Thoughts on 42

With growing uncertainty around AI investments like SpaceX’s stock price and Nvidia with a huge drop in the past month. This is sure to net Anthropic billions of dollars from the sale of shares but I’m confident their valuation won’t stay where it launches. Will it stay relatively steady after the initial rush, have a steady gain, or drop as investors grow weary of a bubble popping? Time will tell…

I’m intrigued by these features but I definitely understand why people would be wary or completely untrusting of any company having something that is ostensibly “always listening to you. As Jason Snell explains below, that’s not really what’s happening. Even though everything is being transcribed that’s never what a user with this feature sees, it’s only ever a summary about what was discussed.

Apple went a long way to try to put things in terms that people can understand but it will take a LOT to get anyone to trust this. Even technical people that might read the white paper will be rightfully skeptical. Apple is pretty much the only company that I would trust with this kind of feature. They’ve shown time and again how serious they are about user privacy and never selling user data. Not to say they’re perfect or haven’t had scandals. Apple sells us products and doesn’t sell our data to advertisers or data brokers to make money.

Apple, obviously aware that this was going to be an issue, generated an entire Audio Intelligence white paper detailing how the features are secure and private. In general, audio is not recorded (per se), but buffered into a “secure exclave,” a portion of the watch’s chip that cannot be accessed by the system at large, and processed into text. That text is also encrypted and sent to the iPhone that’s paired with the watch, so only that iPhone can receive it and provide more sophisticated AI processing. And any cloud-based models used to generate summaries are part of Apple’s Private Cloud Compute infrastructure, which means they’re end-to-end encrypted and discarded after processing, so nobody (not even Apple) can see the data.

As 27.3 arrives, a few other details have emerged. Siri Recap text, which is based on conversations captured by the user by setting a time frame for capture or manually capturing via Control Center, is deleted after seven days if it’s not used. The user receives notifications on their watch when Siri Recap starts and stops, and a reminder is pushed to the user’s iPhone at the end of the day, pointing at the generated recaps, which are stored in a new Recaps tab in the Siri app.

The Apple Watch itself processes the audio with a “lightweight” ML model that detects if the audio it’s hearing is actually a conversation you’re a part of. (It really doesn’t want to attempt to recap other people’s nearby conversations. If you’re listening to audio on headphones, it takes that as a cue and doesn’t monitor any audio.)

If the audio passes that test, it’s encrypted and transferred to the paired iPhone, which turns it into “condensed text” (some filler words are removed). Then that text is encrypted and passed to Private Cloud Compute, which filters out sensitive personal information and other red-flag content and generates a summary, which is returned to the iPhone for display in that new tab. No content is attributed to specific speakers, and speakers aren’t even identified by name.

I think this feature could be really helpful and the summaries obfuscated enough to provide usefulness but not violate privacy of others or yourself. Time will tell but I’m planning on using this feature to see how things go and I’ll definitely turn it off as is appropriate or requested. I’ll share my thoughts as time goes on.

Several tanker ships linked to Iran have been loitering over subsea Internet cables in the Gulf of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz—a possible indication that the Iranian government is preparing to attack such undersea infrastructure in response to any renewed US and Israeli strikes.

… Six active cables currently cross through the contested Strait of Hormuz, linking the Middle East to Europe, Africa and Asia, with two more cables having segments under construction in the region.

Four countries, including Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar, depend entirely upon such subsea telecommunications connections running through the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint to link with the outside world. But other countries also depend heavily on the region’s undersea cable network—one third of India’s westbound Internet traffic goes through the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz.

What could possibly go wrong?

I’m a huge fan of KPop Deamon Hunters and highly recommend the movie to anyone that still hasn’t seen it. But for any stans out there, check out the Blu-ray if you’re not locked into Netflix like my family is!

$49.95 $37.99 at Amazon
$49.95 $24.99 at Barnes & Noble (in-store pickup)

Lolololol

Update on the hilarity: they only sold ~10% of their targeted 250k per year

Whether you want to feel the nostalgia or to feel retro, these throwback to 90’s design are now available for $60.

Joe Barnard of BPS Space makes a rocket to go to 30,000 feet and a camera to pop out right at the top of the flight to get a picture. It’s a wild friggin ride, make sure you watch to the very very end.

MacStories covers some of the background on this feature but once Apple releases their os versions of 27.3 later this year it will come with this Safari dark mode feature. I’m going to get immense use out of this, I’ve used an app called Noir for years to get an automatic dark mode for every website that doesn’t already have one (which is most of them unfortunately). Now it will be built into every Apple platform for everyone to enjoy!

Everyone has voted their beliefs, votes are counted (or enough to know the results), and speeches have been given.

Now it’s time to do good work. Let’s get it done.

