It might just be me, but this interface is the first time I felt the desire to interact with long-running agents even though I use chat interfaces all day long. Maybe it was the demo video on the landing page which was compelling with its examples. Maybe it was the feeling that I could see what was going on because I would be on a canvas. Nicely done!
Off to keep iterating on the prototype app I started...
I'll play slight devil's advocate. The buttons in the toolbar are duplicative of the options in the menubar, and I don't want to learn 2 locations for every feature. You can't turn off the menubar items, so I end up turning off the toolbar. So I don't care what that part of the UI looks like, and the sidebar for formatting they added, as pointed out in the article, uses the horizontal space on screens better than options stretched out over the full width of the menu.
Now the visibility of the liquid glass stuff, that is definitely a problem. Can't recognize a UI element if it's constantly rendered differently and with very little contrast with the background elements.
Well, I guess someone is going to vibecode a decent Linux GUI or fix the driver pains there or something and we'll be free of this. Because Microsoft/Apple and to a lesser extent Google have jumped the shark with their UI these days.
I've standardized on getting github actions to create/pull a docker image and run build/test inside that. So if something goes wrong I have a decent live debug environment that's very similar to what github actions is running. For what it's worth.
Masterclass in turning a goodbye email into a hire me after my next gig ends. I’m not being sarcastic, this is a great example of highlighting the value they added.
I wonder how hard it is to remove that SynthID watermark...
Looks like: "When tested on images marked with Google’s SynthID, the technique used in the example images above, Kassis says that UnMarker successfully removed 79 percent of watermarks." From https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-watermark-remover
Berkeley National Lab did a great study on this recently [0]. Short answer what's raised prices over the last 5 years, slide 22 in the linked doc: supply chain disruption increasing hardware prices, wildfires, and renewable policies (ahem, net metering) that over-reimburse asset owners.
I'd love to be able to point at something that implicates data centers, but first I'd need to see the data. So far, no evidence. Hint: it would show up in bulk system prices not consumer rates, which are dominated by wires costs.
I can live with the different visual style but iOS 26 has cost about 30% of my battery even running all day on low power mode on an iPhone 14. It’s horrendous. Hard to even get through one day on a charge now.
As an English speaker, DuoLingo didn’t seem that interesting to me. Then I listened to a podcast where the found Luis von Ahn explained why he started the company [1]. He grew up in Guatemala, and he noticed that learning English would essentially triple anyone’s earning potential in his country. Sure, I might never learn Chinese in DuoLingo, but if I could triple my income by doing it I bet I’d be much more motivated. English speakers that think this app is a toy aren’t the target market.
Luis also invented the captcha and used it to digitize the full archive of the New York Times. I can’t speak to the quality of the instruction in DuoLingo, but I’m willing to bet that if there’s a computer-assisted approach to language learning that works, Luis is one of the people most likely to invent it.
My guess is the ‘users didnt know what they were doing defense.’ Not that you can deploy software in a secure by default stance. But once somebody sets up users and a million other settings inside Active Directory, it’s pretty much bound to be insecure. And then the defense is akin to ‘you werent supposed to crash the car into the tree’.
Off to keep iterating on the prototype app I started...