FastMail is a good, Google-free provider of e-mail, calendar services, and the like. But it isn't the only one, and it's due for a price increase in 2025. Is it time to switch?

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With macOS 26 Tahoe this year, Apple introduced a new Control Center. Of course, it implements the new Liquid Glass design seen across the entire ecosystem, but it also brings a brand new feature to the Mac for the first time: third-party integrations.

That, on its own, is a big deal, and was a greatly appreciated feature of iOS 18 last year. However, it has an even bigger implication for the Mac.

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Millions yearn to be creativity-adjacent:

"I've always been jealous of the glory authors get," explained Wolverton, assembling fresh Ikea bookcases to display his newly-published oeuvre. "Actual writing takes time away from surfing for deepfake porn. I just want books with my name on them to impress my friends. ChatGPT made that happen."

Chaz is not alone. Machine learning engineers believe millions yearn to be creativity-adjacent.

"These people are entirely bereft of the basic skills necessary for creativity and they aren't interested developing them," said Victor Drolet, Spicy Autofill Evangelist. "A few could potentially string enough words together into something worth reading, but research shows they will never try."

Egon Hunt, who teaches a $4000, eight-week online prompt engineering course, asserted that "authors" like Wolverton can fulfill dreams of passing as a real-enough writer to those who don't read. "A creative vacuum like Chaz can manage to type in a few prompts, and then the LLM does all the rest." [...]

Accusations that LLMs combine greed with sloth are "narrow-minded", assert experts. With the right prompts, they insist LLM's can deliver far more comprehensive moral transgressions. "In addition to the classical seven deadly sins," adds Drolet, "LLMs even generate entirely new deadly sins such as grath, hoth, and lurm!"

Previously, previously, previously.

"The future of podcasting shouldn't be locked behind walled gardens," writes the team at Pocket Casts. To push that point forward, Pocket Casts, owned by the company behind WordPress, Automattic Inc., has made its web player free to everyone.

Previously available only to logged-in Pocket Casts users paying $4 per month, Pocket Casts now offers nearly any public-facing podcast feed for streaming, along with controls like playback speed and playlist queueing. If you create an account, you can also sync your playback progress, manage your queue, bookmark episode moments, and save your subscription list and listening preferences. The free access also applies to its clients for Windows and Mac.

"Podcasting is one of the last open corners of the Internet, and we’re here to keep it that way," Pocket Casts' blog post reads. For those not fully tuned into the podcasting market, this and other statements in the post—like sharing "without needing a specific platform's approval" and "podcasts belong to the people, not corporations"—are largely shots at Spotify, and to a much lesser extent other streaming services, which have sought to wrap podcasting's originally open and RSS-based nature inside proprietary markets and formats.

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Amazon announced a new version of its smart assistant today. Alexa Plus comes with expanded capabilities, the company appeared to demonstrate, like finding concert tickets on your behalf or ordering an Uber to pick up someone at the airport. The upgraded smart assistant will also make it easier to have more natural conversations with it, but Amazon will be charging users for those new abilities for the first time.

Free early access to Alexa Plus will begin in late March 2025 in the United States for customers with eligible Echo Show devices. They’ll be notified through email and device notifications once access to Alexa Plus has been granted, but they will have to opt in to using it.

Subscriptions for Alexa Plus start at $19.99 per month once early access ends, but it’s free for Prime users. Given that Prime costs $14.99 per month, or $139 per year, it’s hard to imagine anyone opting to pay for Alexa Plus on its own. Many of the smart assistant’s new capabilities, such as jumping to the part of a movie where a specific song is playing, will also be dependent on services like Amazon Music and Amazon Prime Video. So to fully take advantage of Alexa Plus, a Prime membership almost seems mandatory.

There were no hardware announcements made at today’s Amazon event, but the company has confirmed that Alexa Plus will work on “almost every” Alexa device released so far, including the Alexa mobile app, as well as Fire TVs and tablets. However, the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21, which all feature touchscreen interfaces, will be prioritized during early access. The company has also confirmed that certain older generation Echo devices, including the Echo Tap and first-generation versions of the Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Plus, Echo Spot, and Echo Show, won’t support Alexa Plus. Amazon’s Astro robot will also only be compatible with the original Alexa.

Update, February 26th: Added additional details on device compatibility and availability.

IMDb founder and CEO Col Needham is stepping down after launching the website 35 years ago, the Amazon-owned company announced on Tuesday. Needham will now serve as executive chair. IMDb chief operating officer Nikki Santoro will take over as CEO.

Needham started building the database that later became IMDb in 1990. He remained CEO even after selling the website to Amazon in 1998, overseeing major changes like the rollout of its IMDbPro subscription and an update that lets professionals hide their age.

Santoro joined IMDb in 2016 and became COO in 2021. She has helped expand the site’s database and build out IMDbPro, according to IMDb’s leadership page.

As executive chair, Needham will still “provide strategic guidance, consult on key initiatives, and serve as a global ambassador” for the company, according to IMDb’s press release.

“[Santoro’s] track record of driving growth and enhancing our products and services makes her the ideal person to guide IMDb into a new era,” Needham says in a statement. “I look forward to continuing to work closely with Nikki and the talented IMDb team in my new role as we build on IMDb’s legacy and shape the future of entertainment information.”