A couple of years ago, I posted a slight criticism of Elon Musk that led prominent venture capitalist Marc Andreessen to block me on X. Since then, I have been unable to view his posts¹, which is a shame because I valued his thoughts and opinions.

Today, X engineering announced changes to the “block” feature:

Soon we’ll be launching a change to how the block function works.

If your posts are set to public, accounts you have blocked will be able to view them, but they will not be able to engage (like, reply, repost, etc.).

I’m glad to see this change from X. The block feature has always been flawed, and this makes it slightly less so.

On buttons and algorithms

The block button is a problematic feature on X because it’s used so often, so cavalierly, and by so many people that it’s difficult to determine whether someone was blocked due to genuine harassment or simply because the...

Last week, Tesla unveiled two world-changing products: Robotaxi¹, a fully self-driving taxi with no steering wheel or pedals, and an autonomous humanoid robot, called Optimus², that can walk and has fully functioning hands and feet. Both of these products have been depicted in science fiction for decades, so the fact that a company is working on them was not surprising. What was surprising is that Tesla showed them existing today.

The event looked and felt like a major product launch; they had clearly spent an incredible amount of time and effort to redecorate the 20-acre Warner Bros. studio backlot with a futuristic theme. In front of a couple thousand attendees, Elon Musk walked on stage and quickly showed off the new vehicles and robots while making very brief remarks about autonomy and the future of parking lots. Then he announced it was time to party, and walked off the stage.

In 2009, Microsoft released an enormous 200lb coffee table with an embedded 30-inch touchscreen called Surface. Although the iPhone had been around for a little while, the larger screen made Surface feel absolutely futuristic: in the Photos app, you could toss around pictures like they were physically in front of you. It cost $10,000. Very few people ever bought it.

A little more than a year later, Apple released the $499 iPad.

Microsoft had made a $10,000 table for no one, and Apple made a $499 tablet for everyone.

This is a common theme among Apple’s most important products. They are usually built around existing ideas and technologies that have been improved and then repackaged into beautiful, premium experiences which are expensive but not unaffordable. This happened with the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Whatever the product, Apple has always brought seemingly...

Ben Horowitz gave this remarkable response to a question about joy and happiness on Time Well Spent:

In my experience there are really two things that lead to happiness and everything else is mostly noise. The two things are contribution and abundance.

Contribution is basically exactly as it sounds. If you can align your life with where you have the talent to make a large, meaningful, and real contribution to the world, your circle, or your family, then you can be very happy. As an aside, doing so often leads to making money because when you create great value like Elon Musk, you get a lot in return. Now, that doesn’t mean you have to be a business person to be happy, because happiness comes from the knowledge and impact of the contribution rather than the reward. However, this doesn’t quite work by itself, which brings me to the second point: abundance.

An easy way to think of...

About ten days ago, when I went to update a few apps in the App Store on my Mac, I was met with a curious error.

The internet is filled with stories from people whose Google accounts were locked for unexplained reasons, causing them to lose all of their data, including years of email, so I was somewhat concerned. But I’d never heard of similar cases involving Apple’s services, and I wouldn’t expect such behavior from a customer-focused company like Apple, so I figured it was a glitch and made a mental note to try again later.

The next day, Music.app stopped working.

Now I was genuinely worried. I checked my phone and neither the App Store nor Apple Music would work there, either. A few minutes later, Calendar popped up an error – it had stopped syncing. I immediately tried to call Apple Support from my Mac, but Apple’s Handoff feature had been disabled as well.

The first person...

Steven Levy interviewed Bill Gates for Wired, and it is quite an illuminating conversation. In past public appearances, Gates – like most experts – has attempted to walk the line between antagonizing the Trump administration and promulgating real science. But now he appears to be finished with that nonsense. He almost sounds angry.

On the CDC, which has been conspicuously absent during this pandemic:

You would expect the CDC to be the most visible, not the White House or even Anthony Fauci. But they haven’t been the face of the epidemic. They are trained to communicate and not try to panic people but get people to take things seriously. They have basically been muzzled since the beginning. We called the CDC, but they told us we had to talk to the White House a bunch of times. Now they say, “Look, we’re doing a great job on testing, we don’t want to talk to you.” Even the simplest...

A couple of months ago, I switched entirely to an iPad Pro for about two weeks. I did not use my MacBook Pro at all, and forced myself to do everything on the iPad. After that experience, I planned to write some kind of review, but it turned out that my conclusions were pretty simple:

iPad Pro running iOS 13 can technically do almost everything a MacBook Pro can, but it is incredibly frustrating to use. Accomplishing anything other than trivial tasks takes 2-5x longer with 10x more cognitive overhead than on a Mac. iPadOS is simply an annoying operating system to use.

The iPad is amazing for content consumption and certain types of gaming, but no matter how much Apple pundits might try to say the iPad is a device well-suited for “creation,” it just isn’t – unless you are an artist using Apple Pencil.

And so, as the iPad turns ten years old this week, I agree with John Gruber’s...

From Apple’s announcement of the 16-Inch MacBook Pro a couple of weeks ago:

“Our pro customers tell us they want their next MacBook Pro to have a larger display, blazing-fast performance, the biggest battery possible, the best notebook keyboard ever, awesome speakers and massive amounts of storage, and the 16-inch MacBook Pro delivers all of that and more,” said Tom Boger, Apple’s senior director of Mac and iPad Product Marketing.

It’s almost unthinkable, but it appears that Apple compiled a laundry list of customer complaints about the 15-Inch MacBook Pro and then simply addressed them, matter-of-factly. Bigger screen? Sure. Unreliable keyboard? Reverted. Not enough RAM? Fixed. There is no story behind the 16-Inch MacBook Pro. It has no soul. It is just a larger, heavier 15-Inch MacBook Pro that lazily fixes some serious flaws that have been left extremely conspicuously unaddressed...

‪Apple TV is a hardware device.

‪Apple TV is an app on Apple TV that curates content you can buy from Apple and also content you can stream through other installed apps (but not all apps, and there is no way to tell which ones).

Apple TV is an app on iOS/iPadOS devices that operates similarly to Apple TV on Apple TV. Apple TV on iOS/iPadOS syncs playback and watch history with Apple TV on Apple TV, but only if the iOS/iPadOS device has the same apps installed as the Apple TV – and not all apps are available on all platforms. Apple TV is also an app on macOS, but it does not show content that can only be streamed from external apps on an Apple TV or iOS/iPadOS device.

Apple TV is an app or built-in feature of other devices, like smart TVs and streaming set-top boxes, but when Apple TV is running on a third party device, it does not show content from other installed apps on that...