So the fact that Apple's share price has increased 1,200% since he took over is just a coincidence?

To be fair Apple was already a giant rolling ball of success, and they have historically had an ingrained culture of caring deeply about their products above all else.

Any decisions that would affect their trajectory will get a ton of deliberation from a lot of smart people; i.e. there wouldn't need to be a ton of input or ingenuity from the CEO to see returns like those from Apple, imho.

Not to say that Cook isn't great or that it wouldn't be difficult to achieve that success.

So many companies have flatlined after a new CEO took over, think Microsoft after Ballmer took over. So I think there is some difficulty involve.

I guess my point is that the leadership within Apple is a lot more diffuse than typical;

I believe most of Apple's value is from delivering a high degree of consistency and polish; owing to its culture of relentlessly developing the UX of their products.

Therefore the CEO's primary roles at Apple would be to maintain that culture, steer the ship into new segments, and discern when the public will care about those segments.

I think Cook has done a decent job of that.

Making it all possible with RnD and supply chain is another story, but also where Cook is known to excel so maybe I'm underselling him. Jobs had Cook so presumably Cook would find a Cook if he weren't Cook.

I don't know much about Microsoft but Balmer was definitely taking over a different beast than Cook.

If I let my bias show I'd say Microsoft's value is from developing technology just enough to set up bill gates for customers :p

Apple was a giant rolling ball of success when John Sculley took over, too.

But that sure didn't last.

Were the shares previously nosediving before he took over?

I think it's laughable to assume that it was only Tim Cook who contributed to that. Indeed, where would we be if it wasn't for these handful of superhuman geniuses.

During his tenure the market cap has increased by about $2 trillion. How much of that value has Cook captured? A very small %. Perhaps even smaller than his actual contribution! You could easily make the argument that Cook is being exploited by the shareholders.

What has been the remarkably great move from Apple in the last 10 years? Develop their iTunes store to provide more media and bring in-house productions to have a more of a moat? Develop their own silicon to decrease reliance on others? Develop products that can take advantage of their strengths, a la Tags? Move into services as most of the world is getting more Apple-product saturated? Extend ownership of their product lifecycles, by being hostile towards 3rd party repairs? Offer financial services to allow the less fortunate to obtain your products? I don't want to detract from the respect that's due for these moves, but they are not that far off the beaten path for a market leader looking to solidify it's position in it's place. Most other improvements to their products and services have been incremental. Of course, there is something to be said about not straying from the light, as other companies have done. However, I do think that Apple's valuation is somewhat tied to the buying power of the world, and on the timescale's we're looking at, more and more people are gaining access to Apples products as the world economy improves. All of these are great things, and of course I'm talking with hindsight, but to me these all feel like strategies that seem somewhat obvious and will generally work wonders when executed from the position of a market leader.

Maybe, maybe not, but I think the idea is that it's hard to say with certainty. Apple is large and complex enough that any number of factors could have lead to that share price increase. My personal opinion is that probably yeah he had a good chunk to do with it. But it's hard to say that with certainty, it's certainly worth discussing and not taking for granted.

Apple's share price has increased more than 12,000% since Foxconn received its first order from Apple. Is that just a coincidence?

Well, the same thing has happened for Amazon and Google, so… yes?

Of course you can argue that the wrong leader would have torpedoed the company.

This article misses the point. The point is that at a time where teenagers' finances (= their parents') are not at their best (COVID), where theaters and libraries are closed-ish (COVID), where you can't just hang out freely at a coffee shop that offers free comics to read (COVID), where you can't side down in the aisles of the comic book store (COVID), they decided to give them $350. Nobody believed they'd use it to go see some Shakespeare, and nobody should. It's just dumb classicism.

Good on them to use it for something they LIKE instead of something someome else deems better for them.

I see a lot of people say "I take theanine" but what do you mean exactly? You just drink tea or does it come in other forms?

L-theanine is readily available in supplement form in the US (e.g. $6 for a bottle of 100 pills). I don't take it regularly but that's mostly because I haven't examined the evidence carefully.

