Cory Weinberg, Jemima McEvoy, Jessica E. Lessin, and Stephanie Palazzolo, writing for the paywalled-without-gift-links The Information:

As Amodei has hopscotched the globe to preach about the potential and risks of AI — from New Delhi to Davos to Sun Valley — Clark has almost always been near his side. Several people who know the couple describe Clark as Amodei’s emotional ballast, someone he has sought counsel from during the turbulence of Anthropic’s growth and clashes with Washington over the future of AI.

Clark may well be the most consequential person within Anthropic’s orbit who doesn’t have a formal role at the startup. You might even call her the first lady of Anthropic. [...]

And before Female Algorithm Technologies, Clark tried her hand at building a pornographic film company, Eddice, that planned to make movies with high-production values and female protagonists. She also hoped it would have online shopping capabilities. In 2011, she tried to raise money for Eddice from Jeffrey Epstein, who’d pleaded guilty to charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution three years earlier, according to emails made public as part of the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice earlier this year. She emailed Epstein the script for the first of a series of films they hoped to make (title: “American Girl in Paris”).

“We thought you and the ladies might enjoy,” Clark wrote. She then appended a winking warning: “A little nsfw,” an acronym for “not safe for work.” Epstein didn’t invest.

While enormous attention has fallen on AI and the people behind the companies developing it, Clark has largely flown under the radar.

James Padolsey, on the Claude-text-watermarking-to-comply-with-an-EU-regulation imbroglio:

The same thought that led to this law could have applied to calculators at the time of their inception, had their outputs revealed themselves through artefacts. Thankfully, a sum borne of the brain is treated no differently from one produced by a calculator. Likewise with spellcheckers. To make assistance suspect only once the tool becomes capable enough to compose a whole sentence is not a principled boundary. It is a moral premium placed on difficulty itself.

Anthropic has nevertheless chosen a blanket, model-level implementation that appears broader than the law’s minimum requirement. That may be convenient compliance engineering, but it discards distinctions the law expressly attempted to preserve. The result is a signal broad enough to implicate harmless and assistive use, yet fragile enough to be removed by a motivated person through substantial recomposition. It risks concentrating suspicion on ordinary and assistive users while remaining weakest against deliberate deception.

Padolsey is the creator of Declaude, a delightfully simple web app that allows you to “Paste in AI-flavored text and get the same content back as plain prose”. Declaude’s original purpose is cleaning the cutesy Claude personality stink from text (whether it was created by Claude or any other LLM), but, if Anthropic persists in its stated plan to begin adulterating all text Claude generates, Declaude will also serve as a copy-paste single-extra-step way to eliminates those marks. Declaude is interesting and useful already, but goes to show how ill-considered this EU regulation is.

Padolsey also wrote and programmed a splendid interactive essay that explains and illustrated how the “watermarking” scheme Anthropic is adopting (and Google Gemini has already adopted) works.

The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

To help alleviate the supply crunch, Apple is looking to Chinese manufacturers.

“The Trump administration is not in favor of that,” Lutnick said in an interview after touring an Apple manufacturing facility in Houston. There have to be “other solutions to the memory issue, but it’s not great American companies using Chinese memory.”

Asked if he has relayed that message to Apple, Lutnick said “plainly.”

But:

U.S. government rules require American companies to secure a license before sharing product information with CXMT and YMTC. The Chinese chip makers would need such information if they were to make customized chips for Apple. But Apple is free to buy off-the-shelf parts from the companies, and to negotiate prices with them.

Apple’s chief operating officer, Sabih Khan, declined to confirm that Apple was testing Chinese memory chips in an interview Thursday. But he said that given the magnitude of the supply shortage, “we have to look at all options,” including working with existing suppliers to increase U.S. production.

XCancel:

XCancel is an instance of Nitter.

Nitter is a free and open source alternative Twitter front-end focused on privacy and performance. The source is available on GitHub at https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [...]

Using an instance of Nitter (hosted on a VPS for example), you can browse Twitter without JavaScript while retaining your privacy. In addition to respecting your privacy, Nitter is on average around 15 times lighter than Twitter, and in most cases serves pages faster (eg. timelines load 2-4× faster).

