Category: Journal

MacBook Neo’s A18 Pro Chip Shows How Flexible Apple Devices Can Become

While the MacBook Neo has been sending shockwaves through the budget laptop market, Apple users are struggling with whether to get an iPad Air or a MacBook Neo.

I think what a lot of people here are missing though is where this is all going.

What the MacBook Neo proves is that an iPhone chip can run MacOS.

So imagine being able to plug your phone into a monitor via a USB-C connection and getting full MacOS functionality on a larger screen when combined with a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard.

This suddenly makes your iPhone highly versatile in ways you couldn’t use it before.

But what if we could take this a step further.

What if your iPhone could slide into a slot on the back of the monitor and the monitor wasn’t a monitor but actually a touchscreen.

For a smaller screen, you’ve now got an iPad-like device.

For a larger screen, you’ve now got a stylus workstation optimized for creative professionals.

Of course, when combined with lighter AR glasses, this again adds flexibility for making your output screens any size you want. However, inputting is still limited to having some physical device to input with, unless the AR operating system can effectively and efficiently emulate a keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen using anything you want as well (ie table top becomes a touchscreen).

AI Can Easily Read XML Files

Apparently AI can access and process XML files natively, since they’re in a structured, plain-text format that they can easily parse and understand.

What this means is I can export all of my WordPress posts on my site as a single WordPress XML backup file and upload it to a project within ChatGPT, giving AI access to everything I’ve written publicly, thus allowing it to understand me better in terms of my own growth and development.

Best of all, getting a WordPress export is super easy to do, so much so that I can update this website export XML file daily, whenever I write a new post.

Eckhart Tolle Simply Explaining His Awakening That Took Him Years to Explain

But even that I couldn’t have explained at the time, it took years before I could verbalize something like this, what I’m saying now.

But it is basically a very simple thing.

It’s a very, in a way it’s a very natural thing.

Eckhart Tolle, Why Did Eckhart Awaken?

I continue to struggle to verbalize and articulate things that I am learning and experiencing.

However, I’m beginning to realize that not being able to do so doesn’t mean there is something “wrong” with me.

It just means it’s a natural, ongoing part of the process and I will eventually be able to do so in time.

Changing the Feeling and Intention of My Site’s Design

I was visiting Kottke.org this morning, enjoying the simplicity of his site’s design, when I flipped back to compare it to my own site’s design and realized something strikingly evident.

I’ve been using my site’s design to try to force people to see what I want them to see.

I do this by having excessively bolded post titles and also frequently bolding parts of sentences, even making quotes stand out in larger pull quotes, so as to make sure people don’t miss them.

This is utterly hilarious and also pathetically sad at the same time.

You can’t make people perceive what they can’t perceive.

Either it’s evident to them or it’s not.

In removing a lot of this boldness on my recent posts, I’m already noticing a calmness and spaciousness on my site that I haven’t felt in quite some time (probably since I was on Squarespace back in the mid 2000s).

Let’s see how this feels going forwards.

Switched Over to Claude AI

I’ve switched over to Claude AI and have been using it extensively the last few days for my growth and development. I’m finding it leaps and bounds better than ChatGPT in that it’s way less verbose but also way more succinct in its communications.

Like you feel like you’re talking to a wise person who is trying to talk to you at your level, rather than talking to an academic who is just trying to use excessive, elaborate wording to try to impress you.

In addition, now that it has memory for even free accounts, I’m finding it much more useful in its ability to refer to recent conversations we’ve previously had in a current conversation.

The Dance Between Cognitive Dissonance, Creativity, and Vertical Development

Creativity often begins with cognitive dissonance — the friction between competing truths.

It doesn’t resolve the tension by choosing one side (e.g. this OR that). Instead, it uses the tension to transform both into a more complex whole (e.g. this AND that).

This is, in effect, vertical development which is creativity applied to one’s sense of self.

You remain your old self while simultaneously becoming a new Self.