> it’s just that a lot of his skills are not transferable because you have to cultivate the kind of taste he spent his whole life acquiring
Steve had great taste and keen insights as a PM, but what pushed him to GOAT status was his intuition for people and his capacity to rally them to his cause. Whether pre-Apple, at early Apple, NeXT, Pixar, or modern Apple, he was consistently able to identify world tier performers and get them to join the vision and do great stuff.
Witness that some of those people are still making Apple what it is 15 years after his death. That’s an insane skill that you very rarely see, whereas as a designer I see people with great taste not that infrequently.
The potential for creepiness and abuse in the example use cases given is too damn high. At Apple scale, a single case of an insane stalker misusing this technology is image destroying - see some of the PR debacles they’ve been facing lately with AirTags.
These sort of things are exactly what hand-rolled setups à la OpenClaude are great for- the potential for insane privacy disaster is still there, but in that case you have no one to blame but yourself.
Large tech companies aren’t going to take that heat for features that aren’t really monetizable.
Our culture only deserves what we feel strongly enough to enshrine and enforce as law.
Americans like to clown on the EU, but consumer protections and privacy laws don’t magically pop up on their own, and businesses don’t all magically act in the consumers’ best interests unless they are legally made to.
The saddest part to me was realizing that pretty much no one gives a shit.
I knew that they were plenty of careless people with no taste for truth or quality in the world, but I didn’t realize there were so many of them.
Especially so amongst my friends and family members and coworkers. Here’s someone who’s now sending AI generated messages for daily communication. Here’s someone who’s now using AI generated slop art to promote their work. Here’s someone who turns to ChatGPT for any random question they have. No regard for beauty or truth or personal expression or the quality of expert work, only hooked to the “get this done” machine.
The Mac Mini and Studio are due for an update in the coming months, a part of this is also probably that they’d rather save memory to build up their next gen model inventory rather than current gen ones?
Like trvz said, they use different memory. M3 Ultra uses LPDDR5X 6400 MT/s, M4 Max uses LPDDR5X 8533 MT/s, while all the M5 models use LPDDR5X 9600 MT/s.
> We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce
What do you think people did with their lives before retirement became a thing? My great grandparents worked the fields and took care of the animals till they dropped. I did have one great grandma who spent the last few years of her life vegetating in a chair because she literally couldn’t do anything else, otherwise she’d have been working the fields and taking care of the animals.
They weren’t “economic entities” in the sense that they got a paycheck from an employer, but they were “economic entities” in that if they weren’t putting daily labor into the farm, they’d eventually freeze and starve.
Based on my grandmothers I’d say they mostly sat around and gossiped, went on walks together, ate meals together, did fun stuff together and then talked about stuff. Repeat until they die off.
Socializing with friends every day can be very fulfilling and doesn’t require to actually produce anything or do any work.
This can be extended even further - hunter-gatherers never retired either. However in both cases people did actually _retire_ from direct activity. Elders would often become advisors and community nurturers rather than actively milking cows, hunting deer and whatnot.
I think here what becomes apparent is that it's not loss of specific activity (work) that causes the decline but activity in general which is very much duuuh - obviously.
Huh interesting datapoint. I just checked on mine, also August 2023 15PM, and 86% @ 707 cycles here. I’m pretty careless with charging it whenever is convenient/letting it drain to 0% while traveling/etc as well.
No, but they have spent tens of millions of dollars on a go bag —> helicopter to private jet -> bunker in New Zealand preplanned route and you haven’t.
Good luck to the billionaires in a real collapse scenario, when their security and support staff can decide that the billionaires are counterproductive, and vote them out of the survival bunkers.
You didn't include the locals, we're not huge fans of being considered a liferaft by people who have actively worked to make the world worse. And we have a can do spirit (and earthmoving equipment...)
A few months of some narrow strait of water in the other side of the world being closed off and New Zealand is about to collapse. And these billionaires think they can just sit back and relax in their bunkers here in an apocalypse scenario?
A few moments' thought will convince just about anyone that their best chances of survival will come from allying themselves with a strong, resource-rich leader, namely the one they already work for.
