Linked List: June 17, 2025

Tuesday, 17 June 2025

Seven Replies to the Viral Apple Reasoning Paper ★

Simon Willison, regarding the various rebuttals to “The Illusion of Thinking” research paper (which I linked to here) from Apple’s machine learning team:

I thought this paper got way more attention than it warranted — the title “The Illusion of Thinking” captured the attention of the “LLMs are over-hyped junk” crowd. I saw enough well-reasoned rebuttals that I didn’t feel it worth digging into.

And now, notable LLM skeptic Gary Marcus has saved me some time by aggregating the best of those rebuttals together in one place! [...]

And therein lies my disagreement. I’m not interested in whether or not LLMs are the “road to AGI”. I continue to care only about whether they have useful applications today, once you’ve understood their limitations. [...] They’re already useful to me today, whether or not they can reliably solve the Tower of Hanoi or River Crossing puzzles.

Count me in with Willison. I think it’s interesting what constitutes “reasoning”, but when it comes to these systems, I’m mostly just interested in whether they’re useful or not, and if so, how.

Why WhatsApp Didn’t Sell Ads ★

WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, back in 2012 (two years before Facebook acquired them for $19 billion, 13 years before this week’s introduction of ads into WhatsApp):

Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it’s all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out... And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.

Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.

At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That’s our product and that’s our passion. Your data isn’t even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.

When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say “Have you considered the alternative?”

WWDC 2025: The Bento Boxes ★

These screens make for a useful overview of what Apple thinks the highlight features are in each OS.

Tracking Down the Original Photo From the End of ‘The Shining’ ★

Aric Toler, a visual investigations reporter for The New York Times, on X back in April:

For about a year, I worked with a retired British academic named Alasdair Spark to solve a mystery: where did the original photo from the end of The Shining come from, and where/when was it captured?

Last week, we finally found the answer.

See also: This post from 2012 about the original photograph, from (who else?) Lee Unkrich.

How Field Notes Went From Side Project to Cult Notebook ★

Nice piece in Fast Company by Zachary Petit:

One critical moment came in February 2010, when J. Crew featured Field Notes in its catalog, alongside the retailer’s other “personal favorites from our design heroes.” There was a Timex watch, Ray-Bans, Sperry shoes — “and out of fucking nowhere, Field Notes,” Coudal says. “And when that happened, a lot changed for us.”

Coudal says it gave the brand instant credibility — after all, if it was good enough for J. Crew, it was good enough for your store. In time, friends began sending him screenshots of Field Notes in TV shows; he and Draplin would see people jotting notes in them in bars and elsewhere; on the design web, they became an obsession. By 2014, there was even a subreddit dedicated to them titled “FieldNuts.”

Bloomberg Publishes Embarrassing Report Comparing Tesla and Waymo Self-Driving Safety Records ★

Fred Lambert, writing for Electrek:

Bloomberg has just released an embarrassingly bad report about the self-driving space, in which it claimed Tesla has an advantage over Waymo by misrepresenting data. [...] The report compares Tesla’s and Waymo’s self-driving efforts, going so far as to claim that “Tesla is closer to vehicle autonomy than peers.”

Right off the bat this smells fishy, given that Waymo is actually operating self-driving taxis in several cities, and Tesla ... is not.

Steve Man, the Bloomberg Intelligence analyst behind the report, based his report on Tesla’s own quarterly misleading “Autopilot Safety Report.” The report is widely considered to be unserious for several main reasons:

Tesla bundles all miles from its vehicles using Autopilot and FSD technology, which are considered level 2 ADAS systems that require driver attention at all times. Drivers consistently correct the systems to avoid accidents.

Tesla Autopilot, which is standard on all Tesla vehicles, is primarily used on highways, where accidents occur at a significantly lower rate per mile compared to city driving.

Tesla only counts events that deploy an airbag or a seat-belt pretensioner. Fender-benders, curb strikes, and many ADAS incidents never appear, keeping crash counts artificially low.

Finally, Tesla’s handpicked data is compared to NHTSA’s much broader statistics that include all collision events, including minor fender benders.

Trusting Tesla’s own safety report is like saying, “Elon Musk says Tesla is ahead, so they must be ahead.”