Think Differential
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Apple’s Inside Out Platform
Absorbing the news from WWDC this week, I noticed a pattern of how Apple approaches their platforms. And that it seems, well, backwards. Last week, one of the leading rumors was that Messages app would be ported to Android. I was expecting Apple would use Messages as a way into Siri with a bot strategy akin to Facebook’s Messenger Platform or Microsoft’s Bot Framework. Instead, the “platform” is built inside the app, which remains Apple only, complete with its own store. In hindsight, of course that’s the path Apple would take, but it’s still almost 180º different from their competitors.
The same is true for Apple’s machine learning efforts. The conventional wisdom is to secure everything in the cloud then use massively parallel supercomputers and exabyte scale corpora to automatically tag and catalog it all. Apple insists they can use the GPU in your pocket and differential privacy to deliver the same promise of how computers are going to work in the near future. There is a fair amount of skepticism around whether or not differential privacy can actually work, especially compared to the Google/Facebook approach.
The charitable explanation here is that Apple has always zigged where conventional wisdom zagged and it’s served them pretty well so far. Apple is now betting on a principle — privacy — that is indeed noble but also one that literally billions of Facebook and Android users don’t seem to care nearly as much about. It seems probable that Apple is building an infrastructure that may not only be inferior to their competitors but for a market that could soon cease to exist.
I was glad to see the News app get a mention and a refined design that brings it more in line with the redesigned Music app. It makes sense that those two share a visual language and I still think there’s quite a bit of potential for Apple News, even as it largely eschews how we’ve come to think of media in the (waning?) social epoch.
WWDC also introduced the world to Bozoma Saint John, whom The Ringer declared “your favorite part of WWDC”. She was, of course, a dynamic presenter and the perfect person to show off the new Apple Music but she also personified what Katie Notopoulos calls the end of “Apple Man”. Finally.
“It’s a damn thing scared to say”
Recurrent neural networks have been something of an ongoing theme here (in as much as a newsletter with six issues can spot a trend). They’re young, dumb, and kinda fun, even if they start to grate after a bit. It’s not quite true to say if you’ve seen one RNN you’ve seen ’em all, but I do feel like I’m up to date on the state of the art at this point.
So I kept my expectations firmly in check for “Sunspring”, a short made for a 48-hour challenge for the Sci-Fi London film festival. The screenplay — all of the lines and even the stage direction — was written by a RNN fed on a corpus of a few dozen pop sci-fi screenplays (plus a few prompts the contest required to be in the film). It’s entirely incomprehensible, of course, but still manages to be captivating in a way I didn’t expect. With the computer doing all the direction, the actors on the screen seem more human somehow.
Creative output from computers isn’t going to be limited to Markov bots and nonsense grammar exercises for long. Google’s Magenta project wants to make art and music. There’s Deep Jazz, which made Pat Metheny listenable. They’re even creating recipes.
Sidebar
• “Saying, ‘Look how many shares this story has’ is interesting, to a point.” Silvia Kilingsworth steps back to consider the viral news share.
• Buzz Andersen on Silicon Valley’s scapegoat complex is definitely worth a read even if you think you’re done caring about Peter Thiel.
• Bloomberg’s Global Tech issue is wacky and superfluous and wonderful. I’ve loved watching Bloomberg’s design morph and change and confound and perplex and grow the past few years. So the news that Deputy Creative DirectorTracy Ma is leaving for Medium’s Matter Studios is intriguing, to say the least.
• I’ve been encouraged by the emergence of “humane technology” and that there are people working hard to make sure the phrase isn’t an oxymoron. “Human scale technology” by Jesse Kriss is a great introduction.
• “In a world in which a phone or computer is rarely more than arm’s length away, are we eliminating introspection at times that may have formerly been conducive to it?” Counterpoint: Virginia Heffernan defends the internet as art. To go meta, and link to yet another fantastic Anna Wiener piece: her take on Heffernan’s Magic and Loss.
• Great question: “What’s the point of doing anything other than video on Facebook when this is the result?”
• “For parents trying to drill good manners into their children, listening to their kids boss Alexa around can be disconcerting.”
• It’s been fascinating watching the rise of cheap electric motors and ever-more efficient batteries work their way into everything from cars to skateboards. There are apparently 2.5 million electric bikes in Beijing, mostly used as couriers for food delivery and last-mile ecommerce, and they are causing a bit of havoc on the already crowded streets.
• A team at Facebook has built a set of tools to help people who think a friend or family member might be suicidal.
• I remember playing a fair amount of Gameboy Tetris in the 80’s so this Cold War saga of the history of the game was pretty fascinating.
• As should be obvious by now, I love The New Yorker, you probably love The New Yorker, so I hope you’ll appreciate, cringe a bit, and hopefully laugh at yourself reading this pitch-perfect (down to the ads) send up: The Neu Jorker.
• Nikole Hannah-Jones writing about where to send her four-year-old daugther to school in New York City is maddening and heartbreaking. Hannah-Jones has written extensively about civil rights today and the piece she produced for This American Life, “The Problem We All Live With” is just a gut punch.
Several of you wrote in noting my failed spelling of “indie” last week. The appropriate parties have been reprimanded.
