Writing about AI tools, Mac & Linux, blogging & SEO, EU tech, and privacy. Dad of 5. 10K+ Gumroad sales. 3.5 million+ reads online. 🙏
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Joined February 2021
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I'm Burk. A writer on tech, blogging since 2007.
Which AI tool, which platform, which Apple feature is worth your time? And what's the catch? I test it on my own work.
Every Tuesday, one free email with all of it:
👉 letters.byburk.net
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I use AI to write a lot of drafts. Without long instructions, they don't sound great.
Do you use AI for writing? Or is that a no-go for you?
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Two switches keep your Gmail out of your Google ads:
Don't connect your apps to Search or Gemini
Turn off personalized ads in My Ad Center
Have you checked yours?
👉 letters.byburk.net/p/gmail-d…
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Apple's on-device model is about 3 billion parameters. Nowhere near GPT or Claude in size.
The limit is the context window: 4,096 tokens, input and output combined. Roughly one page of text.
Fine for a commit message or a quick lookup.
👉 letters.byburk.net/p/apfel-t…
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Three places, one model. What differs is what each one is allowed to touch.
In the terminal, Claude Code runs commands, pushes to GitHub, calls APIs. The desktop app knocks at every door. The browser wins on pure access.
👉 letters.byburk.net/p/three-w…
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The card that avoids Visa and Mastercard in a German store is usually a Visa or Mastercard everywhere else.
New girocards usually come with Debit Mastercard or Visa Debit. Take a look at the logos on your own card.
👉 letters.byburk.net/p/ditch-v…
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Safari, Chrome, Brave, or Firefox?
Safari is my default on the Mac. Brave for Claude, Chrome at the office. What's yours?
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Substack Notes have no draft stage. Run the command, it's live. So I built guardrails.
A Note goes out under my name the second it's public. I want a person between me and that button.
👉 letters.byburk.net/p/how-i-a…
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Milk is the crude oil of the food industry. I heard that line in a video and never thought of it that way before.
Whey, the leftover from cheese, used to get dumped into rivers. In June, whey protein sold for more than $13 a pound in the US.
👉 letters.byburk.net/p/milk-cr…
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Ubuntu or Zorin OS. That's what I'd put on an old Mac right now.
Ubuntu runs on my 2017 iMac. Zorin on my dad's 2012 MacBook Pro, with a macOS-style dock.
Which one would you pick?
👉 letters.byburk.net/p/install…
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Tried Notion. Tried Obsidian. Tried Bear.
Always ended up back in Apple Notes.
What's your notes app? Did you switch back too?
brew install antiwork/cli/gumroad, log in once, and the store lives in the terminal.
Products, files, offer codes, sales, payouts, licenses, webhooks.
Homebrew is about the only way I install anything on my Mac anymore.
👉 letters.byburk.net/p/gumroad…
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The new AI opt-out in robots.txt covers training. Not answers.
Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode have their own setting in Search Console. One line won't keep a site out of the AI answers.
👉 letters.byburk.net/p/ai-trai…
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Bear Blog has a discovery feed that sends readers to new blogs. Almost none of the small platforms have that.
No underdog will hand you Substack's audience. What you get back is speed, low cost, and something that feels like yours.
👉 letters.byburk.net/p/best-pe…
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Burk | A writer on tech retweeted
To all the AEO/GEO tracking software that raised hundreds of millions:
Free tracking inbound from @OpenAI
Kimi K3 scores 57 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Rank #4 of 187 models, just behind Claude Fable 5, ahead of Opus 4.8.
On speed it trails the field: 62 tokens per second, the tier median is 73.7.
👉 letters.byburk.net/p/kimi-k3…
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Alphabet made $127.6 billion in one quarter. Search still grew 12 percent.
The stock still fell about 13 percent the next day. One reason: AI Mode earns less per search.
Google's fix: ads inside the AI answer.
👉 letters.byburk.net/p/google-…
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AI agents ordered four rides on Uber in the week of Halloween. Four.
Out of about 320 million trips and orders across Uber and Uber Eats.
(The Verge says last quarter, TechCrunch says that week. Four either way.)
👉 letters.byburk.net/p/letters…
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Google searches for "minimalism" peaked in January 2017. Down about 40 percent since.
Then "Japandi" passed it in fall 2023. Today it gets more than three times the searches.
Minimalism, basically. Just not white.
👉 letters.byburk.net/p/is-mini…
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Vibe-coders aren't evil. Most just don't know any better.
And many developers use AI carefully. From the outside, their apps look exactly like the weekend ones.
Do you still trust your apps?
👉 letters.byburk.net/p/the-dar…
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