- Whew, I’m still buzzing from the fact I managed to place my order for a new M5 MacBook Air just before Apple raised prices (thanks to AI firms driving up the cost of RAM). When Tim Cook gave the WSJ a heads up, I thought we had maybe a month, but decided to bite the bullet sooner rather than later. I don’t have the cost breakdown to know exactly what I paid for my upgrades, but I think that decision saved me over S$500.
- It was Amazon Prime Day and I got some accessories: a Belkin USB hub, and a 1TB Sandisk external SSD for the same price I paid to get a better 2TB Samsung one just two years ago. This chip crunch is the worst.
- The computer arrived yesterday and restoring my old system to it via Time Machine on an external SSD was surprisingly quick and painless. Under an hour, I’d say. One of the first things I did was to install Geekbench and compare it to my old M1 model. It’s true: the M5 is twice as fast. Old habits like picking up my phone to reply because opening Messages.app on the Mac took too long will need to be unlearnt. I also installed ollama and did some local AI inference using a Gemma model, just ‘cause.
- One of the things I never relied on my old M1 MacBook Air to do was play games. I was a PC gamer until I switched to a Mac, at which point I became a console gamer out of sheer necessity. They fare a bit better today thanks to technologies like Apple Silicon and Metal, but it’s not something I’ve paid attention to. This week I decided to fire up Steam for the first time in years and discovered 1) games on sale go even lower in price than they do on consoles, and 2) I can play games on my Mac and view them on a giant screen in Vision Pro. HMMMM! I picked up Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition for just S$4, and will find some time later next week to play it for the first time since the days of my Xbox 360.
- I finally got access to the new Siri AI on my iPad Pro running the iPadOS 27 developer beta. I did a few tests, like recreating the 2024 WWDC scenario by asking it when Kim would be returning from her business trip — it aced it, finding her hotel stay in our shared calendar, and although there were no flight details, it correctly assumed that she would be returning the same day she checked out.
- One of the things I was excited to use Siri AI for was as a general purpose research/answers service, like, you know, a little app called Perplexity that allegedly planted rumors in the press that Apple wanted to buy them. I redeemed a free year of Perplexity Pro at some point and have become accustomed to using it several times a day. But that’s yet another USD$20/mo AI subscription I’d be glad to be rid of. It reminds me of when Steve declined to buy Dropbox and told them they were ‘a feature, not a product’.
- So did Apple succeed in making Siri AI work just as well by licensing Google’s homework instead of buying Perplexity’s wrapper? Signs point to yes. I tried to trip it up by asking who the man appearing in the new Utada Hikaru music video was, just a day after it landed on YouTube. I fully expected it to fail, since the question involved very current information that probably wasn’t in its indexes or training data (remember, Apple says Siri doesn’t rely on Google’s search or world knowledge). But it answered correctly! It cited info from a fan site, and was even able to answer a follow-up question about his (Hiroto Kohmoto) career highlights.
- On the weekend, we took a few nephews and nieces to see Toy Story 5 in a theater, and I’m happy to report that some of that Pixar magic is still alive. Well, another way to put it might be that Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall-E) is still alive and working at Pixar. As you may already know from the trailers, this installment has old-fashioned toys going up against today’s attention and confidence-destroying tech, in the form of gaming on tablets, socializing on the internet, and even generative AI. The tech toys start out looking like villains, but the film seems to contend they’re here to stay and can support an existing, healthy imagination (should your child be blessed enough to have one).
- An old idea came back to me as a possible new vibe coding project, and I’ve started working on the prototype. It’s a generative art concept, and maybe I’m overthinking it and there’s a simpler way than how I’m approaching it, but at present it’s doing my head in. This one might take a while.
- I also decided to revisit my Shelf Expression project and changed up the approach so that all assets like book covers are fetched and cached just once on build, rather than loading them from internet sources each time a visitor arrives. This dramatically sped up the experience, to the point where I can’t recall why I did it the other way to begin with. I also made a collage tool so users can create shareable images of their shelves, support for custom covers, better AI summarization, and other stuff. So my Bookshelf page (and yours, if you use it) should be much nicer now.
- What am I reading? I finished Ted Chiang’s Exhalation and am now on R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis. I loved Chiang’s first collections of sf short stories so much that I kept Exhalation on my list for years, too afraid to read it and have nothing left to look forward to. But there’s the risk of suddenly dying and never getting to do all the things you were saving up — so I read it, and it was worth the wait. Katabasis, like Babel, is a book that draws on Kuang’s time at elite universities. Cambridge, Oxford, and now Yale. They say you should write what you know, but it’s beginning to feel like trauma dumping rather than a deliberate choice to set her stories in academia.
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