Apple Announces RCS Support in iOS 18

Five days ago, about ninety minutes into the WWDC 2024 keynote, Craig Federighi mentioned — almost in passing — that iOS 18 would support RCS messaging. He spent roughly thirty seconds on it, giving it no demo, no deep dive, no explanation of why it mattered. Just a brief note that Apple would adopt the GSMA Universal Profile for rich messaging with Android users.

I waited for this announcement for years. Literally years. I worked on the RCS ecosystem at Google, where I saw firsthand how the protocol developed and why adoption mattered. I’ve written about the protocol, built tools for it, argued with skeptics about it. And when the moment finally came, Apple treated it like a footnote.

Formula Racing: Pivot to Electric and Tech Success

I’ve been thinking about constraints lately. The kind that make you better instead of smaller.

Formula E started in 2014 as motorsport’s awkward experiment. The cars were slow compared to F1 — embarrassingly slow, actually. The races were short. The tracks were temporary street circuits in city centers. Nobody in the traditional racing world took it seriously; most coverage had a patronizing tone. “Electric racing. How cute.”

Nine seasons later, the Gen3 car produces 350kW (roughly 470 horsepower), hits 200 mph, and recovers up to 600kW through regenerative braking. That regenerative figure is wild — it means the car harvests energy during deceleration at a rate that would’ve been the total power output of the original Formula E car.

Midjourney and the Rise of Generative Media

I woke up this morning and generated a Renaissance painting of a cat in a spacesuit. It took about sixty seconds. The cat looked contemplative.

This is where we are now.

Midjourney opened its beta to the public today, and if you haven’t tried it yet, the onboarding experience alone tells you something about where generative AI is headed. You don’t download an app. You don’t sign up for a waitlist (well, not anymore). You join a Discord server; you type a text prompt in a chat channel; you wait. And then an image appears that didn’t exist thirty seconds ago.