On the other hand, I spent a lot of time with "iTunes U" as both an engineer on the project and as a user. I was sad to see it shut down. (I made the last code changes to the last version of iTunes U that shipped.)
While on the team, I also did what I could to try to keep iTunes U alive—fight against its pending "sunsetting". The Education team owned iTunes U but we were also trying to find our way with a new app, "Schoolwork". Schoolwork didn't have content like iTunes U—it was more like Canvas. An instructor created assignments with it and then assigned them to their students.
A desperate Hail Mary play I made was to facilitate the bridging of "iTunes U" and "Schoolwork". The idea was that an instructor could assign portions of an iTunes U course within Schoolwork. Links within the assignment would launch iTunes U, take the student to the specific course and then the specific chapter…
I hoped someone might then see what an asset all this free content iTunes U (well, Apple) hosted. (MIT courses on computer science, to name just an example.)
In the end when it was clear we were tilting against windmills trying to keep iTunes U going, I relented and spent time trying to help enable a mechanism that allowed iTunes U content owners to export their courseware to Canvas-style courses. A handful of content owners took us up on that. I don't know ultimately what ever happened to all that content though.
Some of it no doubt ended up on Coursera or similar. But that iTunes U courseware, for the decade or so that it existed, was absolutely free and often top-notch… That will be missed.
And unlike the music, books, movies, the iTunes U content was all free. The most nefarious thing you might try to ascribe to Apple was that they were hoping the free content would somehow sell more iPads…
Better still, like a well-written essay, there is closure to the series. All the ends left about in the preceding episodes are drawn together neatly in the final one.
Closing up work on my modular, hobbyist, analog computer. (Finishing up the manual—the hardware is already a wrap).
Something I can finally enjoy: just playing with it. I tediously wired up a pair of pendulum simulations to drive an XY oscilloscope—got a nice Lissajous curve.
But now I want to double it to four pendulums. Each axis (still just X and Y) to be driven by the sum of a pair of pendulums. With them out of phase, the curves appear to sometimes collapse but then suddenly explode again…
(Love to eventually hook it up to an actual plotter.)
Regardless of the degree to which the human mind works like an LLM, my reductionist tendency has always imagined that the human mind will be found to be built from simple enough principles (but at scale, of course). In that regard, LLM as model for the human brain (or at least one aspect of it) is attractive to me. I admit it.
No, and still not horrible. I jeep a trucker's atlas in my van for road trips. Siri and Google Maps (Gigi, we call her) don't seem to realize I want to stay on interstates making distance. Wandering some two-lane country road diagonally through Kansas might save me 10 minutes but having oncoming traffic and the possibility of a rock into the windshield (or worse)—not worth it.
I plan my routes with the paper map.
> In practice it was mostly an annoying game of attempting to guess where people were. You'd call their job, they had left. You'd call their house…
That does not ring a bell at all with me. Sure, I'd call and someone wasn't home, but that was the end of it. If someone else answered, it was "Hey, have them give me a call…" And of course answering machines became a thing…
You know, there was just generally less of an urgency to get a hold of someone then.
And you know what sucks now? Someone able to get a hold of you whenever, wherever. (Unless I go out of my way to shut off my device.)
I used to laugh at a family member and spouse. They were early mobile phone adopters and I watched them call one another constantly with, "When are you going to be home?" I finally commented, "You know what would have happened if you had not called? They would have just shown up in 10 minutes or whatever."
Urgency, expectations… too high these days.
> Cassettes are the worst way to listen to music ever invented.
This is the way. I use printed maps when on vacation. Then I laugh at tourists who are hysterical because their smartphones ran out of power.
I print my boarding cards and then I laugh at hysterical people who's smartphonse do not work.
When I walk around on town, I do not take my phone with me, so anyone looking for me has to leave a message on my answering machine or send me an email, and I'll get back to them when I feel like it.
Have I ever, for many decades, missed anything important because someone just had to get hold of me this second? Never. Magically, everything always sorted itself out.
The idea that we must be available 24/7 is a mind virus that needs to be eradicated.
> This is the way. I use printed maps when on vacation.