Yikes

Google says one of its Android manufacturing partners secretly built a backdoor in 1.3 million devices and turned them into a botnet. The company says it has now dismantled the backdoor and “cut ties” with the manufacturer, the Shenzhen, China-based Videostrong Technology Co., which has been banned from building or selling certified Android devices or supplying software for them.

I’m looking forward to getting a Duo and will be super interested in figuring out what about the interface does and doesn’t work for me.

For Stephen he doesn’t like that closing the screen moved it to the outside screen. He wants it to act more like a flip phone of old. To close the phone means you’re done. Luckily Shortcuts makes this super easy to fix for yourself.

The title of the video, and this post about it are an exaggeration. That said, the video does a great job at walking you through how to handle disrespect towards yourself and others.

You are not the source, you are only the target.

First their disrespect is not about you. It can come from several sources, including but not limited to their insecurity, fear, or need for superiority, often more than one. Most importantly though, it has nothing to do with you. It isn’t about you, it’s about them.

The general principals are:

1. Assume positive intent
2. Respond non-defensively
   • Pause for 5-7 seconds to let yourself and them process what they said and for you to find a good response
   • If at all possible, sincerely compliment them instead of getting defensive
   • This can be difficult but not getting defensive off the bat is one of the most important things you can do
3. Set boundaries and keep them
   • it’s okay to walk away
4. Get curious about them and ask questions
   • Don’t interrupt them as they answer or come up with one

It’s kind of crazy to see them written out but they make a lot of sense in the video and while it will take a long long time for me to implement I’m gong to do my best! I hope it’s helpful for y’all as well.

It’s been an interesting internal struggle but I’ve been having an absolute blast using Claude code to help me build some little tools that I’ve wanted for years and then expand on them beyond my wildest dreams. It’s super empowering and fun to be able to quickly create something. At the same time I also realize that I’m using AI tools that have been created less than ethically. How do we square the fact that something can be super helpful to a lot of people with the fact that it’s harmed others?

Spoiler: I’ve no friggin idea.

Obviously I’ve made the choice to use these tools, for better or worse. I hope that I’ve made, if not the right choice, not a bad one. I’ve tried rationalizing that I’d use more power than they’d get back in money but obviously I can’t prove that. So I’m stuck with hoping and knowing I’m not the only person struggling with this.

The ethical concerns aside (a big caveat), it’s been so so so so sooooo fun and empowering to build things that I’d never have had the ability to make on my own. AI coding tools put a ton of power in your hands and you can use that however you want. I used them to make some fun little niceties for my life (and this blog). I don’t expect to keep paying for Claude code but I might dabble with it every now and then when I need the help with stuff.

It’s truly astounding what AI coding tools can do now. I was able to have it build out (with minimal direction and input from me):

• A podcast live stream recording system with multiple rules
  • Post processing to improve the live audio
  • RSS feed for the live recordings
  • Show notes and artwork retrieval system to pull from the published episode once that goes up and add that to my live recordings
• Another RSS feed that holds all of my DRM free audio books with it’s own api query of Apple Books to get the cover art (if needed) and book description
• An RSS feed tokenization system so that only I can access my RSS feeds (or my friends if I deign to)
• This very blog!
  • The platform it runs on, the systems that maintain it
  • Tools to help me create link and recommendation posts super quick and easy
  • A feature image creator that takes emoji and glyphs I select to make the photos that go with a lot of the posts
  • An image “grabber” that lets me easily grab a photo from a site to use it in a post about that site
  • A system that converts all of the images on my site to be as compressed and small as possible to make my site super duper fast
• A web dashboard to monitor, maintain, and control all of the above systems
• And the AI coding agent even helped me migrate this system from a home Mac mini to a little Linux server in the cloud!

All of that in less than two weeks of me giving it instructions to boot, it would have done it sooner if I didn’t have to sleep or work! 😂

Since 2020 when AI first took off I’ve heard that it wasn’t very good at complex stuff and it did sloppy work. The slop may still be there, I can’t write or read code and I can’t inspect it to tell, but it damn sure works. It works so well that it’s scary.

If you haven’t seen news about AI causing huge security flaws across the internet and your computers you will as it happens more and more often. Some of this is the good team keeping stuff safe and some of it is other people hacking into stuff that then needs to get patched and fixed. It’s a war that no one is going to win but it’s a war we’re all silently caught in the crossfire of.

AI is also super helpful to researchers, scientists, and everyday people. It’s helping to cure and detect diseases, improve our understanding of the universe, and improve our normal lives. I wish I had an answer to whether AI is good or bad for us, but all I can say is to make your own choices and try to be understanding for those that make different choices.

Community can be difficult to find and even more difficult to keep. As Marco says:

Communities form, change, and dissolve over time. … We change, too. I didn’t move on from most of those solely because they changed — it was usually because we both changed, and it was no longer a good fit.

