661: Committing to the Bit

Unless you do stuff with AI because it's twenty twenty six. Uh I'm curious to know if you think this is a winning formula. Are smart glasses the future and do you see a future specifically for Snap's new I've forgotten what they've called already, specs, I think. Stephen, thoughts?

It really feels like the whole smart glasses thing is a little quieter. And if you've seen a picture of these snap glasses, I mean they are insane. Like no one's going to wear these. This is why the metaglasses are the only one that had any chance, because they look the most normal.

Uh but if you watch Joanna Stern actually had a recent video on her new YouTube channel about how people can record you without the light showing and you can just see the reaction from culture now. Like people don't like even the metaglasses with a camera. And these glasses look even more ridiculous. So I think we're many years away, five ish years or more, where we actually have AR glasses that are useful, that people might adopt. I don't think we're close.

Test experiments to figure out what works and what doesn't. And there's a part of me that's very much not uh in love with that idea. And so I'm less of a of a of a tech purchaser version of a tech enthusiast than I used to be because I'm kind of tired of being uh a paying uh participant in an experiment. I'm curious to hear your thoughts, Flo.

Which is how they've managed to stick around. But almost what is it, like twenty five hundred dollars for their pair of glasses? I was just saying the other day, I think the reason that um Smart glasses have sort of bucked the everyone's looking at you trend at this point. Is because they're in Meta's case, they've become way more approachable and affordable, like four hundred bucks.

On sale, you can buy a pair of smart glasses. That's kind of, I feel like, where people are gonna gravitate toward. I'm not really understanding what snap. is gonna try to do with these glasses just the same way that when they did this ten years ago, remember remember my That we wore at C E S.

You know, they started as a social media network essentially. Th the not necessarily and I think Meta has a similar problem, even though their glasses are more approachable, is I don't think they have as robust a platform. You know, Google and Apple have a huge leg up there because both of them are experts at building platforms, have existing platforms with really high saturation rates.

Um, and so being able to leverage all of that into a new product strikes me as perhaps more tenable in the long run. Um it does it is an interesting engineering sp point to see that these cost about twenty two hundred dollars. You compare that with the the Vision Pro at thirty five and you think to yourself, Well, what could Apple produce that looks like this and what price range would that end up in? Could that be competitive? I've seen some people around town in the metaglasses. Um

It really makes me a bit uncomfortable at times. Um I'm not sure that that Snap is necessarily a well, I guess it's hard to find a company I trust less than Meta. Uh but maybe Snap is not so much higher on that list. And so I don't know that these will have a lot of uptick in them. I don't think honestly, I this feels like I bet the company move. I'm not sure. Snapchat uh has a lot more in its in its gas tank after this if these don't go well. So

Uh good luck to them, I guess, but I'm not convinced it's gonna be a winner here. But I agree that I think this as a genre of devices is increasingly coming down the road for all of us, whether we want it or not. Uh thanks again for your thoughts on that. Let us go to our second topic, which comes from Steven.

But I haven't gotten to shortcuts yet. So when I do, we'll see if it disappoints me. And uh if it does, well then I don't know if I'll keep you

Some some neat little things,'cause I'm excited to play with it. So yeah, I like shortcuts.

It struggles a little bit if you aren't great at articulating yourself or figuring out a best way to craft a prompt. Um, but I've seen even some pretty complex workflows done well. Um, I think, you know, lots of people who like pushing the envelope on shortcuts and seeing what it can do or not are probably gonna quickly ex you know, pass through the bounds of this. But For a lot of the super basic, like a and very easy sort of connect the dots thing where it's like, okay.

I could do this thing. I just don't know how. I think it's a huge boon. One of the biggest benefits I have found from it is it really feels like it has had residual effects in terms of the way that it has made Apple improve the shortcuts experience. Whether it's adding, you know, actions that were, you know, necessary or expanding the documentation or explanation of what certain things do or how certain things work.

Even just the editor experience is better than it used to be. And so all of those things are great because now that Apple wants to put this front and center, it's got to spend the time to polish it all up and make sure everything looks good. Um, I've you know, I'm maybe not quite as uh uh shortcuts um br like deep as Steven, but like I've spent a lot of time with shortcuts and building a lot of shortcuts and and wrestled with many of the problems that it has.

And so I'm glad to see that Apple still sits committed to not only uh continuing to improve it, but also bringing cool new levels of functionality to it like this this natural language um you know sort of LM stuff. Steven, you wanna wrap us up here?

Try to just tell it the end result. Like what do you want it to do? Don't try to prescribe how to do it. And you might have a better experience describing the shortcut. Number three, it has been really good at doing some simple automations. I just did a live stream in my community and I asked it create an automation that when I connect to CarPlay and

If it's Monday through Friday between six and seven AM, send a text message that I'm on my way to someone. And it did it all. One shot, formatted the dates, did the if statements. It can do all of that really well. One of the things I do find is with more complex automations, it will add random actions like a get item from list. That specifically will just add randomly. I'm not sure why. Still struggles to connect some variables.

So I have not been Sherlock just yet. At the very most, I'll be troubleshooting other people's uh shortcuts because they might not work out of the box. But I've also been impressed, like I asked it to build a shortcut that uses the anthropic API. Just send a simple request to the API and bring it back.

And it was able to one shot it, even with all the dictionary values. Those are very complex, like JSON requests in the get contents of URL action, and it can do all of it. And it got all the dictionary values correct. So I'm really excited and optimistic. But it would also take some trouble shooting for more complex ones and so I'm here to help if anyone needs.

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You could buy them your FSA, you know. They really do work. However, I'm also aware that last Christmas I did not give you my heart, but what I'm give you back the AI robot, the AI toy that you bought my kid, which nobody actually did, but There was a big thing about people were buying these AI toys off Amazon.

