Consider my ass well and truly kicked.

Absolutely heartbreaking year for Craig Hockenberry. I just purchased Tot. I’d suggest you do as well.

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Absolutely beautiful.

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The Tao of Cal

With the end of year rapidly approaching, and people finding themselves with some spare thinking time as work winds down for the holidays, I thought it might be fun to try to summarize essentially every major idea I discuss in one short primer.

I’m a big fan of Cal Newport’s work. I’d like to quote the entire post, but I’ll just post this one sentence. Read the rest of this article, then buy his books and read those too. Follow his advice and live a better life.

Godot Isn’t Making it

Outside of a miracle, we are about to enter an era of desperation in the generative AI space. We’re two years in, and we have no killer apps — no industry-defining products — other than ChatGPT, a product that burns billions of dollars and nobody can really describe. Neither Microsoft, nor Meta, nor Google or Amazon seem to be able to come up with a profitable use case, let alone one their users actually like, nor have any of the people that have raised billions of dollars in venture capital for anything with “AI” taped to the side — and investor interest in AI is cooling.

Edward Zitron seems to be a rare voice of frustrated reason in the tech industry. He’s very critical of AI, and, more and more, I’m thinking rightfully so. OpenAI is spending over $2 to make $1, burning through billions with no path to profitability.

Couple that with the environmental cost of AI (and its just plain awful cousin, crypto currency) and the unreliability of the generated answers, and I’m wondering just where all of this goes in the next year or so.

I’m rooting for these guys. If they can pull off this truck at the $50-$60k mark, I think they are going to have a winner. I’ve been looking at electric trucks for a while, and I’m excited to see another entry in the market. And what a fantastic video:

A proper body-on-frame truck, 10,000 lb towing capacity, all electric, made in the USA. Count me in.

Love this guy. Patrick Rhone calls him folksy, I agree.

The Cloud Under the Sea

• The Verge

The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data.

Fantastic article, reading it I’m nostalgic for my time as a Sailor in the US Navy. If I was a younger man, I might be tempted to seek out a position on one of these ships.

Tackle complex reasoning tasks with Mistral Large, now available on Amazon Bedrock

• Link

Calculate the difference in payment dates between the two customers whose payment amounts are closest to each other in the given dataset:

‘{ “transaction_id”:{“0”:“T1001”,“1”:“T1002”,“2”:“T1003”,“3”:“T1004”,“4”:“T1005”}, “customer_id”:{“0”:“C001”,“1”:“C002”,“2”:“C003”,“3”:“C002”,“4”:“C001”}, “payment_amount”:{“0”:125.5,“1”:89.99,“2”:120.0,“3”:54.3,“4”:210.2}, “payment_date”:{“0”:“2021-10-05”,“1”:“2021-10-06”,“2”:“2021-10-07”,“3”:“2021-10-05”,“4”:“2021-10-08”}, “payment_status”:{“0”:“Paid”,“1”:“Unpaid”,“2”:“Paid”,“3”:“Paid”,“4”:“Pending”} }’

Output

To find the difference in payment dates between the two customers whose payment amounts are closest to each other, we first need to identify the two closest payment amounts and then find their respective payment dates.

The payment amounts are: 125.5, 89.99, 120.0, 54.3, 210.2

The two closest payment amounts are 125.5 and 120.0. The payment date for the payment amount 125.5 is ‘2021-10-05’ and for the payment amount 120.0 is ‘2021-10-07’.

The difference in payment dates can be calculated as follows:

Date difference = |‘2021-10-07’ - ‘2021-10-05’| = 2 days

So, the difference in payment dates between the two customers whose payment amounts are closest to each other is 2 days.

AWS does well when taking complex systems and packaging them up for consumers. I don’t think we’ve seen the full impact of AI yet. Not even close.

Casey Liss - Every Failure is an Opportunity

So, I called Sonos support this morning, and braced for a fight — I’m about six months out of the warranty coverage.

Thirty minutes later, without any sort of arguing nor complaining, I have a RMA, and I’ll get a new Roam in a couple of weeks.

Reminds me of a time when I took my newly broken iPod Mini into an Apple Store. I showed it to the guy at the counter, he said he couldn’t say for sure if it was accidental or manufacturing defect, so he went in the back and brought me a brand new one. I’ve been a fan since. Sounds like Sonos learned the right lesson.

New Spatial Personas

A pair of links for this one, one from each point of view:

• Jason Snell at Six Colors
• Stephen Hacket at 512 Pixels

I was able to invite my friend Stephen Hackett’s Persona over to my house for a play date and we were able to chat face to face in a way that just seemed more natural than talking to a persona in a box. It felt more like it was him.

After our excellent ideation session, we played a round of Battleship in the excellent Game Room on Apple Arcade. After I sunk all of his ships, we watched a few minutes of For All Mankind in a couple of immersive environments.

I had always wondered about SharePlay, prior to the Vision Pro. Why would I want to keep my phone up looking at someone on FaceTime while we both watched a movie? Never made sense. Now in the light of immersive virtual reality, it makes perfect sense.

The one about the web developer job market

• Baldur Bjarnason

We have the worst job environment for tech in over two decades and that’s with the “AI” bubble in full force. If that bubble pops hard before the job market recovers, the repercussions to the tech industry will likely eclipse the dot-com crash.

Well, this gave me a lot of food for thought.

xz Utils Backdoor

• Schneier on Security

I simply don’t believe this was the only attempt to slip a backdoor into a critical piece of Internet software, either closed source or open source. Given how lucky we were to detect this one, I believe this kind of operation has been successful in the past. We simply have to stop building our critical national infrastructure on top of random software libraries managed by lone unpaid distracted—or worse—individuals.

Not great news the past couple days from the software industry.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT and in China has come up with a solution to the problem of salt accumulation — and in the process developed a desalination system that is both more efficient and less expensive than previous solar desalination methods. The process could also be used to treat contaminated wastewater or to generate steam for sterilizing medical instruments, all without requiring any power source other than sunlight itself.

That’s good news, more of this please.

Link

Now, researchers propose a portable, practical solution that relies on retrofitted train cars that capture and store carbon dioxide as they shuttle around on their normal routes.

Trains and carbon capture, two of my favorite ideas together at last.

Link