Hello, hi! Welcome to the Tuesday edition of the daily digest! In today’s highlight, I’m covering the latest update from the beloved camera app Halide. It stands out by having no AI. But first…

The headlines: 

🤖 Anthropic has published the system prompts that make Claude really tick. 

📱 Apple’s next big iPhone will take place on September 9th, according to the company.

✍️ Elon Musk has thrown his support behind California’s AI regulation bill.

As AI and image processing continues to redefine photography, it's becoming harder to tell when a photo is truly a photo—or something else entirely. Companies like Google, Samsung, and Apple are pushing tools that tweak, merge, and alter your images with ease. But with these powerful features, one question arises: Is the final image still a photo or something entirely new?

Halide, the beloved iPhone camera app, is challenging this trend with its new “Process Zero” feature. This update removes all AI and heavy processing from the photo equation, offering a return to basics. Instead of automated enhancements, Process Zero delivers raw, natural output—similar to what you'd get from a camera from decades ago.

Halide has always offered control over how images are processed, whether using the standard iPhone processor or Apple’s ProRAW. Process Zero takes this a step further by capturing a simple 12-megapixel image as a RAW DNG file without any post-capture processing. This means faster captures, perfect for fast-moving subjects.

Lux Optics, creators of Halide, likens this to shooting on film: you might get color quirks or grain, but the trade-off is a more organic, untouched image. Their comparisons highlight how much processing typically happens—sometimes improving clarity but also losing natural texture. Whether you prefer a fully-processed or raw image is a matter of taste.

Halide isn’t rejecting AI; it’s offering photographers more choice. With Process Zero, you start with the most natural version of the scene, free of digital manipulation, and can decide later how you want to edit it. 

PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS 

PackPack is an AI-driven bookmark management tool tailored for saving content from online resources like news and social media. 

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DEVELOPER TOOLS

Exopods help you deploy the backend, frontend, or open-source apps under one umbrella with features like deployment from GitHub, flexible pay-as-you-go pricing, and more.

Ragie is a fully managed RAG-as-a-Service built for developers, offering easy-to-use APIs/SDKs and instant connectivity to Google Drive, Notion, and more.

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