Where's my flying car?!

I'm reading Hall's "Where is my flying car?" and the introduction made me think a lot. If you compare planes in 1910 with 1960, they're on a totally different tier of technological magnificence. A plane from the 60s looks almost identical to one from 2010.

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It may sound normal to us that we don't have flying cars yet, because that's all we experienced, but people got remarkably close to making them a reality even back in the 30s.

Why do we still have no flying cars? Was it different social, economical, and political factors that enabled such progress between 1910 and 1960? Is it lack of technology, lack of regulation and infrastructure, or something else responsible for not having flying cars today?

I don't have the answers yet, but I want to know. In the meantime, here's a teaser of modern attempts in making vertical take-off and landing aircraft (VTOL).

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Internet Nuggets

Half of the major players in AI announced something last week. Most notably, X.AI released Grok 1.5v their first model that can "see", and Zuck's Meta dropped Llama 3 which competes with Google's and Anthropic's best models while being open-source.

Limitless AI now sells a Pendant that records everything you say, and processes it in an app to create meeting notes, self-reflections, TODOs, reminders, etc. Seems like new fun AI devices are coming out every other week. Personally, I'm not buying anything yet, but I'm excited to see where all this leads.

While everyone is focusing on making AI models that talk a lot, Microsoft is busy making Mona Lisa rap. (See the other videos in the thread as well.)

Tip: Making Siri useful

You know that feeling of murderous anger when you ask Siri anything more than the weather, and it just lists the websites it found on the internet instead of telling you anything useful?

Last week I discovered four words that made Siri useful: "Hey Siri, ask ChatGPT". You're welcome. (You need to have the ChatGPT app installed.)

Recommendations

Spotify dropped this gold on me and I've been listening to it all week:

Patchwork ARKAI PREVIEW   ​

If you want to read more (fun?) thoughts, we can become friends on X or LinkedIn 🌚. Do you know someone who might like this newsletter? Sharing it helps me a lot: https://newsletter.aristot.io​

-Aristotelis

P.S. What I'm doing now: https://aristot.io/now​