And good for them, I say

Lots of tiny AI tweaks are quietly taking over the iPhone.

The new autocorrect, which will be available in an iOS upgrade later this year, is sort of like a less powerful ChatGPT in your pocket. Apple says the software will be better at fine-tuning itself to how we type, as well at predicting what words and phrases we will use next.

I'm a keyboard guy, and have been since, well, longer than you. Not longer than you've been a keyboard guy, but longer than you. That would be my guess.

So when I use an iPhone I dictate. I don't try to type with my thumbs. I use Apple's dictation software a lot, and I've been seeing it get better, slowly, over time. 

It's not perfect. This morning it corrected Oppenheimer to Open Heimcr, so there's that. But it can figure out the difference between "to" and "too" in a sentence, most times, and if I give it a moment to think it can autocorrect some other misheard or misunderstood words and phrases correctly, now and tben.

The news that this function my be getting better is good. Very good. And suggests AI might actually become useful over time.

Stop!

A project to build the world's tallest flagpole has a small Maine town divided. Here's why

You had me at $1 billion boondoggle.

"A flagpole jutting upward from the woodlands toward spacious skies — the tallest one ever, reaching higher than the Empire State Building. And atop it? A massive American flag bigger than a football field, visible from miles away on a clear day."

Who could resist?

Apparently, a lot of people.

But they're in Maine. 

We don't have enough to freak out about already?

CLIMATE CHANGE BLAMED FOR COLLAPSE OF MOUNTAIN

Don't go out if it's maroon

The U.S. government — who knew but who's surprised — has a color-code system for describing air quality, according to which the very worst color is maroon.  Air in Decatur, Illinois, registered maroon yesterday afternoon due to wildfire smoke imported from Canada, our former NAFTA (now USMCA) partner to the north.

Maroon air, according to the EPA, is a "health warning of emergency conditions: everyone is more likely to be affected" — or, as Megan Schopp, a respiratory therapist at the Christie Clinic of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, points out, makes it "a little harder to breathe."

In any case, just so you know, the very best air is, of course. green.

Question:

When I told friends and family I was reporting on the first chicken meat grown from animal cells, their first comment was “Eww.” Their second comment was: “How does it taste?”

And the answer is…

What's really likely to do us all in…

The Terror of Threes in the Heavens and on Earth

Experts say the tripolar age could put human survival at risk.

 …is threat inflation. Whew.

Seems like every morning I tune in to a new something that's going to make us all extinct. Predicting the end of the world is an old, old enterprise, but now it's getting old.

Oh no!

English cricket ruled 'racist, sexist and elitist'

"On behalf of the ECB and wider leadership of the game, I apologze unreservedly to anyone who has ever been excluded from cricket or made to feel like they don't belong," he said.

I watched a cricket game once. On TV. Seemed like a perfectly uneventful nap.

And things get complicated

NASA opposes lithium mining at tabletop flat Nevada desert site used to calibrate satellites

An ancient Nevada lakebed beckons as a vast source of the coveted element needed to produce cleaner electric energy and fight global warming. But NASA says the same site — flat as a tabletop and undisturbed like none other in the Western Hemisphere — is indispensable for calibrating the razor-sharp measurements of hundreds of satellites orbiting overhead.

“No other location in the United States is suitable for this purpose,” the Bureau of Land Management concluded in April, meaning the measuring purpose, not the lithium mining purpose.

Barring a new bettery technology, lithium stands to be a more rare and politically disruptive resource than oil if we're going to convert the worlds automotive fleet to electric vehicles.