I apologize if this comes off as dismissive, but why would hype matter? Google is already everywhere, I'd imagine they don't really have to generate hype like a startup would.
If Apple didn't make the iPhone, wouldn't someone else have? I feel like the iPhone is a natural progression from what came before it (cell phones, PDAs, mp3 players, and other, more niche varieties of pocket devices). I feel like the iPhone isn't some blip on the technological timeline that wouldn't have happened otherwise. It just so happened that, by whatever factors were at play, Jobs was in the right place at the right time.
Civilization done in this way would be really, really cool. So cool I'm surprised it isn't already a thing. Imagine a City Skylines-style game done like this! I wonder if there is some technical reason this isn't done more, I would be way more into a board-game style approach than the motion-sickness inducing first person perspective most VR games take. I know the Vision Pro's primary MO is this "spatial computing" AR approach, but surely there are ways of accomplishing this without requiring an almost $4000 device, right?
I feel one could make a similar argument about any technological advancement and subsequent abstraction. A farmer pulling a cultivator with a tractor certainly has less of a “feel” for the details of the land and climate than someone doing the same with a handheld implement, yet cultivating manually is not economically viable at scale.
Not to say there isn’t a loss; there absolutely is. But, for better or worse, it has long been the case that the individual is responsible for balancing the beauty of psychological flow and craftsmanship against the literal economic output expected of them.
I think posts like this that frame this issue as exclusively a product of the rise of AI are missing the more fundamental piece: we use the tools, and in turn the tools change us. Just as we are what we eat, we are the tools we use. For better or worse.
I think both styles of game have their own appeal. City Skylines scratches a similar itch for me as Factorio and Oxygen Not Included does, where the fun comes from the progressive expansion and optimization of a design.
Based on the title I thought this would be about adapting Factorio for touch controls, but this is way more interesting. The folks at Wube have such a unique sense of technical curiosity.
Having updated from macOS 15 to 27, I think this is one of my favorite macOS releases in a while. macOS 27 is what I think each update should be: one, maybe two, major new features, and a ton of little tweaks and improvements everywhere. Not a bunch of new features that end up never getting touched for a decade, slowly getting worse over time. Hopefully the positive reception (at least, that I’ve seen) encourages Apple to do more future updates like this.
Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business? I’m for less consolidation in the tech industry, but I wonder whether a good balance could be struck between great services like these versus how they actually make money.
Not a developer, but I feel like Apple improving the defaults has been good for the ecosystem. The Reminders app is an example of this, because as it has gotten better over the years, the baseline for a good iOS to-do app has been raised, without reducing the market.
I wonder how much of this has to do with seeing someone you are close to work as a doctor makes being a doctor (or military recruit, SWE, etc.) seem real and achievable to you. When I was little I wanted to be a firefighter purely because my father was a firefighter; it wouldn’t surprise me if the same goes for a lot of other people.
I could see there being an 80/20-style argument for this sort of tool being used for more generic usecases, with "good designers" using Figma et al. for programs where the UI itself is a selling point.
This reminds me of this comment, which I feel is a somewhat unsatisfying explanation, given that despite these difficulties, Windows somehow makes it work.
I feel like people use the word “addiction” to refer to both chemical addiction and behavioral addiction, and that people understand that the latter is (usually) far less serious than the former.
> OpenAI launched Sora last September, aiming to expand its dominance among consumers by creating a TikTok-style social feed that allowed users to share AI-generated content with one another.
I never understood what this app was about. TikTok (and I would argue most modern social media platforms) isn’t really about sharing things with friends, it’s about entertainment. Most people watch TikToks and YouTube videos because they are entertaining. Beyond the initial 2-3 minutes of novelty, what do AI generated videos really have to offer when there is no shortage of people making professional, high quality content on competing platforms?
> Our findings suggest that brain synaptic plasticity evolves over 3–5 weeks in healthy humans following daily intake of escitalopram. This is the first in vivo evidence to support the hypothesis of neuroplasticity as a mechanism of action for SSRIs in humans and it offers a plausible biological explanation for the delayed treatment response commonly observed in patients treated with SSRIs.
Read about this study in an article and I thought it was interesting. I’m not a doctor, and my understanding the topic is purely based on my reading about it for curiosity’s sake. But I’ve always been curious about how SSRI’s work and how they are, seemingly, still pretty mysterious. It is fascinating to me that we’ve managed to make something that (save for the roughly 30% of people for whom they have no effect) works, yet we don’t quite know why.
I also think the neuroplasticity hypothesis is really interesting, and makes me wonder about how these drugs may change the way someone thinks in general, outside the specific realm of depression / anxiety.
Output: I am thrilled to announce that I have successfully spearheaded a critical infrastructure upgrade by single-handedly managing the end-to-end replacement of a mission-critical illumination unit. By identifying a single point of failure and implementing a high-impact solution, I’ve ensured 100% uptime for environmental visibility and optimized workspace productivity. Always striving for continuous improvement and leading the way toward a brighter future! #Leadership #Innovation #Infrastructure #ProblemSolver
It wouldn’t surprise me if this ends up being really popular with families. Parents with iPhones are (I’d imagine) far more likely to get their kids iPhones, and with Messages and FindMy I bet it’ll be the same here. Apple also has screen time and parental controls, so for parents wanting to get their kid a computer but worried about unrestricted Internet access, the MacBook Neo may be the most seamless option.
> Stevens turned down an offer from Harvard following his 1955 Pulitzer because he would’ve been forced to give up his vice-presidency position at Hartford Accident and Indemnity
“Q.ai is a startup developing a technology to analyze facial expressions and other ways for communication.”
This is an interesting acquisition given their rumored Echo Show / Nest Hub competitor (1). Maybe this is part of their (albeit flawed and delayed) attempt to revitalize the Siri branding under their Apple Intelligence marketing. When you have to say the exact right words to Siri, or else she will add “Meeting at 10” as an all day calendar event, people get frustrated, and that non-technical illusion of the “digital assistant” is lost. If this is the model of understanding Apple have of their customers’ perception of Siri, then maybe their thinking is that giving Siri more non-verbal personable capability could be a differentiating factor in the smart hub market, along with the LLM rebuild. I could also see this tying into some sort of strategy for the Vision Pro.
Now, whether this hypothetical differentiating factor is worth $2 billion, I’m not so sure on, but I guess time will tell.
Not an expert in LLM benchmarks, but I generally I think of benchmarks as being good particularly for measuring usefulness for certain usecases. Even if measuring LLMs is not as straightforward as, say, read/write speeds when comparing different SSDs, if a certain model's responses are consistently measured as being higher quality / more useful, surely that means something, right?
> And they keep whining without realizing how spoiled they are.
I think two things can be true at once: that there are many good things to appreciate about the modern world, and that the concerns they are raising are legitimate. There is room to have a bit of empathy here.