No new members in July
ADAM ENGST 21 July 2025
Who among us has not Googled themselves to see how we’re represented online? When humor columnist Dave Barry did that recently, he was presented with one of Google’s “People also ask” questions: “What happened to Dave Barry?” Curious, he clicked it and went down a maze of twisty little AI answers, all different and many inaccurate. In the first, he had passed away from cancer, but in later answers, it became clear that he was being confused with another Dave Barry from Dorchester, MA.
Barry’s Death by AI post captures this absurdity in his inimitable style. (I’m unreasonably amused by his description of Google as “a huge company with a vast network of computers processing more than a billion trilobites of data every second.”) His attempts to submit corrections were met by Google’s feedback assistant seemingly translating his corrections into Latvian, parsing them in English, and then throwing up its virtual hands in confusion.
Eventually, though, Google managed to align its AI with reality. Now, when I ask Google that question, I get something along these lines.
After conducting extensive research for “AI Answer Engines Are Worth Trying” (17 April 2025), I was curious to see how ChatGPT, Claude, Google’s own Gemini, Perplexity, and You.com would answer the question. Spoiler: they all did fine, though the answers from Claude and You.com were once again the weakest.
Having Google declare you dead might be a gift for a professional humor columnist, but these AI Overview errors highlight how dedicated AI answer engines can deliver more accurate results.
I don’t know why Google’s AI Overview is so much worse than Gemini, but I suspect it has to do with scalability and response time. When I asked, “What happened to Adam Engst?” all the AI answer engines responded correctly but took 3–15 seconds to start returning information. Given the exponentially larger number of queries that Google fields and its desire to do so nearly instantly (0.19 seconds for that query), you can see why Google might be willing to sacrifice AI accuracy for speed.
By the way, in the responses to my navel-gazing curiosity, Perplexity earned bonus points for acknowledging my Internet doppleganger, who’s a lawyer in Seattle, while Claude lost points for being by far the slowest and for providing last year’s information instead of something more recent.
Malcolm Owen
Wed Jul 30 2025, 07:49 AM EDT · 2 minute read
Sketchers Kids can now have a compartment to hide an AirTag - Image Credit: Sketchers
Sketchers has introduced a version of its Kids footwear line with support for AirTagso parents can keep track of the shoes — and the child wearing them.
AirTag is often used to keep track of animals and sometimes small children, by adding the tracker to a bag or in a pocket. Now, Sketchers is helping parents do just that using shoes.
The Sketchers Kids range now includes a feature known as "Find My Sketchers," referring to Apple's app for tracking down misplaced hardware and AirTags. This is handled by a small compartment in the heel of the shoe, hiding an AirTag under the insole.
The compartment includes a reinforced screw-tight cover, as well as a lift-up air-cooled Goga Mat breathable insole to cushion the user's heel.
This is not the first time that electronic inserts can be placed inside shoes and connect to Apple hardware. The Nike+iPod Sport Kit used a small puck sensor that could fit inside specially-designed shoes, again to help users work out.
While the feature is obviously intended for parents to know where their kids are at almost all times, Sketchers' website describing the feature stops short. Instead, it is careful to say that it will let parents know where "your kid's shoes" are within the Find My app.
Even Apple doesn't market the AirTags as a way to track people, and it's even gone out of the way to include anti-stalking measures to prevent that from happening. However, it's less of an issue in this case.
The current range of shoes, under the "Go Run" range, are designed to be used from toddler age up to "big kids" sizes, or up to a typical ten-year-old's shoe size.
Apple's anti-stalking measures kick in if an AirTag owned by someone else is detected to be moving with the user. Since the wearer of the Sketcher Kids shoes are probably not going to be owners of an iPhone, or will be accompanied by the person who bought the shoes and owns the AirTag in the first place, it is unlikely to be triggered in this way.
