Good morning. Hello. How are you? #413
Deodorant, Three Body Problem Trilogy, Louis DeJoy is still around, Gait Detection and AI, WWCC, paying the PakMail piper, more Joe Manchin idiocy, Jane's strategizing
Good morning! Hello! How are you? All well? I do hope so.
Programming note: I wrote Steve Manchin yesterday instead of Joe Manchin. I apologize to the former producer of The Lego Movie and secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin.
Updates: I ordered four new sticks of deodorant for $14 and got eleven sticks of deodorant. Great deal. Buck twenty-seven per stick. I’m good to go on deodorant for the next decade.
I finished Death’s End, the third book in the Three Body Problem trilogy by Cixin liu. It was, once again, my least favorite of the three, though I liked it better this time. Mainly because I could skip the boring parts? I am still annoyed with the last 10% or so of the book I think it’s the weakest part of the whole trilogy, but other people seem to disagree with me and find that the strongest part. So your mileage will vary, I guess. Also WTF happened to Wang Miao, from the first book? That is definitely the weirdest thing about those books.
The garden hasn’t had anyone claw or nibble at it for four days now, which is good.
Louis DeJoy is still the Postmaster General of the USPS. There are two democrats on the governing board of the postal service who approve of him. So even if all of Biden’s new nominees get confirmed and join the board, he cannot be removed. Even though is he is under federal investigation. Isn’t that awesome?
That dude is gonna be around forever. “Get used to me,” he told congress at one of his testimonies.
The AI researchers of the world are not content with retina scans, fingerprint scans and the like, and they are focusing now on gait detection. That is, the specific “fingerprint” of how you walk. They have a problem though. There aren’t enough large datasets of gaits to train their surveillance state AIs to get better at gait detection. So some enterprising researchers used a bunch of tools for making video games and movies to make a giant dataset of human gaits for AI researchers to train their AIs with. The abstract of their research paper helpfully points out that this dataset has “no privacy issues” like all of those other datasets out there. So, good news! Now the AI researchers can train their surveillance AIs to surveil us, ethically!
Speaking of gait detection, it is just a coincidence that yesterday Apple announced that your iPhone — and billions of others — will soon be able to analyze gait. The two are completely unrelated.
Yesterday I watched keynote for WWDC, the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference. I used to go every year, we even did some work for Apple one year on building some cool shit for the lobby of the Moscone center. I was profoundly disappointed in the keynote. It’s a paradox, because I think Apple is doing some of its most amazing stuff ever these days. Apple silicon, especially, is magnificent. It is deeply, deeply weird to me they offered no additional information about their roadmap for Apple Silicon in the Macs. It is especially weird to me that they did not do this with the pro line, since WWDC is the closest thing to a “pro” conference that they have, though I suppose it’s time that we acknowledge that the average iOS app developer is not the prime target for ultra-fast Mac Pros and, as Apple pointed out at this conference, they don’t even need a Mac to make iPad apps anymore, they can do it on iPads now. This made me sad, because it feels like the Mac being the tool needed to build iOS apps was the only reason Apple cares about the Mac anymore.
I mean, that’s not really a fair thing to say, I know. In some areas, Apple has delivered so much to the Mac lately. But in others, it’s just a joke. Not having a modern 27” iMac in the lineup is just insane. Only having a single display in the lineup — one that starts at $5,000, vignettes the corners, and hasn’t been updated in two years — is insane. Imagine LG or Vizio not updating their top-of-the-line TV for two years.
I will also say, in fairness, that Apple had to announce all of those consumer-focused features in iOS, TVOS, WatchOS and MacOS at WWDC, because each one of them (or most of them anyway) has an API associated with it, and if you want your developers to implement your new feature, they have to know the new feature exists.
But the end result was a two-hour developer keynote that talked about developers for maybe fifteen minutes. People tell me this isn’t unusual but I disagree. They always talk a bit about consumer stuff, and sometimes there is a consumer thing that they just need to release that they tack on to WWDC because they need to do an announcement, but I believe this was the most consumer-focused WWDC ever.
On top of that, the consumer announcements were all… assistants. Coaches. Gurus. Helpers. No tools. No tools of creation. No GarageBand or iMovie or Logic updates (god iMovie needs an update). They launch this conference with this great pean of a video about creators, then offer nothing for them.
(Okay that Swift educational app on the iPad was super sweet. And so is that new cloud version of TestFlight or whatever).
