Apple Should Introduce FlightPlay™
Recently, while on a flight with United from Tenerife to Newark, I played with the infotainment screen in front of me. These infotainment systems really improved in recent years. Screens are bigger, speed is much faster, and interaction has improved quite a bit. Some of these systems look like iPad-in-the-seat, literally. It occurred to me that Apple while offering CarPlay, could try to find a way to create a version for flight infotainment systems. Let’s call it FlightPlay because Flighty is already used, and AirPlay, too!
I want each plane to offer a complete set of flight data, ready to be consumed by my iPad or iPhone while in flight via a local wifi network. The iPhone or the iPad would then turn into a special StandBy mode where data would be visually presented dynamically, allowing for great interactions with the user. Modern devices have so much powerful CPU, the interaction would be much more fluid and enjoyable. The data provided would be based on a standard model and would provide speed, altitude, current destination, path, atmosphere metrics (temp, headwind speed, etc.), and so much more. The airplane company could directly provide TV shows, music, etc., to our devices. The same would be for games. But Apple could also allow consumption of locally stored content from the device itself. I can imagine Apple’s designers working on a great graphical dashboard.
Is anybody at Apple reading this? What are you waiting for?
👉🏻 Thought of the day: when people put responsibility for solving the climate crisis and the like on the governments and big companies, it’s a clever (or not so clever way) to NOT take responsibility as an individual. It’s too easy.
Governments & companies are made of and operated by people, for god sake! No willingness by the people, individually or in a government, produces the exact same result: no action. But what action can we take as an individual, you might ask? Revisit your consumption habits might eventually help. Less consumption = less need for recycling. Simple.
Meanwhile: the planet IS burning.
Feeling Helpless About Climate
Due to Canada’s forest fires and easterly winds, bad air quality is returning to my town for the next few days. With all the bad climate-related news coming up from everywhere on Earth, trying to understand what is happening is essential, so we can better adapt our lifestyle. I like to read many things on a subject that I find interesting, but climate change topic is utterly depressing. The planet is clearly slowly burning. All indicators are going in the wrong direction. How can we not feel helpless? It’s hard to stay informed and keep faith in humanity. Prove me wrong.
My Morning So Far
What an intense morning.
I learned about the existence of iTelescope, thanks to this blog post from Christopher Curtis, a service where you can rent astronomical observation time from the comfort of your home.
I read about the Eternal Recurrence, thanks to a post from Gr36. I would be ok with the idea of reliving my life as is. Over and over again.
Thanks to this superb article about Fediverse from Glenn Fleishman for Tidbits, I learned that we could follow anyone on Mastodon using an RSS feed, which we could do with Twitter. I’ll be able to re-add accounts to Inoreader to get news in one place, just as I was doing when I was on Twitter. Cool.
All this because I was searching for ideas to write a few linkposts. I wrote none except this post, but I learned quite a lot. I updated my Digital Garden accordingly.
As reported by Om Malik, automation is the next evolution step for fast food chains. Should I care?
Am I missing anything? I think so, and this is where Rewind could help me a lot.
What about your morning?
On AI & Content Creators — So many Questions — So Few Answers
Should I care if my content is used to train AI models? How is it different than someone who uses part of my content in a citation to write a linkpost, for example? Is it ok for a portion of my content to be used elsewhere as opposed to the full content? Should I be able to opt out of any AI training, just like we can opt out of search engines when posting content online?
On Slowing Down AI To Stay in Control
I had a discussion about AI yesterday with my wife. She came back from a two-day conference in Toronto. One of the sessions was about the place of AI in society and how it is time to engage in promoting and organizing some AI regulations.
The more I read and learn about AI capabilities as exposed in tools like ChatGPT, the more I think we will eventually need some regulation. For example, one thing we discussed (and on which we couldn’t agree) is the introduction of a delay in AI training. What I’d like to see is that AI companies are imposed a 2 or 3 years delay for their model training. And why would this be necessary? How would it change the game?
Remember that current training is lagging simply because we lack the processing power to digest all the digital information produced daily. But, eventually, it will come, just like Google replaced Yahoo when index content was initially entered manually by a group of people and then by a community. Sooner or later, ChatGPT or similar tools will digest the web in near real-time. And this is where this is going to be even more scary and could really get out of control.
Imposing delay on models training would help public knowledge and content to settle down and let consensus emerge in any research field, for example. Short-term noise would be reduced. In my opinion, it would be more challenging for ChatGPT to be infected by bad actors who will eventually try to influence results with toxic data.
My wife and I couldn’t agree on the effectiveness of this simple measure. She thinks that it would make ChatGPT useless or less relevant. My take goes the opposite side where, like in real life, things like encyclopedias are still helpful even though they were written and got frozen as soon as they were printed. So there is a need for them, like there is a need for more dynamic knowledge content like Wikipedia.
More than ever, we need to define what makes us unique, how we protect how uniqueness and consider slowing things down a bit, so we can have more time to understand what is going on and where things could go if we let things go without proper framing.
Being full of projects is being alive ™