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John Gruber:

A telephoto is only good for photography, in that sense. The ultra-wide lens is a tool with additional utility beyond capturing photos you want to keep in any artistic or emotional sense. You can always grit your teeth and use digital zoom if you don’t have a telephoto, but you can’t fake going wider or, importantly, closer. The minimum focal distance of the iPhone 17 Pro 1× lens is 20 cm. The minimum focal distance of the iPhone Air 1× lens is 15 cm. Those extra 5 cm make a difference, but the iPhone Pro’s 0.5× lens has a minimum focal distance of just 2 cm. It can focus on pretty much anything you put in front of it. The iPhone Air’s 1× lens can’t do that. With Apple Intelligence and Siri AI, taking macro photos of objects and text, simply to ask Siri or another chatbot about them, is increasingly important.

A 0.5Ă— and 1Ă— lens can also be used to shoot 3d video for the Vision Pro.

Social Media is Broken

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In 2018, during a sabbatical from work, I quit Facebook after 10 years on the platform. I made a concentrated effort to unplug for the first few weeks of my time off and just never returned to Facebook, which had become pretty toxic, at least my timeline.

My usage of Twitter started to fade even before Elon Musk bought the platform, but at some point within the first year of his ownership it really started to feel like an echo chamber of trolls and I deleted my account there as well.

For a while I tried to replace those platforms with Threads and Bluesky and Mastodon, but even these started to become unappealing.

I’ve recently realized that AI slop makes those platforms pretty unpleasant. I never know if I’m talking to a bot. I started to suspect that everything was rage bait and didn’t want to waste my time chatting with a large language model that was being promoted to maximize engagement.