Asides

Between Meta announcing that its AI, Meta AI, reached 1 billion users and Google saying that AI Overviews are used by 1.5 billion, I’m curious to know how many of these people intentionally use the feature, or prefer it to what the AI replaces.

AI Overviews appear at the top of searches, with no option to turn them off. Meta AI, I suspect many people trigger accidentally by tapping that horrible button in WhatsApp, in search results across its three core apps, or when trying to tag someone in a group by typing an @ symbol.

It’s very easy to reach enormous numbers when you already have a giant platform. I don’t think that’s even part of the discussion. The issue is trumpeting these numbers as if they were earned, rather than imposed.

Just a QR Code is a simple, straightforward QR code generator without ads or invasive trackers.

Just a QR Code was born from Gabe Schuyler’s dissatisfaction with online generators of this type. “Isn’t it possible to just make a one-page website that uses Javascript to generate QR codes? Something I could save to disk and run locally”, he pondered.

And from that, Just a QR Code was born. Gabe himself was committed to cover the operating costs. In exchange, he asks:

If you find it valuable, you can pay it back by creating your own useful thing for the world and releasing it for free. Let’s take back the friendly web, one vexingly-monetized utility at a time!

It’s this spirit that drives PC do Manual, a host of FOSS apps from Manual do Usuário. Which, by the way, has two QR code generation tools, a general one and another for joining Wi-Fi networks.

Mozilla has announced the shutdown of Pocket, one of the pioneering “read later” services.

Starting July 8th, Pocket will no longer allow saving content, essentially going into read-only mode. Data can be exported until October 8th, 2025. After that date, it will be deleted.

According to the company, “the way people use the web has evolved,” which justifies redirecting resources into “projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs.”

Signal has found a brilliant solution to shield its app from Recall, Microsoft’s official spyware for Windows 11: setting the app as protected by copyright (DRM), just like Netflix’s, which prevents it from appearing in screenshots — including those taken by Recall.

Recall, in case you’ve forgotten, is an “AI” feature that Microsoft announced in May 2024 for Copilot+ computers, which takes screenshots every few seconds and creates a searchable archive. Basically spyware. The launch was delayed due to public backlash, but testing resumed in April and it’s expected to arrive on eligible computers soon.

Airbnb announced its new app this Tuesday (13th). The app, know for its short-term housing rental service, expanded its scope to include experiences and services. I was struck by the absence of any mention of artificial intelligence in the press release. Is this the beginning of a new trend?

In the lawsuit where the US Justice is deciding which “remedy” to give to Alphabet, following its conviction for monopolizing the search engine market, Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice-president of services, said that in April, the volume of searches made via Safari shrank for the first time in history — that is, in almost two decades.

Eddy attributes the decline to the rise of generative AI assistants that deliver pre-digested search results, such as Perplexity (with whom Apple is reportedly in talks), ChatGPT, and Claude.

Alphabet (Google) shares took a 7.5% dive following the Apple executive’s statement, as reported by Bloomberg. The company released a statement disputing the information, saying that “we continue to see overall query growth in Search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platform”

Who to believe? I don’t know, but if there were doubts that a seismic shift is underway, data like this helps dispel them.

Eddy Cue also said that Apple is considering changing Safari so that the browser can incorporate AI assistants, and that he has lost sleep over the possibility of losing the annual USD 20 billion that Google pays as a “sweetener” to be Safari’s default search engine. I almost feel sorry for him.

The creator of cURL, Daniel Stenberg, has raised barriers against the avalanche of security reports produced by or with the help of generative artificial intelligence. In addition to the volume, he points out that they are often useless: “We have yet to see a single valid security report made with the help of AI.”

Most of the inappropriate uses of AI were already possible before. What changes with AI is the scale.

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Firefox logo. Silhouette of a red panda wrapped in a blue circle.

Firefox 138, released this Tuesday (29th), introduces the long-awaited profile manager. The official documentation explains that “creating multiple profiles allows you to keep separate browsing data, themes or settings for different purposes, such as work and personal use.”

There are also new contrast options focused on accessibility, and in Windows 11, context menus now have that translucent (“acrylic”) look that is standard in the OS. Release notes and download.

Another chapter in the series “fascinated by the details of CSS,” this time featuring the attribute text-wrap: pretty and how browsers handle line breaks, “typographic river” (a concept I wasn’t familiar with), and the length of the final line.

Safari is the second-to-last major browser to implement text-wrap: pretty, a feature announced in a super detailed post, which is quite interesting. “Pretty” in English means “beautiful”; I find it lovely that the CSS specification delegates the decisions for presenting beautified text to each browser.

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This Wednesday (the 9th) we’re celebrating CSS Naked Day. You see, CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, which is basically the “clothes” of a website — a super simple yet powerful language for styling web pages. Take a look at ours.

I thought I’d jump in on the fun! Just for today. Tomorrow (the 10th) the site will be back to normal.