WSJ: “Fundamentally, the problem with touch-based interfaces is that they aren’t touch-based at all, because they need us to look when using them. Think, for example, of the screen of your smartphone, which requires your undivided gaze when you press on its smooth surface. As a result, “touch screen” is a misnomer, says Rachel Plotnick, associate professor of cinema and media studies at Indiana University Bloomington, and author of the 2018 book “Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing,” the definitive history of buttons. Such interfaces would be more accurately described as “sight-based,” she says…The switch back to physical interfaces is also, in many ways, a vibe shift. With touch screens ubiquitous, what was once viewed as luxurious is becoming tacky. Physical controls, done well, now signal the kind of thoughtfulness and exclusivity once attached to the original iPhone.”
Ben Thompson: “AI truly is a new way of computing, and that means the better analogies are to computing itself. Transformers are the transistor, and mainframes are today’s models. The GUI is, arguably, still TBD. To the extent that is right, then, the biggest opportunity is in top-down enterprise implementations. The enterprise philosophy is older than the two consumer philosophies I wrote about previously: its motivation is not the user, but the buyer, who wants to increase revenue and cut costs, and will be brutally rational about how to achieve that (including running expected value calculations on agents making mistakes). That will be the only way to justify the compute necessary to scale out agentic capabilities, and to do the years of work necessary to get data in a state where humans can be replaced. The bottom line benefits — the essence of enterprise philosophy — will compel just that.”
FT on 60 years of the Japanese bullet trains: “In 1964, the first shinkansen ran at up to 210km/h, on 550km of high-speed track. Today the network has extended to cover almost 3,000km and the fastest train, the long-nosed metallic green Hayabusa, reaches 320km/h. The long-termedness of the vision, when you look at the current and future shinkansen routes overlaid on a map of Japan’s central island of Honshu, is astonishing. By the middle of the century, according to this blueprint, Japan will effectively have a shinkansen “circle line” running over 1,500km in a mighty loop of high-speed rail: west out of Tokyo to Kyoto and Osaka, north to Nagano and Kanazawa, but eventually joined…The shinkansen — more so than any other form of transport and by dint mainly of how stupendously easy Japan has made it to access — is the closest we will ever come to a teleportation machine.”
Kelly McMasters: “I wrote my obituary last week. I often do so once a year; it has become a kind of ritual…The result of this ritual obituary writing is not as maudlin as it might seem. If you take a few minutes to try it, you might find the same. In about a page or so, I usually end up with a gentle accounting of the year, held against all the past ones. I found many of the accomplishments that felt precious one year were hardly worth a mention the next. Some years are short and perfunctory; some swell with joy and hope, pride even. There is a comfort in the accumulation, like the stacking of blocks — daughter, wife, mother of one, mother of two. And owning up to the unstacking, too, such as divorces, difficult moves, disruptions and the deaths of others in your life. In years that feel lacking, sometimes I’ll write an aspirational obituary…Just as my aunt taught me the value of keeping a journal, my mother’s obituary exercise taught me the practice and value of holding death close, so I could remember to live.”
