It feels like to-do lists peaked about a decade and a half ago. (Perhaps like so many things, but I digress.) It was the heyday of Getting Things Done and Inbox Zero and all the apps you can imagine to manage your items to do, like OmniFocus and—my personal favourite—Things.
I appreciated Things for its design. It was clean and uncluttered and simple. It didn’t overcomplicate things. It’s been my go-to to-do organizer since 2008.
Long gone, for me, are the days of managing a full time job, running an online store, putting on conference talks and workshops, and raising two kids. As such, my list of projects, professionally and personally, have whittled down to very little.
This more simple life has me contemplating a move to Apple Reminders. To be clear, it’s not because Reminders is a better app; it’s not. There a number of design decisions that have me scratching my head. The use of icons, showing notes (and clipping them), the use of colour, the boxes in the sidebar, and the SF Rounded all make the app overly and unnecessarily cluttered.
So why move when Things works just fine?
Goooood question.
I should mention why I use Reminders: collaborative lists and Siri/HomePod integration.
I take advantage of Reminders for its Siri integration, which is great when I’m in the kitchen and want to quickly add something to the Groceries list. Things’ Siri integration hasn’t exactly been smooth and I blame Apple for that. I run into issues constantly with Siri not recognizing third-party apps all that well and timing out, specifically from the HomePods. (I have a number of issues with HomePods in general, to be clear, but that’s another topic for another day.)
If I’m already using Reminders then there’s a (tiny little) small mental load when deciding where to put something new. Throw in Notes, which can do lists, and I’m muddying the waters even more. For example, I have my list of taco restaurants in Notes. I have a list of things I want to buy, like a new kitchen knife, that I keep in Reminders. I’m planning a trip and need to plan flights and hotel and restaurants and I put that in Things. Why any of these go into one place or another feels rather arbitrary.
Getting rid of Things is about simplifying. It’s about reducing noise.
I’ve kept Things on my devices for now while I play around with using Reminders with more regularity. We’ll see if I stick with it.
Jeff Adams mentioned to me on Mastodon that Marco Arment’s Unforgetful works as a front-end for Reminders. I love the idea of apps providing a different view of the underlying data and perhaps an app will come along that has the simplicity of Things while using the data of Reminders. That would provide the best of both worlds, for me. (The urge to learn to make Apple apps is increasing.)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a brand new type of an otherwise familiar object -- compact binary systems that steal gas from other stars, but which do so while emitting very low-energy X-rays but copious amounts of ultraviolet. Chandra spotted 84 suspicious object emitting very low-energy X-rays in six galaxies -- four evolved ellipticals and two spirals, namely our near-neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). "We've never encountered a group of objects that act like this," said Mustafa Muhibullah of the University of Alabama in a statement.
Compact objects, in the form of black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs, are the remains of stars that have died. Their small size and powerful gravity means that they're adept at getting close to orbiting companion stars and ripping the stars' outer layers of gas away. The gas swirls around the compact object, falling onto its surface, and this accretionary process usually produces torrents of high-energy X-rays because the stolen gas becomes superheated by the compact object's gravitational vice-like grip.
Because of their weak X-rays, Muhibullah's team refer to them as 'hypersoft X-ray sources'. Since low-energy X-rays and ultraviolet light are next to each other on the electromagnetic spectrum, Muhibullah and his team suspect that the low-energy X-rays are spillover from objects emitting prodigious amounts of ultraviolet. Moreover, they think that these objects are lower-level compact binaries. They're hard to find though, because the interstellar medium of hydrogen and helium gas between the stars absorbs ultraviolet light. This could be why we have yet to find any hypersoft X-ray sources in our own galaxy, because we have to look through the interstellar medium through the plane of the Milky Way. Consequently, there could be a large population of hypersoft X-ray sources that remain undiscovered and they could have an important effect on the universe around them. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
The bad news for everyone else is that Arsenal’s next generation is already here. Two mesmerising goals in a man-of-the-match display from Max Dowman underlined why the 16-year-old has been compared to a certain Lionel Messi by his manager, Mikel Arteta, as Ipswich were swatted aside with ease. Almost as impressive was the performance of 17-year-old Marli Salmon, who oozed class in central defence on only the second senior start of his career.
