Here is a great quote on leadership in John Gruber’s pre-post-mortem of Apple Intelligence:

The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI. It’s also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised features last week. Those are problems, not fiascos, and problems happen. They’re inevitable. Leaders prove their mettle and create their legacies not by how they deal with successes but by how they deal with — how they acknowledge, understand, adapt, and solve — problems. The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that.

“Leadership” is a suitcase word and although I disagree with most of the concepts packed into it, maybe it has not become completely useless.

Some pre-weekend reading:

• Fertility on Demand by Ruxandra Teslo
• The Nikola Jokić problem: Why we will never fully explain his brilliance
• Wikipedia: Monkey selfie copyright dispute (learned about this from the offspring)
• The hardest working font in Manhattan ← my pick of the week

📚 Finished reading: Wittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds. Learned much about Wittgenstein and even more about Popper. Both were wrong, as all philosophers are, but I can’t help thinking Wittgenstein was more wrong than Popper, being so obsessed with language which — turns out — is merely the most superficial layer of human intelligence and one that’s fairly easy to emulate. I do wonder what “little Luki” would have made of LLMs.

As I pass the Microsoft Authenticator matryoshka doll gauntlet of one number matching push notification after another, the immortal words of Arthur C. Clarke come to mind: Any sufficiently thoughtless technology is indistinguishable from torture.

Also on that other site: Grok 3. I wish I could say it was pure hype and bragging from a man-child in need of attention. Alas it’s the real deal: it gave me less BS, and faster, to my now standard set of querries. Brave new world, etc.

Deep Research continues to impress: here is a 4000-word essay on how the word “Pumpaj” — Serbian for “Pump!” — became the slogan of the 2024/25 protests. Even the prompt was LLM-engineered, as described in this Reddit post. So it goes…

It isn’t only grad students who should be worried about Deep Research:

Students cannot be expected to continue paying for information transfer that AGI provides freely. Instead, they will pay to learn from faculty whose expertise surpasses AI, offering mentorship, inspiration, and meaningful access to AGI-era careers and networks. Universities that cannot deliver this specific value will not survive. This isn’t a mere transformation but a brutal winnowing—most institutions will fail, and those that remain will be unrecognizable by today’s standards.

Yikes! This is from Hollis Robbins, much more in-depth and thought out than my rapid review, though I take issue with her sticking the G in between the A and the I, because we are no there yet. (ᔥTyler Cown)

One query in, I am convinced of the value of Deep Research and think it is well worth the $200 per month. The sources are real, the narrative less fluffy, the points it makes cogent. The narrative review is not dead yet, but it is on its way out. Here I am thinking about those reviews that are made to pad junior researchers CVs while they are introducing themselves to a field, neutral in tone and seemingly comprehensive in scope. There will always be a place for an opinionated perspective from a leader in the field.

In a year, the AI algorithms went from an overeager undergrad to a competent graduate student in every field of science, natural or social. Would o3 make this into a post-doc able and willing to go down every and any rabbit hole? Even now two hundred dollars per month is a bargain — if the price stays the same with next generation models it will be a steal.

The one snag is that it is all centralized, and yes the not so open OpenAI sees all your questions and knows what you want. For now. Local processing is a few years behind, so what is preventing nVidia or Apple or whomever from putting all its efforts into catching up? How much would you pay for your own server that would give its in-depth reports more slowly — say 30 minutes instead of 5 — but be completely private? And without needing benefits, travel and lodging to conferences or any of the messy HR stuff.

The brave new world is galloping ahead.

(↬Tyler Cowen)

Has it been a year since Apple Vision Pro came out? It looks like it. And a year in, it is clear that it is great for two and only two very specific use cases:

1. Watching media by yourself
2. Being hyper-productive in confined quarters for long stretches of time.

Number 2 only became viable a few months ago when they turned on the ultra-ultra-ultra-wide display option, but that has become my main use for it. You need a long stretch of time because it is not convenient to take it on and off constantly. Since my work day is interrupted by meetings these stretches of time are few and far between.

A third use case may pop up if Apple actually enables 3rd-party controllers and developers actually port games to it, neither of which is a given. So, the uses may expand, slowly, and the user base with them, but I did a quick search on AVP gaming just now and the top articles on Kagi — here is one — are from just before and just after the release. That’s telling.

Visiting San Francisco and just had my first Waymo ride. It was the most obedient, defensive, proper driving I have ever seen, at once frustrating and uplifting. The world would be a better place if every car was fully self-driving and I can’t wait for them to come to DC.