Four years on, and this day—September 9, 2020—remains my most surreal and enduring memory of the pandemic.

Waking up during the 7 o’clock hour in early September in San Francisco usually means blinking away sunlight as it streams into our bedroom, while I fumble to snooze my iPhone alarm. Instead, it was curiously dark.

I didn’t think much of it as I stumbled through my morning ablutions and overnight work email catchup. It was 9 a.m. before I happened to peek out of our back window.

Six months into the pandemic lockdown, and I legitimately thought we’d finally reached Armageddon.

Our usually bright, almost Autumn morning was dark. Street lamps remained on, and morning songbirds stayed eerily silent. The pandemic lockdown already meant our neighborhood was quieter than usual, but this morning the streets were Zombie Apocalypse-level deserted.

It was hauntingly quiet.

Between meetings, I wandered down to Cole Valley. The N Judah station looked like the long-abandoned remnant of a distant civilization, and the usually bustling corner of Cole and Parnassus had but a few hardy souls brunching, as a lone dog walked its human.

My SFBA Friends iMessage group chat blew up that morning as we commiserated. “It’s the rapture,” cried Michael.

“I’m officially done with this year,” lamented Lisa.

“Me too,” agreed Kelly. “I think today’s orange sky is the day I finally lost it.”

We weren’t the only ones. Bay Area Twitter lit up, and the skies made national headlines, with some incredible photos.

The combination of the usual San Francisco fog, coupled with massive wildfires throughout the Bay Area, had conspired to blot out the sun and turn the sky a dusky orange this day four years ago. These images are now indelibly etched into my brain.

Every month or so, a few friends and I gather for a whiskey tasting. For July, Tammy Tan (SpiceHound, Kitchen 519) and Anton Yulo (Meryenda) joined me in a West Coast Whiskey Club (WCWC) blind tasting of seven Russell’s Reserve whiskies. 

This represents most of their lineup, minus the Single Barrel Rye. Here’s what we poured:

• 10 year Bourbon (90 proof)
• K&L Exclusive Warehouse TY-K, Level 4 (110 proof)
• 13 year Bourbon (114.8 proof)
• 15 year Bourbon (117.2 proof)
• Single Rickhouse Bourbon Camp Nelson F (117.6 proof)
• WCWC Exclusive Camp Nelson E (110 proof)
• 6 year Rye (90 proof)

We tasted and discussed the pours together, then ranked them individually. While the three of us have similar, yet distinct preferences in our whiskies, throughout the tasting our preferences were clear and those differences didn’t really show up. Two bottles were early favorites, and another two were immediate dislikes. The battle, really, was for the middle of the pack.

As whiskey drinkers, we are trained that “older is better,” and our assumption was our two favorites were the 13- and 15-year bourbons, and our least favorites were the 6-year rye and 10-year bourbon.

We were half right.

We ended up ranking our top four whiskies in exactly the same order:

1. K&L Exclusive
2. WCWC Exclusive
3. Single Rickhouse
4. 13 year Bourbon

Our final three is where we diverged, slightly:

This differed from the overall WCWC rankings, which put the 13- and 15- year at the top, though we did align on the 10-year bourbon and 6-year rye being among our least favorites.

The 10-year is an approachable introduction for new bourbon drinkers; for cocktails which need the alcohol and flavor profile of bourbon, but won’t miss the nuance (say, a Kentucky Mule); or perhaps in baking.

The rye will appeal to those who enjoy its spicy profile (and, I think it would make for a killer Manhattan).

The 13- and 15-year, and Single Rickhouse bourbons are all limited releases, and retail for $150, $250, and $300, respectively—though you’d be hard pressed to find them for those prices; more likely double that. They would make great gifts for the bourbon lover who appreciates hard-to-get allocations.

The Exclusives, though, can be smoking good deals, usually $75–$100 a bottle. Most large retailers are likely to have one (e.g. BevMo, Total Wine), and smaller shops with a strong whiskey selection (like K&L) are likely to have their own picks, too.

If I were spending my own money, I’d grab a single barrel exclusive pick from Warehouse TY-K or TY-Q (e.g. this ParisTown from K&L). If I were spending someone else’s money, I might splurge on the Single Rickhouse—or maybe just explore a few exclusive bottles.

While I was writing about the Dungeons & Dragons stamp, I discovered—for reasons unknown, and much to my annoyance—that the USPS Postal Store prevents you from copying text from its website. 

This annoys me on any website, but for a government-run agency, it seems like an especially misguided idea. Heck, it might even be disallowed under Section 105 of the Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17), which says 

Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government….

This suggests there should be no reason they’d prevent copying. More broadly though, I don’t understand the desire for any website to block this basic functionality. It’s user hostile. Anyone motivated enough to copy stuff will find ways of doing so, even if it means retyping it, screenshotting it, or, as any self-respecting geek would do, finding a technical workaround to the problem.

First, let me acknowledge that the effort I put into addressing this issue, while minimal, was still greater than simply retyping the text from the site, or taking a screenshot and copying the text that way. The effort, of course, is beside the point for us geeks. It’s the principle of the matter. Information wants to be free, and I’ll be damned if I can’t copy text on my own computer!

Fortunately, USPS.com made this easy on me by using a method to prevent copying that’s easily worked around: The user-select CSS property.

