The weirdest thing about Apple’s Touch Bar is that it might be really good

Finally, after so many nights, Apple showed something that might be important for the future of laptops. The Touch Bar. I haven’t written about Apple in a long time. The reason being that the past iterations of the Mac were, well, bland.  But now, I think that this hybrid approach to input in the laptop can work well and hope to see this developed into more products other than just a strip of OLED display above the numbers row.

  • Would a Touch Bar placed between the numbers row and the letters work better for practical purposes?
  • With such a large trackpad, would it be possible to have the Touch Bar technology in the trackpad and make it a secondary screen? akin to a Nintendo 3DS?
  • There is a lot of real estate on the surface of the keyboard. Between palm rests, trackpad and Touch Bar would be possible to make the entire surface a screen? BUT, please never remove the physical keyboard for text input. Well, Apple could make the individual keys mini-screens with variable input according to apps.
  • Imagine swapping the position of the keyboard with the trackpad. The keyboard would be on the edge and the trackpad near the screen. Next imagine a trackpad whose width was equal to that of the keyboard. But even better. The trackpad also was a touch screen. That would really be an amazing touch bar.

Touch Bar: the beginning of a new trend?

These are ideas that would make the MacBook Pro very expensive, but as the technology matures, prices would go down. What I like in the Touch Bar is that the door is now open to an array of possibilities that until now didn’t exist. I don’t think that this implementation of this Touch Bar is that brilliant, but it is all about the potential for the future of laptops. Let’s just hope that the Touch Bar feature becomes useful and not something like Sony’s PS Vita back touchpad.

Research has been trying to find alternatives input method for ages. Voice controlled, stenographic inputs, eye movement controlled input, etc… All very interesting on their own, but nothing until now could supplant a traditional keyboard. Maybe the combination of touchscreen and traditional keys is the way forward.

The problems of upgrading to Apple’s Mac OS Sierra

There you go again, apple releases a new OS and Dave starts bitching about how broken Sierra is. Here’s a list of things that stopped working and that I’m really upset about:

  • I use a different keyboard layout called ColemaP. A slightly optimised version of Colemak. This keyboard layout relies on the Caps Lock key being the BACKSPACE key. Thus, I used a small software called Seil. With Mac OS Sierra it STOPPED WORKING.
  • Outlines, outlines, outlines, some people can run a NASA space program with outlines. I used OmniOutliner for the past 10 years uninterruptedly. It is a great piece of software that simply made outlining easy. Now, with the upgrade to Sierra, it STOPPED WORKING and crashes every time I launch the program.
  • I use GPGTools for singing my emails and encrypting messages — You are encrypting your emails, aren’t you?. It worked great and integrated well with Mail. Guess what? It STOPPED WORKING. Sure, I can still encrypt/decrypt text manually, but the integration with Mail was so nice.
  • Occasional App crashing. It seems that now and then some app refuses to open and crashes with a message. The previous bullet points are systemic errors.  The apps STOPPED WORKING completely. Furthermore, there have been other random cases of computer fury and sadness. Well, let’s see if incremental releases make this Sierra something tamer.

In conclusion, I’m stuck using Sierra, I’m not downgrading right now, even if the Sierra problems persist. But I’m not a happy camper.

What does football, Brexit and my kitchen have in common?

After loosing to Chile (second time in a row), the second best player in the world doesn’t want to play anymore for his country at the age of 29 (after four lost finals). Maybe there was some problem with the money suitcase travelling to the Cayman islands, but in any case Argentina loses big time and probably only Adidas and Barcelona can call themselves winners in this strange decision.

Back to Brexit, when you have Sarah Palin, Putin, Trump, and Iran, all congratulating the Leave you know you have a problem in your hands. Britain has made one of those mistakes that will take 50 years to overturn, unless politicians ACT NOW.

And still in the UK, finally, scientists are waking from their lethargic lab experiments to the realisation that there won’t be much funding after Brexit after all. And if there is a class of workers that can smell the lack of funding a mile way… that’s us scientists. SHOW ME THE CHEESE.

