Welcome, everyone, welcome. You have reached another Local Maximum. Today we're gonna talk about Apple's announcement, Vision Pro. They kind of threw us a bone here, Aaron, at the last second by doing this really cool demo that everyone's talking about. And if everyone's talking about something we should probably talk about it.

Aaron: It’s nice to have Tim Cook on speed dial when you need that.

Max: Yes, yes. All right. So, but first, I'm not going to make the opening banter too long. Had a really crazy weekend, which is why I am so excited. I had back-to-back bar mitzvahs. So two in one weekend, which was, which was pretty crazy. Saturday into Saturday morning and then into Sunday evening. So one reform and one habbad. So all across the spectrum there.

But anyway, how was your weekend?

Aaron: Good uh-

Max: We saw my cousin's son so that was really, really nice. Sorry, go ahead.

Aaron: No, it was kind of the opposite here. We were, we were homebodies. Got a lot of cleaning done but that does not make for an exciting report out.

Max: Yeah. Well, that's good. Because, I'll be over there very soon in a week to prepare for my ultimate trip to Pork Fest, which is. Do they say upstate New Hampshire? I say like up in the mountains, New Hampshire. That's the kind of liberty, sort of, it's a little hippie-ish, it's a little hippie-ish. I don't know if they would describe it. With guns

Aaron: It’s libertarian woodstock, right?

Max: Yes, libertarian Woodstock.

And the interesting thing this year is that RFK Jr. is going to be speaking. So if that ends up happening, I'll definitely go to that. I'll be very interested to hear what he has to say. And yeah, I believe that's on Thursday. So I'm gonna go check that out. And hopefully, when I'm over there with you, we won’t be able to do so much video. But we'll be able to record some podcasts in person, which would be really nice.

Aaron: Yeah, looking forward to it.

Max: All right. And furthermore, I just released a blog post on the updated version of my paper from nine years ago, fast MLE. Fast maximum likelihood estimate for the Dirichlet-multinomial. It's called revisiting the Dirichlet-Multinomial After 10 Years. It's a great blog post about Bayesian statistics and computation, and how to figure out how to compute something fast by not doing the same computation over and over again. And then making a really cool Python script. So definitely check that out.

If you're interested in Bayesian inference, if you're interested in like conjugate priors and that sort of thing. And if you have to count data. If you have a lot of count data, I bet you could use this Python script. So check it out. I sent it out to my list, my AI research list, but that also goes out to some family and friends and some of them have told me that they didn't understand it. But they posted it in chat GPT and then they said, what's Max talking about here? And they were able to understand it that way. So I heard that was helpful.

Aaron: Yeah, that's always a classic. It's the, whenever you have a technical job, people ask, “what do you do?” And they will tell you years after you've known them, I still don't understand what you do. So maybe the answer is, let me feed something into the the LLM for you.

Max: Yeah. Maybe that's a good answer.

All right. So let's get into it, shall we? Now you're just hearing about this Vision Pro, like five minutes ago? Is that correct? So the rest of us were all glued to the announcement all day today by Apple because they have us hypnotized that much. You're the last person on Earth to be hypnotized.

Aaron: I knew that there was a big Apple reveal coming today. And I think I may have heard somewhere, hints that VR was on the table. But yeah I did not watch with rapt attention. I think the last Apple product I bought with my own money was a like an iPod Nano back in the mid-2000s. So I am certainly not an Apple fanboy, but I try not to be overtly biased against them. So you're gonna have to sell me on this.

Max: All right. Yeah, I know you're still not sold but let's talk about it. Let's do the news headline. And let's get into it. Let's figure out what this thing is. This is definitely the culmination of many years of research.

Aaron: So first off, Vision Pro.

Max: Yes.

Aaron: I am not intimately familiar with the full Apple product line, but Vision Pro implies that there's just a Vision. Did they just skip that level entirely?

Max: They skip that level entirely. I think it's because this is like the expensive one and maybe later on they want a…

Aaron: Okay. So it'll be like, what is it they do with the Pixels? There's like the Pixel 7 and the pixel 7A is the the economy version of it. So maybe they will come out in six months or a year with something with less of a price tag. And you haven't mentioned the price tag yet, but I'm kind of leading there.

