We’ll spare you our standard rant on why saying “Coming Up” should only be done in song, and should only be done with the words “everything” and “roses,” before and after.

But it’s Friday, and we’re going to aim for a perfect score of posting each day this week by bringing you something from our new tradition of sharing interesting things you might want to read and a few more things you might want to spend time checking out this weekend. (Of course, you can choose to look at these things any time you wish to, especially if you work on weekends and have more free time on other days!)

We have selected several selections related to a single theme this weekend, and that theme is AI, also known as Artificial Intelligence.

We consider ourselves to be reasonably intelligent and decent learners of new things. Candidly, we have not made significant progress on our path to achieving a basic mastery of AI. Now specifically, we are talking about using a “generative AI” chatbot tool, and not something that is “AI-powered” such as Grammarly, Notion, Jasper or the like. Instead, we are referring to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, CoPilot (now available on many Microsoft Windows computers in some form), and similar services.

And thus we have been on a quest to learn more about “prompt engineering.” This is simply the skill of interacting with the AI service (and by interacting, we actually mean typing out on a keyboard) and asking the precise question you want. The more precise and understandable your question, the more likely you are to get the AI to do exactly what you want.

Sounds simple enough, but it is anything but. There are a large number of rules, let alone tips and tricks, that are involved. We receive multiple offers daily from online services, coaches, and charlatans who promise to make us AI masters in no time at all. We haven’t spent our money on those, well, not many of them at least, and you shouldn’t either.

In fact, you don’t have to spend a dime, because the good folks at Google will teach you how to become a “prompt engineering ninja” for free. Yes, the search giant offers a free online course to help you learn “AI Prompting Basics” with “Google Prompting Essentials.” Click here to go to their website.

Full disclosure: this is a basic-level course, and there may be an effort to “upsell” you to take other online Google courses via the online class provider Coursera. But we haven’t spent anything yet, and are learning a lot from this free offering. Worth checking out.

Speaking of checking things out, we’ve found some real revelations in the new versions of one of the most widely used tools on our computers. That tool would be the web browser. Like many, we use Chrome on Windows PCs and Safari on our Macs. Microsoft tries to force its Edge browser on us from time to time and we tend to curse at it being so intrusive. Besides, aren’t we living in the world of AI now? Shouldn’t we be able to type in whatever we need to know and have it answered for us, rather than just mainly getting pages of links? Yes, we know that Google is incorporating more AI-style answers into its web search results, but that feels like it is in addition to the old-school style of searching the web.

A startup called “The Browser Company” has been tackling this issue, and they have two browsers you might want to download and try on your own computer. WARNING: On behalf of IT staff everywhere, we caution you not to install this on your work computer without getting approval from the tech team that it is safe to do so. Many organizations have policies on downloading and installing any software that isn’t “approved for company use.”

Don’t get on the bad side of the IT peeps. Trust us, it never ends well.

The Browser Company developed an alternative to the Chrome web browser that seemingly everyone uses. It’s called the Arc browser, and it’s worth trying out. Arc is the company’s initial browser software that transforms the way you use a browser into an experience centered on multitasking in a much easier way. Arc is available for both Windows and Macs, as well as the Arc Search app for your Apple or Google-powered smartphones. You don’t have to be a super geek to give Arc a whirl and see if it makes the online experience of using the web a bit easier. Did we mention that it’s free and does a great job of blocking ads and tracking of your browser history? Yes, it does all that too.

However, we know some of you out there are more “Geek Curious” than others, and aren’t afraid of trying things that are more on the “bleeding edge” of what’s new. For you, there is The Browser Company’s newer browser offering, which is still in beta release and requires an invitation to participate. (Don’t worry, we can help you get in — if you’re interested.) This new browser is called “Dia” and it can best be described as… well, it’s not easy to explain. The Browser Company team created this video to help explain it.

OK, so they may be software geniuses, rather than great makers of explainer videos. Our answer is that if you could hook up a web browser directly to an AI service like ChatGPT, and then that one bit of software would learn what you want to know and just how you want to know it–whenever you have a question that you go to the web looking to answer. It is hard to explain, but shockingly easy to use what they have created.

A few caveats, the Dia browser is currently in beta, as we mentioned, and is currently only available for Macs. If you have a Mac and you’re interested in being invited to the beta to give it a spin, shoot us a quick email to editor@tvnd.com with a subject line that just says “Dia Beta Invite,” and we’ll send you an invite that should get you past the waitlist to try it out. We believe that if you conduct extensive online research or simply want to explore how AI can enhance a journalist’s work, trying Dia will be worth your time.

One final caveat, we don’t love the name “Dia” especially as the letters DIA can also stand for the Denver International Airport or the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is probably not a website that you accidentally want to wind up on if your current level of paranoia runs as high as our may from time to time.

Another thing for you to read this weekend is more of a potential “rabbit hole” that you might end up going down. With the whole AI boom, there are new developments every day, if not every hour in the tech space that are worth keeping up with. Doing so is no simple task. Even for the people who lean more into their “Supergeekyness.” Not that we are talking about ourselves, but “other” people we know quite well.

We find that Techmeme.com is our secret weapon for staying up-to-date on tech news. In a format that can best be described as “information dense” in much the same way that “Drudge Report” is for general news. It’s free, but supported by clearly marked “Sponsor posts.” If you want an even more streamlined way to keep up with tech, the Techmeme folks offer an outstanding daily podcast that is worth listening to on your drive home. That’s probably why they cleverly call it “The Techmeme Ride Home.” Available wherever you subscribe to your favorite podcasts.

We would like to inform you that we will be taking some time away from our computers next week, and therefore, new articles will not be posted here daily. How will you know when you have something new for you to read? Well, you could subscribe to “The Topline” by clicking here and never miss anything from us going forward. That’s because each dispatch we publish would be automatically sent to your email inbox. The best part is that we do this for free, which seems a bit prudent given that, despite the notion that every journalist is heading to Substack to make millions on their own, a Pew Research report released this week states that only 1% of Americans paid for any news last year. Click to read their report.

And with that bonus item available for you to read, we’ll wrap this up by wishing you a great weekend doing whatever it is that you want to do. Cheers!