I personally don’t care for Elon Musk’s X-rebranded Twitter. I also realize that some of you outright despise it, and, worse, that under Musk, they make it difficult to view content if you’re not signed into an account or if you have JavaScript disabled. So, sometimes, when I link to posts or threads on Twitter/X, I include a link to the same content at XCancel.

XCancel isn’t perfect, alas. Just this week I linked to a tweet from Google Design that contained an animation of an Android app that they were inexplicably proud to show off. The XCancel cache of that tweet only showed it as animated to some people. Others just saw a static image. I don’t know why. That’s XCancel’s problem, not mine.

Also, it’s tiresome and repetitive to include an extra link to XCancel every time I link to a tweet on Twitter/X. If you would prefer to view x.com links on xcancel.com, you should automate the redirection. If you use Safari, XCancel Redirect is a free extension that claims to do just what you think it does. (I haven’t tried it.) Or you can use a general-purpose redirect extension. RedirectWeb is a good one that I can recommend. Also, Jeff Johnson’s excellent StopTheMadness — an extension I rely on for multiple purposes and frequently recommend. With StopTheMadness, you can redirect all x.com URLs to xcancel.com with the following rules (you need the leading and trailing slashes in the pattern to tell STM that it’s a regex pattern, not a plain text string):

Pattern: /https?://(www[.])?x[.]com/
Replacement: https://xcancel.com
Enabled on platforms: All

I understand not wanting to visit Twitter/X. But if you feel that way, I do sympathize, but that’s your decision, and you should use tools to redirect Twitter/X links automatically. And if you’re wondering why I don’t just refuse to link to anything on Twitter/X, that just isn’t practical. I wish it weren’t so, but many people, including senior Apple executives, and many organizations post interesting content exclusively to Twitter/X. If something posted to Twitter/X is also available elsewhere, I link to the elsewhere version. But if it’s exclusively available on Twitter/X and interesting, I link to the original.

My linking to original content on Twitter/X does not perpetuate Twitter/X’s relative popularity. Original content appearing exclusively on Twitter/X does.

My thanks to Drata for sponsoring last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Leverage autonomous AI agents to automate compliance, manage internal and third-party risk, and continuously prove your security posture.

Following up on my post yesterday about modern iPhones and scratch resistance, and my personal habits of (a) almost never using an iPhone case, and (b) never setting the iPhone face down except on soft (cloth) surfaces.

I should have anticipated this, because I’ve had this conversation with real-world normies repeatedly in recent years, but I got a bunch of questions from people who say they’re wary of ever putting their iPhone down on its back because they’re worried about scratching the camera lenses. That’s not a silly thing to worry about. It looks like those lenses are glass; glass scratches; and it sure seems like a scratched camera lens might forever ruin all the photos and videos you take with the camera.

There are a couple misconceptions here though. First, the glassy flat circles exposed on the back of your phone aren’t the camera lenses. Those are covers over the lenses, which are smaller, spherical (convex, not flat), and recessed. You can look through the covers and see the actual spherical lenses inside. The exposed lens covers are made of sapphire, not glass, and are thus incredibly scratch-resistant. They’re by far the most scratch-resistant parts of the phone. I’ve never once found even a tiny scratch on any of my iPhone camera lens covers, and I’ve never taken any particular care to avoid scratching them. I mean, I don’t drag the lenses face-down on surfaces. I’m not trying to scratch them. But I set my phones down on hard surfaces lenses-down all the time and they never seem to pick up even fine scratches.

Zack “JerryRigEverything” Nelson is the guy on YouTube who makes videos where he scratches the hell out of products to see how durable they are. (And he bends them, burns them, and abuses them in other gruesomely creative ways.) In his iPhone 17 Pro video, starting around the 4:10 mark, he tries scratching the sapphire lens covers with a sharp razor blade. No effect. Sapphire is far more likely to shatter than scratch, because it’s so hard. (You may recall that a decade ago Apple pursued using sapphire for the displays of iPhones but it didn’t work out.) Don’t try scratching your lenses with a diamond hardness pick and you’ll be fine.