Probably supplements. Be careful about what you buy though, internet is full of random "made in china" supplements containing god knows what

It comes in natural things like mushrooms / green tea, but its also synthesized in capsules / powder / products like neurogum.

Also, who's going to feel less anxiety when filming themselves vs. typing?

The idea worked for Instagram, where the aesthetic for regular posts ended up so forced nobody wanted to just make random everyday posts anymore.

For Twitter I didn't see the use, though posting a Fleet does bother people less than spamming, they're too hard to make without ending up ugly.

I'd rather see a change where the search doesn't let you stalk random people by searching for what they posted 3 years ago…

Makes me think (and shudder) about how one could make filters for text. I partially regret saying this and also still curious :-)

Microsoft already did it, it was called Word Art

No no, not for the visual appearance of the text, but rather the filter equivalent of "improving" the content.

Almost like applying a GPT-3 editor to spice up my tweets. I type X tweet and then use GPT-3 or something like that to modify my words/sentences to have more of a Shakespeare or Steve Jobs voice to it.

edit looks as if I found an experiment with GPT-3 to do exactly this: https://twitter.com/intuitmachine/status/1287050253103968257...

"If you pursue this career, you'll live under a bridge in 5 years, so I'm kicking you out and giving you no money, so you'll live under a bridge right now."

edit: kudos to you for sticking to it really! You should be proud of yourself!

Let's face it, the Moulinette was the hardest part.

No, the hardest part is not punching the asteks in the face when you ask them for help on a problem that has stumped you for two hours, they take one look at your code and they go "C'est pas à la norme!" AND THEY WON'T EVEN TELL YOU WHERE.

If it's never been done then I don't understand how this is specifically problematic for the covid vaccine then.

Well, there IS a pandemic. So there IS a good reason for "selling it" "a bit hard". It will literally save lives and end a world-wide economy-crippling disease.

Now I agree the process was quicker than usual, that it brings up a lot of questions. But it's the studies we should question, the efficiency, the long term effects. The way it's sold and "advertised" is just equally as dramatic as the disease it's trying to stop, in my opinion.

"It will" is a strong choice of words. The root of the matter is I don't, personally, trust the people doing the selling.

It varies by region but where I'm from, back in April-ish, we were sold: "just two weeks of lockdowns and the virus will die out! everything will be back to normal!". So we did. Businesses shut down, transit basically stopped running, our downtown core was a wasteland. Everyone parroted "stay safe, stay home" back and forth at each other and sat at home for a few weeks. It sucked, everyone had a bad time, lots of busineses had to go out of business, but we all were told it was for the greater good and it'll be worth it. And... it didn't do shit.

Now here we are again. Odds on, in a few months, it'll be either "turns out this vaccine doesn't protect you as well as we thought", or "turns out it only protects you for six months", or "turns out the virus mutated so the vaccine isn't effective at all anymore"? In exchange for, what, testing not only a new vaccine, but a whole new method of vaccination on yourself? Whether that's worth it to you or not is a personal choice, but "it will literally save lives and end [the disease]" is firmly TBD.

Out of curiosity, where are you from, that you were told the virus would "die out" after just two weeks of lockdowns?

And also, can you back your claims that the spring lockdowns "didn't do shit"? That's not at all what the numbers show.

I don't know where you're from that you heard that. But from where I'm from, we were told that:

- it was just only the beginning of a massive sh*tstorm, not just "2 weeks of lockdown and we'll be ok"

- the lockdown in April was to mitigate as much as possible the first wave

- a second wave would almost definitely arrive in the winter (hello! it's here! we're in lockdown again, pretty much as planned)

- nothing will be back to normal before we get the vaccine, and even then, it would take months if not years for it to be a thing of the past, and that until then we'd have to do our best to follow the guidelines.

You can't compare scientific proof that something works vs. a government decision taken to "mitigate things".

The spring lockdown helped free beds in hospital and ultimately it saved thousands if not millions of lives worldwide. Period. This is UNDENIABLE.

