BC TECH
Saved by @zmbnski

So, today, for the first time in 25 (!) years of Apple, I downgraded. From the 2016 MacBook Pro to my 2013, which I had kept in a drawer...

 It was pretty simple to do—Apple Time Machine backups let me do it with one click.
That first tweet captures, in two pictures, how badly Apple has “lost the plot” (to quote @wylieprof). On the right is the Apple MagSafe adapter, from 2013. On the left, what I had “upgraded” to.
@wylieprof Thanks, Apple! I really was nostalgic for worrying about yanking my computer off the table.
@wylieprof Oh and I really appreciated not knowing if my computer was charging. What was great was the little whoop sound you used, so that the speaker before me could be informed I was charging my laptop.
@wylieprof Just kidding! That was lame. On the plus side I could now plug the charger in either side. (Except I couldn’t quite because one of the ports was faulty, and it wouldn’t charge properly—I was alerted to that by the salience of a non-whoop silence.)
@wylieprof What else? Oh! The mysterious double-space. At some point, your new keyboard started occasionally inserting two spaces when I only hit the spacebar once.
@wylieprof Maybe I was typing too hard? But then I noticed it elsewhere. For example, I’m pretty sure it happened to Mary Beard too, judging by the unexpected in her tweets. Hi Mary!
@wylieprof The new software updates were great, too. For example, at some point AirPlay stopped working. Fortunately I had yet to upgrade my iPhone, so I could still play music on the stereo.
@wylieprof Still, the upgrade was worth it. After four years, I had a hard drive that was... 50% larger, and a processor that was... 25% faster.
@wylieprof This made it easier when I stared losing work (for the first time in a decade) by unexpected application crashes, because I could load up Safari and... hang on... oop
@wylieprof I also had new friends. Like Laurel and Hardy! Hi guys.
@wylieprof These were so advanced that I had to upgrade their firmware when I first plugged them in (!) Also I think they were $60 each.
@wylieprof The computer itself was so skinny that when I carried these around I felt like a photographer’s assistant at a fashion shoot.
@wylieprof Making the trackpad extra large was great because my finger got a concussion running off the edge of the last one? Not really, but now I could randomly fail to click something if I rested my palm wrong.
@wylieprof This was the first time since the late-1990s Jobs reboot that I felt I was working for my computer, not the other way around.
@wylieprof The era of understated perfection is, in my opinion, over. Given the bugs that erupt with each incremental update now, I can’t even imagine the current team rolling out an entire rewrite of the OS, as they did for OS X. https://t.co/2lZn5RQm4w
@wylieprof One last example, a little more technical. Apple rolled out a new file system. It’s called APFS, you’ll get it free if you upgrade to High Sierra.
@wylieprof APFS forbids “hardlinks”. So if you do upgrade, all of your UNIX stuff will probably break. Why? Because screw you, that’s why.
@wylieprof Oh also—APFS is incompatibile with older versions of Time Machine. Apple can’t even not break its own stuff. And you can’t reformat back to the old system.
@wylieprof https://t.co/RD5XpCYTSm if you don’t believe me.
@wylieprof A new update was released today or so—Mojave (motto: Welcome to the Desert of the Real).
@wylieprof I learned this because people already figured out it breaks Mathematica.
@wylieprof A well-built machine is a beautiful thing. You get attached to excellence in them the way people get attached to the old Volkswagen Beatle.
@wylieprof So, support request to @AppleSupport. Please fire Johnny Ive, and take everyone else on a five year retreat to Tibet to meditate on non-being or something.
@wylieprof @AppleSupport We can wait.
@wylieprof @AppleSupport Or, someone start a tweet campaign and get @elonmusk to build a better laptop—something that will last twenty years and be more than a platform for failed AI voice assistants and marketing popups from Software Update.
To cheer everybody up, here is a list of cool people using macs. https://t.co/pToRotyQyX
https://t.co/NloM4XBgIN
https://t.co/JcUr9ZahSZ
https://t.co/NTmT4BC8dA
Here's why Al Gore lost the election
https://t.co/Oi7WM6vmpe
(Compare to Gore)
The Dixie Chicks?
Don't tell Kayne he forgot the adapter.
Unfriend (@SwiftOnSecurity)
I do not enjoy this user experience
"Mr Putin, I can't find our password?"

