The Ephemeral Scrapbook — Edition 2025-36

👤 Personal

#chatgpt
1️⃣ I recently had a passionate discussion about using ChatGPT as a life coach or acting as a psychologist. Someone I know has a lot of fun using ChatGPT whenever she faces an issue and wants to explore possible solutions. I have a problem with this practice. The argument revolved around the idea that ChatGPT “acts” in much the same way as a psychologist who has completed university studies, adheres to a school of thought, and also uses their own values, experience, and beliefs for giving advice. And as in a therapy session, it is always up to the patient to judge the advice they receive and decide whether to adopt it or not. Having a relatively clear understanding of how generative artificial intelligence works, I find it particularly troubling that people consider ChatGPT as a psychologist. It’s troubling.

🗺️ Discoveries

#security #passkeys #passwordmanager #uidesign #workspace #design
1️⃣ Apparently, people don't like or understand passkeys. As someone who uses Apple Passwords for password management, I don't face the same challenges as those who rely on third-party solutions. Nonetheless, this article sheds some light on the usage and adoption of passkeys. 2️⃣ I you'd like to see other creative people’s work setup, pay a visit to the Workspaces website. You'll find plenty of them there, and you might find some inspiration to improve your own work environment. 3️⃣ Another great website discovery: Making Software, “a reference manual for people who design and build software.” This is mind-blowing! The quality of illustrations is quite up there. Sadly, the website doesn't offer an RSS feed. 🙁

“If people want to use AI as those services, it’s easily accessible to them without building it into the browser. But I think the concept of building it into the browser is typically for the sake of collecting information. And that’s not what we are about as a company, and we don’t think that’s what the web should be about.” - The makers of the Vivaldi browser

Found on LinkedIn (emphasis is mine):

“Bilingual cloud consultant (French and English) with over 20 years of experience in IT, specializing in hybrid infrastructure, cloud migration, automation, backup, and disaster recovery. Recognized expert in transforming complex environments into simple, secure, and scalable architectures on AWS, Azure, and VMware. Daily user of generative AI tools to accelerate delivery timelines, enhance quality, and structure service delivery. Acts as a strategic advisor and trusted technology partner for organizations looking to modernize their operations or migrate to the cloud.”

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

#apps #review
1️⃣ I started working on a piece about Apple Journal. It might take a long time before it sees the light, but stay tuned.

🌄 Photography

#instagram #lightroom #glass
1️⃣ How much shit can Meta fit into Instagram before quitting? I wonder. For many years now, Instagram is no longer the Instagram we loved and cherished. 2️⃣ Where are the female photographers? I mean, browsing the discovery tab on Glass, you'll find that 95% of photographers are male! Why is that? 3️⃣ Glass is now offering a Lightroom Classic Plugin! This means that once photo processing is done, users can publish from within Lightroom directly to Glass! How convenient this is! Sadly, I’m no longer an Adobe subscriber! Sigh. 4️⃣ Speaking of Glass, I published a new series: Clouds & Sun. It's about clouds and sun! I realized that I do have many photos covering these subjects and wanted to put them together. 5️⃣ Speaking of clouds: I made a surprising photographer discovery this past week: Clifford Beshers. He shares his photos on Micro.blog, many of which are about clouds! I love this one! 6️⃣ Here's a strange observation in Photomator's files handling. 7️⃣ Mohammad Awadh won one of the IPA 2025 awards. You'll find the best architectural photographs that you’ve ever seen. I wish my late father could see those images because he was a professional architect.

🍎 Apple & Tech

#liquidglass
1️⃣ We are getting close to the final release of iOS 26 with Liquid Glass, and it seems that Apple has frozen Liquid Glass. This is it, guys. Liquid Glass is still broken. Instead of unifying all Apple OSes, it does the opposite. The Mac is less Liquid Glassy, and the iPhone is in its most intense state. Why is that? Now, macOS feels unfinished. How can Apple, with all its resources, be so wrong about something so fundamental to its past journey? 2️⃣ Google make an infomercial for their new Google Pixel devices? Beyond the strangeness of the show format, there are undoubtedly great phones. Take the Google Pixel watch; it looks better than the Apple Watch, for sure. It looks like... a watch. See the YouTube section below for a quick video. One thing that stood out while watching videos about Google's latest device was how much easier Android is to read than iOS. 3️⃣ A new generation of developers and designers is entering businesses like Apple. One thing that seems clear is that perhaps the younger developers didn't learn to use (and appreciate) the Mac as a computing platform. When they started to work on cross-platform development tools and languages like SwiftUI, did they fully understand every platform across the spectrum? I'm not so sure. This also translates into challenges, I suppose, when thinking and designing Apple Liquid Glass—something to consider. 4️⃣ Something Is Wrong. 5️⃣ Are you excited for the iPhone Fold? 6️⃣ Apple lost its way in icon design. See some exhibits here.

