An interesting essay by Leopold Aschenbrenner discussing the recent history of as well predictions for the next 10 years of AI: “From GPT-4 to AGI”
A long but good read, which itself is part of an even longer series.
It may just be the marketing, but the newly announced DC-1 tablet from Daylight seems poised to scratch an itch of our times. As summarized by Om Malik:
What the company has created is a beautiful tablet — about the size of a normal iPad Air. It is just a “little less than white,” white, with a gorgeous screen. It is very simple, elegant, and lovely. It has an e-ink like screen, and the matte monochrome paper-like display is optimized for reading, writing, and note-taking. It refreshes at 60 frames per second, a pretty big deal for these kind of displays.
I love at least the idea of this.
Complaining about modern technology, addictive software, and the ills of social media can be is tiresome. But it’s also a real, difficult-to-mitigate problem. So I hope this forthcoming thing works as advertised and becomes a commercial success.
And I would love to see this company, on the heels of that success, expand their offerings to additional form factors (the phone being the obvious next choice) or prove the market enough to inspire more mature companies to enter whatever the term for these “deliberate computing” or “modernized retro” or “neo-vintage” or “tech nostalgist” concepts should be.
Nothing currently available has really done the trick. Even the cheapest FreeWrite devices are comically expensive as an isolated electronic typewriter with extremely small displays, and devices like the reMarkable also have a (purposefully) narrow, limiting use case.
The closest thing would be the tablets by Boox, which have good and pretty fast e-ink screens but don’t quite achieve the advertised frame rate here (which if true would be fast enough to function like a regular monitor), feel just a tad underpowered, and don’t have the fun (if potentially gimmicky?) Amber backlight. I actually have a Boox Palma, which is an awesome little phone-sized version of what the DC-1 should bascially turn out to be minus the stylus support, and it’s overall fantastic. It’s a convenient form factor for reading, runs customized Android so Kindle, Libby, and many other apps all work perfectly, and can do the internet and anything else a phone or tablet can do (minus the phone itself). The screen really is pretty fast (you can technically watch a video in grayscale, though not particularly well), and the backlight temperature can be tuned to a slightly warm color for dark environments. Still, it’s just the slightest bit slow such that no one could mistake it for a truly normal computer with a magic screen.
While Boox has made some solid devices, if the DC-1 can run its customized Android system as well and quickly as in the demos, it might function as the productivity and consumption machine for writing, reading, and potentially drawing that the iPad and other tablets have largely failed to achieve due to either not being able to do enough or simultaneously way too much. Maybe this finds the sweet spot.
As a parent with pre-phone-age children, I would love to see more entries in the not-quite-so-smart phone pantheon. There are things I love about modern phones that make using a purposely old-school device too limiting: maps, streaming music, audiobooks, e-books, email (sigh), and yes, sometimes the Internet. Also a top-notch camera (must. take. photos. of. kids). A future world where there are good phones with paper-like aesthetics combined with a curated but powerful productivity and consumption suite of apps would be great.
Here’s a mini-documentary that describes how the new “LivePaper” display works compared with regular e-ink:
The world's first 60+ FPS e-ink display by @daylightco on Episode 45 of S³
See how it works, the 6-year development journey, and Daylight's vision for the future of personal computing. pic.twitter.com/s8DK0iLA1Y
— Jason Carman (@jasonjoyride) May 25, 2024
Sometimes it’s the right features–not more features–that make a new product worth it.
Yesterday, the FTC passed its proposed ban on noncompetes along party lines.
This is not a done deal. The US Chamber of Commerce (which is a large lobbying organization, not a part of the government) intends to sue immediately, and they won’t be alone. Among other complaints, the Republican members of the committee who voted against it and the future litigants do not believe the FTC has the authority to do this.
The FTC’s final rule–including a very long full discussion of their rationale and authority–is here.
One of the exceptions of interest to those following consolidation in healthcare:
The final rule does not apply to non-competes entered into by a person pursuant to a bona fide sale of a business entity.
The original proposal had a limitation to the sale exception that defined a “substantial owner, substantial member, and substantial partner” to “mean an owner, member, or partner holding at least a 25 percent ownership interest in a business entity.”
