Peace and quiet are all relative. For my wife and me nothing could be more serene that a morning walk down an empty beach on a nice day. For the birds trying to catch food and constantly running away from the waves, I imagine life is quite hectic.
In a town filled with people trying to relive their Model UN glory days, trivia isn’t just some silly bar game — it’s the D.C. equivalent of flexing shirtless on Muscle Beach.
While this isn’t what most of DC is actually like, there are many people living here who would like it to be this way and that also tells you something.
April 4, 2024
The foliage may not be the prettiest, but the that cherry is a thing of beauty. At Green World Coffee Farm on Oahu last October.
Google began testing an experimental AI-powered search service in May last year, presenting more detailed answers to queries while also continuing to present users with links to further information and advertising. However, it has been slow to add any of the features from what it calls its “Search Generative Experience” experiment to its main search engine.
These kinds of search results, which include an “AI-powered snapshot”, are more costly for Google to serve up than its traditional responses because generative AI consumes a lot more computing resources. It has offered access to SGE to only a select few users, including some subscribers to its Google One bundle that offers benefits such as extra cloud storage for a monthly fee.
Just today ChatGPT 4 answered a basic question — how to do multivariate regression in Excel — with a response miles better than the SEO spam I got from an online search. Having abandoned Google more than a decade ago, I won’t shed any tears.
Both Ben Thompson and Jason Snell had reservations about Apple’s only immersive video to come out since Vision Pro came out. It is a 5-minute highlight reel of the Major League Soccer Cup and after seeing it myself I kind of disagree with both of them. The video is fine!
There are some limitations of the technology: you can’t have the camera panning around the pitch so you have to be in a fixed position, and a soccer pitch is so vast that there is no way to watch a game from the same spot while being close to the action, while at the same time being close to the action is the whole point of immersion. So, to square that circle Apple, or whomever they chose to produce the video, opted to cut to the most interesting bits of action from the most interesting spots.
I don’t know how much soccer Snell, Thompson and other Apple commentators have seen in their lives but I would wager that it’s not a lot. I am far from being a super-fan, but I’ve seen enough games to know where to look and the cuts in the video were fine — for those who know the game. Moving from spot to spot was logical and it was clear which games you were watching.
But what did Apple intend with this? To have an immersive video for the fans? Or was it a tech demo? Or maybe a vehicle to get more Apple whales — and let’s face it if you own an AVP you are an Apple whale no matter what you tell yourself — to get into MLS? They’re three different things with different tradeoffs and it seems like they went for the fans here first, but how many of them are there who also have a Vision Pro?
Now with basketball you actually can be close to the action and have a good overview of the game, and this is where everyone, fan or not, would probably prefer a single court-side position over quick cuts. So I hope Adam Silver is working on that. I don’t know or watch baseball, but I assume it’s somewhere in between basketball and soccer. At the only baseball game I ever watched I could clearly see every part of the field, I just didn’t know what was going on or where I should look.
The optimal version for every sport would of course be to have a choice between several spots around the court, pitch or field and I do hope we’ll get that for some of the upcoming NBA playoff games. I already have a League Pass and would happily pay extra for the experience.
📺 3 Body Problem (The Netflix version) was a great introduction to the topic for my non-science-fiction-reading spouse, but of course couldn’t even begin to approach the depth of the original. Some unordered observations:
The first season of the show encompasses the entire first book and a part of the second. I didn’t mind that as much as I thought I would, though huge chunks of the parts I liked were cut out.
The plot had more handwaving then I remembered from the book, which I believe was the result of the above cutting but I’ll have to re-read the books to be certain.
Several key (Chinese) characters from the book were combined and re-sliced into an unlikely team of five Oxford buddies who have an oversized role in the future of humanity. I hope that’s the worst we see of the show runners' interventions.
I liked the intro and loved Ramin Djawadi’s theme song but Netflix decided to show the whole thing only in the first episode and cut it down to 2 seconds in all the subsequent ones. Thumbs down for that.
The first season was the easy one. I hope technology catches up to make Death’s End feasible to film.
