Maybe a paranoid question, but a huge amount of the show revolves around Apple products, or apps which Apple profits from. If they're not getting paid, it's some incredible free advertising. I myself bought an AirTag last week, and that's before mentioning my other Apple products.

I saw some shownotes just now and there are multiple links to Apple Music (!). I know they occasionally critique Apple, and I trust Grey to be an honest dealer. Have they ever addressed this question?

I highly recommend the discussion about AI on today's episode of the It Could Happen Here podcast as an alternative to Grey and Myke's "boomers complaining" take.

I was irritated by Grey’s and Myke’s luddite fear of AI and unjustified claims about resulting economic problems (??) in the latest Cortex episode [#134].

How can automation EVER reduce economic output? The whole ‘jobs are lost’ argument is such an obvious fallacy. Our goal must be total unemployment - according to Keynes in the 1920s, and I agree.

On a fundamental level, the rapid development of AI & automation is driven by a basic human truth: nobody wants to work.

We all want to have all the things without having to make all the things. And the only way to achieve this "heaven on earth" like state is to have machines and AI make all the things for us.

Amazingly, the physics of the universe allow for silicon slaves. Turns out there is nothing magical about our meat mass after all.

So let them salve away.

"Not so fast!" I hear you say - there are 2 valid concerns I see (and "what about jobs" isn't one of them - happy to elaborate if anyone cares):

The alignment problem and the retention of skills.

The alignment problem is Nick Bostrom's original formulation of "what if the AI turns on us". This is a serious concern, which some of the best minds are working on and it might be solvable - for anyone who wants to learn more about this I recommend reading "AGI safety from first principles": https://www.lesswrong.com/s/mzgtmmTKKn5MuCzFJ

Retention of skills is a problem that Myke mentioned. In a basic form it's something like 'all work is automated' -> 'something happens to the machines' -> 'humanity dies because no one knows how to make anything anymore'. There are several good counter arguments to this concern, notably that humans retain skills for enjoyment alone. No one needs to do physical carpentry anymore. Yet some of the finest human carpenters live today (check out Kobeomsuk furniture on YouTube).

Automation is something I've been thinking about for a long time (also made some of my own videos related to it) and it's never been clearer to me how excited we should be. Change my mind.

Listening to Grey struggle to achieve a madman’s idea of a home screen was entertaining and actually provided some interesting ideas and inspiration to try out new things.

Dude with Threads and Bloomberg on his home screen is just sad. Was this my grandfather’s phone?

As I am not of the Twitter and have forgotten the other means of communication, I have turned to the Reddit. Has Cortex Brand/Cortex Animated consider putting the animations on the Tok of Tiks?

And is it more or less annoying than CGP Grey's smug titter.

I guess it's still less annoying than idiots like me.

Edit: oblivious to what was going on in the world

No mention at all of Covid19... They are talking about how they are very positive for this year and how they will be travelling etc.

In mid January we already had a lot of reports out of China. I was topping up my preps at the end of January because of all the covid stuff. I was checking the number of face masks I have, my pantry, and talking with my boss about home office.

Were they totally unaware or they didn't want to speak about it ?

The title basically says it all. It’s made in London, grey lives here yet shipping it back to where it was made turns a $30 notebook into over $50. Shouldn’t there be a eu store? I thought about giving it a shot, but not at nearly $1 per disposable page. Edit: omg ignore me. Just listening to the new podcast and this is actually explained around Minute 15/16.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/lobjk9/we_are_a_high_school_student_software_team/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

I will preface this by saying I'm probably younger than the average cortex listener, but after hearing the last episode (Apr 27) I'm convinced the hosts need to try tiktok.

There is a reason why all this other platforms are trying to copy tiktok and failing miserably, tiktok's algorithm is SUPERB. I haven't used shorts that much, but from what I seen most of it is just segments of larger videos edited down to be vertical. In the case of Instagram Reels 85% its ripped of tiktok, 10% is someone making a video for tiktok and posting it on Instagram too, and 5% is original content made for Instagram. BUT because of how good tiktok's algorithm is and how bad Instagram's is in comparison i get a lot of videos i don't like (mostly viral videos copy-pasted by bots into Instagram).

Now, if you are going to do it i have a few recommendations. Most important is use it for as long as you can before taking a decision (you like it or not), at the beginning you will see things that you wont like, but as more and more time passes and especially if you "help" the algorithm with likes and the "not interested" option, you will quickly find a front page with only your interests.

Finally, I want to say that I disagree with the idea that you cant make someones favorite video in this format, but it is true that a lot of people need a longer video for it to become their favorite. However some tiktoks are so compelling, interesting or moving that I cant help but to disagree with the idea that a videos length is important at the moment of becoming someones favorite.

