Yesterday, I wrote about the Apple Vision Pro and how to think about its prospects for success.
Being human, I made one glaring factual error. It doesn’t affect the substance of the argument. It is more embarrassing for me. The sort of brain freeze when you claim Madrid is the capital of Portugal, knowing perfectly well it isn’t.
But every error is an opportunity to learn.
The error was that I said Dan Bricklin invented Lotus 1-2-3. He, of course, created VisiCalc. I even used VisiCalc on the family Apple II. Mitch Kapor developed Lotus 1-2-3, something I should have known, having met Mitch a few times and having developed my first useful, working piece of software in Lotus 1-2-3.
But here lies the power of today’s LLM-powered query engines. I pasted my essay into Perplexity with the following query:
Please review the following essay. Please identify any factual errors and explain the error citing reliable sources.
Perplexity did a fantastic fact-checking job. Here is the beginning of it…