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I’m an extremely critical person. I’m not proud of that, but I’m also not trying particularly hard to change it. I think it’s one of my core strengths and definitely my greatest weakness — I’m able to dissect precisely what makes a thing work and what’s holding it back.

Which is great — except for the fact that it’s nearly impossible not to wear this hyper-critical lens while looking at myself too. Framed positively, this is the most potent “growth mindset” imaginable. Framed negatively, this is being fucking brutal towards myself. And unfortunately, the latter is a much stronger motivator: self-flagellation and withholding satisfaction are addictive in the way that they produce consistent results.

The inactive form is especially pernicious: it feels excruciatingly difficult to ship things when your standard is nothing less than excellence in the eyes of the people you most respect.

Relentlessly examining all the ways that things could be better allows you to recognize and replicate quality while developing a taste for objective truth.

reciting affirmations or “being nicer towards yourself” is basically bullshit advice because it’s asking us to go against our entire nature — the very nature that has been both rewarded and refined into one of our most valuable assets out in the external world.

Backing away from your voices allows you to piece out the kernels of truth embedded in each of their undertones. In my case:I haven’t achieved anything I’m proud of yet and want to feel like I’ve earned my spotI want to commit to something and hold myself to itI want to do something worthy of respect from the people whom I respect

You might avoid doing things that threaten your sense of self, even if they would help you grow. They’ll direct you towards things that feel attainable and legible, even if that’s not what’s best. Being able to accept yourself lowers the stakes, letting you see yourself clearly.

If one must be self-critical, do it based on trajectory, not position.

If you hate things about yourself, it’s impossible to keep it contained. People reserve their greatest cruelty for people who remind them of what they hate about themselves.

maybe that’s the hidden gem of being extremely critical: it gives you a lot of signal on what you want out of life — or at least to start, a lot of signal on what you don’t want. High standards are an essential ingredient to excellence and to be completely honest, I’m quite uninterested in doing anything less than excellent.

I’ve never been good at closing sentences, last paragraphs, or finishing things perfectly. I find conclusions hard to draw because they’re so subjective. Is it really my place to tell you what you got out of my words?

I find it extremely helpful to take notes on my thought patterns in whatever text box, notebook, or messaging app is closest. Texting is particularly great because it’s continuous, ever-evolving, and the exact opposite of an essay ending. Each concise little text bubble is an opportunity to shift, interrupt, and recalibrate how meta my thinking is, given a little help from people who love me.

The clearest sign that I had fallen into the trap of thinking of myself as a brand was how concerned I had become about even slightly shifting my ambitions/interests/personality.

Feeling like you’re worth listening to is a byproduct of making hard decisions and teasing out of them cohesive and convincing personal stories that help you make sense of the world.

I have no perfect conclusion or closing sentence. All I have is a commitment to make the most of my 22-year-won freedom: I will talk more, be wrong more, and feel less ashamed about it. I will endeavor to see beyond myself, chase moments of mental freefall, and unabashedly document the full spectrum of this here human’s experience. I will write this story precisely as I see it, even if that means losing you in the process.

In our system, the prosecutors make the decisions about whether charges are appropriate based on evidence the FBI has helped collect. Although we don’t normally make public our recommendations to the prosecutors, we frequently make recommendations and engage in productive conversations with prosecutors about what resolution may be appropriate, given the evidence. In this case, given the importance of the matter, I think unusual transparency is in order. Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Responsible decisions also consider the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past. In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here. To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now. As a result, although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case.

I should add here that we found no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them. Our assessment is that, like many e-mail users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted e-mails or e-mails were purged from the system when devices were changed. Because she was not using a government account—or even a commercial account like Gmail—there was no archiving at all of her e-mails, so it is not surprising that we discovered e-mails that were not on Secretary Clinton’s system in 2014, when she produced the 30,000 e-mails to the State Department.

From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.

"The United States has prosecuted dozens of former governors, cabinet members and lawmakers. These prosecutions are essential in reaffirming the principle that no one — and especially no political leader — is above the law."

