If you’ve been around, you might’ve noticed that our relationships with programs have changed.

Older programs were all about what you need: you can do this, that, whatever you want, just let me know. You were in control, you were giving orders, and programs obeyed.

But recently (a decade, more or less), this relationship has subtly changed. Newer programs (which are called apps now, yes, I know) started to want things from you.

Accounts

The most obvious example is user accounts. In most cases, I, as a user, don’t need an account. Yet programs keep insisting that I, not them, “need” one.

I don’t. I have more accounts already than a population of a small town. This is something you want, not me.

And even if you give up and create one, they will never leave you alone: they’ll ask for 2FA, then for password rotation, then will log you out for no good reason. You’ll never see the end of it either way.

This got so bad that when a program doesn’t ask you to create an account, it feels refreshing.

“Okay, but accounts are still needed to sync stuff between machines.”

Wrong. Syncthing is a secure, multi-machine distributed app and yet doesn’t need an account.

“Okay, but you still need an account if you pay for a subscription?”

Mullvad VPN accepts payments and yet didn’t ask me for my email.

How come these apps can go without an account, but your code editor and your terminal can’t?

Updates

Every program has an update mechanism now. Everybody is checking for updates all the time. Some notoriously bad ones lock you out until you update. You get notified a few seconds after a new version is available.

And yet: do we, users, really need these updates? Did we ask for them?

I’ve been running barebone Nvidia drivers without their bloated desktop app (partly because it asks for an account, lol).

As a result, there’s nobody to notify me about new drivers. And you know what? It’s been fine. I could forget to update for months, and still everything works. It’s the most relaxing I’ve felt in a while.

There has been a new major release of Syncthing in August. How did I learn about it? By accident; a friend told me. And you know what? I’m happy with that. If I upgrade, nothing in my life will change. It works just fine now. So do I really need an update? Is it my need?

It’s simple, really. If I need an update, I will know it: I’ll encounter a bug or a lack of functionality. Then I’ll go and update.

Until then, politely fuck off.

Notifications

Notifications are the ultimate example of neediness: a program, a mechanical, lifeless thing, an unanimate object, is bothering its master about something the master didn’t ask for. Hey, who is more important here, a human or a machine?

Notifications are like email: to-do items that are forced on you by another party. Hey, it’s not my job to dismiss your notifications!

Sure, there are good notifications. Sometimes users need to be notified about something they care about, like the end of a long-running process.

But the general pattern is so badly abused that it’s hard to justify it now. You can make a case that giving a toddler a gun can help it protect itself. But much worse things will probably happen much sooner.

There’s no good reason why, e.g. code editor needs a notification system. What’s there to notify about? Updates? Sublime Text has no notifications. And you know what? It works just fine. I never felt underinformed while using it.

Onboarding

The company needs to announce a new feature and makes a popup window about it.

Read this again: The company. Needs. It’s not even about the user. Never has been.

Did I ask about Copilot? No. The company wants me to use it. Not me:

Do I care about Figma Make? Not really, no.

Yet I still know about it, against my will.

To sum it up

I’ve read somewhere (sorry, lost the link):

ls never asks you to create an account or to update.

I agree. ls is a good program. ls is a tool. It does what I need it to do and stays quiet otherwise. I use it; it doesn’t use me. That’s a good, healthy relationship.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have services. Programs that constantly update. Programs that have news, that “keep you informed”. Programs that need something from you all the time. Programs that update Terms of Service just to remind you of themselves.

Programs that have their own agenda and that are trying to make it yours, too. Programs that want you to think about them. Programs that think they are entitled to a part of your attention. “Pick me” programs.

And you know what? Fuck these programs. Give me back my computer.

Jay Yagnik, VP of AI innovation and research, on Google’s The Keyword blog:

Private AI Compute is built on a multi-layered system that is designed from the ground up around core security and privacy principles:

• One integrated Google tech stack: Private AI Compute runs on one seamless Google stack powered by our own custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). World-class privacy and security is integrated into this architecture with Titanium Intelligence Enclaves (TIE). This design enables Google AI features to use our most capable and intelligent Gemini models in the cloud, with our high standards for privacy and the same in-house computing infrastructure you already rely on for Gmail and Search.
• No access: Remote attestation and encryption are used to connect your device to the hardware-secured sealed cloud environment, allowing Gemini models to securely process your data within a specialized, protected space. This ensures sensitive data processed by Private AI Compute remains accessible only to you and no one else, not even Google.

Sounds a lot like Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, which raises the question of whether this Google project is related to the Gurman scoop that Apple and Google are on the cusp of a deal for a white-label version of Google Gemini to run on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers to power the next-generation versions of Siri and Apple Intelligence.

I strongly suspect this is something Google has been working on for a while. Apple, I think it’s fair to say, places a higher priority on privacy than does Google, but Google does value privacy. But perhaps the deal with Apple accelerated the project within Google.

OpenAI:

To start a group chat tap the people icon in the top right corner of any new or existing chat. When you add someone to an existing chat, ChatGPT creates a copy of your conversation as a new group chat so your original conversation stays separate. You can invite others directly by sharing a link with one to twenty people, and anyone in the group can share that link to bring others in. When you join or create your first group chat, you’ll be asked to set up a short profile with your name, username, and photo so everyone knows who’s in the conversation. Group chats can be found in a new clearly-labeled section of the sidebar for easy access. [...]

Group chats are separate from your private conversations. Your personal ChatGPT memory is not used in group chats, and ChatGPT does not create new memories from these conversations. We’re exploring offering more granular controls in the future so you can choose if and how ChatGPT uses memory with group chats.

Currently rolling out in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan. Rate limits and advanced model usage depend on the group member to whom ChatGPT replies. Pretty clever, and I can imaging a lot of ways this would be useful, both for family/friends and for work collaboration. I like the idea that this is built into ChatGPT, not an AI bot in a regular messaging app. This way, you know with certainty which of your chats are being seen and read by an AI bot.

We’ve also taught ChatGPT new social behaviors for group chats. It follows the flow of the conversation and decides when to respond and when to stay quiet based on the context of the group conversation. You can always mention “ChatGPT” in a message when you want it to respond. We’ve also given ChatGPT the ability to react to messages with emojis, and reference profile photos — so it can, for example, use group members’ photos when asked to create fun personalized images within that group conversation.

This is a really hard problem to solve. Wavelength, the late great private group messaging app whose team I advised from 2023 to 2024 (when the app shuttered), added AI chatbots (with customizable personalities) in June 2023. Wavelength’s AI bots only responded when mentioned explicitly.