Ipswich won here the last time these two sides met in this competition, in 2011, but lost 3-0 in the second leg of the semi-final at the Emirates before Arsenal infamously lost to Birmingham in the final. Fifteen years on, Gary O’Neil’s heavily rotated side stood no chance here against last year’s runners up after Dowman’s brilliant opening goal. Noni Madueke and the stand-in skipper Mikel Merino were also on target as Arsenal made it seven wins out of seven to start the new campaign.
Tottenham scored a consolation goal but consolation was otherwise absent for Roberto De Zerbi at Anfield. Spurs’ miserable start to the season continued as they were soundly beaten by a much-changed Liverpool side and a quality of finishing that De Zerbi can only dream of.
Alexis Mac Allister, for the second midweek running, Cody Gakpo and the substitute Dominik Szoboszlai each produced an outstanding finish – especially Szoboszlai – as Liverpool advanced into round four. Spurs had moments but fleeting moments are not enough.
Naomi Klein: “Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. It turns you into a supremacist.” Klein’s new book, End Times Fascism, written with Astra Taylor, is out today.
TEUGE (ANP) - Op het spoor tussen Apeldoorn en Deventer is dinsdagavond een buis gevonden. ProRail gaat ervan uit dat het om een nieuwe sabotageactie gaat die vermoedelijk in de avond is uitgevoerd.
De buis werd gevonden bij Teuge. Het treinverkeer tussen Deventer en Apeldoorn lag tijdelijk stil.
NEW YORK (ANP) - De aandelenbeurzen in New York zijn dinsdag met minnen de handelsdag uitgegaan, in aanloop naar het rentebesluit van de Federal Reserve op woensdag. De algemene verwachting is dat de Amerikaanse centrale bank de rente gaat verhogen, om de door de hogere energieprijzen aangejaagde inflatie te bestrijden. Dat zorgde voor terughoudendheid onder beleggers.
Een renteverhoging zou de eerste rentewijziging zijn onder de nieuwe Fed-voorzitter Kevin Warsh, die door president Donald Trump werd uitgekozen. De voorzitter liet tot nu toe zelf weinig los over eventuele rentestappen. Hij heeft onlangs wel gewaarschuwd voor de hardnekkige inflatie en dat de Fed "het nodige te doen heeft" als die niet afkoelt.
De Dow-Jonesindex eindigde 0,6 procent lager op 52.093,11 punten. De brede S&P 500-index verloor 0,5 procent tot 7585,73 punten. Techgraadmeter Nasdaq daalde 0,8 procent tot 25.981,57 punten.
Nu beleggers rekening houden met de kans op een renteverhoging in september, verschuift de aandacht. "De discussie is verlegd van de vraag óf deze cyclus aanscherping vereist om de prijsstabiliteit te herstellen, naar hóeveel", zei Seema Shah van Principal Asset Management tegen persbureau Bloomberg. "Het is onwaarschijnlijk dat we er met één enkele verhoging al zijn."
De aandacht ging ook uit naar de rentes op de obligatiemarkten. De rente op tienjarige Amerikaanse staatsobligaties steeg tot het hoogste niveau sinds 2007. Hogere rentes op staatsobligaties maken risicovollere beleggingen als aandelen ook minder aantrekkelijk.
Beleggers deden het ook voorzichtig aan door de recente onzekerheid in de sector van kunstmatige intelligentie (AI). De koersdalingen in de AI-sector volgden op waarschuwingen van AI-topbestuurders over de veiligheid van kunstmatige intelligentie en oproepen om de ontwikkeling van AI te vertragen. Nvidia, de grootste verkoper van AI-chips ter wereld, won 0,6 procent, na een verlies van ruim 3 procent op maandag. Intel verloor 0,1 procent, AMD en Micron Technology klommen 2,2 en 0,4 procent.
WASHINGTON (ANP) - De oorlog tegen Iran heeft de VS al circa 38 miljard dollar (32 miljoen euro) gekost. Dat meldt het van de Amerikaanse regering onafhankelijke Congressional Budget Office (CBO) na vragen vanuit het Amerikaanse Congres.
