Apple: the Primacy of Privacy

AAPL sold off 2% today

After its run-up to the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple stock sold off 2% today, as traders greeted Apple's introduction of its artificial-intelligence products with a yawn.

Apple said its new software will retrieve information from across apps and scan personal information to help users proofread text, call up photographs of specific family members or gauge traffic patterns ahead of an atypical commute. Users can create images and emojis and even convert rough sketches into polished diagrams...

For certain complex Siri requests, Apple will surface a prompt to ask if the user wants to connect with ChatGPT to get a better answer. Apple is also allowing ChatGPT to connect with other areas of the operating system, such as using the AI to help with composing text. Apple said it gives users the ability to control when and if they want to use ChatGPT...

Apple's AI features didn't overtake the competition technically, but as an Apple customer I really liked the emphasis on privacy. (By way of contrast Microsoft Windows' AI tool "Recall" takes snapshots of users' screens every five seconds and stores the images on an unencrypted database that is easily hacked.) [bold added]

Privacy is at the heart of Apple’s new AI capabilities, a feature that could further lock users into its ecosystem. Most processing will be done on a device instead of shipping to the servers in the cloud. But the company said for running larger AI models Apple will keep it private by running its own servers with what it calls Private Cloud Compute. It will only send data relevant to the task to these servers. The data isn’t stored or accessible by Apple for further training, the company said.

ChatGPT queries from Apple devices will be routed to OpenAI servers, but user information won’t be shared with OpenAI, and the startup won’t be able to identify the queries from specific Apple users. Apple will use a version of ChatGPT that is available free elsewhere online, but those with premium ChatGPT subscriptions will be able to link their accounts.

Users' data is stored on the device itself. If more processing power is needed, then tasks are diverted to Apple's private servers. Users can call on Open AI's ChatGPT, but even here protections are in place.

user information won’t be shared with OpenAI, and the startup won’t be able to identify the queries from specific Apple users.

As an Apple investor and a customer with privacy concerns, I appreciate the fact that Apple will be using its own silicon and not be as beholden as everyone else to external data centers running on Nvidia chips.

This fall I'll be buying a new iPhone 16. My six-year-old iPhone XS Max has served me well, but it's time to move on to the brave new AI world (as well as a much better camera and battery).

I'm not so presumptuous as to believe that hundreds of millions of iPhone, Mac, and iPad customers think like me and will soon upgrade their hardware, but there's a good chance that will be true, so if I didn't already own Apple stock, I'd be buying some.

The Science is Settled if you Halt All Research

This diagram depicts the key aerosol, cloud, dynamics, and radiation processes in the marine boundary
layer (left) and the MCB approach using ship-based generators to produce fine sea-salt aerosol droplets
(right). The droplets are lofted into clouds by updrafts, where they increase droplet concentrations, extending
the reflectivity coverage and lifetime of the clouds. Credit: After Sorooshian et al. 2019. (NOAA)

If global warming is an "existential threat" to mankind, why aren't all solutions being investigated? Your humble blogger can't help but ask this question when the City of Alameda killed a small cloud-brightening research project. [bold added]

The project, led by the University of Washington, involved scientists using specialized machines to spray sea salt particles into the air above the USS Hornet. The research was part of a larger push toward someday using salt particles to brighten low-lying clouds, thereby reflecting enough sunlight away from the Earth to decrease the warming effects of climate change.

Last month, Alameda ordered researchers to stop the project on the basis that it violated the city’s lease with the USS Hornet. The city then hired biological and hazardous material consultants to evaluate the experiment. The consultants concluded that it presented no measurable risk to the health of the surrounding community or environment.

The City of Alameda was pressured by environmental groups who not only insist on the righteousness of their goals but also that the only method to halt global warming is through the elimination of fossil fuels. Per the Center for International Environmental Law:

“We cannot geoengineer our way out of the climate crisis, what we need is to focus on real and proven solutions, starting with a phase out of all fossil fuels,” Mary Church, the center’s campaign manager, said in the statement. The center added, “Deployed at scale, Marine Cloud Brightening would not reverse the climate crisis but create a different climate change potentially exacerbating droughts, hurricanes, and flooding far from the deployment site.”

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Marine Cloud Brightening holds promise as a way to "buy us enough time to reduce greenhouse gas emissions" but more studies are needed. There is currently no evidence that MCB will succeed or that it will be harmful either.

