Linked List: April 28, 2022

Thursday, 28 April 2022

Joanna Stern’s Amazon Astro Review ★

Speaking of Joanna Stern, her review of Amazon’s Astro home robot last week was fun and fascinating (News+ link for the article, YouTube link for the video):

Amazon’s list of Astro’s talents is overwhelmingly long, but at home the robot doesn’t do anything particularly valuable. I take that back: It’s very good at stirring up powerful emotions of love and hate.

How do I know? Astro moved in with my family (two kids, two moms, one dog) a couple of weeks ago.

You can’t buy the $1,000 robot — at least not until Amazon permits you. But you wouldn’t want to buy it. At least not yet. Our adventures with Astro, in its earliest days, showed me a world where computers can be relatable, proactive helpers.

AI research into autonomy is not only about transportation vehicles. The race is on to build and ship useful home and workplace assistants — something like a cross between C-3PO (can talk and go up and down stairs) and R2-D2 (not annoying).

Ducking Autocorrect Explained ★

Joanna Stern interviews Ken Kocienda to talk about why autocorrect remains imperfect, but essential. Don’t miss the video, which involves some actual ducking ducks.

[Sidenote: I noticed just this week that the iOS 15 autocorrect glitch I wrote about in December, wherein my typing “20” would get replaced by “2.0”, seems to be fixed.]

Apple’s Results for the Second Quarter of 2022 ★

iPhone, Mac, and Wearables revenue are all up year-over-year, as is the almighty Services division. iPad revenue was down, slightly. Tim Cook, as quoted by CNBC: “We grew in each of our categories except for iPad where we had some very significant supply constraints during the quarter.”

Cook also told CNBC: “The last seven Mac quarters have now been the top seven quarters ever in the history of the Mac.”

It’s not just we Mac aficionados who see the Mac as resurgent.

‘The Contractual Impossibility of Unwinding Disney’s Reedy Creek’ ★

Jacob Schumer, writing for Bloomberg Tax (my favorite website in the world):

Florida simply cannot promise to prospective bondholders that it won’t interfere with Reedy Creek, and then dissolve Reedy Creek. If Reedy Creek is ever dissolved, it would be a monumental and complicated enterprise even on a years-long timeline. The district has a nine-figure annual budget for expenditures, and even ignoring its various debts, it has a plethora of other contracts that somehow would have to be assigned to and divided between Orange and Osceola counties. However, the dissolution will have to wait until all of its bonds are paid in full.

Via this report by Mary Ellen Klas for The Miami Herald, which contains:

Gov. Ron DeSantis responded to the criticism that repealing Disney’s special district would become a burden for area residents. [...] He added that Disney will also be required to pay all outstanding bonds, but he didn’t explain how it will happen.

“Under no circumstances will Disney not pay its debts,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis should just say that Mexico will pay for it.

Data Suggests That Conservative Twitter Accounts Gained Followers, and Liberal Accounts Lost, After Musk Acquisition Was Announced ★

Corin Faife, writing for The Verge:

Data compiled by The Verge from social media statistics site Social Blade shows that in the two days since the deal was completed, influential conservative accounts have increased their follower counts at roughly ten times the average daily rate for the month leading up to the acquisition. Meanwhile, popular liberal accounts have suffered, collectively losing hundreds of thousands of followers on April 25th and 26th after a month of gains. [...]

Out of the 50 conservative accounts in our dataset, 48 made unusually large follower gains on April 25th and 26th, while only two accounts lost followers. On April 26th, the conservative accounts in our dataset gained 17,229 followers on average. The single largest gain went to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who gained 141,556 followers.

All 50 of the liberal accounts in our dataset lost followers across the same two days. On average, each account lost 6,062 followers on April 26th, with the single largest loss from the account of Vice President Kamala Harris, whose follower count decreased by 22,453.

To put this in perspective, it’s worth noting that Vice President Harris has 19.6 million followers, so losing 22,500 is about one-tenth of a percent. Not precipitous. But, still, I find this interesting.

Conservative-leaning users joining (or re-joining) Twitter in anticipation that under Musk’s ownership, Twitter will be more to their liking makes some sense. I don’t really get why liberal-leaning users are deleting or deactivating their accounts now, though. Nothing has changed. We don’t know what will change. It seems so defeatist, which, alas, is on-brand for the active-on-Twitter left.

I also don’t get deleting your account. Why not just stop using Twitter for now, but keep your account in case you change your mind down the road?

Craig Hunter Reviews the 20-Core M1 Ultra Mac Studio ★

Craig Hunter:

The main focus of my reviews has always been about CPU performance in real world engineering benchmarks, and this is where things take a dramatic turn with the Mac Studio. To really convey my experience, I want to set the stage with previous results from the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) benchmark I’ve been running for the last 10 years. These results cover four generations of pro desktop Mac systems running Intel CPUs. [...]

As shown above, we see a pretty typical trend where machines get less and less efficient as more and more cores join the computation. This happens because the computational work begins to saturate communications on the system as data and MPI instructions pass between the cores and memory, creating overhead. It’s what makes parallel CFD computations such a great real world benchmark. Unlike simpler benchmarks that tend to make CPUs look good, the CFD benchmark stresses the entire system and shows us how things hold up as conditions become more and more challenging.

Now let’s take a look at what happened when I repeated this test for the Mac Studio and plotted results on the same chart.

Off the chart, literally.

‘Marshall Law’ ★

Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer, reporting for The New York Times on new evidence showing Republican members of Congress pressing, futilely, to keep Trump in office even after the January 6 riot at the Capitol:

“In our private chat with only Members, several are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call for Marshall law,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, wrote to Mr. Meadows on Jan. 17, 2021, misspelling the word “martial.”

Good luck finding a single paragraph in a news story that better captures our entire political moment.