I grabbed coffee with someone in DTLA yesterday. Walking almost anywhere in DTLA is awful, so I took a Waymo. On my way back to the office my ride was one of the Ojai vans. A first! The doors slide open, which is pretty neat. I’ve taken them a handful of times and the novelty hasn’t worn off yet. It’s just such a superior experience to having a human driver, which I feel kinda gross saying, but there it is.

While everyone is talking about the Duo, I’ve had my 18 Pro for a couple of weeks (upgraded from a 16 Pro). I bought a case, but have been enjoying it caseless so much, I might return the case.

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I’ve been consolidating a bunch of digital files into a comprehensive personal archive. Today I came upon a sheet of print-your-own stickers from the early days of the dot-com bust. San Francisco was absolutely covered in advertisements from dot-com boom. Shit was already starting to go sideways.

Got a new iPhone 18 Pro today. Went for a 512 GB in Glacier, which looks nice. I don’t have a case for it yet. I wish I trusted myself enough to go caseless, but I don’t. They really do feel so much better without a case.

I traded in my iPhone 16 Pro to Apple and got $510 for it, which seemed like a decent price. I can’t be bothered with anything more complicated. I was almost certain I was going to pre-order the Duo, but I can’t imagine compromising on the cameras, which are way more important than having a foldable phone. And it’s fucking expensive, even with the wife’s employee discount.

I would absolutely not recommend using ChatGPT, Claude or any other cloud-based AI as a diary. They are not private and depending what you put in them, it could very well be reviewed by a human and reported to law enforcement. Case in point.

Reading about Ben Thompson’s Mac getting hacked, which he uses exclusively for agentic AI stuff, is pretty scary. I’ll definitely be making some improvements to my own setup based on this. He also expressed some of the same concerns as I have about Apple locking things down even further. And he’s absolutely right about it being pretty much impossible to run a Mac headless. Good luck if the power goes out and you aren’t physically able to access it.