7 years after the iPad release, some of us are still trying to parse out if it is a real computer. I, for one, have given up. Everything is a computer now. Some just have more well defined roles. While I consider my iPad Pro and my MacBook Pro to both be computers, they are different kinds of computers. Here’s the Venn diagram of their capabilities in my daily life.1

I now own a 10.5" iPad Pro. I’ve occasionally used the 12.9" first generation iPad Pro reserved mostly for my kid. The 12.9" is glorious to look at but it was just too big to be my every day device. As expected, the 10.5" is the perfect size for me. Most of what I’ve read or heard about the new iPad Pro is close to reality but I think the effect of the new 120 Hz refresh rate of the screen is being over stated.

I’m increasingly fascinated by machine learning. Maybe because it feels like there’s more opportunity for machines to learn than for us meat bags. This Github list was really interesting. Gated Conditional Pixel Convolutional Neural Network using TensorFlow (Demo) Value Iteration Networks using TensorFlow — Best Paper Award NIPS ‘16 (Demo) Flappy Bird using Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep Q-learning) (Demo) LSTM Music Generation with Google Magenta Basic RNN (Demo) Live Captioning using Speech APIs on iOS (Demo) Spotify Artist Search using Speech APIs on iOS (Demo) Convolutional Neural Network using TensorFlow on iOS (Demo) MNIST (of course) on iOS (Demo) MobileNets on iOS (Demo) YOLO on iOS (Demo) Inception on iOS (Demo) Symbolic AI Speech Recognition with iOS 10 Speech APIs(Demo) Video Style Transfer using Torch 7 (Demo) Algorithmia API Photo Colorizer (Demo) Clarifai Information Retrieval for Videos on Android (Demo)

Watching through Rakka volume 1 was a bit disturbing but it’s clearly the core of a good scifi story. As with some of Neil Blomkamp’s other movies like Chappie and District 9, it’s a postapocolyptic story built on-top of the inhuman atrocities we’re already capable of. But instead of humans, it’s aliens. I like his movies (Chappie was far better than the critics suggested) and this looks to be a solid follow up with a new production studio and maybe a new release model.

While I do pay for a Slack team account, I also manage a frivolous team with a lot of users on the free plan. The Slack free plans are very generous but can run out of storage space fast and that means no one can share dank memes anymore. This wouldn’t be so bad except Slack does not provide an easy way to delete old file uploads. Here’s a useful Ruby script by James Martinez that uses the Slack API to deletes a specified number of attachments that are old than 30 days.

Ribbonfarm is a nice blog with long, smart posts. It’s now 10 years old. 1,346,678 words later. At an average of just over 2179 words. Good work.

I like Eddie. Everyone is wrong about something. Vulnerability is mightier than the strongest ego. It will win you the most loyal followers.

Great article from Jean-Louis Gassée Let’s indulge in a bit of speculation. Tentatively dubbed Apple Neural Engine (ANE), this hypothetical chip fits well with Apple’s tradition of designing hardware for its software, following Alan Kay’s edict: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” Couple Apple’s AR and ML announcements with the putative ANE chip and we have an integrated whole that sounds very much like the Apple culture and silicon muscle we’ve already witnessed, a package that would further strengthen the company’s moat, its structural competitive advantage.

I used to carefully pick the perfect capacity size of each new Apple device I’d buy. With everything syncing between devices, photos getting larger and videos getting longer, I now just go with the largest size I can get. This is my current iPhone. Spending time juggling what data to keep on the device costs me too much. It’s not worth my time or the interruptions. I’d like to see Apple bring the pricing in line with the rest of the world, but for now I’ll pay the premium to keep my sanity.

Apple did not lie about the size of the iPad Pro 10.5 Smart Keyboard size. It is very close to a full size keyboard. Here it is in comparison to a keyboard on a Macbook Pro 15". Here’s a comparison of the new Logitech Slim Keyboard Case The keys are all positioned where my fingers would expect them to be, but just barely. This is the reason I can actually type on the 12.