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LIFESTYLE
Is Apple Intelligence Making Up Words Now?
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As powerful as LLMs can be, all have one shared weakness: hallucination. For reasons beyond our understanding, AI models have a habit of making things up, totally out of the blue. A response might be accurate, with well-cited sources and relevant information; then, all of a sudden, the AI pushes a false claim, or mistakenly interprets an ironic forum comment as fact. (That’s how you end up with Google’s AI Overviews recommending adding glue to your pizza.) Some LLMs may hallucinate less than others, but none are immune. That’s why anytime you use a chatbot, you’ll see some kind of warning on-screen, letting you know that the AI can make mistakes. Apple Intelligence, Apple’s AI platform, is no exception here. When the company first rolled out its AI, it included notification summaries as a “perk.” Apple had to quickly backtrack, however, once the feature started incorrectly summarizing news alerts—such as in one case, when Apple Intelligence condensed a BBC headline to read that United Healthcare shooting suspect Luigi Mangione had killed himself in jail. The company later restored the feature but included some additional guardrails, like putting news summaries in italics.Apple Intelligence might be making up new wordsI stumbled across this post on the r/iOS subreddit on Thursday, which adds an interesting note to the AI hallucination discussion. The post reads, “Anyone else get fake words in their AI summaries?” with an attached screenshot, showing off notification summaries for the Acme Weather app. The first sentence reads: “Imbixtent light rain for the hour.” Ah, imbixtent rain. At least it’s only for an hour. Wait; imbixtent?”
Despite sounding plausibly like a real word, inbixtent is, in fact, totally made up. The poster didn’t share exactly what the notification says, so we can’t know what words Apple Intelligence is working from here. What we do know is the poster saw “imbixtent” three times, and they aren’t alone. Looking past the jabs poking fun at the weather app OP uses, some comments on the post affirm that others have seen Apple Intelligence making up fake words in its notification summaries. One commenter said they’ve seen “flemulating” in one summary, and “tranqued” in a Mail summary; another shared that they saw “stricively” instead of strictly on two separate occasions.

What do you think so far?

I can’t find any other examples on the internet showing off this phenomenon, and I personally don’t use notification summaries on my iPhone, so I haven’t seen this issue myself. I couldn’t say for sure how widespread this issue is, or whether it’s limited to a certain version of iOS, a specific device, or one app over another. One of the commenters has a theory, however: They think when the on-device AI model Apple Intelligence uses can’t shorten the original phrase on its own, it makes up a portmanteau to accommodate. In their words, the AI “yolos” a “vibes-word,” like imbixtent. They say this happens to them most with the Weather app’s summaries. Does Apple Intelligence make up words in your summaries?Again, there’s no telling whether this affects a large number of Apple users or just a small fraction. The fact that I can only find one post about it, with two commenters sharing similar experiences, leads me to believe it’s the latter, but I’d love to hear from anyone who has a similar experience. If you use Apple Intelligence’s notification summaries, please let me know if you’ve seen made-up words on your end. I may need to turn the feature on to keep an eye out.



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LIFESTYLE
Hacks Every Google Chat User Should Know
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If you’re in the Google ecosystem or use Google Workspace at work, Google Chat is a popular choice for messaging and collaboration. The app replaced Hangouts in Gmail (RIP), originally launching for business before rolling out to everyone. Regardless of the context for using Google Chat, there are a handful of hacks to maximize its features. Add Chat to Gmail to keep everything in one tabIf you already have too many tabs open—and one of them is Gmail—you don’t actually need another one for Google Chat. Instead, you can add Chat to your Gmail taskbar and toggle between your inbox and chat interface in the same tab (as long as they are under the same Google Account). Hit the Settings gear at the top of your Gmail window and tap See all settings. Select the Chat and Meet tab and hit the radio button next to Google Chat. You can also manage your Chat settings from this tab. For Gmail on mobile, go to Settings > Chat and toggle Show the chat tab on. Google Chat has a desktop app—if you use ChromeFor those who prefer a desktop app over a browser window, you can download the Google Chat app. While this is a standalone app rather than an extension, Chrome must be open and running for the app to work. You don’t need to use Chrome for your default browser, though. To install the app, open chat.google.com in Chrome and either click the Install icon or go to More > Install Google Chat. From there, you can launch Chat from your desktop.
Schedule Chat messages for laterThe ability to schedule messages for later means you can draft chats while they’re top of mind but have them send when you actually want them to be seen by the recipient. This is handy for communicating with colleagues who have different working hours, saving messages for someone returning from vacation, or scheduling recurring check-in chats. Draft your message and click the down arrow next to the Send button, then select either a suggested send time or set a custom one. Set Do Not Disturb periods If you don’t want to receive notifications at all hours, set up Do Not Disturb to activate when you’re done with work. This will mute alerts from Google Chat during set time frames. In your Chat window, go to Settings > Notifications and scroll down to Do not disturb schedules. You can toggle on one of the default options or hit Create new to make a custom schedule. Be sure to enable Match do not disturb schedule to time zone, especially if your team spans multiple time zones.Get email notifications for unread messagesThere might be times when you have Google Chat closed or push notifications turned off but still want to see a summary of important messages. You can enable email notifications for unread direct messages or @mentions to get a reminder for Chat messages that you haven’t read for more than 12 hours. On desktop, go to Settings > Notifications and toggle Get email notifications for unread direct messages or @mentions on. Open multiple chats in window modeTo keep from having to toggle back and forth between multiple conversations in Google Chat on desktop, you can open them in pop-out windows to see them side by side. From your Home screen in chat, tap the three vertical dots (Options) on the right side and hit Open in a pop-up. Alternatively, you can hit the pop-up icon at the top of any DM or space. Note that you can’t pop out individual threads. Add individual messages to TasksGoogle Chat obviously plays nicely with other Google apps, including Tasks. If there’s an action item in a Chat conversation, you can put it on your Tasks to-do list by pressing the three-dot menu > Add to Tasks. On mobile, long-press the message and go to More > Add to Tasks. If you have Tasks added to your right-hand panel in Chat, you can view and organize your list in the same window as your conversations.

