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The Go-Wild Edition Friday, May 18, 2018

For Apple, This Year’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day Is All About Education, by Steven Aquino, TechCrunch

In hindsight, Apple’s viewpoint for how they support special education makes total sense if you understand their ethos. Tim Cook often talks about building products that enrich people’s lives — in an education and accessibility context, this sentiment often becomes a literal truism. For many disabled people, iOS and the iPad is the conduit through which they access the world.

Apple ultimately owns the iPad and the message around it, but in actuality it’s the users who really transform it and give it its identity. This is ultimately what makes the tablet exceptional for learning. The device’s design is so inherently accessible that anyone, regardless of ability, can pick it up and go wild.

In The Golden Age Of Television, Can Narrative Podcasts Compete?, by Jake Nevins, The Guardian

Now, radio fiction is experiencing something of a renaissance on the shoulders of the podcast boom, which has spawned more than 525,000 active shows and, according to Apple, another 50bn episode downloads. The rising tide, however, has lifted some boats more than others. Where conversation-based podcasts and true-crime narratives have thrived, with dozens of them being adapted for the screen, audio fiction has been slower to rise, hampered by the innate constraints of audio-based platforms and television’s stranglehold on episodic fiction. But that hasn’t stopped podcast producers from trying to revive the radio drama as a form of contemporary prestige entertainment.

Dear MacOS: Stop Forcing Yourself On Me, by Elger Jonker, Medium

I love you very much. But why did do you seem to be growing being an annoying old hag? Did you look to much to your brothers? Trust me, there is little to look up to. Questions, dialogs and bugs that interrupt my workflow and ruin my precious train of thought are what you have become.

You knew what was right for me. So to help you, i’ve kept some records of your behavior. I hope some introspection will help you become a better OS.

Real Intelligence

What The History Of Math Can Teach Us About The Future Of AI, by Nathan Myhrvold, Scientific American

Like mathematics, intelligence is not just one simple kind of problem, such as pattern recognition. It’s a huge constellation of tasks of widely differing complexity. So far, the most impressive demonstrations of “intelligent” performance by AI have been programs that play games like chess or Go at superhuman levels. These are tasks that are so difficult for human brains that even the most talented people need years of practice to master them.

Meanwhile, many of the tasks that seem most basic to us humans—like running over rough terrain or interpreting body language—are all but impossible for the machines of today and the foreseeable future. As AI gets more capable, the sphere of jobs that computers can do faster or more accurately than people will expand. But an expanding universe of work will remain for humans, well outside the reach of automation.

What Google Isn't Telling Us About Its AI Demo, by Dan Primack, Axios

Google may well have created a lifelike voice assistant that we'll all eventually use to complete mundane tasks like appointment scheduling. It also might be close to creating such a thing, but not quite there yet. Or it was partially staged. Or something else entirely. We just don't know, because Google won't answer the questions.

Develop

How To Stick To A Schedule When You Work From Home, by Whitson Gordon, New York Times

Maybe that flexible schedule keeps you from daily basics like exercising and eating, or maybe it just causes you to work 12 hour days without realizing where the time has gone. Whichever camp you fall into, it’s important to make sure your day doesn’t become a black hole.

Notes

Why Lithium And Cobalt Producers Are The Hot New Acquisition Target, by Amrith Ramkumar, Wall Street Journal

Both lithium and cobalt, which is also used in these batteries, face potential shortages in the years ahead as electric-vehicle use grows.

That concern is driving a growing number of companies reliant on lithium and cobalt to strike deals now, even if it means partnering with suppliers that haven’t started producing yet.

Bottom of the Page

Today is one of those work-days when I felt that I have done quite a lot of things but still accomplished so very little in the grand scheme of things.

(I'm definitely not cut out to be doing sales nor marketing.)

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Thank goodness I'm not selling sugar water though.

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Thanks for reading.