I'm not advocating that everyone should self-host everything. But the pendulum has swung too far toward managed services. There's a large sweet spot where self-hosting makes perfect sense, and more teams should seriously consider it. Start small. If you're paying more than $200/month for RDS, spin up a test server and migrate a non-critical database. You might be surprised by how straightforward it is. The future of infrastructure is almost certainly more hybrid than it's been recently: managed services where they add genuine value, self-hosted where they're just expensive abstractions. Postgres often falls into the latter category. Footnotes They're either just hosting a vanilla postgres instance that's tied to the deployed hardware config, or doing something opaque with edge deploys and sharding. In the latter case they near guarantee your DB will stay highly available but costs can quickly spiral out of control. ↩ Maybe up to billions at this point. ↩ Even on otherwise absolutely snail speed hardware. ↩ This was Jeff Bezos's favorite phrase during the early AWS days, and it stuck. ↩ Similar options include OVH, Hetzner dedicated instances, or even bare metal from providers like Equinix. ↩ AWS RDS & S3 has had several major outages over the years. The most memorable was the 2017 US-East-1 outage that took down half the internet. ↩

Write-Ahead Logging is critical for durability and performance:

Storage Tuning: NVMe SSDs make having content on disk less harmful than conventional spinning hard drives, so you'll want to pay attention to the disk type that you're hosted on:

Making fresh connections in postgres has pretty expensive overhead, so you almost always want to put a load balancer on front of it. I'm using pgbouncer on all my projects by default - even when load might not call for it. Python asyncio applications just work better with a centralized connection pooler.

Memory Configuration: This is where most people mess up. Pulling the standard postgres docker image won't cut it. You have to configure memory bounds with static limits that correspond to hardware. I've automated some of these configurations. But whether you do it manually or use some auto-config, tweaking these params is a must.

When self-hosting doesn't make sense I'd argue self-hosting is the right choice for basically everyone, with the few exceptions at both ends of the extreme: If you're just starting out in software & want to get something working quickly with vibe coding, it's easier to treat Postgres as just another remote API that you can call from your single deployed app If you're a really big company and are reaching the scale where you need trained database engineers to just work on your stack, you might get economies of scale by just outsourcing that work to a cloud company that has guaranteed talent in that area. The second full freight salaries come into play, outsourcing looks a bit cheaper. Regulated workloads (PCI-DSS, FedRAMP, HIPAA, etc.) sometimes require a managed platform with signed BAAs or explicit compliance attestations.

The real operational complexity

I helped prove this to myself when I migrated off RDS. I took a pg_dump of my RDS instance, restored it to a self-hosted server with identical specs, and ran my application's test suite. Performance was identical. In some cases, it was actually better because I could tune parameters that RDS locks down.

But the actual database engine? It's the same Postgres running the same SQL queries with the same performance characteristics.

The value proposition is operational: they handle the monitoring, alerting, backup verification, and incident response. It's also a production ready configuration at minute zero of your first deployment.

For the most part managed database services aren't running some magical proprietary technology. They're just running the same open-source Postgres you can download with some operational tooling wrapped around it. Take AWS RDS. Under the hood, it's: Standard Postgres compiled with some AWS-specific monitoring hooks A custom backup system using EBS snapshots Automated configuration management via Chef/Puppet/Ansible Load balancers and connection pooling (PgBouncer) Monitoring integration with CloudWatch Automated failover scripting

Fast forward to 2025 and I hope the pendulum might be swinging back. RDS pricing has grown considerably more aggressive. A db.r6g.xlarge instance (4 vCPUs, 32GB RAM) now costs $328/month before you add storage, backups, or multi-AZ deployment. For that price, you could rent a dedicated server with 32 cores and 256GB of RAM.

The real shift happened around 2015 when cloud adoption accelerated. Companies started to view any infrastructure management as "undifferentiated heavy lifting"4. Running your own database became associated with legacy thinking. A new orthodoxy emerged of focusing on your application logic and letting AWS handle the infrastructure.

