Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
Mac Layout Guidelines
Android Tracking Switch Privacy Lawsuit
Another Dyson Presentation
I loved watching this. My takeaway: don’t just say what it does, explain how it does what it does.
TextJam
My thanks to TextJam for sponsoring this past week at DF. TextJam just launched last week, it’s a remarkable “1.0” release — a multi-player text editor / word processor with a novel twist on how humans interact with AI. TextJam introduces the metaphors of “pen” mode for writing in ink, when you know exactly what words you want to write, with “pencil” mode for text you want to use a prompt or just a simple dashed-off starting point for AI assistance. It sounds like it makes intuitive sense, and when you actually try it, it feels even more natural. I really love this metaphor of ink vs. pencil. It leaves you, the writer, in control, but also gives all the assistance you want.
TextJam also has other very clever ideas, like using “pinch” multitouch gestures for resizing text — pinch in to get AI suggestions for making the selected text shorter, pinch out to expand it. TextJam has integrations with all of the most popular LLM systems: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Llama, and more.
And that’s just talking about the cutting-edge AI-type features. TextJam is also a great collaborative editor, where you and your teammates can work together on the same document with really clever interface elements who made — or is currently in the processing of making — which changes.
You can say, “Well, why don’t I just use Google Docs for this?” Right? My answer is just look at the two of them. Google Docs is like 98 percent stuff no one uses and therefore everyone ignores. TextJam is focused on the features people actually use and understand. It just looks and feels so much more more comfortable and stylish.
A Cynical Read on Anthropic’s Book Settlement
MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass:
And so you can’t help but wonder if part of the equation in this settlement wasn’t decidedly more cynical. Fresh off a new massive fundraise — one in which they raised far more than they were initially targeting, I might add — Anthropic has a lot of money. More than perhaps all but one of their competitors on the startup side. By settling for $1.5B, is Anthropic sort of pulling up a drawbridge, making it so that other startups can’t possibly come into their castle? I mean, am I crazy?
I’m not so sure I am. At $1.5B, there are only a handful of companies that could afford to pay such fines. Certainly OpenAI is one. Maybe xAI. And of course all the tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta. But could any other startup that has done any level of model training with such data? Probably not.
Kind of dastardly when you think about it this way.