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Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be
Make no mistake, the folks Donald Trump has chosen for his cabinet are mortal. They are also fools.
According to Jeffery Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic, they were communicating via the messaging app Signal, about recent military plans to strike Houthi rebels in Yemen. Bad enough in and of itself, but they also included journalist Goldberg in on the plans.
According to Goldberg:
The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.
I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.
This is going to require some explaining. […]
And explain he does in this article which includes images from some of the messages between Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and more. Don’t worry. Goldberg does a better job of protecting sensitive data than the culprits do.
Obviously everyone but those in the cult of knee-benders and compliant media knows already that these guys are incompetent fools. Perhaps now the media will start calling this ship of fools out for what it actually is.
I don’t wonder at their incompetence or reckless behavior. I just wonder why they aren’t using government secure channels to do their dirty work. Has Elon Musk locked them out of that too?
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Adolescence: A Review
Adolescence. See it.
I’d like that to be all that I write about this sensational limited streaming series on Netflix, but there’s more I want to say.
You’ve probably heard of Adolescence. It’s become a well deserved hot topic of conversation because it’s an excellently done piece of storytelling that cuts through what seems like an impenetrable zeitgeist like a hot knife through melted butter. I’m glad to see that the hype tour surrounding its recent release ramp up after the series took off because something this good needs to be ballyhooed, bravoed, and brandished with flying banners.
For me, the bottom line, beyond just saying “see it” is that the producers and artists involved captured something we all know in our gut and make us face it. Captured it in a challenging way that they didn’t need to, but by accepting that challenge opened up those gut instincts with a rawness that touches nerves we may have all let somehow deaden. The painful intimacy of one family’s story opens up a chasm full of realizations that speak far beyond the specific issues so well portrayed.
In brief, a young boy is accused of stabbing a young girl and through the investigation we delve into a world of young boys and men influenced by Incel culture and bullying. A world not understood in this instance by the young boy’s family, or any one of the parents’ generation that we meet in the story. Watching the investigating detective’s son educate his father is a remarkable scene.
We follow the story through the boy’s arrest, booking and indictment, examination with a therapist, and the devastating conclusion as the family deals with the aftermath. Every moment is powerful. His arrest in the first episode is only the beginning of story that digs into every emotion there is when confronted with horrible moments that one would hope no family would ever have to endure. I can’t imagine any parent of young children, especially boys, watching this without wanting to take the doors off of their child’s bedroom doors and disconnect them from the Internet. It is tough to watch and it’s impossible to look away.
Toxic masculinity, patriarchy, bullying, isolation, fear, self-loathing, and the perils of social media become bigger monsters by the moment than any knife wielding attacker.
Director Philip Barantini, known for filming his stories in one take, uses that device to exquisite effect. He didn’t need to, but he and his team did and the payoff is exquisite. Each episode unfolds like a one-act play, filmed in one amazing traveling take. In later interviews it’s been revealed that they only did two full takes after a weekend’s rehearsal for each of the four episodes. The one take keeps you riveted as it ratchets up the tension, never letting you catch a visual breather from the story. How they filmed the second episode which takes place in and around a school is almost beyond imagining.
The cast is superb, especially 13-year old Owen Cooper as the young boy. In his acting debut he delivers a performance that is so outstanding that it takes your breath away. He’s not only a natural, his performance borders on the supernatural. Stephen Graham, who also co-authored the story with Jack Thorne, plays the boy’s father and strikes true in every millisecond he is on the screen. Well known for playing in-your-face tough guys, Graham’s journey through this story is like watching a rock face that has been the feature of a cliff, let go and crash into a million pieces. The rest of the cast is equally up to the task of matching these amazing performances.
The back story is that Graham, hearing about crimes featuring young boys stabbing young girls, felt that questions needed to be asked, the obvious one being “why is this happening?’ As is the case with all good drama and story telling Adolescence raises as many questions as it answers others. Certainly I imagine parents who see this, and they all should, will be asking the same questions the mother and father in the series do themselves.
On a larger scale, as we daily face an adult and supposedly mature world that seems stuck in adolescent, if not prepubescent misbehavior, celebrating toxic masculinity, bullying, and the perils of social media, this amazingly told story might at least give us a glimpse into how we looked away too often, when we knew we shouldn’t, ignoring so much at the cost of even more.
