Former web developer, current technical writer and sf/fantasy author. Also former Apple-centric technical blogger, although I still post something vaguely technical once in a blue moon.
Submissions
If AI is sentient, then so is "Age of Empires II"
404media.co
3 points·by chipotle_coyote··1 comments
Panic Nova 10 moves to Tree-Sitter
nova.app
6 points·by chipotle_coyote··0 comments
Meridian: An OpenStreetMap-based places database and API
It's become de rigueur on HN to accuse any article one thinks is trite, obvious, or simply disagreeable of being AI-written. ("That comment has three items in a list! No human would ever put three items in a list! Checkmate, bot!")
I'm getting pretty good with Emacs, but I find its Treesitter handling a bit obtuse, and the auto-installation package I found slowed the editor down a lot for reasons I can't determine. (I mean, everything slowed down, and it all sped up again when I uninstalled the package.) I'm looking forward to revisiting this when Emacs 31 comes out, though.
I also don't think I'd ever call configuring Emacs "trivial" compared to more modern editors. Matching the out-of-box experience of something like VS Code or Panic Nova requires some work. This isn't really a knock against Emacs, but I think Emacs fans -- myself included -- need to be honest about that. It's quite possible I would have picked up Emacs years earlier if I hadn't been given the impression that it was just super duper easy, especially once you picked a starter pack. It is not, it probably never will be, and I've come to believe that starter packs are actually a bad idea for most new users. If you don't understand just what it is you're putting in your init.el file and why, then if you run into problems, it's going to be way harder to figure out how to fix them.
I certainly wouldn't mind being able to block ads on the Apple TV for certain services (by which I mean YouTube), but for services which aren't as aggressively terrible as ad-supported YouTube is, I'm generally fine just making the choice between paying a higher price to go ad-free or putting up with ads. I know some folks are absolutely against all ads no matter what no exceptions, but I'm okay with the notion of "you pay for this by watching ads" if they don't abuse their end of the bargain (by which I mean YouTube).
Also, I watch Nebula on my Apple TV pretty frequently, and Dropout's available there, too.
What if -- bear with me here -- it's possible for bright, motivated founders to create startups that your kids can work in, but those founders could be content with merely making a hundred million dollars? Because, and I don't know if you know this so you may have to take it on faith, that is still so much money that said founder and their family and very likely their descendants can live in extreme luxury for the rest of their lives even if they stop working right then.
I don't know what the best solution to the problem of wealth inequality is, but I know that we need to collectively get over this "but if people think they will be limited to a mere hundred million dollars in wealth they will have no motivation whatsoever to work" nonsense. You know what the motivation is? It's still a hundred million dollars, that's what.
"I did not like your answer, therefore I will use the 100% reliable, bullet-proof method of having an algorithm generate the statistically most likely words that form a plausible answer to my question."
I'll just quote from the article, which no one claimed was God and that's really a weird way to dismiss it, but you do you:
"We create a culture of self-censorship and AI-detector-pressured rewriting and paraphrasing as people strive to avoid these witch hunts. That is the opposite of protecting human expression. We should resist normalizing a trust in any machine's ability to determine matters of guilt. If using AI to write is, at its worst, an industrialization of the mind, then AI detection, at its worst, becomes a surveillance system for thought."
And, I'm sorry (I'm not), but I am not going to just roll over and shrug and say "welp, guess we all need to dumb our writing down to keep well-meaning idiots from screeching 'AI! AI! AI! WHOOP! WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP!' at us." That isn't the evolution of language. It's Idiocracy.
Except that the entire point of the article is that they're not AI idioms. They're not "watermarks for text." They're legitimate language constructions that LLMs tend to overuse, but that real humans also use. Real humans do, in fact, say "align with" all the time, just as often as "corresponds."
And you can pry my em dashes from my cold, dead hands.
I mean, a company that loses money on every widget they sell might technically have found "product-market fit." :)
It seems quite possible to me that developer tooling is going to end up being the biggest win from LLMs because there is a product-market fit -- and also quite possible that OpenAI and/or Anthropic end up getting bought for pennies on the dollar because their burn rate is unsustainable. AI may end up being this generation's "dark fiber."
Congratulations to last.fm on this, although I'm not sure what I can do that actually "scrobbles" at this point. I went to their download page for the Mac desktop app, which somewhat forebodingly referred to "what you've been playing in iTunes" rather than Apple Music, and downloaded it anyway. It's an Intel-only app, not universal, and it doesn't appear to be signed, so macOS Tahoe screams about it being possible malware.
After going through the hula dance to open it anyway, it looks like it's working, but it sure doesn't look like it's received a lot of love recently.
I've tried to switch to Spotify from Apple Music a few times because the common wisdom seems to be that Spotify has better algorithmic recommendations. But Apple Music "knows" what I like already, and Spotify never grabs me so fast that I'm willing to stick around for weeks training it -- and I suspect part of that is all of Apple Music's human-made playlists. Apple Music has hired a lot of good editors/curators over the years, and I haven't found any service -- including audiophile darlings Qobuz and Tidal -- that beats it in that aspect.
There seems to be a "spot the LLM" game happening on HN in particular in which literally every damn linked post has a comment accusing it of being written by an AI. Do we not understand that definitionally every AI "tell" comes from humans? Hell, Sam Kriss's article complains about florid writing and then goes on to cite Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy as examples of writers who "pull the same cheap tricks" as AI and with all respect to Mr. Kriss I just can't even. The theme of this article veers dangerously close to "if you use a weird metaphor you're probably using an LLM because surely no human would ever write 'I'm literally the size of a dry martini.'" I'm sorry, Sam, but humans have written weird fucking shit for a very long time without LLMs.