Robots

I love them, thing that they’ll be great in the future, but I don’t understand this quest to make robots resemble mammals — humans, dogs, unicorns… The latest from Boston Dynamics is the epitome of absurdity. A robot-dog doing the dishes… And while they have some sense of humor showing the hurdles that robotics still has to overcome at the end of the video, these four legged versions are reaching the end of interestingness (maybe that’s why Google wants to sell the company).

The interesting part of robotics is not the development of Hardware, but software, mainly “brains”. And brains are algorithms, are neural networks, are simulations, new computation forms, inverse kinematics, and so on. Probably this platform has already reached its limit and is time to move on. For me a robot is something on this software side of the viewpoint. Tesla’s autopilot makes the car a kind of robot, and a very capable one. It doesn’t need to look like a whale to do drive.

and the answer to the question is NOTHING

APFS might be the best new thing in macOS Sierra

I’ve long forgotten to watch Apple keynotes because honestly … they don’t present much these days and my time is very valuable to be sitting for 90 minutes watching promotional material. BUT, in the latest presentation of the future operating system there was something that catched my attention: THE NEW FILE SYSTEM. Apple has been developing it for the past 3 years — making it very young and immature — but it is clearly an attempt to make something modern that goes beyond the HFS+ now on macs. It is good that Apple finally decided to move forward, it is a pity that — in good apple tradition — they did not chose to use open source, but in the end, Mac users will get something better at the next OS that is not just some Bling. REAL TECH. That has to be good, right?

The 1984 we are getting into. Trouble ahead Captain.

  • I’m stunned by this idea that in a near future the written word might disappear from online. At least that is what FB executives think might happen. The written word is probably the best, most elegant, and most fundamental way to articulate an idea, to express a thought, to represent our passions. But VIDEO KILLED THE well… KILLED THE WRITER in all of us. The long-term vision of FB seems to be of a world of dumb people seating happily watching videos. REMEMBER APPLE 1984 AD?. It is terrifying that technology instead of empowering people is making them dumber, and that companies like FB happily comply.

Working remotely: certainly the future.

In a tech world remote work will be the future, but trying to figure out which companies are hiring or allow remote work is not certainly easy. That is why RemoteBase is so great. It is a directory, yes, like those of the ancient webs, but it is great because it is only dedicated to companies that allow remote work. When you are searching for work, maybe it is a good idea to take a look at these companies first.

WE MAKE TOOLS FOR THESE KINDS OF PEOPLE. No more.

Apple is starting to crack and everyone is throwing curve balls at it. The greatest company on earth is not growing anymore. What? Panic? What should I do? What happened? A few quick notes.

  • The most painful truth about apple is that in recent years apple focused more on the superficial than on the essential. When Steve Jobs was at the helm of the company, priority number one was to make great products. And great products != numbers shipped. Apple always built useful tools that you couldn’t find anywhere else. That’s why designers and creatives bought macs, not because of the aluminium shell, but because the platform had the best tools. The iPhone was the same thing. At launch no one had the same tools, thus the iPhone was useful. With time Android played catch-up and surpassed iOS and apple focused on selling the shell instead.
  • The pinnacle of this announced disaster came with two products that show how adamant Apple is right now: The $10,000 watch and the 1-port MacBook. Two products that are so wrong I’m amazed it took so long for them to stop growing.
  • Apple always took some existing market product, made it 10 times better and sold it. This happened with the iPod and the iPhone. Since then these blockbuster products (that they milked, milked, milked like Microsoft milks Windows and Office) there is nothing. Their `love’ for music? They bought beats headphones (the crapiest, low-fi headphones in the market) just because 99% of soccer, football and track players where using them. Did they make a good product out of it? Nah…
  • When apple announced the iPhone it was a revolution and everybody cheered. But Steve Jobs made another announcement that made me scary at the time: They changed the name of the company from Apple Computer Inc. to just Apple Inc. Dropping the Computer from the name wasn’t the issue. The issue was the mindset that this created. A Computer is a tool. Is the digital era equivalent of a piece of plywood and a hacksaw. You can build houses with those. Dropping the Computer meant a change in apple mission. The change from making premium tools (that they charged premium money for) to the making of great gadgets (that they still charged premium money). But a great gadget is not the same thing as a great tool. The later doesn’t need to be useful while the former needs to be useful to succeed. In the end, they started targeting the sheep instead of the shepherd and their sales exploded. Until now.
  • The “Think Different” ads that defined Apple said:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. Maybe they have to be crazy. How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels? We make tools for these kinds of people. While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

