Happy iPhone Day!
Double arachnophobia
Last Friday I installed the QPR1 update of Android 16 on my Pixel 7a and I am really happy with the result. The update has enough changes to the UI and new features to make it feel more like an operating system upgrade, which is probably the point. In the past Google has released upgrades of Android in late August or early September so the release of Android 16 in June was unusual, but then it didn’t really seem like an upgrade because nothing looked or did anything different. I am not entirely sure about the benefit of this approach.
Saw this parked while I was on my evening walk. Gemini says this is a Ford Model A built around 1930.
Oh happy day
While reading Brent’s description of how he programmed in the 90s using UserLand Frontier I immediately thought of NewtonScript. Apple had much innovation in Newton that got overlooked and how apps were developed and ran on the operating system is one. Newton OS even had a database based file system that optimized sharing across applications to prevent redundancy. I think the Newton files system was not only needed due to the constraints of limited physical storage but also to enable fast and easy application development like Brent describes.
One thing I have never understood about conservatism in the United States is how the ideology thinks progress is to be made. Today all tenants of conservatism are being bent in extreme directions such that any and every change today is tarred by the claim of wokeness. Why does it matter that a corporation changes its logo? It only matters when you obsess on watching for and fighting against every single change no matter how big or small, good or bad. What a scary world to live in!
I think we are heading toward a time in which public education in the United States will no longer exist. First, it is already hard enough to get good people willing to be teachers and work in public education, but the right wing populism in the United States makes public education totally unattractive. Further, the last thing populist leaders want is an educated electorate and one of the main grievances of right wing populism is against the “educated elite.” Broadly, public education has long strayed away from its original purpose of developing children in to good citizens. The current purposes range from enabling children to be wealthy adults to providing daycare and in almost all ways alleviating parents from the burden of raising their children.
The prime reason why right wing populism has risen in the United States has been greed or the very least extreme self interest. When the Internet made it easier to ship jobs outside the United States the management class did not think of the consequences., although Ross Perot warned us! The primary message from half the United States is, “get a job” and yet most of that half worked hard to take jobs away. The same thing is now happening with AI. Rather than ignore the consequences we need to make fundamental changes to how work is viewed in the United States and what enables a sound society. I am thinking about things like changing the definition of full time employment to 20 hours a week so that the number of the original pool of limited jobs doubles. It is drastic thinking like this that is going to be required because we are seeing the results of the current way of thinking.