Trump Says Transition’s Going ‘Smoothly,’ Disputing Disarray Reports:

The president-elect criticized a report in The New York Times about his early telephone contacts with foreign leaders. In a post on Twitter, he said he had made and received “calls from many foreign leaders despite what the failing @nytimes said. Russia, U.K., China, Saudi Arabia, Japan.”

In fact, The Times reported that Mr. Trump had taken calls from the leaders of Egypt, Israel, Russia and Britain, but said they had been conducted haphazardly and without State Department briefings that traditionally guide conversations with foreign leaders.

Of the transition effort, Mr. Trump wrote: “It is going so smoothly.”

According to Trump, the United States is a mess, but his shitshow isn’t a shitshow. If you’re stupid enough to believe him, everything always goes smoothly for him, all the time.

I still can’t believe this is happening.

NYTimes: Trump Campaigned Against Lobbyists, but Now They’re on His Transition Team:

President-elect Donald J. Trump, who campaigned against the corrupt power of special interests, is filling his transition team with some of the very sort of people who he has complained have too much clout in Washington: corporate consultants and lobbyists.

Jeffrey Eisenach, a consultant who has worked for years on behalf of Verizon and other telecommunications clients, is the head of the team that is helping to pick staff members at the Federal Communications Commission.

Michael Catanzaro, a lobbyist whose clients include Devon Energy and Encana Oil and Gas, holds the “energy independence” portfolio.

Michael Torrey, a lobbyist who runs a firm that has earned millions of dollars helping food industry players such as the American Beverage Association and the dairy giant Dean Foods, is helping set up the new team at the Department of Agriculture.

If this news comes as a surprise to you, you’re an idiot.

The members of Designer News are tackling Apple’s problems for them.

(sing the title like Neil Young’s Old Man)

Jim Dalrymple is happy to report Neil Young has put his albums back in Apple Music.

So nobody bought your shitty, Toblerone-shaped PonoPlayer, did they, Neil? I think a lot of us knew this wasn’t going to work when he first launched his Kickstarter project for it back in October of 2014.

Slate contributor Seth Stevenson reviewed the PonoPlayer in February of 2015. He compared the remastered, ‘PonoMusic’ version of Neil Young’s “There’s a World,” with the iTunes version.

He couldn’t tell the difference, so he conducted the experiment on his colleagues:

I figured maybe my ears were faulty. So I ran an informal experiment. I asked several Slate colleagues to turn their backs while I played them the same 30-second clip on both devices, through headphones. Then I asked them to pick which clip they thought was higher resolution. I mixed up the order—at times playing the Pono first, and at times the iPhone. Some people borrowed my Polk headphones for the test while others used their own equipment. (The quality ranged from Apple earbuds to Klipsch in-ears to high-end Sony studio cans.)

Bottom line: Not one person had any clue whether they were listening to the Pono or to the “inferior” iTunes track. There was zero confidence in determining which was which. When forced to state a preference, six out of seven people actually picked the iPhone as the higher-quality experience. An eighth person refused to guess because he simply had no idea. These folks were in their 20s and 30s, all avid music listeners. A couple of them write about music professionally and one is a video producer.

I think Young’s intentions were good, but I think he wanted to believe so badly that his music sounded better that he convinced himself he was hearing higher fidelity sounds where none existed.

Neil Young unintentially made a placebo music player and sound format.

Zdziarski explores the myth of professionals needing 16GB of RAM (via The Loop):

Apple’s latest MacBook Pro line is limited to 16GB due to energy (and likely heat) constraints, and that’s gotten a lot of people complaining that it simply isn’t enough for “real pros”. Ironically, many of the people saying that don’t quite fall into what many others would consider a “real pro” themselves; at least based on the target demographic of Apple’s “pro” line, which has traditionally been geared toward working professionals such as photographers, producers, engineers, and the like (not managers and bloggers). But even so, let’s take a look at what it takes to really pin your MacBook Pro’s memory, from a “professional’s” perspective.

