Prose Hacking

Weekly output: Waze updates, Google Images turns 25, Samsung turns to more titanium, Frontier Airlines + Starlink, bill to ban Chinese cars

Fifteen years after leaving the Washington Post, I was sure that the paper's sometimes nightmarishly-bad IT couldn't hurt me anymore. And then I got the same letter in the mail that many other ex-Posties have received in recent days.

Weekly output: Copa Airlines + Starlink, price TBD

A little over six months ago, I asked for trouble by moving from the note-taking app I'd used for more than 15 years to a new one only days before CES. I didn't get that trouble, but the road from Evernote to Obsidian has still presented me with a few UX potholes.

Weekly output: not-so-independent agencies, location privacy, Virginia's data-center tax, Blue Origin's return-to-flight plans, civil supersonic flight, astronomy in VR, Backblaze

The president may want to make himself the face of the American franchise, even on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence's adoption. But nobody should feel obliged to indulge him in that wish or accept his resentful, reactionary vision of the United States--especially today.

Weekly output: Consumer Cellular's SpeakEasy brand, Uber's take rate, Google Play Store fees, Pixel 9 Pro screen replacement, Qualcomm's data-center ambitions, Meta scrapping "Off-Meta Activity" privacy setting, Feds poleaxe Polestar

If the government is going to have some expensive, high-performance aircraft flying over your head, the least it can do is give you a decent heads-up so you know when to step outside with a camera--or when not to be inside on a call.

Weekly output: Verizon revamps plans, edge and on-device AI in connected homes

My shortest visit ever to Austin in this century also felt vanishingly little like my prior trips to my favorite part of Texas. Which says something about the Reality Distortion Field aspect of SXSW...

Weekly output: AT&T iPad day pass, AI + used-car sales, AI + home health care, Mint Mobile, Kalshi, orchestrating AI agents, AI + car rental

I've gotten used to seeing people from other countries dunk on the U.S. for putting Trump back in the White House, but that feedback stung a little more coming from Brazilians who know what it's like to see a president try to overturn an electoral defeat with a violent insurrection.

Weekly output: Craig Newmark + Count von Count, T-Mobile freebies, Android fake call detection, election security

It's one thing to say that Elon Musk is a jerk or that his Starship rocket is an overly ambitious concept with a disappointing record to date. It is another, far-less-clueful thing to say that SpaceX is a failing exercise in crony capitalism or that NASA should still reserve human spaceflight to its own designs.

Weekly output: Pope Leo XIV on AI, American Airlines + Starlink, Taara photonics, New Glenn explosion, way less Waymo

Bruce Springsteen's work has been a part of my life for 40-plus years, but I keep finding new angles to it--like Wednesday at Nats Park in D.C., when songs I've known for decades hit different because of the troubled state of the United States.

Weekly output: AT&T's mass-market plans, digital transformations, ROI of AI, AI in Android and Chrome development, Firefox as anti-Chrome, AT&T's Build-A-Plan, DeepMind CEO on AGI, Starship v3 launch