Alex Micek:

In the future, I will feel angry if my car strands me on the side of the road.
I will feel angry if the motor brushes fail expectedly.
I will feel angry if it leaks water.

By contrast, I don’t feel anger when the car tricks me into seeing an advertisement. Instead, I feel a deep, smothering, let-down at the promise of futurism. Bottomless despair is probably inappropriate; a symptom of the misanthropy I should grow out of. But. In the meantime, I feel helpless, discouraged, deeply sad.

Such a good take. I should not let 19 years pass again between linking to his writing.

This didn’t occur to me but should have — BMW paid Sony to place BMWs throughout the new Spider-Man: Brand New Day movie. They’re not just in the movie but part of the story. So it’s probably the case not that Sony paid BMW to put Spider-Man animations in the dashboards of every late model BMW on the road, but that BMW offered to do it as part of the promotional deal they paid Sony. So BMW probably paid Sony for something that ultimately infuriated a bunch of BMW’s own customers. Geniuses.

Two weeks ago Zuckerberg published a 1,000-word essay, “The AI Future Is for Everyone”. This week he published an expanded 6,500-word version of the essay on Meta’s website. Somehow it almost says nothing more than the original. This tidbit, however, struck me as notable:

For example, in Richland Parish, Louisiana, where Meta is building a large data center, teachers received a $50,000 bonus this year because of the increased tax revenue from our investment. The superintendent told us that teachers are now moving there from across the country and he believes it will become one of the nation’s best school districts.

Unlike the concern about knowledge work displacement, there is a shortage of skilled tradespeople like carpenters, electricians, and construction workers to support the demand for infrastructure buildout. Meta has created America’s Workforce Academy to provide free training for skilled tradespeople and guaranteed high-paying jobs in the areas we’re building data centers.

Those $50K bonuses to public-school teachers are real, and they’re more than most of those teachers’ annual salaries. That’s the sort of thing that could turn public sentiment on data center construction around. But it hasn’t turned around yet.

Chance Miller returns to the show. Topics include iOS 27’s progress over summer, live baseball in Vision Pro, the RAM crisis, Apple’s trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI and io, and the EU/DMA situation.

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Andrew Sharp, writing at Sharp Text last month after Netflix’s earnings, asking “Is Netflix Washed Now?”:

I offer this observation as a swirl of heightened anxiety surrounds the company, so let me clarify one thing up front: I’m not predicting imminent doom. Netflix content reaches a staggering 85% of American viewers and has 325 million subscribers globally. Growth is slowing, but that’s the law of large numbers. If practically everyone in America and much of the world is already subscribed to some version of Netflix, and churn rates are still low, then any concern is relative. Going forward: cable is still dying, and even if the biggest premium distribution platform in the world can’t make great content of its own, it can still license movies, TV and sports rights. Netflix can then spread those costs across hundreds of millions of subscribers and a steadily growing ads business, seeing more engagement in a week than Apple TV sees in a year.

So no, the company’s not doomed today or destined for collapse tomorrow. Instead, I think what’s interesting to consider is that Netflix has almost certainly peaked. As a cultural force, as a business success story, and as an entertainment death star destined to swallow Hollywood whole, the arrows are all pointing the wrong direction.

Sometimes the problem with a company isn’t that it isn’t a good business, but merely that it isn’t as good a business as it holds itself up to be. A billion-dollar business ought to be a good thing, but it’s a disaster if the company is valued by investors as a trillion-dollar business. That’s Netflix.

To me it’s backwards that Netflix is valued at $300 billion, roughly the 50th most valued company in the world, and Disney is valued at $180 billion, roughly 120th. Netflix has a streaming video service and owns some IP, like Stranger Things and Squid Game. Disney owns two streaming video services (Disney+ and Hulu), and owns some IP. Little stuff like Mickey Mouse, Star Wars, Marvel, the Disney princesses, and everything from Pixar. Netflix has started dabbling in sports; Disney owns ESPN. Disney owns the world’s biggest and best theme parks and an entire cruise ship line.

It’s true that Netflix’s streaming service is by far the biggest in the world, and likely will remain so for the foreseeable future. But Disney+ combined with Hulu is clearly in second place globally.

For the most recent 12 months:

Netflix is generating slightly more profit on half the revenue. With its theme parks, resorts, and cruise ships, big parts of Disney are effectively hardware, not software — so it’s almost inevitable its margins will be lower than a pure software play like Netflix. But those “hardware” businesses diversify Disney. How confident are you that Netflix will remain the undisputed leader in streaming 10 years from now, or 25? I’d bet good money that Walt Disney World will be the world’s biggest, best, and most profitable theme park 50 years from now. And it’s a joke to compare the value and longevity of the two companies’ IP.

I don’t know that Disney is undervalued by the market, but I sure think Netflix is overvalued. And as for quality, I’ve watched a bit more Netflix original content this summer than I had of late. David Attenborough’s A Gorilla Story was a splendid documentary, but nature documentaries don’t pay the bills. A few other things I watched (or at least watched part of) were absolute dreck. Not high-quality fun trash like Tiger King but amateur-hour I’m-worried-I-lost-a-few-IQ-points-by-watching-it trash. We pay $27/month for Netflix premium and I can say unequivocally that it’s not worth it. I continue paying for it because I’m willing to overpay for it the same way I am for beverages at a hotel — it’s money I’m willing to squander, knowing full well I’m squandering it.