You can’t look away from this.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Sunday Morning Reading
Everything changes. Everything remains the same. Damnit. With that said, here is this week’s Sunday Morning Reading with links to articles worth sharing and perhaps pondering over. There’s a bit of satire, a golden toilet heist, and the evolving nature of a piece from draft to final polish. And, yes, there is politics. Everything changes. Everything remains the same. Damnit.
Let’s kick off with Tina He and The Last Human Choice. That link is to the final version of the story. I also strongly encourage you to check out the draft version she shared here.
Alex Reisner takes on The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem. The technical scale may indeed boggle, the human greed behind it is a story told too often.
The Apple Intelligence/Siri sucks discussion continues and will certainly do so for quite awhile. Andrew Williams in Wired says To Truly Fix Siri, Apple May Have To Backtrack on One Key Thing–Privacy. I hate to say it, but I think he’s right and wish he weren’t.
Good satire can often be hard to distinguish from the real thing. Eli Grober walks that line well in Sergey Brin: We Need You Working 60 Hours A Week So We Can Replace You As Soon As Possible.
John Passantino takes a look at the unraveling of Threads in Hanging by a Thread.
Clearing the throat and clogging up the arteries with a bit of political writing here’s James Thorton Harris with Imagine Deportation: When Nixon Tried To Pull A Trump On John Lennon. Everything changes, everything remains the same. Damnit.
In the category of “be careful what you wish for,” Phoebe Petrovic in ProPublica gives us How A Push To Amend The Constitution Could Help Trump Expand Presidential Power. We’ve already let quite a few demons out of Pandora’s Box, I’m not so sure we want to crack it open any wider.
Speaking of demons, Elizabeth Lopatto tells us How Trump And Musk Built Their Own Reality. Excellent piece.
John Pavlovitz says we all make mistakes in America Chose The Monster.
Mark Jacob always has a great look at the media, especially in this moment, In this one he examines When The Media Take MAGA Liars At Their Word. I mentioned to Mark that what infuriates me is not just the media taking him at his word–ignorance and stupidity know no bounds–but that they know better and report it out as if they don’t.
And to flush away politics Clodagh Stenson, Jonathan Eden and William McLennan tell the tale of The Inside Story of Blenheim’s Gold Toilet Heist.
Bringing my words at the top full circle, NatashaMH once again delves deep into the personal past through a contemporary moment (her reaction to the streaming hit Adolescence) in A Requiem For My Dreams. I’ll close with a quote from her piece about the series that applies to everything, everywhere all at once:
People say the series is about a new world that’s happening. Fuck that, ignoramuses. It’s about a world that has always been out there behind closed doors when ears weren’t listening
(Image from Ashni on Unsplash)
If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.
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Scorched Apple Trust
Trust is not an easy thing to earn. It’s far easier to burn. When it catches fire, it quickly consumes whatever is in its path. Such a conflagration is made worse when it singes those who have long cozied up, supported, and promulgated that trust as their own. Apple and those who make a living covering the company are both fighting a fire neither can put out without the other, regardless of what caused Apple’s rush to market whatever Apple Intelligence and the new personalized Siri was supposed to be.
The money quote of this episode and this moment is from John Gruber at Daring Fireball in Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino.
The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that.
You could say it starts and stops there. You wouldn’t be wrong.
Here’s a quote for Lance Ulanoff on TechRadar:
WWDC 2024 changed all that and gave me hope that Apple was in the AI race, but there were worrisome signs even back then that because, well, it was Apple, I chose to ignore or forgive.
Om Malk says:
It’s clear Apple must radically rethink its reason for being.
The heat on Apple has been smoldering for some time now with smoke in the air, wafting on a number of fronts. While I’m not pointing fingers and criticizing Apple pundits directly, (they were misled in my view), they’ve carried a lot of water for Apple, keeping these other recent flare-ups from burning too hot.
I’ve written about this Apple Intelligence episode previously, but to recap the particulars: Apple announced its flavor of Artificial Intelligence at last year’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), carving out a fire line to slow down the burning narrative that it was behind and possibly missing the moment with AI. Boldly branding it as Apple Intelligence, the key reveal was unveiling a more personalized Siri, that unlike all of the other AI efforts on the market, would give users “AI For The Rest Of Us,” that would retain the firewall of Apple’s marketing mantra of being more secure and private.
Turns out it was a reveal that wasn’t really a reveal, but has now proven all too revealing.