More from Simon DeDeo

Simon DeDeo
Simon DeDeo
@SimonDeDeo
Donna Strickland, one of this year's Nobel Laureates, was not considered "notable enough" for Wikipedia as late as this May—reported by a number of sites, including the Independent. I dug into this a little. Here's the data—


This is the first deletion, back in 2014. A bit hard to read between the lines, but the basic story that an admin had Stickland's page "speedy deleted"—i.e., deleted without debate. The method was something called Copyright Jujitsu.

In particular, the admin had the page deleted not because of notability, but because it included a photograph of Strickland that had ambiguous copyright status. This is a method that people developed to get rid of content they didn't want, but also didn't want to debate.

"Copyright Jujitsu" because it is usually used against spam from companies; a PR officer uploads promotional material to Wikipedia. Instead of debating whether it's neutral, the admin can say "we'd love to have it, but the material appears to violate your company's copyright".

Usually the PR office and the IP office are separate in a company, and the idea of releasing promotional material under public domain is such a legal nightmare that the PR person goes away.
ALL
Simon DeDeo
Simon DeDeo
@SimonDeDeo
Someone tosses a coin ten times; it comes up heads every time. What's the probability it comes up heads on the next toss? (Pretty darn high—part of @nntaleb's work is unprogramming you from your high-school rules of thumb.) Now consider the (related) Gambler's fallacy...

In this case, it's a theory about compensation: the worse one's luck is, the more likely it is to see a reversal. On the surface, it's irrational. The more bad luck you have, the more you accumulate evidence that the system is rigged.

But there's also an anthropic component. If the luck is bad enough, it starts to become inconsistent with your survival. You've accumulated evidence for correlations in the environment, but these correlations (may be) inconsistent with (people like you) being in this environment.

An example. You're in a city where everyone takes public transport. You encounter a string of bad delays. It's reasonable to conclude they'll end—otherwise people wouldn't take public transport. It's unlikely that you happened to show up right when the network collapses.

Of course, that's a bad heuristic in a casino, which relies on a constant influx of losers. But in other environments, particularly with persistent populations and no evidence for sudden changes in the underlying laws, it makes sense.
CRYPTO
Advertisement
Simon DeDeo
Simon DeDeo
@SimonDeDeo
So—probability. Do we really need it? This has been on my mind since 2017, when I finally sat down to think through quantum theory. (/n)

One thing that’s always struck me is how *late* probability theory came in intellectual history. We had integral calculus before we had probability. And probability is insanely simple, mathematically!

I’m tempted to say that probability theory is not, in fact, Lindy. Frequentist probability is (for all the usual reasons) best understood as a heuristic. Bayesian interpretations, by contrast, take the remarkable step of tying it to mental states.

You have to work very hard to convince yourself that beliefs really are “degrees of belief in sets of events” (or whatever). It’s not natural—and I won’t rehearse the whole story about rational choice and decision theory...

So with those critiques in the back of my mind, when I read David Wallace’s decision-theoretic account of the Born Rule I was rather primed to say, hey, so what? Meaning...
PROBABILITY
Simon DeDeo
Simon DeDeo
@SimonDeDeo
On Bayesianism, the Many Worlds Interpretation, and personal identity.

Some thoughts worked out in a letter to a friend, which is the kind of thing you do when off Twitter for a glorious week. (🧵)

“Chance is ignorance”—the Bayesian story; all probabilities represent states of mind, not states of the world. One *could* put (some) chances “in the world”, but let’s take Occam’s Razor seriously...

That the probability of a fair coin coming up heads is 50% simply means that marginalizing (tracing, as the physicists say) over the hidden facts leaves you, nearly, maximally ignorant of the outcome.

Quantum uncertainty (access below!) poses an apparent challenge to this story. There seems to be nothing to be ignorant about when it comes to (say) electron spin—there is nothing “inside” the

The electron is a simple object, in other words. So where does the uncertainty come from? One could follow David Wallace’s wonderful interpretation in terms of chaotic dynamics and decoherence, but let’s see if we can take another route...
DATA SCIENCE
Simon DeDeo
Simon DeDeo
@SimonDeDeo
One thing that goes unremarked about Wikipedia: the vast majority of the content was written over 12 years ago—which means (given turnover) that the editors dominant today were not directly involved in that creation.

Put another way, the editors who built the dominant nodes in this network...


...have little overlap with the ones who made this much more recent managerial flowchart.


