Apple

Apple's AI Disaster

After repeated delays, more information is coming out now about just how bleak the situation is internally at Apple regarding their botched Apple Intelligence rollout

Endeavorance

26 May 2025 — 8 min read

It's Memorial Day here in the States, but that still apparently doesn't stop stuff from happening. Anyway, wishing you a pleasant day with solid cook-outery.

🎥 You can watch today's Stuff Keeps Happening episode here on YouTube.

Apple's Artificial Artificial Intelligence

Apple has some explaining to do.

Last year, at the announcement of their flagship iPhone 16, they touted Apple Intelligence, their AI offering which would do all the usual apple things:

Revolutionize something
Create a sense of wonder
Feel just like magic

Unfortunately for them, it basically still doesn't exist, and that's probably not changing in any meaningful way for a while.

Apple usually waits a bit to enter into a market or adopt new features, opting to do their own "Apple" version of it. And honestly, it's worked pretty well for them so far. I mean, they've got a few trillion in market value. I don't have that. Checkmate, me.

Anyway, this time it didn't work. Reportedly, they didn't even really have an intention to do AI stuff until after ChatGPT dropped, and even then, they waited a long time to actually invest in the R&D needed to produce a meaningful offering.

So instead, they tried a flurry of options, first attempting to back up Siri with a more advanced AI, which apparently was a nightmare of bugs and caused them to abandon that project. Instead, they more or less just stapled Siri and ChatGPT together, giving Siri the option to admit defeat and pass the query on to ChatGPT. Wow! What a feature!

Beyond that, in an attempt to push back on the narrative of them being behind the game, they basically lied about their whole offering at their original showcase. All the talk about their AI being able to pull from all your apps and work privately in the cloud and all the features that seemed almost sort of interesting? They were less "previews of upcoming features" and were instead more like "literally just lies about the state of the product."

So now we're nearing the next product cycle for the iPhone, and we may legit see the iPhone 17 drop before the 16 even gets half the features they promised it'd have, largely due to what seems like a combination of hubris from upper management, followed by said upper management tryin to cover their asses by throwing their dev teams under the bus.

Policy

The Biggest, The Most Beautiful

The Big Beautiful Tax Bill passed the House of Representatives with a vote of 215-214. Notably, this vote passage was made possibly thanks in part to the deaths of THREE 70-something-year-old Democrat lawmakers who died in office, leaving voting vacancies that would have otherwise prevented this vote.

So that's fuuuuuun.

Anyway, last time I said it was unlikely this would pass. Apparently I should not have done that.

My bad.

Though, I maintain that it'll have a hard time in the Senate. Remember: this passed the house, that does not mean it is now the law of the land. The Senate has a lot on the line, especially as they're moving into the 2026 midterm season. The bill contains many deeply unpopular provisions, and only a few crowd pleasers, so we'll see what they cut up and tape back together by the time it passes.

Regardless, the bill sent bond markets tumbling, and especially caused a dip for solar energy companies, as the bill does quite a lot to fuck over renewable energy initiatives in favor of emboldening coal and fossil fuels.

Signaling Something's Wrong

Let's start off by making something pretty clear: Signal, the encrypted messaging app, is a great choice for privately communicating with people. It's not a great choice for covert government operations, especially when its not actually the Signal app, but a clone of Signal which also archives messages.

Many government officials use an app called TeleMessage Signal, a modified clone of Signal which archives messages for compliance purposes. Signal is secure precisely because they don't do that, but the government is legally required to keep message records, hence the whole, "hey maybe don't fucking use Signal" thing.

Anyway, TeleMessage done got hacked, and a bunch of data was leaked. According to Reuters, nothing int he leaked data seems to be relating to military operations, but does include chats which pertain to the location and travel plans of high profile people.

The data has been uploaded at Distributed Denial of Secrets, a hacktivist group focused on shining a light on government secrets.

MAHAAAA

I will never understand how anyone could seriously see or hear "MAHA" and not just immediately think about the Amanda Bynes character, but apparently we're all pretending its completely normal for "MAHA" to be a thing.

Or, maybe you've not heard of it, in which case, I envy you. MAHA is "Make America Healthy Again," and is essentially the antivaxx/"health skeptic" version of MAGA, with RFK Jr at the center of it.

Between bouts of trying to index all autistic people in the country, RFK put out the "MAHA Report" which claims to investigate the root causes of health issues in America. Surely, its not the microplastics, pollution, lack of safety, absence of reasonable time off policy, the inability to afford quality food, the reduction in childcare availability, or the ability for corporations to tailor junk food advertising to children. Nah, it's the flouride or whatever.

