…although with Amazon having forgotten most of what they ever knew about logistics, Shipmas is a bit like Schrödinger’s Cat Box, with things never showing up as trackable until two days after they were promised for delivery, which is always fun to explain to kids.

Fun(?) with Liquid Ass

iOS 26.2 is out, so one could hope that other customers have done the basic release QA for Apple by now. I wanted to see what the legibility looks like, to see if it’s safe to upgrade my mom’s phone yet. So I installed it on my old California phone, which doesn’t tie into any online services (do not upgrade a device that uses iClown until you’re ready to upgrade everything; they test cross-version compatibility even less).

TL/DR, no, doesn’t look like they’ve finished tuning the UI to restore readability. It’s better than the initial “release” (beta), but still not good for anyone with less-perfect vision than an Apple design team.

Synology pivots to “AI”

Their latest device is BeeDrive, an “AI-powered Portable SSD”. Not to be confused with their BeeStation “private cloud”, which is not to be confused with their NAS products. As far as I can tell, none of the Bee-thingies has any data protection, although the Station offers a free trial of “storing bits of your private cloud in their public cloud”.

TL/DR, both product lines appear to be external drives that come with backup software, which is a pretty crowded market. On the plus side, they didn’t roll their own, and licensed Acronis True Image (“formerly Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office”, signaling that they’ve (partially) recovered from their childish phase of labeling everything “cyber”).

On the minus side, they’re bundling an offline LLM to do text-scanning, image-scanning, and inference on everything you store, for Deep Search(TM). So when the local authorities decide they don’t like your memes, they can sieze your backup drive and quickly find additional double-plus-ungood thoughts to charge you with.

I mention this for the benefit of those living in Australia, the UK, Canada, the EU, and other regimes hostile to free expression of disapproved thoughts.

I also suspect their LLM is going to produce hilarious results when fed a typical Internet user’s hard drive. Most common search result:

(primary difficulty on this one: getting separate speech bubbles with one of them coming from the computer; maybe six tries total)

Definitely not a “1-minute walk”…

A Kyoto “tourism site” describes access to the Sannenzaka shopping district with the words “A 1-minute walk from Keihan Railway’s Gion-Shijo Station”.

Google’s walking instructions suggest they left off the first digit, and it’s not a “1”…

Given how sparse, generic, and monolingual the content of the site is, I suspect it’s AI slop. Which is why I’m not linking to “kyoto-to-do dot com”.

Speaking of slop…

My phone is now getting computer-filtered 50% Medicare/Medicaid fraud and 50% home-improvement fraud. I need to answer the phone for unknown numbers while I’m expecting service providers to show up, so I can’t just let them go to voicemail (and even legit numbers often don’t leave messages any more).

I say “yes” to get to whatever operations center in India is taking the calls today, and then ask them a simple question: “what’s my name?”. If they have even the cheapest possible call list, then they have some name associated with my phone number.

But none of them can answer, and they stop talking immediately and hang up.

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