Max: Well, it's somewhat high. Let me just read from the first couple of sentences from the post. Why not? Not a tech blog but let's see how the normies think of all this.

“Apple, on Monday unveiled its long-anticipated mixed reality headset with a whopping $3,499 price tag, marking the iPhones makers first major product launch in a decade.”

Sorry, it’s ‘long-anticipated mixed reality headset, making it the iPhone makers first major product launch in a decade.’ I might actually take issue with that, but let's move on. Man, I really screwed up that first sentence sorry guys.

“Dubbed the Vision Pro, Apple CEO Tim Cook debuted the device as the centerpiece of the tech giants’ Annual Worldwide Developers Conference event at its headquarters in Cupertino, California.

‘Vision Pro is a new kind of computer that augments reality by seamlessly blending the real world with the digital world,' Cook said during the presentation. Describing the devices and innovation on par with the original iPhone or Mac computer. It's the first Apple product you look through and not at.”

Okay, let's play a little bit of the intro here.

Video: Vision Pro is a new kind of computer that augments reality by seamlessly blending, the real world with the digital world.

Max: That's what's going on here. Again we've been talking about mixed reality for a long time on this program. We've spoken about it with Mars by audio, which I worked on, audio virtual reality. We spoke about it with Timothy West, who was working on mixed reality. So a lot of that and hopefully we will…

Aaron: So two things to pull out of that first sentence to clarify. So is mixed reality actually something different? Or is that just Apple's classed-up version of augmented reality. Does mixed reality imply something more or something less?

Max: That's a good question. My idea on this, and I couldn't be wrong, is that mixed reality is like both virtual reality and augmented reality. It's kind of a…

Aaron: The ability to kind of toggle between either mode.

Max: Yeah, exactly.

Aaron: Not being locked in, much like the Oculus is a full VR experience. Whereas Microsoft’s HoloLens is purely an AR interface. Right?

Max: And you can't look through the Oculus.

Aaron: So my other cheap shot here is going to be, you call that the first major product launch in a decade, which you’d disputed. Because who could forget the launch of the Pro Stand? Which really revolutionized the industry and yeah, it's such a shocking price point.

Max: Right. Well, how much was the Pro Stand?

Aaron: It is still to this day. 999

Max: For a stand. For a monitor stand?

Aaron: Under a grand, yes. That's the less cheap shot I'm going to take at Apple here.

Max: I, for some reason, predict this is not the last cheap shot you're gonna take at Apple here. But yeah, so the post says that. I mean, I guess the implication here is the iPhone maker’s first major product launch in a decade, the iPhone, was 2007. So that's quite a long time ago. That's 16 years ago now. Really? Yeah, I guess it is.

10 years ago, if you want to count the iPad. I think that was, was that 2010 or 2011? I'm not really sure. I know it existed by 2011 for sure. And it would have been early 2011, right? Yeah. Okay, so maybe they're talking about the iPad. Maybe they're talking about the Apple Watch, but that was a little later. That would have been? Let's see, when was Apple Watch launched? Well, I want to say 2014. No, 2015, 2015. So the Apple Watch. They don't consider the Apple Watch to be a major launch. And I sort of, maybe I can agree with that. I think that the iPad. Also I want to check when the iPad original launch was just so I can get the timeline straight, ? Yeah. So that was 2010. That was 2010.

Aaron: Okay, I think there's a distinction to be made. And Apple's reputation is for, they don't invent things, but they are the ones that take an idea and they perfect the form factor, and take it from an idea to a consumer product. So they weren't the inventors of the cell phone. They weren't even the inventors of the smartphone. But they took the smartphone concept and made it something that went into every pocket. That’s slight exaggeration, but they became the huge market leader there.

And they did a similar thing with tablets. They obviously didn't invent the tablet, but they became the gold standard for what a tablet is. And to an extent, maybe less so than with phones and with tablets, but they have also done that with the watch. Although I'm struggling to draw the line where, I think we can all agree that the iPhone was much more revolutionary than the Apple Watch. The Apple Watch did not do as, it didn't change the paradigm nearly as much as the iPhone did. But I don't know that we could have made that determination without hindsight. At that time, would we have known.

