Weeknotes 2024.17

It was a roller coaster of a week for me. The mental health was all over the place. On the positive side is the support that I get from various people, even in relation to the company. I’m exited and thankful!

We are currently evaluating a somewhat different approach to the consulting business. The preview will go out to selected few by next week and hopefully a public release soon after.

The linklog is a bit messy this week since both Obsidian and Notion gave me grief. Maybe I should go back to Apple Notes.

Changelog

• Not much to share, yet.

Linklog

No Notes at Apple? What started as a side-note quoting Phil Schiller’s testimony became hotly debated and is already weaponised at companies. I wonder how many bozos out there are now thinking that taking no notes is the path to an Apple-like success 🤦‍♂️.

Daniel Dennett has passed. Really sad to hear, his input into the application of AI would have been crucial. He might have been a philosopher on paper, but he approached it more like a physicist or engineer. His thoughts on interdisciplinary working shaped my thinking and doing.

Block elements finally can use align-content: center in all major (in use) browsers, meaning you don’t need display: flex or display:grid hacks. Finally puts it mildly…

The ever-looming energy consumption issue bites again. We need to prioritise this more both in the IT industry and the industries relying on it or we face unintended consequences down the road.

HashiCorp and OpenTofu have their first brawl. This was inevitable. We will see something similar with Regis for sure.

Overture Maps is going beta. TL;DR, if you don’t know, it is an open source alternative to Google Maps and Maps API, backed by Linux Foundation and several industry players. Google and Apple are, rather obviously, absent. Also absent is Here Technologies, which you might remember as the maps provider for Nokia and Microsoft, owned by Nokia in the past. This is interesting for two reasons: founding members are three former or current clients of Here (Amazon, Microsoft and Meta) and at least the Volkswagen Group has their fingers in both (CARIAD in Overture and Audi being shareholder of Here). (via)

Alt Stores and Emulators. Loads of App Store related news as we see the effects of the EU ruling. Including unintended consequences. I can’t see how requiring to install an alternative store in order to download and install an app benefits the customer in any way and yet it’s the only way to get the Delta Emulator in the EU. Hard pass!

Marques Brownlee, know as MKBHD is in the news for being honest in his reviews, mainly the reviews for the Humane AI Pin and Fisker Ocean, so much so he felt obligated to release a video talking about his reviews. My opinion: Marques is probably the most balanced and un-biased reviewer out there, not to mention the high quality of his content. That’s the reason for his millions of viewers. Second, virtually every other reviewer agrees. There is a lot more unpack here, so I decided to write something longer this week. To be continued…

In relation to Humane’s disastrous release, there was a lot of chatter in podcasts and social media that the issue was partially due to Humane approach to product development. Allegedly, they tried to go by (current-times) Apple playbook, without being Apple. I see this happening everywhere with startups. Whether it’s Apple or any other successful company. More to explore here as well, likely in the same article as above.

We’re now getting into the “eye-rolling & annoying” part of the AI hype cycle. 🙄

Samsung asks executives to work six days to ‘inject a sense of crisis’. If I was a shareholder of Samsung, I’d consider selling it all. Instead of doing something different, they do what hasn’t been working, but more of it. Awesome strategy, perfectly showcasing incompetence and inaptitude 👍 🙄

Fascinating article how reinforcement learning from human feedback can influence language, when the human feedback is outsourced to certain parts of the world, in this case Africa. (via)

There was a lot more to link to, however I will pick some topics up over the next few weeks with a little more detailed pieces. The week was full of (content) triggers.