timelets

As soon as it rolls out the software update this fall, Apple will instantly make the AirPods Pro 2 into a medical device, essentially turning every pair of the company’s top-selling headphones into over-the-counter hearing aids.
...
75% of people with hearing loss let it go untreated, according to the Apple Hearing Study, a project run with the University of Michigan. In case you don’t trust medical statistics from a trillion-dollar company trying to sell you something, the audiologists I consulted told me that number sounded right.

BEIJING—Microsoft is asking hundreds of employees in its China-based cloud-computing and artificial-intelligence operations to consider transferring outside the country, as tensions between Washington and Beijing mount around the critical technology.

...700 to 800 people, who are involved in machine learning and other work related to cloud computing, one of the people said.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft-asks-hundreds-of-china-based-ai-staff-to-relocate-amid-u-s-china-tensions-b626ff8c

...dynamic processes give rise to particular growth patterns: branching out whilst foraging (to maximize coverage of territory) and forming networks once nodes have been established (to strengthen connections and facilitate the transfer of information). Branching is a fundamental strategy within myriad biological organisms and physical phenomena, from the bifurcation of river deltas, lightning strikes, tree roots and branches, to mycelial networks and in our own bodily systems including blood vessel networks and the cross channelling of neural pathways. Branching facilitates ‘the transmission and parsing of information, no less than the transfer and dissipation of energy’ and, according to philosopher Stephen Shaviro, ‘is an essential process of Nature’ (Shaviro, 2016: 220).

Drawing Processes of Life, 2024.

This past week, Musk called on his echoverse to lobby the Senate not to pass an aid package for Ukraine, in the latest example of the billionaire’s speaking out about the conflict that is dragging toward its second full year.

“[in Jetsons] no one does any actual work. Jetson arrives at his office, leans back in his chair, and puts his feet up on the desk. Jane presses three buttons to accomplish the housework—and that’s before she gets Rosey. Even the robot sets the table for dinner by pressing a button.
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the Jetsons’ lives are ridiculously easy, and they are ridiculously rich. Jane talks to her mother on a wall-sized videophone in a day when 20% of American households didn’t have a television and 25% didn’t have telephones.

[in real life] The working man’s family lived in a cramped row house, not a spacious penthouse. His wife didn’t have a housemaid; she spent the whole day cleaning, washing, cooking, and sewing. He himself worked long arduous days and was often forced to take public transportation. Private aircraft were a dream almost as far out of reach as they had been before the brothers Wright.
The subtext of The Jetsons is simply stated: advancing technology would make the future much better than the past—for everyone. We could all be Jet-Setters.”

J Storrs Hall. “Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past.”