I assume you know at least the basics of CSS. If not, I recommend reading this primer, but very briefly, CSS lets you style how content looks on a website, and how people interact with it. A style sheet contains the definitions, or instructions, for that styling. One of the features of CSS is you can override styles by providing new definitions. Safari provides a mechanism to add your own styles to all websites. I’ll use that ability to override the USPS.com user-select definition with my own.

(Note: This is Mac- and Safari-specific. There are ways of doing this in other browsers, and on Windows/Android, but I don’t use them.)

First, I’ll create a new style sheet that disables the relevant property. Then, I’ll tell Safari to use it. Finally, I’ll reload the page and copy copy copy!

Create a style sheet. user-select tells browsers how to handle content selection. USPS.com sets it to none, preventing any content selection. I want that to be auto (the browser default) which allows selecting—and thus copying—content. I need the !important flag so the browser gives my new definition a higher priority than the one coming from the website. Finally, I want this to apply to everything on the page, so I’ll use * instead of a specific HTML tag, class, or identifier.

I created a file, which I called nof—you.css, with the following content:

* {
    -webkit-user-select: auto !important;
    user-select: auto !important;
}

(Surprisingly, user-select is not a web standard yet, so most browsers prefix it to indicate it’s a browser-specific implementation. -webkit-user-select is for Safari’s current implementation, and user-select is for when the property (eventually) becomes a standard. Other prefixes exist, such as -moz-user-select and -ms-user-select, but again, I care only about Safari.)

Tell Safari to use this style sheet. In Safari, I opened Settings, then the Advanced tab. I clicked on the Style Sheet popup menu and selected Other…, and chose my nof—you.css file. Safari will now use this css on any website I load.

Reload the page. After reloading the USPS Store page, I’m now able to select and copy the text.

What’s great about this solution is it works for any site that uses user-select. I can either leave the CSS file always enabled (so I won’t even notice that a site was blocking selection); or I can disable it (select None from the Style Sheet popup) and re-enable it when necessary.

I think I’ll do the latter so I can emphatically spit out F— me? No, f– you! as I enable it.

Bonus Screenshot Option: I mentioned above taking a screenshot as a way to get around copy blocking. Here’s a brief overview of how you do that. (Again, this is only for Apple systems.) Take a screenshot on your Mac, iPhone or iPad, or take a photo with the Camera. In Photos, use the Live Text feature to select and copy the text. Voila. It still feels like getting away with something, but ultimately, gives me a less visceral f—you! experience.

Your mileage may vary.

This poster hangs prominently in our home, visible to your left after you enter the front door, as you take off your shoes. It’s a newspaper ad that ran in the San Francisco Call in March 1913 to stoke sales of the yet-to-be-built Forest Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, where we now live.

The ad—one of a series of at least ten published by the Newell-Murdoch company—touted the virtues of the new neighborhood, including its proximity to downtown, the return on investment, and the fresh air and sunshine. Many were implicitly or explicitly directed to “the man” who provided for his family (“Where do your wife and children live?” asks one). All contained the typical flowery language of real estate developers. And they all referenced “restricted residence.”

At the end of June, I wrote about the difficulty Willie Mays had when he was buying a house in the Sherwood Forest neighborhood of San Francisco, in the late ’50s; in it, I said:

He later bought another home, this time in Forest Hill, the neighborhood I currently live in, where the neighbors seemed less racist.

We love Forest Hill. We’ve lived here for about eighteen months now. It’s walkable, easily accessible by public transportation, and quiet. It’s a five minute stroll down the hill to West Portal, which has a cute “downtown strip” filled with lovely shops and restaurants.

It’s a great area; and while it may have been more welcoming of Black residents in the 1960s compared to Sherwood Forest, like much of San Francisco—and America—when it comes to housing discrimination, it has a racist past.

When we moved into the neighborhood, the homeowners’ association provided a packet sharing some of the history of the area. Part of Adolph Sutro’s vast estate, it was originally a large forest on a hill—talk about your creative naming! The forest was mostly leveled and converted to a residential planned community in the early 1900s.

Learning that Willie Mays lived here—helping to integrate the area in the ’60s—piqued my curiosity. I found the Forest Hill page on OutsideLands.org. Not much about Willie, but this caught my eye:

Forest Hill followed the example of other residence parks, imposing strict requirements on everything from building design to the racial identity of its residents. (Read a typical flyer.)

“Racial identity of its residents,” eh? I knew what that meant. I’ve seen enough homeowner CC&Rs—Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions—which needed to have discriminatory language struck because it no longer comported with modern sensibilities.

This was different.

The “typical flyer” mentioned by Outside Lands was a textual recreation of the newspaper ad at the top. It starts with the expected flowery language: Forest Hill as an Investment, distinctive exclusiveness, the finest place in San Francisco to live, and so on.

Then, in the fifth paragraph, things turned.

So shocked was I by the language in the ad, I refused to believe it could be real. There was no image, no link that might lend it credence.

I needed to find a copy, and see it in context for myself.

For all the issues modern search engines have, one undeniably great thing is they make it easy to find the proverbial needle in a vast internet haystack. Twenty years ago my eyes would be bleary from spending my afternoons scrolling through microfiche in a stuffy library. Instead, I was able to plug in the remarkably specific phrases and almost immediately pulled up the scanned newsprint.

There was the ad, taking up three quarters of the broadsheet. I stared at it on my screen, reading the copy, slack-jawed. At the bottom of the center column above the fold, were these words:

There are restrictions that safeguard the person of taste and refinement who seeks exclusiveness. There are no Mongols, Africans or “shack builders” allowed in Forest Hill. When a man selects a homesite in this tract it is done with the positive assurance that there will be nothing disagreeable to mar the serenity of the most fastidious.