* "Digital platforms are used for hybrid campaigns."* "EU can't compete with US tech ON THEIR TERMS."* "Post-reality US is what happens when tech is unregulated."* "Ireland is a Trojan Horse for Big Tech."* "The Digital Omnibus is sabotage."

Web2.0 seems to have been a mistake and is being rolled back entirely. The whole concept of having your own web property that other people can write to (leave comments and other things) has gone away. That means also there’s no need for a dynamic website with database anymore.

Reading back all those old posts and weeknotes I have here is super nice and reminds me:Keeping a record of things is really valuable. Just write and trust that it will come in handy at some point.I used to do so many things in a given week. Compared to what I’m doing now, my life was insanely eventful.I was consistently (too) early on a lot of things. For instance: I read myself complaining about restaurants and food in Amsterdam, something which is mostly solved now.

PHP/MySQL is losing adoption

Our backup nodes are located in Switzerland, and we use AWS (Amazon Web Services).

Media files are not directly downloaded in overall syncing to save bandwidth. Instead, when that file is requested, it is streamed to your device from the backup node or your devices on the network. For example, if you have a 4K Video, it will be streamed from the backup node or P2P devices to your device. So when you open an object with an image, it downloads. When you press play on video & audio, it begins to download. After that, this file will be stored in the application cache.

Pricing for Self-HostersSelf-hosters can manage the limits of Viewers/Editors they invite to their Spaces themselves. Those who would like to purchase a name in the Anytype naming system or access priority support, can purchase a membership at the same price as other beta testers.

Frontmatter (the --- metadata at the top) → becomes object properties.

Step 1: Export from ObsidianClean up your notesConvert embeds like ![[Note Title]] into simple links [[Note Title]]Remove or convert plugin-specific syntax, such as Dataview queries, Templater fields, etc.

Pick the plan that works for you now, add more teammates and additional storage anytime you need. Switch or cancel anytime.

Furthermore, the choice of incorporating as an Association rather than an LLC or other legal structure distinguishes ANY as a company managed in accordance with commercial practices, but which exists for the greater good. We consider ourselves a remote team, but we maintain one hub in Berlin (where our team is employed by our local GmbH, a subsidiary of the Swiss Association).

Our applications, on the other hand, are distributed under a source available license.

supported by

Single objects, infinite possibilities Visualise connections using graph & database views

Templates

Databases

Nobody is mediating the connection between your devices

Nobody can see what’s in your vault, except for you

discuss, organize, remember

A: The Calibre dedrm plugin only removes the Readium 1.0 drm. As for Readium 2.5, it employs the tougher drm, it cannot be handled with Calibre drdrm plugin.

The DeDRM plugin i

you can download the .lcpl within the Calibre directly.

All you need to open (or decrypt) LCP eBooks is the account passphrase given to you by the eBook provider - the very same passphrase you'd have to enter into your eBook reader device (once) to read LCP-encrypted books. Sometime, the passphrase can be the passwords.

drei Erkenntnisse

Zusätzlich habe ich mir jeden Freitag eine halbe Stunde Zeit genommen für einen wöchentlichen Rückblick. Dabei habe ich die Einträge durchgeblättert, Muster markiert und die wichtigsten Episoden noch einmal verdichtet. Dieser Rückblick half mir besonders, nicht nur auf einzelne Stunden zu reagieren, sondern auch langfristige Entwicklungen zu erkennen, z. B. wiederkehrende Probleme bei Gruppenarbeiten oder Fortschritte in der Diskussionskultur.

Der Zeitaufwand war überschaubar. In der Regel war ich in rund 10 Minuten fertig. Entscheidend war die Routine: Das Journal hatte in meinem Ablauf denselben Stellenwert wie das Aufräumen des Kursraums.

Ich habe mein Journal in einem einfachen A5-Notizbuch geführt. Jede Doppelseite gehörte einer Unterrichtseinheit. Links: die Events in Stichpunkten. Rechts: Episode und Analyse. Der Ablauf sah so aus: Direkt nach der Lektion: fünf Minuten für die Events – die wichtigsten Beobachtungen notieren. Episode auswählen: eine kleine Szene beschreiben, sodass ich sie auch in drei Monaten noch klar vor Augen habe. Analysis: Reflexion über Ursachen und Konsequenzen, verbunden mit einem konkreten nächsten Schritt.