Other than the AirTag compartment, the Find My Sketchers styles use a mesh and synthetic upper, stretch laces with an adjustable instep strap, and a durable rubber insole. They are also machine-washable, though it is unclear if the user will have to remove the AirTag before cleaning them.
The Find My Sketchers collection starts from $52, rising to $58.
Check your school's rules on trackers before you send them wearing these. Many schools consider AirTag to be a "smart device" and may not allow them in the front door.
ADAM ENGST 16 July 2025
In a press release that scores high on the buzzword count, Seagate writes:
Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ: STX), a global leader in mass-capacity data storage, today announced the global channel availability of up to 30TB Exos ®M and IronWolf® Pro hard drives. Built on Seagate’s Mozaic3+™ platform and powered by heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, these drives are engineered to meet increasing demand for scalable, high-performance storage driven by the rise of AI deployments that are supplementing traditional enterprise infrastructure development.
My first hard drive in 1989 was a Seagate 30 MB drive (see “The Mac Turns 25: Our First Macs,” 25 January 2009), so it’s somewhat sobering to realize that these new Seagate 30 TB drives can store (cue the Dr. Evil accent) one million times more data for $600. In fact, the 1989 drive (available for about $250) would cost roughly the same $600 in today’s dollars, meaning that the price per megabyte has also dropped by a factor of one million, from $20 to $0.00002.
Claims about AI aside, $600 isn’t much if you need 30 TB of storage for any purpose. The hard part will be backing up that much data.
ADAM ENGST 14 July 2025
When drafting “Switching from a 27-inch iMac to a 14-inch MacBook Pro: A Fresh Start” (30 June 2025), I wrote:
The two configuration tweaks that required a bit more effort were displaying the Library folder in the Finder’s Go menu so I didn’t have to press Option to see it each time (see “Dealing with Lion’s Hidden Library,” 20 July 2011) and getting proxy icons to appear all the time (see “TipBITS: Always Show Window Proxy Icons,” 26 March 2022).
The command line instructions in my 2011 article about dealing with the hidden Library folder in OS X 10.7 Lion still work well, but as Michael Schmitt reminded me in the comments, Apple came up with a “better” way of revealing the hidden Library folder. That fact was niggling around the edges of my brain, but when I searched the TidBITS archive for “hidden library folder,” I overlooked “Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Shift Key” (7 April 2017).
That second article mainly discussed how a now-fixed bug in macOS 10.12 Sierra caused the Option key shortcut for revealing the Library folder in the Finder’s Go menu to switch to the Shift key if the Finder was ever relaunched. In the discussion, as I like to do, I snuck in information about the “better” way of revealing the Library folder, complete with a snazzy screenshot.
In OS X 10.11 El Capitan, Apple pulled back a bit on pretending that we users weren’t capable enough to work in ~/Library, adding a Show Library Folder checkbox in the View Options window for the home folder. That checkbox appears only when your home folder is displayed in the frontmost Finder window, and if you’re in column view, you might need to select a folder inside the home folder. When that checkbox is selected, ~/Library appears in Finder windows, but Library does not appear in the Go menu unless you hold the Option key down too. In macOS 10.12 Sierra, Apple made it so that checkbox adds Library to the Go menu too, and in 10.12.3, also added a keyboard shortcut — Command-Shift-L.
I keep using qualifying quotes around “better” because Apple’s solution, while visible in the Finder’s graphical interface, is nothing if not reminiscent of the line from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy about how the demolition plans were “on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.’” Before I searched for the answer in the TidBITS archive, I poked around in System Settings and Finder Settings to no avail, never thinking that Apple would have hidden the checkbox in the View Options for a single folder.
To prevent confusion, here’s how you can permanently make the user’s Library folder visible in both Finder windows and the Finder’s Go menu:
ADAM ENGST 7 July 2025
One of the most significant concerns about the rise of generative AI has been its potential to decouple the relationship between content creators and content consumers. Rather than using a search engine to find original sources of information that might answer our questions, we’re increasingly relying on systems like Google’s AI answers, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude to answer our questions directly. That’s often better for users but poses an existential problem for authors and publishers who rely on ads displayed to human readers for revenue. A new pay-per-crawl proposal from content-delivery service Cloudflare could offer an alternative revenue stream for publishers.
