Top Five Tech

Welcome to Top 5 Tech, my weekly show about what to watch, listen to, read, download, and something deep every week.

On what to watch this week, I would take a look at this Waveform clip.

Waveform is the podcast with Marques Brownlee, huge YouTuber, and his team.

But they talk about the minimal phone.

We haven't covered that a lot on Primary Technology and my other shows.

But the minimal phone is coming out with minimal phone too.

It's actually a Kickstarter right now.

And honestly, the phone looks beautiful.

The hardware looks awesome.

It has a physical QWERTY keyboard, very reminiscent of like old...

old school BlackBerrys.

But as they talked about the different features, it might even be able to sync your iMessages

to the minimal phone.

I actually had the original Lite phone, and I'm always intrigued by these kinds of devices.

So yeah, I backed the Kickstarter basically because of this waveform clip.

So you should definitely check it out.

Link to that in the show notes.

And remember, you can get my newsletter with all these links and a little more commentary

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I really enjoyed this episode with Ben Smith and Nilay Patel on Decoder.

It's the second time Ben Smith has been on the Decoder podcast.

The first time was to discuss his book, Traffic.

And after listening to that episode a couple of years ago, I bought and read that book, Incredible

Thing.

So that's kind of like a bonus what to read pick this week.

Really talks about the start of the whole tech online journalism world, things like the Huffington

Post and Gizmodo, what that was like back in the early 2000s.

So the book is great.

But in this interview, Neelai is asking Ben about

Semaphore, which is the news publication that Ben Smith has started,

their business model, which is trying to gear towards the top percent

of those interested in news journalism and how they're using

live events as a main part of their business.

In an age where it's very difficult to make a media business

with just online platforms, I found it really fascinating.

So definitely worth a listen.

I want to read this week.

I keep coming back and reading excerpts from John Gruber's piece on

Anthropics Watermarking and what they're going to be doing to

watermark text. And what this watermarking means is that in the

EU, because of a law they passed about AI and disclosures, Anthropic

needs to watermark all text generated by its models.

So if you ask Claude a question, you ask it for a paragraph or even

a summary, that text will be watermarked and they're going to

provide other tools for someone to use and distinguish and say

that was generated by Claude, that was AI generated.

But the watermarking is not some kind of metadata behind the

scenes, it's actually the specific

words used in what is being generated

and that means Claude's output

is going to be affected because it's going to

be choosing words that will be water

markable. Anyway, Gruber's piece explains

it in detail and he also links to

this old interview with Borgias

he is a polyglot and he's talking about

the English language and I love this moment

where he talks about why the English

language is the finest language

coming from both Germanic background

and Latin, how we have multiple

words for everything, really compelling

just about the English language so at that

that's worth a watch but it's quoted in Gruber's piece

and if you want to really understand

the whole anthropic watermarking thing

and why people who care about words

are upset about it Gruber's piece is the one to read

on what to download a wonderful

new app that I came across

easy DMG if you ever install

a Mac app outside of the app store you know

that has to download a DMG file

to your downloads you double click it you open

it and then you have this weird

thing you have to eject in your finder

there might be a leftover DMG file that

sits in your downloads for months or years

well one click dmg is a little app it's completely free and when you install it you basically tell

all future dmg files to be opened in this app it will automatically install the mac app move it to

your applications folder eject and move the dmg file to your trash it takes away so many steps so

really cool completely free app download it in the link below and on something deep mac rumors

uncovered a leak in the 26.7 release candidate of mac os tahoe and it is a video of this supposed

airpods pro with some kind of camera and this seems this is from apple inside the rc the actual

code base and this video shows a gentleman looking at a book and the airpods basically the siri ai

assistant talking to him through the airpods saying just ask and I can remember this for you implying

that the airpods can see what is in front of you now jason and I spent a long time on the latest

primary technology episode talking about airpods with a camera how you feel about it but I will say

that after trying

the meta glasses,

I do see the value

of having a device,

especially with Siri AI

and how good that is going to be,

being able to see

the world around you.

So you can just ask it,

hey, remind me about this

or tell me how to get to that

or what is this store's hours

while you're looking at it.

And also things like saving a book

or looking things up

just from asking your AirPods

that are probably

in your ear already.

There are real privacy concerns

about something like that,

a camera in your ear

or on your face.

Meta glasses have had

a really bad rap

because it's a camera

people were using it for nefarious reasons supposedly these new airpods pro likely coming

next year in 2027 won't have a camera that can capture photos and videos that you can then see

on your iphone so nothing will be capturable or recordable but it will be able to see the world

around you I want to know how do you feel about this you can reply to my email if you get that

newsletter or just hit me up on social media airpods with a camera bad idea good idea I see

the value, but I also know

I don't want to have that awkward moment where I'm

in a store or walking into a public restroom

someone sees that I have AirPods

that recognize things around them

even though it can't take a picture, it's going to make for

some awkward moments and I'm not quite sure

how people will feel about it. So let me know

how you feel about it and again you can scan

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