Connor Mason

Connor Mason

@connor.social

Product guy & dad in Chicago. Likes coffee. Hates fascism. Posts about Apple, design, and general tech stuff. Talks with hands. Opinions are my own, especially the bad ones. He, him. connor.site

1.8K followers556 following209 posts

Just saw a Trump propaganda ad during the Ohio State game. Paid for by the US Government, a.k.a., you and me. So we’re just openly violating the Hatch Act now?

@rmondello.com What would need to happen to support Bluesky’s alphanumeric ABCDE-9WXYZ email two-factor codes with iOS Autofill? Is this something someone could contribute to the apple/password-manager-resources repository?

OpenAI is the next Enron, and not just the circular Nvidia deals, it’s accounting fraud all the way down

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social

OpenAI has a leaked memo where their Chief Revenue Officer claims that Anthropic is lying about their revenue numbers and their $30B ARR is inflated by at least $8B. I can't say I'm surprised by this development.

My wish for macOS 27 is official APIs for this type of agentic computer use. Right now the risks of unleashing an LLM on your file system are way too high, but enforcing some standards and guardrails would unlock incredibly useful workflows.

Mobile was the disruptive tech changing society for most of my career. I’ve loved building products for the supercomputer in your pocket. Now the industry’s passion and energy are spent transmuting human creativity and labor into an AI slop nightmare. And it’s a dead end. What’s next after this?

Connor Mason reposted

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

The Conversation U.S.@us.theconversation.com

Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other. Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq

My feeds across social media are polluted with AI slop. Virtually unusable. Makes me want to quit altogether. We’re seeing the end of the web as we know it, and maybe the death of the web in general. But I’d rather abandon new media than accept a post-truth world.

Connor Mason reposted

i don’t think people on bluesky understand the severity of this situation. i woke up to literally hundreds of texts from friends and family thinking about either moving back home to india or applying to other countries for jobs. this includes me.

Gergely Orosz@gergely.pragmaticengineer.com

Those on an H1B cannot return to the US from tomorrow (Sunday) unless paying $100K. This is an out-of-the blue presidential action. We’ll see software engineers stranded abroad. One easy to predict outcome: those on US visas will travel less… for work, for conferences etc.

Connor Mason reposted

Wild, I left X because of antisemitism too. Mind you, that was a couple of years ago, I guess it just takes some people longer

Based on the US population of 3.9M in 1790, the 65 representatives in the 1st US Congress each represented around 60,000 constituents, on average. Today, with the estimated population over 340M, achieving a similar 1:60k ratio would require nearly 5,700 representatives.

Anyway, I just thought this was interesting in light of our present Constitutional crisis. Would love to see a 234-year-old document revised more frequently to address the realities of the future and challenges we face. (aka, retire the electoral college, abolish the senate, pack the court, etc.)

The Economist@economist.com

Donald Trump has committed the most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era. Almost everything he said—on history, economics and the technicalities of trade—was utterly deluded econ.st/3YbbFjq

This is the best automation I’ve set up in #Shortcuts. When I receive SMS spam, it automatically replies STOP to unsubscribe. Spreading the word here, as political fundraising texts seem to be picking up in the US. #SMSspam

Cruelty is the point.

Sawyer Hackett@sawyerhackett.bsky.social

Thanks to Elon Musk and Donald Trump, Republicans cut $190 million for pediatric cancer research from the funding bill. Congrats to DOGE on their first victory.

Y’all, I don’t understand why the unidentified drones in #NJ are not all that anyone is talking about. Just bananas that we have zero information. #uap #drones #wtf

🌠 My wife, trying to create a sense of magic for our three-year-old son: “Oh look, a shooting star! Do you think it’s a *wishing* star?” My son, obsessed with space and science: “No Mom, that’s a meteor.”

Starter packs on Bluesky, combined with a feed that prioritizes who you follow, serves to help find and connect with people who share common interests. On Threads, I found the feed was prioritizing engagement bait from random accounts. The difference in how each app makes me *feel* is enormous.

I’m still tracking the news. I’m still hearing viewpoints that differ from my own. But there’s a good-faith posture with most of the accounts that are streamed into my eyeballs, which is a welcome change. Maybe it’s just content moderation. Who would have guessed.

Connor Mason reposted

"If a woman doesn't look woman enough to a Republican, they want to be able to inspect your genitals to use a bathroom? It's disgusting. Everyone should reject it completely... they're endangering women, they're endangering girls of all kind, and everyone should reject it. It's gross." - AOC