Max: I mean, there were definitely a lot of skeptics of the Apple Watch when it came out. I had high hopes for it. But it turned out to be, I still have one, but I haven't updated it since version three. I got the first version then a couple years later. Those first, those version two, version three, is when they make the first kind of obvious improvements that you want to get. After that I really have not found the need to update my Apple watch. It goes in the water. I'm sure if I updated it, it would be better. But it's like, there's nothing that is must have about that. And sometimes it can be kind of annoying.

So yes, I think the Apple Watch hasn't been as revolutionary as we had hoped. Maybe this is different, though. If I could make the analogy that you're making, let’s see if that analogy works. And again, we won't know for a few years is that the Oculus is like the mp3 player of its time.

Aaron: Right. And that remains to be seen but that would be the metaphor there, for sure.

Max: Yeah, promising metaphor.

Aaron: And it's not like the iPhone killed the rest of the market. I mean, there's still a thriving Android phone market. But it is fragmented in the way that it is the iPhone and everything else, even if I don't know what their current market share is. And it’s much, much less dominant on the watch side. We shall see whether they, what kind of an impact they have on the VR side. I don't expect them to drive the competition out completely. But they could capture a clear majority, potentially

Max: Right. Now if you remember, when the iPhone came out, it wasn't like everyone had an iPhone by 2008. It really took three or four years before the smartphone took off. And the iPhones. This might be a much longer timeframe than we're expecting here. Even if things seem to be accelerating all the time. But sometimes for these consumer products, there's only so long before, you have to wait a certain amount of time before people get used to a product. Especially at this price point.

I think by pricing it at $3,500, they don't expect or want everybody to have this headset. I think this is just for some people are gonna get it for work. Some people are such fans of Apple, that they gotta have the newest thing and try it. So there's gonna be a small number of people they could test on to be the guinea pigs, and then they're gonna come out with a much lower priced one in two or three years. Who knows, maybe they can get it under $1,000, that would be nice. And then you have a one-year financing for like, $90 a month or something and people might.

Aaron: If they can get it into the same price band as an iPhone then I think it almost becomes a no-brainer for their dedicated market segment. I say that without a solid grasp on its actual capabilities. But people have proven that they're willing to buy a product in that range that may not be a need, at least during during the adoption phase. Whereas right now it's clearly a luxury or experimental like you said. People who are already excited about AR VR are going to be the ones leading the charge on this.

Max: Yeah. And people are excited about Apple in general. Now, I know some people on the inside and some people who have tried it. I haven't tried it yet, obviously. But they say it's incredible, and that it's just going to blow Facebook's Oculus out of the water with how natural it is.

Aaron: So the big question is when it comes to these kinds of devices is have they solved the motion sickness problem? And I haven't personally experienced that, my VR experience is limited. But I know there's a significant minority for whom that's a real, non-starter. And I've been told that some of the more recent generations have improved on that. But if they found a way to bust through that, definitively, that could be a game changer.

Max: Yeah, so compared to the Oculus, just from what I can see from first look, this is not just for gaming. This is not being marketed solely for gaming. It's for entertainment, in general. It's for movies, but also productivity, and apps and FaceTime. You'll be able to get all of your iPad, iPhone apps on there. You'll be able to open windows and kind of place it around.

The problem with Google Glass was, which was 10 years ago. That came out in 2013. Today, it's seen as a big joke. I actually thought they were pretty cool at the time. But today, they're kind of remembered as this big joke that came out. And people, there was sort of a backlash to it when you put on those glasses.

Now, this new Vision Pro is going to be like a whole headset type thing, kind of looks like a ski goggles a little bit. The Oculus was kind of glasses with like a little bits around it. So the Google Glass actually looks sleeker, even 10 years later. But I think the difference was, first of all, when you looked into Google Glass, which I have, you basically saw a rectangle in front of you. And that was kind of your heads up display. It was all in a rectangle. So it was always, maybe there was like a knob you can tune to like move it further and closer to you. But it wasn't very interesting in terms of like, it didn't look like. Yes, it looked like it was floating in the room but it was very obvious that it was just not part of your environment.

