Hello. Rant time. I hate iCloud. I’m so sick of it. Of everything I’ve ever used by Apple, there’s no single other thing that’s this awful. And that includes Game Center, which literally didn’t work for months, because Apple apparently forgot it existed. (Games didn’t – they failed to load when Game Center itself failed.)

iCloud is great when it works. Seamless. You don’t notice it’s there. But it’s dire when it fails. Last year, it broke for a whole lot of people. Widgets and apps stopped working. And because iCloud is opaque, it wasn’t possible for users to do anything to fix the problems.

During that period, I suffered unrecoverable data loss for the first time in over a decade. I now cannot trust iCloud to house documents created by one of my key daily driver apps. It’s just too risky.

There are other niggles. Last week, iCloud populated my shared Downloads folder with dozens of empty folders, making me temporarily freak out until I found they were folders I’d deleted months ago. (Thanks, Time Machine! At least you work.) When you move a folder, iCloud sometimes (not always) inexplicably updates its creation date. And then there are times when it just won’t sync data.

I had that happen this morning. I was happily populating an app with a bunch of data, and the iPad and Mac versions were oblivious to this. And also each other. The solution? Turn iCloud off and on again for all those apps, which naturally nuked the new data. It was only half an hour of time wasted, but this shouldn’t happen. It should just work. Why iCloud is still as flaky as it is, despite being the backbone of dozens of Apple services – and instrumental to countless Mac and mobile apps – baffles me.

‘Threads is doomed’ articles are doing the rounds, based on sometimes questionable stats around how many users the site’s lost since its dramatic debut. Mastodon has gone through the same story at least twice. Although, bizarrely, some folks on that platform crow about Threads’ misfortunes, missing that the basic ‘Twitter and closed will still win’ narrative affects that service too.

The more interesting numbers in Time’s Tech Brief come from people who abruptly stopped posting. Again, the same happened on Mastodon. There was a huge influx of people, many posting there because they claimed staying on Twitter didn’t align with their integrity. And then they inevitably mostly scurried back to Twitter. Why?

Much of this feels like entitlement. They expected everyone to follow them, instantly, to somewhere new. And when they broadcast and realised the audience wasn’t there, they didn’t want to build again and so returned to the House of Musk  – even though the audience there is diminishing.

I get it. Starting again is hard. It can feel too much. Doubly so if your career/income in some way relies on a larger audience you’ve spent years painstakingly building without the brand/visibility advantage afforded to a major celebrity. And if you’re used to engagement, it can be quite humbling to suddenly be surrounded by silence. I found this myself when I first joined Mastodon in 2018. Since then, things have changed, in part because I invested time in the service, but also because I wrote a piece on Mastodon that was widely shared. I don’t see the same thing happening on Threads, where, I dunno, B-list tech journo doesn’t exactly give you any creds with the algorithm. But whatever. I still have the occasional nice exchange with folks there. That’s enough.

What I miss more is the diverse and fun group of people I read and chatted with on Twitter. Mastodon covers part of that and is good in its own right, but it’s not the same. I miss comics artists and comedians, news anchors and specific creators of oddball little projects. Then again, nothing is going to be the same as Twitter – perhaps ever again.

Twitter was a strange one-off where lots of different people came together from a huge range of fields, and that was combined with breaking news and brands wanting to help you (via DM) rather than just sell to you (as on Threads). Now, Twitter is increasingly a hideous bloodbath of extremism, Mastodon is a haven for geeks, creatives are over at Bluesky, various folks are trying to make the best of Threads, and so on.

I don’t think any of these services is doomed. Some might not last. What is doomed is the notion that Twitter can be replaced, because it can’t – not even by the current Musk incarnation of Twitter.

I remember years ago a loved one getting all excited about a letter they were sent about a book publishing deal. Someone was offering to publish their book. All they needed was a bit of money. Or, rather, a lot of money. It made said loved one sad, but a swift intervention and explanation of the scam that is ‘vanity publishing’ stopped a costly mistake. Twitter now apparently exists in broadly the same space.

Making good on an unsaid promise to destroy everything that was once good about the service, Musk has ordered his underlings to simultaneously destroy Twitter’s USP and discover how many gullible users it has. This all comes by way of a new character limit that will be exclusive to subscription tier Twitter Blue.

Having apparently fired all the copywriters, Twitter announced in a block of text that would make even the sternest production editor cry that you’ll now be able to send up to 4000 characters in a single tweet – if you pay to do so. By default, the tweet will collapse to the standard 280 and add a ‘show more’ link – perhaps the sole sensible decision Twitter has made since Musk’s takeover.

The broader picture here, though, is nonsensical. Twitter was a place where ideas spread, but not necessarily where they lived. People typically linked to longform content elsewhere. And, yes, although some folks on the site craft threads comprising a dizzying number of linked tweets, those communications have a distinct rhythm of their own, and are shareable on an individual basis.

