If history is any judge, I'll succumb to shiny object syndrome long before my iPhone becomes obsolete. This is likely the case for most iPhone users, though I know more than a few people who have not updated their iPhones in my years. The biggest sign being the charging cable they use. USB-C was added to the iPhone 15, which launched in September of 2023, and one of my friends was still using what appeared to be an iPhone 13 last week. Apple is continuing support on the new OS all they way back to iPhone 11, so that bodes well for longevity of the new iPhones.

What could possibly go wrong? "The patent, published on July 2, describes a device that listens for “audible communications” including sighs, laughter, and vocal tone, and combines them with “contextual factors” like time of day, location, activity, and medication timing. The system builds a persistent mood log from all of this."

I don't trust Facebook. I've made that pretty clear in the past. I'm not sure why anyone does.

"1Password promises your login information will never interact with Anthropic's AI, or its servers," but I'd still be a bit leary of handing over my trusted keychain to AI at this point.

"Along with the Claude integration, 1Password introduced a new Agentic Mode for all 1Password users that will safeguards credentials against active agents. When it detects one, 1Password locks down, so the agent can only find passwords explicitly granted for the current task."

The civil liberty and privacy risks of smart glasses should be obvious. They certainly are to me. From this article, "Meta's current AI smart glasses have an LED in the corner of the frame that lights up to signal to others when a wearer is taking photographs or filming. But Meta executives don't want to activate the LED when the super-sensing features are turned on."

That should concern you. It concerns me.

Meta showed Brain2Qwerty v2 this week, a research system that turns brain activity into typed text with no implant and no surgery. A person sits in a magnetoencephalography scanner and types while the AI reads the magnetic signals instead of the fingers. Trained on 22,000 sentences from nine volunteers, it reached 61 percent word accuracy, with one participant hitting 78. The gear is bulky and far from a product. But notice who this is for. Not people skipping the keyboard. People who cannot type, speak, or move. For them, accuracy like that is a way back into the conversation.

This is amazing. Google earthquake alerts reached 11.4 million people seconds to two minutes before two of the strongest quakes in the country’s history. How?

"The trick is the accelerometer inside almost every smartphone. The same chip that rotates your screen can feel the faint tremor of a seismic wave. Google taps more than two billion of them worldwide.

A quake sends out two kinds of wave. Fast primary waves arrive first and do little harm. Slower secondary waves follow, and they cause most of the shaking. The gap between them is the warning window."