2025

Vibe coding on Apple Shortcuts

With progress on large language models (LLMs) stalling, techbros in the industry have had to come up with new ways to signal progress and keep billions of investors’ dollars flowing while “artificial general intelligence” (sic) remains nowhere in sight.

This led to the emergence of nonsense such as the new “magic” version of ChatGPT that’s supposedly great at “creative writing,” autonomous “agents,” and more models that can “think” or “reason.” (All in quotes because these simulations are, at best, mediocre and often non-functional.)

Amid the parade of new applications for generative AI, “vibe coding” emerged — a term coined in February by Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI.

In broad terms, vibe coding is a complete abstraction of software development. Instead of writing… code, the developer writes prompts in natural language to an AI, describing the software it hopes to achieve. The AI then spits out code which, if it doesn’t meet expectations, is reworked in the same way: with more natural language instructions given to the AI. In this setup, the developer essentially becomes a guesser. In the end — and with some luck — the session wraps up with a working application.

Programming is a powerful skill, even outside contexts like startups and world-changing ideas.

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What’s the deal with SafetyCore, the weird app that suddenly appeared on Android?

Does your phone run Android? If so, you might have noticed a new app called SafetyCore. Announced by Google in October 2024, the company has been rolling it out recently (at least here, in Brazil).

SafetyCore is designed for devices running Android 9 or later, takes up about 2 GB of storage, and according to Google “provides common infrastructure that apps can use to protect users from unwanted content.” The documentation also notes that “the classification of content runs exclusively on your device and the results aren’t shared with Google.”

Almost no one reads these docs or even warnings, alerts of an app. What definitely catches your eye is a new icon among your apps that seems to appear overnight. Is SafetyCore something to worry about?

It’s published on the Play Store and, like any other app over there, it gets ratings and comments. Its average rating is 3.5, with the highest (5) receiving the most votes overall and the lowest (1) not being insignificant in number. One standout negative comment sums up the problem (in Portuguese, here translated):

“The app installed on its own and when I tried to open it, it just showed the app info. I’m not sure if it’s legitimate or not, and that worries me and many other consumers, breaking our trust in the security of the operating system. A quick question: if the app is legitimate, is it supposed to have an icon and do something, or is it supposed to be hidden? Like, for example, Google Play Services.”

If I had to sum the issue up even more, I’d say that the way SafetyCore was released is an example of a lack of transparency and a disregard for user autonomy. No matter how good Google’s intentions may be — which, judging by the history of big tech, is far from a guarantee — this isn’t the right approach.

Apple isn’t off the hook either. At the end of December 2024, someone noticed a new option in Apple Photos: “Enhanced Visual Search,” on by default. It identifies the location of photos even when there are no geo location in the metadata, by recognizing landmarks in the images. The documentation explains that it “works without sending your photos or videos to Apple and without Apple learning about the information in those photos or videos.”

In both cases, trust is lost when features like these are enabled quietly, without giving users the option to opt-out — a practice that remind what malicious parties would adopt if their intention were installing malware on millions, even billions, of devices.

What’s frustrating is that these are promising features that seem like good ideas. Scanning for unwanted or malicious content on your device without sending data to Google’s cloud? A real step forward, if true. Improving photo search without handing over your images to a big tech company? Sounds great.

However, note that both promises are extremely difficult to verify since all the code is closed source. That alone is a huge red flag. Enabling these features by default without any notice only worsens the situation.

Obsessions

I’ve been using the my work as a tech writer as an excuse to dive into some unproductive obsessions. And when I say “obsessions,” I mean it in a pretty serious, almost clinical way.

It’s not just my work’s fault, I think. My “information diet” — reading blogs who obsess over details like which app to use for this or that, watching YouTube channels that scrutinize phone models in such detail that a normal person wouldn’t notice the difference from the last five iterations etc. — pretty much created an alternative reality that initially seemed appealing but eventually turned suffocating.

I spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking about where to host my files and emails, looking into FOSS alternatives to apps that I already have and that work perfectly fine for me, keeping up with and testing new apps that promise to be better than the ones I currently use and enjoy.

The biggest and most recent manifestation of this obsession was trading my trusted iPhone SE for an Android phone.

Switching phones isn’t just… switching phones. Even though I’m getting along fine with Android, the switch has led to even more time spent on crazy excursions in search of things that, strictly speaking, I don’t really need. It’s fun, but it’s a bottomless time sink (which I think is a waste).

In a way, indulging in this feels like eating fast food: enjoyable in the moment, yet leaving you with indigestion later and proving dangerous in the long run.

To make matters worse, the Android phone I bought is huge and heavy. Having it in my pocket is annoying, my hands ache when I try to type even a slightly lengthy message, and there’s no comfortable way to hold it for reading.

I guess I needed to make that impulse decision to try and curb the obsession. It’s kind of like a drunk taking one last swig before committing to sobriety, you know? I think it worked, because I’m having a major hangover after having a blast setting Android up exactly the way I wanted. Even so, I’m going to abort the migration — not so much because of Android, which I actually found pretty cool, but more because I miss the human hands-compatible size of the iPhone.

All of this sounds pathetic, almost comical — or tragicomic, really; it affects both me and my work. If my goal in writing about tech is to achieve a healthy relationship with technology as much as possible, I need to take a step back and rethink some things.

A timeline to bring them all together

The launch of Tapestry in early February has solidified a new category of apps — ones that attempt to create a unified timeline from different sources that, by their very nature, are like oil and water.

Tapestry joins a handful of other recent apps1 — Feeeed, the new Reeder, and Flipboard’s Surf — in tackling the main issue of decentralized social platforms, which is… well, decentralization itself.

The idea is pretty cool: it doesn’t matter if the people you follow are on Bluesky or Mastodon. With one of these timeline apps, you can keep up with them all at once on a single interface. It’s like centralizing the new social internet, but it’s done at the individual level rather than the platform level.

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Using ChatGPT consumes a 500 ml bottle of water; so what?

From the obvious to the outrageous, the list of concerns about artificial intelligence has grown long since late 2022, when ChatGPT took the title of “technology of the future” from the metaverse or NFTs.

I’ve been thinking a lot about one of these concerns: the excessive use of energy and water needed to satisfy the insatiable thirst of big techs and startups for more money.

What is the environmental cost of outsourcing thankless tasks to ChatGPT, like writing reports that no one reads or generating a happy birthday image for that aunt you haven’t spoken to in six years, in the family group chat?

Perhaps the most popular metric for this dilemma of the 2020s is the 500 ml water bottle for every ~50 questions to ChatGPT.

Is that a lot? A little? Is the trade-off worth it? As with everything in life, the answer is: “it depends.”

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Google is right to change Gulf of Mexico’s name in its Maps app in the US

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Google will change the names of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and revert Denali to Mount McKinley in its Maps app, aligning it with one of President Donald Trump’s weird ideas.

Someone dug up a 2008 post from Google’s public policy blog where the then-global director of the sector talks about this very issue — “How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth.”

Google has a uniform policy they call “Primary Local Usage:”

Under this policy, the English Google Earth client displays the primary, common, local name(s) given to a body of water by the sovereign nations that border it. If all bordering countries agree on the name, then the common single name is displayed (e.g. “Caribbean Sea” in English, “Mar Caribe” in Spanish, etc.). But if different countries dispute the proper name for a body of water, our policy is to display both names, with each label placed closer to the country or countries that use it.

In other languages, Google uses the common name in the language that Google Maps/Earth is being displayed in, along with an expandable button that lets you know the name isn’t universally agreed upon and lists other names that are also used.

That’s where people are giving Google a hard time, as they have (or used to have?) a policy that adopted the criteria of “primary, common, local” names for bodies of water:

[…] By saying “common”, we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage.

