Josh Woodward, VP of Gemini and AI Studio, on the Google blog:

The best assistants don’t just know the world; they know you and help you navigate it. Today, we’re answering a top user request: you can now personalize Gemini by connecting Google apps with a single tap. Launching as a beta in the U.S., this marks our next step toward making Gemini more personal, proactive and powerful.

Personal Intelligence securely connects information from apps like Gmail and Google Photos to make Gemini uniquely helpful. If you turn it on, you control exactly which apps to link, and each one supercharges the experience. It connects Gmail, Photos, YouTube and Search in a single tap, and we’ve designed the setup to be simple and secure. [...]

Starting today, access is rolling out over the next week to eligible Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. Once enabled, it works across Web, Android and iOS and with all of the models in the Gemini model picker. We’re starting with this limited group to learn, but we will over time expand to more countries and to the free tier.

In the small print on the Gemini Personal Intelligence product page, they say “In the coming months, and with your permission, Gemini will be able to draw context from even more of your Google apps and services.” Gmail, Photos, YouTube, and Search are obvious services to start with. Calendar, surely, is forthcoming. But a big one for me — an inveterate note-taker — would be my notes app. I’d rather have an AI assistant know everything in my notes app than everything in my email. For Google, I presume, that will be Google Keep (which I consider a serviceable, but overall crummy app that never seems to have gotten much attention).

This is nicely honest, and sets expectations:

We’ve tested this beta version of Personal Intelligence extensively to minimize mistakes, but we haven’t eliminated them. You may encounter inaccurate responses or “over-personalization,” where the model makes connections between unrelated topics. When you see this, please provide feedback by giving the response a “thumbs down.”

Gemini may also struggle with timing or nuance, particularly regarding relationship changes, like divorces, or your various interests. For instance, seeing hundreds of photos of you at a golf course might lead it to assume you love golf. But it misses the nuance: you don’t love golf, but you love your son, and that’s why you’re there. If Gemini gets this wrong, you can just tell it (“I don’t like golf”).

I feel like it’s unlikely a coincidence that Google announced Personal Intelligence a few days after the short joint announcement that Apple is licensing Gemini technology to power the models for Apple Intelligence. What Google is making available today — in beta, to paid personal users only — is basically the feature set that Apple promised back in June 2024 but had to postpone for an entire additional year last March.

It turns out that one of my favorite new features in OmniFocus 4.7 is the Catch Up Automatically option for repeating actions: With this setting turned off, completing an item will create the next occurrence following the schedule you have set, even when the next occurrence is in the past. With this setting turned on, […]

Tim Hardwick (Hacker News): Apple and other smartphone manufacturers are resisting an Indian government proposal that would require them to hand over source code for security review, reports Reuters. […] Apple, Google, Samsung, Xiaomi, and industry group MAIT have all reportedly objected, citing a lack of global precedent and concerns about revealing proprietary details. […] […]

Jacob Krol, reporting for Techradar:

While Verizon had a good few months, with the last major outage occurring in October 2024, it seems that the popular United States wireless carrier is having some issues. So, if you’re on Verizon and seeing ‘SOS’ in place of network bars, you’re not alone.

Countless users have taken to social platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Threads to shout issues, but reported problems with Verizon have spiked on Down Detector to over 46,000.

This outage matters, because I’m on Verizon and my phone hasn’t had a signal for two hours.

T-Mobile, on Twitter/X:

T-Mobile’s network is keeping our customers connected, and we’ve confirmed that our network is operating normally and as expected. However due to Verizon’s reported outage, our customers may not be able to reach someone with Verizon service at this time.

AT&T, in such a hurry to pile on that their punctuation was slapdash:

Our network? Solid. If you’re experiencing issues, it’s not us.....it’s the other guys. Some things are just out of our hands! - BUT if you’re interested in giving us a try — https://att.com/wireless/free-trial/

Full point awarded to T-Mobile for the better, colder, burn.

Update: Service returned for me around 5pm, but the outage wasn’t completely resolved until 10pm ET. Yikes.

The letter speaks for itself, and is very much worth reading in full. I’ll quote only from the conclusion, which rhetorically feels very Bill:

Continue to mislead Americans about what is truly at stake, and you will learn that Americans are better at finding the truth than you are at burying it.

Continue to pursue autopens instead of penning laws Americans need, and you will learn that you are signing away any remaining chance of being on the right side of history.

Continue to abet the dismantling of America, and you will learn that it takes more than a wrecking ball to demolish what Americans have built over 250 years.

The New York Times also published a copy of the legal letter the Clintons’ lawyers (two law firms, actually) sent to Comer. It’s not as good a read as their personal letter.

I’ll just add, revisiting a recent topic, that the legal letter from the Clintons’ lawyers was set in Times New Roman. That’s unremarkable, which is Times New Roman’s calling card. The Clintons’ personal letter, on very nice joint stationery, was set in Courier New, an interesting but disappointing choice. The intention is to evoke the effect of a typewriter — to add a personal touch. The letter is very clearly, from the first word to the last, a personal message from Bill and Hillary Clinton themselves. I suspect they jointly crafted every single word of it themselves. It’s not a short letter, but it’s not long, either. Not a word is wasted. But it would have looked so much better in Courier than Courier New (or, even better, the best version of Courier ever made, Courier Prime). The worst aspect of Courier New is that it’s inexplicably thin and wispy. It looks like it should be called Courier Thin, but there’s no good reason for there to exist a thin variant of Courier. The second worst aspect of Courier New is that a handful of punctuation glyphs are inexplicably not thin, and thus stand out excessively, grating on the eyes. Take note of how the commas and apostrophes appear almost bold in the Clintons’ personal letter. I gripe about Arial more frequently, but Courier New is a worse crime against typography. (Both crimes, of course, were set loose upon the world by Microsoft.)