It feels to me like Mr. Market is getting increasingly skeptical whether Netflix justifies its valuation, and Netflix is getting a little squirrelly and desperate trying to come up with an answer. Simple question: what’s their moat? It sure isn’t content quality.

Anthropic support page:

Anthropic has signed the EU AI Act’s Article 50(2) Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content, as a provider of both generative AI models and generative AI systems. This article describes how we’re planning to put those commitments into practice, how marking works, and what its limitations are. We’ll update this article and publish more detailed technical guidance as it becomes available.

Regarding generated plain text output:

When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response.

Because the watermark is part of the text, it will travel with the text when it’s copied and pasted elsewhere, and may persist through some editing. Watermarking will be applied at the model level, which means it will be present no matter which Claude product or surface the text comes from. [...]

We’re also working to enable users and other third parties to detect Claude’s embedded watermarks and provenance metadata. Detection checks whether a piece of text or a file carries a supported Claude mark. If a supported mark is found, it indicates that the content may have been processed by Claude.

We’ll share details on detection mechanisms in forthcoming technical documentation.

Anthropic is claiming this is for compliance with an EU law but that “Marking will apply to output from supported models wherever Claude is offered, worldwide.”

This is infuriatingly opaque. I won’t speak to the “signed provenance metadata” they say they’ll be embedding in generated files like PDFs, SVGs, PNGs, and JPEGs. That’s important but it’s complex. Plain text is simple. A string of text is just one character followed by another. At first I presumed that Claude is going to start “embedding” invisible characters/byte sequences between visible characters — which would unavoidably cause immediate problems.

Let’s say I have Claude generate the phrase “Hello world”. (Two words is surely too short to bother with “AI generated” detection — I’m using a two-word phrase here for simplicity in the example.) Claude creates the string of characters “Hello«invisible characters that comprise a “watermark” here» world”. I paste this on the web. Humans who look at it will see “Hello world” but the invisible characters are there. Character-count-limited social media platforms will show that the string contains more than the 11 visible characters in “Hello world”.

If the “watermark” is not comprised of invisible characters but rather visible ones, how in the world does this jibe with their claim that it’s “imperceptible”? This Reddit thread claims that’s how it will work — “It’s a form of steganography where the model subtly biases its word choice to create a statistical pattern that can be detected later.” How in the world can that be squared with “it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability”? And any sort of semantic detection like this is going to cause false-positive problems.

If I ask a tool to generate text or suggest text for me, I expect that tool to generate the best possible word choices it can. Not corrupt its output for the sake of watermarking. If they go through with this, this ought to be poison to the Claude brand.

What happens if you copy my text and quote it in something you write, by hand? Now you’ve got a watermark in your prose, invisible characters or something, that implicates that your prose is AI-generated? Even though you didn’t use AI and just copy and pasted text from me? Madness.

They obviously need to explain exactly what they’re embedding in text if anyone is actually going to detect it, but if they explain it, anyone can simply remove it. And what happens, for example, if someone just OCRs Claude-generated text rather than selects and copies it? This is all so stupid. I have never been happier that I’ve never actually used Claude for anything.

Leverage autonomous AI agents to automate compliance, manage internal and third-party risk, and continuously prove your security posture.

Zac Hall at 9to5Mac has a good rundown of new features and changes in beta 5. Some app icons got tweaks (the Siri app in particular looks much cooler now), and a bunch of the existing American and British Siri speaking voices now have the Pace and Expressivity adjustment sliders.

Also interesting: the OS 27 releases were stuck at beta 4 for 22 days. That’s a week longer than usual. Will Hains (my Kotoba friend) maintains a wonderful single-page website tracking iOS version release date history. For these summer “next big version” comparisons, it’s best to filter by “*.0” releases. Do that at Hains’s website and you can see a fairly clear pattern: betas 1 through 4 typically last about two weeks each; then starting with beta 5, Apple switches to a roughly weekly schedule until the end of the beta cycle. I wouldn’t read anything into that other than to expect beta 6 next week and beta 7 the week after that.

Apple Newsroom:

For the first time, baseball fans can take in all the action of “Friday Night Baseball” live in Apple Immersive on Apple Vision Pro, leveraging 3D video recorded in 8K with a 180-degree field of view. On August 28, viewers with Vision Pro will experience the iconic Red Sox vs. Yankees rivalry from unique camera angles that place viewers right in the game, immersed in the drama of each at-bat, the celebrations in the dugout after a big hit, close plays at the outfield wall, and more.

The experience features bespoke commentary from Paul Severino (play-by-play), Xavier Scruggs (analyst), and Michelle Margaux (sideline reporter); dedicated replays; and an immersive graphics package that includes team lineups and stats floating in the viewer’s space. During breaks in the action, the broadcast remains live, immersing viewers in the stadium experience from all angles as ambisonic microphones capture sounds in Spatial Audio.

Hot damn, they even picked the best rivalry in sports to kick it off.

Michael Tsai:

I’m really unhappy about this, both for my role in spreading a false story and because I think it will hurt the cause of reforming App Review. I know there are many crazy rejections and have experienced some first-hand. This story was believable because of that well-known history and because Godier didn’t seem like a nobody trying to get attention — he was the developer of another highly regarded app. But now people are going to point to true developer stories and accuse them of being fakes, too.

Same.