I was gobsmacked.

I am Black (or “African”); my wife, Chinese (“Mongol”). I’m not exactly sure who “shack builders” was meant to impugn , but I’m confident it’s a slur against some immigrant community. (The Irish contractors who remodeled our home believe it meant their people.)

What shocked me about this ad wasn’t the language, which I understand was commonplace in everyday life in the early 1900s—jarring to read, but not shocking.

No, what truly shocked me was to see those words in an ad. In a newspaper. Published for all to see. It’s not coded. There’s no “dog whistle.” It’s perhaps a bit less direct than “only persons of the White or Caucasian race” but it’s pretty damn close.

Some people may shy away from this racist history, ignoring it in the hope that it recedes into the mists of time.

Not me. Forgetting means repeating. We keep this in a prominent place in the home we would’ve been denied buying a century ago as a striking reminder to us and everyone who visits that history is neither static nor abstract. Living in this house, displaying this ad, it reinforces the truth that ideas and ideologies shift. Change may happen slowly, but change does happen.

I’m remembering our past so I can imagine our future.

See this ad and others in the series in full context. I found ten of them; there may be more. All links except the final one are from the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America. The last one is from Newspapers.com.

• Country Life in the Center of San Francisco
• View from one of the homesites
• Forest Hill as an Investment
• Nature is calling your children to Forest Hill
• Where do your wife and children live?
• Do you know what Unearned Increment means?
• The Home is the Cradle of Humanity
• When is a man’s property worth more than his good name?
• A Look into the future
• Houses planned by M. Fisher

Some moments in our life we recognize immediately as capital-H Historic. They are seared into our memories. Mine include the Space Shuttle Challenger, Barack Obama, 9/11, and COVID-19.

What we witnessed on Saturday afternoon in Butler, Pennsylvania was certainly history. Assassination attempts on current or former presidents are, regrettably, much more common than we might expect—or like—in a democracy, and former president Donald Trump is now part of a sad American legacy of political violence, one perpetrated exclusively with guns.

Somehow, a man with an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle managed to avoid Secret Service and local police, climb a roof, and shoot at the former president during an outdoor rally—grazing him in the ear, killing at least one attendee, and critically injuring two more. Mere fractions of an inch and this moment in time would be tragically Historic.

It may yet prove historic. One of Trump’s indisputable skills is that he instinctively intuits a media moment. Those instincts resulted in a photo for the ages. Getting shot at, clipped, and then rising, bloodied, fist raised in defiance, yelling “Fight!” to his audience… those optics may well solidify his supporters and propel him to the White House. A Hollywood screenwriter could scarcely script it better.

Which is not to say Trump is assured of—or somehow now deserves—another term. Nor does it mean that his opponents should stop calling out his dangerous rhetoric. Quite the opposite. It’s imperative they now work doubly hard to defeat him.

This abhorrent act against a former president and current presidential candidate must serve as a reminder that political violence is never acceptable, no matter the target, and that violent rhetoric has real-world repercussions. Yet we must not mistake from where that rhetoric often comes.

Just minutes after the shooting, J.D. Vance wrote on X/Twitter:

Today is not just some isolated incident.

The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.

That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.

This is transparent, self-serving bullshit. Vance is a leading vice presidential contender for a candidate who calls his opponents “vermin,” agitates for immigrants to be concentrated into camps and deported, and reportedly inspired 54 cases of violence, threats, and alleged assaults in his name. It’s unsurprisingly characteristic for their party to blame the other side rather than looking inward at their standard bearer.

President Biden’s call to “lower the temperature” is welcome and necessary, as long as we remember which side generates most of the heat.

It’s right for President Biden to call the attack “sick,” and state unequivocally that “there’s no place in America for this kind of violence,” even as the other side uses violent imagery.

It’s appropriate to call for “unity”, as long as we aren't meeting fascists “halfway” to fascism.

Meanwhile, let’s not ignore the nature of the assault itself. It is practically Shakespearean that the would-be assassin’s weapon of choice was an AR-15, which the GOP fetishizes and the NRA once called “America’s Rifle”. This is a party whose members wear AR-15 rifle pins, pose with assault-style rifles for Christmas, oppose gun-free zones (unless they’re in those zones), and have no intention of addressing gun violence.

Beyond “unity” and “lowered temperatures,” what we should be calling for are laws restricting access to AR-15 style assault weapons (and bump stocks, recently deemed legal again by the far-right Supreme Court majority), plus stricter restrictions on who can buy any gun and when.

I want Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer to immediately offer bills in the House and Senate today. Call it, I dunno, the “Tough Republicans Uniting for Maximum Protection Act” and dare Mike Johnson, Mitch McConnell, and the rest of the GOP to block it.

Taking the attempted assassination of a former president with an AR-15, and using it to ban those weapons?

That would make this moment absolutely Historic, in the best possible way.

I’m a big fan of the TV show Frasier. I’m now halfway through my third or fourth rewatch.

I was thinking recently of an episode, and wanted to look it up. I recalled the plot, and my first thought, as it is for most people seeking answers to simple trivia questions, was to turn to my nearest search engine. But I wasn’t sure how best to word the query, so I thought I’d give ChatGPT a shot, as I’m always looking for reasons to explore its capabilities. I could ask it in plain English, and as it’s likely slurped up all of IMDB.com, frasier.fandom.com, Wikipedia, and so on, it should have a comprehensive grasp of television episode facts.

