I am very surprised it was not his sister, given her prominent role in recent years on diplomacy, and the Olympics.

I'm not sure I would agree in totem. Freeing the minutia allows for a higher cognitive load on the bigger picture. I use AI primarily for research gathering, and refining of what I have, which has freed up a lot of time to focus on the bigger issues, and specifically in my case, zeroing in on the diamond in the rough.

> Freeing the minutia allows for a higher cognitive load on the bigger picture

I think we do agree -- the higher "big picture" cognitive load feels more expensive than the minutia cognitive load

I agree, Tim Cook is a businessman, Steve was someone who constantly put himself in the customers shoes. Apple needs a visionary like that, a dictator to demand a specific user engagement, and a design team able to carry it out. IMHO Tim Cook has never filled this role, and needs to step aside.

AI might just extinguish the entire paradigm of publish or perish. The sheer volume of papers makes it nearly impossible to properly decide which papers have merit, which are non-replicate and suspect, and which are just a desperate rush to publish. The entire practice needs to end.

Its not publish or perish so much as get grant money or perish.

Publishing is just the way to get grants.

A PI explained it to me once, something like this

Idea(s) -> Grant -> Experiments -> Data -> Paper(s) -> Publication(s) -> Idea(s) -> Grant(s)

Thats the current cycle ... remove any step and its a dead end

But how could we possibly evaluate faculty and researcher quality without counting widgets on an assembly line? /s

It’s a problem. The previous regime prior to publishing-mania was essentially a clubby game of reputation amongst peers based on cocktail party socialization.

The publication metrics came out of the harder sciences, I believe, and then spread to the softest of humanities. It was always easy to game a bit if you wanted to try, but now it’s trivial to defeat.

Perhaps I am a very small minority, but.. I really miss skeuomorphism.

I am happy to see this and hope it spreads. A lot of us, IMO, would pay more for physical buttons - which is really a way to go about this, even though logistically it's problematic. If you want physical buttons, pay for it, if not, go with digital capacitive touch. I think cars should be like airplanes - physical controls, able to be felt and pushed without taking eyes off the road. The digital buttons far too often require my attention to be diverted, or pull over.

Alexa was abandoned bout 5 years ago and has continued to wither on the vine. This smells like nothing more than a money grab. The device and its services are little more useful than turning on the lights. Amazon has abandoned Alexa and there's zero reason to put more money into it as a consumer.

They aren't even any more useful than turning on the lights for everyone. I personally have no other use for it. The only thing I say to it other than "turn on/off the ..." is "shut up" when it follows my command with "By the way..."

Ostensibly Microsoft has a goal, and they realize that the public is adamantly opposed to the way they are going about that goal. So the calculus for Microsoft management must be either: 1) We are right, doubters be damned; 2) This will be profitable and people will go along with it whether they want to or not, we're Microsoft, what are they going to do, use Pages?; or a total uncertainty as to the future but really hoping this path pays off for a variety of reasons.

I hate the future of Microsoft. I hate the future, and current iterations of Outlook and Word. I hate AI. I don't want CoPilot. What I WANT is competition in this space so Microsoft has to actually care what the consumer think.

Microsoft may actually manage the near-impossible feat of pissing off so many people they break their monopoly.

This is precisely how I felt. Being obese is not, nor ever, ok. The body positive movement around obesity should have been to help people to 1) nto feel ashamed at being obese, but also 2) to reduce the negativity around it and turn that into positive reinforcement for healthy eating. Instead it became a dogmatic, self righteous movement of encouragement to continue to live that way because others judged it negatively.

No one should be harassed or made to feel bad by the way they look, but at the same time, it's not wrong to want others to be healthy.

I mean… I’d very much push back here.

GLP-1 drugs have basically thrown out the idiotic idea that people were fat because they were sloths or gluttons. Our genetic and epigenetic predispositions very obviously played a huge role in whether on not people became obese. Body positivity was a reasonable coping mechanism for folks who drew the short straw at birth or in youth, and would never be able to have the beauty our society holds above almost everything.

Not we have a drug that fixes these predispositions. Yay! It’s basically the equivalent of “teeth positivity” going away after the advent of braces. The point was about helping people cope in an uncaring world… and then there not needing a coping mechanism after the problem people were coping with gets solved.

I realize this is a nuanced discussion, but could you clarify the predispositions you're referring to? I'm asking because there are people who blame obesity on a predisposition to hunger (obese people have a stronger hunger drive than thin people) but also people who blame it on a predisposition to weight gain, meaning that obese people can eat the same amount of food as thin people and still be obese. Are you saying GLP-1 drugs have refuted the idea of the latter?

I'm actually saying quite the opposite. That GLP-1 drugs have refuted the idea that people do not have built in biological mechanism that make them obese, whether or not that's on the hunger side (say, ghrelin) or on the amount of stored energy per calorie (say, metabolism, gut microbiome, etc).

My hypothesis is that GLP-1 drugs are basically counteracting the effects of various chemicals interfering with the natural processes of our endocrine system. I think something (microplastics, chemicals in the water, hormones, ultraprocessed food, etc) is interfering with how GLP-1 is interacting with our body in the first place. So the GLP-1 Drugs is helping bring this back to normal. I think different people due to genetic differences are affected by these environmental factors differently, that's why two people can both eat the same food and one is still starving and one is full.

I think this is a good thing and do not understand the negativity in the comments. We should want systems to function more efficiently, regardless of how that comes about or who does it.