Apple is doing it again, it is coming late to the party. But it will eventually dominate AI because of how it thinks about users and about use cases where rivals consider only technical issues.

Even when testing the betas of Siri AI on the same or similar devices, everyone at AppleInsider is having different experiences. For instance, I found that in the first developer beta on both the Mac and the iPhone, Siri AI could be staggeringly irritating and sometimes no better than the old Siri. With the third developer beta of macOS Golden Gate, Siri AI would sometimes just abandon any request I make of it, but was always fine for everyone else.

Across all of the betas, though, we are all finding that there are things Siri AI can do that are exceptional, and better than its rivals. Those irritations will surely be fixed before the public release, too.

Only, it almost doesn’t matter. As long as Apple can at least cut down on the aggravations such as really anything you ask via CarPlay, Siri AI is certain to beat everything else. Apple will go from being behind on AI, to absolutely in front.

It’s just that rather than this being because of the technical quality of Apple Intelligence, it’s because of how Apple thinks about users, and because of how, yet again, Apple owns the whole stack. Apple designs and controls the hardware and the software, and in this case it means specifically that Siri AI is physically better positioned than any other AI app.

Over and over, Apple has come late to new technologies, yet then instantly taken over as the leading provider. It has so instantly demonstrated better ways of doing things that all its rivals with all of their benefit of coming first, have subsequently changed their plans to copy Apple.

You’ve seen that with Wi-Fi adoption, with the death of the floppy disk, the rise of USB, and the death of the headphone jack on phones. Apple’s launching of Siri AI is exactly like this, with the one exception that this time, rivals cannot copy it. Or at least, they cannot copy it on the iPhone because no alternative can be as completely embedded in iOS.

Siri AI on CarPlay is not in beta, it’s in Bane-of-My-Life.

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It’s true that the more you know and use AI chatbots, the faster you use them and the quick shortcuts you can find to enter prompts. But for most people, most of the time, if you want to use an AI service, you have to:

• Know it exists
• Know it can do what you want
• Find it
• Install it
• Launch it every time you want something

Compare that to the new Siri AI on iPhone:

• Swipe down the way you always have for Spotlight

There’s still the issue that a user has to think to try something, but Siri AI is part of the familiar Spotlight. And Spotlight will prompt you by trying to auto-complete your searches, showing you a range of what can be done.

Although I wish I could remember what I was searching Spotlight for when it tried to autocomplete “Erase all content and settings” for me.

This is me trying to recreate something, but Siri AI/Spotlight really did offer “erase all content and settings” as a suggestion when I was searching for something else.

But the thing is that Siri AI is now going to be just a swipe away for every iPhone user, and moreover it’s a swipe that every user already knows to do.

Siri AI is therefore close to omnipresent and it works because Apple has expressly thought about how users might use it. Compare that to Microsoft, which has also made AI a deep part of its OS, but instead of being convenient and useful, its pushing of Copilot antagonizes users.

Then Apple, too, has the advantage that not only can people speak to Siri AI, they will do it in precisely the same way they’ve already learned to with “Hey, Siri,” starting with iOS 8 in 2014. Or then just “Siri,” from iOS 17 in 2023.

So every iPhone user already knows how to use Siri AI, and the only learning curve is about discovering what it can and cannot do.

One improvement we’ve seen in the beta releases is that Spotlight now always prompts you with “Search or Ask,” letting you know it’s more than a searching tool.

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It’s the same for the iPad, but surprisingly it is now also the case that Siri AI is going to be used, and useful, on the Mac. Apple talks a good game about sharing the best features across all of its platforms, but that hasn’t really been the case with Siri, until now.

Whether or not your Mac has a microphone, you’ve at least long been able to tap the Command key twice and call up “Type to Siri.” But you’d always type your search, or your prompt, and then have to wait.

Then it might respond, or more recently it might offer to pass your request on to ChatGPT, and you’d wait again. It’s not like this was slow and it’s not even as if it is any faster on the iPhone, but it was slow enough and disruptive enough that it just felt far less useful on a Mac.

This was a real issue I had and Siri AI sorted it. Select a set of documents, right click and you get an Ask Siri box that you can pop a question into.

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That’s because while it changed over the years, in its most recent incarnation before Siri AI, when you called up Siri on a Mac, it overlaid a corner of the screen rather than filling it. That made you expect to be able to continue working. Not while you were typing the prompt, of course, but while Siri was acting on your search or query, or perhaps even as you spoke your command into it.

Instead, no. Take your hands off the keyboard, there was no way to continue working on anything while you were using Siri.

Plus speaking of the keyboard, surely the only way anyone ever found Type to Siri was if they accidentally drummed their fingers on the Command key. I’ve definitely activated it more times by accident than I ever did intentionally.

