People seeing the iMac, then iPod, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods, and then Apple Vision, on day one: it's stupid, not for me, too expensive, I'll never buy it.

People seeing the iMac, then iPod, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods, and then Apple Vision, five years later: yes, please, shut up and take my money.

 Vision Pro

London is a fascinating place where Big Tea™️ has convinced an entire population that garbage water is a valid hot drink.

Everyone speaks in a cute and fake-sounding British accent, whilst real people actually travel on the public transport which accepts the Apple Express Transit Card feature.

AirBnbs are priced like Paris but unlike Paris, London is in England, which is far less fancy than France. Here, they drive on the left side of the road but walk on the right side of the path, and there’s this forced politeness in the air like if you’re not polite you’ll get stabbed. Who knew Jack The Ripper could have left such a lasting impression on culture.

The people are quite proud of their flag, so much so that I could definitely imagine them sailing to other countries and giving them free British flags in exchange for the rights to the whole country.

Despite their global shirt-fronting and general we-think-we’re-cool dispositions, the people of London either commute longer than they actually work, or they live impoverished and close to the famed series of Tubes, spending their final quids on beer or denying that Europe is a cool place.

Brits have influenced more culture in my life than I’d care to admit, but I’m still not sure it’s better than their penal colony I call home.

Long live King Chuck, God knows the bunting and signage stockists and manufacturers couldn’t handle the demand for at least another few years.

Mum to kid (about 4) trying to get him to do something: … or someone’s going to be very upset with you.

Kid, loudly, in the sweetest British accent: well someone is a fucking idiot aren’t they?

Every parent in the playground just bursts out in laughter.

I needed help planning the month ahead's travel, having not been off the beaten track too much in Europe, so I engaged everyone's favourite help, ChatGPT. Check out the chat transcript to see how I got to this itinerary.

British things

Come together, right now

Hey Britain, why did you all get so excited about leaving Europe but still walk on the right hand side of the footpath?

Everyone’s talking about augmented reality at WWDC but no-one’s talking about sharing bodily liquid movements.

Come on Apple. Let me share more bodily liquid stats with my friends.

I'd like a 2023 version of Piano Man where Paul, the real estate novelist, upskills to writing prompts for ChatGPT, John the bartender starts a TikTok, and Billy Joel is sampling in Serato.

185 million views on Unsplash, 19 million views on Pexels, and I've just sold my first photo from my print store. Don't rush and twist an ankle, there's no queue at https://art.josh.withers.co.

Don't tell anyone but the opening of track six on the new Foo Fighters album had me thinking that there was a Taylor Swift collab inside. It's ok, it was Nothing At All.

I made a Steve Jobs chatbot based on the book Make Something Wonderful and asked him how he would bring AR glasses to market.

"... and we're calling it iVision!"

Luna’s following in my footsteps!

By being a radio broadcaster to an unprofitably small audience.

Remember that classic scene from Notting Hill where Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts' characters meet at a travel bookstore and then get a doughnut from that Brisbane doughnut chain?

Overcast and 14 degrees Celsius and the Britts are so sure it’s good weather that there’s a kid at the park in their swimmers.

London things

WordPress just turned 20 years old, which means I've been using it for different projects for a smidge under 20 years.

My memory is that I was about to use b2/cafelog for a project and someone told me to try this new fork, WordPress.

Cheers for making the web better, WordPress!

Luna, who considers herself royalty, wanted to present at the king’s house

Someone call the fire brigade

Maggi Hambling:

It is not difficult to make a work of art, the difficulty lies in being in the right state to do it.

Withers on film in Hawaii

Withers on film at the TWA Hotel.

Man, I loved this hotel!

Withers in Mexico.

I found an undeveloped roll of film from our time in Baja California Sur. Missing Cerritos Beach!

Withers in Paris on 35mm film

What is, and isn’t, AI/artificial intelligence?

Is displaying the letter a on a computer screen, or printing it to paper with a printer, by pressing the a key on a keyboard artificial intelligence?

Every leg of this journey we drop a bag. We’re down three suitcases so far.

At this stage when we come home to Australia in August we’ll be backpackers.

Paris 🚄🚇 London

Bought Luna her first camera, the Hyundai Excel of first cameras: a Nikon point and shoot.

I believe that my kids should save for their first Canon but I’m happy to pay for their potato camera.

She called us to the church house, gin house, school house, and outhouse. She called us to the Nutbush City limits from the wedding dance floors of Australia to a little old town in Tennessee.

She was, simply the best dance floor filler.

She is the Queen of Rock, the Empress of Soul.

Here’s to the diva, Tina Turner.

AI is genuinely exciting and terrifying but most of us nerds have been thinking about it and talking about it for 30 years.

This is Steve Jobs in 1983:

...when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life—his or her whole life—and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday, after this person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, “Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me. And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing.

If you ever want to hate yourself you should try writing a book, then editing the book, and then reading it.

AI is super interesting to me

This is beautiful and terrifying

A terrifying argument for paper voting in voting booths from Ready Player One:

Besides, now that everyone could vote from home, via the OASIS, the only people who could get elected were movie stars, reality TV personalities, or radical televangelists.

Do dogs understand elevators or are they just like ‘Ok it’s time to get into the world changer’?

(via @ronnui_ on Twitter via the Dense Discovery email)

Those good family dinners, they’re no accident

Hawaii versus Paris

I

Imagine being as big as a failure as Yahoo

Dan Shipper in The Unreasonable Effectiveness of 1-1 Learning:

One of the most famous studies in educational psychology found that students who learned through 1-1 tutoring performed two sigma—98%—better than students who learned through a traditional classroom environment.

Just found out that Metallica played a concert across town last night and there were tickets available. I had Australian tickets for their Covid-cancelled concert. This is the most disappointed I've been since we left Australia!

Film’s not dead.

On arrival to a film lab at 3pm on a Friday in Paris there’s like seven people ahead of me and three behind me pretty quickly.

If publishers paid as much attention to how their articles were experienced by readers as newspaper editors used to, maybe they wouldn’t be going broke?

“Non-smoking Garden of Eden”

As Moses wrote in the book of Genesis, the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food except for tobacco.

A mum playing Frozen on her phone for her daughter at the playground is super confused as to why every other kid at the playground is up in her grill right now.

Watching 1980s Inspector Gadget with Luna this morning and I never realised how much Gadget influenced my life. All I ever wanted was Penny's computer book, Gadget's computer watch, and being accepted for being basically useless in society saved only by the woman by your side every time.

Evidence that the world’s first mobile phone was probably French