Aaron: Right. And they certainly weren't driving for that. It was an interface to display additional information. They had no illusion that they were.

Max: Oh yeah. I'm just giving the update on what's happened in 10 years. I mean, it's been 10 years. Like, think of the difference between 2000 and 2010 in computing something like that. That's sort of the equivalent with this kind of technology. But I'm just trying to give the update on how different. Yeah, they obviously they couldn't do at the time. They weren't going at it at the time.

I think one of the things Google Glass had that Vision Pro does not have is Google Glass was kind of marketed as something you were going to walk out on the street with and go out and about in like, as you were wearing your glasses, And they had someone doing Foursquare check-ins from it at the time, which was pretty exciting for us at Foursquare. It kind of had the heads-up display, like, ;Oh, you're at this coffee shop, want to check in?’ Boom yes. And that seemed like a pretty nice.

Aaron: I always envisioned it like… You've watched Veep. Right?

Max: Very little.

Aaron: So the President or I guess in earlier seasons, the Vice President, spoiler alert. She has an aide, who one of his key roles is to like stand next to her and whisper in your ear like, this is the ambassador from France. He has three children. He's getting divorced, don't mention his wife, And he would kind of feed that stuff into her ear. And that's kind of what I envisioned Google Glass having. Whether it's audio interface, which is getting a little bit more Mars by audio. Or if it's putting visual stuff up on the screen, but poviding context. And yeah, this is very different than that.

What I'm curious about is, where's the computing power for this? Is it in the headset? Or…

Max: Yes.

Aaron: Oh so that is huge.

Max: That’s the way they said it like there is a computer on your head. Now, they use the term like a full computer and bet it's a damn powerful one.

Aaron: Because I believe that's one of the big things about limitations perhaps, of things like the Oculus. Is that basically you have to be tethered to a fairly powerful base station that's doing all the computation, the GPUs, and whatnot. If they've basically shrunk that down into something, more compact than a cell phone so that it can live in goggles. That is technologically impressive, at least from where I'm sitting.

Max: Yes, there was one caveat to that. One thing is that there's a little wire that comes down just like in these headphones right here. These are wireless headphones. But… actually these are not wireless headphones. My wireless headphones over there, what am I talking about?

But there is a little wire that comes down, because you have to hold the battery in your pocket. So I don't know if that's what you're expecting, but they couldn't fit the battery in your head. They're like no, no, that's gonna make it too heavy, apparently.

They made it sound like the coolest thing ever. Like, it's so cool, you keep the battery in your pocket. But yeah, I think that's going to be seen as the. I mean, it is cool that it is like, pretty impressive what they've done here.

Aaron: Something my wife mentioned the other day is that it's absolutely boggling that there hasn't been more work done in this area. Self-winding watches have been a thing for for like, I don't know, a century plus? Where you moving around during the day, basically powers the device?

Why do we not have that in our cell phones? Like you can combine that with the pedometer fitness app? So it will tell you, ‘Oh, you better get up and go take some steps. Otherwise your phone's going to run out of battery.’ That would be, maybe not a killer app. But it seems like leaving a lot on the ground because power limitation. I mean, and maybe the the real answer there is that there's no way to. It's orders of magnitude too small to extract what you need to run a device like that. But power limitations and batteries, as I understand it, are one of the major issues with with modern mobile devices.

I've completely sidetracked us there. But yeah, I'm not surprised. I wouldn't have guessed it but if they've got to put something outside of the headset, the battery makes sense that you don't want your headset catching on fire on your head.

Max: Yeah, that's true only in your pocket, which is could be just as bad.

But the interesting thing is you're not walking around with it like Google Glass. So since you're going to be in your office or at home, there's ample time maybe to. You still could get caught with low battery, just like my mouse runs out of battery here. But like it's less likely.

But a few more interesting features that I want to discuss. And, again, I think the significance of this won't be clear until we actually use this. But a big part of this is doing FaceTime. And it's like, well, how do you FaceTime? So FaceTime, first of all, it's really annoying with a phone, right? You got to hold it up, and you get tired after a while. And then the person wants to keep talking to you. And you're like, oh my god, I'm still holding this thing up to my head and my arms.