So the keyboard shortcut was little known, and Mac mini and Mac Studio owners don’t necessarily have a microphone by which to invoke Siri vocally. Siri was on the Mac, but it wasn’t for the Mac.

Or at least, that used to be the case.

Putting Siri AI into Spotlight was a genius move

It’s great that swiping down on an iPhone to get Spotlight now gives you Siri AI. Spotlight used to need a certain swipe down the middle from somewhere near the top of the screen, but not actually at the top.

Then actually swiping down from the center at the top of the iPhone screen used to bring up Control Center. If that’s how you were used to doing it, this is a change you’ll take time to get used to.

But for whatever reason, I’ve always got Control Center by swiping down from the top right of the iPhone screen, so I’m fine. That makes me wonder how I ever found Siri AI in Spotlight, but it also makes me suspect that Apple has done this because most people swipe from the center.

The result, though, is the same, which is that you are presented with a familiar Spotlight search which also interprets what you type into there and sends it to Siri AI.

On the Mac, those three people who had found and liked pressing Command twice to call up Siri, can still do exactly that, although it now launches Spotlight instead of a separate glowing Siri dialog. For the rest of us, the familiar Spotlight keystroke of Command-Space brings up Spotlight, which now opens with a bar that says “Search or Ask.”

I use Command-Space to launch Alfred 5, a Spotlight alternative, but I’ve come to like the new Spotlight/Siri AI so much that I’ve given it a keystroke of Option-Command-Space. To set a keystroke, go to Settings, Keyboard, click Keyboard Shortcuts, then go into the Spotlight section and change what’s there to whatever you prefer.

If you listen to the AppleInsider podcast, you’ll have heard me vacillate between how great and how terrible the new Siri AI is. Almost everything great it has done for me, it has done on the Mac, and it is transformative.

The benefits of Siri AI

I just signed a book contract and naturally part of it is that I will deliver one manuscript at the end. But because of back and forth discussing the topic, I’ve ended up with multiple sample chapters and needed to compile them into one Pages document.

If it’s on your iPhone, Siri AI can find it. Usually. It’s churlish to point out that it sometimes fails over what appear to be obvious elements, such as recognizing that it actually does have your home address, because overall it’s spectacularly useful.

Only, no matter what I did, the word count for that one Pages document was something like 3,000 words short of the total of all the separate chapters. I can’t tell you how often I started over, opening versions of chapters and copying and pasting, but eventually I did this:

• Selected all of the chapters in the Finder
• Right-clicked and chose “Ask Siri”
• Asked it to compare the selection to a document I named
• Asked it to tell me what was missing

And it did it. It actually did it stunningly quickly, coming back in a flash with the fact that I’d somehow missed out two whole sections from certain of the chapters. I pasted those sections into the new document and am now somehow 1,000 words over, but I’m okay with that.

Or on a totally different book project, I had to report to the publisher that a grant we’d applied for hadn’t worked out. I wanted to offer an alternative we could do, but it meant my mentioning two particular people who’d been sources on the book and I totally blanked.

Give me a break, it was five in the morning and I really liked both of these people, I just could not remember my own name, let alone theirs. Siri AI told me the answer.

It took a couple of goes, asking about books and sources, but it told me their names and I got to say aloud, oh, yes, of course.

All of this was done at my Mac, where I would never have used Siri before. Using my iPhone, and specifically swiping down so I could type a prompt, I’ve had very good results with map directions.

Shortly I’m going to be driving some people to a thing and it’s a long enough trip that they say they want to stop for lunch partway. They gave me three suggestions and right away Siri AI said, well, that first one is permanently closed so you can forget going there.

You can go back to previous searches through the new Siri app on Mac, iPhone and iPad.

I asked it which was the better of the other two and it successfully summarized the two venues based on price and types of food offered. Then I picked one and asked how much time it would add to the drive if we went off the route to reach this place.

All quick, all exactly the kind of natural conversation that Apple promises we can have with Siri AI, and all of it working well.

Except all of it was also done by typing. For some reason, it’s when I speak to Siri AI that it goes so wrong as to be appallingly bad.

Siri AI frustrations

Back in the day, I could be listening to some music as I drive and just ask Siri to add the current track to a certain playlist. Or ask it to play a certain playlist.

They were good times.

Then Apple broke Siri and left it broken for two years. During that time, if you asked anything to do with a playlist, it said it couldn’t find it. Unless you asked again, immediately, in which case very often it would find it and do what you wanted.

With Siri AI, forget anything to do with Apple Music via CarPlay. If I ask for a playlist I’ve called Discoveries, it will play the Apple Music Discovery Station instead, which is not unreasonable.

