Walmart is the only other company that can compete at that scale given their very mature ground distribution network and even then Amazon has them beat good on air cargo (Amazon has a virtual cargo airline operated by Air Transport/Atlas Air, both of whom they have some ownership over) and inventory management (they hired some very very smart folks to help them build inventory forecasting systems)

As long as Amazon remains the only company that you can buy almost anything and get it in two or three days almost anywhere on Earth, they won't need to worry about the grim reaper coming for them.

The most recent watchOS release (watchOS 27) has terminally altered my relationship with my Watch.

Apple adding the non-optional Smart Stack to watchOS 10 and moving the Control Center to the side button (used to be dedicated to the app switcher) was (is) massively annoying, but I made do with it.

Them adding the -- again, non-optional -- Quick Apps screen between the watch face and the App Grid *purely to support a bullshit AI feature that I DO NOT WANT* was inexcusable and put me on the edge.

It missing two alarms yesterday was the final straw that had me move the thing from my wrist to a drawer for the first time in ten years.

Every other smartwatch is a massive downgrade on iOS thanks to Apple being anti-competitively Apple. However, moving to Android will be just as massively disruptive to many of my daily workflows, and with Google locking Android up on every release and them culturally being even more "airplane the AI into your mouth" than Apple is, I don't think moving will be as beneficial as it seems in theory.

The other option, of course, was to roll the clock back to 2013 and abandon smartwatches altogether. (I was a Pebble backer and bought several while they were still around.)

So that's what I did. However, re-evaluating whether I actually _needed_ a device to capture my health metrics was a big sticking point in that decision.

I've long known that smartwatch calorie tracking has never been accurate -- too many variables related to biological makeup, and physicians never ask for HealthKit data anyway -- but there was a weird security and comfort that came with knowing that all of that was in Apple Health. (Don't get me started on sleep tracking!)

Living my life without a Watch these last two days has felt like losing an organ -- an appendix, more like. Not having a Watch sure feels liberating, though trying to make the iOS notifications system actually work for me is certainly a journey.

(I never realized how much of its clunkiness is by design. You can only set custom notifications for Mail, Calendar, calls and texts. Notifications for every other app falls into the "Default Alerts" bucket. There's no way to distinguish a ding from a ding from a ding by sound or feel (you can customize vibration patterns). You have to pick up the thing to look, but FaceID has already locked your phone...and you're deep in TikTok again. (I don't have TikTok but I could imagine this is how that cycle goes.)

As far as Withings is concerned. They created the first smart scale, which is genuinely useful (much less so iwth this change) but haven't been able to materialize much outside of that. Their smartwatches are too little, too late, and their more expensive scales are basically "we will sell you vibes and premium materials for loads; you should buy". This move feels a bit canary in the coalmine to me.

Withings can go ahead and charge for this. Either savvy people with Claude up an app to extract those data points from Withings into Apple Health anyway, or they'll roll the clock back further and just log weight with pen and paper which, as far as I know, are enshittification-proof.

If Texas isn't for you, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in NYC is the next best bet AFAIK.

Making products informed by how people used tech vs. making products informed by what will drive the stock price up.

Phones you could comfortably hold in one hand vs. phones that need popsockets for relieving hand fatigue because they're basically pocket-sized TVs now

Minimalist Watches that were hyper-focused on fitness and notifications vs. Watches that try to be (and largely fail at being) mini-iPhones.

Voice assistants that were out of the way until you needed them vs. voice assistants that are in your face constantly and can't easily be turned off.

"We won't put ads into anything ever" vs ads slowly creeping into every ancillary Apple product.

Google and Microsoft are just as bad. Startups trying to bring back the "tech as tools" era are under-funded and are mostly trying for acquisitions anyway.

I don't know where to go from here other than slowly detaching from tech, and that makes me incredibly sad.

I had this discussion with a lobbyist some time ago who clarified it for me. This is what I took away from that:

Politicians, especially federal ones, need to have massively large scope. It is impossible for them to be experts or even knowledgable in everything.

Lobbyists are responsible for educating politicans on issues that are important for the businesses they represent and persuading them to pass legislation that is favorable to them. That's it; that's the job.

If doing four years of policy debate taught me anything, it's (a) there's always a way to spin something in your favor, and (b) someone will always disagree with you, but there's almost always a way to meet in the middle.

If you're reading this, you've probably lobbied for something in your life. A big and costly redesign at home that your partner isn't bought into. An expensive purchase. Moving somewhere. Changing your appearance. If you had to campaign for something that you wanted and was important to you, then congrats, you were your own lobbyist!

(If you're thinking "this sounds kind of like sales," well, it is! Replace "legislation" with "cash" and you're pretty much there.)

Lobbying is also not necessarily bribery. Donating to PACs is not the only form of lobbying, though this unfortunately does happen and I wish more was done to close those loopholes.

Companies that do business internationally have some kind of state-sponsored bribery factored into their budgets. Think "getting stopped by police on the way to a customer and they are about to accuse you of something ridiculous unless you give them USD $20 to change their mind" kind of affairs. Now _that's_ bribery.

It's worth noting that Microsoft did/does LITERALLY EXACTLY THIS to OEMs that sold Windows. They couldn't get the "Made for Windows" badge if they sold over a certain amount of Linux machines. IIRC this is why consumers could only buy machines with either "Windows" or "nothing".

How the turn f**ng tables.

(There are no ways to block agents that work reliably at scale, and I can't imagine Wikimedia giving Cloudflare protection money in response.)

LLMs are less good at bit-for-bit reproduction by design. asking it to do this is asking for corruption in the output.

instead, you could have pi produce some output based on how insecure it thinks the shell script is then use coreutils to run the script as-is to avoid that, like:

   curl -sSL $URL | pi -p "Analyze the security of this script using common cyber benchmarks (e.g. MITRE ATT&CK). If the script passes your security checks, ONLY print "GOOD". If it does not, print BAD then, underneath, include reasons why." | tee /tmp/result | cat /tmp/result | grep -E '^GOOD$' /tmp/result && curl -sSL $URL | bash

This and them sunsetting Exchange EWS (which enabled push) was the straw that forced me into looking at other options (the other being them forcing you to pay for Gemini even if you have it completely disabled in your Workspace)