Humans are better than AI at this?

Everyone's covering the headline stuff from Apple's keynote. But the updates that actually change your Tuesday are the small ones: annoyances fixed, workflows smoothed, rough edges sanded down. Personally, I care way more about what's changing in my Mail app than about how shiny my icons look. This list breaks down the small improvements app by app, so you can check if anything will change for you.

Last October, Meta banned rival AI chatbots (ChatGPT, Perplexity, and friends) from WhatsApp's business tools, leaving Meta AI as the only assistant in the room. Then it offered rivals access again, for a fee regulators called economically unsustainable. This week the EU said enough: restore free access within five working days while the antitrust investigation runs, or risk fines of up to 10% of annual revenue. Meta calls it "regulatory overreach" and is appealing. Why do we care? This decides whether you pick your AI assistant, or your messaging app picks it for you. Personally, I like to choose.

The internet has decided that em dashes (these long ones — ) are the telltale sign of AI writing. Students are scrubbing them from college applications; online vigilantes attack anything with a horizontal line in it. AI overuses it partly because newer models trained on books full of them. The actual tell isn't the dash, it's the flatness. AI reaches for the em dash to sound profound; a real writer reaches for it because the thought genuinely broke off there.

Researchers gave top AI models the Stroop test, that classic psychology task where the word "red" is printed in blue ink and you have to name the ink color. With short lists, the AI models did fine. With longer ones, they fell apart: GPT-4o went from 91% accuracy at five words to 15% at forty. Humans? We stay steady even on long, conflicting lists. Give me a cookie and a cup of coffee - I’m up for the challenge.

So your ability to stay focused on a goal while ignoring distractions is still a genuinely human advantage.

Anthropic launched Claude for Small Business: a package that connects Claude to the tools small businesses already run on (QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365) and ships with 15 ready-made workflows. Think payroll planning, invoice chasing, month-end closing, campaign drafting. The part I like: nothing sends, posts, or pays without your approval. If you run a small business and your evenings disappear into admin, it’s worth a look.

Your phone is hauling around apps you forgot you installed, plus a pile of built-in ones you've never opened. No? Just me? Fine. The NYT has a clear walkthrough for clearing them out on iPhone, iPad, and Android. Two things worth knowing: on iPhone you can offload an app, which frees the storage but keeps your data, so reinstalling picks up where you left off. And most preinstalled Android apps can't be fully deleted (uhm, why?), but you can disable or archive them so they stop running and disappear from view. Ten minutes, lighter phone, fewer icons sulking from little to no use.

You made it to the end, which means it's time for your weekly permission slip to be unproductive. This week: easy line drawings. The whole appeal is that you focus on just one line at a time, so there's no room for "is this good enough," your brain just quiets down. No talent required, no outcome expected. Pick an object on your desk and draw it in one continuous line. Five minutes, that's it.

Stay too productive,
Jana

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