But if I ask it to play the Heavy Rotation playlist, another one that Apple itself curates, it will almost always play a song called “Heavy Rotation” by a band called Upgrade.

Curiously, if I do this on the Mac, if I type Apple Music commands into Spotlight/Siri AI, it works. It takes a surprisingly long time, but it works.

As I’ve said, mapping things work when I type them too. But I have done rash things like saying aloud, “Siri, take me home via Tim’s house,” and it’s said no.

Or rather, it’s said it doesn’t know where my home is. Ask it why it doesn’t know this and it says the detail is not on my Contact card, even though it is.

Once I asked for directions somewhere and it was so confident that it actually started the Apple Maps route. When I stopped it, pointing out that it had got the wrong place, it apologized, and showed me on screen a one-paragraph biography of a band.

Explain that to me. Because Siri AI couldn’t: it actually then denied having shown me whoever this was.

I wish now that I hadn’t swiped up so quickly and, frankly, angrily, that I didn’t stop to read that bio. I wonder if it were for the band Upgrade. I am single-handedly responsible for their streaming earnings going up.

I’m not kidding about it making me angry. That Apple broke something Siri could do was poor of them, and that they left it broken for years is inexcusable.

But to then launch its improvement and have it still fail at the same things all the time, yes, it warrants the odd off-color response. “I don’t know what to say to that,” Siri has replied to me.

I have some suggestions.

Siri AI still wins

It took me a while to connect the dots and see that, wildly, my Mac is now the best Siri tool. Or rather, that typing to Siri is now exceptionally useful.

Perhaps it’s my British accent, since the betas are set for US English. Certainly, or at least surely, or maybe only probably, all of the problems will be resolved before Siri AI is released publicly.

I use the new Siri app so much that I’ve given it a button on my Stream Deck. It’s on the bottom row, second from the left.

But if I’m not kidding or exaggerating about the frustrations, I’m also not putting you on about how Apple is going to win with Siri AI because of where it has put it, and how it has thought about users.

Because despite my blood pressure being driven up at times, I keep coming back to Siri AI. In the car, that’s just stupid and I put it down to the years of habit before Siri was broken.

But for everything else, especially at the Mac, I keep coming back because it’s at least good enough, and it is right there. It’s a “Siri” command away, it’s a Spotlight command away, and when you invoke it, you can go straight back to working instead of folding your arms and waiting.

I do also find that anything that involves Siri searching its World Knowledge was initially a bust. It’s no good at searching AppleInsider for articles I’ve written about specific topics. For that, since Google is also now a bit poor, I use Claude and it finds everything.

Otherwise, though, World Knowledge does somehow seem to have improved, or perhaps I’ve learned not to bother asking it about particular buildings I’m looking at.

Although I do still keep using Visual Intelligence. I am finding that having it now be part of the camera app means that I sometimes wish it would please stop trying to help me, I’m just taking a photo.

But here’s a measure of Siri AI’s effectiveness. For a year or more now, I have added buttons on my Stream Deck for various AI apps, and eventually settled on just having Claude there.

I’ve not replaced that button yet, but it has come close, and I have added a new button just to open the Siri AI app. If I’ve asked Siri AI something and then closed its response but want to recheck anything, I’ll push that button and be back in the app, back in the conversation.

Mind you, the reason I have a spare Stream Deck button to use for this is that it was previously set to open iPhone Mirroring. That has never once worked for me again since the macOS Golden Gate betas launched.

You know it will, though, you know that issues like this will be fixed by the time macOS Golden Gate comes out of beta testing.

Yet even now, even with frustrations, I am reaching for Spotlight and Siri AI on the Mac, I am pushing a Stream Deck button, and I am talking to Siri on my iPhone. And I am using it far more than any other AI app I’ve got, chiefly because it’s right there where I need it to be.

Rivals try to sell their AI services using terms like agentic or boasting about tokenmaxing, and wonder why people aren’t rushing to buy. What Apple has done, even in this bumpy beta, is provide useful tools and put them where they are needed.

That’s all. But when Apple is firing on all cylinders, that’s what they do. Siri AI is doing just that.

Between Siri finally being good, and Apple earning from other AIs on the App Store, in the long run, Apple is going to be the winner of the AI revolution, or bubble, depending on what you believe.

If you are based in Ireland but have ambitions to work for a US multinational then make sure to check out these 10 companies, all of which are looking to add to their teams.

For people in the US, this coming Saturday is 4 July, a national holiday that celebrates the US’ independence. But just because you aren’t based in the US, doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to get into the spirit. 

With that in mind, SiliconRepublic.com has compiled a list of some of the US multinationals with offices in Ireland, that are actively looking to boost their teams. So, if you are a jobseeker, or want to move companies, make sure to check out the list, you never know, your next big career adventure could await you. 

