I heard about this study while listening to BBC Newshour.
One of the scientists discussing the study mentioned that this is important because studies have shown that normally word use doesn’t change with aging.
So being able to detect these dementia signs earlier can be used to provide earlier dementia interventions to help people.
That was before Tim Cook presented Donald Trump with a gold and glass plaque along with a Mac Pro.
We live in far different times these days. I have no doubt in my mind that Apple is complying 100% with every LE request coming their way (not only because of the above gesture, but because it's actually the law)
There is a fundamental difference between the executive branch "requesting" information and the judicial branch issuing a warrant/subpoena. In the former, it is perfectly legal for Apple to say piss off. In the latter, it is absolutely not.
The US Government issues National Security Letters to every tech company operating in the United States, and it is legally mandated that companies comply with these subpoenas. So if Apple or Microsoft receive an NSL, the US Government is going to get your information. This includes anything you've uploaded to iCloud and anything in your Microsoft account/OneDrive/Bitlocker recovery keys/etc.
You are essentially saying “The enemies of a government seek to undermine it so let’s stop people from talking to each other.”
I mean how is that logic different from what Stalin did during the Soviet Union? “The capitalists want to overthrow us, let’s deploy the totalitarian surveillance state to control and monitor the people to stop them from rising up”.
And how is any of this logic compatible with democracy or human liberty?
The use of an external threat to justify internal suppression of basic human freedoms such as the freedom of speech. Freedom of speech naturally includes the ability to communicate with others. When the government blocks people from communicating with each other using an external threat as an excuse that is Orwellian.
It is Orwellian because in George Orwell’s novel 1984 the 3 governments remaining in the world are at war with each other and each government uses the threat of the others for total surveillance and suppression of their own populations.
The Revolutions of 1989 that led to the fall of the iron curtain were bottom up in a region with a large population.
In August of 1989, 2 million people held hands to create a chain. This was one of the large protests in human history. It led to the death of communism in Europe. More information in “The Baltic Way” article below.
China also has many different cultures, languages and so on for the over 1.4 billion people who live there. Why would the “nuance” of Europe be “lost” on a Chinese person?
China mostly has a single national identity, and provincial differences are way too nuanced to be mapped in the same way that country differences in Europe would be. It would be like trying to get Americans to understand that "Henan man" is a meme similar to the "Florida man" meme.
No, guangxi isn’t even technically a province (another weirdness), but having been to guangxi a few times (Guilin, Liuzhou, and Nanning), I don’t think anyone thinks much of it beyond it’s beautiful karst and southern culture. Anyways, there is actually a wiki article on henan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Henan_sentiment
double ironically, your comment precisely answers your question
the two of you operate on different scale of unification - what you see as "many different cultures", chinese and americans see as "a single country". What they see as "Europe pulling in many directions" - you might see as independent national interests
perhaps the best way to recognize the attitude is to think what you feel about subsections of your country - while Scotland/England divide is common, it's rarer to hear in what Yorkshire differs from the Cornwall; and I bet not many people would guess what beef is there between french citizen from Normandy and from Nice
it is this kind of scale that allows China to build transmission lines through the whole country's diameter. It is that kind of scale that made americans scream at each other because of abortion high court decision - while said decision simply said "let states decide"
it's a lot of difference, and there's a lot of nuances "on both sides" - but simply of a different kind
On RMS and Woz specifically, how much have they ever been opposed?
I only know a little about them, but I think of both as good-natured, high-impact, little-bit weird hackers, with substantial common ground in philosophies or thinking.
They went very different life directions, with pretty young career decisions. But I could imagine Woz today supporting what RMS has done, while not seeing a need for all the philosophy and seriousness.
RMS is certainly critical of Apple. But I suspect that the Macintosh team in '84 was closer in intentions to contemporary RMS than to contemporary Apple.
But I suspect that the Macintosh team in '84 was closer in intentions to contemporary RMS than to contemporary Apple.