Anti-fossil-fuel advocates like to say that their prescriptions are "based on science", but they stop research that might further our understanding of the science. What are they afraid of?

Half a Brain is All I Need

(Part of) our brain is in the Cloud

In 2018 I tried to buy the maximum memory of 512GB for a new iPhone XS Max but had to settle for the 256GB model in inventory.

Five years later the XS Max is only 40% filled. I didn't create as many files or download as many apps as I thought I would, but the main reason the extra storage is unnecessary is that I've transferred most of the files to Apple's iCloud. (Our subscription costs $9.99 per month for 2TB, which can be shared among the family.)

The larger iPhone capacity was unnecessary because some of the tasks could be offloaded to Apple's network.

It turns out that there's a biological parallel: the human brain has shrunk over the past 5,000 years. [bold added]

But a growing body of evidence suggests our brains recently changed in an unexpected way: They diminished in size sometime following the end of the last Ice Age.

“Most people think of brain evolution happening in this linear way. It grows, plateaus and stops,” said Jeremy DeSilva, a professor of paleoanthropology at Dartmouth College. “But we’ve lost brain tissue equal to the volume of a lime—it isn’t a tiny little sliver we’re talking about.”

The precise timing of that post-Ice Age brain shrink has remained a mystery until now. A group of researchers led by DeSilva used a mixture of fossil and modern specimen data to pinpoint that this loss of gray matter happened between 3,000 to 5,000 years ago, according to research published in June in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

Many anthropologists had initially posited the changes coincided with the advent of agricultural practices around 10,000 years ago, and a global shift away from hunting and gathering.

The more-recent dates from DeSilva’s group point to booming eras for ancient civilizations in North Africa, the Middle East and South America—complex societies that they think may have played a role in the shrinkage.

They hypothesized that human societies got so cooperatively organized in the past 3,000 years that we began relying on what researchers call collective intelligence.

“It is the idea that a group of people is smarter than the smartest person in the group,” said James Traniello, a biology professor at Boston University and one of DeSilva’s co-authors. “So basically, if you live in a group, you solve problems more rapidly, more efficiently and more accurately than what’s possible for any individual.”

Traniello said the inspiration for applying this idea to why human brains may have shrunk came from “ultrasocial” insects such as ants. Ants form highly cooperative societies in which division of labor has favored smaller-brained individuals due to an advanced level of social organization.

The researchers suggested that perhaps our need to maintain a large brain—to keep track of information about food, social relationships, predators and our environment—has also relaxed in the past few millennia because we could store information externally in other members of our social circles, towns and groups.

We don't have to hunt to survive, so it's logical that our senses--and the related parts of the brain--don't have to be as acute as they once were. Nor do we have to store as much knowledge in our head when we can rely on other people, books, and the World Wide Web. The extra brain cells are not needed.

However, I'm still going to try to get the 1TB version of the iPhone 15 Pro Max.

MacBook Air Life Extension

Last month the touchpad on the 6 year-old MacBook Air became catatonic. The cursor would alternately freeze or skitter across the screen in random directions. Worse, it would open multiple applications and documents, and I had to press the power button to shut down the computer manually.

As the smart people recommend, I zapped the PRAM and reset the SMC but the dysfunction recurred after a few minutes.

Was it time to buy one of the new Macs that were announced today?

Maybe, but just one more thing.....to try.

I wiped out the disk--something that I used to do every six months on Windows machines--then reinstalled everything (of course, this was after performing a back-up to a hard disk). Restoring the Mac to factory settings has the benefit of eliminating all the stray fragments of deleted files that build up over time.

The half a day that it took to clean and reinstall the programs and data was worth the effort.

The touchpad functions like new, and an additional 10GB space was freed up on the solid state drive as a bonus.

The just-announced Macs have switched from Intel-based microprocessors (the speed of the MacBook Air's i7 is perfectly adequate for your humble blogger) to Apple's self-designed M1 microschip (3.5x faster!).

Buying a new MacBook Air was tempting, but thanks to this life-extension project, I'll wait for the M2.

Apple One: Distractions Welcome

Because seven(!) hours a day of screentime is not enough, I signed up for Apple One on Sunday. Apple One is Apple's bundled subscription to a number of its services.

The Premier plan, which has been shared with each member of the household, costs $29.99 a month and is a bargain.

