Interesting visualization tool. You start with a mix of triangles and squares. There are rules that determine whether a shape is happy or not, based on the neighboring shapes being the same type (bias).

Hard to explain, but spend a minute stepping through each scenario and you’ll see the point of the exercise.

Wired:

Let’s say you’re out drinking with your buddies, things get out of hand, you pull out your smartphone, you take a selfie in the middle of all this drunken revelry, then you take 30 or 40 more, and, without hesitation, you start uploading them to Facebook.

It’s a common thing to do. But Yann LeCun aims to stop such unbridled behavior—or at least warn people when they’re about to do something they might regret. He wants to build a kind of Facebook digital assistant that will, say, recognize when you’re uploading an embarrassingly candid photo of your late-night antics. In a virtual way, he explains, this assistant would tap you on the shoulder and say: “Uh, this is being posted publicly. Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?”

The idea is more than just an idle suggestion. LeCun is the New York University researcher and machine-learning guru who now oversees the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, a team of AI researchers inside the internet giant that spans offices in both California and New York, and this rapidly expanding operation is now laying the basic groundwork for his digital assistant.

Interesting idea, but this is a bit of a slippery slope. Tricky when you allow AI to make judgment calls of any kind. Will Facebook step in when it disagrees with my parenting style? My purchases? My voting habits?

A very good, common sense article from Kelly Guimont. I know we’ve all seen those ignorant people in the stores—don’t be that person.

Wired:

The car, Bloodhound SSC, marks a bold attempt to set a new Land Speed Record of 1,609 kph (1,000 mph) by 2016. If successful, it will not only mark the biggest jump in land-speed history, but will also be the culmination of a decade-long experiment in education and open engineering.

What a great story about the engineering challenges of trying to push a car, and I use that term loosely, faster than any has ever gone before.

The Verge:

In an age where fans expect direct relationships with the artists they love, Prince has turned himself into a reclusive legend. But 30 years ago, he was still a young artist on the cusp of releasing his greatest record — and former Vibe and Spin editor-in-chief Alan Light’s Let’s Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain documents how the record and film came to be.

I’m all kinds of biased as a huge Prince fan but I think the album is still amazing and listen to it at least once a month. The movie doesn’t hold up as well but it’s still a lot of fun to watch every now and then.

File this one under sweating the details.

Many of those seminal steps occurred not in the Silicon Valley garages of lore, but in the stuffier labs and offices of Greater Boston, stretching back at least to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Whirlwind Project.

We always think that many of the great innovations happened in Silicon Valley, but before that, there was Boston.

Artcurial Motorcars:

The Collectors’ Car Department at Artcurial has discovered 60 collectors’ automobiles, all major marques dating from the early days of the motor car through to the 1970s. Found following fifty years of lying dormant, the Baillon collection will be sold by Artcurial Motorcars in the first part of the traditional sale at Retromobile Salon, on 6 February 2015, in Paris. These motor cars have been tucked away in a property in the West of France, under makeshift corrugated iron shelters and in various outbuildings.

One of the cars, a Ferrari 250GT SWB California Spyders, is one of only 60 ever built. Another, a 1956 Maserati A6G Gran Sport Frua, is one of just three ever built.

Next time you drive past a barn, take a peek inside – you never know what you’ll see.

New York Times:

Napster did not last long, two years. But for a while at the dawn of this century it claimed to have 70 million registered users. It spawned a host of Internet music-swapping providers, more than a few of them falling on the dubious side of the law. Most important, it irrevocably altered not only the way in which Americans absorbed music but also their belief system in what they should pay. The conviction theologically held by many boiled down to a single word: nothing. “You have a generation of people now who expect their music for free,” Greg Hammer, managing director of Red Bull Records, a branch of the energy-drink company, told Retro Report. “It’s very difficult to change.”

The music industry is not alone in coming to terms with altered realities. As every sentient soul surely knows by now, the “culture of free” — words borrowed from the title of this week’s video — has turned the print world upside down, pushing newspapers, magazines and book publishers into a frantic search for financial safe harbors. With the advent of broad Internet use in the 1990s came a notion that information should be free. Never mind that the gathering and transmission of information can be a costly proposition and that (dirty word alert) money is needed if the survival of, say, a newspaper is to be ensured. As with music in Mr. Hammer’s observation, a generation now believes that the written word, whether on processed wood or in pixels, should come without charge.

