I'm not really sure why anyone would want to use an Apple TV for games, instead of a dedicated console. AFAICT the killer app for Apple TV is airplay. I haven't seen a co-working space conference room TV without an Apple TV attached for years.
I mean, I guess privacy is the other feature. I use an AppleTV at home to bypass all the smart TV nonsense. I know Apple can't be trusted, but I trust it more than a TV manufacturer who tries to shove ads down my throat the moment I connect their TV to the internet.
I refuse to use anything Apple so can't speak for the Apple TV, but I see it as pretty comparable to the Google TV (aka Chromecast w/ Google TV) products, just more open, flexible, compatible, and affordable.
I use Google TV for games on occasion. It has excellent controller support and works great for lightweight games that run fine on the stick. For anything heavier, the Steam Link app is the go-to. I can run the games on my bigass Linux PC and stream them to the TV. I routinely do this for Hogwart's Legacy for example.
Now that said, lately I've been just hooking up my Steam Deck to the TV and using that. Less friction and less bugs by avoiding the Steam Link app. And the Steam Deck is pretty close to a console (certainly much closer than it is to an Apple/Google TV), so perhaps I've just proven your point :-D
The good news is Microcenter seems to have found a niche that keeps them relevant. My local branch is always packed with people trying out new mechanical keyboards, buying new computer cases or monitors, and buying hobby electronics kits.
Hopefully tapping into the gamer & hobbyist markets keeps them afloat.
If that were the case, then you would expect isolated groups of humans who never developed a writing system to be significantly different from "homo archivum", but we know that's not true.
We also know that groups without writing systems were historically able to adopt writing systems rather quickly, which is, I think, rather good evidence that writing is a technology, not a point of speciation.
Going back to Ancient Greece, Socrates didn't even believe in the effectiveness of writing for communication of knowledge. My poetry professor used to spend some time on this, because it's intimately tied to the art of poetry. He would cite a number of studies showing our emotional responses are intimately tied to our language processing, and that humans are wired to emotionally respond to, and remember, stories.
>If that were the case, then you would expect isolated groups of humans who never developed a writing system to be significantly different from "homo archivum", but we know that's not true.
I'm not sure I understand why this would necessarily be what you would expect. I would say it's entirely the other way around. If we have some sort of favorable evolutionary circumstances that predispose us to turn into archivists, that might be at the frontier of the outer limits of the capability we're able to reach, so it might only show up in certain pockets or subsets of our overall population. Getting there would still hinge on favorable probabilities and circumstances that might only obtain in a small percentage of cases.
As for Socrates, I must confess I am rather smitten with him as a historical figure and as a philosopher, but for the many great things that Socrates is, I don't think he's a reliable authority for the evolutionary history of humanity writ large. I suspect that you're entirely right that oral traditions are more emotionally resonant and powerful than written traditions. But don't think there's any logical fallacy or contradiction in supposing that nevertheless a written tradition could emerge in parallel with oral traditions.
I suppose I do agree with your end point though, which is that I'm not sure that a disposition towards the writing can be pointed to as like a singular thing that's at the essence of what it is to be human. In fact, I would say that that very question is kind of romanticized and abstract in a way that doesn't make clear contact with our scientific understanding and therefore is kind of a malformed question. But I don't have to agree with that form of question to nevertheless believe that our capability to put language into a written form had rather transcendent consequences for us as a species.
> If we have some sort of favorable evolutionary circumstances that predispose us to turn into archivists
Intelligence - predicting the future rather than reacting to the present - unlocks the possibility of communicating about the future rather than just the present (basic animal calls - predator alerts, intimidation threats, mating calls, etc), which means the message can have value in the future if stored and transmitted (unlike a predator alert which is useless if not delivered in the moment).
It seems that writing, or proto-writing (drawings become symbolic glyphs?), probably developed before message carrying/sending, which then becomes the big capability unlock - the ability to send/spread information and therefore for humans to become a "collective intelligence" able to build upon each other's discoveries.