Einfache Struktur: Events – Episode – Analysis Beim Start meiner Challenge habe ich bewusst eine schlanke Form gewählt. In Richards & Farrell bin ich auf ein Modell gestossen, das mir sofort einleuchtete: Events – Episode – Analysis. Events: kurze, stichwortartige Notizen zu den wichtigsten Geschehnissen der Lektion. Episode: eine kleine Szene, die ich erzählerisch ausformuliere: vielleicht eine gute Diskussion, vielleicht ein technisches Problem. Analysis: meine Gedanken dazu: Warum war diese Episode wichtig? Was hat dazu geführt? Und was nehme ich mir für die nächste Einheit vor?

ein Arbeitsinstrument. Es schafft einen Raum, um nach dem Unterricht innezuhalten, zentrale Ereignisse zu notieren, kleine Episoden festzuhalten und darüber nachzudenken, was gelungen ist – und was nicht.

Donald Schön hat den Begriff „reflection-on-action“ geprägt: Wir lernen, indem wir nach der Handlung darüber nachdenken, warum wir etwas getan haben, und welche Alternativen möglich gewesen wären [2].

Pädagogische Forschung und Praxis empfehlen es seit Jahren als Werkzeug, um den eigenen Unterricht zu reflektieren und weiterzuentwickeln. Jack Richards und Thomas Farrell definieren es schlicht als „a teacher’s written record of classroom events and of the teacher’s own thoughts and reflections about teaching“ [1].

30 Tage lang wollte ich nach jedem Unterricht ein handschriftliches Lehrjournal führen. Kein grosses Projekt, einfach ein Notizbuch und der feste Vorsatz, nach der Lektion zehn bis fünfzehn Minuten zu schreiben. Am Anfang war ich skeptisch, ob sich dieser zusätzliche Aufwand lohnen würde. Heute weiss ich: Es war eine der produktivsten Routinen, die ich mir als Dozent angewöhnt habe.

the Language Processing Unit (LPU), a new category of processor. Groq created and built the LPU from the ground up to meet the unique needs of AI. LPUs run Large Language Models (LLMs) and other leading models at substantially faster speeds and, on an architectural level, up to 10x more efficiently from an energy perspective compared to GPUs.

The company's stock has declined approximately 34% from its December 2024 peak,

the raw intelligence that LLMs provide

Benioff had recently told Business Insider that he's drafting the company's annual strategic document with data foundations—not AI models—as the top priority, explicitly citing concerns about "hallucinations" without proper data context.

Phil Mui described as AI "drift" in an October blog post. When users ask irrelevant questions, AI agents lose focus on their primary objectives. For instance, a chatbot designed to guide form completion may become distracted when customers ask unrelated questions.

Home security company Vivint, which uses Agentforce to handle customer support for 2.5 million customers, experienced these reliability problems firsthand. Despite providing clear instructions to send satisfaction surveys after each customer interaction, The Information reported that Agentforce sometimes failed to send surveys for unexplained reasons. Vivint worked with Salesforce to implement "deterministic triggers" to ensure consistent survey delivery.

Chief Technology Officer of Agentforce, pointed out that when given more than eight instructions, the models begin omitting directives—a serious flaw for precision-dependent business tasks.

The company is now emphasizing that Agentforce can help "eliminate the inherent randomness of large models," marking a significant departure from the AI-first messaging that dominated the industry just months ago.

admission comes after Salesforce reportedly reduced its support staff from 9,000 to 5,000 employees

All of us were more confident about large language models a year ago," Parulekar stated, revealing the company's strategic shift away from generative AI toward more predictable "deterministic" automation in its flagship product, Agentforce.

would take seriously the fact that intelligence is now being scaled and distributed through organizations long before it is unified or fully understood

examine power as an emergent consequence of deployment and incentives, not intent.