And what "tells" are in this article, anyway? It reads very straightforwardly; it does not, in fact, have any weird metaphors. Em dashes are not actually a tell, but using the wrong characters for em dashes (the article uses " - ", e.g., space hyphen space) seems pretty human. Last but, I would argue not least, I am willing to give the author of an article about not wanting to program with LLMs the benefit of the doubt here. "The orphan-punching machine fills me with existential angst and dread, and the only way for me to communicate this to the audience is to let it punch a few orphans for me."
Now, if you'll excuse me, all this is making me need to be literally the size of a high-proof daiquiri.
This seems to be willfully eliding that proposed wealth taxes tend to either be taxes on wealth above a certain amount, or (such as California’s) a one-time tax on people with wealth over a certain amount. If I were a mere millionaire -- technically, I am, with a net worth of just over $1.1M, but this would be true if that were $5M or $10M or even $50M -- then under any proposal I’ve seen, my wealth tax would be $0. (Note that if someone were to have $50M, then under Graham’s risk-free rate of return of 5%, they would literally have to do nothing to pay themselves an “income” of $2.5M annually.)
If I were an actual billionaire -- say, my net worth was $2B -- then my one-time tax under California’s proposal would be $100M, leaving me with a net worth of $1.9B. Under that 5% risk-free rate of return, I would recover that amount of money within one year even if my income were $0, which seems exceedingly unlikely.
One can argue about the specifics of various proposals -- the Tax Foundation, for example, thinks California’s proposal has “aggressive design choices and possible drafting errors” that could lead to somewhat bonkers results, although I haven’t seen any critiques of their analysis yet -- but a wealth tax cannot be converted to income tax in a reasonable manner any more than a VAT could be converted to property tax. They’re both taxes, but they’re simply not the same kind of tax. And while I don’t mean to cap on Paul here, there’s a distinct “woe, pity the poor billionaires who will surely be driven to bankruptcy” subtext I find to be risible nonsense.
I admit I have recently moved, on my Mac, from BBEdit to Emacs for most things, although Emacs has also taken over from Ulysses and Day One for me. But there are still some things that I end up doing in BBEdit, because it's kind of a multitool for text manipulation that, unlike Emacs, exposes its power very easily. As much as I'm growing to love Emacs, there's something to be said for an editor that doesn't answer so many questions with "write a little Lisp".
It seems to me (entirely anecdotal, YMMV, etc. etc.) that Ed Zitron’s blog posts started getting both longer and considerably more histrionic when he started moving most of them behind a paywall. I’m definitely in the “AI skeptic” camp and think Zitron has good points to make about both the shaky business models around AI and the unrelenting hype train, but it’s hard not to get the impression that he’s found a niche of preaching to the rabid AI haters willing to give him money to keep spouting increasingly repetitive vitriol toward Sam Altman and Dario Amodei.
Apple's history with accessibility is, on the whole, pretty good. I strongly suspect that the "coming soon" part of this means "after we integrate Google Gemini models into the system," so I don't think you should use the current state of Siri as a yardstick. (I actually have decent luck with the current Siri, but I don't push it very much and have sort of adapted myself to its limitations; on the flip side, I have a lot of skepticism around LLMs, but they're really a quantum leap in natural language processing capability over what came before, and the use cases they're showing here seem to be right in the LLM wheelhouse -- with the asterisk of "you're still always going to have to check its work.")
Xanadu was a terrible movie, but the soundtrack was a critical and commercial success -- it went to number one in 11 countries, was certified double platinum in the US and had six charting singles, some of which still get radio airplay over four decades later. (And all the songs on the soundtrack were written for the movie; it wasn't a collection of already-existing pop songs.)
Actually, the part of the article that made me prick my ears up was this paragraph:
In February, longtime CEO Michael Crandell moved to an advisory role, according to LinkedIn, with no announcement from the company. His replacement, Michael Sullivan, former CEO of both Acquia and Insightsoftware, touts his experience with “all facets of mergers and acquisitions” on his own LinkedIn page, including experience working with leading private equity firms.
In combination with downplaying the free plan and removing any hint of now politically unfashionable DEI-like language, what this screams to me is: Bitwarden is being prepped for a sale.
I think the "nerds (like me)" part of your observation is something that a lot of AI-enthusiast nerds seriously underestimate. For as long as there's been personal computing, there's been a narrative that everyone would be a programmer if we just made it easier for everyone to program, and we've seen attempt after attempt after attempt to introduce new technologies that will surely, surely, be the key to unlocking this. What we don't seem to consider is the vast circumstantial evidence that the vast majority of users are simply not interested in creating tools, automations, widgets, etc., and never will be.
For my part, I am not only a nerd, I am literally an Emacs-using nerd, and I am not interested in using LLMs to create a plethora of bespoke applications that are subtle tweaks on existing tools. I haven't ruled out using AI to assist in helping me with a program that I've been wanting to write for years, but a lot of what's blocking me on that is figuring out design aspects that an LLM wouldn't be able to help me with in the first place. (I'm also concerned about "vibe-coding" programs that I don't 100% understand, at least if they're programs that I might ever want to release into the world.)