I’ll be updating this over time.
I just tried the Vision Pro. My friend created a latent-space visualization of songs, where new points are added live, during the song, and you can walk through the resulting web.
Returning to my Macbook pro to do some work, I feel three emotions: excitement, frustration, and sadness.
Excitement: Immersive experiences like the Vision Pro are the future. Hands down.
Frustration: We’re in a weird limbo phase. The Vision Pro is not quite there yet. At the same time, my computer feels suddenly inadequate.
Sadness: To me, experiences like the Mac have felt like the future. But I now realize that some years from now, we’ll look back at things like typing things out on a keyboard, or opening application “windows” on a 2D screen, the same way adults today look back at mainframes. And maybe we’ll feel nostalgic.
I leaned today that during the February Winter storm in Texas back in 2021, the state was 4 minutes and 37 seconds away from a weeks-long blackout. Apparently, some power transmission components are only designed to operate at 60 Hz. During excessive power demand, frequency can drift lower. Even a slight deviation (in this case, the threshold was 59.4 Hz) for more than a few minutes can trigger a cascade of failures.
It’s pretty crazy to me that an issue as deadly as this was only minutes from unfolding, and yet almost none of this is known by most of us.
History is likely filled with moments like these, and with many unsung heroes.
I saw Sally Mann speak the other day at the Sydney Goldstein theater. Something she said stood out. She finds the South to be a far richer ground for photography, as it’s less about the beauty of the landscape and more about the intrigue of a moment. She wants to communicate feelings.
Given the existence of the subconscious, one of two things must be true. Either a) it’s possible for some brain activity to NOT contain consciousness, OR b) the subconscious has consciousness, but it is a separate conscious experience that we don’t have access to.