Finished reading: Constance by Matthew Fitzsimmons 📚 It was an OK sci-fi thriller. The writing was competent but it was never exciting. It was obvious from the start who the big bad was, and the characters seemed to lack inner lives. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ out of 5.
I have been enjoying playing chess puzzles and correspondence chess at lichess lately. It is free and is really, really good.
I joined Club TWiT this evening. Leo’s pleas finally wore me down. I look forward to seeing how ad-free podcasts affect my listening preferences.
Is Dilbert over now? It seems so weird. I remember 20 years ago when Dilbert comic store part of every internal IT presentation. I wonder what will happen to it. Will it get picked up by NewsMax or Truth Social or Fox News?
I had begun to think that my tolerance for hot, spicy food was very high, but the Peruvian chicken place I tried today is making me question that. 🌶️🔥😅
On the most recent Accidental Tech Podcast, I’m pretty sure Marco Arment mentioned that he uses one of my iOS apps, Simple Call Blocker, to block whole town’s worth of potential spam phone numbers.
I have gone from excited about AI to unnerved by it. At this point, I am limiting my exposure to the news articles and blog posts about it. Overall, I am worried about AI now. It seems unbelievably disruptive. Reading endless think-pieces about it is not going to resolve anything for me, though, so I will tune most of them out for now.
Currently reading: Constance by Matthew Fitzsimmons 📚 It’s a thriller with a sci-fi premise. I hope I like it. I hated the last book I started!
🎵 I’m just playing the hits today.
Finished reading: American Girls by Nancy Jo Sales 📚 I abandoned this book pretty early on. There’s nothing new in it if you follow tech and social media issues. No rating, because I did not complete it.
I’m really enjoying the Super Bowl. It’s a great game! I don’t really care who wins.
Finished reading: Fairy Tale by Stephen King 📚 I enjoyed it but wished it was 100 pages (or more) shorter. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ out of 5.
I love how people are interested in Bing again. I don’t think I know anyone who uses it other than myself, and that’s only at work. (I like keeping all my tools Microsoft-only, if possible, at work, where I am mostly searching for Microsoft-owned things.) I hope the AI integration Microsoft announced today will help it be a credible competitor to Google.
🎵 Today’s listen: Dog Problems by The Format. It’s a classic combination of feel-good music and “I feel bad” breakup lyrics. Nate Ruess, who fronted this band before he sang with fun., has a distinctive voice. Standout tracks include “Time Bomb,” “The Compromise,” and “Snails.”
I still have a Google Voice number and at this point I don’t know why.
Public service announcement: If you cut your finger in the kitchen, like I did last night, those silly-looking finger cots (or finger condoms) are awesome for protecting the wound.
Ice Cubes, the Mastodon client, has been getting better at a rapid rate. There are updates every day, it seems. Impressive.
🎵 Today’s listen: In The Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. It’s an indie rock masterpiece. That’s all I can say.
This “track changes” article by Ben Shpigel of The New York Times is wonderfully snarky:
Tom Brady’s football career traced an arc that bordered on mythical, ascending from sixth-round N.F.L. draft pick to seven-time Super Bowl champion quarterback and global celebrity. And, after more than two decades of unparalleled brilliance in his sport, plus another season, it has ended.
🎵 Today’s listen, Groundhog Day The Musical (Original Broadway Cast Recording), composed by Tim Minchin. It is wonderful and timely.
I find the Magic Trackpad (which is connected to my Mac mini) to be very janky compared to my wired trackball (or to the built-in trackpads on MacBooks). The pointer skips around a lot. I wonder if everyone has that but no one complains.
🎵 Today’s listen: Come Get Your Wife by Elle King. Much of it is fun, “angry woman” country music. Whether you enjoy it or not probably hinges on how much you like its hit single, “Drunk (And I Don’t Wanna Go Home),” which is a duet with Miranda Lambert.
A couple new, paid (or optionally paid) search engines have caught my attention recently: Kagi and Neeva. I am trying to figure out if switching to either of them, and paying for a search engine for the first time, makes sense for me.
The main problem with search engines—and Google is the prime example of this right now—is that search results are often worse in quality than they were five or ten years ago. This is because their algorithms have been gamed with SEO, so site creators can make more money, and the search engines themselves have junked up their results listings with ads and promotions for their own properties, so they can make more money.
At this point, I don’t trust Google or Bing to order search results in a way that is beneficial to me, rather than to their partners and their paying customers: advertisers. Paying a subscription for search would, theoretically, align the search engine’s interests with my own.
Kagi and Neeva promise aligned incentives and a more personalized search experience with higher-quality results. Both have iOS apps, which are web browsers that default to their own search engines. Both allow for sign-in with Apple, which allows me to hide my email address/real identity from them, if I choose to. Both have Safari extensions that hijack the address bar search (even on iOS).
I have tested out Neeva the most. I really like its AI-generated summaries of the top few results pages. Kagi is clean and much faster. I find it hard to judge which is better, per se. I think I’m finding what I want on the first page or so. I think I prefer Neeva’s AI summary to Kagi’s lack of one. The summaries are not always that impressive, though; it seems to pull one sentence out of the top three search result pages and smoosh them together into a paragraph.
One thing I have discovered is that I spend a lot less time looking at search engine results pages than I thought I did. Most of my use of the browser search bar ends with me clicking an autocomplete suggestion—one that is handled by DuckDuckGo, rather than Neeva or Kagi. (This is due to limitations in the default search engines in Safari.)
It probably makes sense for me to wait until Google, Bing, and whoever else integrate AI summaries into their offerings and re-evaluate all the search engines again. The Internet rumor mill suggests that change will come fairly soon.
🎵 Today’s listen: John Coltrane and John Hartman I just learned about this album this week. As far as I know, it is the only vocal jazz/standards album John Coltrane ever made. John Hartman has a deep, silky voice that’s so good I am surprised I never heard of him before.
📺 I’m watching The Last of Us. Love it.