Writing by speaking has quietly revolutionized how I work. It has made my writing more conversational and less precious. More amazingly, it has expanded my canvas: I can now write the way street photographers shoot — out in the world, whenever the muse strikes me (or more likely, when I’m loafing around, procrastinating on some other piece of writing). Most of my recent columns, including large portions of this one, were written this way: first by mouth, not fingers.
There is something more interesting here than a newspaper columnist’s life hack. I began writing-by-speaking as part of a deeper exploration into living inside what I call the “screenless internet” — which may well become the internet of tomorrow, for better and worse.
Apple has shared a new "Shot on iPhone XS" video featuring Toronto Maple Leafs stars Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner on its YouTube channel in the U.S. and Canada, just in time for the start of the 2019 Stanley Cup Playoffs tonight.
Apple today announced it has nearly doubled the number of suppliers that have committed to run their Apple-specific production on 100 percent renewable energy, bringing the total number to 44.
Apple this week has overhauled the web interface for Apple Podcasts. The new design is much cleaner and easier to navigate, while also offering support for playback, individual episode details, and more.
I’ve got to think that Apple has a bigger iMac redesign in the offing, but that it’s not ready to make that step right now—perhaps because of price issues involving SSD storage, perhaps because of other forthcoming changes to the Mac platform that require them to hold that design back. But it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which the 2019 iMac doesn’t feel like a relic of a previous era a lot sooner than you might expect. This is the last hurrah of the old iMac, not the first step into a new era.
It is specifically designed for cyclists, runners, and walkers and makes it easy to create custom navigation routes that traditional navigation apps can’t do. It also offers an offline mode to save battery, which is especially convenient for saved routes that you regularly run or bike.
The monthly YouTube TV subscription fee is going up to $49.99. And it will be even higher for those who pay for this streaming video service via the Apple App Store.
This is apparently YouTube’s way of partially offsetting the cut Apple takes from all subscription fees. And it’s something other companies might emulate.
“I can’t think what would cause me to leave” was a common sentiment noted by the researchers, who surveyed almost 1,000 zookeepers, and conducted in-depth interviews with many of them. But the fact that the keepers had found and followed a calling was a double-edged sword. Doing what they did for love also meant putting up with poor conditions and potentially being exploited.
Some of us, like the zookeepers, get a lot of fulfillment out of what we do for a living. In many jobs, however, the connection between our work and the meaning we derive from it is much less obvious. In some cases, the link is almost or completely severed—as in what anthropologist David Graeber has dubbed “bullshit jobs.” At the same time, we’re brought up to believe that work—not the church, the state, or even the family—is the fountainhead from which our sense of meaning should spring.
“We’re in discussions with other vendors, and there’s more to come,” he said Wednesday at the ACT-IAC Health Innovation Day. “We want to partner more with the rest of the [developer] community. There’s a really bright future with respect to apps, app development and helping veterans and others access our legacy systems.”
Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Deb Fischer (R-NE) introduced a bipartisan bill on Tuesday that would make this type of design illegal, affecting any social media platform with more than 100 million monthly active users. Any user interfaces that are designed to hide or gloss over the personal data you’re consenting to share will no longer be allowed.
The bill demands that disclosures of personal data collection be “clear, conspicuous, context-appropriate, and easily accessible” and not “deceptively obscured.”
If it were a metaphor to say that the brain is a computer, then we would expect the claim to be literally false. This checks out with the point that our brains aren’t organised, like PCs, into silicon-based hard drives, RAMs and CPUs. We would also expect it to be difficult to flesh out exactly what we mean when we say that the brain is a computer. The value of the claim, were it a metaphor, would have to lie in whether it suggests the right things to attend to, whether it calls to mind fruitful associations, and whether it succeeds in bringing some coordination to the cognitive sciences. Some think that the supposed metaphor succeeds on these counts, while others think it fails and has poisoned the well of cognitive-science research.
But the claim that the brain is a computer is not just a metaphor. The cognitive sciences are full of hypotheses to the effect that the brain computes such-and-such in so-and-so a way. Many of our perceptual capacities, for example, are understood in computational terms, and there aren’t any viable alternatives around.
Went to a tech conference. Sat through a whole bunch of talks. Gobble up a whole bunch of free food.
Free good food is definitely better all those free USB drives of yore.
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Thanks for reading.