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Apple’s Profit

From Daring Fireball’s Disney & Apple, Sitting In a Tree:

Apple was thriving [in 2006] — the Mac had completed its software transition from classic Mac OS to Mac OS X, and was beginning its hardware transition from PowerPC to Intel; the iPod was a cultural sensation and smash hit; and the company’s foray into its own retail stores was proving to be a, err, genius decision. …In October 2005 Apple announced its then-best-ever financial year: $14 billion in revenue, $1.3 billion in profit.

“Apple today generates more profit every 5 days than it did in the entire year of 2006.

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asides politics

Another week, another indictment

From the New Yorker’s In Georgia, Trump and His Gang Get the Mob Treatment:

There is a temptation to not even bother with the details, no matter how remarkable they may be. That which was unthinkable has now become something of a political routine: another week, another indictment…

“But, of course, there is nothing in the least bit routine about an ex-President being charged with the gravest offenses against the nation that one can imagine. And, even in this summer of Trump indictments, this new Georgia case stands out…

“Trump may believe the executive office comes with a magic get-out-of-jail-free card, but, even if the courts were to agree that it does, the card would only apply at the federal level. Georgia is outside the President’s jurisdiction. These are charges that Trump can’t kill.

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asides

Intellectual Understanding is Not Enough

From the Atlantic’s Hawaii is a Warning:

We live in an age of too much emotion, too much performative reaction, too much certainty, and entirely too much pessimism. All this shouting at one another has the effect of drowning out what actually deserves attention and concern, to say nothing of how it hurts our ability to come together and solve existential problems. But also—and this is a by-product of human resilience and adaptability, qualities that otherwise serve us well—sometimes understanding a phenomenon intellectually is not enough; it’s just not the same as the perspective you get when the flames are licking at your own door.”

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asides

A Worm’s Mind In A Lego Body

From A Worm’s Mind In A Lego Body:

Take the connectome of a worm and transplant it as software in a Lego Mindstorms EV3 robot – what happens next?

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asides

Apple is an AI Company Now

From The Atlantic’s Apple Is An AI Company Now:

Its conference unveiling [its iOS] updates included zero mentions of AI, now a buzzword for tech companies of all stripes. Instead, Apple used more technical language such as machine learning or transformer language model.

But Apple is pushing forward with AI in small ways, an incrementalist approach that nonetheless still might be the future of where this technology is headed.

[Don’t] expect any of the machine-learning features Apple announced this year to significantly alter the iPhone-user experience. They’ll just make it nominally better.

All of this is deeply Apple…focusing on what a feature does rather than how it does it. The fact that it’s using AI behind the scenes is no more relevant to users than, say, which programming language they used to create it.

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asides

The problem with anti-woke centrism

From CNN’s Chris Licht showed the problem with anti-woke centrism:

[W]hen we have a left that is pushing America to finish the work of the 1960s and create a true multicultural democracy and a right that is banning Black intellectual ideas from public schools, it’s a huge mistake for powerful non-Republicans in society to spend so much time bashing the left. This anti-woke centrism often sounds as though people are auditioning to be today’s version of the “white moderates” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. castigated six decades ago.

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What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?

From Stephen Wolfram:

We can say: “Look, this particular [neural] net [works]”—and immediately that gives us some sense of “how hard a problem” it is (and, for example, how many neurons or layers might be needed). But at least as of now we don’t have a way to “give a narrative description” of what the network is doing.