Social media platforms are going to come under increasing pressure to identify and label AI-generated content as such. All the major platforms will do good work identifying AI content, but they will get worse at it over time as AI gets better at imitating reality. There is already a growing number of people who believe, as I do, that it will be more practical to fingerprint real media than fake media. Camera manufacturers could cryptographically sign images at capture, creating a chain of custody.

NetNewsWire is saying goodbye to Slack and bringing its community to Discourse:

Slack’s been pretty great for us, but it does have some limitations: conversations are automatically deleted and they’re not findable on the web in the first place.

I've been saying the same thing for a while already (1, 2). Closed chat communities are bad, and I will stand my ground:

Messages disappear into the scroll, and good answers get buried in the side threads. It’s like a never-ending group chat - great for real-time energy, but terrible for knowledge that needs to stick around.

That’s why forums still matter.

Forums and comments create structure. They’re searchable, linkable, and persistent. A thoughtful post from three years ago can still help someone today. A conversation can grow over time. And when people contribute there, they’re not just answering a question - they’re building something others can return to.

I noticed Cooked.wiki in Olly's App Defaults and decided to give it a try, but quickly realized that I won’t be using the service.

Don’t get me wrong -- it looks like a good tool for recipes, and I’ve been cooking quite a lot recently, much more than before -- but there’s one thing that rubbed me the wrong way.

It feels really weird to me to paywall the privacy of your account. Not privacy in a data protection and regulatory sense, but in the sense that your account is public by default, and there’s no way to change that setting without paying.

One could argue that recipes aren’t personal information and that a throwaway nickname would suffice, but it feels like a strange decision.

They’re committed to never running ads, and I respect that, yet this particular choice is… strange.

Imagine if Google didn’t show you ads, but your search activity was public instead. Or if your email provider were free and ad-free, but your emails were publicly visible. Would you use it then?

Maybe it’s just me. It probably is.

I can’t see how this could have happened without AI:

How do you paste another company’s email address into your reply if you’re an actual human composing that response? And if it’s a canned answer, the correct email address would already be pre-saved.

The reply from Obsidian didn’t make things any clearer and failed to refute the AI allegations, so I’ll apply a familiar maxim:

If it looks like AI, swims like AI, and quacks like AI, then it probably is AI.

My App Defaults as of today, and comments about each one:

• Mail & Calendar: I’m slowly transitioning away from Google, and I don’t want to pay for yet another calendar subscription, so I’m using Fastmail for both right now. It just works, supports Apple Calendar, and it’s great.
• Writing & Notes: Obsidian for writing and long notes, and Antinote as a scratchpad on Mac.
• To-Do: Things 3. I bought it years ago, and with the overall subscription fatigue, it’s enough for my needs. Still, the financial model of Cultured Code is one of the biggest mysteries to me.
• RSS & Read It Later: NetNewsWire via Miniflux as a backend. I stopped using read-it-later apps because, over the years, I came to the conclusion that I never read what I save. So now, if I bump into anything worth reading, I try to read it right then and there. If that’s not possible, it goes into my bookmarks app (see below).
• Browser: Orion by Kagi, and Safari for work stuff. I’m also testing Zen with the hardened config from Privacy Guides. It works almost like a good ol’ Arc and scratches that itch. No Little Arc, though, sadly.
• Chat: Telegram / WhatsApp / Signal. Telegram is not private, but it’s used by everyone in Russia, so I need to use it because of the network effect. Plus, with messengers (including WhatsApp) being blocked there left and right, we’re actually running out of options for staying in touch.
• Bookmarks: Raindrop and Mymind. The free version of Raindrop is more than enough for me, and I use it as a bookmarks dump I might want to resurface later. I like where Mymind is going, but I don’t use it in a way that would require the advanced mastermind features.
• Music: I still have an Apple Music subscription, but I miss my iPod and think that a smartphone is not the best way to listen to music. I’m researching the market for DAPs and IEMs, and I’m this close 🤏 to buying one.
• Podcasts: Overcast. I’ve been using the free version for years. I like the layout and the interface (even with ads), so I’m stuck in my ways. Apple Podcasts is too noisy.
• Password Management: 1Password. The best on the market, even though it’s becoming a bit too “enterprise-y.” Plus, the alumni discount is hard to beat.
• Launcher: Raycast. I already wrote about it. Looking forward to their redesign and improvements next year.
• Code & Terminal: VS Code and Ghostty. I’m not a developer, so I use them rarely.
• Video Calls: Zoom and Google Meet for work, Jitsi Meet for personal calls. The latter is a little unconventional, but everything else is already blocked in Russia, so I need something to call my dad.
• VPN: Giving Mullvad a try.
• Small gems on Mac: Itsycal, Loop, and Supercopy for Safari.