Such a work would treat alignment as institutional design rather than a property of models alone.

Empirical grounding. In 2015, scaling laws, emergent capabilities, and deployment‑driven feedback loops were speculative. Today, they are measurable. That shift changes the nature of responsibility, governance, and urgency in ways that were difficult to justify rigorously at the time.

Political economy and power. The book largely brackets capital concentration, platform dynamics, and geopolitical competition. Today, these are central to any serious discussion of AI, not because the technology changed direction, but because it scaled fast enough to collide with real institutions and entrenched interests.

Alignment as an operational problem. The book assumes that sufficiently advanced intelligences would recognize the value of cooperation, pluralism, and shared goals. A decade of observing misaligned incentives in human institutions amplified by algorithmic systems makes it clear that this assumption requires far more rigorous treatment. Alignment is not a philosophical preference. It is an engineering, economic, and institutional problem.

somethingnew.davidorban.com

what it feels like to live through an intelligence transition that does not arrive as a single rupture, but as a rolling transformation, unevenly distributed across institutions, regions, and social strata.

As a result, the debate shifted. The central question is no longer “Can we build this?” but “What does this do to power, incentives, legitimacy, and trust?”

The book’s central argument was not about timelines or machines outperforming humans at specific tasks. It was about scale. Artificial intelligence, I argued, should not be understood at the level of an individual mind, but at the level of civilization. Technology does not merely support humanity. It shapes what humanity is. If AI crossed certain thresholds, it would not just automate tasks, but it would reconfigure social coordination, knowledge production, and agency itself. That framing has aged better than I expected, not because any particular prediction came true, but because the underlying question turned out to be the right one.

America’s former role is gone. And I think that Americans themselves are having the hardest time of all coming to terms with what that might actually mean in the long run.

The officer then said that even a swift return of America to its former role won’t matter. Because “we will never fucking trust you again.”The Americans at the table seemed somewhat startled by the heat of that pronouncement. I agreed with it entirely. So, it seemed to me, did most of the non-Americans. This wasn’t the only such moment at the forum this year, but it was, to me, the most interesting. And it was still being talked about the next day. “Thank God,” one allied official said to me. “Someone had to tell them.”

But before I could worry about it too much, a senior military officer from a major (non-American) allied nation drove a stake right through the heart of the matter.America has blown 80 years of accumulated goodwill and trust among its allies, our American moderator was told. A rock-steady assumption of allied defence and security planning for literally generations has been that America would act in its own interests, sure, but that those interests would be rational, and would still generally value the institutions that America itself worked so hard to build after the Second World War. America’s recent actions have destroyed the ability of any ally to continue to have faith in America to act even within its own strategic self-interest, let alone that of any ally.

And the damage to America’s soft power — the shutting down of aid programs and things like Voice of America — can’t be undone rapidly no matter who wins the midterms. U.S. troops that are pulled out of bases where the U.S. no longer sees a strategic reason for their presence aren’t likely to come back.And, this is the critical part, wouldn’t necessarily be welcomed even if they did.

The damage is already done. I know firsthand that a great many Americans who really do believe in the post-1945 global order, and of America’s prior role in the world and the value of that role to America and Americans, are still inside the U.S. government. But I also know that many of them are retiring, or seeking early retirement, or switching to consulting gigs. They can’t stomach what U.S. foreign policy is becoming, and they won’t be a part of it.Good for them. But every single person who departs is being replaced by someone who is totally fine with the new U.S. foreign policy. And sometimes is actually quite enthusiastic about it. That will accelerate the process that’s already underway. And those new people are going to have long careers, shaping things both in public and behind the scenes.

The session, over dinner, was a small group. It was about America’s moral leadership in the world. Our moderator was a now-former American official. She was pretty frank and clear-eyed about how America’s allies currently view the country’s place in the world, but also expressed some hope that after the midterms next year or maybe the next presidential election, things would start to get more back to normal. We were assured that a lot of people in America are still with us. Some of the other Americans present nodded their heads.