Whoo boy, was I wrong.

ChatGPT, if you don’t follow the news, is an artificial intelligence chatbot powered by (it says in its self-description) a “vast amount of text from the internet, books, and other sources.” You type or talk in plain language, and thanks to fast computers and fancy math, it can “mimic human language patterns and provide relevant and coherent responses.” It’s often used to polish prose, write code, or brainstorm ideas.

It can also answer questions.

So I asked ChatGPT if it was familiar with Frasier. Things started out great.^[1]

Yes, I’m familiar with the TV show “Frasier.” It is an American sitcom that aired from 1993 to 2004. The show is a spin-off of “Cheers” and follows Dr. Frasier Crane, a psychiatrist who moves back to his hometown of Seattle and becomes a radio show host. The show features his interactions with his father Martin, his brother Niles, his producer Roz, and other characters. It is known for its witty dialogue, sophisticated humor, and strong character development. If you have any specific questions or need more information about “Frasier,” feel free to ask!

Cool, spot on. Let’s dive in.

There is an episode where Frasier and his brother Niles share an office, and have trouble working together. They are mediated by a fellow doctor to reconcile their working relationship. Are you familiar with that episode?

Yes, the episode you are referring to is titled “Rooms with a View” from the tenth season of “Frasier.” In this episode, Frasier and Niles decide to share an office space but soon find that their different working styles and personalities lead to conflict. They seek the help of a mediator, another doctor, to help them resolve their issues and find a way to work together harmoniously. The episode showcases their sibling rivalry and contrasting personalities, leading to humorous and insightful moments.

Hm. That description is right, but I was pretty sure it was from earlier in the series, season 3 or 4 perhaps. So I looked up “Rooms with a View” on IMDB and Frasier Fandom and nope, that episode, s10e8, wasn’t the right one. I said so.

No. Rooms with a view is about Niles having open heart surgery.^[2]

This is where things got absurd.

I apologize for the confusion. The episode you’re referring to is likely “Sharing Kirby,” which is in the ninth season of “Frasier.” However, it doesn’t quite fit your description. Let me correct that:

The episode you’re thinking of is “Bristle While You Work (Part 1),” from Season 10, Episode 4. In this episode, Frasier and Niles share an office space and struggle to work together due to their clashing personalities and work habits. To help mediate their conflicts, they bring in Dr. Schachter, a professional mediator, to assist them in reconciling their working relationship.

First, it apologies, giving an impression of contriteness and a determination to do better.

It again offers a correct description, and the doctor’s name is also right. “Sharing Kirby” is, in fact, a Season 9 episode, and it even recognizes it’s the wrong episode and corrects itself.

But oh! the confidence of its self-correction: “The episode you’re thinking of is....” Not “might be,” “is likely,” or any such qualifiers.

Yet despite its confidence, it’s also doubly wrong! s10e4 is “Kissing Cousin”, not “Bristle While You Work”; that’s actually s10e7.

Some people might call these incorrect answers “alternative facts.” The preferred term in some circles is “confabulations,” but the popular term is “hallucinations.”

I don’t like that term. It ascribes a humanity and basis in reality these tools simply don’t have, as if it’s a benign sensory mismatch to be indulged, like your doddering Uncle Jack swatting at unseen insects.

But there is no humanity in a bot, and “hallucination” mischaracterizes its impact. When Uncle Jack dodges mosquitoes that aren’t there, you might tut-tut in sympathy, but you don’t run to the corner store to pick up a can of Flit. Only Uncle Jack is affected by his hallucinations.

As much as a quarter of what these AI chatbot and search tools generate is factually incorrect. When it’s a wrong TV episode, the worst outcome is you look foolish in a pub trivia game. When they suggest you eat rocks or add paste to your pizza sauce, you may chuckle and move on, but this trivializes the issue. An AI “hallucination” is potentially deadly.

People have learned to trust the results of search engines and, by extension, chatbots. If it’s at the top of the results, it’s the “best link.” If you get a confidently written response from a bot, it must be correct. Because computers.

But this trust is misplaced because AI chatbots and search engines aren’t fact-based. They don’t know the “right answers.” They make shit up. They are, fundamentally, token prediction machines.

Imagine you have a deck of playing cards, arranged just so:

A♣️ 4♥️ 7♠️ 10♦️ K♣️ 3♥️ 6♠️ 9♦️ Q♣️ 2♥️ 5♠️ ???

Based on the pattern, you can probably predict the next card in the sequence^[3]. Combined with some clever patter, you can convince people you’re psychic.

AI chatbots perform similarly. The sequences and predictions are infinitely more complex, and—because those sequences are words and sentences—the responses seem human. But it’s all pattern-based bullshit.

Our acceptance of this BS as truth is dictated both by our knowledge of the topic at hand and our personal level of skepticism. When delivered confidently, we’re even more accepting of its veracity. A plausible response stated as fact, and which matches our expectations, registers as true.

If it feels right, we accept it as right.

Back to my Frasier queries, where ChatGPT continued to confidently give me wrong answers. In one it wrote:

I apologize for the continued errors. The episode you are referring to is “Sweet Dreams,” Season 5, Episode 24. This is the correct episode where Frasier and Niles share an office and face difficulties working together, eventually seeking the help of a mediator to resolve their issues.

“The episode you are referring to is… This is the correct episode.” No qualifiers, no hedging, just straight-up stated as fact.

