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What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
One way Apple may look to cut costs on the new low cost entry-level MacBook is a machine without Touch ID. Is this unlikely? I cannot say. Note that Apple’s entry-level iMac (8/8/16GB/256GB) currently ships without Touch ID. You have a bump of $200 to get the higher-level iMac (10/10/16GB/256GB) with Touch ID. IMHO, it’s strange that Apple offers any computer without biometrics at this point in history.
A MacBook in the $500-$600 range is a game changer, especially for the education/college market. We bought our daughter an ARM-based Windows laptop for college, and while she’s happy with it - Mac was never in the consideration due to the price point. This would have made that choice more interesting, especially since she’s going into a design/arts field where Apple seems to be more prominent.
At that price range - it’s also something I might seriously evaluate for myself.
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Listening to Alex at the 49:20 point (“conversationally find things in my email”) - that sounds a lot like what Windows Recall is designed to do.
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Alex’s comment @1:19:11 about community notes was excellent:
UPDATE: this was Andy speaking, not Alex. Alex seems to also approve, but Alex’s voice is drowned out by Andy:
I’ll say one thing for Elon Musk take over a Twitter. The one thing that he’s done that was very, very good is allowing the community to add notes. Because every time he comes off with something baloney like this, his Own users are saying, actually, no, the App Store rankings have always, often have had alternatives still.
Community Notes are an excellent feature of x.com! Musk allows community notes to be created about his own tweets – even when they make him look bad. AFAICT, there ain’t nothing like it on other social media services: a self-correcting mechanism that nobody owns! I find that x works far better than twitter ever did years ago. Kudos to the MBW panel for noting this wonderful feature of X/Twitter.
Alex pre-announced his MBW 985 pick several days earlier on x.com
First day with the new Blackmagic 180 camera. I’ve been doing immersive for over 10 years. This is the camera I’ve been waiting for. The workflow is light years better than anything I’ve used in the past. Thanks to the band Silk Road for the music and Swell for the space.
Picking up on his “light years better” comment, I asked him:
You’re saying you can do a Blackmagic 180 workflow in less than 12 parsecs?
I knew I wanted to comment something. When I watch live I have a hard time remembering things I wanted to post.
Elon had nothing to do with community notes, outside of not turning the feature off.
I never heard of community notes before Musk acquired Twitter. The NYT summarized it this way:
X’s Community Notes began before Mr. Musk acquired the company in 2022. But Mr. Musk aggressively accelerated the program and largely did away with the fact-checking labels the company had once applied to misleading posts about hot-button issues like elections and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Pre-Musk Twitter was doing all sorts of horrible censorship on the platform: banning users who posted facts/opinions disagreeing with the government, shadow banning of tweets, etc. The group of contract workers doing this were deeply biased. Those were bad times.
Typically, Musk encourages Community Notes. It is a vast improvement over the opaque censorship that happened before he bought the platform.
That’s one view, I guess… if you believe you need a place where people can spout their inauthentic views of the world without moderation. Personally, I think facts matter and I don’t want everyone to freely publish non-factual BS unchecked.
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I’ve not found them that useful. They are more of a popularity contest than a real fact-check.
If you are unpopular, like Musk or governments, for example, everything you post will get a note contradicting what you say.
If you have a big following, any suggested note will get voted down by your fans.
So it doesn’t have much to do with facts IMO.
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Where exactly are there commercial social media services with people solely spouting entirely authentic views? Nowhere! IMHO, I think the best that any service can do is to provide falsifiable (i.e., testable) views. Community notes is a stab at providing that testability, and I think it’s a pretty good attempt. One good data point is that the owner of X/Twitter – the ultimate authority – has no control over community notes. The very existence of Elon getting his #!$$ fact-checked on X/Twitter is a great sign for the service’s integrity.
Do you have the receipts? Can you quantitively demonstrate that the X/Twiter community notes system is a cesspool of “inauthentic views of the world”? Citations? Any good statistical sampling of the “inauthenticity” of twitter community notes? Any links to published science or even thoughtful essays on the topic? I will pay attention to any testable measures you can provide.
Personally, I think facts matter and I don’t want everyone to freely publish non-factual BS unchecked.
Of course facts matter! What social media systems are providing the opposite of “freely publish non-factual BS unchecked” today? Is anyone in the process of implementing it? Where can we see it in action? Is there a beta release? How well does it work? Criticizing the X/Twitter system while asserting there is some superior hypothetical system doesn’t quite add up. Where are the receipts? I’m interested in what you think is better – and why.
Facts definitely mattered during the last 5 years. We just went through an airborne viral pandemic where our public health authorities rarely mentioned the health benefits of raising Vitamin D dosage above the rickety RDA of 400-800 IU/day. The health benefits of higher Vitamin D dosages on viruses has been known for a long time; Security Now! podcaster Steve Gibson covered some of these in SN! Episode #209 August 2009: Vitamin D. That’s a PDF of the show transcript; there were no SN! show notes published back then. In that episode, Steve cited a study showing significant reduction in colon cancer risk with a blood concentration of 20ng/ml of Vitamin D. During the pandemic, a strong correlation was shown with 40-80ng/ml (or 100-150nMol/L) of Vitamin D and vastly improved health outcomes for COVID infections. I did not immediately act on Steve’s recommendations in 2009, but I did significantly increase my VitD supplementation well before the pandemic. I am tremendously grateful for @Leo and Steve for hosting this non-traditional Security Now! episode 16 years ago. Bravo. 