As has been typical with new operating system features the last few years, Apple was clear at WWDC that some of this newness would roll out over the course of the year, so there was no surprise there. Also typical since COVID is that Apple’s announcement was a canned commercial.
Atypical, however, none of the flashier features were ever shown to pundits and journalists, even under cover of an NDA. As Gruber and others are now saying, that smoky smell reeks of vaporware.
Each year Apple faces some degree of heat as it heads into WWDC. I think things will be hotter than most this year with a higher degree of skepticism. What we’re witnessing is a landscape built by years of trust, earning the benefit of doubt, turned to ashes. They say that hell has no fury like a woman scorned, but I’m here to tell you that might take second place when it comes to torching the trust relationship between a company’s PR reps and those who cover them.
Let’s talk about that trust.
Back in my gadget blogging days for GottaBeMobile.com the first rule of thumb was always be skeptical of PR. I’ve been on both sides of that fence, pushing out PR for my own projects and covering it for others. A PR pro tells you the story they want you to cover. Covering that story, you look for the holes in addition to covering it. By and large most of the well know Apple pundits have done a reasonably good job of revealing those holes in my opinion.
Apple was different in that for the most part if they made a claim it usually held up. I remember distinctly when the first iPad was released with a claimed battery life of 10 hours. Those of us at GBM were surprised when those claims proved accurate once we had the devices in our hands. Promise made. Promise fulfilled. Trust earned.
No company is perfect, certainly not Apple. But Apple has been reasonably consistent for most of the time I’ve been covering or using their hardware and software. There have been lapses — Siri being a prime example — but nothing that wasn’t overcome and perhaps, now in retrospect, wrongly overlooked because of the trust Apple built with the media and enthusiasts who covered the company. As most now realize, the smoke and mirror show of last year’s WWDC Apple Intelligence announcement was a red flag warning that needed more scrutiny than relying on trust banked through good will and follow through.
It’s currently being endlessly debated whether or not this failure was caused by a rush to satisfy Wall Street deep in its AI bubble, poor leadership, or just trying to climb too high a mountain too fast in an attempt to create a technical solution that, as announced, would one up those already on the market. In the end I don’t think it matters much what exactly sparked this blaze. I do think it matters how Apple chooses to put out the fire. Those who cover Apple, and more importantly users, feel scorched. I’m guessing there are some in Cupertino feeling that as well.
Burn scars don’t heal well or quickly.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Sunday Morning Reading
The rapid decay of all things continues. I’m not even sure if “decay” is the right word. “Collapse” might be a better choice. Regardless, there’s no “decay” or “collapse” in my sharing articles and writing every week in Sunday Morning Reading. Enjoy.
Russell Shorto tells us that the fracture we’re facing shouldn’t surprise in America’s Fatal Division Is Nothing New: It Was Baked In From The Beginning. He’s right and that’s also nothing new. We just have a propensity for ignoring what we shouldn’t.
Marc Elias says We Can’t Give In To Fear. He’s right. But with those we mistakenly counted on having already done so, it makes it tougher for the rest of us.
Brian Barrett of Wired (which continues to do excellent reporting) gives us a rundown on The United States of Elon Musk. Good piece with good context. I don’t disagree with his premise that it’s unsustainable. The larger concern is what’s left in its wake.
NatashaMH opens up a personal tale of exploring justice, relationships, and personal power in The Price of Guns And Butter.
Things aren’t just decaying on political and social fronts, technology is marching right alongside, if not leading the charge. John Gruber lays out a mea culpa of sorts in discussing Apple’s less than intelligent move into Artificial Intelligence in Something Is Rotten In The State of Cupertino. Om Malik also weighs in with Apple Intelligence, Fud, Dud or Both. I’ll have more to say on this later this week. I wrote a bit about it last week also.
Will Knight, (again in Wired) tells us that Under Trump, AI Scientists Are Told To Remove ‘Ideological Bias’ From Powerful Models. Tell me. Who didn’t see this kind of thing happening?
Cory Doctorow in Pluralistic lays out how Amazon Annihilates Alexa Privacy Settings, Turns On Continuous Nonconsensual Audio Uploading. One way user agreements flow only one way. Again, who didn’t see this coming?
In times of uncertain futures it’s always somewhat uncomfortably comforting to reminisce about simpler times. When it comes to technology there was perhaps no simpler or more innocent time than during the age of the Commodore 64, which was my first home computer. We’ve come a long way. Gareth Edwards takes a look at Jack Tramiel’s success in How Commodore Invented The Mass Market Computer.