Imagine conversing with someone who lied with such unabashed conviction? You might feel compelled to believe him^[4]. You can’t be that confident and be wrong! Yet the only thing right about this response is that s5e24 is in fact called “Sweet Dreams”. But, “this is the correct episode.”

It’s like being gaslighted by an apologetic psychopath.

I eventually gave up and found the episode myself^[5], and asked ChatGPT one final question.

Are you familiar with s3e2?

To which it confidently replied

Yes, Season 3, Episode 2 of “Frasier” is titled “Shrink Rap.” In this episode, Frasier and Niles try to collaborate on a book about sibling relationships, but they struggle with their differing personalities and viewpoints.

They seek the help of Dr. Honey Snow, a family therapist, to assist them in overcoming their differences and completing their project.

Sigh. The “book about sibling relationships” is from s1e22 (“Author, Author”). In “Shrink Rap” they seek the help of Dr. Schachter, not Dr. Honey Snow—who wasn’t a family therapist, and wasn’t in either s3e2 or s1e22; she was in s2e15, “You Scratch My Book...”.

But it got the title right!

Wow, 248 years old! Just a couple more until the big 250! I know you’re already busy planning a huge semiquincentennial.

I hope you make it.

I know, I know, technically you’re only 236 if we count from the ratification of your Constitution, but you know we all like to count your Declaration of Independence as your real birthday.

(Admit it, you prefer that too.)

However you count, you’re still the oldest living democracy. Even Athens, your birthplace, didn’t make it past what, two hundred? And here you are closing in on a quarter millennia!

Remember when you were, what? 165, 166? You went off with your friends to fight Nazism. You were a Big Damn Hero back then. Can you believe after all that effort, Nazism is making a comeback, right here at home?

By your 200th, you’d finally started to recover from that fight, and your unfortunate “excursions” into South Korea and Vietnam, and were looking to put the legacy of Jim Crow behind you.

Though I guess Jim Crow never really went away, huh? It just sort of became... institutionalized.

We both thought you’d finally overcome that legacy when you turned 232, but just eight years later, you suffered what looked like an allergic reaction. You were so angry all the time, so divided. All of us feared you were nearing the end. We weren’t sure you’d even make it four years. Then you got real sick, and had to isolate yourself for a while. Those were some dark, dark days.

Though the fever broke, many of the symptoms persisted. There was that unprecedented flareup the January you were turning 245. That one really scared us. We thought for sure you were a goner.

To be brutally honest, the last seven or eight years feel a lot like it did when you were in your early 80s, and we’re not only worried about another episode like the one you had when you were 85, some people are explicitly threatening us with it. Just imagine, people want to put you through that again. You almost died then, you’re unlikely to survive another.

It might be time to take a good, long look at yourself in the mirror and be honest about how you got sick then, and how it’s still impacting you today.

Yes, sadly, you’re still very sick. Your major institutions are failing, and your little cousin, the Fourth Estate, is collapsing with you.

But as ill as you are, you’re also strong and determined. You’ve weathered so much. You’ve tossed aside kings, courts, and wannabe tyrants before.

And we have good people working to heal you. It’s touch-and-go right now, but we must have faith in you.

So, happy birthday, America. Hang in there. See you at 250.

Despite daily use of an iPhone since they first became available—gasp—17 years ago this weekend, I still sometimes find myself flummoxed by some behavior or other. Today, it was this:

On iOS (or iPadOS) in Settings (assuming you’re signed into your iCloud account), you should see Your Name at the top of the screen, along with either your initials in a circle or an image you’ve selected.

Instead, it was “GU”, with the initials-in-a-circle default, but not my initials of “JG”. I tapped my name, and then the GU initials, and the name shown was “Guest User.”

Interesting… iOS doesn’t have a “guest user” mode. And it was happening on two devices signed into the same iCloud account.

Hm.

I struggled to find an answer, so I threw it out to Mastodon, and then in typical fashion, I answered my own question a short while after.

(If the best way to get a right answer is to give a wrong answer, the best way to answer your own question is to ask it.)

I knew the name was taken from the Contacts app, specifically the My Card setting. Sure enough, the Contacts app showed My Card was “Guest User”: first name Guest, last name User, with an otherwise empty Contacts entry. I have no idea how or why that contact card was created, nor why it was selected.

On macOS, I would select the contact I wanted to be My Card, then select Card > Make This My Card from the menu.

I couldn’t find a way to do this in the Contacts app on iOS.

That’s because it’s not in the Contacts app. It’s in Settings, under Contacts > My Info, from where you can then choose your contact card. Of course! iOS apps rarely have preferences within them; they’re usually in the Settings app.

(You can also change this in Settings under Siri & Search > My Information. I don’t know why it’s in two places, other than Siri uses this information.)

The Fix (in summary)

If your iCloud account name in Settings is unexpectedly incorrect, here’s how you fix it:

1. On iOS (or iPadOS), open Contacts and confirm My Card has the wrong name.
2. Optional: If the contact is otherwise empty, delete it: Tap the name, tap Edit, tap Delete (at the bottom).
3. Open Settings, scroll to and tap Contacts > My Info. (Alternatively: Siri & Search > My Information.)
4. Select the correct contact. Create a new one if necessary.

So, there you have it: a minor mystery solved.

I love a good mystery. As a little boy, I read Encyclopedia Brown, the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew series, all of Agatha Christie’s works, and Sherlock Holmes. Solving mysteries probably goes a long way to explaining why I love computers.

