apple dedicated just a tiny bit more resources to developer relations, they could automate this step and build in worst-case numbers into the interface. A more sophisticated company that cares about the developer ecosystem could even create complex predictions models that would give both worst-case numbers and the 95% confidence intervals for each statistic in question.

Why should Apple care, other than doing a solid to their developer ecosystem with a minimal investment? Well, by making their default user statistics useless they are in fact incentivizing developers large and small to track their users by other means. Large developers may do that anyway since they are likely to have a could component to their app. But an indie developer may turn to third party services: if I am a teenager working on my first big app I will probably turn to the fastest and cheapest way to track, and not knowing anything about anything I am going to guess some of the offerings in that part of the price-value spectrum are going to be less than scrupulous.

So this is how Apple’s privacy-minded view combined with thriftiness and lack of care towards developer experience can lead directly to worse overall privacy for their users. What a surprise.

Happy Friday! A few links for the week’s end:

• De-Atomization is the Secret to Happiness (ᔥOliver Burkeman)
• A Pattern Language which I’ve read in hard copy but makes so much more sense as a website
• How I use LLMs, a YouTube video from the OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy
• 50 years of travel tips

ChatGPT can now take any photo you send it and create an image of any style based on it (↬Stratechery). The results range from OK to spectacular, particularly if the style is simple, and the Internet is now awash with famous photos done in the style of Studio Ghibli.

Miyazaki would be horrified and out of respect to him I won’t link to any of it, but this update has immediate and great effect on our household as we will now have all of our family photos redone in his style, for personal and private use.

A few changes to my iPhone setup, courtesy of a YouTube video which is itself c/o r/dumbphones:

1. Dumbify, which is exquisite.
2. SocialFocus is quite good as well.
3. Only Tot remains in the dock, and thank goodness it has a grayscale icon.
4. Goodbye, silicone case — I’ve gone case-less.

So far so good.

A brief Q&A:

• John Burn-Murdoch: Have humans reached peak brain power? A: Yes
• Alex Tabarrok: What did we learn from torturing babies? A: The power of motivated reasoning
• Raghuveer Parthasarathy: Why don’t academics care about artificial intelligence? A: See questions 1 and 2

A less hopeful harbinger of the future: someone in Serbia — most likely the government — seems to have used sonic weapons to disperse a 100K+ strong crowd of peaceful protestors. Here is a convincing audio analysis, and here are a few videos. Coming soon to a protest near you.

When Tim Berners-Lee has something to say about the future of social media I listen, even if it ends up being a pitch for his next two projects. They are Solid, a standard of data sharing across platforms, and Inrupt, a “data wallet” built on top of Solid. Godspeed, and may he avoid xkcd #927.

Here is a great quote on leadership in John Gruber’s pre-post-mortem of Apple Intelligence:

The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI. It’s also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised features last week. Those are problems, not fiascos, and problems happen. They’re inevitable. Leaders prove their mettle and create their legacies not by how they deal with successes but by how they deal with — how they acknowledge, understand, adapt, and solve — problems. The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that.

“Leadership” is a suitcase word and although I disagree with most of the concepts packed into it, maybe it has not become completely useless.