And how exactly will studying (not even writing!) poetry address these crises? It's holier-than-thou bullshit written by a guy who has only gotten feedback from soulless status-seekers who were smitten by his position at Anthropic.
I would argue that simple acts of authenticity - writing a poem, growing a vegetable, creating art, walking in nature, meaningfully interacting with one's community - represent exactly the sort of trajectory required to address those crises generated by an overzealous adherence to technological advancement at any societal cost.
He wants to focus on community building (as stated in the letter), wouldn't you say that communities in developed countries have been hollowed out? It's also one of the most important aspects of humanity, we are community builders first, that's how we always survived.
Being atomised hasn't improved how meaningful our lives are even though we created a lot of technology going that way. Can you say we have more meaning in life by being splitted apart? We have lots of entertainment and things to keep us busy but for a lot of people gratification comes from doing things together.
As a personal anecdote: I've personally enjoyed much more my times during summer helping a community of friends to build houses in their land than any time I was just travelling around. I pass by their houses every few weeks, have dinner with them here and there, and feel extremely happy to see those people living in structures I helped to build together with them. It's much more meaningful to me than any software I helped to develop used by literal hundreds of millions of people.
The lack of community untethers people from being humans, you can clearly see that in anyone that is chronically online.
Yeah, he posted a low-resolution bitmap scan of it on Twitter a few days ago. I had to open it in Safari and rely on its OCR to actually paste the relevant passage that describes his reason for leaving, which only comes after four paragraphs of preamble.
> What comes next, I do not know. I think fondly of the famous Zen quote "not knowing is most intimate". My intention is to create space to set aside the structures that have held me these past years, and see what might emerge in their absence. I feel called to writing that addresses and engages fully with the place we find ourselves, and that places poetic truth alongside scientific truth as equally valid ways of knowing, both of which I believe have something essential to contribute when developing new technology.* I hope to explore a poetry degree and devote myself to the practice of courageous speech. I am also excited to deepen my practice of facilitation, coaching, community
building, and group work. We shall see what unfolds.
If you look behind the pompous essay, he's a kid who thinks that early retirement will be more fulfilling. He's wrong, of course. But it's for him to discover that by himself. I'm willing to bet that he'll be back at an AI lab within a year.
They almost certainly will course-correct in the next release now that the culprit responsible for Liquid Glass is no longer at the company. But they won't chuck it out wholesale; it will be a gradual evolution back to sanity.
They reacted pretty quickly to the butterfly keyboard fiasco. By the time users received the shipping products of the first gen, the second gen were already in the pipeline so there was a slightly modified with only a dust cover being added. There was no third gen.
Hopefully iOS 26.x releases will continue to correct Liquid Glass, but I'm guessing iOS 27 is well down the path with it still integrated. Maybe iOS 28 will see sanity return???
Second gen butterfly keyboard broke a lot too. And then there was the no-esc touch bar, and the removal of inverted-T arrow keys... It took a few years of no good mac laptops before they backpedalled enough to get back to where they started
I’m pretty sure butterfly keyboard was made worse when it came to the hotter rubbing higher power Mac’s. I rarely saw folks with the original 12” low power model having issues.
It was not an entirely bad concept for the device it was conceived for, but Apple has a habit of unifying their technologies to all their products and sometimes, like with Liquid Glass, that seriously doesn’t work.
They've been delivering empty-noop test updates through that new pipeline in the past couple weeks to beta users, which suggests that they considered it.
It's more the former. I'm assuming though that Background Security updates are basically the same thing as "Rapid Security Responses" was, which on the Mac I can recall being used once, 13.3.1(a) released the same day as 13.4 as an RSR.
Basically, the amount of stuff Apple can realistically change on the fly without restiching an entirely new system volume snapshot into place is quite small, so unless the stars align it can't be used.
I imagine scheduling lined up for the 26.3 release and it wasn't considered dangerous enough. They did this with 26.2 as well including a fix for a zero day. I wonder if they are leveraging that to get people to update sooner. Imagine some people might be turned off of updating with the bugs and visual changes in 26. It's not like 26.2 or 26.3 have any major changes that are enticing.
26.4 is likely to have 9 new emoji, as usual for a late-cycle OS release. That may not particularly appeal to the "7bit ASCII for life" subset here, of course, but it's definitely a driver.