Come on, then you know their limits. Get to your destination city? Better hope your road atlas comes with a city map, and the road you're going to is large enough to have its name printed. Otherwise, you're shopping at the next gas station. Have the city map? Better hope the outer borrows are on it, too. Found your destination on the map? Better hope you have a competent navigator riding shotgun, because otherwise you'll have to stop and park 15 times to consult your map while navigating an unfamiliar jungle of a city.
I think much of the software written over the last 20 years is very close to worthless. A significant fraction has negative worth.
>> Cassettes are the worst way to listen to music ever invented.
>Except for creating portable playlists, sure.
I think it was the frontman for Phish that said something like “metal sounds great on cassette”, referring to 80’s thrash, and I have to agree. I’m sure part of it is nostalgia, but I feel like 70’s rock/prog sounds perfect on vinyl, and 80’s thrash sounds great on cassette.
I have been converting old tapes to digital and they do sound both different and better.
I think there's an aspect of this format having been a target for professional mixing. But there's also the background hiss and the warping of rolling tape and the low fidelity of the heads... It all mixes together nicely for a dirtier sound.
I generally agree with you but paper maps really were horrible for this of us who have no sense of direction (despite trying for years). I remember multiple times trying to go somewhere, getting horribly lost (in one case I was within half a mile of the house I was trying to find the whole time but couldn't find it for an hour), and giving up and going home. The day I bought a TomTom (GPS that you could use without telling Google where you were going -imagine that!) was lifechanging.
But GPS is kind of an interesting one because it's not actually the internet. And it can be used without any loss of privacy.
I was amused to watch the trajectory of all my older relatives, from "I don't understand why you spend all your time on that computer" to "I texted you some idle shower thought ten minutes ago, and it's frankly rude that you haven't replied yet".
Lots of people seem to have lost all sense of perspective.
It's weird that people (claim to) have had bad luck with cassette tape, because it worked pretty well for me. I don't believe I ever had a player chew tape, although I was never rich enough to afford a car stereo with a tape player so maybe those were more prone to it.
Also, paper maps! Excellent! The trick was you had to have done Orienteering at school, where (and I'm not making this up) a teacher would drop you off in the middle of nowhere with a map and if you were very lucky a compass, and tell you they'd see you back at the school, and if you could try to make it back before 9pm because then the teachers would still have time to get a few rounds in at the pub before closing time.
I've stopped submitting quality reports to Apple Maps because they're all met with "while we couldn't make the change you suggested, we hope you continue to waste your time reporting these".
The issues are egregious too, like blatantly incorrect lane guidance that would send you in the wrong direction, or diverting me off a highway onto an unmarked, narrow country road that no one with any knowledge of the local roads would take ever.
Though I'm confident whatever BPO slaves they have processing reports 5000 miles away have a better understanding of the roads than I, as they are wholly incapable of even using Google Street View to confirm details (probably by policy) so they always demand I provide a photo or video a month after the fact. Because when you're lost in the middle of nowhere your first thought should be "Let's backtrack so I can grab some pictures for Apple".
Google Maps isn’t much better. Outside of major population centres, you have to fight with it to keep you on major highway.
Google and Apple both prefer “efficient” routes with unsealed roads that are 4WD only, impassible when wet, have no services, no mobile coverage, and where if you need medical help it literally comes by aeroplane.[1]
maybe give comaps a go. it uses openStreetMap for its map data. i dont know what routing algorithm it uses or how it compares to google/apple but i do like how easy it is to start routes with this app. and if it goes off course is fairly easy to just tap another road and the click "add stop" to have it re-route
another plus is being able to download as many map areas as you would like, and unlike google its actually giving you the full map data (although i havnt used google maps in over a decade now but i remember downloading a map once but then certain POIs would only show up when i had data/cell turned on)
Google and Apple maps are terrible at showing you back roads which actually go through. So I carry Delorme Atlas books. On the other hand, I'm glad I no longer need a Thomas Guide (or whatever your local urban mapbook was called.)
Whether I intend to work a factory job or not I can still decide that unemployment in the U.S., especially unemployment of blue-collar workers, would be better served by local industry than allowing for homelessness or a dependency on welfare. Never mind that there might also be national security issues addressed by local manufacture.
The opposite, expecting everyone in the country to aspire to white-collar professions, is to me much more clearly an elitist (or at least irrational) position to have.