(Image from Ashni on Unsplash)
If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.
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Dye Me A River
My favorite version of Arthur Hamilton’s song, Cry Me A River, was covered by Joe Cocker. I especially like the live version. While others pump up the bagpipes or crank out The Pogues to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, I cue up Cocker’s version today.
One of the things you can still count on in Chicago beyond crazy politics and potholes is that every St. Patrick’s Day they still dye the river green. For some reason the first time I heard about that tradition Hamilton’s song title morphed in my brain to Dye Me A River.
Well, it’s St. Patrick’s Day again, and yes both traditions will continue. They’ll dye the river green and I’ll play the song. I’ll also down a pint and have some corned beef and cabbage, a family tradition, though none of us are Irish.
But I’ll be staying away from any of the large number of parades honoring the day. It’s one thing when the river runs green, but I prefer my beer downed once, and not tossed back up into the streets.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Am I Blue?
I took a trip to the Apple Store today to pick up a new iPad for my mother-in-law. Her older iPad 8 had run out of storage space and would no longer update. Picked it up. Set it up. No hassle. She’s off and running.
While there I thought I’d take a look at the new M4 MacBook Air and other new hardware that might be on display. In looking at the MacBook Air I thought for sure I was looking at the silver colored version for a while. (Pictured below next to the Starlight version.)
When a rep popped by I asked him if they had any of the SkyBlue models on display, he said the one I was looking at was the Sky Blue version. Surprised, I asked if he had a silver version on display and he pointed me to the other end of the table. Walking back and forth, my eyes could not distinguish any real difference between the two colors. But as the photos below show, the camera picked up the slight difference better than my naked eyes could. (Sky Blue is on the right.)
I asked the rep if other folks who may have better eyesight than I were equally confused and his reply was, “Apple doesn’t know what blue is, so why should we expect customers to figure it out.” I asked him further why they were positioned so far apart on the table and he said they were given specific orders to put as much distance between the Sky Blue and Silver variants as possible.
Well, ok then.
By the way, my mother-in-law’s iPad is closer to what I’d call Sky Blue, and yet the cameras tend to make it appear less saturated than it is in person.
Colors can be weird.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Man Bites Dog Headline Takes Second Fiddle to Dog Shoots Man
Call it an American metaphor. Call it silly. Call it what you will. But it happened. The Guardian headline says much of what you need to know: Tennessee Man Shot By His Dog While Lying In His Bed.
Here’s my favorite quote from the piece:
Asked whether she woke up because Oreo jumped on the bed or because her companion was shot, the woman told Fox 13: “The gunshot. Yeah, a combination of the two.”
I also like the The Guardian caption for the photo above says:
The pit bull in the Tennessee incident was not the only US canine to discharge a firearm in recent years.
I’m told the NRA, though insistent that the 2nd amendment to the U.S. Constitution also applies to dogs bearing arms, it does see a potential conflict with our God given right to sleep with our guns.
It may be a dog eat dog world or a dog’s life, but I’m guessing we’re going to see calls for hardening the bedroom with bullet proof sheets sooner rather than later. Apparently there’s a market there.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Apple Intelligently Delays New Siri
It has been inevitable for some time that Apple was going to delay launching whatever the new personalized Siri with Apple Intelligence was supposed to be. To expect otherwise was as foolish as hoping the new American government wasn’t going to wreak havoc on its own citizenry and the rest of the world after the most recent election.
Now Apple has owned up to the inevitable. In a statement to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber announced the delay and a new set of expectations:
“Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with ChatGPT. We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”
Note that last sentence includes “we anticipate.” I anticipate dying at some point. I also anticipate warmer days this summer, rain occasionally, and eating pizza on some day in the future. So, the message is stay tuned.
I have several thoughts on this and I’ll lay them out below, along with links to some interesting hot takes following the announcement, some of which have already cooled off a bit.
First, I think Apple was smart to make this announcement even if everyone paying attention already knew this was going to be the case. This delay wasn’t and isn’t news. That said, the announcement comes after Apple, generally perceived as rushing to catch up in the push for Artificial Intelligence, has made what can only be called a poor first impression. Sure, you can call Apple Intelligence a beta if you want. Apple does. But advertising a flawed beta as the tent pole to push new iPhones can’t be called anything but a marketing misfire, if not malpractice.
