Not only do they have nuclear mutually assured destruction, the US & China have economic MAD. Nowhere is this more obvious than Apple’s supply chain. If either govt disturbs it, Apple’s stock tanks, or Chinese manufacturing gets wiped out. (Or both.)
From a great Lunch with the FT interview with Ted Chiang:
“There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?’ And someone else said, ‘A poor choice of words in 1954’,” he says. “And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the ’50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we’re having now.”
So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics.
“It’s genuinely amazing that . . . these sorts of things can be extracted from a statistical analysis of a large body of text,” he says. But, in his view, that doesn’t make the tools intelligent. Applied statistics is a far more precise descriptor, “but no one wants to use that term, because it’s not as sexy”.
This is going to be a copy/paste of a Facebook post, and a comment thread with Andrew Laurence, a friend of mine. Mostly to stick my flag in the ground… how often do you get to scoop John Gruber?
Regarding Apple’s new $3500 Augmented Reality headset they’ve named Vision Pro that was revealed today: Did you notice how no one in the meetings the wearer is connecting to is also shown using a Vision Pro? No? I noticed that.
I do like the Bank of America Circle-Vision 360 panoramas, though.
Thinking in the long-term, though, they might be prototyping a brainwave sensitive UI. I mean, doesn’t this look like an Oath of Fealty/Minority Report mash-up?
Andrew: I noticed that no users were wearing eyeglasses. They eventually mentioned the Zeiss-provided prescription inserts.
Andrew: I’m skeptical of this entire category.
Me: I am, too. It’s very Dilbert-esque — because they have the tech, they’re doing it, even though it solves no problem. OTOH, in terms of prototyping a UI in preparation for a future physical interface (read: implants), it’s interesting.
Hm. Maybe I’m wrong. They’re positioning it as entertainment (so far). Well… Being a passenger. Either car or plane. Better than those damned tray tables and a laptop — if you can get the wireless pipes to the vehicle. But if driverless cars come about, we’ll all be passengers.
Oh, and I’ll say this before Gruber does: given Apple’s use of the word Pro for products, that implies a cheaper version is in the pipeline. (Checks: yeah, he hasn’t posted on Vision Pro yet. But I’ll bet the Jobs estate he’ll mention this when he does.)
Andrew: Like the Watch’s introduction, I was struck that yes it does new things, but how is it useful? What problems does it solve? The Watch eventually found its market and footing. I‘m sure these AR/VR thingies will too, eventually. (I don’t own a wear any wrist-device. I stopped wearing them nearly 20 years ago and have yet to find a set of usecases that earns back the spot on my wrist.)
Me: Just about every health professional I’ve seen (and I’ve seen many since 2022-01-08) wears one. They’ve got the health sector (not unlike the educational sector with students) locked on the Watch.
My wife and I were driving in our car. I was an IT contractor, and working with a client migrating from Windows 7 to Windows 10.
My team would hire someone, and this would involve getting a variety of network permissions, and equipment for them. The new hires would always have to sit around doing nothing, because their permissions hadn’t come through yet, and we didn’t have the equipment to give them if they had.
“You know what these guys need? They need to use Gantt charts, figure out how long the different paths take, and then tell new hires to show up on the day everything’s ready for them… Instead of having them lurk about. Fun as that can be, depending on the person.”
Ulrika looked at me. She then echoed Joan Kroc’s reported answer to Ray Kroc when he told her he’d bought the Padres (“Honey, what’s a Padre?”) — “Honey, what’s a Gantt chart?”
“You know. A Gantt chart. Stacked horizontal lines? Used to manage a project? You use Office… They’re in Excel, I’m pretty sure.”
“Well, you’re driving, so don’t try to show me just now.”
Now, normally, this would just be a very minor anecdote… except for one thing:
I started seeing ads for Gantt charts in both GMail and Facebook. Ulrika started seeing ads for Gantt charts in both GMail and Facebook.
It’s been four years since I was on that contract, and Facebook still shows me this:
We both have Android phones. We weren’t using them at the time.
It’s really unlikely Ulrika would have been a target audience, given that she didn’t know what they were until that conversation. And it’s a very specialized product.
