Nicely conceived! This is the kind of feature Apple ought to have already delivered with on device models and private cloud compute.

Sending many whole screenshots to an indie mystery box, though, should be a non-starter for anyone without the skills to verify what any given update to this app is doing. Your website's featured use case highlights the risks (to you and users) unintentionally well: "How do I export my passwords?" (I did a double take: was this performance art from The Onion?) If a user opens a plain text file of secrets without closing this app/the help task, what gets captured, sent over the network, and saved to disk? What protections exist for, say, a computer-challenged elderly person's banking details?

A suggestion about the FAQ ...

"Where is my task history stored? Is it private? Your privacy is our top priority. Your task history is stored securely and encrypted on your local machine by default. You have full control over your data."

... This invites unanswered questions about what exactly from the screenshots is stored, for how long, and what design backs the "securely" claim. Being up front about this would invite trust and helpful developer feedback.

thanks for your comment Ryan!

to answer your question regarding screenshots - I am quoting a previous answer "Ourguide only takes a screenshot when the user asks for the next step. We run a PII filter first, then process the image via Tinfoil.sh in secure hardware enclaves (TEEs). This ensures the data remains private from everyone, including us. Tinfoil is open-source and fully verifiable." Screenshots are not stored.

For an academic coffee paper, it is better than many.

A common sin remains: like most coffee papers, I was unable to find calibration procedures in the methods or supplementary sections for the espresso brewing instrument whose performance may vary between runs, days, or users. In this case, they claim/assume "The Opera allows for precise control of shot time, water pressure (PW), and temperature"). As a Decent owner, I'm less familiar with the Opera, but for either machine I would want to disprove any confounding variables by attaching independent sensors. Decent has openly discussed hurdles they've confronted for consistency and accurate measurement.

Their main takeaways, though, are interesting and track with how many now prefer to extract:

As we demonstrated in Figure 3, our model informs us that a reduction in dry coffee mass results in an increased EYmax (shown schematically in blue in Figure 6). Thus, a barista is able to achieve highly reproducible espresso with the same EY as the 20 g espresso by reducing the coffee mass to 15 g and counter-intuitively grinding much coarser (as shown in red, Figure 6B). This modification may result in very fast shots (<15 s), a reduction in espresso concentration, and a different flavor profile.

...

Beyond sensory science studies, a persistent difficulty is that there is no rapid route to assessing the quality of two identical EYs made with different grind settings or brew parameters. It is clear that espresso made at 22% EY in the partially clogged regime tastes more ‘‘complex’’ than a fast 22% EY obtained using the optimization routine presented in Figure 6. In an attempt to recover the same flavor profile as the partially clogged flow regime, a shot must contain a mixture of higher and lower extractions. Consider the tasty point in Figure 7: One can approximate its flavor pro- file by blending two shots: (1) a low extraction/high dose (purple point) and (2) a high extraction/low dose (green point). This procedure can more economically yield a shot with a flavor profile that should approximate that which was previously only obtainable in an economically inefficient partially clogged shot. Blending shots does double the total volume of the beverage, and the procedure comes with the added combinatorial complexity associated with calibrating two shots that, when mixed together, yield superior flavor. We expect only the most enthusiastic practi- tioners would consider this approach, but it may well be actionable in an industrial setting where extraction is carried out in bulk.

I often chuckle when (our) animations may have more complex math that consume more resources than the awaited logic/call that they gate.

Users will get used to ensuring a stable supply of said sponsored products, otherwise Optimus may get mad if said product was not in the fridge.

Apple rescued itself from bankruptcy with the iPod. When mobile phones began to gain storage for MP3s and internet access, Apple saw the writing on the wall for their cash cow. They pushed a multitouch acquisition from room-scale projection to another level for handheld devices, and then married that with its supply chain breakthroughs at the time. Now it sees the writing on the wall for iPhone and the relevancy of all the halo products and services once more ambient on-person computing becomes common.

I'm sorry, but no. Apple was a quite stable company in 2001 before the iPod. It was saved from bankruptcy with the iMac and the early Jobs era of Macs. The iPod helped rocket Apple to the stratosphere, but the company would have been fine without it.

Writing is on the wall for the iPhone? That couldn’t be further from the truth.

A bike/stroller FLARM and auto manufacturers supporting it would be fantastic

Ingenuity's wobble from a color vs bw frame is a great example of solvable but surprising latency problems along the way.

“Coffee trade” is not monolith. There is commodity and specialty. The specialty side has been moving more toward just in time inventory for a while. It’s shocking how long the farm-to-processor(s)-to-distributors-to-roaster-to-brewer/consumer span can be and how many warehousing and exchange steps there are. Moving to just in time is quite disruptive for many business models; it’s not just this jump in price.

The amount of copium when it comes to China vs US is illogical. If you’ve ever done business in China, you know there are honest folk and there are officials who do backroom deals that flaunt or bend the law, particularly abroad. If there’s money to be had, it will be made. If there’s points to be scored on the latest edict, they will be scored. If it needs to be done, but the public can’t handle hearing about it for their own good, it shall be so.

The same is true of US officials. I still dont think any of them are running scam centers.

Not hard at all.