“Hey buddy, nice frames.”

Seinfeld’s father tried them out too.

Re: my post on Verizon flat-out admitting their business practices have resembled a scheme from Dr. Evil, Domino’s did something similar regarding their pizza a while back. This 2021 story for Inc. by Jeff Haden describes the turnaround.

Verizon has sprung for a new ad campaign set in the Austin Powers world, with four stars from the cast — Mike Myers, of course, as Dr. Evil; Rob Lowe as Number Two (Robert Wagner is alive but is 96); Seth Green as Evil’s son Scott, and Mindy Sterling as Frau Farbissina — and director Jay Roach. The premise of the two-minute spot is that Dr. Evil is proposing “Menace Mobile”, a wireless carrier with confusing pricing and plans. Scott pooh-poohs the idea on the grounds that “This isn’t evil. This is just typical phone company stuff.” Then, after some back-and-forth, comes this exchange:

Scott: Diabolical phone companies are why we’re all switching to Verizon.

Dr. Evil: I thought Verizon was just like the rest of the wireless organizations.

Scott: Well, they were, but not anymore. They just got rid of activation and upgrade fees. They’re changing everything.

I don’t think the commercial is particularly funny, alas, but I do find it extraordinary, because of the exchange quoted above. “Well, they were, but not anymore” is one the most extraordinary lines I’ve heard in a commercial. They’re just flat out admitting that, until recently, they ran their business like a scheme from Dr. Evil.

I’ve been on Verizon for a long time. It’s expensive, but so was AT&T, and I’ve always felt like I got better service and better coverage from Verizon (which is why I switched in the first place). But just last year I did the wrong thing when I bought my iPhone 17 Pro. I should have bought it unlocked, but instead I bought it as a device upgrade tied to my Verizon account, and the bastards nicked me for a $30 upgrade fee. I’d like to think that will never happen again because they’re actually dropping all of their bullshit fees, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Austin Powers, by the way, came out in 1997. In the film, Powers was frozen since 1967. That means next year, we’ll be as far removed from the debut of the movie as unfrozen Austin Powers was from the groovy 60s in the film.

Usually when I link to a new app, it’s something that I find useful personally. Cotypist is something else. It’s an AI-powered autocomplete utility for the Mac, using on-device models and processing, by developer Daniel Gräfe of Accelerated Thought. It is very well-designed, and remarkably Mac-assed (right down to where it stores its local data and AI models). It respects your privacy and all the best conventions of MacOS. Cotypist suggests a few words ahead of your insertion point at a time, and you can accept them by hitting Tab; if you want to ignore them, you just keep typing. The autocomplete suggestions appear inline, in whatever app you’re typing in, using your current font. I wasn’t even aware that was possible, but it is via MacOS’s rich accessibility APIs. Cotypist’s suggestions are eerily good. It’s even got a great name.

Personally, I can’t stand using it.

For me, it’s actually worse that the suggestions are so good, and so often on-point for what I intend to write. That’s why I can’t stand it. It’s like having a voice in my ear whispering my own thoughts before I think them. But are they my thoughts, or are they just close to my thoughts? They’re so close I can’t tell. And thus the experience of seeing these words appear before I’ve typed them feels more like a curse than a blessing, and a never-ending distraction. I’d find Cotypist far less distracting if its suggestions weren’t as good — but in that case it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting or useful, and I wouldn’t be writing about it at all.

But I’m a writer. I enjoy writing. Writing is probably the most satisfying and fulfilling thing I do in life. I enjoy picking every word as I get to it. I find a blinking insertion point in the middle of a good but half-written sentence to be thrilling. But you might feel otherwise. Perhaps you find all writing to be a laborious chore, like washing dishes. Or you might have a job that requires answering a lot of repetitive emails. I’ve done email technical support in the past, and I would have killed for Cotypist then. I would imagine Cotypist is simply marvelous for someone who writes English as a second language.

It’s absolutely worth trying if you think you might want to use it, and probably worth trying just to see it in action even if, like me, you don’t want something like this. Trying it out might change your mind. There’s a free tier for casual use (100 completed words per day), and Plus and Pro paid tiers for $6 and $9 per month. New installations get a 30-day free trial of the Pro tier.

See also: Quinn “Snazzy Labs” Nelson’s review on YouTube.

Apple Developer:

Later this summer, Apple will unify the email domains used by Sign in with Apple and iCloud+ Hide My Email under a single, shared domain: private.icloud.com.

New addresses generated for both features will be issued on the new domain. For example:

• Sign in with Apple addresses, previously issued on privaterelay.appleid.com, will be issued on private.icloud.com.

• iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses, previously issued on icloud.com, will be issued on private.icloud.com.

Existing addresses on the legacy domains will continue to work and forward mail to users without interruption.

Initial reaction to this change is that it might render “Hide My Email” ineffective, because shitbird services will simply ban the domain, trying to force you to use your primary email address. It seems inevitable that some number of services will do this. But my retort is that a service that won’t accept these email addresses is one that I probably don’t want to have anything to do with. The only reason not to accept private.icloud.com email addresses is if you want to do something invasive with users’ actual email addresses.