So now this thing doesn't have a camera far in front of you. So what does it do? And also, even if it did, you'd have this weird thing over your eyes. Somehow, what it's going to do is, (a) it's going to. It's all about eye tracking, so you're going to be able to select things with your eye movements. So that's pretty awesome.

But then this thing is going to reconstruct your face through FaceTime in real time, so that the other person, it looks like they're looking at you without the headset on. And then you're gonna be able to talk to other people, make eye contact with other people, and then you're gonna be able to put them in windows at different places in your room. And you're gonna be able to hear them coming from the direction where they seem to be standing.

Aaron: I think the positional audio and windowing people, I think that's pretty cool. The taking the me-moji or whatever, and putting that up in my place, that creeps me a little bit.

Max: Right. And now it's not like a me-moji. I don't think it's like the Zuckerberg like, cartoonish version.

Aaron: It's not completely cartoony but it is an artificial version of you.

Max: Yeah. And is it gonna look like you? Or can you make a change? Can you be like, ‘Look, hey, I forgot to shave this morning and the last few days, can you just shave for me so that I will look like what I want in my business meeting?’

Aaron: I would imagine it's going to look like you when you recorded your face puppet basic.

Max: Yeah, I was wondering that because there's so many cameras on there. Like, is it going to look at your face close up and then try to reconstruct what the picture looks like far away? Or is it just going to be some…

Aaron: I would’ve assumed that it's just tracking your eyes for that movement. But is it also doing mouth, lip reading, mouth tracking to sync that up?

Max: I don’t know.

Aaron: In which case where? I mean, maybe there are cameras pointing down. Will my mustache interfere with its ability to see my lips?

Max: Yeah, I can't see that. I can't see that. So it's just going to be, so you just have to look good one day.

Aaron: I suppose they can fake the lip-syncing by, some good artificial intelligence on going from audio to lip-syncing rather than the other direction?

Max: Yeah, if this thing really works and really looks real, you're gonna hear people say wow because I have no idea what this experience is going to look like. And is it gonna be the true deal or not?

Aaron: I'm already and this is old man shouts at clouds here. Welcome to my TED Talk. But the whole, like, filters, whether it's Snapchat or Instagram or whatever, I don't like it. And yeah, and this is essentially a filter now, it's based on you. But obviously, one of the first improvements, enhancements is going to be okay, we're going to be able to give you the best view possible or a completely, transhumanist you where, if you want to be a talking cucumber, then we can do that. Why can't we? As long as we do eye tracking and lip-syncing, then who cares what's underneath it. And there’s definitely gonna be lots of people that go for something that's either an enhanced version of them or a completely unrealistic version of them. It's getting back to classic metaverse.

Max: Well, maybe one day, we could do a podcast like this through that kind of FaceTime. So that might be fun. But it's like, yeah, I don't know. Since COVID, it's like everyone wants to see each other. And at some point, it's just like, can an audio call suffice for most of the stuff that we're doing?

The announcement also contained the surprise guest, which is Bob Iger from Disney, and they spoke about all they wanted to do with immersive sports, 3D characters, video, that kind of thing. So there's definitely going to be a big entertainment aspect about this.

And there was a little thing about for people like me who wear glasses. But I'm a little bit concerned. They said we've got this little high-tech thing, but it looked like you had to clip in some lenses. And I'm thinking, how expensive are these lenses going to be? Are they going to be, specific for for me? Am I going to have to get these customized? Does that mean that my unit is only for me, it can't be like a family unit?

And so all of these questions I'm kind of thinking about in terms of the glasses. It sounds like you can't just wear glasses under it. Maybe I don't know, if you can't that's a big issue for me. Unless, of course. Look, if I'm already paying $3,500, would I pay another $1000 to get the special thing for people with glasses? I don't know. But it just sounds, I mean, maybe it's not that much. But yeah.

Aaron: Here's a question. And I don't think they put any effort into this in quote-unquote, standard VR, because it's not the problem they're trying to solve. But is there a reason that they can't tweak the projection? What's being displayed in the VR to correct for your visual distortion?

Max: Well, when you're looking through it, you're looking at the rest of the room. So you still need that?

