James' World 2

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For months, Luke Bassett had been searching for a particular hard-to-find item, whose market value he estimated at a thousand dollars. He found a collector who was willing to sell him two, for a total of six hundred and fifty. That was a bargain, but there was a catch. Payment had to be made by bank transfer, and the seller wouldn’t ship. Bassett was living in Connecticut and studying computer engineering; the seller was in Ukraine. This was more than a year before the Russian invasion, but there were still logistical challenges. Luckily, Bassett had a wealthy friend, in Barcelona, whose sister-in-law knew someone in Kharkiv. The sister-in-law’s friend made the pickup, then sent the package to Spain on the wealthy friend’s private jet.

What Bassett bought were two sets of computer keycaps: the squarish buttons you press when you type, maybe half a pound of plastic altogether. I was looking at one of the sets, which he had installed on an OTD 360 Corsa, a keyboard that was produced in limited numbers in South Korea in 2013. “The keycaps were made back in the nineties by a German company called Cherry,” he said. On the face of each letter key was a Roman character, in black, and a Cyrillic character, in red. On eBay, for twenty or thirty dollars, you can buy a keycap set that (to me) looks the same, but to Bassett, there’s no comparison. “These were made for a Russian company, and only a few sets still exist,” he said. The keyboard was unusual, too. “It’s one of a hundred made by one of the most influential designers in the world. The color of the case is called hyper gray, and what’s unique about it is that each one is a slightly different shade. The designer was trying to reproduce the gray of an earlier keyboard of his, but he never did get it right.” Bassett acquired the keyboard in a trade. Next to it, on a table, was another scarce model, a Kira 80, whose Escape key Bassett had replaced with a keycap from a series called Mummy II, made by a keyboard artisan known as PunksDead. “That keycap is rare,” he said. “Right after I got it, a guy offered me three grand for it. And I was, like, ‘Hmmm, tempting—but no.’ ”

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Illustration by Maria Chimishkyan

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“Oooooooooooooooh,” the audience gasped at the image of a manila envelope splayed across the screen before them. It was 2008, and Steve Jobs, the digital messiah himself, was holding court at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, dressed in his signature presentation attire of turtleneck, jeans, and New Balance sneakers. At the time, laptops looked mostly like squished cinder blocks, with thick and bulky frames and about as much sex appeal as Donald Trump on a golf outing. Jobs had a tradition of saving big announcements until the end of a presentation—“one more thing” for the faithful followers—and this year was no exception. “It’s so thin, it even fits inside one of these envelopes that we’ve seen floating around the office,” Jobs said as he pulled the first MacBook Air out of a manila envelope, like a doctor delivering a baby. This, of course, ushered in more “oohs,” “aahs,” claps, and cheers from the audience as they beheld a silver laptop—the thinnest computer ever made.

A lot has changed at Apple since that day in 2008. Jobs passed away, and the company became the most valuable company on the planet, with an incomprehensible market valuation of over $2.5 trillion. Yet, some things haven’t changed, including, up until a few weeks ago, the overall design of the MacBook Air that Jobs showed off 14 years ago. For more than a decade, the design of the Air largely remained unchanged, with a few minor tweaks here and there. Until last month, that is, when Apple unveiled a completely new design of the MacBook Air, which runs on the company’s new M2 chip.

The laptop, which is the shape and thickness of a pad of paper, comes in four “colors”: starlight, space gray, silver, and midnight. (The midnight looks black to me, but Apple representatives insist it is a blueish-blackish-midnight color.) The reception among critics has been predictably gushing. “Gorgeous,” CNN declared. The Verge called it “beautiful.” And CNBC said it was “near-perfect.” I’ve used the new Air, and those adjectives are on the money. But I did find myself wondering: What took so long to change the design?

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from Bloomberg/Getty Images. 

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You can find AI that creates new images, but what if you want to fix an old family photo? You might have a no-charge option. Louis Bouchard and PetaPixel have drawn attention to a free tool recently developed by Tencent researchers, GFP-GAN (Generative Facial Prior-Generative Adversarial Network), that can restore damaged and low-resolution portraits. The technology merges info from two AI models to fill in a photo’s missing details with realistic detail in a few seconds, all the while maintaining high accuracy and quality.

Conventional methods fine-tune an existing AI model to restore images by gauging differences between the artificial and real photos. That frequently leads to low-quality results, the scientists said. The new approach uses a pre-trained version of an existing model (NVIDIA’s StyleGAN-2) to inform the team’s own model at multiple stages during the image generation process. The technique aims to preserve the “identity” of people in a photo, with a particular focus on facial features like eyes and mouths.

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Wang, X. et. al

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This has been going on a long time.

I can’t remember when the habit was formed, but the vast majority of humanity appears to have adopted it.

No, I’m not talking about posting pictures of your frou-frou dessert to Instagram. This is far more elemental. This is the proclivity to put a case on your phone.

When you buy it, your phone looks so pretty. Just like in the ads. But then you buy a hideous $20 piece of rubber to hide its pulchritude. 

Do you do it because you’re afraid of dropping it? Or do you somehow (make yourself) believe that a case will cause your meticulously designed phone to stand out?

Yes, some cases are so, so fetching. Who doesn’t want to put sparkles around their phone? Who doesn’t buy a lovely blue iPhone and then encase it in an ugly black cape?

I fear Apple has had enough of this. More than enough.

Have you ever seen an Apple executive wrap their iPhone in a case? No, you haven’t. But even that example hasn’t been sufficient. So the company has now released an ad, surely intended to help you wean yourself off your unaesthetic, anti-aesthetic behavior.

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