I disagree with Gruber. While the current calls against social media echo the comic-book/rap-music/video-game scares, there is hard(ish) data on their detrimental effects in some children and adolescents. Certainly enough to justify more scrutiny.

Google’s NotebookLM now supports asking questions about more than 10 sources and is apparently making lifelogging great again. “Lifelogging” evokes misguided attempts of Mark Cuban to measure everything and the narcissistic tendencies of Stephe Wolfram to write about me me me; but then, isn’t my DEVONthink database also a life-log of sorts and wouldn’t it be great to be able to ask plain questions about the documents inside? Of course it would, and the use case is so obvious I wrote about it already.

Considering the types of documents that are there — tax returns, birth certificates and such — uploading them to a hive mind is out of the question, but Apple and Microsoft should unquestionably work on an on-device solution. Whichever Mac — laptop or desktop, I don’t care — enables this will be the one to replace my current M1 Air which is entering its fourth year soon but still going strong.

So this is the (near? let’s hope so) future I imagine: asking when the kids' last doctor’s appointment was and having the LLM confirm it through both the calendar and a saved note. Let’s say I need this information to fill out a form at a different doctor’s office, and it also asks me about their height and weight. Well, even if we don’t obsessively check our children’s biometrics and log them in a database, they are still recorded in those school forms and would be available to LLM bots.

This is, of course, a privacy nightmare. Even Apple has privacy slip-ups, and even if the data itself is kept on a personal device which also does the processing, who’s to say that the audio won’t be sent somewhere and kept on recorded for quality control? It seems like a whole new frontier has opened up where 19th century laws contorted to fit the 20th may not easily apply, but I’ll stop there before I get too political.

There may still be a use for NotebookLM, though. With the source document restriction lifted, I can at least upload publicly available documents like journal articles, book chapters and lecture slides that I also keep in DEVONthink, grouped by topic so that they are easily transposable into NotebookLM’s “notebooks”. And I will report more, as soon as there are any publicly shareable use cases to report.

(↬Dave Winer)

ChatGPT has been a godsend for custom Mathematica functions, especially simple ones that may take 10–15 minutes to write but still take me out of the Thing I’m Actually Trying to Do.

Are they the most efficient functions there are? Probably not. But they are well-written, easy to debug, and let me put small flourishes that ultimately make my life easier but that I wouldn’t bother with if I had to do everything on my own.

A recent example is Mathemathica’s built-in Tally function which takes in a list and puts out the frequency of each element (e.g. {Yes, No, Yes, Yes} in and {{Yes, 3}, {No, 1}} out). I usually deal with longer lists where percentages would also come in handy, so having percentages also listed (i.e. {Yes, 3, 25}) would be nice. I asked ChatGPT-4o, and what it gave was good enough: ⊕ This was, of course, only a part of the response. It tends to be professorial when answering code-related questions, which is very much appreciated.

TallyWithPercentages[list_] := Module[
  {tallied, total},
  tallied = Tally[list];
  total = Length[list];
  {#[[1]], {#[[2]], N[#[[2]]/total*100]}} & /@ tallied
]

It wasn’t exactly what I wanted because the output was {Yes, 3}, 25} instead of {Yes, 3, 25}, but that was easy to change with a simple intervention — Flatten the output then re-Partition it — without thinking too much about Mathemathica’s sometimes incomprehensible short-code which I forget after a few days of not needing it.

Could I have done this with a quick online search? Of course! But the cognitive load of doing it this way is essentially zero, as is the chance of getting distracted by something else happening on the page.

📚 Finished reading: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt while trying to avoid confirmation bias since we are of the same mind on phones in schools and I was very much on his side during on of the most interesting and least civil Conversations with Tyler (Cowen).

The last third of the book — calls to action — was too much of a laundry list for my taste, but I was pleasantly surprised by Haidt’s take on spirituality with which he concluded the middle section.

Apparently, this book was supposed to be only the first chapter of Haidt’s next one, about the influence of smartphones and social media on everyone’s lives. I suspect that here, too, we will agree, though I had only written about the destruction wrought upon the older generations (present company included) in Serbian.

It was a packed coast-to-coast flight a few days ago and I was flying economy. But even then, the social anxiety of being “that guy” ultimately stopped me from putting on the goggles. The series of events before that decision was this: I had opened a book as soon as I got into my seat, then the plan took off, then drinks and snacks were served and before I knew it we were an hour and a half into a five-hour flight. Fiddling with AVP’s battery and jamming the charger in between the seats felt like too much.

Still, there were a few emails in my inbox that needed long, thoughtful responses that referenced a few different files so as soon as the flight attendant cleaned out the drinks I got my laptop out, set it on the tray and started typing. Not a minute later, the person in front of me — about 6' 8", can’t say I blame them — reclined their seat all the way down.

I had never dug into my backpack so quickly, and it turns out that setting up AVP doesn’t take all that long, considering.

A few minutes later I was in Joshua Tree National Park, my Mac’s large virtual display in front of me, typing away on the MacBook Air’s keyboard that was just barely visible from the screen that was being pushed by the reclining seat. A seat that I didn’t see and wasn’t bothered by one bit.