Aaron: But if they have the ability to do both full VR and AR, could they not basically record what's going on outside and then completely virtualize it but with correction for your optical discrepancy there?

Max: I don't know if that's optically possible. That's a very good question. I wish I knew more about. I feel like I should know how optics works.

Aaron: I’m sure there's a simple answer for why this is not an easy problem to solve. But it seems like it should be possible. My guess is that it's just that their solution is, well, you just get corrective lenses. It's easy. It means that it's not something that they're focused on.

Max: Right? Well, no, they are building a thing where it looks like their special lenses kind of hook right into the device. So we'll feel natural once you get it done. But it's also like, look, you want it to feel I think when you're looking at the rest of the room, that's that natural light coming in. And so if they were to do some corrective thing on that digitally, then you wouldn't get any of the natural light coming in. And one of the things that's interesting is people can see your eyes behind it. I don't know if that's a digital projection of your eyes or what but it's kind of. And if they if you could see the person's eyes, they could see you.

Aaron: So you mentioned Disney, I only watched a very short clip there, I was not that blown away by. And granted, it's a lot of, kind of early-stage tech demo stuff. So I'm sure they will eventually do stuff that's super cool with it. But that did not buy me in. I think AR, VR…

Max: It could be a lot of gimmicks like the 3D movies and stuff.

Aaron: AR, VR suffers from the minority report problem, which is that it looks really cool up on the screen when someone's like waving their arms around manipulating stuff, but nobody's going to do that, in a prolonged context. Like that is not an effective, efficient way to work.

I can see it being a solution for, so right now I've got three screens in front of me, laptop and two monitors. It sounds like this device could, maybe not unlimited, but could significantly increase the number of screens that I can virtually project to have multiple things going on at once. And take that with me in a much more portable sense. Which would be a pretty slick feature. But I don't believe I'm going to be wanting to manipulate it like this, I'm gonna want to have a less rigorous interface there.

Max: So first of all. From what I see, first of all, you're not going to be moving your hands around like this. From what I see, it's almost like you're holding a mouse. There's gonna be like a little flick like this, and you can put your hands on the table. Something like that.

Now, also, there are people saying, this is going to be my laptop and I'm going to take all the screens completely off my desk. I don't know if we're there yet. But that's an interesting idea. I mean, you know how they have those where they have those memes where it's like your desk in 2000, your desk in 2020, and it's like completely different. And so you might see, you might see all these monitors being removed from desks in favor of this kind of thing. Certainly, we’ll save desk real estate. But I don't know if this actually replaces your MacBook or, or what.

Aaron: So I'm gonna have to throw this into the show notes but somebody did a project with a what they refer to as a full-body keyboard. Imagine sign language, but if you were literally using your full body and your arms and legs and like YMCA on crack.

Max: I think we said no one’s doing that.

Aaron: Well, they absolutely did it as a gag. But yeah, I think it would be hilarious to, much like they have the, what is it the spreadsheet World Championships on ESPN every year. I don't know if it's literally on ESPN.

Max: I have never heard of that.

Aaron: Oh, well, you're missing out. But I think that they should have coding competitions, where the people code using this full body on the floor technique. Anyway, I'll throw a link to that in the show notes.

Max: All right, excellent. localmaxradio.com/281. Speaking of the show notes page, my archive page is broken. Thanks, Squarespace. So we've got to figure out how to get local maxradio.com/archive working again. I think I need to like separate out the old episodes into like, different blogs by year because there's only so many you can fit.

Aaron: So what you're saying is you have too many episodes.

Max: Too many episodes for Squarespace. Not too many episodes for me, or for anyone. It's 300. It's not like too many episodes. I can read off all the episodes we've done. Like I could literally sit here and read it and it wouldn't take me that long. Why is it hard for a computer to do it? That makes no sense to me. But okay, that's the way it is. And that's what Squarespace wants to do. So this is where we are.

All right. So the debate here now and this is what will be seen in the next… this will play out, I don't want to say five to 10 maybe three to five years. Is this the iPhone moment that Apple is looking for? And also is Facebook cooked with Meta and Oculus?