Terrific article, partnered with the video below. Clearly, the culture of free is at the soul of many new business models. As you craft your business plan, you must consider the possibility that someone out there will do the same thing for free.

CNET:

Some of the last video footage taken of the late Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs shown in antitrust court last week may see the light of day after lawyers representing the Associated Press, Bloomberg and CNN filed a motion with the court to have it released.

“Given the substantial public interest in the rare posthumous appearance of Steve Jobs in this trial, there simply is no interest that justifies restricting the public’s access to his video deposition,” attorney Thomas Burke, who is representing all three media organizations, wrote in the filing Monday.

Apple opposes this filing:

Today’s filing follows an official email request made Sunday by Burke, to which Bill Isaacson, Apple’s lead attorney, replied Sunday night, “Apple does not consent to your request. We are preparing a substantive response to your points and will get that to you tonight hopefully.” No such filing has yet been made on behalf of Apple’s request to keep the video restricted to the courtroom.

Personally, I’d rather not see this video be made public. It serves no one outside the courtroom.

The testimony from other witnesses may have been more germane to the case, but the never-before-seen video footage of the late executive has grabbed the spotlight and, Burke argues, deserves to be shown to the public because it is “far more compelling and accurate than any transcript could ever be.”

Burke’s argument is self-serving. He represents the media, not the plaintiffs.

Wired:

Street View, which launched in 2007, was conceived as a way to improve the user experience by letting people see what the area around their destination looked like, says Brian McClendon, Google Maps VP. “But we soon realized that one of the best ways to make maps is to have a photographic record of the streets of the world and refer back to those whenever there’s a correction,” McClendon said.

And as the data collected by Street View grew, the team saw that it was good for more than just spot-checking their data, says Manik Gupta, group product manager for Google Maps. Street View cars have now driven more than 7 million miles, including 99 percent of the public roads in the U.S. “It’s actually allowing us to algorithmically build up new data layers from information we’ve extracted,” Gupta said.

Those algorithms borrow methods from computer vision and machine learning to extract features like street numbers painted on curbs, the names of businesses and other points of interest, speed limits and other traffic signs. “Stop signs are trivial, they’re made to stick out,” McClendon said. Turn restrictions—which directions you can turn at a given intersection—are a big deal for navigation, but they’re trickier to capture with algorithms. Sometimes the arrows that tell you which turns are legal are painted on the road, sometimes they’re overhead. They can be different colors and sizes. “Lane markers are harder because they’re not consistent, but we’re getting much smarter about that,” McClendon said.

Beyond the algorithms is an application called Atlas that lets an army of Google map workers fine tune the data.

It’d be interesting to learn about Apple’s approach, see how far down this road that team has travelled. I’m wondering if Apple has learned from Google’s approach or if they created their own methodology from scratch.

What a great question. I know people that hate Uber, but I’m not convinced they actually know why. I think it’s probably the company’s business practices and the fact they have been creepy, more than anything.

For fuck sakes, the plaintiffs didn’t even own eligible iPods to bring the $350 million lawsuit.

Yes, I am breaking the gift guide by putting this here. Why? Because as you’ll notice, none of us recommended the Nexus 9 (edit: Cameron recommended it, but don’t listen to him), because it’s not exactly great. In fact, I’d argue no Android tablet is. The Shield Tablet is a lot of bang for your buck, but the screen kind of sucks and the battery life isn’t spectacular (standby is bad in particular) and it’s heavy, thick, and kinda ugly.

Much respect Android Police people.

As a user, when sites put text on an image, I like the blur or using the out-of-focus techniques. I always feel like contrast makes the text much easier to read, which makes my interaction with the site or app much better.

An interesting post from John Martellaro. I’ve wondered about this myself after using Apple Pay recently. Sometimes, I need to sign, while other times they just wave me on without any other interaction.

Photographer Brooks Kraft has been covering the White House since 2000, and over the years, he’s had plenty of opportunities to document the unveiling of Christmas decorations at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This year, however, he decided to mix things up a bit — and shot the event with Apple’s new iPhone 6.

Great story.

The tone-creation possibilities are now virtually infinite with BIAS. Download artists’ signature amps, or try out the latest and most popular matched amp models created by your fellow guitarists.

The new version of BIAS Desktop really is amazing. You can match a real amp using the software and then recall it whenever you want. The company made some new amp match models available to download from within the app.

