Solstinox

Wouldn't give Phil or Apple marketing that much credit. They're good, they're not that good.

Guess Scott Forstall did not make extraordinary technical OR leadership contributions to personal computing while at the company. Bummer.

One of the ugliest and more difficult to grasp charts Apple has put together in a long time. Desktops vs. notebooks vs. a sickly light shining on bathroom tiles in the background.

The kind of people who make and buy these technologies say, “you just need more data/a better algorithm.”

They don’t get that you could have 99.99999% of all possible information on a person AND that the missing 0.00001% could change everything you know about them.

The question, if you have the luxury of asking it, is do you want to sign away a big chunk of your life to one of these companies?

Oh it's absolutely possible that if they had settled in the 1920s they'd eventually get screwed anyway.

Palestinians got screwed over by something geopolitical. Again and again they were egged on by their Arab neighbors to walk away from more equitable treaties. All in the name of geopolitical Arab nationalism. Today their Arab neighbors are building cutting edge cities, while Palestinians are asking for a fraction of what they were offered in the 1920s/30s.

Look around at all the companies shaking taxpayers for loose change because they could not handle a moderate economic downturn. A responsible company needs a cash stockpile for the same reason a responsible person needs savings, to weather storms.

The way I read that, the problem isn’t exclusive deals. It’s Amazon signing exclusive deals.

What do you think about this: authors can sign exclusive with non-monopolistic entities?

Harm means to hurt or injure. If I write a book and exclusively circulate it among my closest friends, am I harming you because there is 1 less book you for you to happen upon?

I like how some still characterize Apple's money pile as a weakness. The last five months showed Apple's cash pile to be a wise choice in a world where most businesses can't weather a few weeks of global perturbance without shaking tax payers for loose change.

You don't see people sit around staring off into space. Not trying to sit. Not trying to follow some gimmicky Sitting™ 2.0™ technique. Just sitting. In idle.

Slow breathing is just a gimmick here. The change came from realizing what cats everywhere already know. It's good to idle.

The only vocal minority that counts in business is the minority writing the biggest checks. They probably get access to roadmaps anyway.

This is cool! The visualizations could be a little finer, but it's neat to see these trends.

People have tackled this stuff for millennia. By all means focus on the emergent structures, as that's the only way to learn about that structure. If you only study the modern proxies for these structures ("network theory") you miss out on great stuff.

An Aesop's Fable from 2000+ years ago about influence in a network:

"A trumpeter being taken prisoner in a battle, begged hard for quarter. "Spare me, good sirs, I beseech you," said he, "and put me not to death without cause, for I have killed no one myself, nor have I any arms but this trumpet only." "For that very reason," said they who had seized him, "shall you the sooner die, for without the spirit to fight, yourself, you stir up others to warfare and bloodshed."

He who incites strife is worse than he who takes part in it."

Coronaviruses make up a smaller portion of colds. Call me a pessimist, but it's more likely for this coronavirus to branch off into new varieties that need updated vaccines.

Look into network science. Albert-László Barabási does cool work in the space.

Don't get too dazzled by proxies.

Ideas propagate through people. If you want to get people, read some fiction, some history, and some philosophy.

Do you know what you want to do? Do that. Don't know what you want to do? Sit around and be bored for a while. Your natural curiosity will kick in. Follow where it leads.

If you want to work in "the world of atoms" that Peter Thiel likes to refer to, there is a lot of money to be made in dealing with corrosion. In the US, it eats away 200-300 billion every year.

Companies that get to be as big as Intel are destined for this kind of failure.