Today the US DOJ+16 states/DC (HA we had 19+) filed suit against Apple over abuse of market position ̷b̷y̷ ̷m̷a̷k̷i̷n̷g̷ ̷a̷ ̷v̷a̷s̷t̷l̷y̷ ̷b̷e̷t̷t̷e̷r̷ ̷c̷o̷m̷p̷u̷t̷e̷r̷ in an effort to keep customers reliant on iPhone.

🧵contd until I lose steam 1. This is scary/concerning/freaky if you work at Apple. My first thoughts go to them. What I can say is heads down, be patient. It’s an ultramarathon.

2. If you are a competitor cheering then history tells us down the road you will either become a faded memory or will be sued.

So much of the evolution of technology can be summed up by “what’s new, was already done before…but being first (or early) if often no different in result than being wrong.”

Of course being done before is never ever the same as the new things… 1/ 2/ New things that appear to have been done before have a different perspective, bring unique market forces to a problem, and rely on technologies that are often more mature, not brand new.

Many latest and greatest inventions fail and need to be reinvented in new contexts.

Apple's 'Mother Nature' sketch was a complete dud, and didn't belong… // No, no. Issue is much more subtle and practical. Need to separate weird marketing from reality. This is greenwashing but the green is…profit. This isn't Bud Light. Or even "woke" 1/appleinsider.com/articles/23/09… 2/Sure the presentation might have been awkward or even a dud to some. A quasi-religious tone viz. Mother Nature isn't everyone's approach.

At the same time, every fact or position put forth is a strategic, margin-positive, and innovative effort from Apple. Super important.

Why are people so quick to proclaim failure for new products? It seems a dumb thing to ask. I mean knowledgable people look at a new product and think it doesn't cut it and will fail. Much more going on. Innovation is nearly impossible to deliver. Harder to predict/analyze. 1/ 2/ Regardless of the era, predicting failure has always been easy, always been attention grabbing, and always kind of fun. Some say it's necessary simply to counter the marketing and power of the launch. Silly. A launch still has to battle the market. The market is really brutal.

Not a prediction for WWDC. But want to share what I will be looking for, IFF Apple announces a new platform and hardware. New platforms are super exciting. But a new platform from a massively established company is an extra degree of difficulty. 1/ 2/ The an insurgent releases a new platform such as the original iPhone Google Chrome, or chatGPT, there’s nothing but upside. The risk is existential failure for the platform but not risk to a massive existing business.

Apple earnings today. Some happy (after hours trading). Some might say less than perfect. So much short-term punditry over the years has been so very wrong about Apple in the long term.

My favorite predictions came more than a quarter century ago as Apple was on the brink... 1/ 2/ Best of the industry got together to come up with 101 ways to save Apple in June 1997.

"Dear Apple: In the movie Independence Day a PowerBook saves the earth from destruction...We don't believe Apple is rotten to the core...You have the power to save the world and yourself."

When an innovation hits the market and/or an scale player enters an known market, there's a predictable pattern.

Generally the press focuses on scale and what scale players will do to either dominate with their entry or by using their assets. What happened on August 12 1981? 1/ 2/ Of course it was the launch of the IBM PC (or my 16th birthday). It was a colossal move for IBM to enter the PC space. IBM was a massive company. It was synonymous with computers, just really big ones.

Very exciting. Watching 50th anniversary of Alto kicked off by CEO @danllewin @ComputerHistory computerhistory.org/events/the-leg… @danllewin @ComputerHistory GUI, mouse, networking, laser printer, and so much more.

Progress happens in fits and starts, often (or always) w/ major failures. There’s something about these times that is intolerant of anything that does not work immediately—perhaps because we’ve actually made a ton of progress over the lives of most here? A look at progress… 1/ 2/ Starship was the largest and most powerful launch vehicle ever created. That the first flight was not flawless though exceeded expectations should be seen as a triumph. Watching the launch recalled the opening montage of “The Right Stuff”. Like this

Software is unique in many ways but one of the most unique aspects of it—the soft part—is that it morphed into a tool for every human endeavor. What started out as a way to do math permeated every aspect of our lives. How did that happen? 1/ 2/ Well it took a lot of smart people. Until about 1970 or so there wasn’t even college training in “programming”. Yet software had already landed us on the moon, paid social security and Medicare, and was routinely involved in running the global business world.