Also, believe it or not, a fine scratch on the lens cover will almost certainly not affect image quality at all. Try sticking a strand of hair (which is probably much thicker than a typical scratch) to the surface of your iPhone 1× main camera lens. Take a picture. Clean the hair off the lens. Retake the same picture. You almost certainly won’t see any difference at all. Here’s a great video from DPReview back in 2020 showing just how much dust or scratching you need to put on the outside of a lens to degrade image quality. It’s counterintuitive but the surface of the lens is not where light is focused — the sensor, inside the camera, is.

This page from Google Design on their “Material 3” UI language came to my attention after my snarky post about the ungainly new to-do app they bizarrely bragged about on Twitter/X this week. I don’t think this “Material 3” page is new — I think it’s a few years old — but I’d never seen it before.

First, it’s crazy that (in desktop browsers with a mouse cursor) they change the I-beam cursor for text selection to ... a circle. I guess it looks kind of fun but the whole point of the I-beam cursor is to enable precise character selection. They changed that to something that makes precise selection as difficult as possible. It’d be better to just use an arrow pointer than to replace the I-beam with a goddamn circle. This, from the UI design team.

Second, this paragraph made me honestly wonder if I was reading a spoof, a years-old unfunny April Fool’s “prank”. But as far as I can tell this is totally straight, not a prank:

These factors can be quantified in users’ responses to new M3 Expressive designs. We found a 32% increase in subculture perception, which indicates that expressive design makes a brand feel more relevant and “in-the-know.” We also saw a 34% boost in modernity, making a brand feel fresh and forward-thinking. On top of that, there was a 30% jump in rebelliousness, suggesting that expressive design positions a brand as bold, innovative, and willing to break from convention.

Nothing says rebellious and “in-the-know” like assigning precise percentages to “rebelliousness”, “modernity”, and “subculture perception”.

Update: Believe it or not there is video of the Google Design team putting this research together. Worth a watch.

Philip Michaels, writing last September for Tom’s Guide:

iPhone 17 torture test videos done by JerryRigEverything indicate that Ceramic Shield 2 certainly resists scratching, with scratch testing leaving only light scratches at level 7 on the Mohs scale of hardness. Scratches typically show up on glass at levels 5 or 6 on that scale.

“Ceramic Shield 2 is indeed the best we’ve ever seen,” JerryRigEverything remarks in the iPhone 17 Pro testing video.

That backs up Apple’s own Ceramic Shield 2 video, in which a mineral tip can be seen rubbing against a Ceramic Shield 2-coated display. There’s residue left on the screen, but it’s material from that tip, as it wipes away fairly easily.

I mentioned yesterday that I try never to place my iPhones face down, to avoid scratches, and that my nearly year-old iPhone 17 Pro seemingly has not one visible scratch on the front glass. Not even a single micro abrasion I can see, even when tilting it with the display off to hunt for them. Surely Apple’s Ceramic Shield 2, which is intended to provide best-ever scratch resistance, is a factor too — and likely the biggest factor. Apple at its best.

A few years ago I’d have looked at this post and maybe leaned toward the idea that a precocious 8th grader somewhere hacked into the @GoogleDesign Twitter account and tried to pass off their little to-do app as having come from Google’s design team. But this is apparently real. I almost hope it’s AI slop and that there aren’t any human designers there who think anything in this app has appropriate proportions or is aesthetically pleasing.

(Here’s an XCancel link for the x.com averse. You can just change any x.com/* URL to xcancel.com/*. But, alas, the XCancel mirror of the original tweet loses the animation showing the UI in motion — for some, but not all, users.)

Joanna Stern, writing at The New Things (gift link):

I used to love the blinking notification light on my BlackBerry, and later my Droid 2. It was a simple way to know I had a message without actually looking at my messages. Then BlackBerry let you customize the color, and it was a rainbow dream.

Google’s HiLight takes it a step further by letting you assign different colors to VIP contacts. So when your phone is face down, you can tell who’s trying to reach you without picking it up. It looks cool. The big bummer? At launch, it only works for phone calls.

