¶WWDC is going to be quite interesting this year, I think. Apple has been touting its focus on privacy lately, so an “on device” aspect to its AI feels natural. But it’s also working with OpenAI, so a connected aspect must be in play, too. Will users have options? In a global setting…at each interaction?

¶“My goals are to tap into the full scope of human talent, to bring the very best to M.I.T. and to make sure they thrive once here,” Dr. Kornbluth said in a statement. “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”

¶OpenAI will have access to Stack Overflow’s API and will receive feedback from the developer community to improve the performance of AI models. OpenAI, in turn, will give Stack Overflow attribution — aka link to its contents — in ChatGPT.

¶Interesting. Stack Overflow is the single best repository for coding knowledge on the web. Hard to believe the company is only receiving attribution for giving OpenAI access to its mountain of content.

¶Boeing has publicly admitted that record falsification did occur.

¶What the actual hell is going on at Boeing?

¶This year’s report is a measure of good news for the millions of Americans who depend on Social Security, including the roughly 50% of seniors for whom Social Security is the difference between poverty and living in dignity — any potential benefit reduction event has been pushed off from 2034 to 2035,” Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley said in a statement.

¶Literally the year I’ll turn 65....

¶In 2021, Koh came across a paper that discussed how to grapple with chaotic orbits from the perspective of symplectic geometry, an abstract field of math that is generally far removed from messy real-world details. She started to suspect that symplectic geometry might have the tools she needed to better understand orbits, and she got in touch with Agustin Moreno, the author of the paper. Moreno, then a postdoctoral fellow at Uppsala University in Sweden, was surprised and pleased to hear that someone at NASA was interested in his work. “It was unexpected, but it was also quite interesting and sort of motivating at the same time,” he said.

¶This is the beauty of pure academic research – someone makes an unforeseen connection and our collective knowledge grows. You never know how people will apply your work later. Pretty neat and compelling example of the value of basic research.

¶[L]arge language models such as ChatGPT can serve as valuable sources of information for informal caregivers, although they may not fully meet the needs of formal caregivers who seek specialized (clinical) answers. Nevertheless, even in its current state, ChatGPT was able to provide responses to some of the clinical questions related to dementia that were asked.

¶I suspect this is true for medical information on the web, too — good for most of us, incomplete for medical folks.

¶Sodium-ion tech has received heightened interest in recent years as a more reliable, potentially cheaper energy storage medium. While its energy density lags behind lithium-ion, advantages such as faster cycling, longer lifespan and safer, non-flammable end use have made sodium-ion an attractive alternative, especially for stationary uses like data center and EV charger backup storage.

¶This is going to be interesting to watch over the next few years and decades. Battery technology is having a moment, for obvious reasons, and the Midwest stands to benefit if interest in sodium-ion technology continues to grow. There’s a giant salt mine in Cleveland that extends beneath Lake Erie and another under Detroit.

¶Look at that! Rakus, the orangutan I posted about yesterday made today’s New York Times!

¶Here’s the original paper in Nature’s Scientific Reports:

¶Laumer, I.B., Rahman, A., Rahmaeti, T. et al. Active self-treatment of a facial wound with a biologically active plant by a male Sumatran orangutan. Sci Rep 14, 8932 (2024).

¶I forget where, but I read something that characterized this new phase of the space race as the “base race,” meaning countries (presumably the United States and China) are racing to be the first to establish a base on the moon. I wonder when that will be possible - ten years? Twenty? How long until the billionaires of the day are hitching rides back and forth?

¶Three days after his wound appeared, Rakus did something that the researchers had never seen before. He ingested, chewed, and spit out bits of a nearby plant, then dabbed his wound with the resulting plant mix.

¶This is pretty remarkable. I’d really like to know if Rakus discovered the healing properties of the plant on his own, or if he learned it from another orangutan. If the latter, did the other teach him, or did he just observe the other healing his wounds?

¶“We believe in the transformative power and promise of AI, and we believe we have advantages that will differentiate us in this new era, including Apple’s unique combination of seamless hardware, software, and services integration, groundbreaking Apple Silicon with our industry-leading neural engines, and our unwavering focus on privacy, which underpins everything we create.”

¶Apple is arriving late to the generative AI party and is bringing a different approach with it. Sound familiar? This is how the company came to dominate portable music players, smartphones, earbuds, tablets, laptops, etc. The strategy doesn’t always work (think cars), but I’m betting it will in AI.

¶a software glitch caus[ed] some iPhone alarms to fail to play a sound.

¶This has driven me crazy more than once, making me wonder what the heck I was doing wrong (is it muted or silenced or whatever?).

¶the company “never even submitted them for testing to the [Food and Drug Administration] or National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), and the masks were never certified as N95.”

¶File this under unintended consequences of the response to the pandemic. Anyone with a factory or supply chain can manufacture and ship medical equipment, devices, and supplies, right? I wonder how many people and companies shipped bogus hand sanitizer.

¶I don’t know what a “patent listing” is, at least in the context of “patent filings” as mentioned in this article, but I do know that we already have ways for dealing with “junk” patent applications - the patentability requirements of existing law. If those aren’t met, a patent the USPTO shouldn’t issue a patent. If the Office needs more resources to better analyze “patent listings” or “patent filings” (I assume both refer to “patent applications”), then give the Congress needs to increase funding for the Office.

¶It’s a question of resources, not rules.

¶Hey, look at that…someone else that shares my opinion on Apple’s FineWoven case and wallet. I actually like mine, and am a bit sad to see Apple abandon the material so soon after launching it (although it looks like we’ll get one more round of FineWoven cases and wallets for the forthcoming iPhone 16.

¶Change is hard.