First impressions of shipping products matter more than clever shiny announcements of things yet to come.
Apple should know this because they are no strangers to bad first impressions. MobileMe left a bad stain that iCloud still has difficulty erasing. The VisionPro continues struggling with poor perception and reception. Yes, Apple also does have a history of turning some poorly received rollouts around. The best examples of that are Apple Maps and the Apple Watch. Even so, once a product launched becomes a product laughed at, it’s difficult to erase the echos of that laughter.
But perhaps the product ridiculed crucially here is the one that Apple married to this all out AI effort: Siri. Purchased, proudly launched, and then allowed to wallow — like too many other of Apple’s efforts (*cough* iPadOS *cough*), Siri has become not just a joke, but one that keeps on giving. Some say it has improved. I’ll agree with that to a point but that depends on the day.
Siri has never fulfilled Apple’s bold promises with any consistent value beyond setting a timer or adding a reminder. Even that fails enough of the time to earn users’ distrust and provide late night comedians with jokes so easy to make that the shrewder jokesters have moved on.
The debate following this recent Apple announcement in pundit circles seems to be on whether or not Apple should jettison Siri and start from scratch. I’m sure that debate has gone round and round in the circular halls of the Apple campus. I doubt that happens, given that the marketing mavens in Cupertino seem to be erratically driving the bus these days. There’s been a huge investment in Siri branding, problematic as it has always been. Unfortunately salvaging a brand is also expensive.
Apple’s Long Game Mindset Might Just Be Short Sighted
The success of the iPhone has given Apple the benefit of playing a long game, plotting product and growth strategy with a large enough cushion to weather the occasional storm. It’s certainly easier to sail through rough seas in a large ship, but the bigger the boat, the more maintenance is required to keep the hull from rusting and the engines running smoothly. The nuts and bolts matter.
Artificial Intelligence, regardless of what company is pushing it, is nuts and bolts, bits and bytes, ones and zeros. Everyone scanning the horizon thinks this is the future we’re sailing towards, full steam ahead. But nothing that’s been released or demonstrated yet has really proven that anyone can chart a correct course. The current moment resembles that scene in Jaws when all the ships set out in an armada to chase a bounty, not knowing really what they’re up against.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Artificial Intelligence may indeed prove useful. Someday. On an enterprise level. I’m just not so sure if it will ever be as big a deal on the consumer front as the marketers want us to believe it is or will be.
I also doubt Apple Intelligence will end up being another Butterfly Keyboard, MobileMe, or Siri, but at the moment there’s as good a shot of it joining the ranks of those jokes in Apple lore as there is for it becoming a success, much less useful.
Ian Betteridge in this piece, lays out what I think the AI true believer vision is in this excerpt:
But AI presents a fundamentally different challenge. This isn’t merely a new product category to be perfected – it’s a paradigm shift in how humans interact with technology. Unlike hardware innovations where Apple could polish existing concepts, AI is redefining the entire computing experience, from point-click or touch-tap to conversations. The interface layer between humans and devices is transforming in ways that might render Apple’s traditional advantages increasingly irrelevant.
He also captures the key context that reveals the tension between the long and short game as Apple has historically played it in this excerpt from earlier in that post:
Apple has long been characterised as a “fast follower” rather than a pioneering innovator. It wasn’t the first to make an MP3 player, smartphone, or even a personal computer. This strategy served Apple brilliantly in the past – observing others’ mistakes, then delivering exquisitely refined products with unmatched attention to design, usability, and integration. The first iPhone wasn’t novel in concept, but revolutionary in execution because it had a unique interface: multitouch. In fact, I would argue this was the last time Apple’s user interfaces went in a bold direction.
What is obvious in this frenzied sea of Artificial Intelligence is that Apple did a quick course correction and tried to “fast follow” before the mistakes of others could be identified well enough to refine and/or correct the way Apple has historically been successful in the past. In the case of Siri, the fact that Apple has let it languish for so long more than hints that it just doesn’t see enough value in the voice assistant proposition.
Were those bad moves? Who can really say at present. It is true that Apple had to react. OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT upset a lot of apple carts and not just those in Cupertino. But Apple’s quick course correction, coupled with a less than enthusiastic response in the same year of its other attempt at a computer interaction paradigm shift–spatial computing with the Vision Pro–has cut down the chances for any short term smooth sailing.