  • WE MAKE TOOLS FOR THESE KINDS OF PEOPLE. No more.

AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol. Lessons from 1997

Go was praised as the last frontier for AI. Computer programs were not good enough to tackle the complexity of the game because they lacked the intuition and creativity shown by human professional Go players — that studied the game all their life. This lead to the idea that Go players, as opposed to chess players, were protected from the silicon invasion.

But now it is GAME OVER. Google’s AlphaGo demonstrated that silicon is now able to win against the best Go players. Is this a Shock? Why would anyone think so?

While the line of players queuing up to lose to AlphaGo is growing, the important think about AlphaGo is not to play against it, but to use it as a machine for improving. The line of Professional Go players wanting to buy a copy of AlphaGo is growing bigger.

Like in chess, where the Stockfish and Rybkas of the game changed the training process of the players, the same will happen in Go. Professionals already use computer databases of Go games. Now they will embrace the computer style of play to become stronger players. Others, like in chess, will do the opposite and try to do what the computers lack. Creative play, even if objectively inferior against other humans, might give some players the pleasure of taking the fight to places where the machine has not been before and might have a blind spot.

After 1997 defeat to Kasparov, the world of chess was also in shock. The end of the human domination. #AI was here to control us. In the end no one worried much and even had a little bit of fun when in 2006 Kramnik played Deep Fritz and left a mate in one on the board for the computer to win. That’s the reality of AI engines. We have fun and make mistakes like Kramnik. They are just machines and can’t loose like that.

The problem of having strong silicon players available is that cheating will now become an issue they will need to deal with. Cheating in chess is a problem and strong measures have been put in place to try to solve the issue. Will we have a Go Toiletgate? Go play will certainly have to adapt.

Another final point about the match. Lee Sedol is one of the Go monsters and there’s nothing to be sorry for this match. He won one game against the computer, and not many players will be able to say the same from now on. Anyone that comes next in the line to play AlphaGo, is just going to face a stronger engine and will have diminished chances to win. Meanwhile Sedol deserved his place in history.

The game of Go, like the game of chess, sees changes in the style of play from time to time, namely when some genius grandmaster comes and starts applying a new style. AlphaGo greatest legacy will be how humans will start playing Go in the future. Maximising winning chances instead of maximising winning margin will be on everyones mind and those seemingly spurious moves will be analyses until understood fully. The game of Go will not be the same in the future and for that AlphaGo alone is the most important stone in the board of the XXI century.

What’s next for #AI? Well, the game Arimaa — that was invented after Kasparov’s defeat to Deep Blue, and can be played with a traditional chess set — was specially constructed to be difficult for computers to master, was beaten in 2015 (And honestly, what were they thinking with that childish set pieces of the comercial Arimaa, cats, dogs and rabbits?). My suggestion is that the next challenge to #AI has to be in games were information is not complete as Vitorino Ramos puts it:

Will #AI move in that direction? Backgammon is a game were the roll of the dice can change the results. Poker depends also on chance and human strategies (bluff) that are difficult for the computer to understand. Talking about adaptability, can #AI move in a direction where the same program learns the rules of all these different games and starts playing them well without human tweaking of the underlying computational paradigm? That would be truly revolutionary.

As for me, I tried Go but I’m just a stone thrower. I’ll stick to that inferior game of Chess, play some gambits, and loose in many creative ways.