I need a cellophane balloon wall robot in my life.
If a meeting requires privacy, a robot that looks like the innards of a computer on wheels and is equipped with sensors to detect its surroundings comes over to inflate a translucent, cellophane balloon wall to keep prying eyes away.
â…advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.â
– Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in a 1998 research paper while they were doctoral students at Stanford
Iâve been trying out the search engine service Neeva lately. You can read more about the founding of the company by ex-Googler Sridhar Ramaswamy here (itâs a fascinating story).
I come from the time when the web was still in its primordial stage. Thought technologies such as web browsers and search engines were still young and completely exhilarating. I paid for Netscape (and I was amazed when I got to college in 1996 and walked into the computer lab with 8 machines running Netscape, WordPerfect, Office, and the Corel suite). Browsers and search engines and minute-based access to the web were something you paid for (unless you stockpiled AOL disks like I did).
Neeva is definitely a different service. Iâm still wrapping my head around it, but it feels like a good mix of âold school webâ and what weâll eventually get to once we exit this period of advertising-based âfreeâ services that have been the predominate business model on the web for the last 15 years.
The search interface is clean and fast. There are no ad trackers. The company is looking to make money by offering subscriptions. Thatâs intriguing for me. Iâve never been a big fan of the saying âif youâre not paying for a service, youâre the productâ and all, but it does ease my mind to exchange money for what I consider valuable services on the web (Pinboard for bookmarking comes to mind).
Google is such an intimate part of all of our lives, whether we care to admit it or not. Our memories, correspondence, social graphs, birthday reminders, calendars etc are all wrapped up in the service (at least… much more than that for âpower usersâ like myself). But we need alternatives.
Iâll continue experimenting with Neeva to see if itâs one of the dandelions that pops up to spread seeds across the ecosystem of the web or if itâs just a one-season deal. But it âfeelsâ like it has staying power. And for that, Iâm excited. Will report back here about my usage as it accumulates in the coming weeks.
Pretty funny because I read this via Apple News and there’s no way to share it out to a web browser on my iPad…
Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, told The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern that the company’s goal is to “give users a choice.” Those four words are at the core of the problem with the position Facebook has taken since Apple announced the changes last year at its developer conference.
Go grab the iOS 14.5 update in Settings > General > Software Update if you have an Apple Watch… and welcome to our mask-wearing longterm future!
iOS 14.5 will let Apple Watch owners unlock their iPhone while wearing a mask: Another oft-requested feature, especially with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Apple doesnât support Touch ID in it is newest iPhones, which can make unlocking with Face ID while wearing a mask a pain. But Apple is helping with that. Apple Watch owners will be able to confirm unlocking their iPhones while wearing a mask with iOS 14.5.
Source: Apple releases iOS 14.5, iPadOS 14.5, and watchOS 7.4 with Apple Watch iPhone unlock and more
Basecamp (and Jason) has been a bellwether for how companies operate for almost 20 years now. Here’s an interesting memo for the company that I can only imagine more organizations will be implementing in the coming months / years…
With that, we wanted to put these directional changes on the public record. Historically we’ve tried to share as much as we can â for us, and for you â so this transmission continues the tradition.
1. No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account. Today’s social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It’s become too much. It’s a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. It’s not healthy, it hasn’t served us well. And we’re done with it on our company Basecamp account where the work happens. People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can’t happen where the work happens anymore.
Source: Changes at Basecamp
Handy walkthru here… if you do anything on WordPress, this is one of those questions that you’ll need an answer for sooner or later:
For those wondering, the footer is the bottom part of your website that appears after the content area. This can be a copyright statement, the year, contact details, branding, social media icons, privacy policy links, disclaimers, and so many other things you want it to be.
I absolutely adored my eee PC 701 and used it all the time. I’ll add a gallery here later.
There were two products that arrived in 2007 that fundamentally changed computing: one, of course, was the iPhone. The second, obviously more important product was the $399 Eee PC 701. It originally ran a custom Linux operating system that reviewers loved (Laptop Magâs Mark Spoonauer said it was âten times simpler to use than any Windows notebookâ) and was generally heralded as a new kind of computer with tremendous mass appeal. Spoonauer: âPound for pound, the best value-priced notebook on the planet.â
One of my favorite Bowie moments (I’m a massive Bowie fan):
I get the allure of Substack and applaud the move to decentralized platforms, but why not write on your own blog if your goal is independence and direct interaction with your own audience?
It’s not that difficult.
So many more benefits to creating in your own space, on your own domain, with your own platform…
And despite a handful of departures over politics, that wave is growing for Substack. The writers moving there full time in recent days include not just Mr. Lavery, but also the former Yahoo News White House correspondent Hunter Walker, the legal writer David Lat and the columnist Heather Havrilesky, who told me she will be taking Ask Polly from New York Magazine to âregain some of the indie spirit and sense of freedom that drew me to want to write online in the first place.â
Source: Why Weâre Freaking Out About Substack – The New York Times
The researchers explain the universe as a learning system by invoking machine learning systems. Just like we can teach machines to perform unfolding functions over time, that is, to learn, the laws of the universe are essentially algorithms that do work in the form of learning operations.
Source: Physicists working with Microsoft think the universe is a self-learning computer