What do you think so far?

Use search filters to find specific messagesJust like other Google apps, Chat has advanced filters to narrow down search results and help you find specific messages in your spaces and conversation histories. Type your query into the search bar at the top of the window, then select from any of the following filters: You can further sort by recency and relevancy. Turn off chat history to auto-delete messagesFor sensitive messages you don’t want saved in your chat history, there’s a disappearing messages-like feature in Google Chat that will delete new messages from your chat log after 24 hours. To enable it, open the conversation, click the down arrow next to the chat title, and select Turn off history. Your log will show which messages are sent with history on and off so you know which ones will be deleted. Get conversation summaries from GeminiIf you’re have a Google Workspace account, you can ask Gemini to summarize read and unread conversations in Chat so you don’t have to go back and review every message individually. Summaries are available for DMs (group and individual), spaces, and threads. Conversation summaries are enabled by default for eligible accounts—to use the feature, choose a read or unread conversation in Google Chat or Chat in Gmail, hover over it in the Home tab, and click Summarize. You can also summarize unread messages in a conversation by opening the conversation and selecting Summarize unread.



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LIFESTYLE
G.K. Chesterton on How to Dig for the “Submerged Sunrise of Wonder” – The Marginalian
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There is a myth we live with, the myth of finding the meaning of life — as if meaning were an undiscovered law of physics. But unlike the laws of physics — which predate us and will postdate us and made us — meaning only exists in this brief interlude of consciousness between chaos and chaos, the interlude we call life. When you die — when these organized atoms that shimmer with fascination and feeling — disband into disorder to become unfeeling stardust once more, everything that filled your particular mind and its rosary of days with meaning will be gone too. From its particular vantage point, there will be no more meaning, for the point itself will have dissolved — there will only be other humans left, making meaning of their own lives, including any meaning they might make of the residue of yours.
These are the thoughts coursing through this temporary constellation of consciousness as I pause at the lush mid-June dandelion at the foot of the hill on my morning run — the dandelion, now a fiesta of green where a season ago the small sun of its bloom had been, then the ethereal orb of its seeds, now long dispersed; the dandelion, existing for no better reason than do I, than do you — and no worse — by the same laws of physics beyond meaning: these clauses of exquisite precision punctuated by chance.
Nebular by Maria Popova. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy)
And yet, somehow, against the staggering cosmic odds otherwise, we get to experience this sky, these trees, these colors, these loves we live. The recognition of this unbidden miracle of chance is the fundamental matter of meaning — the great awakening from the myth.
How to awaken to this miraculousness and begin to make meaning is, of course, the great creative challenge of life.
All of this — the dandelion, the insistence on wonder as the sieve for meaning — reminded me of a some passages by G.K. Chesterton (May 29, 1874–June 14, 1936) — philosopher, impassioned early eugenics opponent, prolific author of several dozen books, several hundred poems and short stories, and several thousand essays — from The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton (public library).
G.K. Chesterton at seventeen
A century after Baudelaire observed that “genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will,” and a generation before Dylan Thomas insisted that “children in wonder watching the stars, is the aim and the end,” Chesterton looks back on his early life and how it fomented the animating ethos of his later life as a literary artist and thinker:
What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.
With an eye to the absurdity of pessimism as a life-orientation, given the astonishing good luck of existing at all in a universe where the probability is overwhelmingly against it, he adds:
No man* knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains… [there is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life [is] to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he [is] actually alive, and be happy.
Once Chesterton found the art through which to channel this blaze of astonishment, he found his writing “full of a new and fiery resolution to write against the Decadents and the Pessimists who ruled the culture of the age.” He reflects:
The primary problem for me, certainly in order of time and largely in order of logic… was the problem of how men could be made to realise the wonder and splendour of being alive, in environments which their own daily criticism treated as dead-alive, and which their imagination had left for dead.
Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
And so we get to the dandelion:
I had from the first an almost violently vivid sense of those two dangers; the sense that the experience must not be spoilt by presumption or despair… I asked through what incarnations or prenatal purgatories I must have passed, to earn the reward of looking at a dandelion… [or a] sunflower or the sun… But there is a way of despising the dandelion which is not that of the dreary pessimist, but of the more offensive optimist. It can be done in various ways; one of which is saying, “You can get much better dandelions at Selfridge’s,” or “You can get much cheaper dandelions at Woolworth’s.” Another way is to observe with a casual drawl, “Of course nobody but Gamboli in Vienna really understands dandelions,” or saying that nobody would put up with the old-fashioned dandelion since the super-dandelion has been grown in the Frankfurt Palm Garden; or merely sneering at the stinginess of providing dandelions, when all the best hostesses give you an orchid for your buttonhole and a bouquet of rare exotics to take away with you. These are all methods of undervaluing the thing by comparison; for it is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such captious comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all; and above all no wonder at being thought worthy to receive them.
Dandelion by Jackie Morris from The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane — a spell against the erasure of wonder from this world
Find some kindred thought in this epochs-wide meditation on the flower and the meaning of life, starring Emily Dickinson, Michael Pollan, and the Little Prince, then revisit Roar Like a Dandelion — poet Ruth Krauss’s lost serenade to wonder, found and turned into a modern picture-book by artist Sergio Ruzzier.



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