Take a few minutes and watch this speech. Obama breaks down the difference between American principles and the principles our current leadership seem to believe in.
Author: Daniel Andrews
Album-focused Music Apps
Call me old fashioned, but I love queueing up albums and listening to them all the way through. Nowadays, playlists are all the rage, but because listening to Albums in a CD-changer was the way I grew up listening to music I still enjoy hearing the entire album from start to finish. For me, it […]
Continue reading →Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store
From The Verge:
Apple has removed Epic Games’ battle royale Fortnite from the App Store after the developer on Thursday implemented its own in-app payment system that bypassed Apple’s standard 30 percent fee.
The rules are the rules but I’m just so sick of reading about this stuff. I’m rooting for the US or the EU to do more than just slap Apple on the wrist with regards to their IAP policies.
Here’s why Apple believes it’s an AI leader—and why it says critics have it all wrong
From Saumel Axon at Ars Technica:
If big tech companies and venture capital investments are to be believed, AI and machine learning will only become more ubiquitous in the coming years. However it shakes out, Giannandrea and Borchers made one thing clear: machine learning now plays a part in much of what Apple does with its products, and many of the features consumers use daily. And with the Neural Engine coming to Macs starting this fall, machine learning’s role at Apple will likely continue to grow.
John Giannandrea joined Apple a few years ago from Google to run the AI part of the business and the fruits of his expertise appear to be paying off according to this article. There’s a lot of direct quotes and anecdotes in this article, but near the end you get the feeling that there’s a cultural shift happening in Cupertino:
After a long track record of mostly working on AI features in the dark, Apple’s emphasis on machine learning has greatly expanded over the past few years.
The company is publishing regularly, it’s doing academic sponsorships, it has fellowships, it sponsors labs, it goes to AI/ML conferences. It recently relaunched a machine learning blog where it shares some of its research. It has also been on a hiring binge, picking up engineers and others in the machine learning space—including Giannandrea himself just two years ago.
Remember when Giannandrea said he was surprised that machine learning wasn’t used for handwriting with the Pencil? He went on to see the creation of the team that made it happen. And in tandem with other teams, they moved forward with machine learning-driven handwriting—a cornerstone in iPadOS 14.
It appears that behind the scenes there’s a decent amount of restructuring happening that should help Apple deliver more practical enhancements to experiences without just shouting “AI” from the rooftops the way that Google does. Users don’t actually care about those implementation details, they just want nifty products that work well and get out of the way.
Microsoft Analyzed Data on Its Newly Remote Workforce
From Harvard Business Review:
Is work today permanently different from what it was before Covid-19 and the work-from-home shift? We don’t know yet, but the data can give us ongoing, real-time information that we can use to influence what happens next. We believe that what we learn about these changes will be key to organizational resiliency in the months and years to come
Lots of great insights in this breakdown. I’ve definitely seen the demise of the lunch hour first-hand. People try their best to protect it from meetings but I find most people are using it to eat and catch up on things that don’t quite need a meeting but need some follow-up. It’s fascinating to see tons of workplace norms fall so quickly when everyone that can is working remotely and using the tools at our disposal.
Using Email Filters To Replicate Some Of HEY’s Approach
This isn’t a review of HEY, the new email service from Basecamp. I gave it a shot and while impressed, I opted to stick with my current setup (Fastmail). The main reasons I stuck with Fastmail was that I prefer having choice with which email client I use, and going with HEY requires you to […]
Continue reading →Revenge of the Suburbs
From Ian Bogost at The Atlantic:
But after the anxious spring of 2020, these defects seem like new luxuries. There was always comfort to be found in a big house on a plot of land that’s your own. The relief is even more soothing with a pandemic bearing down on you. And as the novel coronavirus graduates from acute terror to long-term malaise, urbanites are trapped in small apartments with little or no outdoor space, reliant on mass transit that now seems less like a public service and more like a rolling petri dish.