Amgen

US pharmaceutical multinational Amgen has been in Ireland since 1998 and employs around 1,250 people across its three sites in Santry, Dún Laoghaire and Waterford. Advertised roles include manufacturing process technician, senior maintenance technician, engineer for inspection and packaging and QA specialist, among other opportunities. 

BMS

US pharmaceutical Bristol Myers Squibb, or BMS, has had a presence in Ireland since 1964 and in those six decades the company has established businesses in Swords, Dublin, Cruiserath, Dublin, Blanchardstown, Dublin and Shannon, Clare. BMS employs around 1,000 people across the country. For professionals based in the region, vacant roles include project programme management, drug product associate in sterile drug products, scientist in analytical strategy and lifecycle and senior specialist in QC quality systems, among others. 

Boston Scientific

Massachusetts-headquartered medical equipment manufacturer Boston Scientific operates three Irish locations, in Tipperary, Cork and Galway. The organisation has held a presence in the country for more than 30 years and in April of this year announced an investment of €75m to be put towards the expansion of its R&D capabilities in Galway, as well as the opening of new, purpose-built laboratories. Job applicants should consider roles such as quality engineer III, principal quality specialist, quality system specialist and principal chemist. 

Cisco

California-based technology company Cisco has been in Ireland since the mid-1990’s. In Galway the Cisco team is looking to boost numbers with a cloud engineering technical leader, software engineer for application development, senior software engineer and software engineer for the cloud platform. In Dublin vacancies include threat detection engineer, software engineering manager and senior software engineer, alongside other opportunities. 

Fidelity Investments

Boston-headquartered financial services firm Fidelity Investments has operated in Ireland since 2000 and has premises in both Galway and Dublin. There are plenty of roles at both locations, for example, the Galway office is looking to recruit a senior software engineer in test, a cloud engineer, a principal QA engineer and an ECS product analyst. In Dublin there are opportunities for a corporate actions analyst and a senior manager in software engineering for core custody.

MSD

Originally established in New Jersey, pharmaceutical company MSD employs roughly 2,500 people in Ireland across its five sites in Tipperary, Cork, Carlow and Dublin and first came to the region in the 1970s. Currently the organisation has vacancies for roles across four departments, manufacturing and QA, engineering, IT and digital data and research and development. Available jobs include senior specialist in microbiology, microbiology technical specialist, API maintenance lead and process scientist, among others. 

Regeneron

US multinational Regeneron has multiple global locations, including in Dublin and Limerick. The Dublin-based team is looking to recruit an associate director for global patient safety, a medical affairs senior coordinator and a senior manager in aggregate reporting management. Limerick vacancies include roles for a principal data engineer, an associate manager for quality control, a principal QA specialist in IT and a project engineer. 

Rent the Runway

Headquartered in New York and established in 2009, Rent the Runway first came to Galway, Ireland in 2019. The e-commerce platform currently has three roles open to professionals based in the country. The engineering team is looking to employ a senior observability engineer, a senior software engineer and a software engineer III. 

Workday

US software company Workday has its European headquarters in Dublin and is currently looking to recruit professionals to a number of its teams. Open roles include opportunities for a cybersecurity engineer, site reliability engineer, AI senior data scientist, a technical implementation manager and a senior developer for agentic AI engineering.

Yahoo

US messaging and technology company Yahoo launched its Irish headquarters in early 2025, at the EXO building in The Dublin Docklands. There are two roles open to Ireland-based professionals currently. A senior data engineer job and a senior software apps engineer job, both under the Yahoo Mail division. 

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IQM, a full-stack quantum company out of Finland, went public on the Nasdaq Thursday via a SPAC merger at a valuation of about $1.9 billion. But share prices didn’t pop. They spent most the day below the IPO price — a lukewarm welcome.

SPAC mergers are often not immediately popular with retail investors these days. But this fizzle was arguably fueled by IQM’s own admission in its prospectus that “large-scale commercial traction of quantum computing technology may never occur.”

In fairness, this warning applies to all quantum companies. Yet, that hasn’t stopped the industry, including IQM, from acquiring customers, who use the tech as it is today for tasks like simulations and optimizations. IQM, which sells actual physical computers, as well as a cloud service, has customers like VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Germany.

“We sell computers into advanced supercomputing centers and data centers, and we sell computing time through the cloud,” its CEO and co-founder Jan Goetz told TechCrunch.

Having grown from eight customers in 2024 to 22 in 2025 is a fair motive for celebration in IQM’s circles, especially when two recent customers are from the private sector. But it also suggests that demand won’t scale until the “quantum advantage” — when quantum chips start outperforming classical computers for a larger range of complex and lengthy tasks, unlocking use cases from biotech to fintech, while potentially upending encryption.