It includes Apple Music, TV, News, Arcade, 2TB iCloud storage, and a soon-to-be-released Fitness app.

I had not heretofore explored the game and music libraries, and they are a welcome distraction from the post-election scrum.

We won't know definitively about who controls the Senate until the runoff elections for two Georgia Senate seats on January 5th. As for the Presidential race, it looks like Mr. Biden will soon have the necessary 270 Electoral votes, but there seems to be evidence of vote fraud that could reverse the result.

So it looks like we'll have at least two more months of politics to obsess over, argue about, and ruin our Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I never thought I'd be saying this, but being distracted by games, music, and video entertainment will be a better use of time than the alternative.

Somehow Fittingly, Today's 9/11

The Victorians ("Painted Ladies") of Alamo Square (maybejb)

Over one day later Bay Area residents are still buzzing about Wednesday's orange skies:

The otherworldly phenomenon was a result of smoke from multiple wildfires burning in Northern California, Oregon and Washington blowing into the Bay Area.

The wind pushed it to lower elevations, where it rested atop the foggy marine layer. The sun filtering through produced ominous shades of orange and red.

The Painted Ladies on a normal day (Times of India)

Though omnipresent, the ominous orange did not correlate with poor air quality.

the air quality was moderate in much of the Bay Area for most of the day.

“People were seeing the reddish orange skies and thinking the worst, but in actuality today’s air quality is worse,” said Walter Wallace, Bay Area Air Quality Management District spokesman, on Thursday. “The smoke has fallen today.”

A very unusual sky shouldn’t necessarily make people think the air quality is hazardous, he said.

“We’ve had much worse air quality days and didn’t have nearly as crazy a sky as we did yesterday,” Wallace said.

To the list of apocalyptic afflictions and warnings (crime, homelessness, COVID-19, unemployment, school closures, business closures, heat waves, power failures, lightning, wildfires, and polluted air) we can add an orange sky that no one had seen before. And 2020 has nearly four months to go...

Situation normal, nothing to worry about (Chron photo)

BTW, in case you missed it, a pyrocumulonimbus cloud appeared over Northern California:

That’s the name for a rare formation that NASA dubbed “the fire-breathing dragon of clouds.” It occurs when the scorched air from within a wildfire or volcano meets moist, buoyant air a few miles above the earth. The resulting mass is essentially a rain-less thunderstorm sitting atop a giant fire.

To quote the great Han Solo: "everything's under control...Uh, we had a slight weapons malfunction, but uh... everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine."

Not So Diaphanous

Apple's 500,000-sq-ft data center in North Carolina.

One of the big advantages to cloud computing is that the customer can cut back on hardware maintenance, utilities, and upgrades, not to mention its footprint.

However, while society's overall hardware burden is reduced, it doesn't go away.

Investment in cloud infrastructure has surged since 2015, and the market for data-center equipment is expected to grow at an average annualized rate of roughly 16% this year and next, according to Citigroup Inc.

Cloud servers, though, typically have a lifespan of only about three years, according to experts, meaning that some of the earliest equipment already has passed its use-by date.

The dollar value of new infrastructure equipment was $142 billion in 2017.

Amazon disclosed in its 10-K that Amazon World Services added $9.2 billion in Property, Plant, and Equipment in 2017. If the largest company in cloud storage comprises only 6-7% of world capacity, and if capacity is growing at 16%, then the opportunity for suppliers is immense (Amazon and Microsoft aren't the only players) in a business where the equipment must be replaced every three years.

And that goes for the disposers and recyclers, too. You can't bring in the shiny new equipment if the old stuff is still there.

Cloudless Day in Redwood Shores

Oracle HQ at Redwood Shores, 2004

2017: Buildings added, plus marine craft.

The Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores has changed a bit over the past decade. (The site was home to Marine World/Africa USA through 1986; your humble blogger retrospectively appreciates the lions' roars that floated up to Foster City at sunset).

The glass cylinders were ostentatious for their time but now are in tune with the trophy HQ's of Apple, Facebook, and Google. However, none of the latter have an America's Cup yacht parked in a lagoon right outside.

Oracle's market capitalization has risen to $206 billion from about $60 billion a decade ago, so Mr. Ellison is entitled to indulge a few outside interests.

Oracle looked like it was going to be left behind in a new world of social media and mobile devices but has more than regained its footing in the cloud.