The pandemic will improve suburban life, perhaps in lasting ways. Take the automobile commute: The exodus from the office has dramatically decreased traffic and pollution, a trend that will continue in some form if even a fraction of the people who abandoned their commutes continue to work from home. Dunham-Jones, who is also my colleague in Georgia Tech’s college of design, thinks that even a modest rise in telecommuting could also increase the appeal of local walking and bike trips. Families have two cars, but nowhere to go. They are rediscovering the pleasures of pedestrianism.
[…]
Multigenerational households represent a modest increase in density, and they can make quarantine more tolerable on top of it. The summer is upon us, but camps are largely closed and ordinary family activities have been substantially disrupted. The spring lockdowns also proved that working from home while facilitating children’s remote schoolwork is extremely challenging. Intergenerational households offer more hands and eyes to watch the kids or manage mealtimes made incompatible by overlapping schedules. Schools have always been a huge driver of residential real-estate sales, and even a modest increase in online learning could shock the market. Economic pressure may encourage consolidation of some families into bigger but more populous single-family homes, while decoupling home values from school districts even somewhat could make them more affordable.
Living in the suburbs is a mixed bag as it’s always been – you trade things like culture, collectivism, walkability and energy efficiency for a longer commute, more space (but more isolation) and (often) better schools. However, I’m hopeful that this pandemic has shown us there’s possibility to find a middle ground now that more folks are working from their homes and helping educate from the comfort of our house. If we’re lucky, residents in suburban areas will look to invest more in their local communities and build them into places that might make those longer commutes less necessary. If we can move to a world where remote work is accessible for more folks, suburban and exurban communities can be more sustainable.
I try to remind myself daily how lucky we are to have a setup like we do – we have an office that I can work remotely out of, (mostly) uninterrupted during the day. Our kids can complete their schoolwork in the basement. We have a fenced in back yard that the kids can play in as well. So generally speaking the quarantine has been “easier” for our family than the average apartment dweller.
To our YouTube TV members: an update to our content and price
From the Youtube TV blog:
As we continue to evaluate how to provide the best possible service and content for you, our membership price will be $64.99. This new price takes effect today, June 30, for new members. Existing subscribers will see these changes reflected in their subsequent billing cycle on or after July 30.
I get that the content business is a cutthroat, low margin world. But we’re slowly getting into cable prices – which defeats the entire purpose of services like YouTube TV and Hulu Live TV.
Welcome to the 21st Century
From Tim O’Reilly:
Our failure to make deep, systemic changes after the financial collapse of 2009, and our choice instead to spend the last decade cutting taxes and spending profusely to prop up financial markets while ignoring deep, underlying problems has only made responding to the current crisis that much more difficult. Our failure to build back creatively and productively from the global financial crisis is necessary context for the challenge to do so now.
I enjoyed this article so much. O’Reilly talks a lot about how the future won’t be be just like the past, and we should be thinking about what changes this new world we’ve living in will require of us so that we don’t just revert back to our old habits. What will be gone or changed forever? Travel, large-scale events, privacy, health care and work-from-home are all certain to be transformed. But how? And what new things will emerge?
My fear is that this article assumes we’ll handle the Covid crisis and learn from that experience. Instead, it’s looking more and more like a preview of how America and much of the western world might handle coming climate crises. We won’t – can’t? – work collectively on big problems as a nation any more and that’s a huge danger to both our political system and our planet. But it’s not all doom and gloom. I am hopeful that changes to attitudes and tools for working remotely will create a more equitable job market. That will in turn allow communities across the nation to be destinations for remote workers.
For us to emerge as strongly as possible from Covid and not be left behind by the rest of the world as they recover, we’ll need to see more planning and strategic thinking from our local and national leaders, however. Businesses are doing their part, but our nation is rudderless.
Liverpool – Champions of England
The story of my soccer fandom in general and in particular that of Liverpool FC isn’t particularly novel. Like a lot of Americans, I started watching the Premier League when NBC acquired the rights to stream games back in 2013, and I actively committed to staying neutral – just watching the big games and trying […]
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