But no one, not even a company making quantum computers, can say when that might be.

This hasn’t stopped investors from doubling down on quantum companies public and private, further encouraged by President Trump’s recent executive orders to accelerate the timeline for quantum. In response, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has committed to deploying “the world’s first fault-tolerant, scientifically relevant quantum computer” by 2028.

While this follows similar announcements from France, Germany, and the U.K., Trump’s orders carry extra weight for IQM, which has recently established a quantum tech center in Maryland and deployed a computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is part of the DOE. “We can benefit directly from it,” Goetz said.

Unlike other European unicorns, however, IQM isn’t moving its center of gravity to the other side of the Atlantic. In parallel to its IQMX ticker in the U.S., where most of its quantum peers are listed, it is due to debut tomorrow on Nasdaq Helsinki, where it expects continued support from the likes of Tesi, Finland’s sovereign wealth fund.

IQM’s story is indissociable from Finland. It was founded there in 2018 as a spinout from Aalto University in Espoo, a tech and quantum hub near Helsinki where two-thirds of its staff still work. But another hundred out of its 420-people team are based in Munich, with the remainder split around various locations to help the company in its global deployment roadmap.

In its prospectus, IQM noted that this duality appealed to RAAQ, the blank check company that helped IQM go public via a SPAC. “As evidenced by over €200 million in public support for IQM, European sovereign states and companies have supported IQM’s emergence as a prominent quantum computing company in Europe. IQM also demonstrated its ability to operate outside of Europe,” according to the RAAQ board.

Despite global ambitions, Goetz expressed pride at IQM becoming the first European quantum company to list in the U.S. — within a hair’s breadth, as French competitor Pasqal also announced plans to go public via a SPAC. “It always feels good to be first and to be a pioneer, but ultimately it’s about long-term success,” Goetz said.

The operation will generate new liquidity for IQM — approximately €198 million after costs, or $226 million. But the company had already raised $300 million last September. “It’s a big success raising very shortly after the Series B,” Goetz said. This also reflects that IQM’s main goal was to position itself more prominently in a race still full of unknowns.

Right now, you can get the Bose QuietComfort Headphones at Amazon for $179 (was $359). That’s the lowest price yet for the excellent headphones and a continuation of the same deal we saw during the recent Prime Day sale.

Sales are cyclical, and it’s already halfway through the year. Since this is the lowest price we’ve seen for the Bose QuietComfort Headphones, once it expires, I wouldn’t count on seeing it again until a major commercial holiday like Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

Today’s best headphones deal

The QuietComfort are some of the best Bose budget headphones, even if the word “budget” is more comparative to the price of the QuietComfort Ultra. They are intentionally designed to be light, offer a comfy fit and focus on active noise-cancellation for an affordable price.

Overall, these cover the basics well and keep the noise out for much less than the pricier but more powerful QuietComfort Ultra counterpart. These have stayed a popular, fuss-free choice if you’re looking for a reliable brand with ANC and aesthetics.

In our Bose QuietComfort Headphones review, we rated it four out of five stars for the ANC, comfort, portability, and ease of use. Our reviewer clocked up to 26 hours of battery life during testing, which is lower than many other competitors but still acceptable given the specs.

For more, see our best headphones (for more than just wireless) and best wireless headphones. We even have a list of best wireless earbuds for those who prefer in-ear listening.

from the phew dept

While we’ve been discussing a bunch of other Supreme Court end-of-term decisions this week, we should also call out two decisions the Supreme Court thankfully decided not to make. These non-decisions continue to help preserve First Amendment speech protections.

First, and most importantly, they rejected Alan Dershowitz’s attempt to appeal his laughably embarrassing SLAPP suit against CNN, which was filed in the hopes of getting it before this Supreme Court as part of the ongoing and extremely dangerous project by the rich and powerful to dismantle the “actual malice” standard found in NYT v. Sullivan. If you want to learn more about that dangerous project, listen to the podcast I recorded with reporter David Enrich, whose book, Murder the Truth, goes deep on this issue.

Dersh seemed to really hope that his case would be the one to overturn Sullivan, but it’s not to be. The Supreme Court denied cert. Of course, with that denial, Justice Clarence Thomas decides to pen another whiny blog about how much he hates the “actual malice” standard. He cites his own previous whining as well as his mentor’s, former Judge Laurence Silberman, who picked up the same cause soon after Thomas starting yelling about it.