Internet time runs at hundred-fold speed—the difference between the people who painted what's in the Uffizi, and the people in charge of keeping those paintings from deteriorating. Very different tasks, and (one presumes) very personalities as well. @PaulSkallas?
ALL

More from Tech

Mrkhtake2
Mrkhtake2
@mrkhtake2
Today we’re going to talk statistics and semantics. I’m going to do so via the medium of one of Twitter’s favourite stats 1.7% (aka “intersex is as common as red heads.”). The statistic comes from Fausto-Sterling’s work, which you can see a review of

To understand the statistic, we have to drill down into what the meaning of the word intersex is. Most people think of hermaphrodites. Let’s stress at the beginning there has been no example ever of a human being with both sets of working reproductive organs.

There is a very tiny percentage of people who are born with both testicular and ovarian tissue (what Fausto-Sterling calls “true hermaphrodites”). And when I say tiny, we’re talking intersex tiny, as in 0.0117/1,000 live births, or one in 1,000,000. These are very complex cases.

So, how do we arrive at 1.7%? What Fausto-Sterling does is apply a wider scope. Instead, she argues that intersex is anything that doesn’t fit into a platonic ideal. The platonic ideal, in this case, being a phenotypically perfect XX female and a phenotypically perfect XY male.

This means that intersex, used in the context of the 1.7% statistic, includes people for whom there is no sexual ambiguity. Take for example Klinefelter syndrome (XXY males). As Fausto-Sterling acknowledges, many males can go their whole life and not realise they are XXY.
TECH
Corey Gwin
Corey Gwin
@corey_gwin
Great thread full of potential https://t.co/jA8h08M48z ideas! 💡

📸 Social disposable camera app

Create a digital "roll" with friends. Take pictures from the roll. You can't see them until: the roll is used up, a time limit expires, or you get to a specific location.

🎙 Asynch interview platform

Send a guest a video or audio clip asking a question. Guest replies when able with same medium. Repeat. When done, share produced video/podcast.

✅ 24 Hour Startup Checklist/Overlay

A web app to track the progress of your project: ideation, naming, shipping code, launching.

Page can also be a dynamic browser overlay for live streaming.

Have tools for polls, surveys, sharing, launching to various outlets, etc.

👩‍⚖️ Healthcare "Lawyers"

If health insurance screws you over, no one has your back but you. Instead, can pay a small monthly fee to a service to take care of BS like this for you should issues arise.
TECH
Advertisement
Jessica Guynn
Jessica Guynn
@jguynn
Mark Zuckerberg on NYT story: "To suggest we weren't interested in knowing the truth or wanted to hide what we knew or wanted to prevent investigations is simply untrue."

Facebook says it will take a couple of questions on the article but wants to focus on (looks at notes) its transparency report.

Good luck with that folks.

Now Mark Zuckerberg is running through all the tactics it's deploying to clean up the platform (you know like they should have years ago).

What every Facebook user should be reading in the
TECH
John Carmack
John Carmack
@ID_AA_Carmack
The vast majority of images are jpegs, which are internally 420 YUV, but they get converted to 32 bit RGB for use in apps. Using native YUV formats would save half the memory and rendering bandwidth, speed loading, and provide a tiny quality improvement. It would also be \

a good path to supporting better video codec still image formats and 10 bit components. You can do it today, but you need to do the color conversion manually in a shader, which can be a big ask for some devs. Defining a FMT_JPEG_YUV that does driver injection akin to the \

external image support on Android could make it much more of a drop-in. Even doing it the hard way seems like it would be worthwhile for web browsers today.
TECH
Donald @87 \U0001f418
Donald @87 🐘
@disco_donald
@RubinReport Your commentary on the dangers of silicon valley coming under the spell of wokeness and cancel culture is spot on. I know this to be true because in Bitcoin we have already lived through a similar culture war against crypto anarchists.

We experienced firsthand the tactics such groups use to eliminate ¨wrongspreak¨ from public debate. And as you rightly recognize, this exact thing is currently happening in society as a whole. And not surprisingly often by the exact same people.

For example, Jack Dorsey, investor in and honored by the BTC cult, is the same person responsible for the twitter bans of many people, including a lifelong ban for the former president of USA. BTC ideology and such policies may seem incompatible with each other, but it is not.

As we stood up against social engineering and the destruction of language in Bitcoin we have been demonitized and deplatformed. Evidence: Just read the whitepaper and see how BTC, what they tell you is Bitcoin, doesn´t even come close to it.

So, just like you, we have been busy building our own alternative platforms based on new incentive structures and the Own Your Data philosophy.