Certainly, investor and host of this week in Startup’s Jason Calacanis thinks yes, on both accounts. Now, the caveat here is he's hated Facebook. He's been a professional Facebook hater for a long time. But he says Apple will win augmented reality thanks to their app store. Obviously, Meta, which has Facebook we have to remind ourselves, Meta will lose $75 billion funding the roadmap and R&D, eventually giving up on the Oculus and spinning it out. So that's his very positive view for Google right there.

Aaron: I think it's very possible that Meta could still crash and burn in this area, but I don't think it's game over for them. It remains to be seen whether this is really the big breakthrough moment.

Max: Yeah, I guess we'll see. But I don't. I could be wrong, they could have lots of sale, Meta. But I just don't see people getting that interested. Yeah, it’s a cool thing. It's like when you go buy drones 10 years ago. I didn't buy drones, but like a few people thought drones were cool and bought them and it was on South Park or whatever. But it was kind of faddish, you don't really. And you still see drones, but it wasn't like the next big thing in the way that it was supposed to be.

Aaron: I say is look to the side at my drone.

Max: How often do you take that thing out?

Aaron: It’s a cheapo drone. It barely even counts. Definitely does notrequire FAA registration,

Max: I thought you were gonna say it barely even flies.

Aaron: But that drone is about as effective as the model airplanes that I flew back in the early 2000s.

But what I was going for is absolutely, Meta has not cracked the egg. The Oculus, in its current instance, is not the winner here. But I wouldn't count them out because I'm not convinced that this Apple product is. Now, on the one hand, I think the FaceTime thing could be big. But who's gonna go out and buy a $3,500 FaceTime enhancing machine. We'll have to see how this kind of, beta testing is not the right term, but what the early adopters actually end up doing

Max: The early adopter guinea pigs. Just like I remember this in 2007. Who bought an iPhone in 2007? Now, like our Chief Product Officer at Wireless Generation, where it worked at the time, immediately bought one and brought it in to show us so that we could try to figure out what the future was. That made sense. But like, people weren't going out and buying them immediately. Then you started seeing a trickling up pretty fast in like, six to 12 months, particularly when the next couple of versions arrived.

Aaron: Yeah, I don't think I went from a flip phone to a smartphone for a long time after the first iPhone came out.

Max: You're the late majority, you're not the laggard. There's like the early adopters, then there's the early majority, then there's the late majority, then there are the laggards. So you might be more late majority? What do you put yourself?

Aaron: I am probably late majority, primarily driven by extreme frugality.

Max: Well, that's maybe not such a bad idea. Try to let other people waste their time on things that don't pan out.

Alright, I want to know what the audience thinks here, localmaxradio@gmail.com. Or join our locals at maximum.locals.com to tell us what you think about the Vision Pro announcement today. I look forward to talking about that with you. I hope it's not just gonna be the same discussions we always have, Apple fanboys vs. Apple haters. But, we've been talking about this stuff coming for a long time, and it has not panned out. But yeah, it is starting to pan out.

Aaron: Purely from a Apple as a company viewpoint. I mean, not that Apple is struggling financially. Are they still like the wealthiest company in the world or highest valued or something? I knew for a long time, they were, far and away, larger cash reserves than most nations type situation.

Max: But top five for sure.

Aaron: Everyone has been talking for a long time about, when are they going to come up with an innovation? Rather than just increase the screen size on the iPhone and giving it slightly longer battery. And the icons are slightly rounder this year and next year, they’ll be slightly more pointy and basically becoming fashion rather than innovation. This could be them kicking that into overdrive and actually pulling out something new. If it floats. We shall see.

Max: Alright, so not the Apple-hating tune that you were singing before. All right. So good topic. Let's get into our segment.

Narrator: And now the probability distribution of the week.

Max: All right, the probability distribution of the week. We've already gone over all the easy ones. Now we're going into ones that are less well known. And we've talked about the difference between thin-tailed distributions like the normal distribution where things don't really go that far away from the mean. And then we started getting into fat-tailed distributions where you could get a wild pitch. And I threw out an obvious one, a really kind of twisted and warped one last week called the Cauchy distribution. And I know you listen to that, right? I don't know if you've heard that one before but that's a pretty cool one.