The “actual malice” standard for public figures “bears ‘no relation to the text, history, or structure of the Constitution.’” Berisha v. Lawson, 594 U. S. ___, ___ (2021) (THOMAS, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari) (slip op., at 2) (quoting Tah v. Global Witness Publishing, Inc., 991 F. 3d 231, 251 (CADC 2021) (Silberman, J., dissenting)….

Instead, Thomas believes that public figures deserve extra special protection from critics, again citing his own previous whining:

Instead, the founding generation believed that, if anything, public figures had stronger claims for damages when they were defamed. See McKee v. Cosby, 586 U. S. 1172, 1177 (2019) (THOMAS, J., concurring in denial of certiorari). I and others have thus called for reconsideration of the actual-malice standard for public figures.

Thankfully, seven other Justices have no interest in this. However, Thomas did get Gorsuch to sign on to this, which perhaps isn’t surprising, as he’s joined Thomas’s anti-actual malice crusade in the past. However, in Enrich’s book, he uncovers that Gorsuch’s hatred for “actual malice” was based on a study… that was wrong. Apparently Gorsuch hasn’t adjusted his position, even though the data he has relied on has been proven to be incorrect. Not great, but at least this misinterpretation hasn’t infected others on the court yet.

The actual malice standard is what makes First Amendment speech protections function in practice — it’s the mechanism that keeps powerful people from drowning critics in expensive litigation. I get that Clarence Thomas hates the fact that people criticize him and his rich and powerful friends, but that’s a reason for him to go retire somewhere, not to rewrite one of the core planks that makes the First Amendment work.

The other denial is a bit less eventful. The Court refused to hear an appeal from Donald Trump on his $5 million loss (by jury verdict) in one of the defamation suits filed by E. Jean Carroll against him:

In November, Trump came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to hear his appeal. He contended that Carroll’s lawyers should not have been allowed to introduce testimony by other women who also alleged that Trump had assaulted them, as well as the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump bragged about grabbing women by their genitals.

In her brief responding to Trump’s petition, Carroll argued that even if the jury should not have been allowed to consider the evidence, it ultimately would not have made a difference because the rest of her case was so strong. She asked the justices to deny review.

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On Monday, the justices did so, without a noted dissent from the denial.

Of course, this is just one of two separate cases that Trump lost to Carroll on, and he’s also appealing the other one — the $83 million verdict — and that’s still pending. However, for now Trump appears shocked that his buddies on the Supreme Court didn’t get him out of this particular pickle. Once again, nothing short of total, unconditional loyalty will ever satisfy Trump.

In the meantime, though, we have the Court passing on these two cases, both of which might have messed with the basic standards regarding defamation. Passing on both means that, for now, the Supreme Court hasn’t taken a sledgehammer to First Amendment protections.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, actual malice, alan dershowitz, clarence thomas, defamation, donald trump, e. jean carroll, free speech, neil gorsuch, nyt v. sullivan

Companies: cnn

from the opacity-as-a-strategy dept

There are bad takes on AI, and then there are bad takes on AI. Some of you think my takes on the use of AI in gaming are bad. Cool, love you, kiss kiss. I think the takes from folks on both extremes, the never-AI-ers and the AI evangelists, are pretty awful most of the time. I’ll accept your love and kisses in return. And I particularly don’t like it when those in gaming journalism act like there is zero place for this technology in the industry nearly as much as I absolutely hate it when those within the industry itself fuel the concerns about it by claiming AI will do all the things most gamers feverishly don’t want it to do. I can assure you it can be very frustrating being me when it comes to this particular topic. And, no, I don’t expect any sympathy over it.

But what Tim Sweeney just said about Steam’s use of AI disclaimers on its platform might well be one of the dumbest fucking things I’ve ever heard someone in the industry say.

In the past few months, video game publishers and developers have been going all in on generative AI with the justification that it speeds up and improves development. In the attempt to help gamers make informed choices about their purchases, Valve has started enforcing AI disclosures on Steam, which Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney believes is irresponsible of the company, as it has a negative impact.

“It’s unfortunate that so many developers now are put into this position. If you want to launch a game, and get it as widely publicized as possible, you’ve got to put it on Steam so people can wish list it, and if you want to play it on Steam, then you have to get this Scarlet Letter of AI attached to your product, and now there is a hater community trying to kill the game,” Sweeney said to PC Gamer in a new interview. “I think it’s really irresponsible of Valve. They shouldn’t do it, because it makes it much, much, much harder for a game developer to have a chance of success. You have to choose from either not using tools that can make you way more productive, and probably failing due to competition that does.”

First, to quibble with the article: claiming that “video game publishers and developers” writ large are “going all in” on generative AI is just plain wrong. In fact, there are plenty of developers and publishers out there that have flatly sworn off the use of this technology entirely. And that’s a good thing, to my way of thinking. Every experiment needs a control group, after all.