I recently stumbled across a couple of very old books, gifts from my parents in 1985: Alfred Hitchcock’s Daring Detectives, a collection of eleven “Exciting Stories of Great Feats of Detection” featuring Ellery Queen, Dame Agatha’s Hercule Poirot, Perry Mason, and more; and an anthology of five of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novels.

You may be able to tell I read the snot out of these.

I also found 12 issues of Stanford University’s facsimiles of The Strand Magazine featuring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “consulting detective.”

The Strand Magazine was a monthly publication which was, among other things, the first to publish the Sherlock Holmes stories. It also serialized The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901. According to Wikipedia,

Readers lined up outside the magazine’s offices, waiting to get the next installment.

Can you imagine doing that in today’s binge culture? Even weekly episode drops bug me now.

Back in 2006/2007, as part of Stanford’s exploration of the Victorian era, they published these facsimiles and sent them monthly—for free—to anyone who requested them. I couldn’t resist.

They published 24 issues, but I foolishly only signed up for the first half. Fortunately, that half included The Hound of the Baskervilles, serialized and made available monthly just as they were to readers in 1901. I loved waiting for, and then devouring each issue.

They’ve long since discontinued publication, but they’ve kept the website up. You can download all the individual issues as PDFs, though it’s not obvious how to get to all of them, so as a public service, below are the direct download links for each issue.

If you’d like to save yourself two dozen clicks, I’ve compiled them all into a single zip file you can download. I also renamed the PDF files for consistency.

Series 1, 2006

Series 2, 2007

Try reading them one per month for the full experience!

Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) tackles the eternal product marketing question of “Product or Feature” when it comes to AI.

He highlights the Humane Ai Pin and Rabbit R1 as examples of “AI as a product,” that is, a standalone thing you buy that “does AI,” versus being integrated into existing products, such as a phone or smart home device.

Both the Humane Pin and Rabbit R1 require AI for them to be useful. Without AI, they are merely interesting hardware products that provide no meaningful functionality. Everything they do with AI can easily be (and perhaps already is being) done on a phone, either via an app or integrated into the system. The unique hardware bits they have exist solely because they’re not phones and need some mechanism for us to interact with them. A phone without AI is still useful. A Humane Pin without AI is… what? An attractive accessory?

AI is an enabling technology. People aren’t buying AI. They’re buying what AI can do for them. The question for any company selling an “AI product” is “to do what?”

If the what can be incorporated into another, more popular or widely used product, that “AI product” is in danger of being obsoleted, or at least becoming less relevant.

Marques uses the once-popular Clubhouse to highlight this transition. The enabling technology for Clubhouse was “live voice chatrooms”. However, the product was effectively obsoleted after other companies incorporated this feature into their own, more popular apps. People didn’t want Clubhouse, per se. They just wanted to chat with each other.

It’s likely we’ll see this happen a lot more for “AI products.” As Marques points out, Apple’s WWDC Keynote showcased many features powered by AI. In almost every instance, products that do “that thing” already exist today. Such products may soon become superfluous to a large number of Apple’s customers, because customers care about the feature, not the product.

One example: The next versions of iOS and macOS bring the ability to “rewrite, proofread, and summarize text,” directly integrated into just about every text field on the systems. This is huge for Apple customers. But if you’re, say, Grammarly, for whom “AI writing partner” is what you sell, you’re now competing with Apple in your only business. Feature, not product.

This isn’t to say Grammarly goes away. They provide some features not offered in Apple’s version, and as they noted to NPR:

Whenever new entrants come into our market, the reality is that we see increased demand for Grammarly.

OK, sure. But how many people will pay $12/month when they can get a basic “AI writing partner” for free?

As Apple demonstrated, it’s possible to build your own AI stack, and subsume AI-powered features, making them “just another bullet point” on a deck or press release.

Look at ChatGPT, for instance. Despite being the best-known, most popular AI chatbot, it was the last item mentioned in Apple’s two-thousand-word Apple Intelligence press release. And it won’t even be the only chatbot available on Apple’s devices. Eventually you’ll be able to replace ChatGPT with Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and who knows what else. Feature, not product.

And dollars to doughnuts, Apple already plans to Sherlock all of these chatbots, as they do with so many other features-pretending-to-be-products.

So is AI a Product or a Feature? Marques demurs:

Now there is no answer yet as far as is AI actually a feature or a product, which one will win, which one will lose, we don't know. But I think if history is any indication, I do think that more people in the long run are going to end up using this AI stuff as a feature, more than going to, like, a standalone thing.

I agree that for most people AI will simply be the technology that powers features they love. They won’t go seeking out AI, and won’t buy standalone “AI products”. In fact, most won’t think about AI at all.

The trajectory technology takes is to transition from a visionary product to an important feature of another product to a mundane feature used without thinking.

A great example comes from my friend Ron Lue-Sang: Biometric authentication.

In popular media, fingerprints, facial recognition, and retina scans once demonstrated just how advanced the civilization (or organization) was. Visionary.

Then biometrics were added to products like door locks as a key reason to buy them. Important.

Today we unthinkingly unlock our phones and computers with our fingers and faces. Mundane.

Companies will continue to sell “AI products” for as long as they can, and many of them will exist as foundational technologies and find ways to differentiate themselves, but most are on a glide path toward irrelevance. For me, and I think for most people, AI is absolutely a feature, not a product, and one we won’t even think of as AI.

