markjgsmith

Since moving to Android I've been using QR codes a lot more. I noticed that several products I've bought recently have QR codes that encode a url. It's kind of neat. Well it just occurred to me that the ability to share a url with someone nearby you could be very useful. Turns out you can do this in Chrome. It's just another option in the share menu. You don't need an internet connection, you don't need to exchange contact details or login info, the url is encoded into the weird looking pixelated image. The person nearby that you are sharing the link with just has to scan the image with their phone's 'scan qr code' feature, which most modern phones have.

BTW, I'm seeing QR codes everywhere here in Europe. I think you can even pay bills using them, but I haven't figured out how people are doing that yet. Stablecoins perhaps? #

Lots of insightful stuff in the latest Vergecast podcast, especially around AI and the future of the web. Great episode, worth listening to. A few snippets that stood out:

Nilay Patel (1:11:31): "The web is the place where the information is, is quickly getting abstracted away to the web is the database that the new AI Google search synthesises for you."

Nilay Patel (1:16:05): "The web is a miracle. Straightforwardly, the web is a miracle. We have, in the world, a giant interconnected interdependent mostly open application platform. That's weird."

David Pierce (1:19:18) asks “Do we still need websites?” And after a bunch of interesting discussion including a quote from Sundar Pichai saying “What is the web but a series of databases” and eventually lands on this thought:

"The fundamental question here is what happens when display adds don't work anymore? What is the business of the web for the people that have traditionally relied on display ads? [...] but if the web is a series of un-rendered databases, the whole business of the web is suddenly immediately gone."

Alex Heath: Are websites just going to become like driving a vintage car? It's going to be this thing you do because it's a luxury, it feels good, it's a bespoke unique experience, it's not as efficient, but you do it and you spend more money. I kind of feel like that's the direction websites are going to go. #