But the real issue here is just how tone deaf and idiotic it is for Sweeney to chide a rival platform for the severe crime of informing customers about the content of the games they purchase and how they were created, specifically on a hot button issue like the AI in gaming. While I, too, have made it clear that I think pre-judging every game that made any use of AI at all in development is a mistake, the cure for it is certainly not obfuscating that information from the very people that pay for these games.

Customers are supposed to be making informed buying decisions. I didn’t really think that was a matter open for debate. And Steam making that information transparent to the public is quite literally the opposite of “irresponsible”. It’s being very responsible to Steam’s customers. As for calling such disclosures a “scarlett letter”, well, I think the lady doth protest too much, as it were.

Especially when it’s obvious why Sweeney is taking this position.

To be fair, it’s not surprising to see Tim Sweeney staunchly defending the use of AI in game development, as Epic Games’ upcoming Unreal Engine 6 is going all-in with AI integration.

Now, Sweeney went on to talk about how generative AI can be used by developers to reduce the need for game makers to buy pre-made assets off of asset stores, content libraries, and reduce the economic costs for developing a game as a result… and I think those arguments are interesting and worthy of debate.

But pretty blatant attempts to try to inoculate the ecosystem against backlash for games produced by Epic’s engine by purposefully making the consumer less informed is an absolute loser of an argument.

Filed Under: ai, ai in video games, disclosures, information, tim sweeney, video games

Companies: epic, valve

Inspired by the hit anime and manga series Jujutsu Kaisen, Jujutsu Infinite lets players master a variety of powerful Innate Techniques. However, not every Technique is equally powerful, even if it has a higher rarity. Some perform much better in battles, while others are better left behind. If you’re unsure which Technique deserves your spins, this Jujutsu Infinite Innate tier list will help you find the strongest choices for both PvP and PvE gameplay.

Best Jujutsu Infinite Innate Tier List

Every Innate Technique has its own strengths and weaknesses. Some are excellent for most situations, while others have limited use. We have ranked every Technique from S Tier to D Tier to make your choice easier. Your main Innate Technique should ideally come from the S or A Tier. These Techniques deliver serious damage and powerful Domain abilities. B- and C-tier techniques are better suited for support roles. They can help you build, but aren’t reliable for challenging content. These rankings reflect their overall performance across the game.

S Tier Innate Techniques

A Tier Innate Techniques

B Tier Innate Techniques

C Tier Innate Techniques

Technique	Pros	Cons
Blood Manipulation	• Visually impressive abilities • Can bind enemies and apply pressure	• Inconsistent damage • Low overall damage
Boogie Woogie	• Excellent mobility and disruption • Good combo potential in 1v1 and team fights	• Lacks raw damage
Blazing Courage	• Decent choice for the early game • Features flashy fire effects	• Not strong enough for high-level content

D Tier Innate Techniques

Technique	Pros	Cons
Cloning Technique	• Decent mobility	• One of the weakest Innate Techniques • Clones are easy to destroy • Very low damage
Construction	• Can stun enemies	• One of the weakest Innate Techniques • Difficult to aim • Performs poorly in PvP
Tool Manipulation	• No major advantages	• One of the weakest Innate Techniques • Lacks damage output

Eight months in, they’re looking to set up a physical stall to meet growing demand

When brothers Gary Wong, 32, and James Wong, 31, were growing up, food was always part of their lives.

They were born into a family of cooks who ran dim sum and zi char stalls, though those ventures never quite took off. While F&B was, as Gary put it, “in our blood,” their family actively discouraged the brothers from entering the industry.

That changed at the start of 2026, when the brothers and their wives launched Hippopotato, a home-based rösti business operating out of their mother’s executive flat in Tampines.

We spoke to Gary and his wife, Yiying Tan, about how the family scaled the business to sell around 150 rostis a day, generating between S$30,000 and S$35,000 in monthly revenue, with plans to open a physical store soon.

Starting out as a canteen stall

James holds a degree in culinary arts from the Culinary Institute of America—one of the world’s most prestigious institutions for aspiring chefs—through a joint programme with the Singapore Institute of Technology.

Before Hippopotato, he worked as the head chef at a café, giving him a firsthand understanding of the industry’s demands: long hours, capped pay, and little upside working for someone else.

That convinced him he wanted to build an F&B business of his own.

For Gary, who had spent years in private equity and venture capital, the motivation was different. He saw Hippopotato as a side project at first—a chance to test whether the idea could work before committing to it fully.

Gary and James’s wives would eventually join the business, but in its early days, Hippopotato looked very different. The brothers weren’t selling rosti yet.

