I really enjoyed Kyle Chayka’s latest piece for The New Yorker about using the Process Zero feature of the Halide camera app for iPhone, which forgoes the AI-powered image processing that iOS applies by default.

My phone camera roll looks different now. There are fewer repeats or slight variations on the same image, taken in a burst. The compositions are less static or symmetrical, and the colors are funkier. I have a Halide snapshot of some leaves casting shadows on a tree’s trunk, which occupies most of the frame. Whereas the Apple phone app tends to turn every color warm, this one is very blue and cool, and the background behind the tree is dim rather than eye-burningly brightened. But I prefer the photo that way: the visual qualities of the specific scene are still there to be appreciated. It doesn’t, and shouldn’t, look like everything else.

I’ve been using Process Zero the past few weeks as my main shooting mode, and I couldn’t agree more. I don’t see myself going back to the iPhone’s default image processing.

It occurs to me that Process Zero is popular for the same reason as Instagram’s original filters—imperfections imbue a kind of personality that feels more human. AI-perfected pixels feel cold and lifeless because they optimize and average away the details, leaving photos without any distinct “vibe.”

The images that an iPhone produces by default are a form of advertising for Apple. Buy an iPhone, snap a photo, and it will always look great. The uniformity of the experience ensures the results are always good, but it has the side effect of preventing them from feeling great.

Apple has a history of sherlocking great features introduced first in third party apps, and I would be very pleased if they decided to bake this into the native camera app.

Here’s a thing I never would have imagined possible: an LLM embedded into a font.

Many applications (including Chrome and Firefox) use a font rendering engine called HarfBuzz, and HarfBuzz recently added support for running arbitrary WebAssemply code in order to “shape” the pixels that are drawn onscreen when rendering a font.

You can see the font, llama.ttf, in action in this video.

Over the past several decades we’ve seen computers be embedded into more and more contexts. Today, computers are everywhere, from our cars to the locks on our doors. Computers have even been built and embedded into the digital worlds of video games.

I wonder if, in the years to come, it might be LLMs that get embedded into all the things.

A smart refrigerator that can reason about what’s inside and maintain a grocery list for you? A font that completes your sentences? A doorbell that answers in your voice and tone when you’re not at home? In-flight entertainment that generate content based on your preferences?

Strange times ahead.

Humane (the mysterious company founded by ex-Apple executives) has finally revealed the name of the product they’re hoping to ship this year: the Humane Ai Pin.

I’m as skeptical as the next person about AI and wearables and really anything with as much hypebeast marketing as this product has received. But if I put my skepticism aside for a moment I’m able to appreciate this for what it is—a group of people trying to create a new kind of computer and computing paradigm.

There’s a bit of footage out there of the device in action, but regardless of the specifics I think it’s essential that we never stop asking ourselves what a computer could or should be.

In the new book Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in His Own Words, Steve talks about his love for books and also their shortcomings:

The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And I think, as we look towards the next fifty to one hundred years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit, or an underlying set of principles, or an underlying way of looking at the world, then, when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life—his or her whole life—and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday, after this person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, “Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me. And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing.

Steve Jobs’ speech at the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado on June 15, 1983

For all the work we’ve put into creating ways to capture our lives digitally, it doesn’t feel like the ritual of passing that information down to future generations is considered much.

I wonder if this might be a common use case for conversational AIs in the future. You can imagine a ChatGPT trained on the works of Aristotle, waiting to answer new and novel questions. Like Steve says, we won’t always get the right answer, but maybe we will.

The digital book is lovely and full of wisdom—definitely a recommended read.