Ben

Ben

@benpickering.bsky.social

65 followers171 following111 posts

Ben
@benpickering.bsky.social

@mgsiegler.com I don't think I've read anything in your WWDC writings about iPhone developers being able to access the on-device LLM model. It seems pretty huge and will enable all sorts of new app features. Do you have a take? Is Siri the only AI win that matters?

Ben reposted

Ian Dunt
@iandunt.bsky.social

Here you go: an absolute beast of a starter pack, with many of the UK's most prominent humanists on it. Includes scientists, historians, philosophers, public figures, the New Humanist editorial team and Humanists UK staff. A network for reason and decency. go.bsky.app/PTC4j2d

Ben
@benpickering.bsky.social

@mgsiegler.com I'm beyond fascinated by the idea of a screenless AI device. It feels to me that the use case pattern of "summarise options 1,2,3 and let me pick" is so fundamental to such a broad range of interactions that it just *has* to have a screen! Very excited to see how I'm wrong 🤣

Ben
@benpickering.bsky.social

Could it be that the device does have a screen, but that interactions never *start* from the screen? This would address the social media addiction issue. Doomscrolling is impossible without the timeline as a starting point.

Ben
@benpickering.bsky.social

@sindresorhus.bsky.social I saw this feature request for Pure Paste on Threads: "If I am cutting and pasting within the same app/document, then I probably want to keep the formatting. If I am pasting from outside the app/document then I do not." I guess this is hard to do, though :)

Ben
@benpickering.bsky.social

@flexibits.com Today I deleted Fantastical from my iPhone. I'd like to write you a quick postmortem. I've raised a few requests over the years for the option to disable all the smart parsing of event details, and I won't be using FCal again until this is present.

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Ben
@benpickering.bsky.social

"Remind Fred about the event on Monday". FCal removes "remind" and "on Monday" leaving me with a nonsense reminder for the next upcoming Monday, when my intent was to set a reminder ABOUT a Monday in the future. Please, just let me enter the text as-is and choose the date myself!

Ben
@benpickering.bsky.social

Apple has some smart parsing, but it's presented as an option that needs to be tapped before it's applied to the event. This seems more logical to me; I'd urge you to consider this as an approach if you didn't want to provide a setting to disable it altogether. Thanks!

Ben
@benpickering.bsky.social

@flexibits.com Today I deleted Fantastical from my iPhone. I'd like to write you a quick postmortem. I've raised a few requests over the years for the option to disable all the smart parsing of event details, and I won't be using FCal again until this is present.

Ben
@benpickering.bsky.social

I love the UI, it is better than the default Calendar app. I would use FCal just for this, even if it had no smart parsing. However I can't ignore that the experience of actually capturing events fails for me so often that I have had enough.

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