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Back-to-school shopping used to mean pencils, notebooks, and if you were really lucky, a Crayon box with a built-in sharpener. Now? One kid needs a laptop that can survive an entire school day, another is filming everything in 8K, someone has already lost the project they stayed up until midnight finishing, and you’re labeling forty-seven nearly identica… Keep reading with a 7-day free trial Subscribe to Techish to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.

Howdy! I hope you had a fabulous week and get to bask in the best of summer this weekend. It’s all in full swing, and before any of us are ready (or maybe not quite soon enough for some…), it’ll be back-to-school time.

Did you know you can talk to ChatGPT out loud and it will talk back? There’s a little voice icon next to the message box; it’s been there for a while, and most people have never tapped it once. Seriously? You weren’t missing much—until now. OpenAI rebuilt ChatGPT Voice on new models called GPT-Live, and for the first time, you can talk with it instead of at it.

When I was growing up, back-to-school shopping meant the Sears catalog and a box of crayons with the built-in pencil sharpener. If we were really lucky, we got a scented eraser that kind of, sort of smelled like strawberries—or more like what strawberries might smell like if they grew in a rubber patch. Now? The list includes laptops, apps, online accounts, family calendars and enough passwords to qualify as an AP course.

💃TGIF Party People!🕺🏽 I got caught in the Pacific Northwest’s version of a torrential downpour yesterday: thunder, lightning, hail, raindrops the size of grapes. We don’t really do weather like that here, so by late afternoon, when Apple’s Weather app showed one harmless little cloud spooning a smiling sun, I totally believed it. Rookie mistake. After a full day cooped up inside, everyone on the farm needed out.

Parents in this country lose the equivalent of 48 nights of sleep a year worrying about their kids and technology — and screen habits keep them up more than just about anything else. That’s from a new survey of more than 2,000 parents by Cosmo, a company that makes kids’ smartwatches. Here’s the ironic part, though: Nearly three-quarters of the parents surveyed said their child already has a smartphone.

šŸ‘‹ Hi friends, and happy Saturday ā˜• ā€” Iā€™m doing a happy dance because Meta already shut down the Muse Image feature that let strangers turn public Instagram photos into fake scenes with a simple @mention. I tested it, the backlash hit, and Meta pulled the feature three days after launch. I updated our big story below with what happened, why the company backed down, and why your Instagram sharing settings still matter.

I have a public Instagram account. It is part family album, part work portfolio, and part running record of every bad hairstyle since 2010. Starting this week, Meta’s new AI image generator, Muse, can use photos from my public Instagram account to create brand-new pictures of me that never happened. If your Instagram account is public, it can do the same thing with yours. So naturally, I had to try it. I created this in about 60 seconds with Meta's new Muse AI.

Happy 250th, America! 🎆 What are you doing to celebrate this weekend? Crabbing season kicks off around our little island tomorrow, so I hope to head out on the kayaks (I call it “crabayacking”) to drop a pot in and see what the sea-gods send our way. If it’s anything like the past few years, we’ll be cracking Dungeness, drinking a cool cocktail, and watching the pros handle the fireworks out over Puget Sound.

If reading your phone in a moving car makes your stomach do that slow Jell-O wobble, your iPhone has a fix built right in. Most people have never found it, because it’s buried deep in the accessibility menu. It’s called Vehicle Motion Cues, and it’s a brilliant little piece of genius.