Speaking of IQ, when I listen to interviews and podcasts of supposed high IQ people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, I struggle to see signs of intelligence (not saying that they don’t have above average IQ). I find that these 2 have a hard time sifting through the noise (competing thoughts) in their head to get to want they want to say (the signal).
When I listen to Steve Jobs, I hear someone who has very strong ability to sift through noise. So Jobs couldn’t see engineering in a new way like Elon does but Elon couldn’t do what Jobs did either.
Regarding Zuckerberg, from what I’ve read he is the Bill Gates type where he has the traditional variant of high IQ, aka raw hardware/horsepower but lower on creativity/imagination side.
So intelligence seems to have different shapes and sizes.
Look at the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad. It’s constantly nudging you to subscribe to some Apple service, like AppleCare, or to pay for more iCloud storage because your measly 5 GB is running out. If Tim Cook is this shameless, then ads in Maps are practically old-school Apple by comparison.
Speaking of these standardised tests, I think it's ridiculous that even for someone like Elon Musk, who read for up to 10 hours a day for most of his of pre college days and learned how to build rockets with the use of books och instruction manuals, only scored 730 on the Math section and 670 on the Verbal section for a total composite score of 1400. The fact that he couldn't get higher score means something is wrong with these tests. They are mirroring a very narrow frequency of aptitude.
Reading text is a recent phenomenon and the brain doesn't have hardware acceleration. I'm not surprised that less and less people read long form text. Becoming an intermediate reader is exhausting when you didn’t grow up with books. After 500 hours, I can only navigate titles like The Selfish Gene with middling comprehension. Black text on white background feels flat and dopamine free, yet the grind itself becomes the reward, and social media’s quick hits lose their appeal.
After reading the book "Apple in China", it’s hilarious to observe the contrast between Apple as a ruthless, amoral capitalist corporation behind the scenes and these WWDC presentations...
Ask the average woman in the US, Europe and even Asia if they cared about any plight that men might go through, like losing their jobs in some fashion. Most would shrug and move on. Why are men expected to show so much empathy for women they don’t even personally know? These days, men and women compete for the same jobs, degrees, and apartments. So why should men keep putting women first?
It’s time to stop writing in this elitist jargon. If you’re communicating and few people understands you, then you’re a bad communicator. I read the whole thing and thought: wait, was there a new thought or interesting observation here? What did we actually learn?
Apple’s App Store fees are to Apple what Search is to Google: a license to print money. On the plus side, this allows Apple to invest in extremely expensive, high precision hardware that other companies can’t afford, and it enables Google to fund R&D that led to breakthroughs like the Transformer architecture. But on the flip side, these companies also crush competition and stifle innovation in other areas. One could argue either way about whether these huge corporations are doing more good than harm or vice versa.
“We already established above that the next paradigm is wearables. Wearables today, however, are very much in the pre-iPhone era. On one hand you have standalone platforms like Oculus, with its own operating system, app store, etc.; the best analogy is a video game console, which is technically a computer, but is not commonly thought of as such given its singular purpose. On the other hand, you have devices like smart watches, AirPods, and smart glasses, which are extensions of the phone; the analogy here is the iPod, which provided great functionality but was not a general computing device.
Now Apple might dispute this characterization in terms of the Vision Pro specifically, which not only has a PC-class M2 chip, along with its own visionOS operating system and apps, but can also run iPad apps. In truth, though, this makes the Vision Pro akin to Microsoft Mobile: yes, it is a capable device, but it is stuck in the wrong paradigm, i.e. the previous one that Apple dominated. Or, to put it another way, I don’t view “apps” as the bridge between mobile and wearables; apps are just the way we access the Internet on mobile, and the Internet was the old bridge, not the new one.”
Have we ever seen another company like Apple create world class hardware (the M4 chip in the iPad Pro is the worlds fastest single core chip) then actively make it a worse product by kneecapping it through software or artificial restrictions, not because of technical necessity, but to maintain control, extract rent, or block competition?
Gemini 2.5 Pro might be one of the best for coding but for creative tasks like writing and sharing ideas, I vastly prefer GPT 4o and GPT 4.5 to an even larger extent.