PDFpen 2 is fully optimized for iOS 8 with an all new look and feel which runs on both iPad and iPhone. The enhanced toolbar and new editing bar make popular writing and highlighting features easy to access, with minimal taps. Import and export documents via iCloud Drive, making it easy to share cloud-based documents not just with the Mac, but with other apps on an iPad or iPhone. Use AirDrop to quickly send documents to other devices. PDFpen 2 supports palm and wrist protection when writing and highlighting. Documents can be secured with a password. Number pages automatically, including Bates numbering. All this and more make PDFpen 2 the perfect solution for all of your mobile PDF editing needs.

In short, we’re told that while Transmit iOS can download content from iCloud Drive, we cannot upload content to iCloud Drive unless the content was created in the app itself. Apple says this use would violate 2.23 — “Apps must follow the iOS Data Storage Guidelines or they will be rejected” — but oddly that page says nothing about iCloud Drive or appropriate uses for iCloud Drive.

I really don’t understand some of these decisions.

During an appearance before a U.S. appeals court on Thursday, lawyers for Samsung sought to have vacated the $930 million judgement awarded to Apple earlier this year in a landmark patent infringement lawsuit, saying the sum was “absurd.”

No, what’s absurd is that Samsung made so much money from copying Apple’s design. The judgement against Samsung should have been much more.

This is great, I love it.

Mashable:

The Calgary Hitmen held their 20th annual Teddy Bear Toss on Sunday, which allowed fans to throw 25,214 stuffed animals onto the ice in a heartwarming and entertaining display of charity.

The bears, which are bagged prior to tossing, are gathered up by the team and donated to more than 60 charities for the holiday season.

The Hitmen do this every year and it’s heartwarming and funny every time I see it.

Darrell asked Eddie to make him a replica of his famous black and yellow striped guitar a few months before he died.

When Van Halen arrived at the viewing, he had the guitar, but it wasn’t what Rita expected. He brought his original 1979 Bumblebee Charvel Hybrid VH2 to be placed inside Dimebag’s casket and buried along with him.

Much respect to Dime and Eddie.

Andy Ihnatko had the chance to visit the war room at NASA Goddard’s space weather lab. Take a look at this picture he snapped of what he calls “the single greatest browser tab ever rendered”. These three screens are processing a tremendous amount of data, all driven by a single Mac.

The funny thing is that these three huge HD screens, put together, have fewer than half of the 14.7 million pixels of the Retina iMac.

That’s astonishing.

Austin Mann is a noted iPhone photographer. You can check out his work here.

Mann put his experience to work to build a list of gifts for the iPhone photographer in your life.

Back in October, Jean-Claude Biver, president of LVMH’s watch division (makers of high end brands such as TAG Heuer and Hublot), had this to say about the Apple Watch:

“A smartwatch is very difficult for us because it is contradictory,” said Mr. Biver. “Luxury is supposed to be eternal … How do you justify a $2,000 smart watch whose technology will become obsolete in two years?” he added, waving his iPhone 6.

Jean-Louis Gassée, writing for Monday Note:

At the medium to low end, the impact of Moore’s law was nearly lethal. Smartphone cameras have become both so good and so convenient…that they have displaced almost all other consumer picture taking devices.

And:

The biggest question is, of course, Moore’s Law. Smartphone users have no problem upgrading every two years to new models that offer enticing improvements, but part of that ease is afforded by carrier subsidies (and the carriers play the subsidy game well, despite their disingenuous whining).

There’s no carrier subsidy for the AppleWatch. That could be a problem when Moore’s Law makes the $5K high-end model obsolete. (Expert Apple observer John Gruber has wondered if Apple could just update the watch processor or offer a trade-in — that would be novel.)

We’ll see how all of this plays out with regard to sales. I’ll venture that the first million or so AppleWatches will sell easily. I’ll certainly buy one, the entry-level Sports model with the anodized aluminum case and elastomer band. If I like it, I’ll even consider the more expensive version with a steel case and ingenious Marc Newson link bracelet — reselling my original purchase should be easy enough.

Regardless of the actual sales, first-week numbers won’t matter. It’s what happens after that that matters.

I have a different set of expectations for a watch than I do for my iPhone. Fair or not, I expect my watch to last forever, or until it breaks beyond a reasonable cost of repair. I think it is key that Apple find a way to keep my first generation Apple Watch usable longer than my first generation iPhone. Perhaps that’s just old school thinking.