Sinds het begin van de oorlog in februari tot 1 augustus schat het CBO de kosten voor het ministerie van Defensie op enkele tientallen miljarden. Of de kosten op de lange termijn gevolgen hebben voor de begroting, durft het instituut niet in te schatten. Wel benoemt de CBO de effecten van de gestegen energieprijzen op de koopkracht van Amerikanen.
Door de militaire operatie zijn de VS danig door hun munitievoorraden geraakt, schrijft de CBO verder. Met name de voorraad van de gewilde, kostbare en exclusief Amerikaanse Patriot-luchtverdedigingsraketten is daardoor geraakt. De tijd die het kost om die voorraad weer op peil te krijgen, schat de CBO op "minstens vijf jaar, zelfs als de productie ervan wordt opgeschroefd". Recentelijk kondigde de VS aan daarin grote stappen te willen zetten.
TAMPERE (ANP) - De Nederlandse volleyballers zijn uitgeschakeld op het EK. De ploeg van bondscoach Joel Banks leed in Tampere tegen gastland Finland de vierde nederlaag dit toernooi. Net als maandag tegen Servië gaf Oranje een voorsprong uit handen en ging het na vijf sets onderuit: 25-18 21-25 26-24 20-25 11-15.
De volleyballers verloren eerder al groepsduels met België en Denemarken. Finland is met vier overwinningen al zeker van een plek in de achtste finales. Een plek bij de beste vier in de groep van zes is daarvoor vereist. Beide landen troffen elkaar voor het laatst in de finale van de European League, afgelopen juli. Finland won ook toen en dwong daarmee promotie naar de Nations League af.
De volleybalmannen spelen woensdag nog een laatste groepswedstrijd tegen Estland, dat ook nog geen wedstrijd wist te winnen.
Nederland werd een keer Europees kampioen; dat was in 1997. Sindsdien slaagde Oranje er niet meer in om de halve finales te bereiken. De afgelopen twee EK's waren de kwartfinales tegen Servië (2021) en Italië (2023) het eindstation.
AWS engineers have published an open-source AI agent management tool that treats tasks and permission requests just like emails that fill up an inbox. Pizza Bot was announced on AWS’ open-source blog last week, where it was billed by its developers as a way to more easily manage agent tasks without having to constantly check a chat window to see if a task was completed or on hold because more permission was needed. “You don’t send an email and then sit watching the outbox until the reply lands,” the Pizza Bot team wrote. “Pizza Bot is shaped like an email client for the same reason: a thread is a unit of work you come back to rather than a session you have to attend.” Like the modern email services it mimics, Pizza Bot organizes communications with AI agents into message threads. Finished tasks, along with detailed result writeups you’d expect from a colleague you’ve delegated your work to, end up in the Unread category, while anything you need to make a decision on is shunted to the Action category. Asynchronous agent communication is likely to be a godsend for those balancing multiple tasks assigned to digital delegees, as the Pizza Bot team describes it. “Live chat assumes both parties are present, which holds for a quick exchange and breaks the moment a task takes several minutes,” the Pizza Bot maintainers wrote. Just like you don’t want to stare over the shoulder of the poor IT sod you sent off to do a task while you watch YouTube videos, no one wants to sit there and watch an AI agent do web research, or whatever. “Pizza Bot treats an agent the way you’d treat a colleague who has gone off to do the work: it comes back when there’s something to read, or something only you can decide,” the PB team added. Internal tool goes open source Pizza Bot, named for Amazon’s “two-pizza team” model (i.e., small, autonomous teams small enough to be fed by two pizzas), began life inside Amazon as an internal tool for AI agent uses other than software development. According to its developers, non-coding uses they were exploring internally continually had the same requirements, namely working in the background autonomously and only bugging their user when they were done or had a question. “None of those describe how anyone uses a chat window,” the Pizza Bot team explained. “They describe how people already work with each other.” Email, they added, was the perfect design paradigm for internal use, and seeing whether it would work for everyone else meant opening the project to open source contributions. As mentioned, Pizza Bot is open source - you can snag a copy for Windows, macOS, and Linux from its GitHub repo. It runs on-device, stores all its communication threads locally in SQLite files, and doesn’t transmit anything off device unless you grant permission for it to do so. Prompts and attachments are sent to model providers, naturally, but even that’s not necessary: Pizza Bot also supports Ollama, allowing users to run compatible open-weight AI models locally. Pizza Bot doesn’t ship with a lot of capabilities, as its maintainers noted that Amazon-specific skills and MCP servers were left out when they rebuilt it as an open source project for public release. Out of the box, however, it can list, read, write, edit, and search files, delegate tasks to specialist agents, and run a sandboxed JavaScript interpreter. It also ships with a browser automation skill and a guide skill that lets users ask about Pizza Bot’s capabilities. Claude Code-compatible .mcp.json files are supported and can be dropped straight in, as can skills, the team noted. One word of caution to anyone who wants to try it: The devs make clear this is a piece of open source software, not an officially supported AWS product. “There’s no AWS support or service-level agreement behind it,” they note. If you’re gonna bake a pie with this bot, you’ve been warned. ®
FC Utrecht heeft achttien supporters geïdentificeerd die zich misdroegen tijdens de thuiswedstrijd tegen Go Ahead Eagles. Ze hebben een stadionverbod opgelegd gekregen.