So perhaps the question isn’t “is AI a product or a feature?”

Perhaps it’s “when will AI become mundane?”

As an Apple nerd, the week of WWDC is both a great and a terrible time to launch something new. Almost no one will pay attention to this new website, yet it gives me much to write about.

If you’re also an Apple nerd (and if you’re reading this, there’s an above-average chance you are), Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference offers a ton to explore, learn, and generally obsess over. For many, it sets the direction for the rest of their year, acting as something of a launching pad, a new beginning.

For over two decades, WWDC was a major focal point of my year. I worked in Apple’s Worldwide Developer Relations organization (WWDR), which puts on the show, and the team I was on, Developer Technical Support (DTS), was an integral part of it.

Months of long days, sleepless nights, and endless planning meetings culminated with WWDC Monday. It was immensely gratifying to see the results of many months of hard work from the teams make it to the stage or screen. And while much of what was announced at any given show was a surprise to me, my excitement was generally tempered by having already spent a lot of time living on the new software.

Not so this year. It’s my first WWDC “on the outside” since 2001^[1], and my anticipation for what’s new was sky-high.

Restraint

Leading up to WWDC, there was much speculation about what Apple would do with AI, and its impact on the company’s fortunes.

Apple answered, but they sure took their time.

Monday’s Keynote (anchored by Craig Federighi) was effectively two events. The first sixty minutes was the normal annual updates of Apple’s software product lineup: All the new features coming in iOS 18, iPadOS 18, tvOS 18, watchOS 11, macOS Sequoia, and visionOS 2, with a surprisingly long Apple TV+ segment. Despite the hype, there wasn’t a single mention of “AI” or “artificial intelligence” in this first hour.

I must applaud Apple’s restraint here. I speculated last week,

What if Apple announces “Siri AI” and says it’s “Advanced Interactions” or “Apple Intelligence”?

“Edit your photos using your voice. Powered by Siri AI….”

“Xcode 16 helps you write code twice as fast using Siri AI.…”

“In the newly improved Developers Forums, you can quickly find answers to your code-level questions thanks to Siri AI….”

They get to utter “AI” a bunch of times, but make it distinct from “artificial intelligence”.

It would be very Apple to try to redefine what AI means.

🤔

What I expected was a presentation littered with “AI” droppings to satisfy those carping about Apple falling behind in AI. Instead, Apple stuck to their usual language as they highlighted new features enabled by “intelligent capabilities”, “machine learning”, and “powerful new algorithms”, just as they have for years.

It was in the back forty minutes that we finally got what for many people was the main attraction: The introduction of “Apple Intelligence”, Apple’s name^[2] for their on-device, privacy-focused, and deeply integrated take on artificial intelligence.

Apple Intelligence

Tim Cook introduced Apple Intelligence this way:

At Apple, it’s always been our goal to design powerful personal products that enrich people’s lives, by enabling them to do the things that matter most, as simply and easily as possible.

We’ve been using artificial intelligence and machine learning for years to help us further that goal. Recent developments in generative intelligence and large language models offer powerful capabilities that provide the opportunity to take the experience of using Apple products to new heights.

So as we look to build in these incredible new capabilities, we want to ensure that the outcome reflects the principles at the core of our products. It has to be powerful enough to help with the things that matter most to you. It has to be intuitive and easy to use. It has to be deeply integrated into your product experiences. Most importantly, it has to understand you, and be grounded in your personal context, like your routine, your relationships, your communications and more. And of course, it has to be built with privacy from the ground up. Together, all of this goes beyond artificial intelligence. It’s personal intelligence, and it’s the next big step for Apple.

I include the entire quote^[3] because I see this as Apple’s AI thesis. Their privacy-first approach to AI is all about experiences and functionality, not data collection. Technology as Infrastructure, not as a business model. Apple Intelligence gives Apple (and developers) the ability to craft experiences that are relevant to you, using the extraordinarily personal information available on your device, and without compromising your privacy.

This is the right approach. People care about what technology lets them do—or can do for them—not the technology itself. They buy a new iPhone because it “takes better photos” not because it has an “ƒ/1.78 aperture.” The technology enables the feature, but it’s not the feature.

For Apple, it’s not about AI, it’s about what AI enables.

What sets Apple Intelligence apart from other offerings are Siri’s deep integration with the system, on-device processing, and new cloud server infrastructure.

With Siri’s improved integrations, better natural language understanding, and awareness of my personal contexts, my iPhone, iPad, and Mac—which already know more about me than my wife or mom—will be able to use that knowledge even more directly.

It’ll do this without needing to go to the cloud. Much of Apple Intelligence will be processed locally, which is a massive win for both speed and privacy. (It does require devices with the latest Apple silicon: iPhone 15 Pro, or any M-family iPad or Mac. One can presume any new phones announced this year will work.)

For requests too complex to process locally, Apple’s new cloud server infrastructure adds scalability. Private Cloud Compute uses Apple silicon-powered servers created specifically for this task. Limited data is sent to those servers, the data is used only for your requests (not to train models for others), and then the data is deleted once the task is complete.

As Craig said,

You should not have to hand over all the details of your life to be warehoused and analyzed in someone’s AI cloud.

This is what differentiates Apple from everyone else doing AI, and why Apple remains one of the few companies I trust with vast amounts of my personal data. Apple Intelligence is built, as Tim noted, “in a uniquely Apple way.” They aren’t trying to monetize your data, so there’s no need to hold onto it. It’s a solution “only Apple” could make.