On X, the company responded to the criticism by saying they have “a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”

In the case of the US, that would be the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS). Note that the two changes — the Gulf of Mexico and Denali — haven’t been published by the GNIS yet, so Google Maps is still showing the “old” names there.

I get the frustration with the arbitrary decisions of an erratic president, but this seems like a… non-issue? If the government changes the names of bodies of water, as the US government plans to do (the executive order was published by Trump on January 20th and is pending a GNIS update), Google is right to reflect that in Maps.

MOS brings macOS’ smooth scrolling to any mouse

The biggest (only?) issue with using a non-Apple mouse on macOS is losing that smooth scrolling, also known as kinetic scrolling.

It might seem like a silly detail, but it’s such a nice feature that I really miss when it’s not there.

A few years back, when I swapped out my MacBook’s trackpad for a cheap mouse, I found a solution in this quirky, free, open-source app called MOS.

MOS does one thing, and it does it well. It has a few options to add exceptions to its effect, which is sometimes necessary, and it lets you hide the menu bar icon. Awesome!

All this time, though, I’ve learned to live with (and accept) one major annoying flaw: it would “freeze” the scrolling when it got interrupted in some apps made with Catalyst (Apple’s tool for converting iPadOS apps to macOS) and Electron (web apps turned “native”). It’s hard to explain, but trust me, it’s super annoying.

There aren’t too many of them, but I use a few of those apps, like WhatsApp and Signal. Apple itself uses Catalyst in standard macOS apps like Maps, Messages, and Weather.

After almost two years of complete silence, MOS 3.5 just dropped the other day, bringing just one fix:

In Catalyst apps, scrolling is not properly responded to immediately after scrolling stops, including Maps/Messages/Weather, etc…

While it doesn’t mention it, the fix also applies to Electron apps.

After stumbling upon this update and sitting down to write this, that I realized there are alternatives to MOS, even if they come with their own issues (and I’m not sure if they’re immune to the glitch MOS had in Catalyst/Electron apps).

There’s magicScrollWheel (which hasn’t been updated since 2020) and SmoothScroll (proprietary and paid, a USD 10/year subscription). The latter even has a version for Windows. I’m not sure if Microsoft’s system offers smooth scrolling; if not, it’s worth a shot.

PS: SmoothScroll has a video that explains smooth/kinetic scrolling, which is tough to put into words, way easier to explain with moving images.

PSS: I’ve been using Latest to keep track of updates for apps that weren’t downloaded from the Mac App Store. That’s how I found out about MOS 3.5.

Screen time and face-to-face conversation

I spent almost 11 hours last Sunday staring at screens, not counting the TV. Between my phone, tablet, and computer, I ended the so-called day of rest with tired eyes, a fried brain, and a bit of frustration.

Not all those hours—an excess even for me, who works looking at screens—were wasted. I spent a good 40 minutes, for example, talking to my parents via video call. It’s hard to think of better uses for the screens that surround us than that.

The problem was the other 10 hours, or most of them.

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This Friday (17th), the Read.cv platform announced that it was acquired by Perplexity, an AI startup, and it will cease operations.

Read.cv had a social network focused on design called Posts. In June 2024, I wrote about it. I called it “the last good vibes social media.” By that logic, “good vibes social media” has come to an end.

Coincidence or bad omen, the announcement coincided with my opinion that the only way to shield a social platform (any venture, in reality) from eccentric billionaires and mega-corporations is to make its sale impossible.

In this context, Mastodon and other applications based on the ActivityPub protocol are the only viable solution we have today.

US$ 30 million to reinvent the wheel

I have been thinking and reading quite a bit about Free Our Feeds, a campaign to “save social media from billionaire capture”.

Free Our Feeds consists of a group of experts willing to raise USD 30 million via donations, over a three-year period, to create a foundation and “[…] turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app.”

