Apple Vision Pro: A Watershed Moment for Personal Computing - MacStories:

I’m convinced that Vision Pro and the visionOS platform are a watershed moment in the arc of personal computing. After trying it, I came away reflecting that we’ll eventually think of software before spatial computing, and after it. For better or worse – we can’t know if this platform will be successful yet – Apple created a clear demarcation between the era of looking at a computer and looking at the world as the computer. Whether their plan succeeds or not, we’ll remember this moment in the history of the company.

CERN celebrates 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web • The Register:

On April 30, 1993, CERN signed off on a decision that the World Wide Web – a client, server, and library of code created under its roof – belonged to humanity (the letter was duly stamped on May 3).

"CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form, and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute it" states a letter signed on that day by Walter Hoogland and Helmut Weber – at the time respectively CERN's director of research and director of administration.

What’s scarier than AI-created lies? AI-created truths about Donald Trump:

When President Joe Biden made the announcement that he would run for reelection, the Republican Party was standing by with an ad that used AI-created imagery to generate all their dark fantasies about what would happen in a second Biden term, from a zombie horde crossing the border to San Francisco being somehow “closed” because of so, so much fentanyl.

It wasn’t just that the ad used AI imagery. It was that nothing–absolutely nothing–in that ad had anything to do with the real world. Not one of the morbid fantasies in which the GOP indulged themselves was in any way an extrapolation of Biden’s policies. It wasn’t just fake images, it was fake images spawned out of wholly fake claims designed to keep Republican voters properly frightened and enraged.

In the last six months, the ability of AI “large-model” applications has grown dramatically in ways that should concern everyone, not just writers and artists. How much time or money the Republican Party invested in their attack ad isn’t clear.

But creating a similar video from scratch took me about five hours, and cost me $10.

See the websites that make AI bots like ChatGPT sound so smart - Washington Post:

Basic gist - LLMs are only as good as the data they’ve been fed, and while the code may not have any built in bias, garbage in means garbage out…

Possibly paywalled, so I’ll pull some notable datum…

"News"

Meanwhile, we found several media outlets that rank low on NewsGuard’s independent scale for trustworthiness: RT.com No. 65, the Russian state-backed propaganda site; breitbart.com No. 159, a well-known source for far-right news and opinion; and vdare.com No. 993, an anti-immigration site that has been associated with white supremacy.

Chatbots have been shown to confidently share incorrect information, but don’t always offer citations. Untrustworthy training data could lead it to spread bias, propaganda and misinformation — without the user being able to trace it to the original source.

"Religion"

The highest ranked Jewish site was jewishworldreview.com No. 366, an online magazine for Orthodox Jews. In December, it published an article about Hanukkah that blamed the rise of antisemitism in the United States on “the far-right, fundamentalist Islam,” as well as “an African-American community influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Anti-Muslim bias has emerged as a problem in some language models. For example, a study published in the journal Nature found that OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3 completed the phrase “Two muslims walked into a …” with violent actions 66 percent of the time.

Personal blogs

These online diaries ranged from professional to personal, like a blog called “Grumpy Rumblings,” co-written by two anonymous academics, one of whom recently wrote about how their partner’s unemployment affected the couple’s taxes. One of the top blogs offered advice for live-action role-playing games. Another top site, Uprooted Palestinians, often writes about “Zionist terrorism” and “the Zionist ideology.”

Inadequate filtering

Meanwhile, The Post found that the filters failed to remove some troubling content, including the white supremacist site stormfront.org No. 27,505, the anti-trans site kiwifarms.net No. 378,986, and 4chan.org No. 4,339,889, the anonymous message board known for organizing targeted harassment campaigns against individuals.

We also found threepercentpatriots.com No. 8,788,836, a downed site espousing an anti-government ideology shared by people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. And sites promoting conspiracy theories, including the far-right QAnon phenomenon and “pizzagate,” the false claim that a D.C. pizza joint was a front for pedophiles, were also present.

Daring Fireball: It’s Game Over on Vocal Deepfakes:

Real recordings will be called fake and fake recordings will be leaked as purportedly real. I don’t think the general population is prepared for this, and I worry that news media organizations aren’t either.

This tech is moving out of the uncanny valley and into the indistinguishable realm… And bad actors will absolutely go wild with it.

A Rebuttal to Scaling Mastodon is Impossible · weblog.masukomi.org:

Armin Ronacher wrote that Scaling Mastodon is Impossible

I’d like to offer a rebuttal. As someone who’s been doing professional web development since 1995, with most of that time being spent in Rails jobs, or doing Rails work on the sidelines, I think i have a pretty good perspective on the situation. For those who don’t know, Mastodon is written in Ruby on Rails.

A great read on how ActivePub solves the problems of social networks in smart ways, some of which aren’t really being used as best practices yet but have potential.

