Good morning everyone,

It feels like every direction I look right now the temperature is shifting. The weather here is hot, politics locally and globally is spicy, AI is also going to insane places and the designers at Apple have been designing.

It’s a lot of change and it does feel like it’s all at once.

I assume we’re all seeing the our timelines and feeds turning this chaotic mix of hellish news followed by summer vibes and parties. Strange doesn’t quiet capture it.

All of this reminds me of this quote that is apparently from Lenin: "There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen”.

I’m not a historian, but if you ask me, some shit is defiantly happening.

A bit on each of these things below.

Hope you’re all good out there.

Nick

It’s 8:44 am and it’s already 32c/90f on its way to 38c/100f. It won’t get below 27c/80f for the rest of the week. A few years ago the NY climate was classified as subtropical. The plants, animals, insects are changing. I was at a running group this morning and they said for the first time that they’re discussing changing the program this year because of the heat.

Today, NYC can vote in the democratic mayoral primary. They’re basically choosing who they want to run in the election in November. Zohran Mamdani is a the 33 yr old, charismatic, socialist that is in an arm wrestle with Andrew Cuomo. 

We went to Mamdani’s rally a couple of weeks ago (photo above). The vibes were electric. If Mamdani wins, he will be on track to be the second youngest mayor of NY. The youngest was Hugh Grant (not that one obvs) who was 31 when he became the mayor in 1889. Mind you the life expectancy for males born around 1859 was between 35 and 45 yrs, although Grant lived to 52.

I hope Zohran get’s up. It’ll send a strong message to the rest of the country and piss off the billionaires.

This is a history newsletter now.

Hard to know what to say or even comment here. I’ve got a heap of messages from people back in Aus being like “are you okay should you come home?” Even people here are discussing what their exit strategy might be, which seems a bit much? Maybe it’s right. The President is getting frustrated though - he just said “fuck” on live TV. A first?

My current position on AI is that I expect that for the next couple of years we’re going to be flooded with AI everything. Especially things like art, movies, music, DJ sets, and more. And the bet I’m going to make is that we won’t care much because we won’t connect with it. AI will live in all our software and products, but art will be okay.

The latest hot start up is Cluey, with the tag line “cheat on everything”. The 21 yr old founder got kicked out of Columbia for using AI. Now he’s raised $15m to… help others cheat… or something.

Is there any value in knowing anything if AI can just tell you?

What is ‘knowing’ anyway?

This is a philosophy newsletter now.

In 2012 I was in Singapore for work and I stayed up all night to download the dev beta for the new iOS. I was so excited. This was the one (ios7) that moved us from skeuomorphic to flat.

Skeuomorphic made a lot of sense. Touch screens were new and referencing the real world in the icons and UI was a genius move to help onboard people to these new devices.

The move to flat was also very smart. Flat UI meant faster load times on the device and it also influences the entire web design world. Applications became faster and the content was allowed to shine.

Having watched the announcement of the new Liquid Glass iOS design, I cannot understand the rational for changing. It doesn’t seem technically better or help with performance. It doesn’t help with AI. And it also looks, bad?

Is this a big deal? Well it will roll out to between 1.5 and 1.8 billions users this year. And if you believe that what you see around you changes you (as I do) then yes, this is a big deal.

It’s till in beta and it’s been changing (see example here), but are these just small improvements on something that is fundamentally going in the wrong direction?

A bigger question, is this evidence that Apple has indeed lost its way a bit when it comes to design?

Too hard to know today, but I’m watching with interest.

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With all the noise right now, did you catch that Trump is launching his own American Made smart phone? (Not parody) Link

Interestingly, Meta’s head of AI doesn’t believe in LLM’s and things that AI needs to be able to understand physics and reason from first principles. I agree? Anyway, this is a pretty interesting update on what they’re working on. Link

This start up is making beautiful dimmer switch knobs. Clever! Link

Architectural Digest toured Michael Shannon's Brooklyn apartment and it’s really nice. Link

Zohran on Odd Lots Podcast Link

Most of the philosophy we know and are taught is from a few dudes from Europe. But there were other dudes from other places also think and writing. This interview makes the case that we need to also study the philosophical traditions from places like India, China, Africa (which country(ies)? and more. Makes sense. Link

Album: Leni by Thurpance / Jack Vanzet. So beautiful Link

I recently spent some time with Cassandra Jenkins who is a musician living here in NYC. She just dropped two tracks on Bandcamp that are 21 and 12 mins. Very calm and very nice. Link