It's interesting why some groups of humans never culturally developed along this path though - aboriginees and forest peoples who have no written language. Is it because of their mode of life, or population density perhaps? Cultural isolation? Why have these groups not found the utility for written language?
Apparently as recently as 1800 global literacy rate was only around 10% - perhaps just a reflection that in the modern world you can passively benefit from the products of our collective intelligence without yourself being part of the exchange, or perhaps a reflection that desire for information is not the norm for our species - more for the intelligentsia?!
> I won't pretend to know what makes us human, but ultimately I believe it has to be rooted in something neurological
In terms of intelligence, yes, but in terms of what we've achieved then "technology" such as writing/archiving certainly has made a massive difference, else we'd be limited to what could be built by passing down oral history and skills passed from one generation to the next, much like Aboriginal Australians.
I suspect that the neurological (& vocal) differences that make us more intelligent than other apes are likely extremely few - more like "fine tuning" differences than anything major.
The question is whether or not cultures that had no writing systems were limited to the same level of intelligence and/or development that other primates exhibit.
Given that with exception of an interesting knot-encoded (Quipu) system for some period of the Inca empire, the entire human population of the Americas (at least 15-20% of the total human population) fits this description, the answer seems to be "no". These cultures built huge cities (among the largest in the world at the time), used sophisticated irrigation schemes, ceramics technology and more.
Just to be pedantic, it is unclear if the Aztecs had "full writing". The notation system in the codices is probably more like a kind of mnemonic and accounting system along with a calendar. They probably couldn't write arbitrary sentences. But so little material survives we don't actually know!
The Maya though absolutely had "full writing" at least during the classical phase around 200 - 800 AD, and their writing probably derived from the older Olmec system. The Maya system worked much like classical Japanese or ancient Egyptian, and uses a mix of ideographs and purely phonetic symbols. They could, and did, write anything they could say. There are historical accounts of battles and names and etc. given in monumental inscriptions. And it is almost certain during the classical era that the Maya had full literature, with stories, mythology, histories, anthologies, religious scripture, etc. There were probably still priests who could read the Maya system when the Spanish arrived - one Jesuit recorded notes that indicate some of the phonetic values of some of the symbols correctly! - but they were mostly killed and most of the codices burned by the conquistadors.
It was not deciphered again until the 1970s and it's sadly still not widely appreciated that Mesoamerica had literate civilizations.
Fun fact: The Maya were such good astronomers and record-keepers that we have exact date alignment, which we have neither for Ancient Egypt or for Mesopotamia. For example any dates in Assyrian records are subject to a ~40 year window of uncertainty for exactly when they occurred. There is no such ambiguity for the Maya: Pacal the Great almost certainly died on August 29, 683.
Yes, for sure humans are fundamentally more intelligent than other primates, but still it does seem that writing and written communication is a big capability unlock.
It's impressive, and perhaps a bit surprising, what a culture like the Incas were able to achieve using only (we assume) oral tradition and passing down of skills, but there must be a limit to the complexity of what can be passed down this way - more along the lines of the skillset of an individual man being passed to an apprentice, but presumably also "managers/planners" passing down skills as well as tradesmen.
I think that's exactly the right question and the answer is pretty clear that there is no comparison. I do understand that there's a little bit of something going on with water-based mammals like orcas and dolphins being able to teach certain skills to their young and so there's a notion of intergenerational knowledge there. But we're just a different order of magnitude in terms of our capability of transmitting intergenerational knowledge and it's not even close. It's almost disappointing because there's no interesting question of comparison between us and other species.
As I mentioned in another comment, I'm skeptical of the questions that imply a kind of species essentialism, suggesting that there's such a thing as a one particular trait that distinctly makes us human. I think the real answer to questions like that are vast convergences of immense clusters of facts relating to our evolutionary history and our morphology and so on. I don't think there's any like one single thing. But I do think in comparison to other species a rather elegant way of distinguishing this is to put to our written traditions which as far as I know don't really have any precedent. And if that doesn't blow you away in terms of how miraculous and special are evolutionary trajectory is, I don't suspect anything would. But the important thing is that you don't need a species essentialism to be impressed with who and what we are.
