As I read this article, I couldn't help but recognize that this future of whispering to our computers wasn't a future at all for me—it was my current state of living. These days, I spend a lot of time holding down the function key on my laptop, letting Gemini transcribe my voice. In fact, that's what I'm doing right now as I'm typing—and I use the word "typing" loosely. You'll notice that the word "typing" was put in quotation marks in the last sentence. I didn't ask Gemini to do that; it knew exactly what I meant when I spoke it. Dictation here is completely unedited. Yes, I'm already living in the whispering future.

I couldn't help but think of how I use the iNaturalist app when I don't know what kind of plant or insect I'm looking at. It identifies the plant and saves my image to an archive. I can see all of the different plants and species I was curious about. It's real value, to me, however, is in the moment. I didn't know what a thing was, and it helped me know.

This app from graphic designer David McGillivray is different. It's, as he described it, a bit like a digital rock collection. Except, I think most people know what the object is they are taking a picture of. Afterall, they are "everyday" objects. I wish him luck.

The headline last week seemed too big to be true. $1.4 trillion in potential penalties to Meta over social media addiction? You knew this would get settled. It did. For a fraction of the $1.4 trillion potential- just $18 billion. "Just."

I'm not sure how I feel about this one yet. Text messaging isn't that difficult. I suppose if I were trying to catch up on a big group chat, perhaps it might save a bit of time. I'm not sure what the win is here.

Out of the box it's approve-per-message, though you could apparently turn that off. That means someone could easily use this to automate messages, even though OpenAI warns against granting persistent approval. And messages integration is useable in ChatGPT Work and Codex in the desktop version of ChatGPT, but it does not work in regular ChatGPT chats. It also requires an Apple silicon Mac.

There is more than one way to skin a cat, so the expression goes. And Liang Wenfeng is certainly bot a different kind of cat and skinning the AI cat differently than the tech overlords here in the USA.

"While America will maintain its capability advantage for now, China, in his eyes, will play the role of token factory at global scale, pushing the price of intelligence down as it did for countless other industries during its manufacturing boom."

Facebook has been promoting fake content for as long as I can remember. My own son has been used in fake ads. We did nothing about it then, and we're likely doing nothing about it now. Social media has groomed us for this dystopian version of the world we now find ourselves in. Don't blame AI. Entirely.