Some are positioning this moment Apple has created for itself as a necessary gamble Apple had to make. Here’s an excerpt from Jason Snell at Six Colors:
And if you asked those same Apple executives if they were aware that the cost of underdelivering those features in the spring of 2025 would be getting beaten up in the press a little bit for delaying features, perhaps even back to iOS 19? I’m pretty sure they’d say that a little bit of negative press today, when the world isn’t really paying that close attention to Apple and AI, would totally be worth it.
That may indeed be true in and of itself. I have no way of knowing. What I do know is that this gamble might have had better odds if Siri, prior to all of this, hadn’t been such a historical and neglected mess for far too long.
Security and Privacy
This delay announcement has also opened wider the door for criticism that might shatter another of Apple’s tent pole marketing strengths: security and privacy. Here’s a post from Simon Willison, who has a hunch that the delay might be related to those issues. It’s also worth taking a look at Willison’s earlier post on prompt injection. John Gruber of Daring Fireball takes Willison’s point further in this post. Here’s the key excerpt:
Prompt injection seems to be a problem that LLM providers can mitigate, but cannot completely solve. They can tighten the lid, but they can’t completely seal it. But with your private information, the lid needs to be provably sealed — an airtight seal, not a “well, don’t turn it upside down or shake it” seal. So a pessimistic way to look at this personalized Siri imbroglio is that Apple cannot afford to get this wrong, but the nature of LLMs’ susceptibility to prompt injection might mean it’s impossible to ever get right. And if it is possible, it will require groundbreaking achievements. It’s not enough for Apple to “catch up”. They have to solve a vexing problem — as yet unsolved by OpenAI, Google, or any other leading AI lab — to deliver what they’ve already promised.
‘Ay there’s the rub,” as Hamlet would say. No one has those solutions, yet it’s full speed ahead as the selling and hype continues. There may be a dream in there somewhere, but as for now, whether sleeping, sleepwalking, or blindly chasing bounties, all the consumer is left with at the moment is “stay tuned.”
For better or worse, we are not going to return to our regularly scheduled programming.
(I note that I was putting the final touches on this piece Bloomberg is reporting that Apple plans the biggest user interface design overhaul in quite some time with this year’s new operating system releases that will be unveiled at WWDC. Apple is under pressure from not only this Apple Intelligence, but other issues that concern developers as well. Shiny distractions generally win when it comes to taking the heat off of failures and problems.)
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Sunday Morning Reading
Losing an hour only to gain it back in a few months feels like a capricious two-step, forward and back, never gaining ground. Something we’re all experiencing at the moment and not just because of Daylight Saving Time, but on many levels. Time marches on regardless, even as it retreats for brief periods. Regardless of what time it is, here’s some Sunday Morning Reading to share.
To kick things off this week while you’re enjoying your coffee take a look at NatashaMH’s A Sip of Revolution.
Apple did the right thing. Eventually. Finally announcing that its Apple Intelligence features for a more personalized Siri will be delayed. John Gruber got the scoop handed to him from Apple. Ian Betteridge has some good thoughts on this as well in Hardware Dreams, AI Nightmares: Apple’s Crisis of Imagination.
While I’m on the tech beat, M.G. Siegler’s newsletter always offers good insight to ponder. A perfect example this week is It’s The End of the Web as We Know It (And I Feel Fine). I’m not so sure I do.
On the political beat, Jason Sattler, perhaps better known on social media as LOLGOP, tells us Why America Is On The Verge of Committing Atrocities Against Our Neighbors.
emptywheel spins out Attention Deficit And Defiance Division Of Labor: There’s Stuff Happening Where You’re Not Looking. It’s long and worth the time and reminds us that what we see and hear isn’t all that’s happening. Although at the moment, we’d like to see and hear more.
And if you’re like many wondering why some of these evil, decidedly American streaks of cruelty seem to resurface now and then, history is never kind and always a reminder. Take a look at Why This Puritan Sculpture May Revolutionize Your Thinking About The Rise of Christian Nationalism by Christopher Knight.
And to close out this week, here’s a look at how one of our real life Bond villains took over the James Bond franchise, in Benjamin Svetkey’s License To Shill: Inside Amazon’s 007 Takeover.
Image above by Jon Tyson
If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.
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Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3
Musings on life, the theatre, technology, culture and the occasional emu sighting
Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3 