My friends, it was glorious. I spent the next three hours Doing Important Things, messaging apps on one side, documents on the other, and I could easily have spent three more but before I knew it the pilot announced that the trays should go up so I packed all the electronics — again, quite quickly, considering — and went back to my book.

The flight back was not nearly as full — I had the row for myself — which made the experience even better: with all three trays to myself I could position the apps all around me from the middle seat. Better yet, I was ready for landing, flipping the tray up and setting the laptop back into my backpack but continuing to work with AVP on and Apple’s tiniest keyboard in my lap. I liked this set up so much that I was wondering whether Screens has a VisionOS version (it does), and whether I could ditch the MacBook altogether and stream my Mac Mini — or, in the future, a Mac Studio — for the heavier work.

So that was good.

But of course AVP is still very much an 0.1 product. It couldn’t remember app position or different setups: of all of Apple’s platforms, VisionOS needs Stage Manager the most. It often couldn’t decide whether to use the virtual or hardware keyboard. Using on-flight WiFi made things laggy at times — which is why the Screens setup probably wouldn’t work — and I had a feeling that some of the legginess was from unoptimized software more than anything else, particularly from the iPad apps. But if people don’t use it, what is the developers' motivation to improve their apps?

Which ties to what will most likely kill AVP, if something does kill it: Apple’s inexplicable inertia. Environments that were “Coming Soon” on launch still haven’t arrived. All but one immersive show are still in the Season 1 Episode 1 stage. There haven’t been any new Apple apps since launch even though the iPad event would have been a pretty good time to highlight them.

This is important: unless you use AVP as a personal TV — which I don’t, movie and TV watching should be a communal experience — or travel almost daily, your only incentive to put it on frequently is to see what’s new. And not using AVP frequently brings it into the empty battery — wait to recharge — wait to start up — wait to update death loop that has been the bane of many household gadgets, most of them, admittedly, costing much less than $3,500 plus tax.

Bud I digress; I do travel often enough for AVP to see frequent-enough use, and for the scenario I described at the beginning it is well worth the price. Conditional, of course, on what you actually do with the freedom it grants you.

Of course I mean Crush, which is quickly becoming Apple’s second-most iconic add. Much like 1984, Apple’s most iconic add, it will be remembered and reference for a long time to come and for the same reason: it is an accurate, impartial representation of the effects technology has, or will have, on the world.

The only difference, and the reason why 1984 is still better, is timing: it took almost three decades for technology to break “The Man”. So 1984 was prophetic to the extreme, the second-order effects of “The Man” breaking weren’t immediately clear, and the add was well-received. Alas, we now know all to well what they are and how they came about, as described by Martin Gurri in his 2018 book “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium” and as seen on your favorite and less favorite social networks.

But imagine that add airing in 2020, in the midst of the Covid pandemic. Here is Anthony Fauci ordering you to socially distance and mask up. A year later he drones on about vaccines. And here comes our valiant antivaxer, ready, willing and able to break the mainstream media, the deep state, the uniparty, or whichever else term is popular with that particular crowd these days. I haven’t checked, but I am quite sure there is a meme out there with 1984 cut in just such way.

What 1984 was to media, Crush is to the material world. It is not as good as it is quite late to the game: we are already seeing dematerialization in action, at least in the United States, and are closer to its second, third, nth-order effects. These range from beneficial (to the planet and natural resources) to potentially devastating (to our sense of identity, history and culture), so the anxiety is completely justified and Apple was right in deciding not to air it on TV. But it is still good, educational work which I will be showing and talking about with my kids.

Kudos to Apple for making it.

Update: As promised, Pratik wrote more about the creative destruction aspect of the add. For many people, as bridges are collapsing and the world is crumbling, destruction is destruction.

I, for one, appreciate Apple for their honesty. There is no point in sugarcoating it: the things we create with their help will be ephemeral; the things destroyed in the process through ignorance and neglect, well, whatcha gonna do?

“Mute notifications for 8 hours” is a godsend on WhatsApp, and the only thing that would make it better is more granularity (8 hours is the least amount of time, and the next step up is a full week). Apple’s Messages/iMessage, on the other hand, has no time-limited muting and even no way of knowing at a glance whether a pinned group chat is muted. I am no fan of Facebook/Meta, but they are eating Apple’s lunch and drinking their milkshake at the same time, and I fully expect WhatsApp to overtake Messages in the US.

Analogy of the Week Award goes to Eric Levitz of Vox:

In our conversation, Przybylski said he doubted that using social media shortens people’s attention spans. To me, this is a bit like doubting that chewing broken glass causes oral discomfort. And I imagine most of my fellow heavy X users would agree.

Though not as big of an X user as I used to be, I, too, agree.

Jonathan Haidt’s interview with Tyler Cowen was excruciating and my opinion of Tyler deteriorated significantly, but it was the push I needed to order Haidt’s new book. I thought I’d skip it because we were already in perfect agreement but I’ll make sure to turn on my confirmation bias shields.