retskrad

Interesting perspective, thanks

Speaking of IQ, when I listen to interviews and podcasts of supposed high IQ people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, I struggle to see signs of intelligence (not saying that they don’t have above average IQ). I find that these 2 have a hard time sifting through the noise (competing thoughts) in their head to get to want they want to say (the signal).

When I listen to Steve Jobs, I hear someone who has very strong ability to sift through noise. So Jobs couldn’t see engineering in a new way like Elon does but Elon couldn’t do what Jobs did either.

Regarding Zuckerberg, from what I’ve read he is the Bill Gates type where he has the traditional variant of high IQ, aka raw hardware/horsepower but lower on creativity/imagination side.

So intelligence seems to have different shapes and sizes.

Look at the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad. It’s constantly nudging you to subscribe to some Apple service, like AppleCare, or to pay for more iCloud storage because your measly 5 GB is running out. If Tim Cook is this shameless, then ads in Maps are practically old-school Apple by comparison.

Speaking of these standardised tests, I think it's ridiculous that even for someone like Elon Musk, who read for up to 10 hours a day for most of his of pre college days and learned how to build rockets with the use of books och instruction manuals, only scored 730 on the Math section and 670 on the Verbal section for a total composite score of 1400. The fact that he couldn't get higher score means something is wrong with these tests. They are mirroring a very narrow frequency of aptitude.

Reading text is a recent phenomenon and the brain doesn't have hardware acceleration. I'm not surprised that less and less people read long form text. Becoming an intermediate reader is exhausting when you didn’t grow up with books. After 500 hours, I can only navigate titles like The Selfish Gene with middling comprehension. Black text on white background feels flat and dopamine free, yet the grind itself becomes the reward, and social media’s quick hits lose their appeal.

After reading the book "Apple in China", it’s hilarious to observe the contrast between Apple as a ruthless, amoral capitalist corporation behind the scenes and these WWDC presentations...

Ask the average woman in the US, Europe and even Asia if they cared about any plight that men might go through, like losing their jobs in some fashion. Most would shrug and move on. Why are men expected to show so much empathy for women they don’t even personally know? These days, men and women compete for the same jobs, degrees, and apartments. So why should men keep putting women first?

It’s time to stop writing in this elitist jargon. If you’re communicating and few people understands you, then you’re a bad communicator. I read the whole thing and thought: wait, was there a new thought or interesting observation here? What did we actually learn?

Apple’s App Store fees are to Apple what Search is to Google: a license to print money. On the plus side, this allows Apple to invest in extremely expensive, high precision hardware that other companies can’t afford, and it enables Google to fund R&D that led to breakthroughs like the Transformer architecture. But on the flip side, these companies also crush competition and stifle innovation in other areas. One could argue either way about whether these huge corporations are doing more good than harm or vice versa.

Interesting piece from Ben Thomson regarding Apple’s troubles in AI. He says this of Vision Pro:

https://stratechery.com/2025/apple-and-the-ghosts-of-compani...

“We already established above that the next paradigm is wearables. Wearables today, however, are very much in the pre-iPhone era. On one hand you have standalone platforms like Oculus, with its own operating system, app store, etc.; the best analogy is a video game console, which is technically a computer, but is not commonly thought of as such given its singular purpose. On the other hand, you have devices like smart watches, AirPods, and smart glasses, which are extensions of the phone; the analogy here is the iPod, which provided great functionality but was not a general computing device.

Now Apple might dispute this characterization in terms of the Vision Pro specifically, which not only has a PC-class M2 chip, along with its own visionOS operating system and apps, but can also run iPad apps. In truth, though, this makes the Vision Pro akin to Microsoft Mobile: yes, it is a capable device, but it is stuck in the wrong paradigm, i.e. the previous one that Apple dominated. Or, to put it another way, I don’t view “apps” as the bridge between mobile and wearables; apps are just the way we access the Internet on mobile, and the Internet was the old bridge, not the new one.”

Have we ever seen another company like Apple create world class hardware (the M4 chip in the iPad Pro is the worlds fastest single core chip) then actively make it a worse product by kneecapping it through software or artificial restrictions, not because of technical necessity, but to maintain control, extract rent, or block competition?

Gemini 2.5 Pro might be one of the best for coding but for creative tasks like writing and sharing ideas, I vastly prefer GPT 4o and GPT 4.5 to an even larger extent.

As long as ChatGPT uses Bing for searching the web, Google Search is not going anywhere.

It all falls down on Tim Cook. Can the board punish him for his decision to literally ignore Siri for the last 15 years? Even when ChatGPT entered the public consciousness several years ago, he still didn’t get the company going in the direction of Gen AI. This signals that he might not be fit for Apples current and future challenges. He failed to bring the car to market and Vision Pro headset has been DOA. And now the AI debacle.

When John Gruber, Apple's unofficial defence attorney, is shattered like this, you know it's bad. The stock market also agrees: ever since this Apple Intelligence debacle, Apple has lost several hundred billions of dollars in market value.

Sam Altman views Steve Jobs as one of his inspirations (he called the iPhone the greatest product of all time). So if you look at OpenAI in the lens of Apple, where you think about making the product enjoyable to use at all costs, then it makes perfect sense why you’d spend so much money to go from 4o to 4.5 which brings such subtle differences to power users.

The vast majority of users, which are over 300 million weekly, will mainly use 4o and whatever is the default. In the future they’ll use 4.5 and think it’s most human like and less robotic.

People say CPU benchmarks are meaningless (what does even 10-15% better mean in practice?) but LLM benchmarks are even more of a mystery. The same LLM will produce a novel output everytime you given it the exakt same prompt.

When Elon stripped the Twitter organisation down to its fundamental parts, saved tons of money and the service is still ran like usual, people said the he’s a moron and the service couldn’t possibly run without a bloated and inefficient workforce.

They were wrong. Now that Elon is applying the same philosophy to all of his companies and now the federal government, people are once again saying he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

At a certain point, you have to ask yourself if these people who complain like headless chickens are actually serious people …

ChatGPT has become a synonymous with chatbots and Thell be synonymous with AGI when it arrives. ChatGPT had 300 million weekly active users some time ago and it’s growing at an incredible clip. Normies now see OpenAI and chat bots like they view search engines and Google.

Monthly active users in a vacuum docent mean anything. Facebook has 3 billion monthly active users but has zero relevance. Bluesky and Threads have no cultural foot print compared to X.