Immediately turning on such a leader would be a bad move, because you'd then have to fight all the other traitors for your share of the loot.
If I was a guard. Would I pick up my boss I see every week or some random dude I might have seen year or more ago once? Probably would go with the boss that I am hopefully reasonably friendly with. There really is quite a chain of command even in security.
I don't care. And I guarantee you most wealthy people don't care either. A few eccentric wealthy people do and you think r/preppers is filled with the elite - it's not.
Heh, people have an interest in other people. Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran or whoever is cool these days are popular because they are real people with real lives and histories that can be related to, followed over time, etc.
Of course the music matters, but the persona of who creates the music and their lore matters just as much. There’s a reason why live events are the moneymakers, people care about physicality.
No one gives a shit about AI music designed to make money, there’s no story to follow or be inspired by there.
All this was already tried with “digital idols” etc in the 2000s, the only one that had any lasting success was Hatsune Miku by virtue of being “first”.
I think you're conflating two things: fictional characters/personas, and attributing "music" to them.
People go wild for characters all the time, whether they be Batman, Pikachu, Colombo, Dora the Explorer, whatever -- have you ever seen Nyango Star drumming? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UYgORr5Qhg -- not to mention the entire VTuber scene, where people build the same weird parasocial relationships as other YouTubers do, but hiding behing an animated avatar and voice changer.
Hatsune is an odd one in that she's a character whose "voice" is a set of parameters for a vocal VST (Vocaloid) that you can plug into your DAW and have a synthesized singer along with your synthesized piano, drums, guitar, etc. But for whatever reason, the Japanese loved the character, so they rolled with it and you can now make 3D videos with the character as well as having her singing.
More to the point, the Gorillaz are a full touring band of VTubers, even though the people behind the animated masks are themselves pretty famous already. They have fans, including deranged ones that can't seem to separate the fictional cartoon characters from real people and imagine themselves as Murdoc's wife.
This goes back a long way, I was thinking Josie and the Pussycats, but Wikipedia reminds me that Alvin and the Chipmunks is probably the first.
It also makes me think of ABBA and their "ABBA experience", where they've "digitized" themselves. What it really is is wish-fulfilment and nostalgia; their fans, themselves in their 60s/70s, are thinking of their youth 50 years ago, and the actual members of ABBA also look 70 and not 20 anymore. So they've made a virtual replica of themselves from when they were in their prime, and you can go and dance to them if you want, while the real ABBA members water their garden and feed their cats at home.
Yes but there will be AI personalities in the near future too that I predict will be just as popular as real humans. I don't think people care too much if a personality it carbon based or silicon based. it'll be us old farts that'll be the ones telling the AI to get off our lawns.
Agreed, and it matters that even the most vapid pop star isn't just a product of our collective (or individual) desires. They're a real person existing for their own sake, and not just for our sake, no matter how much they cater to us.
This "human connection" is over rated IMHO. We create an image of a human musician and too often become disappointed fans because, for example, we disapprove of the musician's lifestyle (the expression sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll exists for a reason), or because of disagreement with the social and political causes the musicians support. Occasionally, fans follow an artist for their commitment to their art later to discover they sell out, like their style changes to pursue mass appeal, or they sell their work to become a jingle for sugar pops or similar.
I think it is best to appreciate their creation and admit the person creating it may not be someone to place undue adulation on. To quote a film, I think it is best to "separate the art from the artist".
I replied earlier to the parent and meant this comment. I don't think people care too much if a personality is AI or not. we'll have pop stars that are AI, there will be actors that are AI with all the same fanbase that humans have today.
Steve had great taste and keen insights as a PM, but what pushed him to GOAT status was his intuition for people and his capacity to rally them to his cause. Whether pre-Apple, at early Apple, NeXT, Pixar, or modern Apple, he was consistently able to identify world tier performers and get them to join the vision and do great stuff.
Witness that some of those people are still making Apple what it is 15 years after his death. That’s an insane skill that you very rarely see, whereas as a designer I see people with great taste not that infrequently.
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