Project Mariner — much like its closest kin, Claude with computer use — look, to me, fundamentally regressive and uninspiring. Not only I don't want to watch an agent use my computer (duh); I don't want it to complete tasks that way at all. I get that most of the modern world relies on app/web-based UXs, and this is a workaround. But the whole point of AI is not automation of current workflows: it's enabling paths to the desired solution that unlock new, faster, and more powerful ways to do the thing.

In 2016, when the Pixel came out, Material Design (to this day, the largest-ever effort in applied, at-scale digital design) was maturing, folks including me started wondering whether Google could bridge the hardware gap faster than Apple in software. It's been 7+ years now and, typing these tweets from my iPhone 15 Pro, it's abundantly clear that Apple has won the race. Their software still has quirks here and there, but it's largely a delightful experience that plays off their biggest strength, i.e. the integrated ecosystem.

The more I read about Apple's "Reality" headset, the more I really do feel we are moving away from hardware and into AI as a massive paradigm shift. In a world where the smartphone is the undisputed universal platform, everything else feels like a gadget; an appendix at most. The 2020s' AI will be to the 2010s' mobile devices what the 00s' web was to the 90's computers. Except compounded, and at an infinitely larger scale — not a perfectly fitting analogy, but the shared point is the software life juice that makes the gear worth a billion times more.

One particularly underappreciated aspect of the latest genAI wave is, in addition to what these systems are capable of, how widely and easily accessible they are. AutoGPT only took a few months to materialize. How deep these programs will get into the web's undercurrent (and the social strata they feed into) is something we have almost no way of even remotely calculating; let alone the cascading effects that will be generated as a result.

For some reason I myself don't entirely understand, I feel like it's easier to bullshit your way through something in English than it is in Italian (the two languages I speak). It's as if English allowed for a more nuanced, blurred transmission of whatever message is being sent. You can say something clearly and directly, of course. Or you can use fuzzier language — knowingly or not. Sometimes it's just not possible (or it doesn't make sense) to pin down specifics; the listener/reader will understand regardless, and that's fine. But sometimes...

Discovery and curation are, unquestionably, one of the internet's largest problems. Every time I want to get off a platform (because it wastes too much of my time and/or it's full of uninteresting stuff I need to wade through), there comes a piece of content that is actually worth it. And I think: "Ah, if only it were always like this".