Siri

There were several demos showcasing the capabilities of Apple Intelligence. Many were tied to generative writing and images, done locally, and constrained to specific contexts. I found them interesting, but not exciting.

There were three examples which delighted me. All were tied to Siri’s deeper integration into and across the system:

1. You’re filling out a form and it requires your driver’s license. If you have a copy of your license in Photos, Siri will be able to find that photo, copy your license number, and type it into the form for you. I had this exact need just a few days ago. I had to launch Photos, search for “driver’s license”, tap on the text icon, and copy and paste the number. It was quite handy, as I didn’t have to leave the couch to grab my wallet, but I can’t wait until I can say “Siri, paste in my driver’s license number.”
2. A friend sends you a Message with his new address. You say to Siri “add this address to his contact card”. Siri knows what’s on your screen, what an address is, how to get and format an address, what “this” address refers to, what a “contact card” is, who “his” means, what it means to “add to contact card”, and how to add it to the Contacts app.
3. You’re picking your mom up from the airport. You ask Siri “what time is my mom’s flight landing?” Siri knows who “my mom” is, what flight she’s on (because of an email she sent earlier), and when it will land (because it can access real-time flight tracking). You follow up with “what’s our lunch plan?” Siri knows “our” means you and your mom, when “lunch” is, that it was discussed in a Message thread, and that it’s today. Finally, you ask “how long will it take us to get there from the airport?”. Siri knows who ”us” is, where “there” is, which airport is being referenced, where you are now, and real-time traffic conditions.

I’ve been dreaming about these types of interactions since first seeing Apple’s Knowledge Navigator concept video, where—among other futuristic things—an “intelligent agent” has such deep contextual knowledge about a professor, it jumps in—unprompted—with the answer to a forgotten appointment time.

History

The WWDC video opens with Phil Schiller flying an airplane filled with Apple executives^[4]. Craig is pumping them up ahead of the show, then they all parachute out above Apple Park. The airplane, the jumpsuits, and the parachutes themselves are all liveried in the six colors of the classic Apple logo. It’s a lovely callback to Apple’s history.

Ninety minutes later, toward the end of the event, Craig gives us the tag line for Apple Intelligence: AI for the rest of us.

This is another callback to the earliest ads for Macintosh, the computer for the rest of us, and I think it encapsulates everything about how Apple envisions their place within the broader AI ecosystem.

The original series of ads compared the graphical user interface and one-button mouse of Macintosh to DOS-based PCs where you typed in cryptic, text-based commands to get things done. In one ad, a Macintosh is removed from a zippered bag:

It’s more sophisticated, yet less complicated.

It’s more powerful, yet less cumbersome.

It can store vast amounts of yesterday, or tell you what’s in store for tomorrow.

It can draw pictures, or it can draw conclusions.

It’s a personal computer from Apple, and it’s as easy to use as this.

The ad ends with a finger pressing a mouse button, highlighting the simplicity of using a Macintosh.

With new visuals, and some minor changes to the narration, this could be an ad for Apple Intelligence.

It can’t be coincidence that a Keynote that opens by evoking the early days of Apple computing, ends with one too. Apple is saying there’s Artificial Intelligence, which is all about LLMs and models and prompt engineering, and which requires specialized knowledge and lots of typing to accomplish anything, and there’s Apple Intelligence, which uses context and relevance and personal knowledge to make it easy to be creative and productive.

The pundits worry Apple has fallen behind.

Apple is telling us this is just the beginning.

After 22 (and a half!) years at Apple, I’ll be going on an extended, open-ended sabbatical.

That is, I’m retiring.

I’ve spent my entire career at Apple in Developer Technical Support (DTS), part of Worldwide Developer Relations (WWDR). In my time, I've been fortunate enough to be a (small) part of every OS launch, hardware transition, and WWDC since April of 2001.

I’ve helped developers move from Carbon to Cocoa, Objective-C to Swift, PowerPC to Intel to Apple silicon, a “sweet solution” to native development. I’ve helped them ready apps for the introduction of iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and now Vision Pro.

I worked closely with App Review from its initial launch, and helped launch and lead the Mac App Review team.

I partnered with Inclusion and Diversity and University Recruiting to help bring focus to the hiring, retention, and growth of female and Black engineers across Apple, and I was honored to be on the leadership team for Women@Apple-Tech for two years, and Co-chair of Black@Apple (formerly African-American Employee Association) for seven years.

All of which is to say:

I’ve had the great good fortune to work with hundreds of the smartest people across Apple in pursuit of things that mattered.

Whether it was addressing an issue affecting thousands of developers; crafting and polishing a talk for WWDC, Grace Hopper or NSBE; or exploring race and gender in the industry, every day I was part of remarkable, thought-provoking, insightful discussions with people from across this amazing company.

Those discussions have educated me, challenged me, comforted me.

Steve said “the journey is the reward”. To all of my colleagues past and present, thank you for being a part of my journey, for making it rewarding beyond measure.

What's next?

For the first couple of months, I plan to relax and recharge, to “drain my brain”. After that, I’ll be reconnecting to some long-dormant hobbies, including photography, podcasting, and perhaps some writing.

Sometime next year I plan to launch an organization for the next generation of tech leaders of color. The focus will be on building important non-tech skills, facilitating conversations that go beyond pure engineering and technical discussions, and strengthening networks and community. I’m excited to use my experience and skills in different ways, to be a mentor and coach, to open doors, and show a path upward.