First of, “myth” is a misnomer. It’s not a myth, it’s a view held by some (not all) professionals who legitimately need at least 16GB of RAM to work smoothly. Zdziarski acknowledges these people exist but I disagree in calling them “edge cases” like he does.

Zdziarski correctly points out developers need to write software that doesn’t try to eat every gig of memory your system has:

A couple apps you won’t see on this list are Chrome and Slack. Both of these applications have widespread reports of being memory pigs, and in my opinion you should boycott them until the developers learn how to write them to play nicer with memory. You can’t fault Apple for poorly written applications, and if Apple did give you 32 GB of RAM just for them, it wouldn’t matter. Poorly written apps are going to continue sucking down as much memory as possible until you’re out. So it’s reasonable to say that if you’re running poorly written applications, your mileage will definitely vary. RAM is only one half the equation: programmers need to know how to use it respectfully.

This is the Catch-22: Apple could raise the Macbook Pro’s memory to 32GB but then there’s the risk that developers just make more bloated, memory-hogging software.

This reminds me of what Robert Moses did in the early 20th century in New York City, building bridge after bridge after bridge to alleviate automobile congestion. In the short-term it worked, but eventually the number of cars increased to fill all the bridges and the congestion returned.

NYTimes: Donald Trump’s Victory Is Met With Shock Across a Wide Political Divide:

Among the candidates for cabinet secretaries and advisers are members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle, aides said, including Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a crucial adviser on policy issues; Steven Mnuchin, a businessman who was Mr. Trump’s national finance chairman; Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former mayor of New York; Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey; and Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House.

Christie. Giuliani. Gingrich.

That’s one of the most sickening sentences I’ve ever read.

Inside Donald Trump’s Last Stand: An Anxious Nominee Seeks Assurance:

Mr. Trump’s campaign is no longer making headlines with embarrassing staff shake-ups. But that has left him with a band of squabbling and unfireable advisers, with confusing roles and an inability to sign off on basic tasks. A plan to encourage early voting in Florida went unapproved for weeks.

The result is chaotic. Advisers cut loose from the campaign months ago, like Corey Lewandowski, still talk to the candidate frequently, offering advice that sometimes clashes with that of the current leadership team. Mr. Trump, who does not use a computer, rails against the campaign’s expenditure of tens of millions on digital ads, skeptical that spots he never sees could have any effect.

Trump doesn’t use a computer and his campaign staff took control of his Twitter account. It seems like he spends half his time on Twitter. Where is he channeling all his angst?

His head might explode in the next 48 hours.

This made me smile.

October 31st marked the 51-year anniversary of Arnold Schwartzenegger and Franco Columbu meeting for the first time at a bodybuilding competition in Germany.

So they decided to make a short video about it.

Yesterday Microsoft launched their Slack competitor, Teams.

Then Slack responded in a full-page ad and on their site/Medium:

Dear Microsoft,

Wow. Big news! Congratulations on today’s announcements. We’re genuinely excited to have some competition.

We realized a few years ago that the value of switching to Slack was so obvious and the advantages so overwhelming that every business would be using Slack, or “something just like it,” within the decade. It’s validating to see you’ve come around to the same way of thinking. And even though — being honest here — it’s a little scary, we know it will bring a better future forward faster.

However, all this is harder than it looks. So, as you set out to build “something just like it,” we want to give you some friendly advice.

That, my friends, is what’s called passive-aggressive. It’s also douchey. This is how nerds talk shit. Soooo intimidating.

After checking out their product video, I’m quickly reminded of what I just wrote earlier today about Microsoft always being a day late and a dollar short.

I’ve been using Slack for a few years now with different companies. I think it’s solid, but I don’t think it’s as amazing as a lot of reviews make it out to be. From the two companies I’ve used it at I’ve actually found Slack to be the place where a lot of people waste time not working, posting animated GIFs and sharing stuff. I’m sure those companies were complete edge cases.

The reality is I won’t be using Microsoft Teams unless a client or the company I’m working for asks me to. It looks interesting based on the screenshots and you can clearly see where they’ve been influenced by Slack.

