THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, I’ve mentioned a few times in the MacSparky Labs that I pay for web search. That always raises eyebrows. So I thought I’d explain. Even Google now injects AI slop before giving you search results, and there’s a good argument that search is going the way of the dodo. I use AI often, and yet I still find use for search. When researching, I often don’t want an AI synthesis (or I just don’t want to burn unnecessary and expensive tokens). Search is very much a...

THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, As we all experiment with AI and how it can help, I went down a rabbit hole over the last month that I wanted to share. I called it “The Daybook”. It was an automated daily note. It ran every night, pulling in my calendar, my open tasks, my repeating chores, and anything else I might need before the day started. It was pretty advanced and I enjoyed building it. But I found myself not looking at it. So I tinkered with it. And I still didn’t read it. The...

THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, Back when I was practicing law, I created an automation that used the terminal, AppleScript, and chewing gum to make a weekly status report for the staff. It was formatted beautifully. It went out like clockwork, and I spent too much time building it. Then one day in a meeting I asked about something from that week’s report. Nobody had read it. Not once, not ever. I want to tell you the lesson there was about automation. It wasn’t. The report ran perfectly....