Okay, I think there's an Apple event? Let's do this. God help us all.
The Apple Music guy has some thoughts on R.E.M.'s uneasy embrace of mainstream success
The new AirPods have a thing called spatial audio, which will make it sound like you're listening to a band playing somewhere even though in reality you're on a bus
Okay, still no cable, but the new AirPods seem uncomfortably big. Maybe a mistake to pursue that much bass?
Stink feature gives you a sharp olfactory warning if AirPods are not properly aligned with ear canal
"What? I was supposed to do the luxury edition? Due tomorrow?" *shakes can of white spraypaint*
Ok, let's talk heat sink
This is like Apple's tenth-generation custom chip and they still haven't figured out how to round the corners
Apple working towards the holy grail: breaking the Soviet record for the world's largest microchip
Top-of-the line M1 Max can support four displays, over thirty open Chrome tabs
Chip has not one but four Unified Memories! Please just take my money
New iTunes interface is sick
Extra GPU performance allowed Apple to add an Exposé button just called "fuck my shit up good"
Some numerical analysis feature you've never used on the laptop you send email with is now over 3 times faster
We know how much you love the notch on your phone, so we brought it to the laptop. Audience in hushed anticipation to see if there are camera warts on the back too.
New MacBook Pros also way bigger. You can type on them like the Tom Hanks piano scene in "Big"
This is like boasting that you no longer get blackout drunk and soil yourself. You wasted five years of our life.
It's Donglegeddon at today's Apple event. But they'll be back.
TouchBars come and go, but Caps Lock lives forever
Apple's keyboard team was reassigned to the display, and they're bragging about how much attention to detail went into fucking it up
Choose your own caption:
1) Thing you stare at all day now thinner from side
2) Never forget that bracket costs $1000
New MacBooks will still burn through half your battery in 30 minutes like the previous generation
Show me how much you still hate Jony Ive
Apple events are like if Stanley Kubrick had needed money
Tim Cook looking like the crop just failed and they're going to have to sell the old Cupertino farm to Apple
I guess that's it. New MacBooks to offer features needlessly removed in 2015, 75% more performance, 25% better battery life, and 100% more notch. Also there's a colorful surveillance golf ball and you can spend even more on headphones.
I wish Apple had gone ahead and designed a car so we could have breathless announcements like "the steering wheel is back!"
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Lurking the r/generator subreddit recently I learned something interesting about the situation in Texas. Quite reasonably a lot of people in the Houston area have decided to get generators installed, since there have been recent major power outages both in summer and winter...
This being Texas, what most people want to run off their generator is a five-ton whole-house air conditioner. This as you can imagine is pretty power hungry, particularly when it first powers on. To avoid storing gas/diesel, a lot of people have opted for a natural gas hookup
Natural gas distribution in Texas is not set up to support hundreds of multi-kilowatt generators running at the same time, let alone firing up at the same time. So what people have collaboratively built in Texas is a system for converting power outages into massive gas outages.
The first time I voted in a US election I was amazed that no proof of citizenship—not even photo ID—was required. From the point of view of an immigrant, you're constantly made to prove your legal residency for stuff—jobs, school, driving—but for some reason not voting.
I don't really get why positive proof of ID isn't a voting requirement, other than the fact that voting law in the US is very old and predates the modern surveillance state. I don't have strong feelings about it, but it's definitely a US oddity, like the lack of national ID
From the point of view of public faith in elections, there does seem to be something rickety about the combination of trust-me voter registration requirements, absentee ballots, and mail-in votes getting counted for weeks after election day.
Cryptocurrency and generative AI make roughly the same size claims to being transformative innovations, so it's interesting to see how many interesting things people have already found to do with the latter, while the first has mostly been an expensive tour through human folly
I like thinking of cryptocurrency as "financial string theory", but for the parallel to really work a lot more physicists would need to be in jail
With both crypto and string theory, you have domain experts in thrall to a mathematical apparatus so intellectually satisfying that they get emotionally invested into bringing it into contact with reality. But instead each failed attempt pushes them further out into la-la-land
Rising from the crypt to talk a little about how pre-wikipedia generations lived. There was a big encyclopedia in the library, but only really rich families would own one. The best that poor kids could hope for was grocery store encyclopedias, bought one volume at a time
Grocery chains really would sell the world's saddest encyclopedia, one slim volume a week, and you felt lucky to have it. Unrestricted access to a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica is the thing that felt most like having access to the world wide web in the pre-www days.
Naturally when the web came along, we all wondered how encyclopedias would work online, and for a brief while it looked like Microsoft would sell expensive access to a kind of crappy one. And then wikipedia appeared and blew everyone's mind by the fact that it worked
Early this year I went online after taking too many drugs and ordered a Mongolian yurt. Here is my yurt, and here is my story:
The great thing about yurts is you can get high, make a deposit, and forget you bought one for seven months. Then in late July I got email giving me an imminent delivery date and demanding to see a photo of the finished substructure. I tried to bluff them with a quick Lowe's run
The yurt company was totally on to me, though. Everyone lies about the substructure. Demands for photo evidence grew insistent, and I found myself having to level heavy things in the desert while getting heatstroke
This whole thread on large-scale circulation in the Atlantic Ocean is great, but the real showstopper is that global-warming induced breakdown in this flow will result in significant *cooling* for a large chunk of Eurasia, greatly complicating the politics of climate response.
The existing strategy for mitigating climate change is incoherent because:
1. It demands a total restructuring of societies worldwide 2. Most of this burden would fall on developing nations 3. It ignores imminent tipping points that (by definition) there is no coming back from
But with no politically achievable plan for capping (let alone reducing) global emissions, what will happen is we'll run into one of these tipping points, and if that happens to be AMOC collapse, then suddenly a bunch of G7 economies have much less incentive to decarbonize