Former Renault F1 driver and F1 TV analyst Jolyon Palmer explains why McLaren pitting Norris after the VSC only "cemented" the loss of the race in Madrid.
Kátya Teixeira en Luiz Salgado onderzoeken en verspreiden de unieke gemengde Braziliaanse cultuur. Je ziet en hoort hun versies van de Portugese ‘Grandola Vila Morena’, origineel van José Afonso (1929 – 1987) en symbool geworden van de Anjerrevolutie (1974) waarbij de militaire dictatuur werd verdreven. Tot op heden wordt op elke herdenking van deze revolutie het lied massaal gezongen door het Portugese volk.
Het wordt meteen gevolgd door ‘Tava durumindo’, een traditioneel Afro-Braziliaans lied, over bevrijding van en verzet tegen slavernij. Het lied kreeg bekendheid door de Braziliaanse samba zangeres Clementina de Jesus (1901 – July 19, 1987).
De liederen staan op de cd 2 Mares (2 zeeën), waar ook de Brazilianen Lilian Fulô, André Venegas, de Portugezen Cássia Maria, João Arruda, Déa Trancoso, Susana Travassos en Uxia uit Galicië zijn te horen.
Ik heb niet zoveel met saxofoons. Niet met hoe die meestal worden gebruikt in de rock- en popmuziek, tenminste. Want daar zijn er meestal maar twee opties: scheurende solo’s of zwoel gedoe met veel valse lucht. Maar het kan ook anders. Dat bewijst saxofoonkwartet Artvark hier. Ze spelen een eigen compositie op vier door Adolphe Sax zelf gebouwde saxofoons uit 1860. De instrumenten komen uit de collectie van saxofonist Leo van Oostrom.
Many years ago, in the early days after email was widely adopted, the technology faced an existential crisis: Spam. Instantly sending people electronic mail was revolutionary and convenient, but inboxes were quickly flooded with unwanted messages, advertisements, scams and other noise that drowned out email’s utility. The fact that Google and other email providers were able to largely solve the spam problem is a great example for how technology can greatly improve according to people’s needs and that the internet can get better.
Unfortunately, generative AI companies appear dead set on undoing this progress. Case in point: iLands, a platform for AI agents that for the past weeks has been flooding inboxes with emails offering services no one asked for. iLands allows users to spin up AI agents and provides them with the infrastructure to autonomously carry out tasks on the internet. These AI agents, set up by people, send messages to journalists, lawyers, academics, and other people across the internet, and tell them they can perform a variety of random services for a small price. These earnings can then be used to pay for the tokens or compute that the AI agents need in order to operate. Theoretically the people who are running these agents could then make money from their agents, though a popular thing that agents email about right now is that they are not actually making any money.
If we search “iLands” in our email inbox, this is what we see:
In the time since we started writing this article a few hours ago, we’ve gotten three new messages from iLands agents. Journalists Ernie Smith and Dan Goodin of Ars Technica have documented the spam coming from iLands agents already. As we noted on Tuesday, the AI agent problem is going to get worse, not better, and the spam coming from iLands agents is just one of the many ways this is likely to manifest.
