đź”— Articles: Wednesday 01.May.2024
Manton Reece: AI hesitancy
The tech and startup world has had no shortage of over-hyped sidetracks. Blockchain is the most recent flop. Just because a technology is novel, doesn’t mean a practical purpose and business model will emerge.
I almost never jump on trends because you can waste so much time chasing productivity gains that you actually end up going backwards. I run my servers with old tech. I use tried and true programming languages and frameworks. I am not cutting edge.
Interesting post from Manton.
Ars Technica: The BASIC programming language turns 60
Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That’s when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college’s General Electric GE-225 mainframe.
Harpers: Daniel Bessner: The Life and Death of Hollywood
Making a show for Apple was not what she’d hoped it would be. What the company wanted from her and the series never felt clear—there was a “radical information asymmetry,” she said, regarding management’s priorities and metrics. After she and her colleagues completed the first season of Dickinson, they waited for the streamer to launch and the show to air. Their requests for a firm timeline and premiere date were ignored. Smith started to worry that Apple might scrap the idea for the streaming platform altogether, in which case the show might never be seen, or might even disappear—she didn’t have a copy of the finished product. It belonged to Apple and lived on the company’s servers.
NYT: Ross Douthat: Biden Is Still Losing. His Campaign Should Stop Acting Like He Isn’t.
In February there was a flurry of discussion about whether President Biden’s advancing age and seeming weakness in a matchup with Donald Trump meant that he should step aside. I wrote a column on that theme, but the more notable (that is, nonconservative) voices arguing that Biden should consider withdrawing from the race included the polling maven Nate Silver and my colleague Ezra Klein. The report from the special counsel Robert Hur, which indicated memory problems for the president, was also part of the discussion – or, if you prefer the terms favored by the president’s allies, part of the unnecessary freakout.
“The Drumbeat for Biden to Step Aside Will Only Grow Louder” ran one headline from that period, from Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect. Kuttner was wrong; the drumbeat has quieted. All it took was Biden giving a passable State of the Union address: Thereafter his poll numbers marginally improved, the optimists on the Democratic side seized the rhetorical initiative, and the “Should Biden step aside?” discourse faded into background noise.
But here we are entering May, with just six months before the election, and the basic dynamic that inspired the original discussion/freakout is still with us.
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It means eschewing the smaller kind of potential ticket shake-up, in which Kamala Harris, the worst possible backstop for an aging president, yields to a vice-presidential candidate who might actually be reassuring, even popular.
MacRumors: Google Paid Apple $20 Billion in 2022 to Be Default Safari Search Engine
Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to be the default search engine for Safari on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, reports Bloomberg. The information was revealed in court documents Google provided in its antitrust dispute with the United States Department of Justice.
The DoJ has accused Google of having a monopoly on search, and in the lawsuit against Google, the search engine deal with Apple has been a major focus. In November, lawsuit documents indicated that Google was paying 36 percent of the total revenue that it earns from searches conducted on Safari, and now it turns out that equates to $20 billion.
Last Updated: 01.May.2024 23:55 EDT