Reddit Wants to Get Paid for Helping to Teach Big A.I. Systems nytimes.com/2023/04/18/tec… // This is a super important “development”. Reddit is in a position to develop and require a pay-for API. That essentially creates a copyright / notion of ownership around their data. 1/3 2/ Current state of training models “breaks” the web. Crawling used to be allowed in exchange for clicks. But now the crawling simply trains a model and no value is ever delivered to the creator(s) / copyright holders. More here -> medium.learningbyshipping.com/ai-chatgpt-and…

Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back A.I. Rivals // What an amazing story of marketplace competition. New ideas from underdog to challenge much-disliked incumbent with > 80% share. Except this has nothing to do with technology at all. It’s all money and control. 1/ 2/ Super easy to spin this up as a story about a “better technology”. Everything is better with AI so of course search should be too (though Google has always used AI in search). While AI might have been discussed at a first meeting over dinner, all that follows is money/control.

One of the most famous memos in all of Microsoft history was a first memo about cost-cutting which came about in 1993 (see early 90s recession). Mike Murray, leading HR, wrote the memo "Shrimp and Weenies"—before MS, Mike was at Apple, having led OG Mac marketing. 1/ (third try) 2/ The company was going through challenges like much of the macro-economy. Only we were worried “maybe this is it? PCs are saturated”—MSFT paranoia. GDP was down. Sales were slowing. We were getting complacent.

Still, memo could have backfired. MS in 89 was a “Velvet Sweatshop”

A well-known hallmark of AI innovation over 65 years have been the cycles of AI winters.

Another less considered cycle has been that as soon as an AI solution can do something "promised" (aka hyped) that solution is not "really" AI as claimed. 1/2 2/We tend to forget collectively that it was AI (ML) that provided routing directions with maps, analysis in data lakes, and translation to name a few. Now those are just "services" that work spectacularly better than all previous attempts.

The excitement over how GPT will impact software engineering is worthwhile. This is a step function change for a good set of s/w eng efforts.

Need to keep in mind the history of innovations in developing software. There's supply and demand… 1/4 2/ Historically, excitement in immediate term implicitly assumes the demand for software is roughly constant. This means "we" can catch up and get more done with less.

Many advances over history: compilers, IDEs, graphical debuggers, object-oriented programming, OSS, CICD…

GitHub's Copilot was Microsoft's first big OpenAI-based app. Now it's getting additional chat features for computer programmers bloomberg.com/news/articles/… // The innovation in programming is probably on par w/ high-level languages and core principles of abstraction. Incredible. 1/4 2/ It simply blows my mind to think about working with (and then on) one of the first "smart" programming editors. The big innovation—it "understood" syntax and semantics of a program as it was typed. Cornell Program Synthesizer (later 'Generator'). Ran on this PDP Terak.

Steve Jobs (aka the original "Mr Apple Computerman") in November 1981 (on the heels of the IBM PC launch) on describing the state of technology (they they invented) at the time. 1/ 2/
Q. How "personal" computers will actually play a part in a normal person's life, even a person as normal as the average houseperson.

A. "That is the wrong place to start" …

The use of AI in writing should be required of first year university students in fall 2023. When I started in school I was enrolled in an "experimental" section to test if computers/word processors made writing "worse". Fortunately Macintosh came out between fall and spring. 1/3 2/3 Once a technology is ubiquitous the only path for education is to broadly adopt it otherwise they end up on the other side and enforce not using it turning many students into cheaters. In the case of AI it is the worst case because the tech is available free in many forms.

“No losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by the taxpayer.” “As with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank, no losses [at Signature Bank, NY, NY] will be borne by the taxpayer.
Shareholders and certain unsecured debtholders will not be protected. Senior management has also been removed.”

Microsoft limits Bing chat to five replies to stop the AI from getting real weird theverge.com/2023/2/17/2360… //NOOO. IMO a significant strategy error misreading failure of past week & over-correcting. This compounds the mistake of conflating LLMs, Bing, and Search in general. 1/ 2/ With OpenAI we *broadly* experienced the new wonders of a generative text platform. It gave us all a taste of an entire new form of creativity—generative creativity. In this thread I argued for the importance of “human in the loop” for productivity.

https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/1622842851137830912

One thing has been driving me bonkers are all the “fact checkers” against generated output. Here’s the problem.

Humans take computer output as “default correct”. That’s both an asset and a liability. Systems have to be designed to work around this.

Clippy, you say… 1/4 2/ Clippy came about because we wanted to put a less “absolute” character on the screen than text. The use of comic sans and the animations were about making the computer “less precise” and “less absolute”.

The problem with text output->people assume it is right.