Google told me it’s “continuing to invest in this technology” and that messaging notifications are coming. Still, it’s odd they aren’t there at launch, especially since Google found plenty of colors for Gemini. The ring changes hue depending on whether the AI is listening, thinking or responding.

I have no interest in this because a few years ago I stopped ever putting my iPhone on any surface face down. I don’t use a case, so setting the phone face down is a good way to pick up scratches. I stopped doing that, ever, and now I’ve got a nearly year-old iPhone 17 Pro that seemingly doesn’t have even a micro abrasion on the display glass.

And it seems downright goofy that it’s launching with support only for phone calls. Google can’t even launch a blinking light right on these Pixel phones.

David Imel, The Verge:

But in our current moment, the photos people are drawn to are not flawless — and that’s created a real problem for the people making smartphone cameras. “The gap between what two random people want from their camera is growing dramatically,” says Isaac Reynolds, who leads the Pixel camera team at Google. Some people want a perfectly optimized photo, Reynolds says. “But there’s a growing number of people who want something that they feel is more authentic or traditional, by their definition.”

That’s what Reynolds and the Pixel team are setting out to solve with Camera Looks, a total rethink of how the camera captures and styles an image on the Pixel 11 series. The phones include a new suite of processing tools aimed at giving people much more control over the camera’s output. At first glance, they look a lot like filters, with names like Black Tie, Classic, and most strikingly, Digi, in reference to the growing trend of buying cheap digital cameras from the early aughts. But unlike a filter, which generally applies editing tweaks after the processing happens, Camera Looks is changing how image data is processed at the sensor level.

This sounds a lot like Apple’s “Photographic Styles” in the iPhone 13 and later, but with the addition of some control over grain and sharpness. I love grain, and the thing I like least about Apple’s built-in photo processing is the way it attempts to eliminate all noise. I like digital cameras that embrace noise and try to make it pleasing, rather than over-processing to try to pretend these tiny sensors aren’t inherently noisy. So I say kudos to Google for loosening up on “everyone gets the over-sharpened, over-smoothed look”.

But, that said, what’s made me happy over the last year is shooting almost all my photos with third-party apps — in particular, Halide, Not Boring Camera, and Analogue — that give me low-level control over processing through LUTs (or in Halide’s parlance, “looks”). These apps give me the looks I want just through point-and-shoot photography. No need to process images after shooting. But because they (optionally) shoot RAW, I can reprocess in post without losing any original sensor data. I can shoot in black-and-white and subsequently change my mind and reprocess with a color look later. These apps enable honest film-look photography without looking at all gimmicky, and without baking any sort of filtering into the image data in my camera roll. It’s the best of both worlds. It’s also way, way fussier than the built-in Camera app should be.

Anyway, all this Pixel announcement news today has me thinking that these days, I never hear much about Pixel cameras or image processing. In the early years of the Pixel lineup, there was a common view that Pixel phones were the best camera phones in the world. I never believed that, but I did think they were an interesting alternative, taking different but equally valid philosophical choices than Apple. Apple has always insisted on instant processing. You snap the shutter and the iPhone saves your image instantly. Pixel cameras often undertook seconds-long processing. That enabled features the iPhone couldn’t offer.

I think it’s pretty easy to pinpoint when things changed for Pixel — when Marc Levoy left Google for Adobe in 2020 (where he now leads the team making the very intriguing Indigo camera app, that is exclusively available for iPhone and which offers a slew of innovative computational photography features).

When Levoy was leading Google’s camera photography team, there was a credible argument that Pixel phones were the best still camera phones in the world. (They were never even close on video.) Ever since, I never hear about them except in the middle of August each year, when Google announces new Pixel hardware. See you in 12 months.

Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch:

With this year’s Pixel 11 series launch, Google is thinking more agentic AI to complete your tasks. With Gemini, U.S.-based users will be able to order groceries, book rides, or get coffee, for instance. Plus, Gemini can call businesses on users’ behalf for table reservations or appointments. Google said that users can take over or stop tasks at any point in time and also review transcripts for AI-operated calls.

Over the next few weeks, a new slate of connected apps will be able to work with Gemini to get things done, including Granola, Otter.ai, Wix, Fever, Get Your Guide, Localiza, OpenTable (U.K.), Ticketmaster, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Angi, Thumbtack, and Zocdoc.