Don’t tell me the phones don’t listen.
If Lucy Fell (1996) would be a mostly forgettable movie, except for the way some of the performances are plainly early versions of characters the actors would take up later. Lucy Ackerman, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, is the template from which her portrayal of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City was drawn. Bwick Elias, flower-child idiot artist, is the ur-goon of every idiot Ben Stiller has played thereafter (notably Zoolander).
But there’s also this great scene, at 0:56. Lucy and Bwick are on a date, at Bwick’s apartment:
^^^
{Bwick joins Lucy on a couch, facing a painting we’ve seen him working on previously.}
BWICK: It’s symbolic. {He gestures at the painting, which stays unseen.} Life equals love which actually equals death. Life equals death.
{We cut to see the painting}
LUCY: It’s symbolic?
BWICK: Yeah.
LUCY: Symbolic death?
BWICK: Symbols of life, and death, and love. Life equals death which is in the middle. The sub-set is love. Which is really what the symbol is. Love. Life equals love equals death. It’s symbolic.
LUCY: Wait. {She gets up off the couch, and walks over to the painting} You have a woman with “LIFE” painted on her, uh… area, and she’s stabbing to death a man with a knife that says “LOVE” on it. And then in big, bold letters it says, “LIFE=LOVE=DEATH.”
{beat}
I don’t know that it’s very symbolic, Bwick. It’s kind of spelled out.
BWICK: So… It sucks. HANS!
LUCY: No. It doesn’t suck. It’s just that it’s not really… You know, it’s… It’s a literal painting.
{As she says this, an assistant who looks like Fabio — long blonde hair, overalls, no shirt — splashes some sort of fluid onto the painting.}
LUCY: It’s not symbolic. Which is… Fine.
BWICK: Hm-hm.
LUCY: It’s literal.
BWICK: Right. It just… Literally sucks.
{We see that Hans is patiently standing next to the painting, now with a blowtorch in his hand.}
LUCY: No.
BWICK: No, you’re right. You’re right. It just symbolically sucks. HANS!
{Hans turns on the blowtorch, and sets the painting ablaze.}
BWICK: It certainly isn’t very literal any more, is it?
{Lucy turns to the painting, as it continues to burn.}
LUCY: No, it’s… It’s symbolic.
Interestingly, this morphed when we got a Mercedes wagon. When trying to figure out some arcane feature of the car, I always imagined some engineer in Stuttgart, whom I had to think like to understand: HANS!
(Although sometimes I would credit his partner, Fritz.)
This method also is required for Microsoft products, both apps and operating systems. Step back, and think like a programmer in Redmond, not like a general computer user.
I already knew that ssa.gov, the site for Social Security, won’t let you sign in from an iPad. It doesn’t tell you that’s the problem — you get an error message saying there are “technical difficulties” — but that’s what happens.
ttp.cbp.dhs.gov — the site for the Trusted Traveler Program, which includes things like Global Entry — lets you sign in just fine.
irs.gov lets you sign in. Or so I thought. You can look at your account. You can make payments. But set up a payment program to pay your taxes on a monthly schedule? “Technical difficulties” again.
Fortunately I have a Windows 11 laptop in here, so I could do what I needed to do. But the trial and error to find out what is allowed, and what isn’t (especially since they won’t just, you know, tell me) may drive me mad someday. (Statler! Waldorf! Stop that snickering about “someday.”)
This has been bouncing around for a while, but as far as I can tell Hugh MacLeod, the brilliant scribbler and crafter of bon mots said it first in May of 2022.
The Metaverse is The Segway of our time.
What else can you say of something even the developers refuse to use?
Dave Winer wrote that, back in 2005. “People come back to places that send them away. Memorize that one.”
I did, Dave.
Alert users might have noticed I make my posts linkeriffic. One of the things I’ve missed on Twitter and Facebook is the ability to link more than once, maybe twice. Because links are a form of footnoting, to me. Even Ted Nelson might appreciate that. And I want to reach beyond Wikipedia entries, and go to people’s own sites, if possible.