50 years of text adventures and 50 weeks of AI adventures

Hello all! It’s been a little while and I’ve been holding on to a really great interview the whole time. In summary, after a long few years of running the podcast through varying shapes and sizes… I am joining a podcast network and agency! This is great news for me and will help me move the show to the next level, however I need to do a few technical transfers behind the scenes and that made me pause for a few weeks to avoid downtime. Unfortunately we hit a few issues here and there and that switch over will happen after this issue and episode now.

Podcast version

So, with that news over, the great interview mentioned above is with Aaron A. Reed, author of the amazing “50 years of text adventures”. I backed the book on Kickstarter, but Aaron gave me an advanced press copy and it’s a fantastic read! We spoke about the book, text adventures in general, and had a great conversation around the intersection of technology and writing.

Flop or future?

WWDC happened, and nestled amongst other announcements that actually excited me much more, was the new Vision Pro. I am extremely un-excited by VR, and while AR has interesting applications, we have seen many large projects from equally large companies fail. But who am I to know? Here’s some interesting links from the discussion around WWDC.

With Vision Pro, Apple shows computing's future. But who's it for? →

Tomorrow belongs to somebody, but Apple’s much-talked-about mixed-reality device, Vision Pro — unveiled Monday during a glitzy presentation at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference — won’t ship until early 2024.

Apple will face an uphill battle convincing developers to build apps for its headset →

The ‘one more thing’ announced by Apple at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this year was the industry’s worst-kept secret. The Apple Vision Pro, the tech giant’s gamble on making mixed reality headsets a thing, has received a mixed welcome.

News from WWDC23: WebKit Features in Safari 17 beta →

It’s been a fantastic year for WebKit. We’ve shipped eight Safari releases since WWDC22, with more than 140 new web technologies in the first half of 2023 alone. Now, we are pleased to announce another 88 web features coming this fall in Safari 17. Web apps are coming to Mac.

AInt so smart?

It wouldn’t be a tech newsletter without AI news would it? This week, efforts to regulate and the sites feeding all those “smarts”.

Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart →

An analysis of a chatbot data set by The Washington Post reveals the proprietary, personal, and often offensive websites that go into an AI’s training data.

Ethics — what ethics? For Microsoft, it’s full speed ahead on AI →

Microsoft is all in on artificial intelligence (AI) for a very simple reason: it believes its lead in the technology will make it the tech world’s top dog again.

Who should take responsibility for evil UX design and digital ethics? →

Ethics = moral philosophy. It defines what’s good and what’s evil.

And finally

Digital nomadism is on the decline and behind the scenes at Raycast’s developer experience.

How the Raycast API and extensions work →

Since releasing our API, lots of developers have asked how it all works under the hood. It’s a great question, if a little knotty, especially because we’ve intentionally tried to hide when users interact with extensions in Raycast.

The workers quitting digital nomadism →

The digital nomad has become an iconic character of the modern remote-work era. The words often conjure the image of a professional writer or tech worker with a computer, meandering through the streets of a picturesque foreign city, or tapping away at a keyboard in a beachfront café.

From me

7 macOS native generative AI apps

Video version coming soon, but in the meantime, I explored 7 offline first, macOS native apps for using AI tools.

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