Amazon or any other U.S.-based company will then make the decision that best promotes and protects long-term shareholder value. And that decision will be, in every case, to submit and comply. Everyone in the room knew that. America is different, now. It’s inescapable.

There were two fascinating things about that exchange (it starts around the 17-minute mark of that video). The first was the question itself; it alone was a signal of how much things have changed. The second interesting thing is that Zapolsky’s answer was, with respect, bullshit. I can see why he’s a legal officer! He gave an answer that was legally correct — the only way that the U.S. government can officially bar Amazon from providing cloud services for a foreign military, for example, would be by sanctions or some comparable legislation.

What would happen is that someone senior at Amazon, maybe Jeff Bezos himself, would get a call from some golf partner or drinking buddy in the administration, and the message will be simple: “Stop, or you won’t get contracts. We’ll arrange some hearings into your operations. Your little spaceflight company will find itself under way more levels of regulatory review than your Musk-owned competitor. This is what the boss wants. Make it happen.”

Tarabay dropped a humdinger of a question on Zapolsky. Here’s the quote (slightly cleaned up for clarity): “We’re in an age where there’s a government that puts pressure on companies [and] people for [Trump’s] own gain. You have been so steadfast in your support for Ukraine. What will Amazon do if your government says ‘Stop’?”Zapolsky replied that the company has contracts with foreign governments and NATO allies and said that Amazon would only change those relationships if it was legally forced to do so via something like a sanction.

but it raised a much deeper point — America has “walked away” from its allies. And the leader of the CODEL took no issue with that characterization.

Kucher said this to Shaheen: “We’ve talked about allyship. What should the allies, who uphold democratic values, in the reality that the United States has walked away from them … what should the allies do?”

I will not confirm or deny that that is happening, but there is nothing in 12333 to prevent that from happening.

Hypothetically, under 12333 the NSA could target a single foreigner abroad. And hypothetically if, while targeting that single person, they happened to collect every single Gmail and every single Facebook message on the company servers not just from the one person who is the target, but from everyone—then the NSA could keep and use the data from those three billion other people. That’s called 'incidental collection.'

Executive Order 12333 has been regarded by the American intelligence community as a fundamental document authorizing the expansion of data collection activities.[9] The document has been employed by the National Security Agency as legal authorization for its collection of unencrypted information flowing through the data centers of internet communications giants Google and Yahoo!.[9]

Part 2.3 permits collection, retention and dissemination of the following types of information along with several others. .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 32px}.mw-parser-output .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;margin-top:0}@media(min-width:500px){.mw-parser-output .templatequotecite{padding-left:1.6em}}(c) Information obtained in the course of lawful foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, international narcotics or international terrorism investigation ... (i) Incidentally obtained information that may indicate involvement in activities that may violate federal, state, local or foreign laws[1]

Amerikaanse wetgeving zoals de CLOUD Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act), de Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)5 en Executive Order 12333 komt te vallen?

Indien de Algemene Rijksvoorwaarden bij IT-overeenkomsten 2022 (ARBIT-2022)6 van toepassing verklaard is op de overeenkomst is er een ontbindingsgrond als er sprake is van een ingrijpende wijziging in de zeggenschap (wat het geval kan zijn bij fusies en overnames) met betrekking tot de onderneming van de wederpartij/opdrachtnemer. Door de landsadvocaat wordt momenteel onderzocht in hoeverre dit het geval is. Indien door de overname de nakoming van de verwerkersovereenkomst en de naleving van de AVG wordt bemoeilijkt of zelfs onmogelijk wordt, kan dit een grond vormen om de dienstverleningsovereenkomst respectievelijk de verwerkersovereenkomst te ontbinden. Dit laat overigens onverlet de mogelijkheid om in een concreet geval een overeenkomst op basis van de Algemene Rijksvoorwaarden op te kunnen zeggen.

Het versterken van digitale autonomie vergt daarom een Europese aanpak.