Since the health authorities did little, how did social media do on getting the word out on this topic? Pretty darn poorly. Many leaders advocating higher Vitamin D supplementation were called out for “publishing disinformation”. You may even remember the moniker “disinformation dozen” that labeled the “worst offenders”. Interestingly, someone did ask Fauci in 2021 how much Vitamin D he took daily; he replied on Twitter: 6000 IU/day. TTBOMK, that’s the best our health authorities ever did in suggesting a significant increase in VitD supplementation, and that one tweet actually did make a difference. Unfortunately, nobody ever asked Fauci the painfully-obvious follow-up question.
I did my best to tell everyone in my circles about higher Vitamin D supplementation.
During the pandemic, Twitter/FB/Instagram/etc. were a bust. The place I did find good VitD information was on YouTube. (PhD) Dr. John Campbell and (medical) Dr. Roger Seheult come to mind. Both of these men would read/interpret a lot of science papers on their channels. They were both strong advocates of higher Vitamin D dosage. Seheult’s recent video Sunlight and NIR Pass Through the Body and Can Affect Distant Cells could well be his magnum opus. One site note: there is a correlation between the UVB in sunlight and COVID health outcomes, but it’s not strictly causality. A stronger signal comes from the metabolic impact of Red/NIR radiation from the sun is now strongly linked to anti-inflammatory and other health outcomes. I am crossing my fingers and hoping that Apple will finally provide instrumentation and display to monitor Red/NIR radiation supplementation daily – a fourth fitness ring for the Apple Watch Ultra 3. The value of this should be obvious to anyone who regularly scans the PBM Database, and Apple has had plenty of time to do all sorts of clinical studies/surveys over the last 4-5 years. The time is Hammertime on the PBM Revolution, and I fondly hope that Apple will decisively drive that F1 Car over the line this fall. I’d hate to see Google/Samsung lead this revolution. 
The Wikipedia is a lousy source of authentic information. It’s just fine for viewing the Little League brackets, but it’s terrible for many other topics. You never really know what’s good and what pages are clunkers. Dr. John Campbell continues to be a great source for the planet for health science, but he’s dismissed in the Wikipedia as a source of “COVID-19 misinformation”. Nonsense. The folks who wrote that hatchet piece are the same kind of folks who foisted the myth of “fully vaccinated”. You don’t get to 3.23M YT viewers on a science channel without tons of excellent information and a giant heart.
To answer your question, I think YT is the best source of authentic information on the social media sites. For videos posting fact-based stories, I can test for authenticity by looking up the science papers, etc. and verifying the data myself. Observing the audio and video presentations also give me a way of telling if a video has the ring of truth. YouTube appears to have pivoted their Algorithm in 2021, they point me to all sorts of interesting science that I may or may not be interested in. I’m sure that was a win for YouTube business; it certainly was for me.
A “community notes” system is a vast improvement over the authoritative system of censorship, banning, and shadow-banning that Twitter had in The Old Days. If you think something better out there exists, please provide the receipts. I look forward to exploring that system!
@Leo any idea when Andy is going to make his site live? I periodically check in on ihnatko.com to see if he finally has it ready to go, and it now appears to be the home for a Chinese deer antler farm. I’m not kidding.
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That something would be here, as just one example, and that’s because it’s actively moderated and people know that to be the case, which I presume generally stops people from spouting whatever the heck they want here. (Which is not to claim that nothing inauthentic gets through, but it’s not open season here.) Moderation requires humans (at least so far) so it’s expensive, and that’s why large/busy sites would rather come up with something like community notes instead… in the hope that their users will do that work for free.
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The webpages are from Jinlushan Sika Deer Farm:
“Good velvet antler comes from Jinlushan”
What products can you get from velvet antler? Good question! If you don’t want to know, don’t look at the translation of Andy’s dummy page on google translate . It ain’t wine.
That’s quite a lorem ipsum website! Can’t imagine what the real one will look like.
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Yeah, I made the mistake of examining a little too closely.
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it’s nice that Andy is branching out and making a career pivot to the Chinese markets
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Perhaps it was a dubious decision. OTOH, he did avoid the wet markets.
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It looks like he let his domain expire and someone is squatting it.
It sounded like it was really close to being ready, so maybe he’s just going to put it up at another domain. Or maybe this is the hold up. 
andyihnatko.com seems to be a blank template for now, so maybe he’s moving over to that spot.
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No. There’s no comparison. A single moderator managing a handful of discussions over about 100 average active users doesn’t compare to something like X/Twitter’s Community Notes service. The real social media sites are 7 to 8 orders of magnitude larger than the twit.community.
Can you suggest a single one of the larger services that does anything close to the X/Twitter Community Notes? Anything at all?
Do you have specifics where you think X’s service collapses into “a place where people can spout their inauthentic views of the world without moderation”? Could you make an authentic critique in the style of a community note that actually makes your point? Doubtful.
Your use of the word “authentic” is suspect. If any social media service strove to provide “authentic” messages, it would fail spectacularly.
that’s why large/busy sites would rather come up with something like community notes instead… in the hope that their users will do that work for free.
People “work for free’ on X/Twitter with Community Notes because they believe in the principle of community notes. Why is that a bad thing? If you think something negative is happening in that program, do you have any specific examples live from the service?