Apple’s website on their product dimensional drawings. I had no idea they published this to the general public. This makes complete sense to foster their huge third party cases, skins, etc.

The detail here is amazing - have a look at the Apple Watch Ultra 3 and the level of detail. Imagine you’re the manufacturer and this is the spec you have to meet. Of course, they will have tolerances but still this is incredible. I wonder what the accepted rejection rate is?

Recently, Jacob Coxon posted on X that he believes frontier AI models will likely kill us all by the end of the decade. And as always - the media and the internet has picked it up and ran with apoloptic Skynet like scenarios.

Honestly, I’m getting pretty tired of this kind of AI doom and gloom.

The idea that we are somehow hurtling toward an inevitable superintelligence that will wipe out humanity makes for a great headline, but I don’t see much evidence for it. What we actually have today are large language models — probabilistic token-prediction systems - that can produce remarkably impressive results while also making spectacularly stupid mistakes.

That’s it.

They’re software. And, like all software, they’re buggy.

They hallucinate. They lose context. They confidently make things up. They struggle with basic reasoning tasks. They can produce brilliant answers one minute and complete nonsense the next. Calling these systems “superintelligence” or “artificial general intelligence” doesn’t magically turn them into something they aren’t.

What bothers me most is how the conversation has shifted from “here’s what these systems can actually do” to increasingly elaborate predictions about what they might become.

And there are plenty of financial incentives behind that story. If you’ve spent the last three years selling investors on the idea that AI is going to fundamentally transform everything, it’s probably not a great time to start admitting that the technology has some pretty significant limitations. “We’re building powerful but imperfect software” doesn’t quite have the same Wall Street appeal as “we’re creating superintelligence.”

So now we’re supposed to believe that the same companies that have been hyping AI as the greatest technological revolution in history are also racing toward machines that will destroy civilization.

These stories are designed to keep the money flowing.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe something radically different will emerge. But I have lived through multiple iterations of the Silicon Valley tech bro’s so called revolutions. The Metaverse, VR, Crytopcorrency and NFTs are just some of the things we have gone through in the last decade - the latest of which is AGI. I’m not convinced we’re watching the birth of some digital god.

We’re watching the development of some very impressive—and and very buggy software. Skynet - it is not.

An amazing artwork constructed from hundreds of 1950s vacuum tubes sourced from Eastern Europe:

Vacuum Tubes require high voltages to work efficiently and are not for the faint hearted. They can switch several hundred million times a second, and in the 1950s they were combined with germanium diodes as the basis for many incredible computer designs.

The Tube Computer has a modern 8 bit architecture. It is designed to run a simple airship flight sim, flying around Brighton for the grandchildren, or a 64 bit Fibonacci sequence for the grown ups.

The Chicago Public Library informs patrons of how much money they’ve saved borrowing from the library instead of buying.

Then, underneath the administrative business, came a little piece of information I had somehow never noticed before: You just saved $58.94 by using your library. You have saved $231.79 this past year and $1,107.24 since you began using the library!

I stared at this. My first thought was not, “What a compelling demonstration of the economic value of municipal services.”

But maybe it should be. Because that is exactly what it is.

We tend to think about the value of government services in terms of what they cost us in taxes. But we rarely stop to think about what those services save us—or what they would cost if we had to pay for them individually.

The library is an obvious example. You borrow a book instead of buying it. Maybe you use the computers. Attend a class. Download an audiobook. Take the kids to a program. All of that has a real dollar value.

And libraries books aren’t the only example.

For example - my township offers:

• Free meeting rooms for large public programs/lectures/meeting/presentations, to mid-size instruction, small meetings, and individualized study - cost of booking privately at local hotels $150-$250
• Passes to museums for a group of 4 - average coast would be $200
• Even includes free rentals of electronics and basics (metal detectors, wifi hotspots, auotmotive OBD code reader, Stud sensor, and a car battery charger, etc.)
• Free lighted pickle ball courts
• Free lighted tennis courts
• subsidised access to pools
• subsidised access to country golf courses
• free local transit services for senior citizens

Just to name a few.

Imagine if every municipal service gave you a running total of what you received versus what it would have cost you to purchase privately.

These could easily save residents a few thousand dollars a year.

The 101 Plays Itself turns live traffic on Los Angeles’ Highway 101 into music. Every car captured by the Caltrans traffic camera becomes a musical note, creating a constantly changing soundtrack shaped by the actual flow of traffic.

This isn’t a prerecorded composition. The camera feed is live, and the timestamp is real. That means the music changes with the time of day: quiet and sparse late at night, then increasingly busy as rush hour approaches.

Gloria Steinem, in a posthumous essay for The New Yorker:

For me, saying that I am a feminist has always meant that I believe in the social, economic, and political equality of all males and females of all races and groups. I know this sounds too simple to need a word, but equality is still the exception, not the rule.

Maybe we should call it egalitarianism, or even humanism. The problem with humanism is that it is often interpreted as being anti-religion, so I don’t think it’s inclusive enough. Regardless of what we call it, it just means treating each of us as uniquely human. The experiences of race and gender and class are very real and important, but they are also constructed and changeable. Our humanity is consistent and sacred.

Still, for some, it remains a mystery why women need a movement to distinguish our efforts toward equality. For me, it seems quite obvious.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot more about what I actually care about.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the daily grind—work, earn, spend, repeat. But the older I get, the more I realize that the real luxuries in life aren’t necessarily the things we can buy.

They’re the things we often take for granted:

• Time
• Health
• A quiet mind
• Slow mornings
• Rest without feeling guilty
• A good night’s sleep
• Calm, “boring” days
• Meaningful conversations
• Home-cooked meals
• People you love
• People who love you back

None of this is particularly flashy. There’s no status symbol attached to most of it.

But honestly, that’s kind of the point.

Maybe the goal isn’t to have more of everything. Maybe it’s to have more of what actually makes life feel good.

Jamelle Bouie in a New York Times opinon piece:

The details of what is happening here are important — that’s why I laid them out — but it’s also important to step back and make a more fundamental point: the president of the United States is engaged in a conspiracy against the voting rights of the American people, which is to say that the president is engaged in a conspiracy against the Constitution itself. And this is part of a larger effort, spearheaded by the most fanatical of his allies, like Stephen Miller, to end the American republic and supplant it with an authoritarian regime in which President Trump holds sovereign authority over the whole nation.

It is important to say, as well, that this is all out in the open, as plain as day.

Writer, journalist, and feminist activist Gloria Steinem has died. She was 92.

She challenged sexist assumptions, helping women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at work, at home and in society at large.

Phil Schiller steps down from running App Store and Product Events:

Apple Inc.’s Phil Schiller, one of the most visible and influential executives across both the Steve Jobs and Tim Cook eras, has stepped down from his role leading the App Store and product events.

The 66-year-old executive, who was Apple’s senior vice president of marketing until leaving that job in 2020, made the latest change in recent days, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Homing pigeons may sense the Earth’s magnetic field using superparamagnetic macrophages in their livers:

An international research team led by scientists from the University of Bonn, the University Hospital Bonn and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior has identified supermagnetic macrophages in the livers of homing pigeons (Columba livia domestica) that appear essential for navigation when the Sun is not visible, pointing to an entirely new mechanism for animal magnetoreception.