The report blames vaccines, processed food, and screen time. It also poked at the notion of calling pesticides unsafe, but stopped short of doing so, instead calling for a separate assessment to happen next year. Yet also, according to the Wall Street Journal...

The White House made last-minute changes to the report, including cutting references to agricultural company Monsanto and details of corporate lobbying on “forever chemicals” and food labeling, as well as conflicts of interest in chemical regulation

Wonder why that is.

World News

Israel's Isolation

Netanyahu continues to push the boundaries on how far he can go with his "we're the most moral army ever" bullshit, as he's now loudly talking about the complete overtaking of Gaza and the elimination of its people. He continues to block necessary levels of aid from entering the region, sparking human rights organizations to issue warnings of mass child casualties.

When faced with the deeply obvious criticism from some other world leaders, Netanyahu went on to say they were on the "wrong side of history," somehow managing to survive the sheer truckload of irony spewing out of his mouth.

Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers shot at a delegation of European, Asian, and Arab diplomats who were visiting the West Bank to assess the situation amid rising humanitarian concerns over attacks on the Palestinian people living there. Israel's explanation for this was that the soldiers were simply "firing warning shots" because the diplomats had gone off the "pre-agreed course" they would be taking.

Of course, two Israeli embassy staffers were also shot and killed in Washington, DC this past week, sparking increased tensions statesite as well. The targeted staffers were a couple, one was Israeli and former IDF, the other was an American zionist.

I've seen a lot of outlets painting the story as a random, religious-oriented attack, which is insultingly reductive. Direct employees of a regime that is doing everything it can to continue a genocide are not random bystanders. Please be careful—even in times of incredibly high tension and emotional confusion—to not conflate Judaism and Israel.

But also, maybe don't murder random low-level people on the street during one of the most highly propagandized administrations in the history of the country, handing them an incredible amount of fodder to sway public opinion on a topic they're desperate to find footing for.

MUH WARSHIP

Kim Jong Un was excited to launch a new warship, but it did not quite go to plan. The northern lad has been pushing for his particular Korea to have a more advanced navy, of which this ship was intended to be a large part. But upon launching the ship, it capsized and crashed.

Kim was not particularly thrilled with how the events of The Big Launch unfolded, citing that the people running the operation showed "absolute carelessness, irresponsibility and unscientific empiricism." He went on to dramatically state, "I cannot suppress my emotions."

We love an emotional ~~dictator~~ King.

Anyway, he arrested the officials from the launch.

Technology

Telegram, the Not Actually Private Messenger

Telegram bills itself as a private, encrypted messenger, and is a wildly popular service especially in eastern Europe for general social networking and messaging. Unfortunately, its also plagued with child exploitation material and other dangerous activity, though I'd also note that most platforms are that way at this point, just with varying degrees of keeping it under wraps.

However, given Telegram's positioning as a private messenger, it should be concerning for users to know that Telegram has handed cops data on over 20,000 users just in 2025 alone. This number is largely due to the recent arrest of the CEO of Telegram in France, who is also now more or less grounding him there while they continue with their lawsuit.

An interesting breakdown of data access requests by country can be found here.

Google Video; But Not Like That

Remember Google Video? The pre-YouTube video streaming platform from Google? It was legit pretty nice actually. But uh, that's not what this is about.

Google had their annual I/O event, a developer-focused convention with a flurry of headlining announcements about the company's products. This year, they of course showed off all their fancy new AI stuff, making sure that everyone knew that their leadership team cannot reach climax unless AI is mentioned.

Among their announcements was Veo 3, a video generating AI system capable of generating "realistic" videos with dialogue and everything. So far, it still seems pretty obviously AI, but I get why people are getting spooked. Nobody asked for this to exist.

Does humanity truly need to be able to generate 4 second clips of pink dinosaurs stomping around a town? Like, are we better off now because of that? Because at this point, I'm getting pretty tired of being told my tech executives that these glorified tech demos are products we should be paying up to $250/month for. And yeah, that's actually a pricing tier they offer.

They're Still Trying to build HER

OpenAI recently purchased an AI hardware design startup run by Jony Ive for $6.5 Billion. Aside from funding far too earnest-core announcement video, they seem to be building some another kind of AI personal assistant device. And of course, this device is not a phone, and has all the best things that people love, like no screen, and always being on and listening to everything.

I mean, the movie was pretty good I guess

Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, says that living with this new device is life changing, and that we should be super excited about this. When asked, literally no other human being on the entirety of planet earth said they give a shit.