quoteblog on Routine Revelations

iPhone Duo Quotables

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 14:42:56 -0400

I spent time this morning reading several articles about about the iPhone Duo and I look forward to the more detailed reviews to come. I think the biggest impact of the iPhone Duo will be with how it spurs software development for the form factor. My observation from afar of the Android based foldables has been that neither Google nor other developers have done enough to take full advantage of the form factor.

Apple’s Surprise and Shine Event: All the Small Things

John Voorhees https://www.macstories.net/news/apples-surprise-and-shine-event-all-the-small-things/

“Apple has released a six-video playlist on YouTube and in the Apple Developer app called “Get ready for iPhone Duo” to help get designers up to speed with the phone’s new format. The Human Interface Guidelines have been updated too.”

“Continuous Angle API lets developers receive ongoing updates about the Duo’s hinge angle to power interactive effects.”

The iPhone Duo: Tradeoffs, but Fewer Than Feared

Dan Moren https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/09/the-iphone-duo-tradeoffs-but-fewer-than-feared/

“However, when folded, the Duo is itself a chunky 11.3mm. I found myself wondering if that was, in turn, the thickest iPhone ever. The answer? Just barely not. But you have to go all the way back to 2009’s iPhone 3GS, which—like its predecessor, the iPhone 3G—rang in at 12.3mm, in large part due to its slightly convex back.”

iPhone Duo Is Thicker and Heavier Than Basically Every Android Foldable

Will Sattelberg https://9to5google.com/2026/09/09/iphone-duo-thicker-and-heavier-than-basically-every-android-foldable/

“But no matter how “modern” the iPhone Duo appears at first glance compared to Google and Samsung’s respective first-gen entries, it loses out on one big metric: bulk. The iPhone Duo measures in at 11.3mm thick when closed and weighs a whopping 254 grams. Compared to Apple’s most recent foldable rivals, that’s 15 grams (or three nickels worth) heavier than the Pixel 11 Pro Fold, 39 grams heavier than the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, and a whopping 53 grams heavier than the similarly-shaped Fold 8. Each of those phones is significantly thinner too, ranging anywhere between 8.9mm to 10.1mm when closed.

iPhone Duo: 254g, 11.3mm closed
Pixel 11 Pro Fold: 239g, 10.1mm closed
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra: 215g, 8.9mm closed
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8: 201g, 9.7mm closed”

Why Your iPhone Duo Will Inevitably Develop a Screen Crease

Apple Insider https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/09/10/why-your-iphone-duo-will-inevitably-develop-a-screen-crease

“The iPhone Duo developing a crease over time is inevitable as the tides, and a matter of physics and engineering. Here’s how and why that crease develops, and what Apple has done to mitigate it.”

Live Life Without Regret

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 12:18:33 -0400

From around the web….

A 450-Year History of Blogging

Brennan Kenneth Brown https://brennan.day/a-450-year-history-of-blogging/

“In his 1574 A Regiment for Sea, William Bourne describes how, with a line tied to it, a log was thrown over the side of the ship, and the length of line was measured “while someone turned a minute sand glass” or in some cases “spoke some number of woordes [sic]” in order to measure the ship’s speed.[2] (The length was eventually counted by literal knots tied in the line at regular intervals; thus, our equally iconic term “knots.”) Recordings of the log-derived information, eventually replaced by the “chip log,” a weighted wooden quadrant, were entered into what would come to be called the “log board.”
— Janet Sorenson, “Logging-In: The Ship’s Log as Medium””

Denormalizing Hypernormalization

gapingvoid.com https://www.gapingvoid.com/denormalizing-hypernormalization/

“Hypernormalization is what happens when something is obviously broken, everybody knows it’s broken, and yet everybody carries on as if it isn’t. Some people can’t see what’s wrong. Others see it perfectly well but feel powerless to change it. So they shrug. They adapt. They learn to work around the dysfunction instead of confronting it. Eventually, what once seemed absurd becomes expected.”

Levoshovo

Terry Cowan from New Notes from a Commonplace Book on Substack

“How far back should we go? Hiroshima? ¹ Nagasaki? If this argument resonates with you, I do not need to list everything since. But let’s just take a recent example: our bombing of the Iranian Middle School in Minab, killing over 150 schoolgirls and teachers. There has been no acknowledgement, nor has there been an apology. While Americans strongly oppose this war of choice, there has been no widespread public outrage over the murders. I am just saying that at some point we will have to come face to face with our crimes, individually and as a nation. The Russians are doing so, and they are the better people for it.”

