That's like saying going to Washington DC at all is "politics."
It'd be bad business stewardship if he didn't; bad for shareholders, ultimately.
It looks silly optically, but it's plain to see that Apple has trump nailed psychologically. And it worked! They knew what was needed to get an administration to support the company in meaningful ways.
Same difference. "I spent millions/billions that could have been avoided because I did not want to appear to degrade myself" doesn't sell very well to stakeholders. The CEO should do what is in the best interests of the company, and in the US when Mr Trump is president, it is in the best interests of the company to bend the knee.
So you think he is a Trump supporter, then? I would have guessed precisely the opposite. My assumption is that the trophy was his way of looking out for the best interests of Apple. In that regard probably a fairly good ROI.
> Edit : Sorry I'm asking specifically about paywalled stuff
Ah, you mean, like the NYTimes RSS feed. The NYTimes (and other paywall sites) only render the headline and one-sentence article summary. Like this:
> Not All Malls Are Struggling
> A certain type of shopping mall has become a surprising bright spot for real estate investors.
You do not…please correct me if I’m wrong…and cannot get a full-text RSS feed from the Times. Or Slate. Or [insert legacy media company here].
Which is deeply frustrating. It’s obviously a way to cut off the most blatant way for a bot to scrape the site, but c’mon, please, media tech teams, we can make private subscription RSS feeds work for podcasts, we can make it work for news. Your most engaged and nerdy and tech literate customers will go for it.
In lieu of that, I use Safari, and I have it set to automatically pop into Reader mode (https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/hide-distractions-whe...) when I hit certain websites. While I would prefer to read my news in NetNewsWire, hitting a de-shittified reader view in Safari is a decent fallback.
I have an ASUS ProArt Display 27” 5K. And I somewhat regret it.
I love the pixel density. But I don’t love the matte finish. Which is apparently a controversial take. But I really don’t. I like the crisp pop of typography you get with a glossy display. And, for UI design, the matte finish just doesn’t “feel” like the average end-user experience. I am constantly pushing Figma between my laptop display and my monitor to better simulate what a design will look like on an average glossy LCD or OLED display.
I still do a double-take when I see Pokémon trading card game vending machines at the grocery store.
I am an elder Millennial with no kids…I knew it was still a popular game, but seeing a great big Pokéball machine next to the shopping carts really drove it home.
Probably the idea is broad enough to get away with borrowing it or putting their own spin on the general idea (I mean, it is expected that stores will influence each other and ideas will spread). I’d rather guess that a studio executive thought the battery idea would be more understandable to people (if that is the case though, I think they were dramatically wrong, the computing idea makes much more sense and I think all of us in the audience would have been fine with it).
Remember that all critiques of Hollywood require you to think like you’ve just consumed a massive line of cocaine. Because that is how they think and live. So, empathy reduced to zero, all your ideas are great, everything else is dumb, etc. Making decisions under the influence of strong narcotics is a recipe for idiocy.
Source: me, I had a huge cocaine problem and worked many years in the tech side of music and movies
I saw a YouTube video where they said this was more-or-less the original backstory but then they changed it. I think it said that the People In Charge thought the 'living power source' would be easier for the audience to understand?
I don't have the link handy, and don't trust everything I read on the Internet, etc, etc.
But yeah - this makes so much more sense than breeding, raising, and feeding humans just to harvest their body heat.
I think we the urban legend really sticks around because the compute explanation just makes much more sense and we all want this beloved movies not to have a sill (albeit inconsequential) plot hole.
I like to think the machines actually were using them for processing power, and the humans themselves just misunderstood (or oversimplified for Neo) what was actually going on.
Processing power is my second favorite explanation.
My first favorite would have been: they don’t use the humans for anything, the pods are just the most efficient way to store humans. The machines think they are being benevolent, just want peace and quiet and for humans to stop doing dramatic things like scorching the sky. But I don’t know where the plot would go from there.
There is backstory that the films could have gone into, though I don't know if it was written before or after the first film. The humans in the matrix were allied with the machines and they put them in the matrix to protect them from the war. They were being benevolent.
I'm sure that one Star trek episode had the same premise, together with something from Lem. The connection human/machine brain is rather old and human brains being used for computation is so reused, it is practically public domain.
Hitchhiker's Guide had a slightly deeper philosophical implication though, in that the premise is that powerful computers already existed to solve complex problems. Earth was created to pose powerful questions.
It obviously owes a lot to Stephen King’s IT. But it stands on its own merits…and I give it extra credit because it was set in my home town. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Night)
I am 42. I came out when I was 19. I’ve worked in tech for 15 years, though no in the Valley.
I have a snarky response, then a real response.
Snark: Oh like a bunch of gays are capable of that level of coordination without it breaking into vicious drama and infighting. We can barely hold together a volleyball team sometimes.
Real: Well, yes, a lot of gay guys do know each other, especially in dense urban cities like SF, NYC, and Chicago, because we are all in the same sports leagues, we go to the same bars, we go to the same circuit parties, and it’s natural to give someone you know an internal referral as a leg up, because it’s a lot easier to hire someone you know versus sifting through 1600 job applications from strangers.
I wish more tech execs were in Cook’s mold. Reserved. Controlled. Calm. No Twitter beefs, no overt politics, no blow-ups behind closed doors.
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