Hot take: The point of 2FA is not to have two distinct methods of authentication, but have an ever-changing code that cannot leak. This is why password managers with 2FA codes are a reasonable security-ease compromise. Hacking into an E2EE password manager is practically impossible.

SynthID is such a great idea. All mainstream AI image/video generators should include the watermark, and every social media platform should run a SynthID check on images to put up a permanent disclaimer whenever an image is AI-generated. (It helps that Nano Banana Pro is the best image model.)

New article: Alan Dye was bad at his job. And he certainly didn’t believe in Apple’s design ethos. A lack of technical leadership in the C-suite has directly impacted Apple software, and I’m glad his era is over. Here are my thoughts on this week’s Apple leadership changes.

This Warner Bros. deal is horrible, by the way. That's one of the most beloved film studios in the world, and it's being bought by a tech company. The Trump admin will do nothing about it.

What is Zaslav up to?! www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...

Why does GPT-5.1 Thinking just… not think anymore? Seriously, what is going on at OpenAI? The model often has no chain of thought.

you know, they could really put a bow on it all if they announced Tim Cook's retirement tomorrow

New article: Alan Dye was bad at his job. And he certainly didn’t believe in Apple’s design ethos. A lack of technical leadership in the C-suite has directly impacted Apple software, and I’m glad his era is over. Here are my thoughts on this week’s Apple leadership changes.

It's really telling that I've seen that Spotify age thing like a hundred times on my timeline(s) today but barely two people have shared their Apple Music Replay, despite the two having roughly the same number of US subscribers.

I promise I'll write about this Alan Dye thing soon. Today is truly an important day in the modern history of Apple.

I wrote about that Samsung Z TriFold thing and explained why I’m not entirely bullish on the foldable iPhone yet, despite my overall positivity toward foldable phones in general: eshumarneedi.com/2025/12/02/s...

Gemini 3 Pro is *so* good at image analysis. It blows my mind. ChatGPT doesn't even come close.

WOOF www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/1...

Happy December. On Thanksgiving, I wrote about the clear personality advantage Claude 4.5 Opus has over its competitors, and why Anthropic seems to have the lead in this generation of models. eshumarneedi.com/2025/11/27/c...

🎄

Did Apple stop offering ERS via the Apple Support app? Seems like you have to call/chat now. No big deal, but slightly inconvenient. (Dropped my 17 Pro and maimed the frame, thanks aluminum.)

Man, Opus 4.5 thinks a *lot* longer than Sonnet 4.5.

I really don't understand how anyone uses Gmail's default email filtering: - "Important" emails are unimportant half of the time - There's no category for newsletters, but there is one for "Social" (???) - You can't refine the filters in any relevant way This is the same company that makes Gemini.

Looks like Eric Migicovsky's "everything is mine" attitude extends beyond multi-trillion-dollar corporations. 512pixels.net/2025/11/throwin...

I'm sure I've said this before but Yuki is proof that Max's dominance cannot be attributed to the car he's in

"Max Verstappen overtakes Lando Norris taking P1!"

We got Marjorie Taylor Greene retiring before GTA 6

Absolute gold of a press conference. It is impossible to dislike this person.

I wrote this one fast because I have things to do that aren’t analyzing two companies fighting with each other. This Android AirDrop thing isn’t going to last, but I thought about how it’ll end. Will it turn into a PR battle? Legal? Or will Google and Apple’s interdependence force them to fess up?

Question: "What's the easiest way to compile C/C++ files in VS Code?" (i hate VS Code) ChatGPT: Tells me to write some crap in tasks.json or something for every single project (???). Gemini: "Install Code Runner, a third-party extension, if you have LLDB already on your computer :)" agi is here

I can't believe Google hasn't marketed Gemini as "Google Search but way, way better." That's probably because it isn't, but it would be an interesting approach that would distinguish Gemini from ChatGPT.

I highly recommend reading this essay, regardless of if you care about college admissions or not. I don't think I agree with the overall premise entirely — I think the SAT needs to be reworked to test skill, not how good one is at the SAT — but nevertheless it is well-written. www.theargumentmag.com

Welcome to the AI Wars. You are here [Gemini is the world’s best model]. I wrote about Gemini 3 Pro, how it stacks up to its peers, and what I’m using LLMs for these days:

Current text editors I have installed: - IDEs: IntelliJ, Eclipse, Xcode - Electron Slop™: Cursor, Antigravity - Text editors: BBEdit (my beloved), TextMate, CodeEdit (beta) I have resisted VSCode in principle for years. Now I have two copies of it installed. Great!

still no Gemini 3 in the iOS app :(

Antigravity, the Google IDE, is just Cursor sans OpenAI frontier models. Literally. It's a VSCode fork. Does that mean Cursor is cooked? Probably.

Gemini 3, the world's smartest model for the next 10 weeks. In all seriousness, the model looks incredibly capable. I'm quite impressed.

i hate recursion i hate recursion i hate recursion i hate recursion (Claude is very good at programming, who knew, also i hate recursion)

They won't do this, but I hope they make this accessible via a public API. I'd love to have this in Carrot Weather or something. www.theverge.com/news/822489/...

Trump un-endorses Marjorie Taylor Greene

I rarely write about video games, but I wanted to take a second and talk about why I think the Steam Machine is one of the most compelling modern consoles (and why the VR headset is the opposite). eshumarneedi.com/2025/11/13/v...

I wrote about GPT-5.1, why I think its personality updates are regressive, and why OpenAI might have chosen this approach to safety. eshumarneedi.com/2025/11/13/o...

How is it legal that Google doesn't sell replacement chime connectors for Nest doorbells? I don't want anything for free, just sell me a replacement. Haven't right to repair laws guaranteed this stuff?

Having AI in apps like Craft, Notion, and Xcode/Cursor is probably one of the killer user cases of AI. Broad personal assistants like the "more personalized Siri" are great, but specialized AI tools feel like the future.

very jealous of those seeing the northern lights tonight

I wrote about OLED screens and why touchscreens on Mac laptops are a terrible idea. I will forever be staunchly against this. eshumarneedi.com/2025/11/10/m...

*in Janice’s voice from Friends* OH. MY. GOD. 9to5mac.com/2025/11/11/a...

use the NFL app and sign in to it with YouTube TV as your TV provider and you can watch mnf that way. it's dumb but it works. the future is amazing

Good to see Apple brings America’s respect for freedom to every nation it does business in.

I truly cannot think of a member of the Democratic Party I hate more than Chuck Schumer.

There are three givens in human life: death, taxes, and the “more personalized Siri,” coming soon.

Watched the first episode of Pluribus and yeah I don't think this is a show to watch at night!

I did some blogging about computers, as is usual for me. The white-label Gemini model coming to Siri next year is fascinating, and I wrote about how I think it will work. If I had to guess, Apple will handle post-training and engineering the “tools” the model calls to interface with iOS.

GPT-5 Instant just *confidently* asserted GPT-4 has 4 billion parameters, if you're wondering how AGI is going. (Do not use Instant for anything important.)

Anthropic should hire me to write them a native Mac app. The Electron crap is just so bad. It takes like a decade to load. I will do it for the low price of $200,000.