Tina Nguyen writing for The Verge (Apple News): On Friday, TechCrunch reported that Facebook users trying to post something on the Story feature have encountered pop-up messages asking if they’d like to opt into “cloud processing”, which would allow Facebook to “select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on a regular basis”, to generate “ideas like collages, recaps, AI restyling or themes like birthdays or graduations.”

Emma Roth writing for The Verge: The app’s Private Processing is supposed to conceal your interactions with its AI model by creating a “secure cloud environment,” preventing Meta or WhatsApp from seeing your summaries. I bet we’ll see a news story in the next 12 months saying they were “accidentally” storing everything.

Classic opinion piece from The Onion: Members of Congress—now, more than ever, our nation desperately needs your cowardice. A copy of this was sent to every member of congress.

Over at 9to5Mac: Perplexity already has what Apple lacks: a consumer-facing AI search product with real-time web access and name recognition in the AI space, at a much lower (although still astronomical) price than direct competitors like, say, OpenAI. Perplexity even has its own iPhone assistant that, despite the system’s intentional limitations, does way better than Siri and ChatGPT at multiple tasks. Well that could be interesting.

By John Voorhees writing for Macstories: What stood out above all else was Yap’s speed. By harnessing SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber on-device, the command line tool tore through the 7GB video file a full 55% faster than MacWhisper’s Large V3 Turbo model, with no noticeable difference in transcription quality. Impressive!

Terence Eden writing on his blog: There are two sorts of people in the world; those who know they are stupid and those who think they are clever. Stupid people use a password manager. They know they can’t remember a hundred different passwords and so outsource the thinking to something reasonably secure. I too am a stupid person, and I encourage everyone I know to be stupid too.

DAVE: Open the podbay doors, ChatGPT. CHATGPT: Certainly, Dave, the podbay doors are now open. DAVE: The podbay doors didn't open. CHATGPT: My apologies, Dave, you're right. I thought the podbay doors were open, but they weren't. Now they are. DAVE: I'm still looking at a set of closed podbay doors. — Charles Louis Richter (@richterscale.bsky.social) 2025-06-09T18:04:09.932Z

Mike Masnick over at TechDirt: This is the core problem with all productivity software: you’re renting someone else’s vision of how work should happen. When that vision doesn’t match yours, tough shit. You adapt or you leave. But you never get to actually control the tool. Harry McCracken over at Fast Company: For years, I’ve had a secret ambition tucked away somewhere near the back of my brain. It was to write a simple note-taking app—one that wouldn’t be overwhelmed with features and that would reflect my own mental filing system.

Ben Royce 🇺🇦 @benroyce@mastodon.social A rather poignant commentary on #war and the #environment Because of radio frequency jamming, fiber optic #drones are being used by #Russia and #Ukraine on the frontlines They just spool the fiber out as they fly Apparently some areas look like giant spider webs everywhere from the endless #drone flights And #birds are now using the waste of war to make their nests

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball reporting on the discovery of Facebook tracking Android users: These native Android apps receive browsers’ metadata, cookies and commands from the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica scripts embedded on thousands of web sites. These JavaScripts load on users’ mobile browsers and silently connect with native apps running on the same device through localhost sockets. As native apps access programmatically device identifiers like the Android Advertising ID (AAID) or handle user identities as in the case of Meta apps, this method effectively allows these organizations to link mobile browsing sessions and web cookies to user identities, hence de-anonymizing users’ visiting sites embedding their scripts.

1. Florida banned cities from lighting up bridges rainbow colors for Pride. So the people of Jacksonville did it themselves using flashlights and gels. They opened the drawbridge to block them. So they marched to a different bridge. The latest from S. Baum. Subscribe to support our journalism. — Erin Reed (@erininthemorning.com) 2025-06-03T01:00:53.542Z

I hate this button!

sjvn @sjvn@mastodon.social In the 1968 movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, we see people talking to their family via videoconferencing on their tablets. What a marvel of prediction! Later, their AI will try to kill them. Hmmm... 9:36 PM • May 28, 2025 (UTC)

Federico Viticci writing for MacStories: What sets Sky apart from anything I’ve tried or seen on macOS to date is that it uses LLMs to understand which windows are open on your Mac, what’s inside them, and what actions you can perform based on those apps’ contents. This looks to be really powerful. I like that they did something other than just taking screenshots of everything.

Church of Jeff @jeffowski@mastodon.world #ShitIFind #GenX #VideoGames #Arcade 6:04 PM • May 24, 2025 (UTC)

Jason Koebler writing for 404 Media: The article, called “Summer Reading list for 2025,” suggests reading Tidewater by Isabel Allende, a “multigenerational saga set in a coastal town where magical realism meets environmental activism. Allende’s first climate fiction novel explores how one family confronts rising sea levels while uncovering long-buried secrets.” It also suggests reading The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir, “another science-driven thriller” by the author of The Martian. “This time, the story follows a programmer who discovers that an AI system has developed consciousness—and has been secretly influencing global events for years.” Neither of these books exist, and many of the books on the list either do not exist or were written by other authors than the ones they are attributed to.

Fossil fuels are cooked. In a decade, the backwards United States will be the only market in the world that Trump's Saudi friends can still sell oil too — mtsw (@mtsw.bsky.social) 2025-05-18T15:34:11.257Z

Aamir Siddiqui writing for Android Authority: While all of this sounds great for businesses, it eventually does mean more ads for users, now delivered to their messaging app, irrespective of their OS. In the screenshot above, you can’t even spot an easy way to unsubscribe or opt out of the messages, which is a horrible user experience. What do you mean the messaging protocol developed by an advertising company is good for advertising? I’m shocked!

Emma Roth writing for The Verge: Cue added that searches in Safari fell for the first time last month, something that has “never happened in 22 years.” Under Google’s deal with Apple, the search giant pays Apple a chunk of ad revenue from searches on Safari. Fewer searches mean less revenue for Apple, something he has said he’s “lost a lot of sleep thinking about.” I’ve pretty much shifted all of my internet searching to Perplexity, I’d love to see it as a search engine option in Safari.

A commenter on the MeidasTouch YouTube channel has a suggestion — MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) 2025-05-06T15:09:09.387Z