We had a great time looking at and smelling all the tulips in Holland Michigan. Here is an album of the pictures that we took.
It’s tulip time in Holland Michigan
In my opinion, SCOTUS’ decision in Louisiana v Callais is based on two flawed beliefs. First is that it is ok to make voting districts for partisan reasons, in other words, allow a majority party to create districts that favor their party winning seats. Second is the belief that racial discrimination is a thing of the past. I also have qualms with the idea that a majority can be discriminated against.
The refusal of seeing partisan gerrymandering and lobbying and very large campaign donations as wrong is evidence of a system functioning as desired by those in power.
A few days back I asked the question, does Apple really need to have an AI product? In this video Nate Jones reads the tea leaves of Apple’s impending re-org suggesting that Apple’s strategy towards AI may be the same as it’s strategy about personal computing 50 years ago. I think it’s the right move by Apple. However, I do wonder about what might be the relationship between local models and personal computer operating systems.
Pitching Is Hurting The Cubs
While acknowledging this as probably too much of a generalization, I think baseball games are won (or lost) by either pitching or hitting. Based on earned run average, I think that when a MLB pitching staff gives up more than four runs it did not do its job. During the Cub’s recent ten game winning streak their pitchers gave up more than four runs only once. Now the Cubs have lost three in a row, and in every one the pitchers gave up more than four runs. Worse, they have given up six or more runs in each game, therefore not giving their hitting much of a chance to win.
The Cubs do currently have a winning 17-12 record due to the fact that of the 24 games played in April, Cub pitchers held opponents to four are fewer runs in 16 games. It appears to be the case that the huge number of their pitchers on IL is catching up to the Cubs.
If the pitching trend continues and given how well the other teams in the NL Central are playing, the Cubs will end up with a losing record for the season and not make the playoffs.
I can’t help but notice that in his blog post about the value of RAM for AI and how Apple’s unified architecture has proven to be an advantage, Om does not mention the Neo. Om’s point in this post, Memory Is The Machine, is the reason why think users are going wish their first generation Neos have more RAM. Heck, my M4 MacBook Pro’s 16 GB of RAM might not be enough in three years.
Our fears about artificial intelligence are a projection of the fears about ourselves. The human ego desires to control the world, and AI is probably the biggest threat to human control we have created to date. We know that we are incomplete yet our ego insists on turning to ourselves to resolve what ails us rather than changing our mind to follow the path of Jesus.
Personal Programming
I am old enough to remember a time when there were no personal computers. While computers existed throughout my life time (I was born in 1966), personal computers didn’t exist until 1975 (the Altair 8800) and back then they weren’t very useful because one had to program these computers for them to do anything.
In the 1970s there were no stores for one to go to and buy software needed to make the PC do something useful, instead one wrote their own programs. Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800, which enabled one to write their own programs, and ironically that led to the formation of Microsoft and the personal computer software industry.
The need to write programs limited the market for PCs to hobbyists who were willing to spend the time to learn and tinker and share their code with others. To most hobbyists the idea of selling programs was abhorrent as they saw them as art to be freely shared, and with this point of view the animosity toward Microsoft was born.
I was struck by how bright these white blossoms were in the morning sun.
