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A year or two ago Gulikit, a Chinese electronics manufacturer splashed onto the scene with a new kind of joystick replacement for Nintendo’s joy-con controllers that claimed to resolve the stick drift problem. Nintendo famously had to offer free repairs to its customers as the joysticks on its smaller controllers would wear out over time. In public interviews Nintendo said they improved but would never be able to resolve the joy-con stick drift. Gulikit claimed to have solved this problem, and in addition to its joy-con replacement kits released the King Kong 2 controller with the same hall effect joystick technology. I tried the King Kong 2 and had mine fail with a software update. After waiting for reviews and for Gulikit to release a new version of the controller with improved back buttons, I picked up the King Kong 3 Max.

After reading the press release and hearing the buzz about Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI model, I gave in and paid the $20 for their premium tier. The thing that most interested me was their project functionality that allows you to contextualize your conversation with files like code. The demos looked neat so I figured I’d feed it at JavaScript/Node project and ask it to make what should be an easy fix. It flopped spectacularly.

The consensus among analysts seems to be that Apple’s AI features announced at WWDC yesterday are largely catch-up with third party services. Yet Apple’s approach to AI is different. Instead of merely providing a chat bot for you to play with in the cloud, they are using the data on your device to personalize your AI. Instead of being limited to web results and its own corpus, Apple Intelligence will be able to return and interact with your data.

The software industry’s approach to security is broken. Among professionals there is a lack of consensus on best practices. Adoption of innovations is slow, uneven, and poorly executed. The regulatory and compliance framework around security involves large amounts of labor by businesses and practices that are hostile to end users. Despite all the effort that goes into security, it fails and fails often.

Mastodon’s secret sauce might be that it declined to use algorithms to sort your content. While the slot machine appeal of Facebook or Instagram leaves me checking their apps hoping for something fresh, they rarely deliver. I have nearly exhausted the well of DIY and construction content on Instagram. Travel influencers can only post so many photo worthy pools and cocktails before they stop impressing. It used to be nice to use apps like Threads or Facebook to find news articles, but now that everything is behind a paywall it is not worth my time.