On top of that, so many of the new OS “features” that Apple is offering already exist. They are apps that the very developers sitting in that room made. For your platform. AND FOR ANDROID. So now you’re going to make a “better” version that is only better for one or two reasons: because of your massive financial advantage, or because you are going to leverage platform lock-in and make the new version of Houseparty or whatever do things with the iPhone hardware and OS integration that a third-party developer can’t do. And all of that is bad enough, but it’s not even the worst of it, because now, through your monopolistic position, you’ll slowly become the dominant of these apps, and you won’t work with Android. So now we all have to suffer because the dominant version (ahem iMessage) of a software tool doesn’t work with 50% of the world.
Because you want a deeper integration between hardware and software.
They talked so much in the keynote about “connections” but all I saw were a bunch of features that we going to break when I tried to use them with my wife.
In any case, I got some nice new screenshots of various Apple Enterprise logos, a design body of work to which I reference with shocking frequency.
So after that I sucked it up and went to the PakMail store, our local postal store. I’ve been avoiding going because years ago I rented a postbox there so our local branch of Indivisible would have a mailing address to stick on the bottom of their emails. But eventually they got a different address, and I forgot about the box. A few months ago the PakMail called me and sent me a letter telling me I needed to come pay and/or return the key. Only I didn’t know where the key is. On top of that, I’ve had this slow-rolling deadline becsause the Philippines need me to sign and notarize this document for our Philippine trademark by August and they are the only notary around me. So I knew, eventually, I was gonna have to go in there, but I didn’t want to because they revealed themselves during the pandemic and stripped off their masks the second they were allowed to.
But I finally sucked it up yesterday. I had to return that stupid HDMI adaptor and the PakMail is the only nearby UPS dropoff joint. Plus I had two boxes to ship.
Emma and I went through the box of unmarked keys, and I grabbed them all, and went went in, dropped off my boxes, got my Philippine trademark letter notarized and faced the music about the postbox. One of the unmarked keys we found did turn out to be the box key, so that saved me a change-the-lock fee, thank goodness. It turned out I had rented the box in June of 2017, and paid through June of 2018, which meant that I owed three years of box rental fees, or $420, dude. They cut me a break and gave me a year off. I can’t believe how utterly irresponsible, pointless, and dumb that whole episode was. If you ever think I have my shit together, just remember I once blew $300 on a postbox I never used, never opened, not even once.
They were actually a lot nicer about it than I though they would be. They are notoriously mean at the PakMail store. But I guess this was entertaining enough to them.
Some fun facts about Joe Manchin! It turns out that in 2019 he was a supporter of the For The People Act, aka HR1, aka the bill he now says he’s against.
Another fun fact! The For The People Act has wide bipartisan support in West Virginia! He could totally vote for this and it wouldn’t damage his electoral situation at all!
Another fact! Joe Manchin is a dick! Here’s a decent summary of his craven, ghoulish political calculus from Indivisible.
I was thinking yesterday about Jane and bedtime and how resistant she was during teeth and jammies time, like I wrote to you yesterday, and something occurred to me. I only have to do this thing where I have to brush her teeth for her once every month or two now. Like it is a rarity. Usually she just brushes them happily. But when she doesn’t want to, and I have to do it for her, every time, she has developed some clever new resistance strategy. It is amazing! I have questions! Like: for the entire intervening period of several weeks, is she secretly plotting and dreaming up a new resistance strategy? “The next time daddy and I face off about teeth, what new obstructionist tactic can I deploy?” Just in case we ever go through that teeth unpleasantness again? Or do the new, improved resistance strategies spring forth, fully improvised, the minute I try and brush the teeth? Who knows!
Let’s do a playlist. Covers. Notice how the key art for the playlist, as well as the cover art for certain songs on the playlist don’t work? I think that might be outage related? Who knows. I thought that was fixed by now. Anyway, we are doing covers today. It’s a good mix. I particularly like the way it ends. And the back-to-back Cash and Cave. Even though I’m mad at that guy. Even though I’m wearing a Cave shit in the photo above. Still mad at him. Today’s Red Right Hand files was such a boomer classic: it’s great being old so I can say un-PC things all the time, he said. I wonder if he realizes how awful that sounds to, like, EVERY AMERICAN UNDER SIXTY. Whatever. Have some covers.
Okay. Wow. Getting through today’s edition was a battle with the Substack editor. Not pleasant. Hope you enjoyed it. Hope you’re doing well. Hope you don’t turn into an old person who thinks they have earned the right to be greedy and conservative. Hope your Tuesday goes swimmingly.