On October 26th, Microsoft unveiled their new all-in-one, touchscreen Surface Studio.

From everything I’ve seen and read about it, it looks like an amazing integration of hardware and software. This integration used to be the sole domain of Apple, but now Microsoft and Google are coming to realize the practical and financial benefits of controlling the whole widget.

First thought: will this machine make me move to Windows? No.

Second thought: will this machine make other people move to Windows? I’m not sure.

It’s in Microsoft’s DNA to be a day late and dollar short on everything they’ve done, at least for the last decade. Windows Phone was late, their Surface tablets were late, and now an iMac competitor. I’m feeling a little déjà vu with the Surface Studio.

Microsoft is like the kid in college who needs until the summer to finish their thesis paper. Sure they might turn a great paper, but everyone else has moved on.

In case you forgot, the original Microsoft Surface was a big-ass, $10,000 table. In 2007, when the original iPhone launched and the race kicked into high gear for dominance in mobile computing, Microsoft decided to go big and impractical. Now let me be clear: the Surface Studio is way more practical than its great grandpappy was, but there still is a wiff of impracticality in it.

Microsoft is going after the high-end, creative segment of the desktop market with the Surface Studio, a segment dominated by Apple. They’re barely making a dent in the mass market with their phones, tablets, and laptops. So now they think they can eat Apple’s lunch and steal away desktop users? It’s possible, but I’m not convinced.

On the other hand, there’s been considerable backlash over the new MacBooks Apple announced, but we’re only a week out. Let’s see where we are this spring. We’ll be seeing new Mac desktops by then too.

—Keith Richards from The Rolling Stones documentary, Crossfire Hurricane

Comma.ai cancels the Comma One following NHTSA letter:

Renowned iPhone hacker turned entrepreneur George Hotz (aka geohot) has cancelled his autonomous driving startup’s first official product, the Comma One aftermarket add-on that would’ve allowed certain cars to gain Autopilot-like highway driving assistance abilities.

Hotz announced the news on the Comma.ai official Twitter account, noting that the decision to cancel was made after he received a letter from the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The NHTSA letter explained that given its mandate of ensuring safety on U.S. roadways, it needed to ensure the Comma One is compliant with regulations before it can be offered for sale.

Some of these startups are fragile little snowflakes, aren’t they? One letter from the NHTSA and they’re done. Hey Hotz: this isn’t just publishing code to a fucking server, you’re putting physical vehicles onto physical roads.

I’m all for innovation, but safety is kind of important. The transition we’ve begun — from humans driving cars to cars driving themselves — is not something we can take lightly or we run the risk of killing many people.

In the longterm, after we’ve conducted thorough tests and ironed out the kinks, I’m certain autonomous vehicles will be multiple times safer than us humans driving ourselves. Robots don’t drive angry, robots don’t play Pokémon Go while driving and end up killing a young boy, and robots don’t drive drunk.

This Old-Ass Commodore 64 Is Still Being Used to Run an Auto Shop in Poland

Over at CNN Money, Matt McFarland looks into the the benefits of taking walks and why so many top execs take them:

Marc Berman, a University of Chicago psychology professor, has found that walking in nature can improve what’s called directed attention, when we force ourselves to focus on a task. With the other type of attention, involuntary attention, our interest is naturally captured and held, such as by a sunset.

“You don’t hear people say ‘Wow I’m so exhausted looking at that beautiful waterfall,'” Berman told CNNMoney.

When we’re in nature, our directed attention isn’t lost on distractions. You don’t waste brainpower focusing on the conference room you’re in, your chirping cell phone, or making sure a car won’t hit you. We only have so much attention to use, so saving every bit is an advantage.

I take walks all the time. I suppose the habit began during the 10 years I lived in Manhattan. When you live in New York you do a lot of walking. I walked everywhere and for different reasons. Sometimes I walked to clear my head, sometimes to take pictures, and sometimes just because the weather was nice.

I recommend everybody pick up this habit. There are no downsides, just don’t fall down a hole or get hit by a car.