Internet advertising has long been highly problematic because publishers are financially beholden to their advertisers, not their readers, and thus resort to questionable tactics to entice or compel users to view ads. It’s how we ended up with surveillance advertising, where companies like Meta follow you around the Internet in an attempt to display ads you’re more likely to click. (Almost no one does—industry statistics show click-through rates for display ads are well under 1%, leading publishers to increase ad volume in an attempt to boost total clicks.) Readers detest advertising because it has little or nothing to do with why they’re reading, leading to the widespread use of ad blockers and the (usually small-scale) success of publications that support themselves primarily through subscriptions or voluntary contributions.
Near the end of “AI Answer Engines Are Worth Trying” (17 April 2025), I wrote:
However, what I would prefer to see is a system that pays micro-royalties based on the materials used to generate responses. The technical, legal, and social hurdles to implementing such a system are significant, but some form of business collaboration between for-profit content creators and AI companies will be necessary in the long run.
Cloudflare’s pay-per-crawl proposal suggests at least a technical solution to this problem. In essence, Cloudflare proposes that when an AI crawler visits a website, the site’s publisher would allow access only if the crawler agrees to a specified price. If the crawler agreed, the publisher would earn money; if the crawler didn’t agree, it would be blocked.
Pay-per-crawl cleverly resurrects an old idea from the early Web: HTTP response code 402, which was originally intended for handling digital payments but was never widely implemented. Combined with Cloudflare’s proposed Web Bot Auth standards, the system would require AI crawlers to authenticate themselves and set up payment accounts before accessing content. Authenticated crawlers would then be linked to payment accounts, enabling the actual financial transfers. Unauthenticated crawlers would just be turned away.
Since Cloudflare provides content delivery services to 44% of the top 10,000 websites and millions of smaller sites (including TidBITS), the company is in a good position to make pay-per-crawl a reality on both the technical and financial sides. I signed up for the private beta to learn more, but haven’t heard any more from Cloudflare about it yet.
There are undoubtedly numerous concerns with pay-per-crawl, not the least of which is that it would put Cloudflare in a position of even greater power within the Internet ecosystem. It could also hinder academic research and open source projects that lack substantial funding.
However, what I find even more interesting about pay-per-crawl is how it might revive HTTP response code 402 as a more general method of enabling direct transactions between producers and consumers. We’re getting close to some of the micropayment-related ideas in Ted Nelson’s largely theoretical Project Xanadu, which could radically democratize commerce on the Internet (I’ve been beating this drum for decades; see “Xanadu Light,” 29 November 1993).
Imagine if your browser had a wallet you had funded with $25 for a month’s worth of browsing and configured to allow payments of up to 1 cent per page, prompting you for approval of higher amounts. Then, as you browsed the Web, it would automatically pay up to a penny per page, pausing to request permission to pay more if a fancy site—say the Wall Street Journal—was charging 5 cents for a particular article. At a penny per page, your $25 monthly budget would cover roughly 2500 page views—a reasonable amount for many casual Web users.
Of course, if you were getting some of your information from a chatbot, you could be paying it some amount for each response, too, but it would, in turn, be paying the content creators whose work it was ingesting to generate its answers. The same payment approach, though likely with different rates, could work for music, video, and even time-based chunks of interactive media like video games.
Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market would determine what the prices would be, settling somewhere between the high prices that publishers would undoubtedly prefer and the zero cost that readers are largely accustomed to paying today. In some ways, it’s not all that different from subscribing to a service like Apple Music or Netflix. The key difference is in how payment works. With this system, you pay based on what you actually consume. With Apple Music or Netflix, the aggregators calculate a flat fee that will cover their costs and generate a profit, regardless of how much content you use.
