E-bike for the mind

5 things worth sharing this week

Each week I like to share five things that stand out to as noteworthy.¹ If you're new to the newsletter these are often pulled from the corpus of Reeder articles I've saved from my OMPL feed.²

Here's the thing, this is a crazy time right now. There's so much going on. Part of the way I'm dealing with it is by myopically focusing on little interesting tidbits to try and make life better myself and those around me. Hope this list helps you do the same.

AI narrators will never be able to tell a real human story

This piece hits a personal cord for me. 

Unlike my frail biological instrument, an AI voice will never experience sickness. It will never suffer paralysis of its vocal cords; it will never falter in its energy or ability to narrate a text 24/7. It will also never learn from suffering. It will never experience thrill or sadness. It will keep driving its steam hammer incessantly, though humans die in droves by its side.

Adam’s story is worth reading. He’s made a life of telling stories—primarily as a narrator for audio books. He’s a human at the questionable cusp of being replaced by AI. 

I’m a huge fan of Audible. My library shows 603 titles. Growing up I was intrigued by Books on Tape (cassettes and later CDs narrating audio books). But a lot of the books I listened to were for school related things, and felt like homework.

Audible is different. I’ve adopted a philosophy of listening to books for delight and curiosity, not for work. That’s meant I’ve listened to stories on every topic, many of which have informed my work; but rarely do I approach the app with the intent of bettering myself. 

As a result, my adult life has been heavily influenced by humans reading human writing into my ears. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this app—this way of ingesting information—has changed me for the better. 

For the last few years I’ve been wondering if human narrators would get replaced. AI is making leaps in this area every few months, and the audio narration is good. 

But Adam makes the case that they’re soulless. They lack of the empathy, the humanity, the experienced life of a human relaying a story to another human. 

After listening to synthetic voices and witnessing my fellow narrators pouring their whole soul into their art, I know we will never be fully replaced. I listen again to the voice of my father on my one precious cassette tape, now digitized into an MP3 for posterity.

Eleven Labs offers their voice cloning service for a very reasonable price. I could send them this MP3 file and experience my father talking to me from beyond the pale. But the idea of cloning my father’s voice is repulsive to me.

I get it. Adam has experienced audio in a way that few ever will. It shaped his childhood, his career, and he has a connection to his father who did it before him. 

While my heart hopes that human narrators will stay the norm, my head says it will become niche. I’ll happily continue to ingest great audiobooks by fantastic narrators, but I imagine more and more consumption will fall prey to the ease of switching text to audio with the press of a button. 

E-bike for the mind

Steve Jobs famously imagined the computer as a bicycle for the mind. If the computer is a bicycle, perhaps AI is an e-bike.

The Steve quote is a great one. And it’s often referenced in tech and product circles. 

This analogy from Josh has stuck in my mind since I first read it. 

I love to go on runs, I like to get out in the woods or a trail or a road and just go. Running is my jam. So I'm not a huge biker. But in the last few years my friend has encouraged me to join him. He gets on his road bike, and I borrow his wife’s e-bike. 

Just last week we road through country roads in hilly Tennessee at an average of 17 mph (much higher than I could do on my own). He pushed as hard as he could on his super cool fancy road bike, and I kept up for thirty miles straight. It was still a workout for me, but when I really needed help I was able to punch the pedal assist from level 2 to 3 (I couldn’t keep up at level 1).

Because I’m not a strong biker I was able to benefit from the e-bike functionality and do something really fun with my friend. It leveled me up. I’ll note that there’s also risk here, which will apply to the analogy in a minute. 6 years ago I had a bad crash on the same e-bike because I was pushing beyond my limits. Now I’m more careful. 

So let’s apply this concept to AI. 

As we consider the potential augmentations of AI, we need to hold them in tension with the concurrent amputations. E-bikes and their tradeoffs can offer us some wisdom.

Josh lays out a mental model for imagining AI as augmentation and support, as opposed to replacement. And I’m digging it. Just as with an e-bike I can do more than I would on my own, with AI I can push my skills furthers, and do more. Maybe that’s a good thing. 