For example have a look at this excellent presentation on @twetchapp
TECH

You May Also Like

Breaking The Lines
Breaking The Lines
@BTLvid
We are all products of our own environments. Our environments shape our character, our personality, our habits, our identity.

The environment that Ousmane Dembélé grew up in and the environment that FC Barcelona seeks to engulf its youngsters with could not be more different.

The Great Gatsby starts with a life lesson.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

Ousmane hasn’t had the advantages that La Masia youngsters have had. That’s why he’s Ousmane.

Like every La Masia youngster, Ousmane grew up with a dream: playing for Barça.

Like every youngster, he fought to stand out amid a talented group of players, the majority of which would fail to go pro.

However, his football education was the polar opposite to that of La Masia.

Ousmane did not reside in one of the most expensive academies in Europe: he lived in a low-cost public housing unit in Normandy. He did not play in the well-trimmed pitches of La Masia, he played in the concrete jungles of Évreux. These disadvantages made him the man he is today.

While street soccer encourages individuality & creative freedom, academy-based training like La Masia encourages unselfishness & teamwork.

That’s why Barça produce certain types of 20-year-olds like a factory line. It’s also why Barça spent €145m on a 20-year-old Ousmane.
SOCIETY
Matt Fuller
Matt Fuller
@MEPFuller
They’re shooting into the chamber.
POLITICS
Advertisement
Kevin Murphy
Kevin Murphy
@kwmurphy
Okay look - I didn’t grow up with comic books. But I read stacks of science fiction digests and I kit-bashed model cars into fantasy rods, and just tried to maintain a low profile until I could get out of the house. So you could say I’m a distant cousin of the comic book fan. /1

And sometimes one’s childhood passion follows them into adulthood, sometimes not, sometimes as an adult one finds a passion they never had as a child and embraces it. For me, that must include getting involved with a puppet show at the age of thirty. /2

So who’s to say whose passion’s legitimate and whose is bogus? Nobody. Someone might indict your passion but they have no ground to stand on and should be dismissed out of hand. /3

Maybe they’re envious that you have a passion, maybe they think that their passion is cooler than yours, or maybe they’re just insecure, who knows. Doesn’t matter. /4

What matters is that if something gives you joy, and in the process doesn’t hurt others, then by all means follow it. It’s how we explore our secret hopes, our shadow sides, our inner character. /5
CULTURE
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
A thread on HN about bad code in legacy projects both makes me think how little we've learned as a discipline over the years and, honestly, how little credit we give ourselves for some pretty major

Fun going down this list and thinking: "Hmm, plausible at a well-run modern software shop", "Hmm, possible, but requires implausible tradeoffs", "Literally disallowed by languages", and "If you were to attempt doing that our test suite wouldn't let you merge."

I think we as an industry celebrate (not quite the right word) failure too much and don't celebrate success nearly enough. There is no DailyWTF for competent execution, word of which generally stays pretty local to the source while incompetence passes into legend.

Alrighty let me try to thread the needle on being the change I want to see in the world while not giving away anything that will get me in trouble:

Ruby has wonderful developer ergonomics. Typed languages are easier for machines to guarantee the correctness of. We built a type checker for Ruby (and I believe it is slated for OSS release sometime).

c.f.
TECH
Vibhu Vashisth
Vibhu Vashisth
@VIBHU_Tweet
ARE WE FAMILIAR WITH THE MEANING & POWER OF MANTRAS WE CHANT?

Whenever we chant a Mantra in Sanskrit, it starts with 'Om' and mostly ends with 'Swaha' or 'Namaha'. This specific alignment of words has a specific meaning to it which is explained in Dharma Shastra.


Mantra is a Sanskrit word meaning sacred syllable or sacred word. But Mantras r not just words put together,they r also vibrations.The whole Universe is a cosmic energy in different states of vibration &this energy in different states of vibration forms the objects of Universe.

According to Scriptures,Om is considered to be ekaakshar Brahman,which means Om is the ruler of 3 properties of creator,preserver&destroyer which make the https://t.co/lyhkWeCdtv is also seen as a symbol of Lord Ganesha, as when starting the prayer,it's him who is worshipped 1st.


'Om' is the sound of the Universe. It's the first original vibration of the nothingness through which manifested the whole Cosmos. It represents the birth, death and rebirth process. Chanting 'Om' brings us into harmonic resonance with the Universe. It is a scientific fact.

Therefore, Mantras are described as vibrational words that are recited, spoken or sung and are invoked towards attaining some very specific results. They make very specific sounds at a frequency that conveys a directive into our subconcious.
ALL