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The Blue-Dot Edition Sunday, November 17, 2024

Lost Your Sense Of Direction? Turn Off Your Phone And You’ll Soon Reconnect, by Jerry Brotton, The Guardian

In my lifetime we have gone from looking up, aspiring to a shared global village inspired by Nasa’s blue marble photograph, to looking down, glued to the blue dot on our phones as our hippocampi shrink and many of us withdraw from nature. It probably isn’t the end of civilisation. After all, maps and compasses are cognitive artefacts, like the internet, and we’ve been using them for millennia. But for our sense of wellbeing, and that of the world that sustains us, we can take steps not just to appreciate nature, but understand how we are part of it, acknowledging that it will always be bigger than us, in a positive, not phobic way. Many share basic principles of psychotherapy: grounding, breathing, being “in the moment”, imagining ourselves from outside or “above” our bodies. It seems that, more than ever, we need to explain who we are by understanding where we are. Here are a few tips on how to do so.

Stuff

Apple Acknowledges iCloud Notes Disappearing And Explains How To Fix, by Joe Rossignol, MacRumors

Apple has now indirectly acknowledged this issue in a new support document that outlines steps to follow if your iCloud notes are not appearing on your iPhone, iPad, or Vision Pro.

[...]

Notes disappearing has not been the only problem. In another new support document, Apple said iPhone, iPad, and Vision Pro users who receive a "Cannot Complete Action" error message when trying to accept the updated iCloud terms and conditions should update to the latest version of iOS, iPadOS, or visionOS and try again.

Adobe Premiere Elements 2025 Review, by Cliff Joseph, Macworld

There’s no doubt that Premiere Elements is an impressively powerful program for video-editing work, and it’s great value for more advanced amateurs and semi-professional users such as podcasters and vloggers. Even so, it’s still a pretty complex piece of software, even when using Quick mode, so newcomers will have to be prepared to roll up their sleeves and do a bit of work in order to really get to grips with the program’s undeniably powerful editing tools.

'Pinning' Helps You Track Meaningful Events In Life, by Michael Burkhardt, 9to5Mac

It offers a visually appealing way of keeping track of birthdays, calendar events, anniversaries, and more! It also includes a number of native-feeling design elements.

Over 20 Apps Are Donating To Charity This Weekend, Here's How You Can Help Out, by Michael Burkhardt, 9to5Mac

This weekend is Indie Charity Weekend – a new initiative started by notable app developer Will Bishop! Starting today, 100% of this weekends proceeds from the 23 participating apps will go to the charity of the developers choice.

Notes

Top Execs Explain Apple’s Chip Philosophy: ‘We Are Not A Merchant Silicon Company, Trying To Leave Nothing On The Table’, by Nandagopal Rajan, The Indian Express

“How did we know? I think we have to go back to 2017 when we introduced the Neural Engine in our iOS products. And really this was inspired by our recognition of the importance of computational photography,” explained Millet. “So we were seeing the amazing research that folks up in the University of Toronto were demonstrating… these new neural networks were capable of doing image recognition beyond the capacity of humans, or at least matching, and they were headed on a trajectory that was clear. And so we pounced on the opportunity to build that embedded capability into our camera processors for the phone,” he added.

[...]

He recalled how an “interesting paper” was published in 2017 that led to the invention of the transformer network, which then became the foundation for the LLMs that exploded in 2022. “It took about five years. Folks on my team recognised that these papers had the potential to be very interesting and might have a huge impact and made big architectural changes to the Neural Engine, just in case. We introduced the first transformer-capable SOCs in 2020 when we introduced the M1 and this all lined up perfectly,” he said.

People In The '80s Thought Unix Would Take Over. Here's Why They Were Right, by David Delony, How-To Geek

Even if you don't use a Unix or Linux system on your desktop, you most likely have one in your pocket. Most modern smartphone OSes, including iOS and Android, are rooted in some form of Unix. So in the end, a Unix takeover predicted in the '80s really did come to pass.

Bottom of the Page

Over the two days of the weekend, it rained and rained and rained. So I didn't get to any parks or did any walks. And now I am miserable.

Yes, I know of people who will walk indoors in shopping malls and such, but I am not that person. Shopping malls make me miserable too.

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Thanks for reading.