tech

culture faith favorite highlighted noise saturday night video tech

  • Pocket Closing

    Mozilla made a surprise announcement today that they are closing the Pocket read-it-later service. With nothing but a bland, corporate statement to go on, I imagine users have a fair amount of confusion about the move. I was actually looking at the Pocket entry on the App Store earlier in the day to see if it had been updated lately. I always had dreams of the service/app being improved, so I could go back to using it with a Kobo, which is a quite delightful combo. I had a Kobo a few years ago, and the sync with Pocket, while it could use a few features (like highlight sync), was key for me. I probably read more articles than books on the device. I kept this option in the back of my mind for a possible switch back.

    I would have been extremely frustrated if I had bought another Kobo under the assumption that I could fulfill my use case of synchronizing with my saved articles from Pocket.

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  • Closed Off

    My son watched the Spike Jonze movie Her a few days ago and remarked to me about how prescient some of the ideas were. I was thinking about how accurately Jonze (who also wrote the screenplay) predicted some of the aspects of generative AI and the role that it could play in our lives. The film was made not too long ago, but remember how quickly OpenAI sprang up with most of its current capabilities and how taken by surprise everyone was.

    My son mentioned the fact that everyone in the movie walked around with headphones on and how that’s now the case when you are out and about. My wife actually wears AirPods most of the day in the house. It makes it challenging to have conversations with her. I always feel like I’m intruding into her little audio bubble.

  • Oh HEY, Hello

    I have to admit something: After writing about quitting the email service HEY from 37Signals, I ended up going back and resubscribing (before my data was deleted). Sure, I tried other services. Proton was a total bust. I ran into bugs that rendered the platform unusable, unless I wanted to wait for hours to be able to access the emails the alerts were telling me I had in my inbox, or deal with the emails that, for some reason, couldn’t be deleted. Fastmail was better, but lacked polish. There were some unpainted spots, carpet that had a few stains, etc.

    When HEY warned me that my data would soon be deleted, I dutifully entered my credit card information and resubscribed for another year. Reading debates about the service, I often come across discussions about the unique features, such as the screener. People have come up with some clever hacks to replicate the functionality of the screener in other email tools. My needs/wants are not so simple, though.

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  • Bio Vinyl

    I noticed that The Cure was advertising their heavily praised new album Songs From A Lost World in a bio vinyl format. I was curious about what that meant. Fortunately, I had my good buddy Claude to help answer the question. He responded with this:

    Bio vinyl refers to vinyl materials manufactured using bio-based or renewable raw materials instead of traditional petroleum-based ingredients. This type of vinyl is part of a broader category of sustainable alternatives to conventional plastics.

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  • The Precarious Fox

    It seems that being a Firefox user means being in a constant state of trepidation about whether the app will last the year. For a long while now, it has been well known that the browser’s very survival depends on the largesse of its search partner, Google. The Mozilla Foundation, which develops Firefox, is a non-profit, but it gets 85% of its funding thanks to the commercial interests of the biggest beneficiary of ad revenue on the internet.

    Once again, the threat of the infusion of cash from Google in exchange for placement as Firefox’s default search engine disappearing is imminent. The latest risk for Mozilla is thanks to the Department of Justice case against Google.

    The DOJ wants to bar Google from paying to be the default search engine in third-party browsers including Firefox, among a long list of other proposals including a forced sale of Google’s own Chrome browser and requiring it to syndicate search results to rivals.

    The sad irony is that the pursuit of the DOJ to expand user choice in the area of search would limit user choice in the browser space. I have some sympathy for the argument against doing that. For all the bluster from the DOJ over the last few decades about bundled browsers, it’s easy enough for a consumer to switch if that is what they want to do. The choice is free for the making.

  • Hookmark + Linkding

    It’s hard to believe that I hadn’t heard of Hookmark until recently. The crowd I follow online doesn’t tend to miss Mac productivity tools, but this one seems to have escaped mass publicity within that community. The premise seems like a powerful one:

    Hookmark is the standalone contextual bookmarking app. It complements your launcher by also being the contextual launcher. Hookmark enables you to create and link robust bookmarks to files, emails, tasks and more, making it easy for you to access information without needing to search.

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  • Accumulate Wisdom, Not Information

    Chris Butler writes about the glut of information to which we are exposed and how that does not advance our wisdom or understanding.

    Think about this comparison: Information is to wisdom what pornography is to real intimacy. I’m not here to moralize, so I compare to pornography with all the necessary trepidation. Without judgement, it’s my observation that pornography depicts physical connection while creating emotional distance. I think information is like that. There’s a difference between information and wisdom that hinges on volume. More information promises to show us more of reality, but too much of it can easily hide the truth. Information can be pornography—a simulation that, when consumed without limits, can weaken our ability to experience the real thing.

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  • Trusting Agentic AI

    ↬www.manton.org/2025/02/27/nick-heer-is-impressed-with.html

    Manton Reece commenting on Nick Heer from Pixel Envy expressing his distrust for agentic AI.

    I also don’t trust AI for this. And yet, in 1995 a lot of people didn’t trust entering credit cards on the web. I’m open to the possibility that in 10 years, AI buying things for us will be normal.

    I tend to agree that most of us will adapt and adjust as the plates shift underneath us from the tectonic changes that AI brings. I would make a distinction, though, in the types of agentic AI that will be much easier to get used to and that where we would prefer to keep our agency closer to the vest. As a developer, if I can use AI to remediate a CVE for me, I think it’s fairly easy to give up that control. As a vacation-starved worker bee who wants to plan a trip to Europe, I might even relish the possibiliy of booking that myself and certainly would have trouble trusting AI to do it for me.

  • HEY HEY HEY, Goodbye

    Though I love the service, I canceled my HEY email account. I’m not happy about it, but I am pretty sure it’s the right thing to do. The founders have been saying things I’ve been critical of for some time, but it has reached the point where I don’t trust the company with my data.

    For weeks now, my wife has been telling me about data that she uses to do her job being deleted from federal databases. This includes economic and health information, such as statistics on energy burden (the cost of utilties vs. household income) and maternal and infant medical facts. Of course, my spouse is not the only one to notice this disturbing trend, but the examples she has provided seem particularly egregious and incomprehensible.

    It’s shocking to me to go online and see people from 37Signals, which runs the HEY service, encouraging this type of behavior as a service to the country. If 37Signals is as cavalier about data as those they are praising, I believe it’s only natural to question if they are good stewards of your resources.

    I’ve started my switch to Proton Mail, which is an appealing alternative, given their focus on encryption and security. I’ve never been one to go overboard on privacy protections, given that I’m kind of a nobody. However, with a government this adversarial towards many of its citizens (not to mention its own employees), known and unknown, I think it’s a good idea to start taking extra precautions.

    My initial experience with Proton hasn’t been altogether bad (though there are some serious bugs with their MacOS client — which I will be soon reporting). However, Proton doesn’t have the same level of consideration and willingness to defy conventions as HEY, which makes the user experience less delightful. If I could in good conscience stick with a 37Signals product, I would, but it’s time to move on.

  • Mario Icons

    A colleague recently named her AI Hackathon team “The Pipeline Plumbers,” due to their work with YAML-driven build pipelines. I told her it reminded me of Super Mario. Since she loves Mario, she decided to do a Mario-themed presentation (I wish I could embed it here).

    I came across another Mario-themed artifact this weekend. The always talented Louie Mantia, who produced icons for the Icon Factory for years, just created a new set of drive icons with a Mario theme. These are gorgeous.

    lmnt.me