This quote from There Are Rivers in the Sky, the 25th book I finished this year, hits hard when you’re abroad, with a muddled perspective on whether you’ll ever come back:

"The Ancient Mesopotamians are famed for inventing writing, mathematics, astronomy, irrigation, and the wheel, but their biggest discovery has gone unrecognized. They are the first to experience the pain of losing a motherland."

I love a good whodunnit, and the Knives Out series is a good one. I liked it more than the most recent Hercule Poirot triplet from Kenneth Branagh.

In order of my personal preference: Knives Out > Wake Up Dead Man > Glass Onion.

I also noticed how Andrew Scott's character, a writer, mentions Substack in a dialogue:

I’m not sure how happy the Substack executives are with this mention, given the context, but credit where it’s due: the brand has become so widely recognised as a type of blog that even Hollywood/Netflix scripts reference it. Pretty sure the line would have been something like, “This is my last-chance ticket out of blogging hell,” before Substack existed.

I think it’s a case of what linguists call appellativization -- when a brand name crosses over into everyday language and becomes a common noun, or even a verb, as it did with Google.

Still, there is a reason I’m not blogging on that platform, even though my visibility might have been greater there.

Don’t be like Rian Johnson. Don’t call it a Substack.

The current state of affairs in the world of data privacy, and the way it affects the internet as a whole, is miserable.

On the one hand, you have eurobureaucrats who do not really understand technology, yet hold enormous power over how it is shaped. This does not just slow down innovation in the EU. It also makes the everyday internet experience worse. One of the primary examples is the decades-old ePrivacy Directive. It is funny how everyone blames GDPR for the cookie banners that “ruined the internet,” even though GDPR has nothing to do with them. The real culprit is the ePrivacy Directive itself, which was passed 23 years ago and last amended 16 years ago. In tech terms, that is several lifetimes ago. And the number of directives and regulations is only growing.

On the other hand, there are US tech moguls who are undeniably innovative, but driven by capitalism above all else. Their products move fast and scale fast, but they are also built on collecting as much data as possible with no regard for user privacy. Where European regulation is slow and clumsy, American tech is aggressive and unapologetic. But in return, they give you a remarkably convenient digital life. Ad-ridden, but convenient.

With all the privacy fatigue we're all experiencing, I am no longer sure which option is more palatable. Only one of them is actually moving us forward, rather than being stuck in the past under a pile of dusty compliance papers.

But I really hope a third path will emerge, because right now neither of these options feels like something I want to fully accept.

I love the Internet.

Not the over-optimized, bot-filled imitation we scroll through today, but the early Internet -- when stepping online felt like joining an unruly, hopeful collective not divided by countries. When humanity met in the open, long before governments arrived to tame it.

It’s strange how quickly those years slipped away.

Now, AI spam bots are everywhere, big corporations treat people like a piece of data, and governments, having finally arrived at the last frontier, have started using the Internet to stretch their powers even further.

“Digital sovereignty” is suddenly the phrase on everyone’s lips, a banner waved by every nation, each convinced they’re protecting something sacred while quietly reshaping the open web into something smaller, more territorial, and less free.

China built its Great Firewall first, Russia is quickly following suit, the EU is dreaming of disconnecting from the United States, and the United States… oh well. Don’t even get me started.

A world that once felt boundless is slowly being divided up, and the walls are being erected before our own eyes, brick by digital brick.

In this age when everything is trying to divide us, from social media to governments, I find myself longing for that early-Internet feeling again, that fleeting sense of belonging to humanity itself, the one Carl Sagan meant when he spoke of the pale blue dot and the quiet miracle of “togetherness.” A sense that despite all the nationalities, languages, politics -- despite all the noise and all the chaos -- we are still, somehow, in this together.

And the more time goes on, the more it seems it won’t be the Internet.