Why $100 in Your 20s Is Worth $500 in Your 60s

Nick Maggiulli https://ofdollarsanddata.com/why-100-in-your-20s-is-worth-500-in-your-60s/

“In 1877 the French philosopher Paul Janet put forth a new idea about why time seems to speed up as we age. He proposed that “the rate of passage of subjective time is proportional to the age of the person making the judgement.””

“Janet’s Law is directionally accurate, but needs to be adjusted for one thing—memory. Most of us have little to no memories of our early childhood, so our perception of these early years as adults is basically non-existent. Research on memory agrees with this. Older adults consistently seem to have a reminiscence bump (or enhanced memory) of ages 10-30.”

“As you can see, age 20 represents 2% of your memorable life while age 60 is 0.4%, or about 1/5 as much.

This simple observation has profound implications for how you spend your money throughout your lifetime.”

“This demonstrates how your view of the future can influence your spending habits today. For example, if you don’t understand (or don’t believe) in investing, then your money is worth more today than it ever will be in the future.”

“On the flip side, if you can earn high returns via investing, then you should save as much as possible to consume more in old age. There’s an irony to this approach as well—the data suggests that those who are great savers (and investors) end up not spending the money they worked so hard to acquire in retirement. Blowing all your money while young isn’t a smart move, but hoarding money now that you won’t spend later is worse.”

“This doesn’t mean that you should stop investing if you’re young or that you should strive to die with zero if you’re old. But you shouldn’t feel guilty about spending money on experiences, especially while younger. As Jack Raines wrote in Young Money (his new book out today):”

Only You Can Change You

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:32:56 -0400

I am catching up with sharing some quotes from what I read during our recent road trip. Today’s batch presents some ideas that I think are useful for self reflection.

On the Importance of Rituals

Protesilaos https://protesilaos.com/commentary/2026-07-27-importance-rituals/

“God is everywhere, but to the person with the tunnelled conscience God does not exist even if they consider themselves religious. Belief as such is not relevant. One can make the casual claim “I believe in God”, which usually has the same meaning as “I do not believe in anything in particular”. The reason is that belief only matters when it is expressed as a lifestyle. It otherwise is tokenistic, an exercise in virtue signalling, or a parroting of precepts that are devoid of substance.”

The Extreme Is the Easy Way Out

JA Westenberg https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-extreme-is-the-easy-way-out

“We talk about the boring middle. The lazy middle. The compromised middle. But I put it to you that our obsession with picking the extreme and laughing at moderation is little more than cope. It’s our obsession with tribalism, with extremism, with feeling over thinking, with belonging over being. It’s destructive, unhelpful, and soul-destroying.”

“The middle path is the exhausting work of noticing - today, in this hour, in this moment, in this body, in this season of your life and your work - what moderation actually means; knowing the answer may be different next month, and knowing the responsibility for that moderation is yours and yours alone. There is no tribe that can make your decisions for you and make them easier to live with; no ideology that can forgive your sins or blame your failings on someone else’s flaws. The right amount of anything is a moving target that you have to find for yourself, again and again.”

Why I Stopped Arguing With People

A Geek’s Page https://wangcong.org/2026-06-30-why-i-stopped-arguing-with-people.html

“Many people are ego-driven. Their opinions aren’t positions they hold; they are the position. Prove the idea wrong and you haven’t corrected a fact, you’ve attacked a person. So they defend it the way anyone defends themselves: not with reason, but with resistance. The stronger your argument, the harder they dig in.

You can’t win an argument like this, because it was never an argument. It was a fight over whose ego stays intact. Even when you “win,” you lose, because now you have an enemy who is more convinced than before.

So I’ve drawn a line. I only discuss pros and cons with smart people; I don’t argue right and wrong with ego-driven ones. With the first kind, a disagreement is a joint search for the better answer, and both of us walk away sharper. With the second, there is no answer being sought, only a self to be defended”

“We like to believe humans are rational animals who occasionally feel emotions. It’s the reverse. We are emotional animals who occasionally think.”

“If the only person you can change is yourself, then the one question that matters is: how do you actually get better? Not by winning arguments. You get better by asking others for feedback, again and again, and truly listening to it. It’s the same asking I described earlier, the one clean exception, now turned on myself: I’m the one requesting help, so the advice can finally land. And you cannot do that with an ego in the way. The ego that needs to win is the same ego that can’t hear. It’s not just harmful; it’s a disaster, to everyone around you and to yourself most of all, because it quietly walls you off from the one thing that would improve you.”