Apple has always been patronising and thought of users as exploitables to be controlled and herded; the Macintosh, and even more so the Lisa that came before it, were far more closed systems in comparison to the IBM PC.
That would be a cynical '84 TV ad. (Like the extremely common revolutionary leader who pretends to want to free the people, but actually just wants to be the dictator instead.)
I had the impression that the original Macintosh team was extremely user-oriented, and wanted to build an empowering machine, in terms of applications. And they also just wanted to build what they thought of as a nice machine. But definitely not a hacker machine, but they wanted to empower everyone who wasn't a computer nerd.
I don't know whether impression is accurate, but if it is, then I'd say they are closer -- in terms of intentions -- to RMS, than to contemporary Apple.
> I had the impression that the original Macintosh team was extremely user-oriented, and wanted to build an empowering machine, in terms of applications.
One could say exactly the same for the original IBM PC, which had infinitely more tech pubs at introduction than the Mac.
Inside Macintosh was great documentation (I’d argue that the second generation in the 1990s, split up by topics, was the peak of Apple’s documentation writing), but I would not classify it as “Internals” in the sense of how a 1970s computer would be documented. There was a clearly delineated API boundary beyond which it was discouraged to venture.
Yes, Apple was/is mostly about computing as an appliance (realized fully in iOS), but there was occasional dabbling with User computing, especially with HyperCard, and to some extent with AppleScript. It seems that ultimately these did not have enough uptake to warrant investing more into them.
The more time I spend getting elderly people’s entertainment systems back into a state where they can watch their 3 favorite TV channels in peace without getting lured into the paywalls of their Android TVs or cable providers, the more sympathetic I’m getting to the “appliance” view.
I used that name because I did not recall exactly the naming and was too lazy to search for the actual one. :)
Something like Hypercard naturally allowed for experimentation and playground, and if anything, a proof how to balance programming in the context of appliances.
You can find something more recent like Dreams for the PlayStation, which is also no longer.
The difference is that even environments like HyperCard and now all the sandboxed stuff create a clear division between mere "power users" and "developers", while the PC had a ROM BASIC in the beginning that effectively gave you full access to the hardware. DOS came with DEBUG that you could write short binaries in, and PC magazines would often publish source code for such utilities. These were no less lacking in power than any other software. With a PC, there was no sharp division between user and developer.
Kind of agree, which is why we are discussing Apple was always about appliances, starting with Lisa and Mac models.
As someone that started using PCs on MS-DOS 3.3, having BASIC and DEBUG around wasn't much help without having the required books, and they were not that easy to get.
There was still a divide between user and having the means to become a developer.
I think a more obvious candidate is self-selection. People with known mental issues that want a pet are wise to choose those that demand less maintenance. It's hard to go walk the dog while undergoing a mental breakdown. Cats, on the other hand, don't require people to walk them, and are mostly self-cleaning. They are a safer pick for people whose routines are subject to sporadic disruption.
A tiny economy compared to Florida, a deeply right wing government and culture, it’s already fully built up with no room for newcomers, hurricanes and rising sea levels also make it an insane choice. Please be serious.
I was just on a ski-trip in Aspen. just about 75% of people I met there were “just in Miami” or “just in Key West” (mostly Miami) but “came up for Christmas and New Years” Billionaires have a “home State” as much as I have hair (you probably are guessing correctly now that I am bald…)
I don't believe that the whole billionaire-led VC industry in California is going to relocate to Florida, in part because of the weather, in part because of the cost, and many other factors. As far as "everyone leaving" California, I don't think that's true, but I'm on the other side of the country and it doesn't bother me either way.
Florida, Texas, Nashville - there are lot of better places to live outside of NYC and SF in 2025. Let's revisit in a year after the weather tax shakes out.
The scientist mentioned that other studies have shown that vocabulary does not narrow with normal aging. Word use does not change over time.
A person's vocabulary narrowing is an early sign of dementia. It is important to recognize when this happens so that early interventions can be done.
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