4000 characters upends what makes Twitter unique, and welding it to Twitter Blue suggests Twitter thinks content creators should pay Twitter for the privilege of posting original content on to Twitter’s platform – a platform currently run by a man who showcases a flagrant disregard for rules, and presumably can be trusted with IP roughly as far as you can throw a Tesla. That sounds like a pretty crappy deal to me.

Last summer, I wrote a piece for Stuff magazine: AI is primed to eat the world – but it’s dining on what people already created. Within, I explored the then largely nascent world of consumer-accessible creative AI, digging into the visuals and text output these systems could crank out in seconds.

Since then, things have moved on. Not a day goes by now where we don’t see someone mulling over a bleak future for creative industries, as AI becomes smarter – and in some cases, more human – in terms of what it can produce.

Political commentator and columnist Ian Dunt today mulled on Twitter: “About 50% of the time I get excited with AI stuff, 40% I get worried about my career/the general economic implications and 10% entering a state of baffled existential terror.” Marina Evans then responded: “It feels like it’s being used to replace humans in exactly the wrong way.”

I have a lot of sympathy for both viewpoints. It is exciting to see what AI tech can do, but also deeply worrying thinking about how AI can now be used for everything from political disinformation to revenge porn. And in the creative space, I do find it sad that certain people are rubbing their hands with glee, considering AI primarily to be a cost-saving shortcut that removes swathes of paid creative types entirely.

Ideally, AI should be used to offload routine work so humans can do more interesting, useful and creative things. This is happening in, for example, machine learning operations. You often see AI employed in largely automated systems, poring though data at extreme speeds, and then alerting humans to handle key decision points. Without AI, these systems would be unviable or even impossible.

But AI has created a ticking time bomb within certain creative industries. There are already publications using AI to write routine articles – only sometimes bringing in human editors to make corrections. The internet is awash with AI-generated art and pseudo-photography, making illustrators fear for their very livelihoods while AI systems eat these people’s entire creative histories to use as the basis of their own output. There are exceptions – AI is good at dealing with mechanics. In video, it can sometimes sort a rough edit to give an editor a head start. And even in the aforementioned creative spaces, it has value as a trigger for inspiration.

The bigger concern is when higher-ups determine that mediocre/derivative output (which is where a lot of AI is right now) will do. But that misses the snag that when you run out of data to feed into the system, you get a kind of endless remix of grey. And it also glosses over what happens when humans are removed entirely or where key data is missing in the first place. AI can currently write, say, a review of a software product that a layman would read and think is OK. But an expert would spot errors. For an app, whatever. But for something critically important? That’s not good.

I’m not sure where things will go from here, but I’m not optimistic. Today, we exist in a strange space, where people are wowed by AI or hand-wave it away. The Ryan Reynolds ChatGPT Mint ad is a case in point. Reynolds offers good acting – at least, I hope that’s the case because what the AI comes up with is box-ticking mediocrity. However, if everyone does this again in a year, what will the AI come up with by then?

If nothing else, there’s one lesson we all need to learn – yet again – when it comes to disruptive technology: things never quite shake out as you might expect. Technology – and the world in general – is unpredictable. And AI may well turn out to be the most disruptive technology we will see in our lifetimes.

It looks like there’s growing consensus that Dynamic Island’s primary interaction model is wrong. Michael Tsai compiles commentary across two posts, which include people grumping about how a tap on Dynamic Island opens an app, whereas a long-press is required to expand what’s in the island to use its controls. Everyone from Nilay Patel at The Verge to John ‘Daring Fireball’ Gruber seems to want the opposite.

I’ve taken a contrary viewpoint. The iOS Home Screen has long had a similar interaction model. Whether you’re interacting with an icon or a widget, a tap opens an app, whereas a long press (and, previously, Force Touch) exists for actions. To my mind, Dynamic Island follows this existing convention, rather than making up new ones. So if a timer’s in the island, you tap-hold to perform a contextual action, or tap to open the item’s app. Even if you take a more desktop analogy of minimising to a ‘dock’ (which is in some ways how Dynamic Island presents), Apple is being consistent in this regard.

Rob Jonson on Twitter disagrees, arguing we’re effectively talking about a long press for a quick interaction and a tap for a deeper one (that is, opening the app), which “doesn’t seem right to me”. He asks: “Put it another way – is the dynamic island primarily the holder of the full app, or the holder of the expanded dynamic island?”

I’m clearly in the minority here (albeit, at present, a minority that includes Apple), but it’d feel odd to me if a long-press in Dynamic Island was the route to launching an app, just the same as it’d be weird elsewhere in the operating system.