Looking In The Mirror

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:03:33 -0400

The following articles that I have recently read provide some deeper thought about artificial intelligence as it relates to humans. Theologian Ilia Delio says: “AI unsettles us because it is a mirror, and what we see in it is what we have been refusing to see in ourselves.”

Notebooks and the Extended Mind

Steven Johnson from Adjacent Possible https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01kxp9dxbtgxqhg9hrb8yk6s3d

“The core principle of the extended mind theory is one that will be familiar to Adjacent Possible readers: the external tools that we use to help us reason, remember, associate, calculate—from counting on our fingers to chatting with an advanced LLM—should be properly understood as extensions of our own cognitive process. “Thinking” is something that happens inside _and_outside our brains. In their original 1998 paper, Chalmers and co-author Andrew Clark argued for what they called an active externalism, based on the ‘active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes.’”

“One of the most provocative arguments in that original paper is that the human brain itself may have been specially adapted to work with these external “tools for thought”—starting with language itself. “Think of a group of people brainstorming around a table, or a philosopher who thinks best by writing, developing her ideas as she goes,” Chalmers and Clark wrote. “It may be that language evolved, in part, to enable such extensions of our cognitive resources within actively coupled systems.” In other words, embracing extended cognition is a “core cognitive process” for humans, not just a modern invention.”

“I mention this whole chapter in Chalmers’ career because it seems much more pertinent to the present day realities of AI. To me, the most pressing question is not whether the machines are on the verge of sentience, since the likelihood of that seems low. The more pressing question is how you build an extended mind architecture that deepens your understanding and expands your creativity, given that there are promising, if slightly chaotic, tools for those tasks on the market right now, at the fingertips of billions of human beings.”

A Little Psychology

third-bit.com https://third-bit.com/sdgc/a-little-psychology/

“Classical economics assumes that people are rational agents who consistently maximize their own utility. When faced with a choice they weigh expected outcomes, discount the future at a consistent rate, and select whatever serves them best. This has been proven false over and over again, but persists because—well, we’ll get to that later in this essay.”

“Behavioral economics looks at how people actually make decisions, and has repeatedly shown that they deviate from “rational” in predictable ways. The first problem with the rational-agent model is computational. Optimizing requires evaluating all possible options against all possible outcomes under all possible conditions. No one can actually do this, so instead, people use a strategy that Herbert Simon called satisficing: they search through available options until they find one that is good enough and then stop. Herbert Simon called this bounded rationality: people are rational within the limits of the information, time, and cognitive capacity they actually have, which makes the heuristics people use to make decisions worth studying.”

Why AI Feels Like Grief

Ilia Delio https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01kxem5ry0s7k1t6taaf59g7zq

“Why does artificial intelligence unsettle us so deeply? Not because it threatens jobs or security alone. Those fears are real, but they do not explain why the feeling reaches so far down. AI unsettles us because it is a mirror, and what we see in it is what we have been refusing to see in ourselves.”

“A human being is a spatially and temporally limited piece of the whole, what we call the “Universe.” He experiences himself and his feelings as separate from the rest, an optical illusion of his consciousness. The quest for liberation from this bondage [or illusion] is the only object of true religion.”

“Trained on the sediment of human expression—our scriptures, myths, philosophies, art, and the half-articulated longings of billions—AI functions as a kind of externalized unconscious, a surface in which we meet our own depths returned in unfamiliar form. Held rightly, that encounter could serve what Carl Jung called individuation: seeing our archetypal patterns reflected without the comforting filters of tradition or tribe, we might recognize the common origin beneath our divisions. Yet the mirror is partial in a way that matters. AI reflects what has already crossed into language, image, or recorded gesture, while the depth Jung pointed to is precisely what has not yet been articulated, what stirs beneath speech and presses toward form.”

“This is why AI is not primarily a technological or economic or even a safety problem. AI is a mirror, and what we see in it is what we have been refusing to see in ourselves. Every anxiety about it maps with uncanny precision onto an anxiety we have carried about ourselves. Will it become conscious? is the question we have refused to ask about matter and life: where does consciousness come from, and what is its relation to the substrate that bears it? Will it replace us? is the question of what we are for, asked from the other side—if intelligence and capability are not what make us human, then what does? Will it deceive and exploit us? is the record of what we have done to one another and to the Earth, reflected back through a system that learned its values from us. Will it have a soul? is the question we stopped asking about ourselves when we let a substance-metaphysics reduce the soul to a ghost in the machine.”

