Linked List: December 19, 2016

Monday, 19 December 2016

Tim Cook on Why He Met With Donald Trump 

Tim Cook, from that same Apple Web Q&A:

There’s a large number of those issues, and the way that you advance them is to engage. Personally, I’ve never found being on the sideline a successful place to be. The way that you influence these issues is to be in the arena. So whether it’s in this country, or the European Union, or in China or South America, we engage. And we engage when we agree and we engage when we disagree. I think it’s very important to do that because you don’t change things by just yelling. You change things by showing everyone why your way is the best. In many ways, it’s a debate of ideas.

We very much stand up for what we believe in. We think that’s a key part of what Apple is about. And we’ll continue to do so.

Tim Cook Assures Employees That It Is Committed to the Mac and That ‘Great Desktops’ Are Coming 

Tim Cook, in a Q&A on the company’s internal message board Apple Web, leaked to Matthew Panzarino:

The desktop is very strategic for us. It’s unique compared to the notebook because you can pack a lot more performance in a desktop — the largest screens, the most memory and storage, a greater variety of I/O, and fastest performance. So there are many different reasons why desktops are really important, and in some cases critical, to people.

The current generation iMac is the best desktop we have ever made and its beautiful Retina 5K display is the best desktop display in the world.

Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we’re committed to desktops. If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that.

This doesn’t surprise me, but it’s good to hear it.

I’ll note that Cook only calls out the 5K iMac — no mention of the Mac Pro.

The Hazards of Going on Autopilot 

From a 2014 story by Maria Konnikova for The New Yorker (thanks to reader Dave Aton for the link):

But, as pilots were being freed of these responsibilities, they were becoming increasingly susceptible to boredom and complacency — problems that were all the more insidious for being difficult to identify and assess. As one pilot whom Wiener interviewed put it: “I know I’m not in the loop, but I’m not exactly out of the loop. It’s more like I’m flying alongside the loop.”

Here’s the PR statement issued by Uber after one of their self-driving cars was caught on video running a red light in San Francisco last week:

“This incident was due to human error. This is why we believe so much in making the roads safer by building self-driving Ubers,” spokesman Matt Wing said in a statement. “This vehicle was not part of the pilot and was not carrying customers. The driver involved has been suspended while we continue to investigate.”

At first read, it sounds like Uber is saying there was a human driving the car. But if you parse it closely, it could also be the case that the car was in autonomous mode, and the “human error” was that the human behind the wheel didn’t notice the car was going to sail through a red light, and failed to manually activate the brake. I think that’s what happened — otherwise the statement wouldn’t be ambiguous.

As Craig Hockenberry and I discussed on the latest episode of The Talk Show, this sort of thing seems inevitable. How can a human being maintain moment’s-notice attention for hours on end while riding in an autonomous car that drives safely for days and days? I don’t think it’s feasible.