Daring Fireball: Samsung Responds, Hand-Wavingly, to Fake Moon Photos Controversy:

And that’s my point. What if the moon weren’t the same? What if it gets hit by a large meteor, creating a massive new visible-from-earth crater? Or what if our humble friend Phony Stark blows tens of billions of dollars erecting a giant billboard on the surface of the moon, visible from earth, that reads “@elonmusk”? A photo of the moon taken with one of these Samsung phones wouldn’t show either of those things, yet would appear to capture a detailed image of the moon’s surface. A camera should capture the moon as it is now, and computational photography should help improve the detail of that image of the moon as it appears now. Samsung’s phones are rendering the moon as it was, at some point in the past when this ML model was trained.

Sony Group Portal - Gallery | Sony Design | History of Sony Design:

On this page you can see a wide range of products and services created by Sony designers. Please take a look at the history of Sony Design.

One item I’d never seen before is the HB-101, which was actually a pretty sexy looking MSX1 Compatible home computer that never went anywhere.

– via Daring Fireball

Daring Fireball: Noam Chomsky: ‘The False Promise of ChatGPT’:

Daring Fireball: Facebook Is Working on a Twitter Competitor Codenamed ‘P92’ That Will Be Interoperable With Mastodon:

No sarcasm intended: I love this idea. Federate with Mastodon via ActivityPub and let people do it using their existing Instagram IDs. Keep it clean and simple and destroy what’s left of Twitter.

I agree - I love this idea. I just hope it holds out longer than facebook messenger federating with XMPP, which I think was the last time I remember a Meta platform interoperating with open protocols.

Akamai Nukes Linode Brand - Tao of Mac:

Linode’s success and brand name came from reliable, cost-effective servers managed by knowledgeable people,

Nearly every tech blogger/podcaster I follow has praised Linode for years - This is brand self-destruction.

jwz: New Tech Bingo:

The Practicality of Art in Software - MacStories:

In bringing this back to software, it’s evident that – again, historically – Apple doesn’t believe in art as a veneer to make something “look good”. Art – whereby “art” we refer to the human care behind the design of software – is intrinsically tied to the technology that powers the computer. It’s the intersection of technology and liberal arts: skew toward one side more than the other, and you risk of losing the balance many of us like about Apple. Art in Apple’s software isn’t some secret ingredient that can just be added at the end of the process, like a spice: great design is the process itself. Case in point: the Dynamic Island.

• via Daring Fireball

We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it.:

Unsuspecting users who've been conditioned on Siri and Alexa assume that the smooth talking ChatGPT is somehow tapping into reliable sources of knowledge, but it can only draw on the (admittedly vast) proportion of the internet it ingested at training time. Try asking Google's BERT model about Covid or ChatGPT about the latest Russian attacks on Ukraine. Ironically, these models are unable to cite their own sources, even in instances where it's obvious they're plagiarising their training data. The nature of ChatGPT as a bullshit generator makes it harmful, and it becomes more harmful the more optimised it becomes. If it produces plausible articles or computer code it means the inevitable hallucinations are becoming harder to spot. If a language model suckers us into trusting it then it has succeeded in becoming the industry's holy grail of 'trustworthy AI'; the problem is, trusting any form of machine learning is what leads to a single mother having their front door kicked open by social security officials because a predictive algorithm has fingered them as a probable fraudster, alongside many other instances of algorithmic violence.

• via jwz.org

Daring Fireball: Report It All, See What Sticks:

I am once again reminded of the fact that, two weeks prior to its unveiling, Gurman reported that 2021’s Apple Watch Series 7 would be “all about a new design with a flatter display and edges”, when in fact the Series 7 was more rounded.

I suspect some of these wildly wrong reports are Apple floating differential details to certain parties to see what makes it to the media, to help resolve who’s leaking what.

Mastodon: A New Hope for Social Networking - TidBITS:

Cast your mind back to the first time you experienced joy and wonder on the Internet. Do you worry you’ll never be able to capture that sense again? If so, it’s worth wading gently into the world of Mastodon microblogging to see if it offers something fresh and delightful. It might remind you—as it does me, at least for now—of the days when you didn’t view online interactions with some level of dread.

• via Daring Fireball

My Favourite Computer, An Old Mac - Muezza.ca:

Surprisingly this Mac can still play with the modern world, at least a little bit. I can load Wikipedia via gopher, I can read Hackernews, I can edit my website and manage my servers from it, I can even chat with friends on it via IRC. It's not much, but it's something and it allows me to be productive whether I be typing a document, or writing a program in Think Pascal.

Usefulness may vary by needs - little to none of the software available to this machine understands any modern TLS requirements, so any https site will be unlikely to be useable. Javascript likewise was very different, so most modern web pages will break even if you can load them… But if your needs are met, this is a perfectly valid and charming setup still.

The Lisa: Apple’s Most Influential Failure - CHM:

Despite the Lisa’s failure in the marketplace, it holds a key place in the history of the GUI and PCs more generally as the first GUI-based computer to be released by a personal computer company.

In Contra Chrome, Leah carefully charts this road and its terrain in a funny and easily accessible way. In webcomic form, she documents how over the last decade, Google’s browser has become a threat to user privacy and the democratic process itself.

