AI, wasted on us old people
You’ve got to be careful when you pull this card, so many in tech pull it too quickly, but you’ve got to reserve the Steve Jobs Card for times when it matters.
I can’t stop thinking about AI - artificial intelligence, not Apple Intelligence - and the original 1984 Mac.
Steve Jobs, age 29, in Playboy magazine (the articles, not the pictures):
It’s often the same with any new, revolutionary thing. People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. It’s a rare person who etches grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a specific way of questioning things. It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing. Of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they’re rare.
A lot of the people talking about AI today are olds - like me. I’ve been driving around Italy this week hearing my favourite podcasters, and reading my favourite writers, wax lyrical about artificial intelligence, Apple Intelligence, generative AI, large language models, and the like with fear and loathing. Age changes us but it feels similar to my childhood, predominately the early 90s where “olds” were fearful and against the incoming technological change whilst I was so eager to play, toy, and learn.
I think about the earliest stories I’ve read of the 1984 Macintosh being shown to olds but it was the kids that really got it.
Andy Hertzfeld writes about Steve Jobs delivering a Mac to Mick Jagger the weekend before the computer launched:
Fortunately, Mick’s twelve year old daughter Jade had followed Mick into the room, and her eyes lit up when she saw MacPaint. Bill began to teach her how to use it, and pretty soon she was happily mousing away, fascinated by what she could do with MacPaint. Even though Mick drifted off to another room, the Apple contingent stayed with Jade for another half hour or so, showing off the Macintosh and answering her questions, and ended up leaving the machine with her, since she couldn’t seem to part with it.
And then there’s the story from a day or two earlier of Steve Jobs taking a Mac to Sean Lennon’s 9th birthday party where Walter Cronkite, Andy Warhol, and Yoko Ono were in attendance. John Lennon’s son took to the computer right away, but Andy Warhol was enamoured by the machine.
Warhol wrote in his diary that night, “I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who’d helped invent it.”
Me too, Andy. Me too. I just try every day to be one of those people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life.
When you’re watching Instagram Reels before the Zoom meeting begins and the AI Zoom Meeting Summary takes it as fact
Pentax has made a portrait-orientation, made for sharing on modern social media, analog film camera in the new Pentax 17.
The Pentax 17 has a 25mm F3.5 lens which works out at 37mm equivalent, and derives its name from the horizontal width of the 17 x 25mm frames it captures. The company says the vertical format makes it similar to images shot by smartphones.
What a time to be alive.
Jamstack websites terrify me.
I feel technology often takes a backward step as it advances.
I used to make the most powerful small business, single use case, applications in Microsoft Access for businesses. To do the same today is so much harder. It’s the same with websites. Jamstack is exponentially more complex than Wordpress and its PHP brethren.
Our Imaginary Brother Only Watches PBS by Eileen Donovan-Kranz
What happened next made sense only to my mother: She created an eighth child, a three-year-old she named Joe.
Thanks for the link, Scotty.
In the spirit of Zuckerberg renaming Facebook in honour of what’s coming up, please no longer call me Josh. Only refer to me as my new personal brand identity in honour of the next big thing: Sleep.
Everyone has their different social media celebrities they get excited about meeting. Today I meet mine.
12 years ago I shared this infographic about the data being transferred around then. Here’s the 2024 version on my daily letter.
Little pleasures in life is your laptop remembering the password and automatically connecting to the wifi at your cheap Rome airport hotel
Yes, hello, is this Qatar Airways? I’d like to collect my prize money.
Qatar things
When I make photos I like I share them, and because of the way the world is today (i.e everyone has a camera, algorithms rule the world, photos don’t get as much airtime as videos, plus no-one knows who I am) most people never see my photos, so I upload them to Unsplash and Pexels.
Something I find super interesting is how even on those two sites the per-photo statistics vary so wildly.
The Sunday night commute to work 📍 Beachcomber Island, Fiji
Easy like Sunday Melbourne Airport morning
I like writing, I like reading, I enjoy running a sustainable and fun business, and I like getting email letters on the topic, so I made one called Aisle Authority.
My pitch is that it’s a short daily letter to the best wedding creators in the world.
The stats say that most people scroll on, but I’m hoping maybe one other person who likes reading encouraging daily things about being a wedding creator might like it too - read today’s letter and subscribe.
In my happy place - plane watching - for a few hours in Melbourne Airport on the way to Fiji for a wedding
Shalom Auslander:
I was thinking about sex the other day because I was having a really depressing day, and a dead body had been found by the pier, and as I was taking my son to school and waiting at a traffic light, a homeless man in a mad fury began circling my car, shouting and spitting, and it felt like forever before the light turned green and I thought I needed to get my mind settled so I went to a bookstore and all the books were about how to succeed in business, and about how to work even more, and there was a whole section about how to use the ancient philosophy of Stoicism to get ahead in your corporate career, and outside the bookstore people were sleeping on the sidewalk and there was a store where shoes were 30% off and still cost two-hundred dollars and I stopped to write at a coffeeshop where people were arguing about politics and war and fascism and genocide and a woman at the table beside me was talking loudly at the people on her laptop screen, who were talking loudly at her about the client and the presentation and the need for a more aggressive social media marketing plan, and as I drove home the billboards and buses were covered with advertisements for movies, and the people in the advertisements were giants, and they were perfect, and they were revered and admired like Gods and most of them were actually truly awful people who shouldn’t be admired at all and so by the time I got home, I crawled into bed and I closed my eyes and a moment later, I heard a little girl outside my window, and she was crying and shouting and her mother asked her what was wrong and she shouted, at the top of her little lungs, “EVERYTHING TODAY MAKES NO SENSE!” and I thought that must have felt really good, I would love to scream like that right now, I would love nothing more than to scream “EVERYTHING TODAY MAKES NO SENSE!” and how that would make me feel better than sex, better than the best sex better than all the sex in the world, and that’s why I was thinking about sex the other day.
Free entry!
What’s weird/nerdy/fun/cool and not on the “must see” lists for Doha, Qatar? I’ve got a full transit day there on Thursday.