steveanderson.digital

A new Apple Pro Display XDR is being rumored. I hope the price comes down, for the display and its accessories.

I remember watching the Apple WWDC Keynote in 2019, and there were some “boos” when the pricing for the display’s semi-optional Pro Stand was announced ($999 just for the stand). In my memory, I feel like the boos were louder during the live-streamed event than in the recorded version (the applause seems the same). John Ternus even pauses at the live audience’s reaction.

I have a Studio Display, which I love, but the camera quality and audio is a bit lacking. I use an Insta360 Link 2 instead of the built-in webcam.

A new Studio Display is also rumored, and hopefully the camera quality will be upgraded. A higher refresh rate would be a welcome addition too, especially for gaming.

What would also be nice, would be a lower-tier Apple display, designed for those with Mac minis and general computing needs. This would be like the 15-inch MacBook Air, filling a need (for quality displays – no more creaky plastic monitors), and also introducing more folks to Apple’s integration between software and hardware.

Man and Computer: A Perspective, IBM, 1967 (Computer History Museum).

“In studying the principals, the first point is that a computer is quite dead. It can do nothing without someone to give instructions.” (4:05)

“But computers have no originality, no initiative.” (19:15)

“I’ve had it explained to me, but I still don’t understand it.” (The New Yorker, cartoon by Alan Dunn, 1957).

The “mop and pail” in the computer room were a constant theme for mainframes in the late 1950s and 1960s. In this cartoon the “it” is unclear, which is part of the humor. Is the “it” referencing computing in general, the fixation of people with computers, or an attempt to converse with the machine, or other possibilities?

The cartoon is from the book (with accompanying CDs of image files), The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker, by Robert Mankoff and David Remnick, 2004.

“No dialogue ever, except “Beep-Beep!”

I took this photo at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York, eleven years ago. This was just before being told by a docent that photography was not allowed in the exhibit space (sorry!). The exhibition was titled, “What’s Up, Doc? The Animation Art of Chuck Jones.”

Jason Kottke also posted “The Rules of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote Cartoons” around the same time, in 2012 (a vintage post). The two versions are pretty close!

As Chuck Jones says in Chuck Amuck, “The rules and disciplines are properly difficult to identity. But there are – there must be – rules. Without them, comedy slops over the edges. Identity is lost.” (1)

This reminds me of Claude Shannon’s notion: “The rules of a game provide a sharply limited environment in which a machine may operate, with a clearly defined dial for its activities."(2)

When thinking of AI, it seems there are no rules at the moment. The game is being played while the rules are being made.

(1) Chuck Jones, Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York: 1989), p. 224.

(2) C. E. Shannon, "Computers and Automata," in Proceedings of the IRE (Vol. 41, No. 10, Oct. 1953), p. 1237.

“First you must ask yourself…are you wealthy?”

The Laundromat on Netflix (2019) is quite good, and it’s an interesting way to make something like the Panama Papers more relatable. It seems that some films focus on the technology of the leak first (which I enjoy, of course), rather than how the physical world is impacted by the digital (which, as in The Laundromat, is more approachable and interesting).

Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas are wonderful in the movie, they provide both comedy and information. In the educational technology field, this serving of “chocolate covered broccoli” is difficult – it’s either too much of one or the other. In The Laundromat, the satire is a perfect mix of alarming humor.

After watching The Laundromat we watched The Descendants, which is also a great film, and also deals with trusts, estates, and inheritance, among other things.

Maybe a rewatch of Knives Out or The Grand Budapest Hotel are next on the movie list.

“But I don’t want to be a computer programmer!” (The New Yorker, cartoon by Vahan Shirvanian, 1969).

These days it’s more likely to be AI engineering than computer programming, but the rapid cultural change is similar.

The cartoon is from the book (with accompanying CD image files), The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker, by Robert Mankoff and David Remnick, 2004.

John Oliver on Last Week Tonight regarding AI slop.

“AI slop is basically the newest iteration of spam.” (3:26)

“It’s not just that we can get fooled by fake stuff, it’s that the very existence of it then empowers bad actors to dismiss real videos and images as fake. It’s an idea called the liar’s dividend.” (24:33)

“AI slop can be…worryingly corrosive to the general concept of objective reality.” (25:46)

Via Primary Technology podcast.

We’re in TDF: Unchained! We finished watching Tour de France: Unchained on Netflix, and we’re in the last episode in Nice! We’re blurry figures on the side of the road during the time trial, but still there ☺️ (S3: E8).

I took this video of Tadej Pogačar at the time trial. The video was taken with a DJI Osmo Pocket 3 in slow motion, but slow motion video doesn’t include audio. So I used my iPhone to record ambient sound, and then synced the video and audio together with Final Cut Pro on Mac.

So excited to watch Tour de France: Unchained, Season 3, especially after visiting the Tour during its filming.

I’m sure it’ll be a different perspective, enlightening our trip to week 3 of the Tour last year in July, 2024.

I’m enjoying the Apple TV series, “Murderbot."

The mix of “green world” (organic and open), and “closed world” (artificial and enclosed) are quite prevalent, even in the mind of Murderbot himself: [1]

“I could just leave them to cope on their own, I guess. But it wasn’t that easy. It’s wrong to think of constructs like me as half-bot, half-organic. Like the bot-half should just want to obey orders and do its job. And the organic part should want to protect itself and get the hell out of there. As opposed to the reality. Which was that I was one, whole confused entity.” (S1: E7 at 13:22, Murderbot internal dialogue)

And in the next episode:

“I was trying to calm myself down with some of my favorite episodes. But I couldn’t focus. It was like this new show, “Murderbot: And Its Selfish Ungrateful Hippie Clients,” had just taken over." (S1: E8 at 22:39, Murderbot internal dialogue)

I’d share some screenshots of the show, but sadly, screenshots are disabled on Apple devices. There are some workarounds though, and here’s the trailer:

Note that the trailer is from YouTube. It would be nice if Apple TV shows and movies could be embedded from Apple TV, without all the ads and other nonsense.

[1]: The “green world” and “closed world” ideas are from a book by Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

Honeywell Rabbit Sculpture (ca. 1965) at the Computer History Museum.

The Rabbit sculpture features on pages 48-49, in Core magazine (2015), published by the Computer History Museum.

The sculpture, made of resistors, was created around 1965, and part of an advertising campaign featured in Business Week magazine.

“Univac - For Finding Lost Moons of Lost Dollars”

Early computers, from the scientific world to the business world.

Video from our trip to the 2024 Tour de France, it’s 15min but quite entertaining!

We toured with Custom Getaways and had a wonderful time. They’re an official tour operator of the Tour de France, making us part of the tour with special access and events, amazing!

The video was taken with an iPhone 15 Pro and a DJI Osmo Pocket 3.

Photos from our trip to the 2024 Tour de France, week three in Nice.

We toured with Custom Getaways and they were absolutely amazing 👌

Hyper-Reality on Vimeo was posted 9 years ago, but it feels like the not-so-distant future, like in the next 5 minutes.

Is it just me, or was there a pre-roll before Craig’s F1 driving showing an Easter egg of the iPad Window Controls? I think there was a quick image of the traffic light buttons on an iPad window floating by in the montage, but it’s not on the published video as far as I can tell.

One of the best parts of the WWDC 2025 Keynote, “6 out of 5 ⭐️” by Allen Stone.