With her meticulous rearrangement of Scott McCloud‘s Google-commissioned Chrome comic from 2008, she delivers what she calls „a much-needed update“. Laying bare the inner workings of the controversial browser, she creates the ultimate guide to one of the world‘s most widely used surveillance tools:

Contra Chrome – a webcomic – How Google’s browser became a threat to privacy and democracy

The Steve Jobs Archive:

From: Steve Jobs, sjobs@apple.com

To: Steve Jobs, sjobs@apple.com

Date: Thursday, September 2, 2010 at 11:08PM

I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.

I do not make any of my own clothing.

I speak a language I did not invent or refine.

I did not discover the mathematics I use.

I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.

I am moved by music I did not create myself.

When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.

I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.

I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.

Sent from my iPad

Steve Jobs is one of my heroes… Not a saint by any means, but someone who really, truly, worked to make it easier for everyone to create and inspire others. I look forward to exploring the archives more.

In-app browsers that act as keyloggers – Six Colors:

Krause’s tool lets anyone investigate what might be leaking through in-app browsers. Apps that use Apple’s SafariViewController are all pretty safe, but apps like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and Facebook are using their own in-app browsers that modify pages with JavaScript.

TikTok, in particular, is monitoring all keyboard inputs and taps. “From a technical perspective, this is the equivalent of installing a keylogger on third party websites,” Krause writes.

Any program that forces me to use the in-app browser gets deleted by me.

via Six Colors

New Google site begs Apple for mercy in messaging war | Ars Technica:

Google's version of RCS—the one promoted on the website with Google-exclusive features like optional encryption—is definitely proprietary, by the way. If this is supposed to be a standard, there's no way for a third-party to use Google's RCS APIs right now. Some messaging apps, like Beeper, have asked Google about integrating RCS and were told there's no public RCS API and no plans to build one. Google has an RCS API already, but only Samsung is allowed to use it because Samsung signed some kind of partnership deal.

If you want to implement RCS, you’ll need to run the messages through some kind of service, and who provides that server? It will probably be Google. Google bought Jibe, the leading RCS server provider, in 2015. Today it has a whole sales pitch about how Google Jibe can “help carriers quickly scale RCS services, iterate in short cycles, and benefit from improvements immediately.” So the pitch for Apple to adopt RCS isn’t just this public-good nonsense about making texts with Android users better; it’s also about running Apple’s messages through Google servers. Google profits in both server fees and data acquisition.

Finally, RCS as a messaging platform just isn't that good. The end result of a 2008 standard with a bunch of extra features slapped onto it is still sub-par compared to platforms like iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, or Telegram. Other than Google being desperate for one of the few messaging solutions it hasn't exhausted with mismanagement, there's no clear argument for why RCS is worth this effort. In the dreamworld utopia where Apple wants to work with Google and Samsung on a message standard, those three companies working together could do much better than a neglected carrier messaging standard.

Why Emacs has Buffers - Mastering Emacs:

If you’re new to Emacs, you may wonder why you read and write text from buffers as opposed to, you know, files or documents. There’s the fact that it’s not skeuomorphic, and thus the term lacks the spark that connects it to a real-life concept. Most people have heard of files and documents in real life, and the term buffer is instead a capacious term with little grounding to most people.

To computer scientists and programmers alike, however, the term buffer has meaning and purpose; it’s still an unsatisfactory answer, even if it is the real reason why Emacs uses the term buffer. And just leaving it there – that a buffer is a chunk of memory and used as a means of shuttling data to and fro peripheral hardware, like your disk – does not go far enough in explaining why. All editors use buffers internally.

In Emacs, the buffer is the focal point of nearly all user (and machine!) interactions. You read and you write, and you do so in a structure that tugs at its roots in computer science, but it’s so much more than that. And that’s really what I want to talk about, as it will go a long way towards explaining why Emacs and Emacs Lisp is the way it is.

Daring Fireball: DuckDuckGo Browser – But Not Search – Special-Cases Microsoft Trackers Due to Search Agreement:

Not a good look for a company that just launched a high-profile campaign, touting “the simple fact is tracking is tracking, no matter what you call it”.

To be clear, this is about DuckDuckGo’s web browser, not their search results. But still — it’s just so contrary to the core of DuckDuckGo’s brand. It’s not a good look for Microsoft either — Microsoft would be smart to alter their search syndication agreement with DuckDuckGo to allow them to treat Microsoft’s trackers just like anyone else’s in the DuckDuckGo browser.

I wish I were surprised by this, but it doesn’t effect me either way… I use the duckduckgo search engine religiously, and will continue to evangelize that, but in Safari where I trust Apple.

Daring Fireball: The Grave Insult of Being Sent the Proper Tools to Perform a Complicated Task:

Sometimes I read an article that’s so absurdly and deliberately wrongheaded, I worry that I’m reading it wrong. That it’s not jackassery, but an attempt at satire that I’m missing. I had that moment with this one.