>The opposite, expecting everyone in the country to aspire to white-collar professions, is to me much more clearly an elitist (or at least irrational) position to have.
This, when you have everyone go to college and then they'll be shocked to be unemployed or work for peanuts since there's an oversupply of college grads and not much demand.
Here in Austria people working in construction cam earn way better than SW engineers because the former have an oversupply and the latter a shortage.
If you need a mobile app or a Java app, the're dime a dozen developers but if you need a plumber, lock smith, facade, roof specialist, well good luck.
The days when a college degree were an instant ticket to a well paid job for life are over.
I have worked enough blue-collar jobs to know that there exist people for whom technical work is a non-starter. Not that they are somehow dim and incapable of learning engineering, but "work" that is not done through labor, that does not show in a tangible way a day's effort… is anathema to them.
Still it's supply and demand issue. The west has had 20-30 years of grooming the youth that going to college is the right path to middle class lifestyle and blue collar jobs are for losers who are too stupid to study. You can't be shocked when the supply demand reverses. South Park even had an episode mocking this, with plumbers being the new tech bros, and tech bros being unemployed.
> but "work" that is not done through labor, that does not show in a tangible way a day's effort… is anathema to them
Same applies within white collar jobs too. Some engineers want to work in hardware, firmware, mechanical jobs, because the output is tangible, instead of pushing JSONs to the cloud, even if that's not more complicated than the other.
"I feel for the people living there and being affected by the pollution."
Isn't it all of us with carpets in our homes that are affected? (Albeit to a lesser degree—but also we are at the least partners in this if our buying carpets are destroying these other people's communities.)
I think “to a lesser degree” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The degrees of exposure are many orders of magnitude wide. Occupational exposure in a factory is far greater than living downstream from a polluter which is far greater still than being a far away consumer of the polluter’s products.
Your carpet doesn’t contain enough PFAS to create dangerous runoff and contaminate groundwater or entire rivers, but a town that manufactures most of the world’s mass produced carpeting is going to generate industrial amounts of pollution in a concentrated area.
You should probably be more worried about the flame retardants in the rebond carpet pad. Better these days, but older installed stuff had non-trivial PPM.
That's wild to me that that is how you know the risks of cigarettes. I forget just how many people rely on corporate authority to "warn" them of everything. That puts many of my peers in a constant state of fear. I put the word warn in quotes because it is only to insulate themselves against future lawsuits and revenue loss.
I just used it as an obvious example. I knew cigarettes caused cancer at some point growing up. I'm concerned of course about the abundance of products that I don't know about—wishing as a community we did more to label those.
Anthropocentric thought is a problem and it shows. How about as a community not needing corporations to tell you how to exist while they destroy ecosystems around us? Maybe if they label everything, that'll make it alllllllll okay.
To some of these I say, good riddance.
On the other hand, I spent a lot of time with "iTunes U" as both an engineer on the project and as a user. I was sad to see it shut down. (I made the last code changes to the last version of iTunes U that shipped.)
While on the team, I also did what I could to try to keep iTunes U alive—fight against its pending "sunsetting". The Education team owned iTunes U but we were also trying to find our way with a new app, "Schoolwork". Schoolwork didn't have content like iTunes U—it was more like Canvas. An instructor created assignments with it and then assigned them to their students.
A desperate Hail Mary play I made was to facilitate the bridging of "iTunes U" and "Schoolwork". The idea was that an instructor could assign portions of an iTunes U course within Schoolwork. Links within the assignment would launch iTunes U, take the student to the specific course and then the specific chapter…
I hoped someone might then see what an asset all this free content iTunes U (well, Apple) hosted. (MIT courses on computer science, to name just an example.)
In the end when it was clear we were tilting against windmills trying to keep iTunes U going, I relented and spent time trying to help enable a mechanism that allowed iTunes U content owners to export their courseware to Canvas-style courses. A handful of content owners took us up on that. I don't know ultimately what ever happened to all that content though.
Some of it no doubt ended up on Coursera or similar. But that iTunes U courseware, for the decade or so that it existed, was absolutely free and often top-notch… That will be missed.
And unlike the music, books, movies, the iTunes U content was all free. The most nefarious thing you might try to ascribe to Apple was that they were hoping the free content would somehow sell more iPads…
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