It fits the basic concept of writing, where complex ideas are communicating through time rather than space.
As to using symbols it depends on what you mean by symbols. Though an ants nest is a dark environment so writing the way we think of it via coloration would be a useless. In such an environment pheromones have inherent advantages, but you can’t get the same highly detailed shapes.
At least one contract appears to be for the air force's effort to move secure workloads to a multi-cloud environment. Based on publicly available slides, I think Accenture is acting as a middleman to avoid dependence on Azure or AWS technical support creating lock in to their clouds.
IMHO firing Accenture is probably a good move in this case. I bet they were extracting money at every opportunity just so the gov't could nominally avoid cloud vendor lock-in.
You're right, which is why factories are already automated that way.
Where humans still reign supreme is in two areas: assembly and work in human-centered environments.
So, it's a lot easier to have a human welder do welding inside a Hyundai-built ship because the interior of the ship is designed for humans to walk around.
Likewise, it's easier for humans to work with machines on assembly, because humans are flexible and assembly lines typically need to be rapidly reconfigured for different production runs.
A purpose-built facility excels at maximizing throughput for mass produced parts (paperclips), but doesn't work well for lower-volume integration tasks (cars, ships, etc.).
Great analogy at the end! I'm going to have to steal this, because it hits right at the heart of the problem with relying on LLMs to do things outside of what they were designed for.
I mean, I'm a US citizen and I'm not doing foreign travel any time soon because I don't want to fly into the US either. With the way ICE is acting, I'm not going to count on my citizenship to protect me from violations of my constitutional rights.
To be fair, a lot of Asian ingredients have picked up such weird English translations that they could use a rebrand. Case in point: "Prickly pear ash" is an amazingly unappetizing translation of the spice's proper name, sanshō or sancho.
"Prickly ash" is an ingredient in Chinese cuisine, particularly Szechuan cooking. We buy it in quantity at Asian groceries where it's pretty inexpensive.
In the US it's known as "Szechuan peppercorn". Preparing it for use requires carefully inspecting a handful for stems and thorns (which can be quite big), pan toasting and crushing/grinding to a coarse powder.
As pointed out in the sister comment, the spice has a mild numbing effect which counters the heat of chilis. Adding a little to hot dishes makes the flavor more complex and enjoyable.
For people who like to cook it's an ingredient worth experimenting with across culinary boundaries.
Part of the problem with the English translations is this ambiguity. Sansho comes from a different species (Zanthoxylum piperitum) of the same genus, native to Japan and Korea. The flavor is different, but reminiscent. I keep both sansho and red Sichuan peppercorns for use in different dishes.
Is that prickly ash? Like a toothache tree with all the sharp spikes on the trunk?
It looks like sancho is the berry produced by the tree. The leaves look similar to our toothache tree or Hercules Club as some call it. I know that the bark here in NAmerica has been used as a local anesthetic for a long time. It produces a tingly, numbing sensation when it becomes wet. I have used the bark to numb gums or throat pain. I never tried the berries.
My tree here died in the last drought. It was a birdshit variety since it was growing along the fence. The seed was dropped by a bird as it rested on the fence and I got a tree as a result! Gotta wait for the next one I guess.
Different tree, same genus. I'm not sure if all species (of 250+) in the genus have edible fruit, but the berries of several Asian species are harvested for spices, including Sichuan Peppercorns, which are made from the dried berries.
I would bet that the flavor (citrusy, with a numbing effect) is similar among all the species, but varies in strength and pungency. I'm not sure if I would bet that any species is safe to eat, however.
I'll need to look into the ways the tree was used by Native Americans and early settlers. I have known about the use of the bark for decades but don't recall anything about other parts of the tree. Thanks for the information.
I mean, I guess privacy is the other feature. I use an AppleTV at home to bypass all the smart TV nonsense. I know Apple can't be trusted, but I trust it more than a TV manufacturer who tries to shove ads down my throat the moment I connect their TV to the internet.
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