"This is far graver than the previous indictment by a rogue New York prosecutor, and it will roil the 2024 election and U.S. politics for years to come," the board said. It is "striking" and "legally notable" that the indictment never mentions the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which "allows a President access to documents, both classified and unclassified, once he leaves office... The indictment assumes that Mr. Trump had no right to take any classified documents," the board said, which doesn't fit the spirit or letter of the PRA. "If the Espionage Act means Presidents can’t retain any classified documents, then the PRA is all but meaningless. This will be part of Mr. Trump’s defense."

In particular, Special Counsel Jack Smith hits a few key points: "First, that Trump handled the classified material exceptionally sloppily and haphazardly, including stashing documents in a shower, a bedroom, and—as depicted in a striking photo—onstage in a ballroom that frequently held events,” Graham said. "Second, that Trump was personally involved in discussions about the documents, and in directing their repeated relocation. Third, that Trump was well aware of both the laws around classified documents and the fact that these particular documents were not declassified. Fourth, that Trump was personally involved in schemes to hide the documents not only from the federal government but even from his own attorneys. The indictment carefully lays out its case with pictures, texts, and surveillance footage."

Nuclear and military secrets among the documents? Check. Knew the documents were classified, and confessed he hadn't declassified them? Check. Instructed lawyers to lie and conceal the documents' existence? Check. Showed off classified information to people without clearance? Check. Kept them in insecure locations? Check.

"However cavalier he was with classified files, Mr. Trump did not accept a bribe or betray secrets to Russia," the board said. Is that the standard? That a president can only be charged if he's found selling state secrets to Russia post-presidency? No thank you. Not in a country where people spend years and years in prison for markedly less than what Trump did.

As lawyer and conservative columnist David French noted (under "What the right is saying"), this is the "Comey test." This was the standard he set. Based on the indictment, the allegations against Trump very obviously meet that standard. The Justice Department is alleging his conduct was willful and that he obstructed justice.This was also the standard Trump himself set. Nobody is really talking about this for some reason, but please remember that Trump spent his entire 2016 campaign demanding Clinton go to jail for her email server. "Lock her up" became a rallying cry at his campaign rallies, and some of Trump's own quotes about the need to protect classified information were helpfully collected in the indictment (again, this was a cornerstone of his 2016 campaign)

Many Trump allies say that prosecuting Trump will make us a "banana republic." But the rest of the democratic world is actually much better at holding its leaders accountable than we are. If anything, there is a better argument that both Clinton and Trump should have been prosecuted than that Trump shouldn’t be prosecuted because Clinton wasn’t.

France, South Korea, Israel, and Italy have all prosecuted former leaders for alleged crimes. Just this weekend, Scotland arrested its former leader Nicola Sturgeon for financial crimes. Why shouldn't we hold our leaders accountable?

As Barr noted, the documents’ degree of sensitivity was shocking, and Trump could have avoided all of this by simply returning them. Instead, he appears to have obstructed, lied to, and misled investigators over and over. Yes, we have to wait to see what the defense says, but as Barr also said: "If even half of it is true, then he's toast."

it is totally reasonable to prosecute him for what appears to be egregious and unbelievably negligent behavior. Trump has nobody to blame for his actions and decisions here but himself, and we should set the standard, for our future leaders, that this conduct is unacceptable.

At the end of January — I want to say January 26th — I had another call with Reddit prior to all this where they were saying, “We have no plans to change the API, at least in 2023, maybe for years to come after that. And if we do, it’ll be improvements.” So then two months, three months later, for them to say, “Look, actually, scratch that, we’re planning to completely charge for the API, and it’s gonna be very expensive,” kind of made me think… what happened in those three months? This clearly wasn’t something that was cooking for a long time. And I don’t think they understood how much this would affect people and the response that they would get.

I think as time went on, things like only giving us 30 days to make these monstrous changes, I think it started to muddy the waters. It’s like, well, if you don’t want us to die, why are you giving us such aggressive timelines? And why can’t you bump things out? Or listen to us? Why are you acting in this way?