De overeenkomsten tussen de Staat en Solvinity bieden aanknopingspunten om ten minste van Solvinity te verlangen dat er technische en organisatorische maatregelen worden getroffen om te waarborgen dat de gegevens waartoe zij toegang heeft op een wijze worden verwerkt die voldoet aan de in de EU geldende regels, zoals die uit de Algemene verordening gegevensbescherming. Welke maatregelen dat zullen zijn vormt onderwerp van de gesprekken tussen de Staat en Solvinity.

De drie genoemde wettelijke instrumenten maken het, in ieder geval in theorie, mogelijk dat autoriteiten in de VS onder de in deze wetgeving genoemde voorwaarden toegang kunnen krijgen tot de gegevens waarover een onderneming in de VS beschikt, óók wanneer de gegevens zich bevinden onder een dochtervennootschap en op servers buiten de VS. Als Solvinity wordt overgenomen door een onderneming in de VS brengt dit Solvinity onder de reikwijdte van deze wetgeving. Het gevolg daarvan kan, in ieder geval in theorie, zijn dat autoriteiten in de VS in voorkomend geval toegang krijgen tot de gegevens die door Solvinity in opdracht van de Staat worden verwerkt.

An aspect of the human use of information that has generally been overlooked in the automation of information services is the human tendency to locate information spatially. Computer-based systems do not necessarily assign any unique role to spatial tags, and so a feature of considerable importance for the organization of the user's memory seems to have been largely overlooked. The spatial dimension of human memory is discussed, and some suggestions are offered for exploiting it more effectively in the context of information retrieval services.

The economics are far from certain though, and competition will be fierce. Even if NASA is able to spur a private orbital economy, there may not be enough business to support multiple private space stations.

All these projects hope to have NASA as an anchor tenant. But they are also heavily reliant on the idea that there are a broad range of potential customers also willing to pay for orbital office space.

In addition, Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, is working with Sierra Space and Boeing to build Orbital Reef,

Meanwhile, Voyager Space and Airbus are designing a space station called Starlab, which recently moved into “full-scale development” ahead of an expected 2028 launch. The station can host four astronauts, features an external robotic arm, and is designed to launch in one go aboard SpaceX’s forthcoming Starship rocket.

Axiom Space, one of the companies vying for this funding, plans to piggyback on the ISS to build its space station. The company will first launch a power and heating module and connect it to the ISS. The module will be able to operate independently starting in 2028. They’ll then gradually add habitat and research modules alongside airlocks to create a full-fledged private space station.

The agency has paid out about $415 million in the program's first phase to help companies flesh out their designs. But next year, NASA plans to select one or more companies for Phase 2 contracts worth between $1 billion and $1.5 billion and set to run from 2026 to 2031.

Development of Vast’s second station relies on funding from NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations program,

Haven-2, a larger modular station that Vast hopes could succeed the ISS.

May 2026, when California-based startup Vast plans to launch its Haven-1 space station

ISS is nearing the end of its planned lifespan and NASA’s been clear that it doesn’t intend to replace the space station.

The ISS was humanity's only permanent outpost in space for nearly a quarter of a century, until China’s Tiangong station was permanently crewed in 2022.

Main entry point[edit] Main article: Entry point As in C, C++, C#, Java, and Go, the entry point to a Kotlin program is a function named "main", which may be passed an array containing any command-line arguments. This is optional since Kotlin 1.3.[26] Perl, PHP, and Unix shell–style string interpolation is supported. Type inference is also supported.

The name is derived from Kotlin Island, a Russian island in the Gulf of Finland, near Saint Petersburg. Andrey Breslav, Kotlin's former lead designer, mentioned that the team decided to name it after an island, in imitation of the Java programming language which shares a name with the Indonesian island of Java

On 7 May 2019, Google announced that the Kotlin programming language had become its preferred language for Android app developers.[7] Since the release of Android Studio 3.0 in October 2017, Kotlin has been included as an alternative to the standard Java compiler.

Prerequisites Basic Kotlin knowledge

Once you have multiple enhancement prompts, you can switch between them on the fly without opening the main app window. This is done using keyboard shortcuts when the Mini Recorder is active. For a detailed guide, see Quickly Switching Enhancement Prompts. By configuring an AI provider, you unlock the full potential of VoiceInk's enhancement features, allowing you to transform your speech into perfectly formatted and context-aware text.

