Also, as mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, Google's "Search and A.I. are deeply integrated" assertion is eerily reminiscent of the "Windows and I.E. are deeply integrated" assertion Microsoft made in United States vs. Microsoft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7518428...

In 1854, Dr. John Snow famously put cholera death data on a map to help readers see that reported deaths in Soho, London were in the vicinity of the Broad Street pump, which was the source of the contagion, as well as to shift from an understanding of cholera as airborne to waterborne. Snow's map certainly reinforces the value of putting data on a map to help readers see the patterns revealed, which is as important to contemporary thematic mapping as it always has been — geography and cartography were showcased during the Covid outbreak.

Such mapping techniques aren't just useful for infectious disease epidemiology, but it should be noted that the maps still need to be reviewed and analyzed, not just created. A sad reminder of this is the recent court appearance of Lawrence Reed, the man charged with setting a woman on fire on a Chicago Transit Authority subway train on Nov. 17. With more than half of her body burned, the victim — who reportedly remains in critical condition — got off the train and collapsed at the Clark/Lake CTA stop, just a few hundred feet away from Chicago's City Hall, which Reed was also later charged with trying to burn down just three days earlier on Nov. 14. In a press conference, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson suggested the Nov. 14th City Hall arson may have been political in nature ("this type of violence has no place in our politics"). Days later, he called the Nov.17th CTA fire attack horrific but isolated, but later recharacterized it as an 'absolute failure' of justice, mental health systems after reports broke of Reed's extensive criminal record ("This individual was charged with dozens of felonies over the past three decades," Johnson said. "He was clearly seriously mentally disturbed and was a danger to himself and to others. The system that we had failed to intervene.").

Incredibly, Reed's past felonies also included trying to burn down the State of Illinois' Thompson Center (now being rehabbed by its new owner, Google) — which is across the street from the site of the City Hall arson attack and houses the station where the CTA fire attack victim collapsed — on April 23, 2020 as Governor JB Pritzker was preparing to hold his daily COVID-19 press conference inside the building.

So, while it may be a little unfair to "armchair quarterback" the investigation into Reed's November 2025 arson crimes with the benefit of hindsight, one can't help but wonder: Would a simple review of a Chicago Crime map for historical arson crimes in the immediate vicinity of City Hall (map) right after the Nov. 14th arson have called out Reed's 2020 arson (map) at the State of Illinois Thompson Center and led to his apprehension before he got the chance to set afire the woman who collapsed at the subway station in the Thompson Center (map) three days later, especially since Reed's whereabouts were readily available from the electronic ankle monitor he was wearing while awaiting trial for another violent attack?

By the way, don't count on Copilot to automatically connect the map dots for crimes. An attempt to do so was initially stymied by Copilot's refusal to even acknowledge Reed had any connection to the horrific CTA arson attack.

If you've ever made the jump from PC to Mac (or vice versa) at work or home, you're painfully aware that there are very real costs of switching platforms in terms of lost knowledge and productivity. In addition to flushing years of accumulated knowledge down the toilet — goodbye Outlook-Teams-OneDrive-SharePoint-Excel-Word-PowerPoint-VBA, hello GMail-Workspace-GDrive-Sheets-Docs-Slides — there's also the matter of a thousand UI and other "paper cuts" to contend with ("Why are you looking for a 'prt sc' key," condescendingly replies a Mac aficionado in response to a question from a former Windows user, "when Shift+Command+3 is so intuitive?").

The Los Angeles public school system will vastly restrict the use of AI at all grade levels, reported the NY Times and others. The news of the ban — which oddly had to be coaxed out of LAUSD employees (YouTube) at a meeting of the LAUSD School Board Generative AI Ad Hoc Committee — stunningly came as a complete surprise to both the LAUSD Board and K-12 AI usage protestors...

July, 2026: Google copybara allows one to move code between two prod repositories

March, 1974: IBM COPY allows one to move code between two prod partitioned data sets: OS/MVT and 0S/VS2 TSO Data Utilities COPY, FORMAT, LIST, MERGE User's Guide and Reference https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/downloads/8987

In addition to the obvious negative effect on learning curves, I'd argue this dearth of "long-form documentation" has a negative impact on programming language and app development, as well as software usability in general (isn't CONTROL+COMMAND+SHIFT+3 for a MAC screen capture intuitive?)..

AI has become the new "teacher of record" to fill this documentation void, but it's very individualized and narrowly focused. There's no longer a shared mental model, where everyone has read the same books and are working somewhat off the same page. Ironically, it's probably never been easier to write a good tech book, but there's likely zero money in it and the search and AI giants are likely to hover it up and start serving snippets of it up for free before you see a dime, making people very unlikely to buy your book, even if you've written a technical masterpiece!

ibm :: 370 :: DCF :: SH35-0050-2 Document Composition Facility Generalized Markup Language Implementation Guide Rel 3 Mar85

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibm370DCFSpositionFaci...

At Gawker, They Battled a Billionaire. 10 Years Later, the Scars Are Still Healing https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/inside-ga...

Jefferson and Read had sold a scripted series to Apple titled Scraper that was based on the inner workings of Gawker, and the quartet, along with a handful of, as Carmichael puts it, “very accomplished, amazing screenwriters and playwrights on Broadway,” were producing scripts for the first season. [...] “Max and I had been concerned about that when we sold the project to Apple,” says Jefferson, but the executives developing the project “told us there was a very protective firewall between the TV side and the tech side.” But a month before the writers room wrapped with scripts for the first season’s eight episodes, Jefferson recalls, “an executive called me and said word had reached Tim Cook that we were doing a show set in a world similar to Gawker, and he had put the kibosh on it personally.” Jefferson and his 3 Arts Entertainment manager Jermaine Johnson (who also represents Read and Carmichael) say they heard about but never saw an email in which Cook allegedly referred to Gawker as rife with “vile human beings.” (Cook did not respond to requests for comment.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47902034

Points: 2

# Comments: 1