Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
‘Micro-Soft’
Added this footnote just now to yesterday’s piece on MSNBC’s rebranding to “MS NOW”:
Historical pedantry: from 1975–1979, Microsoft spelled its name “Micro-Soft”, with, yes, an uppercase S. But that’s not camel-case, and that hyphenated spelling is as much a footnote to Microsoft’s brand history as the woodcut Isaac-Newton-under-a-tree logo is to Apple. Microsoft’s logo from that era was very disco-’70s and kind of cool — but while “Micro” and “Soft” were broken across two lines, there’s no hyphen in the logotype.
★ MSNBC, Spinning Out of NBCUniversal, Rebrands as ‘MS NOW’ With a Godawful Backronym and Even Worse Logo
Claim Chowder: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Five Months Ago
Kwan Wei Kevin Tan, reporting for Business Insider five months ago:
Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI startup Anthropic, said on Monday that AI, and not software developers, could be writing all of the code in our software in a year.
“I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code,” Amodei said at a Council of Foreign Relations event on Monday.
Complete bullshit, but, I guess he still has one month to go. (Via Dave Winer on Threads.)
‘No Frame Missed’
Five-minute short film from Apple, about people with severe hand tremors from Parkinson’s disease using the iPhone’s Action mode to shoot steady video — including filmmaker Brett Harvey, who was diagnosed at the way-too-young age of 37. There’s also a brief short with Harvey explaining the settings to shoot in Action mode by default, or to use voice controls to avoid needing to tap buttons.
Apple at its very best. If this doesn’t hit you, you’re not hooked up right.
‘American’
Kieran Healy on, just now — amidst all this — becoming an American citizen:
When I sat down to write something about becoming a citizen, I was immediately tangled up in a skein of questions about the character of citizenship, the politics of immigration, and the relationship of individuals to the state. These have all been in the news recently; perhaps you have heard about it. These questions ask how polities work, how they impose themselves upon us, how power is exercised. They are tied up with deep-rooted principles, claims and myths — as you please — about where authority comes from and how it is or whether it ever has been justly applied. These are not easy matters to understand in principle or resolve in practice. Nor can they simply be dismissed. But I am not writing this note because I want to take on these questions, even though I acknowledge them. I am writing this because I do not want to forget how I felt yesterday.
Beautiful.