Issue 2292 - Monday 17 March 2025

Good afternoon. I experimented with my first smart home sensor over the weekend, a basic Bluetooth Govee therometer, and I can already hear the little voice whispering “what if you got one more…”. Have a great week and enjoy the edition! - CW

The News

Apple’s AI rot spreads

Apple’s AI woes have reached DEFCON 1 as the company’s Siri chief admits that their “improved” AI voice assistant doesn’t work a third of the time in a leaked meeting (Bloomberg, archived). Since covering the Siri delay last week, there was a palpable vibe shift led by notorious Apple fanboy John Gruber. He wrote a damning blog post ‘Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino’ that took the company to task for its AI features both delivered and imagined (Daring Fireball). There’s a feeling, right or not, that this AI failure symbolises a cultural inability to innovate at Apple, especially when it comes to software¹ . At the same time, there’s a new leak about future iPhones (The Verge) including the rumoured 17 Air which was supposed to be Apple’s first ever port-free phone — but was reportedly ditched because of concerns with EU regulators (Engadget).

Bonus: I really enjoyed listening to this podcast episode with Stratechery analyst Ben Thompson on Apple’s problems last night. It does a good job explaining why Apple has lagged behind on its software offerings going back decades, and why the company, despite being hamstrung on AI efforts due to their stricter privacy stance, has an enormous potential future advantage because of the superior iPhone hardware (Sharp Tech).

EVs shine in Cyclone Alfred chaos

A story that has come out of the Cyclone Alfred saga is a trend of people using their EV’s vehicle-to-load features to keep the lights on when hit by power outages (The Guardian Australia and The Driven). Popular EVs in Australia have had the feature for a while — although Tesla’s Model Y and Model 3 notably don’t — but retailers say they started to become inundated with orders for V2L equipment in the lead-up to this year’s storm. The V2L tech goes some way to rubbish the criticism that EVs are inherently less useful than traditional combustion engine vehicles in abnormal situations because they’re so dependent on electricity rather than gas.

Is ‘vibecoding’ a programming sin?

You might have seen the term ‘vibecoding’ pop up in the last few weeks. Last month, former Tesla AI lead Andrej Karpathy described the experience of using an LLM to write code for projects without much care for keeping it tidy or really understanding what’s happening under the hood. (X)

Apparently, it’s possible to get pretty far using Claude or Cursor, a relatively new AI-powered programming app, without much programming knowhow. One guy reckons he made a flight simulator game in 30 minutes that earns $50k a month (404 Media, $). Naturally, some people are very mad about the idea of people just jamming together shitty code and the general impact of generative AI on programming because (See: AI is Making Developers Dumb - eli.cx). I get that. I have concerns about how LLMs cut people off from the source of knowledge. But when it comes to vibecoding — which is more DIY stuff than pro coders — it’s hard to get too upset that Joe Blogs is making a custom workout tracking app without having memorised UNIX: The Textbook, Third Edition.

Have you used LLMs to hack anything together? Do you think it’s a cardinal sin? I would love to hear from you!

Leftovers

Oh, Also

18yo tries to get out of drone fine by saying shot was AI-generated

A write-up in techAU alerted me to the 18-year-old-photographer who unsuccessfully tried to get out of a CASA fine for breaking drone rules by claiming the footage was AI generated. Hiroki Rule posted a video to Instagram showing a fine from Australia’s aviation regulator who were alerted to a drone footage of Sydney Harbour that he posted to social media in early February. Rule claims that he tried to tell them that it was AI and not real, but he was still fined anyway.

I went back and looked at the original Instagram post that got him in trouble and I saw that he has since edited the image’s caption to say “The Sydney harbour on a quiet arvo, taken from a really long pole that I stuck my camera ontop😉🇦🇺” (Instagram).

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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Always Was, Always Will Be Aboriginal Land

The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.