I think to a certain extent, after some of the blowback from initial posts from developers being like, “This is gonna cost us a lot of money,” they almost went on the defensive internally and said, “These developers are entitled, and they just want a free lunch or something.” And I feel like it got very personal when it didn’t really need to. It was just like, this is gonna kill my business — can we have a path forward?

Where does the line fall between the parental responsibility for loving and caring for a child that you've forced into existence, and your own personal responsibility for growing as a person? I wish I knew.

46% of all new code of GitHub is written using Copilot. (Oh and 75% of developers feel more fulfilled.)

What does it mean that computers can peer a tiny distance into the future? I have the vaguest of vague senses that a few things I’ve seen recently are conceptually connected.

And, to highlight one particularly wild point, if you virtual objects to feel real, then the computer has to PEER INTO OUR (subjective) FUTURE to get ready to react.

Wouldn’t it be great… if you could see… into the future… of the ocean. WELL. Here’s WavePredictor by Next Ocean. First they continuously scan the water around the ship with radar. Then: WavePredictor propagates the observed waves into the future resulting in a near future prediction of the waves arriving at the ship and the resulting ship motions.

It’s not just about avoiding freak big movements. It’s the reverse too: Pick the right moment to hook onto the load on deck when motions are temporarily low. Faster-than-realtime simulation of ocean waves to anticipate moments of still.

I skip forwards across realtime when writing with Copilot. Type two lines manually, receive and get the suggestion in spectral text, tab to accept, start typing again…

the personal computer OS has a model of what’s in the user’s working memory (the screen) and the user’s focus (the cursor) and therefore apps can be interactive the mobile computer OS has a native model of the context of the user (their geographic location) and their communication networks, and therefore we got apps like Google Maps and Facebook the spatial computing OS contains a model of the room, and so we’ll get augmented reality And therefore: the future computing OS contains of the model of the future and so all apps will be able to anticipate possible futures and pick over them, faster than realtime, and so… …?

It’s no surprise that Apple considered holding off on announcing the price until months after WWDC to avoid the negative headlines. In the end, the company decided the price would become an even larger target if it wasn’t revealed at the event. Consumers now have nine months to digest it before the Vision Pro goes on sale.

Betting against a first-generation Apple product is a bad trade — from infamous dismissals of the iPhone to disappointment with the original iPad. In fact, this is a reflection of Apple’s strategy: Start with a product that’s more an elegant proof-of-concept than a prime-time hit; rely on early adopters to provide enough runway for its engineers to keep iterating; and trust in unmatched capital, talent, brand equity, and staying power to morph a first-gen toy into a third-gen triumph

We are a long way from making three screens, a glass shield, and an array of supporting hardware light enough to wear for an extended period. Reviewers were (purposefully) allowed to wear the Vision Pro for less than half an hour, and nearly every one said comfort was declining even then. Avatar: The Way of Water is 3 hours and 12 minutes.

Meta’s singular strategic objective is to escape second-tier status and, like Apple and Alphabet, control its distribution. And its path to independence runs through Apple Park. Zuckerberg is spending the GDP of a small country to invent a new world, the metaverse, where Apple doesn’t own the roads or power stations. Vision Pro is insurance against the metaverse evolving into anything more than an incel panic room.

The only product category where VR makes difference is good VR games. Price is not limiting factor, the quality of VR experience is. Beat Saber is good and fun and physical exercise. Half Life: Alyx, is amazing. VR completely supercharges horror games, and scary stalking shooters. Want to fear of your life and get PTSD in the comfort of your home? You can do it. Games can connect people and provide physical exercise. If the 3rd iteration of Vision Pro is good for 2 hours of playing for $2000 Apple will kill the console market. Playstations no more. Apple is not a gaming company, but if Vision Pro becomes better and slightly cheaper, Apple becomes gaming company against its will.

Inspired by biological form and motion, the Dynamic Island is designed to feel like a living organism, with a deliberate elasticity that serves as a playful contrast to the fixed nature of the hardware it embodies.