Linked List: May 10, 2024

Friday, 10 May 2024

David Letterman in 2024: John Mulaney on ‘My Next Guest Needs No Introduction’ 

Whole episode was great, but the intimate dinner with Letterman, Mulaney, and Mulaney’s dad was just amazing TV.

Mulaney’s own live talk show, Everybody’s in L.A., finishes its 6-episode limited run tonight, also on Netflix. We’ve been loving it.

David Letterman in 1985: Crushing Things With an 80-Ton Hydraulic Press 

“If you want to have a good time, you can of course spend a lot of money going out to fancy restaurants with big floor shows, but I believe there’s more than enough good wholesome fun to be had with just a few close friends and an 80-ton hydraulic press.”

Wes Anderson Made a Commercial – and Designed a New Pen – for Montblanc 

In case you’re in need of a video-ad palate cleanser, you won’t find a commercial more delightful than this one.

Cinematography by Linus Sandgren, of No Time To Die and Saltburn fame. More details at Vogue Business, including the fact that Montblanc found out only on set that Anderson had designed his own pen, the Schreiberling (“Scribbler” in German).

Sam Altman Puts the Kibosh on Reuters Story Claiming OpenAI Is Launching a Search Engine Next Week 

Sam Altman, on Twitter/X:

not gpt-5, not a search engine, but we’ve been hard at work on some new stuff we think people will love! feels like magic to me.

monday 10am PT.

Perhaps they’ve invented a way to type uppercase letters?

The Sound of Software 

Andy Allen and Thomas Williams, from Not Boring:

Sound is an outcast in Software Design. We may embrace the aesthetics of animation and visuals, but sound is different. It’s intrusive. Unlike visuals on a screen, you can’t look away or ignore it. It’s enough to make you rip the batteries out of a toy or frisbee an iPad across the room (speaking from experience).

And yet, play a video game without sound and its powerful punch lands with no force. Without music, once moving moments in a film become dull, even comical (Jurassic Park, Rocky). Sound holds an immense power to elevate any experience — including the most boring of software.

Sound in software isn’t inherently bad. It’s just been really badly designed.

We use sound in every !Boring app, and many have called it out as one of their favorite aspects of our apps. We’ve learned a few things about when to use sound, how to design it, and how to implement it. When done right, sound unlocks a path to much richer software experiences.

Previously: “The World’s Most Satisfying Checkbox”.

Classic Marathon Is Now on Steam 

Even the user manual brings back memories. (“This manual contains sarcastic language that some readers might find condescending.”) From the “Performance Notes” section:

For Power Mac Users
If you need more speed, you better call the Apple Dealer where you bought your computer, ’cuz he probably sold you a Centris in a Power Mac case. Keep in mind however, that as of System 7.5 the sound drivers in the Power Mac are still running under emulation. You will, therefore, see speed gains by decreasing the number of sound channels Marathon uses. [...]

For 68020 Mac Users (Mac II, LC, LCII)
Unfortunately you are at the bottom of the food chain here. You will probably want to run in low res at 50% screen size with no floor or ceiling textures, no music, one channel sound, and with the every other scan line option selected. In all honesty though, you’ll probably want to run on a Power Mac. Look on the bright side, Apple just lowered their prices again...

I owned an LC at the time, but played all my Marathon at the Drexel student newspaper on Power Macs. They really shouldn’t have even claimed it ran at all on 68020 Macs.

Pointless NYT Report Says Apple Plans to Improve Siri 

The Times sent me a news alert for this story — under the three-way byline of Tripp Mickle, Brian X. Chen, and Cade Metz — but I don’t think there’s a single sentence of news in the entire thing. The gist of it is that Apple recognizes that ChatGPT makes Siri look even dumber than it did before and that they plan to use LLM technology to improve it. That’s it.

Determined to catch up in the tech industry’s A.I. race, Apple has made generative A.I. a tent pole project — the company’s special, internal label that it uses to organize employees around once-in-a-decade initiatives.

This is niggling, I know, but if “tent pole projects” only come once per decade at Apple, that means, by the Times’s count, there have only been 4 or 5 since the Macintosh debuted 40 years ago.

The truth is that in Apple lingo, tentpole is used to describe features, not projects, and they aim to ship around three or four tentpole features in every major release. The tentpole features are the ones that get the most time in keynotes. It’d be flabbergasting, given the current state of the tech world and Apple’s teasers, if a much-improved LLM-based Siri were not one of the tentpole features announced at WWDC next month.

(Bonus usage note: New Oxford American — the dictionary Apple licenses to include with MacOS and iOS — has the term as two words, “tent pole”, and thus hyphenated when used as a modifier. But Merriam-Webster closes it up, both as a noun and adjective. The Times isn’t nearly the bastion of consistency and quality that it once was, and, having dismantled its once-legendary copy desk 7 years ago, you’ll be unsurprised to know that in other recent articles tentpole has appeared in closed-up form.)

Anna Tong, reporting for Reuters:

OpenAI plans to announce its artificial intelligence-powered search product on Monday, according to two sources familiar with the matter, raising the stakes in its competition with search king Google. […]

The announcement could be timed a day before the Tuesday start of Google’s annual I/O conference, where the tech giant is expected to unveil a slew of AI-related products.

Remember the thing about Netflix being in a race to become HBO before HBO could become Netflix? My money here is that Google can become OpenAI (with generative AI) before OpenAI can become Google (with search), because I just don’t think OpenAI has any sort of moat around ChatGPT. They’re ahead but everyone else is nipping at their heels.

But: Google has left itself vulnerable by allowing the quality of Google Search results to degrade so much in recent years. Google remains dominant in search, but their share has started dropping.

Update: Sam Altman says nope, not a search engine, but they are launching something new Monday.