Update: I brought the Thoughts on 42 brand over already. I didn’t like the name of the site being just my name, seemed super self aggrandizing. Plus I didn’t like the old site and didn’t want anyone to see it anymore 😅

Seems like I made a new site for some reason! Thoughtson42.com is still online for now but this will be my new home. Maybe I’ll bring the To42 name over to this site but only time will tell.

Hopefully you’ll see some slightly more regular posts from me here on out! Once again, time will tell!

I’m running a campaign to help toward Relay FM’s St Jude fundraiser. My goal is $500 so if you can donate please do!!!

Oh and I’ll match the first $150 in donations (excluding my own)!

Donate here

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital gives totally free care to children and their families that are battling cancer. It’s an amazing cause and a dollar or 5 helps a lot! You can read a lot more about St. Jude here: about St. Jude

So I LOVE the discord community of Off-Nominal and while we’re not super diverse I always try to approach things with diversity in mind. I’ll note that as a community we’re working really hard to improve our diversity and we will do better (see more of what we’re doing to improve and help).

So one of the most common things that we all do on Discord is “react” to posts with emoji, everyone is familiar with this and Slack popularized it years ago. This is what it can look like with a mix of faces, custom and animated emoji.

While it might sound silly the biggest thing I do is only use the default color emoji when I react to a post. 🤘👍 I know that I would be hesitant to react using a darker skin tone “thumbs up” emoji someone had already used so I don’t want to make anyone feel that way. The default color is most neutral and is most likely to be used by everyone. I will use my own skin tone emoji when typing a post 🤘🏻👍🏻 but that’s my words and actions so I feel its okay there but in a reaction I want everyone to be able to quickly second a reaction emoji.

Another thing that I do is to always use neutral pronouns I’ll say “I think they meant” instead of “I think she/he meant” that way I’m not using a gendered pronoun where someone wouldn’t like me to.

These are tiny little things but I believe that it’s big and small acts that improve our inclusivity.

I want to tell you something so you can better understand me and so that I don’t have to hide behind lies or half truths anymore. I’m sorry that I’ve lied but this is a difficult thing for most people and especially when you’re the one going through it.

We all have routines, we go through most of them every day without even thinking about them. My routines the past three months have been quite different than what most people have. This is about what those are, how I got them and the consequences of not doing more to deal with the underlying issues.

You get up in the morning and take a shower. You drive to work. You finish work and you drive home. You make dinner. You go to bed. Among many other little things, these are some of the basics that most of you go through at least a few days a week.

But this is how my days have gone: I wake up in the morning in the back of my car and drive to the gym where I take a shower. I drive to work when my anxiety doesn’t trap me. I finish work and drive “home” to the same Walmart I’ve parked at the past three months. I eat dinner, what wont spoil in the heat and will give me something akin to a “healthy” diet. I crack the windows and curl up in the back seat of my car.

I’m homeless. I live in my car. I have a gym membership not to work out but to have a place to shower and clean up. I’m not telling you this to garner sympathy. I got myself into this situation and I trying to learn my own strength so that I can deal with things in a more healthy way.

I don’t think that my anxiety is particularly strong but I know that my responses to it need to improve a lot. I will never be rid of the anxiety in my every day life but I don’t have to let it control me. That’s why I’m getting back on medication as well as a few other things to help control it instead of trying to hide from it.

We all have anxiety about something, for me at least it’s there for everything. It’s like hearing “is this how you want to look going in there?”, “is that the right thing to say?”, “will you ever do a good enough job?”, “remember how badly this went last time?” All day about almost everything. The only time it leaves is when I’m too busy thinking about something else. Bit the moment that I slow down its back.

I’ve felt this way for as long as I can remember and for as long as I can remember I’ve hid from it in books, movies, tv and learning about anything that strikes my fancy. But again, the moment something ends or is put down it comes back.

I try to push myself to go sit at Starbucks to at least be around people instead of sitting alone all day. Or I’ll make myself go dancing but I’ll hide in a corner or behind my camera. Sometimes these experiences are helpful, that show me that I can do this but then sometimes they backfire and they discourage me and trap me in a feedback loop of anxiety.

I truly haven’t really minded living in my car much. I wish I could stretch out instead of having my knees bent to fit in the back seat but I’d be content if I wasn’t afraid all the time of just interacting with people. Some of you have talked to me and may not even know of my anxiety and very few people knew of my situation because I work hard to seem “normal” in general.

But probably the most time important thing that I need to tell you is that after next weekend I’m moving back to South Georgia to live with my grandmother so she can help me get my life back on track. So I’ll be gone for 3-6 months and then I plan to return to Austin.

But I wanted you all to know because I appreciate your friendship whether it’s close or not. I only made the decision or realized I was had no other choice but to move back with my grandmother today. I wish I had more time with everyone here but I will be back.