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).

Pain Warns You That You May Need to Change Your Behaviour

What you’ve been told about pain is wrong
A pain scientist breaks down the surprising brain‑body science that explains why so many of us hurt more than we have to
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-truth-about-pain-that-your-doctor-might-not-tell-you/

Yeah, so simply put, pain is our body’s warning system. It’s our danger-detection system. And it’s adaptive and evolutionary, right? Like, pain helps us survive. It tells us, “Pay attention. You may need to change your behavior. Something dangerous and bad might be happening.”

College Graduate Expectations of Adulthood Are Being Upended

Why College Graduates Feel Betrayed

Their anger goes far beyond the recent rise of unemployment and the looming threat of A.I.

nytimes.com

Perhaps most alarmingly, recent college graduates are having a harder time finding work. Between 1990 and 2018, it was almost unheard-of for the unemployment rate of recent college graduates to exceed the country’s overall rate. But that has been the case for five straight years now.

But for young college graduates, extended bouts of unemployment, or long periods stuck in a low-paying job that didn’t make use of their degrees, upended the entire picture of adulthood they had been taught to expect. In effect, a gap has opened up between the life that many graduates believed they had been promised and their actual prospects. And they’re seething about it.

For people in their 20s and early 30s, those expectations were forged as early as elementary school, when “college for all” became a national obsession — the way every American could achieve middle-class affluence.

And then, once they graduated, many found themselves with tens of thousands of dollars in loans, and no path to a job in line with their credentials.

In a high-wattage presidential election, when the country was primarily focused on cultural issues, college graduates and those without a degree often appeared to have little in common. But when it came to how they felt about their bosses or their bank accounts, it was suddenly harder to tell them apart. They were no longer on opposite teams.

How Apple’s M5 Ultra Is a Turning Point for the AI Industry

So, here’s what changes. A top of the range M5 Ultra Max Studio is expected to arrive later this year. At a fully maxed out configuration costing about $10,000, the unit economics are extraordinary. If you amortize $10,000 over three years, that’s $280 a month. And the possibilities this unlocks are significant. Every use case that was too expensive, too risky, or too slow for cloud Al now becomes possible.

When Al runs on the chip in front of you, rather than making a round trip to the data center, the latency disappears. That means we can talk real time. Real-time Al that responds before you’ve even finished asking. And for use cases where speed matters, local will win.

Data sovereignty. Every organization that’s wrestling with Al adoption is asking, “What happens to our data when we send it to a third party cloud service?” On device Al means your data never leaves the building. So that’s not just a privacy story. It’s a compliance architecture story.

And for regulated industries, that could become the only acceptable answer.

The architectural decisions that Apple has made are the right bets for the next decade of Al, and the foundation is now in place. Nvidia has claimed one mountain, the data center, the cloud, and the infrastructure that powers the Al boom. But Apple has just claimed another.

The device, the desk, the point where intelligence meet the real world.

They’re two different mountains and two different futures. I genuinely believe that’s a significant moment and one that the market has largely missed, but it will be one that is probably remembered as a turning point for the industry.

Identity As a Continuous Cycle of Exploration

The Myth of Finding Your True Self
Still trying to “find your true self”? You may be asking the wrong question. New research shows identity isn’t something hidden waiting to be discovered. It’s something you build.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unconscious-branding/202603/the-myth-of-finding-your-true-self

Identity is much less likely to be the result of a single breakthrough “aha!” moment and more of a continuous cycle of exploration, commitment, and reevaluation. Even the foundational work on identity formation by Erik Erikson suggested that the final product is never fully realized. Subsequent research shows that who you become is an open-ended, multidimensional process that is actively shaped through personal, social, and environmental contexts. And psychological flexibility has been linked to mental health, well-being, and school engagement.

The key question to ask is not whether these different selves are the same, but whether they are integrated. Psychological flexibility makes integration possible by anchoring these distinct context-dependent “selves” to an evolving set of values and goals. A fixed “take it or leave it” identity may seem authentic, but it can also narrow down the necessary exploration needed to create a well-developed identity.

That shift matters in the pursuit of identity. When we tell young people that there is a single “true self” and that it is their job to find it, uncertainty and confusion can feel like failure. When we realize that identity is something we can create and refine over time, exploration becomes healthy and necessary.

Abandon

Charles Fauna

I couldn’t find myself last night
And I know where I’d be
Today I’m feeling so damn light
And I’m ready to be seen

I need to forget
Everything I know
About myself, not me

Admitting that I crave control
Can make me feel so weak
So find me at abandon, love
Think we’re ready to be seen

“Ethical” Capitalism Is an Illusion

The Grand Old Illusion of ‘Ethical’ Capitalism
Donald Trump’s Big Oil bonanza is an environmental disaster — but the industry’s reaction exposes a larger truth about capitalism itself.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-grand-old-illusion-of-ethical-capitalism/

The damage that companies inflict on society without literally paying for it entirely escapes ESG’s radar.

Today, corporate profits are at their highest proportion of GDP in 50 years, while wages are at their lowest. Overall, income inequality, has never been greater, not even in the Gilded Age, the period immediately preceding the Progressive Era, when many toiled in Dickensian poverty while a few, like the Vanderbilt dynasty, flaunted their extravagant and lavish lifestyles. Now, like then, the people, with justification, are losing faith in the system.

It is folly to ask business to do the work of government. The sooner we stop expecting companies like Exxon to be voluntary agents of social change and acknowledge that they are amoral profit machines, the sooner we can stop the flow of hypocrisy and greenwashing and start working on resolving the social and environmental crises that blight the lives of billions. The path to greater corporate social responsibility leads through the voting booth and the statehouse, not through Wall Street and the C-suite.

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.

Just Change Going Forwards

Don’t try to change what has already been done.

Just change going forwards.

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.