“We're going to see an Apple Watch at the September event that looks the same as the original from a decade ago, with a several-year-old SoC inside, with few capabilities that original didn't have. You still can't have the watch face you really want, because it's not your watch, it's Apple's watch. What a waste” — Steve Troughton-Smith

🚧 Special projects

#newsletter #experiment #mailbrew
1️⃣ Under my project of finding a replacement for Mailbrew, I've been testing Inoreader Email Digests for a few days now. This feature enables users to create newsletters based on feeds and articles. The editor is surprisingly flexible and powerful, but comes with some missing capabilities. I'll keep exploring Inoreader Email Digest in the coming days, and I should be able to write more about my experience. One problem is that this feature isn't free and requires an upgrade to my current subscription. See the next section for more information about this service.

📱 Apps & Services

#openai #notion #aibrowser #utility #tot #raycast #mailbrew #inoreader
1️⃣ What if OpenAI bought Notion? Parker Ortolani thinks so. I think it would provide OpenAI with relatively quick access to business-related software and a lot of data. The only issue is that, as of my last check, Notion Mail is a client or a front-end to Google Mail. I'm not sure Google would love this to happen. They would rather let a player like Notion tap into their users than a direct competitor in the AI space, such as OpenAI. 2️⃣ Comet and Dia, two AI browsers, continue to receive updates. I'm still experimenting with them, and I'm still not convinced about their usefulness in any of my workflows. 3️⃣ Before using Raycast Notes, I was using Tot and very much liked it, but found it to be too limited in the number of notes I could store. Tot 2 is now available, but it appears to have the same limitation. I'm curious to see how it will adopt Liquid Glass, if it ever does. Perhaps it's for version 2.1. 4️⃣ Inoreader launched a redesigned email digest functionality. After reading the official announcement, I thought it could replace Mailbrew, an email digest service that is no longer being developed, as I first mentioned in this edition of my Creative Summary newsletter, edition 2023-37. I request a trial, as email digests aren’t free and require a subscription upgrade. 5️⃣ iA Presenter 1.5 for iPhone and iPad is out! If you plan to create and give presentations on the go, you might want to take a look.

📺 YouTube

#llms #generativeai
1️⃣ Curious about how LLMs in generative works and how they are put together, watch this short video from the Computer History Museum. Very well done. You might watch it more than once so that you better understand. 2️⃣ Demo of MacPaint draws awes from the crowd. It's still fascinating to see how far we have come since those times. 3️⃣ Google launched the Google Pixel 10, among other things. Just like Microsoft with their Surface, I respect Google for what they are doing. But AI is taking too much space in these products. I'm not sure everything is useful. Cue Marques Brownlee quick overview of these new phones. Oh, and they announced a new smart watch, too. We shouldn't dismiss round smart watches. I like those.

🌟 Miscellaneous

#vibecoding #techtrends #techhistory
1️⃣ From 2009 to 2013, I was doing experimental iPhone app development and shipped three apps on the App Store. I made about $5K. At that time, building an app meant using Xcode, Interface Builder and Objective-C. Fast forward today, and I wonder how my journey as a hobbyist developer would be different with generative AI and vibe coding. I find this post from Matt Birchler interesting in that respect. 2️⃣ According to a post by Niccolo Conte, 60% of web traffic comes from mobile devices while 40% comes from desktop computers. The article shows how that trend has evolved since 2009. It's fascinating, but it doesn't align with the visitor analytics I've seen for my various websites. A majority of people are coming from the desktop. I wouldn't be surprised if visitors were older generations, too. 3️⃣ If you are old enough to be in the older generations, you might remember dot matrix printers? Maybe you even had one? Do you remember the font appearance? Take a look here (Spend some time exploring the website, which features a retro-style. Pretty clever). 4️⃣ Another good read from Riccardo Mori: Smoke Break. Community. Awareness. AI. Individualism. He made me think.

🔮 Looking forward

#iphone17
1️⃣ The September launch for the iPhone 17 is coming soon, but what can we expect for a product that is now more than mature? Another infomercial? I'm not really looking into it as I wrote here, in this depressing blog post.

I wish you a great week! ✌️ 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇪🇺 💪🏻