The final rule does not require the seller to have a minimum ownership stake for the exception to apply.
This presumably means that, for example, all doctors who sell their practices to private equity are still bound by their noncompetes, regardless of practice size. (Non-legacy “partners” who weren’t partners at the time of sale would be free).
The new rule, if it survives, will be retroactive to essentially all noncompetes starting on the effective date ~120 days from now.
The FTC has argued it has authority over at least some nonprofits here. They bookend their argument thusly:
The final rule applies to the full scope of the Commission’s jurisdiction. Many of the comments about nonprofits erroneously assume that the FTC’s jurisdiction does not capture any entity claiming tax-exempt status as a nonprofit. Given these comments, the Commission summarizes Commission precedent and judicial decisions construing the scope of the Commission’s jurisdiction as it relates to entities that claim tax-exempt status as nonprofits and to other entities that may or may not be organized to carry on business for their own profit or the profit of their members.
[…]
The Commission stresses, however, that both judicial decisions and Commission precedent recognize that not all entities claiming tax-exempt status as nonprofits fall outside the Commission’s jurisdiction.
See pages 50-54 of the final rule above for their argument regarding jurisdiction over nonprofits.
The only true exceptions to the ban are senior executives and the bona fide sale provision.
The press release is here.
If you have HBO Max, standup comic Alex Edelman’s one-man show was excellent. The official description of its main narrative thread: “In the wake of a string of anti–Semitic threats pointed in his direction online, standup comic Alex Edelman decides to go straight to the source; specifically, Queens, where he covertly attends a meeting of White Nationalists.” Here’s the trailer.
On April 23 at 2 pm ET, the FTC is holding a special open meeting with a live webcast to discuss the proposed final rule banning most noncompete clauses. At the end of the meeting, “the Commission will vote on whether to issue the final rule.”
Potentially huge news (that will then immediately be challenged legally).
Incredible story briefly detailed in NYT’s “Did One Guy Just Stop a Huge Cyberattack?” by Kevin Roose:
In the cybersecurity world, a database engineer inadvertently finding a backdoor in a core Linux feature is a little like a bakery worker who smells a freshly baked loaf of bread, senses something is off and correctly deduces that someone has tampered with the entire global yeast supply. It’s the kind of intuition that requires years of experience and obsessive attention to detail, plus a healthy dose of luck.
This could have been an unmitigated disaster. So much of the world’s infrastructure relies on random individuals being generally good or exceptionally thoughtful, in this case, the diligence of some dude who describes himself as a “private person who just sits in front of the computer and hacks on code.”
But, on the darker side: Given the seemingly miraculous nature of this catch, what are the odds there aren’t other backdoors already in place in our key systems?
From last year’s “Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result” by David Merritt Johns in The Atlantic (“Studies show a mysterious health benefit to ice cream. Scientists don’t want to talk about it.”):
In 2004, the English epidemiologist Michael Marmot wrote, “Scientific findings do not fall on blank minds that get made up as a result. Science engages with busy minds that have strong views about how things are and ought to be.” Marmot was writing about how politicians deal with scientific evidence—always concluding that the latest data supported their existing views—but he acknowledged that scientists weren’t so different.
The ice-cream saga shows how this plays out in practice. Many stories can be told about any given scientific inquiry, and choosing one is a messy, value-laden process. A scientist may worry over how their story fits with common sense, and whether they have sufficient evidence to back it up. They may also worry that it poses a threat to public health, or to their credibility. If there’s a lesson to be drawn from the parable of the diet world’s most inconvenient truth, it’s that scientific knowledge is itself a packaged good. The data, whatever they show, are just ingredients.
The data are just ingredients.
I got an underdesk elliptical a couple of weeks ago…I think maybe it’s awesome and wish I had gotten one a long time ago. I’m honestly a little surprised I can pedal while thinking.
I tried a few, and this is the one I landed on: very stable, pretty cheap, reasonably quiet.
I’m running low on my stash of Cometeer coffee. If you’re interested, you can get $20 off your first order and help subsidize my terrible caffeine addiction. (Full review here. Not an ad, but I do like cheaper coffee.)