I’ve never heard of most of those apps, or, if I have heard of them, I thought they went defunct years ago. The one app amongst those I do use, OpenTable, apparently only supports this Gemini integration in the U.K.?

Another knockout year for the Pixel phones and Android.

Sam Rutherford, writing for Engadget:

Granted, the P11 Pro Fold still includes IP68 dust and water resistance, which is better than what you get on the Z Fold 8 line (IP48). But after making an absolute tank of a foldable phone with last year’s model, I said Google really needed to cut weight and thickness this generation, and it just hasn’t. Instead, it seems like Google has leaned even more into the Pro Fold’s sturdiness with a new glass fibre material for its rear panel that the company says is nearly impossible to crack. This is great in theory, but obviously I wasn’t in a position to smash one of Google’s demo units in order to test that claim.

I have never seen anyone, anywhere, with a folding Pixel phone. Pretty sure I won’t this year either.

I played with a Pixel 10 Fold or whatever its name was last year at the Google Store on Newbury street in Boston, which store felt like a small library or museum. The Pixel Fold display was so plasticky that I had a moment where I wondered if the display units were fake props, like at Ikea. But no, it was the real thing. And it cost $1,800 to start.

Victoria Song, The Verge:

The $399 Google Pixel Watch 5 isn’t about the hardware. Sure, there’s a new satin pyrite case finish, a few new strap colors, and a Steph Curry Special Edition. Under the hood, there’s a slightly faster Qualcomm processor and an itty-bitty battery bump. There’s a $50 price hike from last year, too, because the Pixel Watch 5 isn’t immune to RAMageddon — none of us are. Otherwise, no one would blame you for looking at this watch and thinking absolutely nothing’s changed. That’s because the big updates this year are all software-based.

I have never seen anyone in real life wearing a Pixel Watch. (I’ve only seen a handful of people using Pixel phones, and every single one of them was at a tech event of some sort.)

You can also use AI to generate watchfaces. I created a watchface featuring “fat cats and an elegant font.” It didn’t quite do that. The fat cats weren’t characters, so much as pleasantly plump, cat-shaped clock numbers. It’s a gimmicky way to shoehorn the Nano Banana model onto the watch… but if that’s your thing, it works.

Well I’m sure now I’ll see plenty of people wearing Pixel Watches.

Mia Sato, The Verge:

Earlier this summer, Amazon customers began noticing that emails related to their online orders looked sparse: Order confirmation emails didn’t name specific items anymore, and instead listed only item categories.

“Your Beauty item is confirmed!” an email about my retainer cleaning tablets read. Shoppers have posted other iterations of the redacted emails as well: “Ordered: 1 Hardware item,” “Your Drugstore, Shoes, and other items are here!” and “1 Nutrition & Wellness, 1 Wireless Accessories,” for example. The emails have clip art-style illustrations of general product categories, and a shopper has to exit their email and go to Amazon to see what item it’s actually referring to.

Complaints about the vague emails appear to have started in July; orders placed as recently as June contain thumbnails and names of the exact item purchased. [...]

“As customers shop with us more frequently, including on their phones, and use the ‘Your Orders’ page in the Amazon app to get real-time, consolidated order details and delivery status, we’ve simplified several order-related emails to direct customers to our app and website for the latest information on their orders,” spokesperson Maxine Tagay said in an email. “This also reduces customer information shared outside the Amazon app and website to further improve customer privacy.”

That statement from Amazon is almost honest, if you squint at it and ignore the bit about it having anything to do with “simplification”. If you order a Torx screwdriver, what’s simple is getting a confirmation email with the exact name, brand, and photo of the item you ordered, not “a hardware item”. The honest part is “reduces customer information shared outside the Amazon app”.

The fact is, a lot of people use apps like Gmail for email. In fact, a lot of people use Gmail in particular. There’s a good chance you do. When you use Gmail, Google learns everything in your email. Amazon sees this as a competitive problem for them, not a privacy problem for users. Everyone who uses Gmail basically knows that Google “knows” what’s in their email, and they’re voluntarily agreeing to that. Amazon just doesn’t like that any of its competitors — perhaps especially Google — can glean so much information about what people are buying from Amazon. So Amazon, in an act of competitive spite that corrupts its relationship with its own customers, is limiting all useful purchase information to channels that it controls — its website and its own apps.