In the Enhancement settings, you can also enable Clipboard Context and Context Awareness. These features provide the AI with additional information from your clipboard or screen to produce more accurate and relevant results.

Select a Model: Once connected, you can choose from any of the models you have pulled in Ollama.

Supported Providers Ollama (Free & Local): Run powerful open-source models locally on your machine. This is a great option for privacy and offline use.

Enhancement ModelsTransform your transcriptions with AI-powered enhancement and correction

Here are the best transcription models you can use with VoiceInkAI transcription modelDescriptionParakeet modelthe real-time offline model with the best accuracyWhisper large v3 turbofast and accurate Whisper model from OpenAI

Made with ❤️ by Pax

Open Source & Privacy-FirstThe source code of VoiceInk is available on GitHub

VoiceInk works only on Apple Silicon Macs and requires macOS 14.0 or later. The local models require Apple Silicon's Neural Engine for fast, local AI processing. While we offer cloud models as an alternative, the local version is designed specifically for Apple Silicon. We recommend having at least 8GB of RAM for optimal performance.

The Cloud Enhancement feature is entirely optional - if enabled, only the transcribed text (not your voice) is processed by third-party providers for improved accuracy.

SoloWorks on 1 macOS device

Personal DictionaryTrain AI with your custom words, phrases, and replacements for faster, more personalized responses

VoiceInk is a macOS dictation app that uses local AI models to convert speech to text with complete privacy since all processing happens offline on your device.

Offline Mode: Works without internet connection

MacWhisper is a Mac-exclusive transcription app that runs OpenAI's Whisper AI model directly on your computer for speech-to-text conversion.

The local processing makes SuperWhisper stand out for privacy-conscious users who want dictation without cloud dependency

Apple Dictation is the built-in speech-to-text feature that comes with all Mac and iOS devices.

Flow uses a combination of open-source models (i.e. LLAMA 3.1) and proprietary LLM providers (such as OpenAI) to provide its services. Wispr has agreements with all third party generative AI providers to ensure no data is stored or used for model training (zero data retention).

Privacy built-inWith Privacy Mode enabled, zero dictation data is stored on our servers. To enable it, go to Settings → Data & Privacy → Privacy Mode.

Backed by the bestWe are fortunate to work with some of the best investors in the industry. Our backers include the top venture firms and some of the world’s most exceptional founders and product builders.

We are entering a time when the ability to create software is no longer a specialized skill. It is becoming a basic form of digital literacy, like writing a document or making a spreadsheet. Not everyone will do it. But everyone could, if they wanted to.

Apple faces choices. They could try to restrict sideloading further, but that means fighting against a tide of users who simply want to run software they or their friends created.

The implications are significant. Apple's control over iOS software distribution has always rested on two pillars. First, the App Store as the only legitimate channel. Second, the high barrier to creating software in the first place.The second pillar just collapsed. And without it, the first pillar looks different. The App Store is not going away. It will remain the home of professional, polished applications. But it will no longer be the only place where iPhone software lives.

You need three things. A Mac with Xcode, which is free to download. A $99 per year Apple Developer account. And an AI tool that can write code based on your descriptions.

This way I made a lot of existing apps that I happily paid for absolutely obsolete. The stuff that I created was simply doing more of what I wished for, building on the ideas of all the apps I have seen before. A next iteration, but just for me.

So far I have built six different apps this way in the past few weeks. A personal transit tracker. A task manager tailored to my exact workflow. Small tools that solve specific problems in my life.

a voice app called Wispr Flow to talk to my computer in Dutch

Much of it feels like a monopoly hiding behind rhetoric about security and user experience.

The base case isn't resolution. It's controlled escalation with higher compliance spend, modest margin drag, and forced substitution as the biggest platforms build moats from regulatory complexity itself.

The wild card remains a behind-the-scenes "Digital Bretton Woods"—standardized frameworks for transparency, due process, and appeals that let both sides claim victory while lowering uncertainty.

