Holding the S8, I’m struck by the fact that nothing about it feels especially surprising, and not just because damn near everything about it has been leaking for the past few months. The boldest feature is every phone’s more important feature: the screen. On the S8, it extends up and down to cover nearly the entire front of the phone. It also curves around the left and right, something Samsung is calling the “infinity display,” which gives it the look of not having any bezels at all. And speaking of curves, the four corners of the screen are also slightly curved instead of squared-off, which adds some elegance and perhaps some screen durability.

But will it explode?

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Machine learning is different. Now, instead of humans designing algorithms to be executed by a computer, the computer is designing the algorithms. It is still Artificial Narrow Intelligence — the computer is bound by the data and goal given to it by humans — but machine learning is, in my mind, meaningly different from what has come before. Just as Shannon fused the physical with the logical to make the computer, machine learning fuses the development of tools with computers themselves to make (narrow) artificial intelligence.

Like I was talking about in On Computing Tomorrow, the ability of computers to generate algorithms, or entire programs, is potentially fatal to a certain set of developers. I’m certain my role in DevOps is not immune. If you can ask a computer to look at a git repository and build the exact right environment to support that application, what need will there be for sysadmins or devops? Far less than what there is now. This train isn’t going to stop, and like all technology, we either need to get on board or get run over.

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Perspectives in OmniFocus allow you to include additional task details like due date, defer date, flag status, and project status to customize your task views even further. If you wanted to see only tasks that are available to be worked on right now, require you to have access to your Mac, and are due next week, perspectives allow you to find the tasks that meet this criteria quickly and easily.

Without OmniFocus, I’m positive there are important things in my life that would not get done. OmniFocus helps me to forget about when to take the trash to the curb, when to pay bills, and when to change the oil in my jeep. It also helps me make sure that I’m making progress on all the projects I’m working on throughout the day.

While I’m at work, I have an OmniFocus perspective that filters out everything that’s not relevant that I’ve committed to working on today. Before and after work, I shift over to my “Today” perspective to see everything that I have on my plate for the day.

OmniFocus is an essential piece of software for me, and I highly recommend it to anyone who feels like they have more to do than they can keep track of. In today’s world, I imagine that’s just about everyone.

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Restating, underscoring, or even strengthening those scientific results won’t solve that problem. The results already come from multiple fields, are reinforced by multiple lines of evidence, and have been vetted (extremely vetted, you might say) by several extended, multi-layered review processes. Collectively, we don’t know how to “know” anything more confidently than we know this stuff.

If someone chooses to simply reject those scientific institutions, procedures, and results, then piling on more facts is beside the point. It’s not about facts any more, it’s about the authority of the institutions.

I understand why politicians who get their funding from oil companies want to discredit global warming and research into climate change, what I don’t understand is why that willingness to disregard established facts trickles down to everyday republicans.

I’m starting to think that this has more to do with tribalism than actual beliefs. The right-wing tribe believes this set of ideas, given to them by their elected leaders, and nothing will change their mind about that.

Given that we can now safely refute any scientific research (biased), well reported news story (fake news), and even disregard things we’ve seen and heard ourselves (he didn’t really mean that), we have entered a dangerous era where a major section of the population has decided to make up their own reality.

How can we have a meaningful conversation when your loyalty to your tribe means more than facts, reason, or logic?

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You will never get any more out of life than you expect

Keep your mind on the things you want and off those you don’t

Things live by moving and gain strength as they go

Be a calm beholder of what is happening around you

Looks like I’ve got a new podcast to check out.

Because the truth of the matter is that, however you go about it, you do need to build your capacity for hard, focused work. That is vital in an age of complexity, where we need to carve out a niche. Most of us aren’t making widgets anymore, and much of that work is being replaced by machines anyways.

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I’m not sure if I’m ready to drop $80 on his course quite yet ¹, but I completely agree with what he’s saying here. The ability to concentrate on difficult problems for an extended period of time is only going to become more valuable. Far too many people spend every spare second they have looking at their phone, literally falling down stairs so they don’t miss the latest snapchat alert.

It kind of feels like our lives are made up of a countless number of weeks. But there they are—fully countable—staring you in the face.

…

Sometimes life seems really short, and other times it seems impossibly long. But this chart helps to emphasize that it’s most certainly finite. Those are your weeks and they’re all you’ve got.

