Put a Sparkle in Your Life: You May Not Have a Choice

"Sparkles" emojis have come to represent artificial intelligence:

The sparkles emoji has become a near-ubiquitous symbol that applications are powered by artificial intelligence. Even ChatGPT doesn’t know how it started.

If you’ve searched something on Google, written an essay on ChatGPT or used the AI features on Slack, Spotify or dozens of other apps, you’ve seen a version of the small stars used to indicate magic. Of the top 10 software companies by market capitalization, at least seven use a sparkles emoji in conjunction with their AI applications.

“This is the biggest example of an entire industry effectively saying, ‘OK, this symbol is our representation of this kind of feature,’” said Keith Broni, editor in chief of Emojipedia, a website that documents the meaning and usage of emojis.

[Since early 2021] the symbol has since spread like wildfire in the Silicon Valley hive mind. Design and marketing executives at software companies said they started using sparkles because everyone else was doing it, helping customers widely understand that the symbol meant AI.

Widespread adoption across the AI industry isn't surprising; sparkles are harmless, happy, and remote from the dystopian AI future that many are worried about. Your humble blogger, who limits his emoji insertions to a smiley face, doesn't buy into the premature joy and won't be sparkling any time soon.

San Francisco Has a Font (and I Don't Care)

Added to the list of things that I never knew were needed: San Francisco finally has its own font.

The old embossed typeface

The font is inspired by San Francisco’s old embossed street signs, distinctive black-on-white steel markers that began appearing in 1946 and were prevalent in the city in the 1960s and 1970s.

The bubbled-out letters can be seen in archive photos, movies such as “Bullitt” and “Vertigo,” and almost every episode of “The Streets of San Francisco.”

According to designer Ben Zotto

Fog City Gothic (photoshop)

The [old] typeface was embossed in metal, and what happens is the edges get softened, and they paint the sign on top so it looks different from different angles.

That’s what I wanted to capture. Bold and blockish, but soft around the edges. I called it Fog City Gothic hoping to evoke that feeling.

Eh, the San Francisco font is fine.

Your humble blogger knows what he doesn't like: at one extreme he shuns letters that are too squarish and on the other he always switches from fonts that have a lot of curly cues. Fog City Gothic falls within the vast middle that is acceptable, and some people like the designer obviously care, but I just don't.

The iCar is Coming

(Macrumors image)

Reuters reports that Apple is moving ahead with its long-rumoured self-driving car:

Apple Inc is moving forward with self-driving car technology and is targeting 2024 to produce a passenger vehicle that could include its own breakthrough battery technology, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The iPhone maker’s automotive efforts, known as Project Titan, have proceeded unevenly since 2014 when it first started to design its own vehicle from scratch. At one point, Apple drew back the effort to focus on software and reassessed its goals. Doug Field, an Apple veteran who had worked at Tesla Inc, returned to oversee the project in 2018 and laid off 190 people from the team in 2019.

Since then, Apple has progressed enough that it now aims to build a vehicle for consumers, two people familiar with the effort said, asking not to be named because Apple’s plans are not public. Apple’s goal of building a personal vehicle for the mass market contrasts with rivals such as Alphabet Inc’s Waymo, which has built robo-taxis to carry passengers for a driverless ride-hailing service.

Central to Apple’s strategy is a new battery design that could “radically” reduce the cost of batteries and increase the vehicle’s range, according to a third person who has seen Apple’s battery design.

Personally, I'm most excited about injecting a fresh list of car-naming possibiities, e.g., golden delicious, honeycrisp, etc.

Mary Kay could award its top performers Pink Ladies instead of Pink Cadillacs, the Fuji and Rome models are tailor-named for overseas markets, and the Granny Smith would be perfect for elderly conservative (not in a political sense) drivers.

From a practical standpoint what's been holding me and other buyers back from buying an electric vehicle has been the limited range and the possibility of being stuck in the middle of nowhere without being able to recharge. Apple is smart enough to know that it should not be entering the highly competitive automobile market unless it had a technological advantage, like something "that could 'radically' reduce the cost of batteries and increase the vehicle’s range."

Yes....you wouldn't want to see your Apple run out of juice.

The Full Flintstone

(Chronicle photos)

We've admired Hillsborough's "Flintstone House" for decades. From three years ago (scroll to bottom for update):

For nearly 40 years Peninsula motorists have been driving by a white, mushroom-shaped structure off Highway 280. When it was re-painted in 2007, the 2,730-square-foot orange-and-purple home was nicknamed the Flintstone House.

The unique Hillsborough property is listed at $4.2 million. If you can afford to cut a check for such a whimsical purchase, you're entitled to shout Yabba-Dabba-Doo.

The interior's special, too.

The metal dinosaurs are new (Mercury News photo)

2019: Hillsborough sues to declare Flintstone House a ‘public nuisance’

Calling it a “highly visible eyesore” and “out of keeping with community standards,” Hillsborough planning and building officials are asking a judge to officially declare the iconic Flintstone House a “public nuisance,” and they want a recently-erected metal menagerie of prehistoric animals, along with other features, removed.

Media mogul Florence Fang purchased the property in 2017 and quickly got to work remaking the backyard with a herd of 15-foot dinosaurs, plus a giraffe, mastadon, and brightly-colored mushrooms.

You've gotta admire owner Florence Fang for her commitment. If you're gonna go Flintstone, go full Flintstone.

Joking, I Hope

Probably won't survive
a 7.0, though.

The repair work had been completed in September, but the cabinets still were not installed.

Our household has become increasingly worried (paranoid?) about earthquakes that could topple heavy furniture.

I ordered safety straps from Amazon. I couldn't trust plastic anchors to hold to hollow walls, meaning I had to locate the wooden studs.

Stud finders have advanced amazingly since I last bought one 40 years ago. Back in the '70's they were little more than compasses, that is, magnets in search of beams' metal nails instead of the North Pole.

Now they use radar and sensor technology to read changes in density. Costing about $30, the stud finder was successful about 80% of the time; my hit rate got better with experience.

Straps finally in place, the cabinets were set up over the Thanksgiving weekend.

The member of the household in charge of these things said that maybe they would be better in another corner. She was joking, I hope.

Old and Beautiful

At the car service center yesterday were two immaculate cars in the showroom: the first, a sporty model with a big red ribbon on top (some people give cars as Christmas presents) and the second, a sedan with a 20th-century design sensibility. Was Lexus making a retro edition?

No, the car was really from the 20th century, 1990, to be exact. The owner had driven his LS400 over 500,000 miles before bequeathing it to his son.

Lexus had decided wisely, IMHO, that showcasing a still-on-the-road example of its first model was good advertising. Both the interior and exterior were in better shape than my two-year-old crossover. The original sticker, with a $40,000 price tag, was taped to the left rear window.

It wasn't retro, just old and beautiful.