Gregory's Server
“Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15”
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2024/12/3.html
> By enabling the "feature" without asking, Apple disrespects users and their preferences. I never wanted my iPhone to phone home to Apple.
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“Disney has reportedly pulled a Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur episode for telling a trans-inclusive story - The Verge” https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/15/24297438/moon-girl-and-devil-dinosaur-the-gatekeeper When I wrote about the counterculture switch the other day, this is exactly the sort of shit I expected. Mainstream media is going to be a very hostile environment for minorities and diverse stories A couple of days off social media was what I needed. Did a lot of walks and photography. A curious quality of Iceland’s short midwinter day is how it feels like a dawn and a sunset rolled into one with no actual day. The light is born dying. But then again, isn’t everything? Queer Comfort Viewing: cozy coming of age movies: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/queer-comfort-viewing-coming-of-age/ Being the obsessive type with a comp. lit. background I have enough ideas to do one post like this a week for a long long while, but it’s hard to tell if it’d actually interest anybody “Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said - ABC News”
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@baldur Why does every person have the same facial expression? Every decent editor would send back that image with a change request to have more variety (not every kid stupidly grinning). Why are helmets lying around on the floor? Looks like someone threw them around, which you should not do with your helmet. And heck no – that cop should not carry a gun! @baldur I also recall being told in school in the event of a school shooter event, we had shut off all lights and get under desks and stay quiet. We were to avoid the shooter since the police might immediately shoot anyone with a gun. This was of course on one of the "school shooter" drills. @baldur I mean, there’s kids missing fingers, floating busses. The kid front and centre with a helmet on is putting a second helmet on. And the cop is also carrying the abyss inside him. He is death My sister sent me a couple more photos of her cat Kolka, a former rescue she got from the cat shelter here in Hveragerði. A masterful blepper. #caturday  @baldur  Liskov’s Gun: The parallel evolution of React and Web Components https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/liskovs-gun/ This is a bit of an experiment. Probably the longest essay I've published directly on my website. 🙂
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@baldur Fantastic post. My only minor quibble is that I do think the React team has kept innovating – concurrent rendering and RSCs come to mind. Although I'm not convinced the first is a great idea (https://nolanlawson.com/2022/10/22/style-performance-and-concurrent-rendering/) and the second seems to be heavily dividing the React community, I have to give them credit for having the guts to try new stuff even though they're the clear market leader. @baldur +1 on the laughs sprinkled into a piece with great webdev insights and excellent cross-pollination of CS and SE thoughts throughout. The experiment was successful from my PoV. The problem with predicting the imminent pop of the AI Bubble by pointing out how incredibly bad its business fundamentals are, is that tech investors—the crowd that needs to panic for the bubble to pop—have an extremely high tolerance for falsehoods and unrealistic promises. Otherwise they wouldn't be investing in tech. The other problem is that the tempatation to commit fraud—fake the numbers to make AI look successful—is going to be incredibly strong, because those who believe in "AI" also believe it will happen eventually. For many of them, a little bit of criminal falsifying in order to buy time for the revolution to truly kick in won't even cause them to blink. Look at open ai; they clearly stole more material for this latest round of training which is why they are covering it up The way AI fans keep having to say “AI is not going away” makes me think there’s absolutely a chance it might go away.
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@baldur if they do not find a way to make it more error prone (which they wont), it will go away, but it will do A LOT of damage first. maybe that damage is part of their calculation, but that thought leads into conspiracy worlds. @baldur I recently heard the first company advertising (it was a radio commercial) with the fact that if you contact their customer services you get to speak to a real human being, rather than an AI bot. This, to me, is an indication that the AI hype is over the hill.  @baldur I have several genuinely useful LLMs on a USB stick now, that happily run on my laptop. Llama 3.1 8B and 70B are two of them You could shut down every existing model and I’d still be able to get some use out of those “The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus” https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-slow-evaporation-of-the-foss-surplus/ Where I try to explain, as succinctly as I can (which isn’t that succinct), why I’m worried about where FOSS is heading
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 @baldur This side branch deserves its own writeup: “Some are reaching for LLM-generated code before they even look for an OSS project, both disconnecting those projects from opportunities to grow a sustainable community and nullifying the strategic advantage of having made an OSS solution for a problem. Note that the models are originally trained on that OSS.”  @baldur @glyph Not sure about the point about laid-off/unemployed engineers not coding. I have spent periods of funemployment between contracts/jobs on side projects (a few apps/frameworks, some playing around with various technologies/languages and such). Looking at the fediverse, I don’t seem to be alone in this. Perhaps better social security such as a UBI would lead to more open source contributions.  @baldur I would argue the industry didn't overspend, but overbuilt on FOSS. FOSS was free, is free and that encourages usage. But as all infrastructure, even free one, there is a maintenance price tag and the people with the bills are starting to knock on the door. As a result: panic. Not to mention that governments start to pick up on the transparency FOSS provides for regulations. Today’s #caturday photos are of this semi long-haired cat. She lives next door to me and is, apparently, very effective mouser. For this #caturday, my sister sent me a few close-ups of her cat Kolka, who was originally rescued semi-feral from near a farm in Flúðir here in the south of Iceland So, for this #caturday, my sister sent me another batch of photos of Kolka. As Kolka is a bit of a “what are WE doing today” kind of cat, whenever my sister is painting or drawing (she’s an illustrator) Kolka just stares at the proceedings as if filled with curiosity
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@baldur That's probably how things are going at work-school - we're using a service called TeachMate AI. It's LLM based. Most of the teachers won't touch the thing, but at least two of the couple of hundred we employ* must have had glowing things to say because they got featured in the company newsletter urging the other teachers to please use it. It can write lesson plans and mark essays! We all know the real reason: So we can lay off teachers. *It's not one school, it's a chain of schools. I mentioned the other day that my sister has been digging through old photos our late granddad took that my dad discovered in a box in our grandmother’s basement. One of his subjects was the cat they had at the time, sixty years ago, a white male kitten with blue eyes. He never got neutered and so Kópavogur for years afterwards had a substantial population of white cats. The cat was also, judging by the photos, quite the cutie I don’t think I’ve shared this pick of one of my neighbour cats before. Taken between the planks of my balcony railing #caturday Been a while since I last got pictures of my sister’s cat, Kolka. Everybody’s been a bit busy. But this cat sure has _expressions_. #caturday Forgot to post this during the weekend but here are a few retro #cat photos, all dating back to the 90s. |
@baldur So, guess who is in control of 'your' phone?