Also, maybe if some people weren't so doubtful that these decisions were for their own good and stopped throwing tantrums about their "fundamental right to breathe air", we wouldn't have had a second wave at all. Maybe.

That doesn't make any sense. The worse the virus is the less you should need to "sell" the vaccine.

If it was a rushed vaccine to prevent you from becoming a zombie you wouldn't need to sell it.

If it was a vaccine for the common cold you would need to sell it.

Of course, you're right, it doesn't make sense and that's not how it should work. Unfortunately, science and medicine are fields that are largely driven by money. Laboratories don't really care about a vaccine for a disease in Africa that nobody will be able to afford or invest in. They will turn to better markets. There are multiple reasons, the most obvious one is that they're private companies, their goal is to make profit. The second one is that it's a field that requires a lot of resources. So you need a big ROI.

One of the reasons the vaccine for COVID-19 was produced so quickly is not because of some sort of conspiracy, like they had the antidote all along or something. It's just that when there's a real buck to make, it becomes a race between these big pockets companies.

That's one side of it and I don't know enough to cover every aspect of it. Also, it's just my opinion of course and how I see this.

Edit: I'm doubtful about a zombie vaccine being given for free. Most likely in a Walking Dead type scenario, where the economy would completely go down, there wouldn't be any financial incentive to keep the searches going, and no money to back up the researches either. So we'd be scr*wed I think. :o)

Same question. People seem to be researching that kind of stuff (numbers that are sums of 3 cubes). Why?

I only recently heard what I think is a pretty solid answer to this question [1] that put it this way: We've pretty much got addition nailed down. We're pretty solid on multiplication. However, we are surprisingly weak mathematically when we try to put the two together; you can write down some extremely small math statements that baffled mathematicians for centuries, and for such statements that we have solutions for, they often get into very, very complicated math.

So you have things like Fermat's Last Theorum, or if you prefer, the Question: For a^n + b^n = c^n, are there any solutions with n > 2 for integers? Note how it's just multiplication and addition on the integers. There are simpler questions, but they don't get much simpler. There's no real analysis, transcendental numbers, imaginaries or higher-dimensional numbers, infinities, and so on, at least not in the question itself; it's literally so simple you can reasonably explain it to a middle schooler. It took mathematicians centuries, and the simplest version of the current proof is still PhD-level work to understand. (I suspect even a Master's student in math would have to carefully craft their entire post-doc education for the purpose of understanding this exact proof to be able to say they fully understood it, with no lemmas taken on faith, and I'm still not sure they could make it without a lot of independent study.)

You have things like "Can all of the numbers of a certain form be created via 'a^3 + b^3 + c^3'?", which sounds like it really ought to be simple. It's not too hard to eliminate 4 or 5 mod 9, but proving that it can always be done for everything else is beyond all current known math.

There's a lot of these sorts of questions in math right now. This is a particular single example of a family of very vexing problems.

It's hard to know what the practical impact of mastery over this combination would be, but I expect there probably would be some. Mastery over addition and multiplication have practical consequences that would require a series of books to explore; you have to think that mastering them in combination couldn't help but be practically useful.

[1]: I think it was a somewhat recent Numberphile video, but it may also have been a Terence Tao lecture. References solicited if you've got 'em.

[2]: https://youtu.be/wymmCdLdPvM?t=209

Addition and multiplication (i.e. arithmetic) over the integers are all that are necessary to express first order logic and allowed Gödel to express his incompleteness theorems at such a fundamental level. The logical power of arithmetic is likely why many seemingly simple questions about arithmetic can have very complicated answers or no definitive answers at all.

I see! I'm math-dumb and always struggle with that sort of research. I need to see practical applications for what seems TO ME like ridiculous questions (I'm not implying they are, I have a feeling PhD+ level people don't usually waste time on pointless stuff). Thanks for the elaborate answer!

Questions that are simple to understand and difficult to answer will naturally attract the attention of a lot of mathematicians, because they don’t require a lot of specialized knowledge to work on.