If customers relied solely on the “Your Orders” page at Amazon, they wouldn’t need to send any emails at all. The obvious fact is, people go to Amazon when they want to buy something. They don’t come back until they want to buy something else. They enjoy getting confirmation and shipping notifications in email because they check their email regularly.

Jeff Johnson:

These purported reviews, all but one of which is 5 stars, are all in English. Yet none of them is in the US App Store. I also looked at other English-speaking countries such as Australia and Canada but found no reviews. Also suspicious is that the name of every reviewer was a first name followed by an initial for the last name. If you’ve ever looked through App Store user reviews, it’s unusual to find this naming format. In most cases, the name on App Store user reviews is a uniquely chosen username, with no space character, often suffixed by a number.

The final and most conclusive evidence that these reviews are fake, totally invented out of thin air by the developer (or more likely, by an LLM), is that the dates on the reviews, such as “Mar 12,” predate the release of TabControl Extension in the App Store!

God only knows what this obvious AI slop scam is doing with the data from users’ Safari tabs. It’s currently the 12th or 13th most popular Safari extension in the App Store.

Watch this. No words needed, everyone can feel it. Genes are a hell of a thing.

Basic Apple Guy:

Apple just dropped the hardest icon glow-up for the new Chess icon in macOS 27 Beta 5.

This is not just a tweak or small improvement. This is the difference between total shit and a really nice icon.

The Economist (‘twas a gift link, but alas, I guess gift views have been used up — here’s an archive link in case the gift link is vexing you):

You can discover AI’s hallmarks by comparing the writing of man and machine. To do this you need a baseline that is distinctive and familiar. The Economist turned to prose that we’re sure is human and that readers will recognise: our own. We designed a study to ask top LLMs — OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok — to write versions of our articles without consulting the web. (As a prompt, we gave them the AI-generated summaries that we have experimentally added to some of our articles.)

This gave us a corpus of human and AI creations and we compared them across 55,940 sentences and 1.2m words. To make sure we were detecting AI quirks rather than our own, we also checked the AI texts against journalism from CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Excerpts from hit novels published between 1950 and 2022 offered another test.

Our findings are surprising. AI prose is distinguishable by word and punctuation choice as well as sentence and paragraph structure. But its hallmarks are not what you might expect, partly because its writing style has changed with software updates. That does not mean that LLMs are great writers: their prose lacks lucidity and elegance and is often formulaic. So those aspiring to be impressive (human) storytellers should avoid the following peculiarities in their own prose.

On point for today.

Some specific findings:

Much of this language could be described as what George Orwell called “pretentious diction”. He railed against writers who “dress up simple statements” with complicated words and jargon to sound clever. Such pontificating penmen, Orwell observed, also believe that “Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones”. (Bots agree: more Latinate suffixes crop up in their writing than in human texts.)

Then look at punctuation. Many believe LLMs stuff their prose with em-dashes, but that is not true after the most recent updates. Today only Claude uses more em-dashes than human writers, with ChatGPT using markedly fewer than any other writer in our study. Humans rejoice — and start using dashes again.

A better way to spot AI-generated writing would be to look for texts without much punctuation at all. LLMs are very Joycean about it: they use fewer commas and semicolons than humans (and hardly any parentheses). They use less punctuation in part because they write longer sentences — “and” is their most overused word — and in part because they do not quote experts.

Alex Micek:

In the future, I will feel angry if my car strands me on the side of the road.
I will feel angry if the motor brushes fail expectedly.
I will feel angry if it leaks water.

By contrast, I don’t feel anger when the car tricks me into seeing an advertisement. Instead, I feel a deep, smothering, let-down at the promise of futurism. Bottomless despair is probably inappropriate; a symptom of the misanthropy I should grow out of. But. In the meantime, I feel helpless, discouraged, deeply sad.

Such a good take. I should not let 19 years pass again between linking to his writing.