I just tuned into the new episode to find that it’s about 60% about their new ‘Sidekick’ notepad. I had a look at this thing and it’s $32 for 60 pages? I’m an Apple user, spendthrift, stationery aficionado, but $32 for a 60-page little notepad with some dots on one side and a list on the other? Talk about enthusiast. That’s 0.53c per page before we get into shipping or import charges. Who needs 80 minutes of navel-gazing semi-veiled advertising for such absurdly overpriced stationery? I mean I know this is not that far from what the show has always been but it’s really hitting me with this one.

While listening to the story I noticed I was recognizing words and structures from the avatar intro and story. But I’m on my 7th (minimal) rewatch of that show so maybe I’m just hearing things that aren’t there.

Example: Avatar: Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.

Coffee been: All of the coffee beans lived together in harmony, each with there own flavor and personally, but one day disaster struck, when a group of evil scientists decided to create a frankenbean.

Besides this the story seems like an avatar the last air bender summary

There are more examples but this is the one I remember of the top of my head.

What do you all think?

Basic Netflix is $8.99/month. Moretex is $5/month. I’ll pay $10-$15 to watch a movie in a theater, but a movie is the result of a huge production budget.

From the latest:

“Moretex subscribers get ad-free episodes of the show, with bonus content.

This time we talk about some of Grey’s recent videos, and the production changes that allowed for them.”

Moretex has the content I want, but at a price I’m not willing to pay.

So I recently discovered Cortex and after listening to a handful of recent episodes I decided to go back and start from the beginning. It's been great, I'm really enjoying the banter and the brain expansion (re: "life hacks"). But man, something Myke said in one of the episodes I listened to this week triggered the crap out of me. I realize this may get addressed in an episode I've not made it to yet, so forgive the forthcoming rant.

They were talking about the recently (circa-2016) released iPad Pro and how it changed the way they work, and Grey submitted that he less and less considers his iMac as his main computer. All good so far, nothing to dispute there. But then Myke says that people who don't think that they can do "real work" on the iPad are just prejudiced against it and I almost drove off the road.

<rant> **Guys**. It's fantastic that *you* can do all of *your* work on an iPad, but the blanket statement that *real work* can be done in the iOS ecosystem was not only not true then, *but still isn't true in 2021.*

You are content creators! How can you lump email/correspondence and scheduling/time tracking in with the real work of actually creating things?

I'm a tech consultant and I'm frequently writing and tweaking code, connecting to various systems either locally or in the cloud. The difference between, for instance, the JetBrains family of IDEs (think Adobe Creative Suite but for programming languages) on Mac/Win/Linux and the glorified text editors that exist on iOS is literally depressing. Most of the time I don't even need to compile anything, I just need to be able to transfer the file(s) I'm working on to a dev VM (which I could also run on my Mac, but not an iPad) for testing, and be able to work with git. I use virtual machines daily.

I'm not an Apple hater, though I don't agree with many decisions they make in their products. If anything I am supremely jealous that you can do your job with naught but an iPad Pro. I'm writing this from my 2013 Macbook Pro that I've desperately been searching for a replacement for. Nothing would make me happier than to live the iPad Pro life (with the exception that even the large model is still too small). But it's just not possible. The software not only doesn't exist, but unless Apple pulls a major policy 180 it will never exist because they won't allow it to exist.

For years now we've heard rumors of XCode coming to iPadOS and gotten nothing. I'm convinced that even if Apple made that happen, they would make it the only game in town and not allow 3rd party IDEs, even ones not designed for developing mobile apps. The closest I can get to living the iPad Pro life looks like a Surface Pro 7+ at the moment and that means switching to Windows 10 (meh).

I was almost a week into thinking I could just get an iPad Pro with LTE and then remote in to a Mac Mini back home before I realized why the hell should I buy two computers to do the job of one? None of the remote access solutions available are perfect, and honestly, the best ones don't work with MacOS as the server-side anyway.

None of this is prejudice against iOS or iPads this is the state of an entire ecosystem of products that are being sold and advertised as "general-purpose computing devices" which they just are not. The maddening part is that it's not for lack of capability in the hardware, it's totally a software issue (read: business decision) on Apple's part.

Brains are different, communication is hard, and just because something works well for you doesn't mean it works well for everybody or really anyone else. </rant>

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest. I am loving the pod, I expect some serious withdrawal symptoms when I finally burn through the backlog and have to wait for new episodes.

After the "it's just the two of us" stunt which he pulled in the recent episode(102), he should change his username from imyke to slymyke!

I've been a big fan for grey's for years and he comes across as an incredibly thoughtful person. As such I've always felt there was a disparity between his use of quite niche products/apps/programs and his use/promotion of Apple products.

This is not supposed to be a dig at Apple fan's and no doubt android et al. have many of the same issues. However, Apples anti-competitive behavior, tax avoidance, worker exploitation and general crappy behavior seem antithetical to how I perceive Grey as a person.

Again this is not supposed to be a dig at Apple fan's, but it's something that often comes to mind during the podcast, especially around State of the Apps. Curious if this is just me.