Ditch those words

So this is feedback I give to myself as I’m working on an interface today: Remove that subtitle! Make that title as brief as possible! Kill that second sentence! Make it impossible for users not to read this! Disambiguate! Separate these concepts! Hide the fluff! Say one thing! Ditch those words!

Recently I was working on an interface that needed to be redesigned. The default included titles, subtitles, descriptions, an assumed validation warning state, and a paragraph below the input field with additional information. 

The whole thing felt messy, unclear, and without direction. It got the concept across, if you spent the time to look, but it felt busy and not immediately clear what job it needed to solve. After a little bit of thought I was able to simplify it. Title, input field, and a few buttons to replace the issue with validation. 

It’s so tempting to add words to software to clarify.

But the result is always addition by subtraction.

A little thought to understand the use case and drive toward it will go a long way toward making products better. 

Apple Watch Gets New Mode to Extend Battery Life — But For Kids Only

Starting with watchOS 26, Adaptive Power is enabled by default on all compatible Apple Watch models set up via Apple Watch For Your Kids, formerly known as Family Setup. This includes an Apple Watch that is already set up and updated to watchOS 26.

Apple Watch for kids is in a weird space. 

Most US carriers don’t support it. It also doesn't feel like a full fledged product. A while back we needed to get our son a device to reach us when he’s at after school events. We landed on Apple Watch SE (all the other watch hardware is absolute crap), but needed to pair it to one of our old iPhones because of carrier restrictions.

That’s mostly fine. We had an old iPhone laying around. I connected the watch to the phone, then threw the phone into a closet.

In theory this is the perfect setup. In reality there’s been two glaring issues. 

First, every few months the watch stops receiving messages—kind of important when we’re trying to text him. I have to fire up the iPhone, update software, and make it all sync again. It doesn't feel like the watch is really meant to be used standalone. But we don’t want to give our (at the time) 10 year old son an iPhone. So I’ve dealt with it.

But second has been the battery. It’s not good enough. The model we bought is an SE 2nd generation. We grabbed it brand new, and the battery has never lasted long enough. Regularly, at the end of the day—when we’re most likely to try to reach him—the battery just straight up dies. It’s not reliable enough, we can’t count on it. And yet we still keep limping forward, trying to make it work.

This new adaptive power mode is great. But I can’t use it.

I’m going to try upgrading him to a different watch. But it really needs 24 hour battery. 18 hours isn’t realistic, in reality it’s more like 14-16, which doesn’t keep up with an active pre-teen from 7am to 9pm. 

The iPhone camera has been good enough for quite a while, it’s what you do with it

This past week I’ve been pouring over the iPhone 17 line up, specifically camera specs. What I’ve come to realise is the iPhone camera has been good enough, even great for quite a while. … It’s about using what you have now and just getting out and taking images without worrying if you have the best hardware available.

I’m including this one as a note to my future self.

I have an iPhone 16 Pro Max, and I'm having a bit of FOMO related to the latest camera tech. Last night I was at our son’s soccer game and wishing I had the 8x optical zoom. 

I am the target audience for the best cameras. So I checked to see if I was truly using the lenses with my current phone (apropos of being curious about the iPhone Air).

• Main lens: 2893 photos
• Telephoto lens: 757 photos
• Ultra-wide lens: 315 photos

And the selfie camera: 364 photos.

It does seem I use the telephoto enough to justify it. But looking through the photos the main reasons are capturing my kids at sports events, or for church events where we have lots of kids running around that I’m capturing for church videos. 

Even though a new camera encourages me to take new pictures for about six months, the reality is I have a great camera on me at all times, and I could do a lot more with it. 

That's it, no real story here. Just a hope to hold off the itching desire to upgrade my hardware.

1. If you've been keeping track you may notice the illustrations missing the last few weeks. I haven't been sure of the value versus the time spent. They may come back, but right now they're easily taking as much time as the writing.
2. An OMPL feed is just a list of newsletters all bundled together into a file, and you can add it to an RSS Reeder. It's pretty great. These are like sharing around USB drives back in the day, grab one from a friend and see what they're reading. They're manually curated, and for me a counterweight against the ongoing blast of social media. It's real articles written by real humans. If you want my feed (thanks Michał for the kickstart) feel free to email me. Happy to share it.