And uh the AI would li had like a chat bot in it and the kids would chat with it and then, you know, it would say awful things and so there's always an extreme to all of this, of course. But with a company like Casio You know, I can imagine that something like this would be curated for the right people. I feel like Um, this is just gonna become a bigger category now that AI and chatbots are

a part of the uh the equation. And honestly, I think it's fine because a real like real animals are difficult to take. They're expensive because they have real bodies that have to be taken care of versus I mean just to like put it in perspective.

Everybody's different. There are f people for whom this may appeal. Personally, I find the idea of a thing that I another thing that I need to take care of, even if it's just in very sort of basic ways. Like I don't have to feed it, but I have to like you know, like the Tamagotchis and stuff, right? Like trying to keep up with those always felt like very overwhelming and at a certain point I just give up.

U it's similar ways I feel on like you know, like Animal Crossing or games like that where I have to like just do stuff just to keep up with doing up and I w eventually get into the cycle and wonder why am I even doing this? Um So to me this feels like a animatronic version of the Duolingo Owl where it just constantly wants your attention. And I just I already have enough of that in my life. I don't feel like the return I'm gonna get on my investment.

uh you know, is is necessarily really gonna pay off there. Honestly, just get me a cute stuffed animal any day. Those things are much they're much lower maintenance. You don't have to do anything. Steven, what about you?

Let's see, maybe this over a real rabbit. But I also just want to mention, have you guys ever heard of a corky doll? Because I had this when I was a kid. This is before all the AI toys. This was a doll.

you know, the people they're taking care of. So I understand, you know, it's it's a very complicated area and also depending on whether this LLM is connected to the internet or is a local model and what could possibly say be said, what is said. It's all very uh messy for sure, uh, but there are times where the little thing does a little squeak. In in a video I'm going. Mm maybe that would be so cute to have. But yeah, I think I would just end up.

But at the same time, the way that this news keeps taking off, this week, for instance, uh Commodore, they're working on a uh flip phone. And it looks really cool. It's kind of see through ish and it has what you need on it. So it has WhatsApp, a camera, a music player, that sort of thing. But it doesn't have access to social media.

And so I'm sort of wondering, I wanna hear from you guys. Uh you know, I haven't this phone isn't out yet, I haven't played with it or anything, so I can't speak to how it works. But wanna hear from you guys if The world starts to log off a little bit. Would you be enticed to do the same?

I thought about it more and I was like, but it's not I don't think it's going anywhere. Like I I always am very suspicious of this trend because I certainly get the idea of wanting to spend less time on your phone and less time doing things, especially the things on your phone that you don't w you know, are feel like time sync.

But I am not convinced the answer to that is a technological device. Um very rarely do technological devices solve the problem of I don't m my technological device takes up too much of my time. Um and so while I think there are single use devices that are better, like e readers. Um, you know, I I have uh a couple of different e readers and I I really like them much better for reading. But even my tiny little X T X four, I don't carry most places. And the reason is because

I don't want to carry four devices with me. I mean, that was the great thing about the smartphone is like I don't have to carry my phone and my iPod and my ebook reader. Are you getting it? It's one device. Um but I I think that At the end of the day, I think that there is a lot of this trend is people outsourcing what is actually best solved by a like

With a psychological problem. And I don't mean to say like a clinical psychological problem, but like a mind over matter matter problem. If you don't want to log on to social media, remove the smos social media from your phone.

That is a much easier solution than going out and spending four hundred dollars on a new gadget that you probably will stop using because honestly, even if it does have a lot of the apps that you need, it will not, it will invariably not have something that you need or want.

And then you won't carry it and then you'll have a four hundred dollar paperweight. So I think as with many of these things, it it kind of starts with us as human technology of like If there are things that are habits that you want to break, it's much harder, absolutely, to like find ways to to break it free from those habits.

But the easy tempting answer is not probably to go and spend a bunch of money on another device that isn't really gonna solve this problem for you. So I think this is a trend in s like uh that is really kind of a trap trend. And I I encourage people like, if you really are struggling with those kinds of issues, maybe like take a step back and look at the habits that you've got and what tools you can use maybe more simply at first to see

uh how you can correct that rather than going out and getting something else'cause that just feels like basically consumerism at that point. Steven?

You need to reach for your actual phone and then you have your actual phone. And you do that three to five times and you immediately think, I'm not I'm gonna stop carrying both devices. And I can't just go out with my light phone or whatever because I can't do all the things I need to do when I'm out and about or iMessage, like all of those things. And so I I'm with Dan, like a focus mode or removing the social media app from your phone, like

way better than trying to figure out how to make a second device work. And also just you know, there's a lot of muscle memory in like the Doom scrolling. And that's why like when I change focus modes in the evenings and weekends, my home screen changes. So where social media apps like Instagram are on my home screen during the day, they're not there at night and on the weekend. And just that slight

obstacle of my thumb naturally will open Instagram at this point. Instead it opens something else. And just that little bit of disruption can help change your habits at certain times. So I would say just try a focus mode with a different home screen first. The second device, it's it's just really difficult to make that work.

And so I don't have any interest in buying a dumb phone because I know that it would be a dumb choice for me as a person who's not going to commit to the inconvenient bit. And instead, as Dan has suggested, perhaps um if I really wanted to, I could look at some other ways of of going about uh making those changes. But honestly.

Other than Instagram, I very rarely open up a thing and learn about uh the the latest uh scandal and so so so in that way I think that it's uh but my phone is kind of taken care of. of that problem for me just because of uh gesturing all around into the air. I just don't want to look at all of it anyway. Uh so my phone is a little dumb in that way. Uh anyway, that's my thoughts. Uh Flo, what are yours?

All right, bonus topic for you. What is your favorite plane or car or travel snack, Steven?