Portrait Mode photos aren't just photos with a blur applied. They have the potential to be photos that are more about what they are photos of. It gets back to one of the oldest, most durable posts on this site: Less is More. We frame our shots carefully, and shallow depth of field allows us to frame our shots in depth as well.
Sometimes that makes the photo prettier. Often, it can make the photo.
"His spirit will always be the DNA of the company," Cook said of his colleague and friend. Jobs' vision, he said, was to make the best products that enrich people's lives.
"Lots of things will change with Apple," Cook said, "but that will never change."
Walking around this place did make me a bit wispy and emotional. It reminded me how fortunate I was to have had a hand in the marketing of many of these objects—an not getting stuck in some ad agency writing ads for insurance or toilet paper.
In the burgeoning field of computer science known as machine learning, engineers often refer to the artificial intelligences they create as “black box” systems: Once a machine learning engine has been trained from a collection of example data to perform anything from facial recognition to malware detection, it can take in queries—Whose face is that? Is this app safe?—and spit out answers without anyone, not even its creators, fully understanding the mechanics of the decision-making inside that box.
But researchers are increasingly proving that even when the inner workings of those machine learning engines are inscrutable, they aren’t exactly secret. In fact, they’ve found that the guts of those black boxes can be reverse-engineered and even fully reproduced—stolen, as one group of researchers puts it—with the very same methods used to create them.
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have advanced sufficiently by century’s end that countries like Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.