And so today, we're going to talk about student's t-distribution. And the way I think about this, is that this is. First of all, this is another fat tail distribution so you can get something very far from the mean. It's a little easier, I think, to wrap your head around how bad this one gets compared to the Cauchy distribution. Because it's sort of like, you have a normal distribution, right? And you know where the mean is. Like, let's say like, the mean is zero. But you don't really know what the standard deviation is.

And so what this one does is, it looks at the standard deviation, really, the square of a standard deviation, of the variance, and one over the variance is the precision. So the standard deviation, there's variance, there's precision, but they’re all kind of are different calculations of the same thing. But this takes the precision and it slaps a gamma distribution on it. And now if you remember that gamma distribution is one that we spoke about earlier. I wish I could figure out which episode that was.

Now that my archive is broken, I am I'm very upset about that. Or maybe I could do a search, right? If I go to localmaxradio.com, and then gamma distribution. Let's see. Maybe it is hmm. Is it this one? Yes, it's episode 268 on Pascal's mugging. All right, I'm gonna post that in the Local Maximum. You remember that one? That’s a good one.

All right, so we spoke about the gamma distribution before. The gamma distribution is a distribution over positive numbers. Whereas the precision, and also the variance, and also the standard deviation are all positive numbers as well. So you're basically saying, there's a positive number here, I don't know what it is. It could be in here, it could be far out there, we don't know. So that makes the tail quote-unquote, fat. But because it's a gamma distribution, gamma distribution is kind of exponential distribution, it's not that fat. It's kind of like a... It kind of has this kind of elongation method to it. But there's sort of a limit to how far out some of these points can go, even under student’s t, whereas Cauchy just goes all the way around, if that makes sense.

So but student’s t is a good distribution, there's some parameter of it, where like, if that parameter goes to infinity, then it just collapses into the normal distribution. So that parameter kind of tells you how far around the precision are we allowed to go? And I guess, once it's infinity, that gamma distribution kind of collapses into a direct single point.

So yeah, so that's the student’s t distribution. And yeah, it's just a very simple way to make the normal distribution fat-tailed. And so it's one to consider if you have a normal distribution, but it doesn't quite fit the error in your data. You want something that could account for wild pitch errors. It's a very good one to use.

Aaron: Cool.

Max: So yeah. Any questions about that? Before we move on?

Aaron: Not about that, in particular, but you mentioned that we've kind of covered all the easy ones. So is it just that the remaining ones, they're going to be some very, very niche distributions? Or is that they're all going to be variations or derivations of existing ones that we've kind of already talked about?

Max: Right? Well, oftentimes, like different distributions or variations and derivations, even before like, it's just it's a little bit inevitable. But some of them, I don't think all of them will be. And I think some of them will just be either a little more complicated or a little bit more obscure. Are there any simple ones left? I don't really think so. So they might be a little more complex. But I'll try to pick ones that have a certain, special intuition, intuitive meaning to me because I am not going to state the equations here on the podcast. I'm just going to state how to think about them. And, if you're interested, you can learn more.

So all right, that was good. Looking forward to oh. I'm reading Meganets by David Auerbach about networks like Google and Bitcoin and government networks that are so big that the owners have lost control. So that is interesting and I'm going to talk to him on the podcast next week or actually the interview is tomorrow. So if we do that, it will come out next week. Very exciting. All right.

Aaron: Looking forward to that.

Max: I’m looking forward to coming into New Hampshire and talking about a lot of new stuff with you, including the whole AI debate. And if I get to writing this, how I would change the Constitution. So that's gonna be a fun one. All right. Have a great week, everyone.

Narrator: That's the show. To support the Local Maximum, sign up for exclusive content and our online community at maximum.locals.com. The Local Maximum is available wherever podcasts are found. If you want to keep up, remember to subscribe on your podcast app. Also check out the website with show notes and additional materials at localmaxradio.com. If you want to contact me, the host, send an email to localmaxradio@gmail.com. Have a great week.

Based in Sydney, Australia, Foundry is a blog by Rebecca Thao. Her posts explore modern architecture through photos and quotes by influential architects, engineers, and artists.

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