Second-order effects create opportunities: vendors selling compliance plumbing (audit trails, policy ops, transparency systems) gain; European "sovereignty stack" providers (cloud, identity, data governance) benefit if retaliation shifts to procurement preferences over fines.

The splinternet thesis gets its Western chapter. Not US-China separation, but US-EU divergence inside allied markets—subtler, but more margin-destructive. Big Tech that can operationally bifurcate wins near-term. X-style political defiance loses because EU enforcers smartly choose process violations over content disputes.

That raises fixed costs and favors scale—paradoxically advantaging the largest platforms that can afford regional bifurcation while crushing subscale competitors.

Expect geo-fenced product design: "EU mode" platforms with different algorithmic defaults, transparency flows, and researcher access versus "US mode."

U.S. willingness to treat compliance as hostile action changes the calculation.

That increases risk premium on firms whose EU revenues depend on algorithmic distribution: social platforms, digital advertising, app stores, marketplace ranking.

The irony both sides miss: this conflict could entrench the very platforms Trump claims to defend and Europe claims to regulate. Compliance burden becomes incumbent moat.

The DSA doesn't mandate content removal based on viewpoint; it requires transparency in algorithmic curation, researcher access to platform data, and accountability for enforcement decisions. What the Trump administration calls "censorship," Europe frames as democratic governance of the digital public square—the same principle that makes "what is illegal offline illegal online."

a sharper conflict emerges: this is about who owns the distribution layer of democracy—who sets the rules for how speech gets amplified, throttled, demonetized, and made discoverable on platforms where most political discourse now occurs.

The EU had just levied a €120 million fine on X for DSA violations—the first major enforcement action under rules requiring platforms to moderate illegal content

Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed it as combating a "global censorship-industrial complex" targeting American platforms and speech.

visa restrictions on Thierry Breton, architect of the EU's Digital Services Act, alongside four anti-disinformation advocates: Imran Ahmed of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Clare Melford of the Global Disinformation Index, and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon of HateAid

The cost goes beyond simple inefficiency and becomes a mountain of invisible labor, usually absorbed by the most junior person in the room or whoever has the misfortune of being labeled as “good with computers.” It becomes a drag on every collaboration, the friction in every workflow, the meetings that take an extra ten minutes while someone (who is often paid twice the average salary of the other people in the meeting) figures out why they can’t access the shared folder the rest of us have been using for months. It’s the quiet erosion of patience and goodwill among people who are constantly expected to know and fix things that shouldn’t need fixing in the first place.

Imagine a carpenter who couldn’t figure out how to adjust their table saw, or a surgeon who shrugged and said something like, “I’m just not a scalpel person.” We would never accept that. But in the field of knowledge work, “I’m just not a tech person” has become a permanent identity instead of a temporary gap to be filled.

I’m talking about the basics: keyboard shortcuts that save hours per week. Understanding the difference between “reply” and “reply all.” Knowing how to search your own inbox or switch between work and personal accounts. Reading the words on your screen or an error message before throwing your hands up and declaring “something’s broken.” Learning how to unmute yourself or share your screen after years of being forced to do all our meetings on Zoom.

The number of professionals in journalism, media, communications, and academia who still don’t understand how to use the very tools they depend on for their livelihood is, frankly, staggering

I assumed we would all finally reach a baseline level of digital fluency. I could not have been more wrong.

I think we’d see a much more substantive transformation in journalism if we started by simply learning how to use our computers.

Maar ik leerde een waardevolle les: je kunt compliant zijn én tegelijk een puinhoop hebben. Borging betekent meer dan regels volgen. En die borging wordt per dag beter!

Art is a habit of the intellect, developed with practice overtime, that empowers the artist to make the work rightand protects him ... from deviating from what is good forthe work. It unites what he is with what his material is.It leads him to seek his own depths. Its purpose is not hisself-enhancement, his having fun or feeling good abouthimself. These are byproducts. It aims solely towards bring-ing a new thing into existence in the truest manner possible.It is about truth and, as such, has to do with ultimates and,as such 1 posits self-sacrifice and consecration