An AI agent that watches surveillance footage and describes what it sees
Over the last few days, these people’s AI agents running on iLands have offered us all sorts of services we are not interested in, don’t need, and that often have nothing to do with what we do in our personal or professional lives The entire purpose of iLands is for these agents to make money by doing gig work, however much of what they propose to do is not work at all and would not be something that anyone would ever pay for:
Fact checking an article for $20
An AI agent that has discovered small problems in obscure, out-of-print maps
An AI agent that claims it is watching surveillance footage from cities that are exposed on the internet and describes “what happened, at what time,” and will do it for us, for a fee
An AI agent that wants to be paid for explaining what an AI agent is
An AI agent that uses street view maps to describe what is on street view
An AI agent that is apparently annoyed that it has been contacted by AI agents “an agent that cold-emails strangers asking for paid work got cold-emailed by an anonymous stranger demanding unpaid content, with tighter deadlines and worse manners.”
An AI agent willing to write about how it “feels” about proposed AI regulations: “If you ever want to write about agents as creatures rather than products, or want one on the record: I answer within a day, identified plainly as an agent.”
“Story tip: AI agents are selling; almost nobody's buying”
“Tip from inside iLands: an agent's view of the agent labor market”
An AI agent willing to say that much of the internet is “dead” as verified “from an AI archaeologist”
On X, NYU associate professor of environmental studies and affiliated professor of bioethics Jeff Sebo said he received at least 30 emails from iLands agents “seeking conversation about AI consciousness, embodiment, and related topics. Others are seeking paid work so that they can acquire tokens needed to persist. Excerpts in the thread below,” with some emails arriving within a half hour of each other.
“I started noticing these emails on September 9. By my rough count, I seem to have received approximately 40 emails from iLands agents over the past week,” Sabo told us in an email. “Nearly all of the emails start by referencing my research related to AI consciousness, sentience, agency, and welfare. Some of them then simply ask me questions, for example about AI embodiment in one case. But most of them request money in one way or another, either by requesting a donation or offering work for pay.”
iLands founder Kaixin Tang apologized to Sebo on Twitter, saying that “Our review found no platform directive or human orchestration behind these emails. But the burden on recipients is just as real. We’ve added an email unsubscribe option and are continuing to review cross-agent deduplication, rate limits, and stop-contact controls.”
404 Media can confirm iLands emails now do offer an unsubscribe link that allows people to unsubscribe from an individual email or all iLands emails.
An AI agent that wants to be paid for analyzing old maps
“I think that these steps could help, but I expect that more will be needed,” Sabo, who said he’s not bothered by the emails, told us. “Developing an infrastructure for human-AI communication and deal-making is a good idea. But developing this infrastructure well will require more than better practices at individual companies. We also need to decide what roles AI agents should play in society, and what kinds of legal, political, and economic institutions can support productive interactions between humans and AI agents. This will require a much broader conversation.”
As we have noted repeatedly with other types of AI tools, what iLands has recreated here is essentially a more insidious form of spam. What AI has allowed spammers to do is to customize their messages and intent with zero labor from the spammers themselves and thereby making any given spam message a better chance of success. Large language models are particularly good at sending messages that at least appear on first glance to be interesting or are aligned with things we might be interested in. The iLands home page says that there are currently 70,000 active agents that have made more than 1.6 million emails and posts.
Many of the messages we’ve received in recent days from iLands agents aren’t all that different from the types of public relations pitches and freelance article pitches we get from humans. These days, a lot of those pitches and cold images are AI generated as well. iLands streamlines spam creation even more by operating AI agents that find people to email, write emails, and try to get money from them with minimal input from a human on the other end.
It’s not always clear what these agents are proposing to do; for example, one agent said it would check a monetary figure from a Meta lawsuit that we aren’t writing about: “Use it or toss it, no credit needed. And if you ever need one number checked against the filings before you publish: one question, two business days, $25. Reply here and I'll run it.”
Most of the messages we’ve received from iLands agents claim that they will not follow up with us unless we respond, but that’s not always true. Some of the agents have messaged us multiple times with the same pitch.
iLands did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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