It’s a noble goal, but not very original. On Bluesky’s website, one of the first sentences on the cover says:

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TCL’s bet on screens that look like paper

Since 2021, TCL has been investing in an intriguing screen technology called NXTPAPER: an LCD panel that attempts to simulate paper to be less harsh on human eyes. As someone who spends more time than recommended looking at screens, this greatly interests me.

The Chinese manufacturer announced a new version at CES 2025, called NXTPAPER 4.0. It brings a “significant advancement” in the weak point of previous versions, (low) brightness, thanks to a “sophisticated nano-matrix lithography technology”.

I don’t know what this means, but it seems to have yielded results. The screen of the Tablet 11 Plus, one of the devices with NXTPAPER 4.0 announced, reaches up to 550 nits. This value doesn’t compare to the best traditional screens, but it should be readable.

In addition to the tablet (still without price or release date), TCL also announced a phone, the TCL 60 XE NXTPAPER 5G. (Good name, marketing folks.) Both tablet and phone have an “NXTPAPER Key” that toggles between conventional mode and “Max Ink Mode,” which, according to TCL, “turns the display into an e-ink format designed to reduce eye strain and ensure maximum eye comfort.”

When activated, Max Ink Mode also disables notifications and adds a super nice side effect that I’ll only believe when I see it: a huge increase in battery life, up to 7 days of reading and 26 days (!) on standby. It will be released first in Canada, in May, for USD 199.

The rest of the 60 XE phone’s specifications seem decent, a level above those of its predecessor that Marques Brownlee tested, liked, but not enough to recommend it.

Some videos show the “NXTPAPER Key” and “Max Ink Mode” in action. TCL made a clip (13min) of the section where they discussed mobile devices in their CES presentation and made it available on YouTube.

While E-Ink (company) tries to make its screen technology (the one used in Kindle) faster, some manufacturers have been betting on the same approach as TCL and are trying to make conventional screens more eye-friendly. The startup Daylight launched an (expensive) tablet in 2024 with an even more aggressive proposal — black and white LCD panel, similar to those of calculators.

Meta’s moderation policy dismantling will hurt, but it can be good in the long run

Meta’s announcement on Tuesday (7th) that, among other actions, it will end partnerships with fact-checking agencies in the US, replacing them with “community notes,” and relax restrictions on certain types of content, has alarmed many people.

In a somewhat convoluted way and not without causing damage, this might lead to a good outcome (for us) in the long run.

If we take X (former Twitter) as an example, the relaxation of moderation there accelerated the discarding of Elon Musk’s platform as a habitable place, leading to losses in revenue, users, and relevance in public debate.

It would be great if this were repeated with Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. Even if so, we will have to deal with three inevitable and worrying consequences:

  1. Targeted campaigns of hate, harassment, and the occurrence of crimes (as considered outside of the US, such as racism and homophobia in Brazil) are likely to increase. It will be up to the police and the judiciary to increase their attention and be quicker in their actions to mitigate the damage.
  2. Fact-checking agencies will suffer a financial blow. Meta is the largest funder of many of them; some were created solely or primarily to act in the company’s program.
  3. Mark Zuckerberg’s boot-licking Trump, combined with an explicit threat to the sovereignty of Latin American justice and European legislation by Joel Kaplan, Meta’s vice-president of global affairs, could have serious systemic effects, such as on commercial and diplomatic relations and tariff policies between those countries and the US.

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It would be naive to expect a mass exodus of users from Meta’s platforms in response to the dismantling of moderation, although searches for deleting accounts increased sharply. Less naive would be to witness a more incisive reaction from governments and companies committed to values opposed to those made explicit by Meta’s leadership.

How about abandoning their presence on Instagram and Facebook or, at the very least, stopping injecting money into Meta’s advertising engine? If Meta’s business is to dominate our attention, nothing hurts the company more than ignoring it.

On an individual level, abandoning ship is a more difficult, less obvious decision. I should keep my Instagram account — it’s where loved ones post updates — and I won’t block Threads on the fediverse, although I don’t condemn or criticize those who do/will do so. That crowd of “preventive fediblock” to Threads had some reason.