Finer Things in Tech

Nerdstalgic is a great YouTube media and culture analysis channel, and this recent video is a great example: Directed by the Russo Brothers, adapted from Simon Stalenhag haunting dystopian graphic novel starring Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Stanley Tucci and Jason Alexander, The Electric State isn’t a bad movie, it’s just an empty one, which kind of makes it worse. It’s a greatest hits…

For a while I’ve used utilities like Bumpr and now Choosy for Mac to open certain links in an alternative browser, mainly for privacy reasons. Things like all Google, YouTube, Facebook, and other icky companies, for example, open in my alt browser (Firefox for years, now Vivaldi). I have simple rules like “if a link includes facebook.com, open it in X browser.” Or “if I click a link from Y app,…

Nick Reuben: I think we can do better. “Slop” evokes a tepid cylinder of condensed cream of mushroom soup, glumly wibbling in a chipped bowl. When I think of GenAI, I picture something closer to tropical insects laying eggs beneath soft flesh of victims. There’s something parasitical and sinister about flaying the skin of artists who’ve explicitly spoken out against GenAI and then gleefully…

Niccolo Venerandi breaks down some of the technical reasons behind why Bluesky is, shall we say, not living up to its promise of decentralization. I suspect it is by design. TL;DR: They claim to want to decentralize, but the protocol is built in a way as to be prohibitively expensive for anyone but large businesses to set up a connected server. And in my layperson’s reading of it, this…

Apple is apparently working on massive redesigns of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Here’s Bloomberg’s original report (paywalled) and 9to5 Mac’s summary. Bloomberg’s headline calls it “dramatic.” 9to5 quotes a snippet of “the biggest revamp since iOS 7,” which is quite the tall order. I’d like to go on record that I actually liked the iOS 7 redesign, or at least what it eventually turned into. The…

Despite its problems, one thing I love about Reddit is all the strange and funny reasons why a subreddit, and thus a new community, can be created. Someone cracks a joke or floats an idea in a comment, and right before your eyes it can blossom into an entirely new community, sometimes with broad appeal, sometimes just as niche humor. One of my favorite examples (of the latter) is the subreddit…

Aside: Should I write about more culture and media stuff I’m interested in here or on my personal blog? Let me know here, on Mastodon, or Tumblr. This is a nice, nine-minute video essay from Nerdstalgic that lays out the ways the Alien franchise painted itself into a strange corner by (technically) three reboots, strange homages by its creator to his previous work, and an inability to land on…

I think Apple's sales pitch of privacy is solid and important overall. But Safari is not the leg to stand on, thanks to Apple's financial deal with Google. And no, I don't care about the nuance of this particular situation.

Great app for great social media gets a couple big hitter features and a bunch of QoL improvements.

On the latest version of macOS and Pages, I dragged a file from Finder into messages. Before sending, it displayed a unique preview of the file with a menu option to either collaborate with the recipient, or just send a copy.