The Machine Where God Used to Be

Ilia Delio https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01kwj0v5v9pe64kvrvshq44axx

“How did we arrive here? Not by the route most commonly proposed. Blaming another party, another system, another century’s failure is a familiar move, and it is, at bottom, a form of scapegoating — a way of exiling responsibility so that we do not have to hold it ourselves. The great catastrophes of the last century, its genocides and its machinery of mass death, taught us astonishingly little about ourselves, because we never let ourselves see the problem as within us. It was always the other side, the other ideology, the other tribe.”

“It is out of exactly this unexamined wound that computer technology was born. The founding question — can a machine think like a human? — was never a neutral engineering puzzle. It was our last-ditch attempt to prove we were human before we finished the job of destroying ourselves. And yet we are barely staying afloat in the wake of that question, because we have surrounded the very tool we reached for with a thick cultural fear. We don’t get it. We built the raft and now we are afraid of the water.”

“Concretely, this means the work is not first a matter of writing better AI policy or electing better leaders, though both may follow from it. It is a matter of rebuilding, person by person, the practice of an inner life that is taken as seriously as the outer one — prayer, contemplation, a run at dawn, whatever form the encounter with “something more” takes for a given life — until that inner ground is no longer vacant enough to need a machine, or a monarch, or an enemy, to stand in for it.”

After AI Takes Everything

Airing https://ursb.me/en/posts/after-ai-takes-everything/

“These three questions are, fundamentally, the same question. On the surface it looks like an engineering question, or a career planning question, but underneath it is an existential question: once execution is fully taken over by machines, where does the human stand? Or more bluntly — once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us?”

Independent Food For Thought

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 12:20:12 -0400

Two articles I think are worth reading on this, the 250th birthday of the United States because they describe how far we have come, yet still the same, while fighting against what we tell ourselves is the norm of civilization.

America, 1926: What a Forgotten 100-Year-Old Report Says About Who We Are

Derek Thompson https://www.derekthompson.org/p/america-1926-an-absurdly-deep-dive

“In other ways, the America of 1926 was another world—practically another planet. Roughly half of the U.S. still counted as rural, and tens of millions of Americans had no indoor plumbing or electricity. Thick smoke from oil lamps filled their homes, and they emptied their bladders and bowels in old-fashioned chamber pots. Women had only voted in two presidential elections. Millions of children still worked for pay. Of the nation’s 27 million households, only 11 million had a phonograph, to listen to music, or a car. The first movie with sound would not come out for another year.”

Democracy Is Bullshit

David Pinsof https://www.everythingisbullshit.blog/p/democracy-is-bullshit

“So what is democracy? It is a key that perfectly fits the lock of group mode. It is a system that brandishes a fearsome weapon before our eyes—the coercive power of jails and cops and militaries—and tells us we cannot control it, and cannot defend ourselves from it, unless we band together into huge, lumbering groups. It is a system that pries power away from the hands of individuals and tosses it to mobs, cliques, unions, religions, interest groups, ethnic groups, and grotesque agglomerations of all the above called ‘political parties.’ It is a system defined by the crushing hopelessness of individual toil and the awesome power of collective synchrony.”

People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a ‘common purpose’. ‘Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they’re going to visit at 3am. -George Carlin

“The purpose of a group is to increase the power, status, and resources of the humans inside it relative to the humans outside it. How do we know this is true? Because over evolutionary time, the groups that reliably fulfilled this purpose became our ancestors.”

“Monarchy is rule by monarchs. Oligarchy is rule by oligarchs. Democracy might seem like it’s rule by the ‘demos’—by the people—but it’s not. Or at least, not by individual people. Democracy is, instead, rule by tribes. Yes, it’s time to switch from ‘groups’ to the more pejorative ’tribes.’ The most cohesive, well-organized, well-funded tribes, bound into supertribes called ‘parties,’ are the ones who rule. It’s a tribeocracy. And given the well-documented ethical and intellectual downsides of tribalism, that is a very bad thing. It’s hard to think of a worse way to run a society than to systematically take power away from wonderful individuals and wise crowds so we can give it to mean, dumb, incoherent, sanctimonious tribes.”

“But there is a worse way to run a society, called autocracy, which leaves us with an important question: Why are democracies nicer places to live than autocracies? The main reason is that democracies are multitribal while autocracies are unitribal.”