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Reminds me of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. “That the powerful play goes on, and you get to contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”

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Sal Soghoian, writing for MacStories:

Here’s a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that Apple decided to combine their engineering resources to form app teams that delivered both iOS and macOS versions of applications.

In such a scenario it may seem logical to retain application features common to both platforms and to remove those that were perceived to require extra resources. Certainly Automation would be something examined in that regard, and the idea might be posited that: “App Extensions are equivalent to, or could be a replacement for, User Automation in macOS.” And by User Automation, I’m referring to Apple Event scripting, Automator, Services, the UNIX command line utilities, etc.

I’ve said many times that one of the main reasons I came to OS X is the underlying Unix utilities. I literally can’t do my job without the command line. It’s always in my dock, it’s always open, and I’ve got it customized just the way I like it. There is no replacement for the terminal, and no App Extension can provide a way for me to string together the tools I use to get done what needs to get done.

In such a world like Sal is imagining, I would have to find an SSH app like Prompt and setup my entire development environment on a Linux server somewhere. While possible, it’s not economical and it’s certainly not how I’ve become accustomed to working. I don’t think I’m alone in this either, anyone who does web development relies on command line versions of Python, Ruby, PHP, or Perl, along with a host of other small utilities to do things like syntax checking or unit tests.

I think it’s possible that Apple could remove the Terminal from OS X, along with the Unix utilities, similar to what they’ve done with iOS, but I don’t think they will. Apple uses OS X to develop their own software, so they know what the developers need to be efficient and productive. However I could see a world where you had to install Xcode and enable “developer mode” to get to the Unix utilities. We may not be far away from a day when OS X no longer ships with Terminal.app, but I think we’ll always have a way to install it when there’s real work that needs done.

I think Apple may be heading in the wrong direction, and it’s sad to see Sal be let go, but I’m glad to see him carrying on fighting for the users.

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Today we’re making Instapaper Premium available to all Instapaper users, free of charge. Instapaper Premium is the best way to experience all that Instapaper has to offer, and we’re excited to open it up to everyone.

I’ve been an Instapaper user for as long as I’ve known about the service, and a premium subscriber for as long as it’s been available. I was worried when Marco sold Instapaper to Betaworks, but Betaworks did some good work on the service. I started to hope that Instapaper had found a stable home and that my Saturday afternoons were safe for catching up on interesting reading.

When Pinterest bought Instapaper, and acquired a majority share in Betaworks, I started to wonder about the long-term viability of the service again. Would Pinterest keep it around? Would Instapaper line up with Pinterest’s future goals? We’ve all seen popular services be acquired by larger companies just to be unceremoniously scrapped. Thinking through the goals of the two services however, I believe that Pinterest is more interested in watching user behavior than making Instapaper a profitable stand-alone service.

In that light, yesterday’s announcement that they were doing away with Instapaper’s revenue model of selling premium subscriptions makes sense. It’s in Pinterest’s best interest to get as many subscribers frequently using the service as possible, presumably to leverage machine learning on the back end to be able to serve up better targeted advertising in their main Pinterest service. So, I think the service will be fine, at least for the time being. While I’m often adverse to such intrusive monitoring of my online activity, with Instapaper I’m completely fine with it. My Instapaper queue comprises who I wish to be, my ideal self is interested in reading everything in the queue. My actual self sometimes selects all and deletes.

Sometimes, not all the time. When that lovely Saturday afternoon comes and I’ve decided to read, Instapaper is waiting for me. Sometimes on a Sunday morning, early in the day before the kids get up, I’ve made my coffee and found my seat on the couch. The house is quiet, Oliver settles at my feet, and Instapaper opens up the world to me.

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macOS Sierra 10.12.1, released yesterday, includes hidden Apple Pay images that depict the brand new MacBook Pro with an OLED touch panel that’s set to be announced by Apple on Thursday, October 27.

The “magic toolbar” looks like it will replace the function keys, along with the escape key necessary for using Vim. I’ve seen questions asking what Vim users are going to do. For a moment I started to worry myself, although I’m not using MacVim on my Mac anymore, I still need to use it regularly on servers, and on servers I’ll have no .vimrc customizations for remapping keys.

However, since the point of the touchscreen is to be able to dynamically assign keys as needed, I bet when the Terminal is open, the escape key will be right where it needs to be.