Their first venture was a cai fan (mixed economy rice) stall at a local junior college, which they secured in Jul 2025, selling a rotating menu of up to 16 dishes daily.

While schools mandate that canteen vendors stay open until 2PM, the food was almost always sold out by noon. Faced with a choice between going home and cooking another batch, they’d top up, but doing so came with a risk: anything that didn’t sell by closing time would go to waste, eating directly into their already-thin margins.

For every dollar of sales we made from the cai fan stall, 60% was just food cost. If you don’t sell, you’re screwed.

Gary Wong

The waste problem pushed them to rethink. Instead of preparing food in advance, what if they sold something made to order? Ideally, it would also appeal to junior college students without requiring them to cook 16 different dishes before dawn.

The answer came from one of James’s earliest F&B jobs: a brief stint at Marché’s rosti station nearly a decade earlier. The brothers decided to give the Swiss potato dish a shot at their canteen stall.

And it was the right call. Students started queuing almost immediately, with lines growing long enough that the school principal joined in.

To manage volume, the brothers capped sales at 30 portions a day, first-come, first-served—and even that wasn’t enough.

“It was similar to the scene at those Pokémon card queues at Plaza Singapura,” Gary said.

Escaping the limits of the school calendar

The school canteen proved successful for the rosti concept, but it came with its own problem: schools would close for holidays. Long breaks meant canteens would be empty of customers, and there was no income to be made.

To fill those gaps and to avoid being entirely dependent on a school calendar, Gary and James decided to launch Hippopotato as a home-based business in Nov 2025, while continuing to operate the canteen hall.

Although business was slow in the first week or two, with only one or two orders a day, business picked up gradually after that.

By the new year, momentum had built. Media coverage followed, while new menu items kept customers coming back. Orders climbed steadily from just a handful a day to an average of 100 to 150 rostis daily.

Hippopotato operates out of Gary and James’s mother’s 1,500 sq ft executive flat in Tampines, which the family shares. As Gary put it, the business is very much a family affair, with his wife, James’s wife, and their 70-year-old mother all playing a role in its day-to-day operations.

Even so, Gary has not left his full-time job, saying he still sees Hippopotato as a business in its early stages.

What makes a good rosti?

James’s culinary training shaped everything about how Hippopotato approaches the product, from the ingredients to the cooking process. They only use 100% USA Russet potatoes, and everything, even the sauces, is freshly made on the same day. 

“If we want to do it, we will do it right,” Gary said. 

Using Russet potatoes gives the rostis a crispy, golden crust while keeping the inside moist and fluffy, Gary said. Just as importantly, the brothers have kept prices deliberately accessible: a chicken schnitzel with rosti costs S$12.50, compared with around S$35 for a similar dish at Marché.

The brothers have also experimented with flavours such as the Salted Egg Chick rosti and Okonomirosti—a rosti topped with okonomiyaki sauce, Japanese mayo, and bonito flakes—which have become customer favourites.

There are more flavours the brothers want to explore, but the constraints of a shared home kitchen have kept the menu tightly curated for now.

Every new item adds prep work, ingredients, and storage requirements, while Singapore’s Home-Based Business Scheme means they can’t hire staff from outside the household to cope with the extra workload.

That said, for a business still finding its feet, the numbers made financial sense.

Without rent or significant overheads, the main cost is ingredients, and those margins are covered quickly. Compared to the cai fan stall’s punishing 60% food cost and pre-dawn starts, running Hippopotato from home five days a week gave them the room to breathe, refine the product, and build a customer base before committing to a commercial space.

Forging the road ahead for Hippopotato

Taking all this into account, it only made sense to the Wongs to close the canteen stall.

Running both simultaneously—the cai fan stall from the early hours of the morning until 2PM, followed by Hippopotato’s evening service and the prep work in between—was burning the family out.

The final confirmation came during the Mar school holidays, when the canteen closed, and the team focused solely on Hippopotato. The experience reinforced what they had already suspected: the rosti business delivered stronger returns, generated less waste, and made better use of their time.

With that, the family decided not to renew the cai fan stall’s lease when it expired in May, choosing instead to focus entirely on Hippopotato.

But Hippopotato’s home-based model was always meant to be a stepping stone, not a destination. The constraints of a shared domestic kitchen have a ceiling, and the brothers are aware of it.

Thus, Hippopotato has plans to open its first physical store later in 2026, with a potential second location to follow. The customer base it has built makes a compelling case for the expansion: the business has amassed more than 200 five-star Google reviews, while customers travel from across Singapore for its rostis.

For the Wongs, it’s a sign that Hippopotato has outgrown the home kitchen where it all began.

• Find out more about Hippopotato here.
• Read other articles about Singaporean businesses here.

Featured Image Credit: Hippopotato