I’m not alone in seeing possibilities here—watch Dylan Beattie’s video explaining the Cloudflare proposal to see him arrive at much the same conclusion.
Charles Martin
Wed Nov 13 2024, 11:28 PM EST · 1 minute read
Some of the many new features that came to the Journal app in iOS 18. Image credit: Apple
The release of iOS 18 brought a number of new features to Apple's Journal app, including the new ability to search and sort entries.
Apple's Journal app was originally introduced in December 2023 alongside iOS 17. In October 2024, it received its first major update, as part of the iOS 18 upgrade.
There's new support for noting one's state of mind, if desired, along with the ability to print individual entries, and more. The biggest new addition to Journal in iOS 18, though, is the arrival of search and sort functionality.
Search, which was strangely missing from the initial release of Journal, now has the familiar "magnifying glass" icon right at the top, enabling searching by a variety of criteria. When tapped, this will show any recent searches, as well as categories one can filter the search time by, such as date, mood, or any specific word or phrase.
Entries can also be searched and sorted by other criteria, including text-only posts, or those with photos, audio, or videos included. Other categories include "Bookmarked," "Places," and "Reflections."
For example, in addition to a word or phrase like "basketball game," you can add the Video category to show only entries that have video included. You can freely mix and match things like Mood and Places with any word or phrase you might have used in an entry to help you find it.
The iOS 18 update to Journal also brings more sorting options. The original version only sorted entries by the date they were written, but now a new method called "Moment Date" has been added.
When writing about an event that happened in your past, you can now set the entry date to the date the event happened — the Moment Date — or leave the entry date as the day you wrote the entry. The Moment Date option allows you to see a chronological timeline of events as they happened, rather than when you documented them.
If you are using the Moment Date rather than the day you wrote the entry, the Moment Date will be shown when doing a search for entries in a given time period.
iOS 18 also brings statistics to the Journal app, referred to as Insights. The number of words written on average per entry, places you have visited, how often you've written in a given time period, and your longest writing streak or writing gap can be seen, among other options.
The Journal app also now has a calendar view, marking entries and statistics — including writing streaks. As with the Notes app, Journal can now lets users record an audio diary entry, rather than writing it out, by using the new Record button.
Once recorded, user will be prompted if they want to generate transcriptions of the audio. There is also more text customization in iOS 18, including colored text and highlighting.
There are also new Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets. These offer writing prompts, and the ability to start a new entry right from there.
Examples of Journal widgets for the lock screen (left) and home screen (right).
For the Home Screen, Journal can add Streaks and New Entry widgets. The Streaks widget shows your current streak if you are in one, or your past daily or weekly streaks — depending on how often you make new entries.
If you tap on the widget, it will open the Journal app to the Insights page for more information.
The New Entry widget will show a random writing prompt on the Home Screen. Tapping on a prompt will take you directly to the New Entry page in the app.
There are also Lock Screen widgets available for the Journal app. These allow for direct access to the new features, such as audio recording, choosing a picture, quickly adding a State of Mind status, or photos, or location information.
To add one of the Journal widgets to the Lock Screen, tap and hold the Lock Screen, and tap the Customize button. Choose the Lock Screen, then tap "App Widgets," which appears directly below the time display.
From there, pick one of pre-existing Apple widgets, or scroll down through through the list of apps to see their widgets. Tap one to add it, and then tap Done to exit the lock screen editing mode.
What's more, users can expect more to come to the app over the course of 2024 and 2025, with the arrival of more Apple Intelligence features in iOS 18.2 and later updates. If you have a qualifying iPhone, such as the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 models, Apple Intelligence will offer features such as summarizing long entries, or helping you rewrite an entry with a specific tone in mind.
These improvements and enhancements should entice more users to keep and regularly update their Journal, and make it easier to document their lives, thoughts, and special moments. While there's still no iPad or Mac versions, oddly, the ability to dictate entries and add media make it easier to build your journal from anywhere.
