FeedCity

It's this blog's 23rd birthday today!

On June 12th 2022 I celebrated Twenty years of my blog with a big post full of highlights. Looking back now I'm amused to notice that my 20th birthday post came within two weeks of my earliest writing about LLMs: A Datasette tutorial written by GPT-3 and How to use the GPT-3 language model.

My generative-ai tag has reached 1,184 posts now.

I really do feel like blogging is onto its second wind. The amount of influence you can have on the world by consistently blogging about a subject is just as high today as it was back in the 2000s when blogging first started.

The best time to start a blog may have been twenty years ago, but the second best time to start a blog is today.

Tags: generative-ai, blogging

Fun episode of Tested with Adam Savage and Norman Chan. The first segment goes deep on what’s new in VisionOS 26. Apple is ignoring the jokes about the platform’s relative obscurity and has obviously been heads-down on building the platform out and up. VisionOS 26 is a huge ...

MG Siegler:

The underlying message that they’re trying to convey in all these interviews is clear: calm down, this isn’t a big deal, you guys are being a little crazy. And that, in turn, aims to undercut all the reporting about the turmoil within Apple — for years at this point — that has led to the situation with Siri. Sorry, the situation which they’re implying is not a situation. Though, I don’t know, normally when a company shakes up an entire team, that tends to suggest some sort of situation. That, of course, is never mentioned. Nor would you expect Apple — of all companies — to talk openly and candidly about internal challenges. But that just adds to this general wafting smell in the air.

The smell of bullshit.

Link: spyglass.org/spyglasslighting/

‘How come I can’t breathe?': Musk’s data company draws a backlash in Memphis The biggest environmental scandal in AI right now should be the xAI data center in Memphis, which has been running for nearly a year on 35 methane gas turbines under a "temporary" basis: The turbin...

Agentic Coding Recommendations

There's a ton of actionable advice on using Claude Code in this new piece from Armin Ronacher. He's getting excellent results from Go, especially having invested a bunch of work in making the various tools (linters, tests, development servers etc) as accessible as possible through documenting them in a Makefile.

Armin also recently shared a half hour YouTube video in which he worked with Claude Code to resolve two medium complexity issues in his minijinja Rust templating library, resulting in PR #805 and PR #804.

Via @mitsuhiko.at

Tags: go, ai, llms, rust, ai-assisted-programming, coding-agents, generative-ai, armin-ronacher, anthropic, claude, claude-code

Jason Snell:

After last year, Apple could’ve been forgiven for wanting to soft-pedal this year’s Apple Intelligence announcements and regroup. It didn’t do that, nor did it double down on last year. Instead, it’s chosen a middle ground — a bit safe and familiar but also a place where Apple can feel a bit more like itself. In the long run, it needs to get this right. In the short term, maybe it should focus on meeting its users where they are, rather than pretending to be something it’s not.

Agree with Snell’s take completely, I do.

Link: sixcolors.com/post/2025/06/apple-intelligence-shifts-gears/

In the 1960s, the band the Grateful Dead became consumed by a quest that would take up 10 years, cost millions of dollars, and almost break up the band. It was the quest for audio perfection – to bring crystal clear sound from the front row to the nosebleeds and back again. It’s a story that takes us from the infamous acid tests of the 1960s to standing in front of a 60-foot tall wall of 600 speakers…and to tell it we’re joined by Brian Anderson, author of “Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection.”

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Disney and Universal Sue AI Company Midjourney for Copyright Infringement

This is a big one. It's very easy to demonstrate that Midjourney will output images of copyright protected characters (like Darth Vader or Yoda) based on a short text prompt.

There are already dozens of copyright lawsuits against AI companies winding through the US court system—including a class action lawsuit visual artists brought against Midjourney in 2023—but this is the first time major Hollywood studios have jumped into the fray.

Here's the lawsuit on Document Cloud - 110 pages, most of which are examples of supposedly infringing images.

Tags: ai-ethics, midjourney, generative-ai, training-data, ai, law

Breaking down ‘EchoLeak’, the First Zero-Click AI Vulnerability Enabling Data Exfiltration from Microsoft 365 Copilot Aim Labs reported CVE-2025-32711 against Microsoft 365 Copilot back in January, and the fix is now rolled out. This is an extended variant of the prompt inje...

Disney and Universal Sue AI Company Midjourney for Copyright Infringement

This is a big one. It's very easy to demonstrate that Midjourney will output images of copyright protected characters (like Darth Vader or Yoda) based on a short text prompt.

There are already dozens of copyright lawsuits against AI companies winding through the US court system—including a class action lawsuit visual artists brought against Midjourney in 2023—but this is the first time major Hollywood studios have jumped into the fray.

Tags: ai-ethics, midjourney, generative-ai, training-data, ai, law

Stephen Hackett has a list of the Intel Macs that MacOS 26 Tahoe supports, and the ones they’re dropping support for this year. Apple has gone through three CPU architecture transitions in the Mac’s history: 68K to PowerPC starting in 1994 PowerPC to Intel starting in 20...

Giving up on the idea that truth matters is not just cynicism, it’s surrender.

Malleable software New, delightful manifesto from Ink & Switch. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can reshape with minimal friction to suit their unique needs. Modification becomes routine, not exceptional. Adaptation happens at the point o...

Since Jevons' original observation about coal-fired steam engines is a bit hard to relate to, my favourite modernized example for people who aren't software nerds is display technology. Old CRT screens were horribly inefficient - they were large, clunky and absolutely guzzl...

Anohni is a singer and songwriter originally from England, who started putting out music in 2000. She’s released 6 albums, and won the Mercury Prize. She’s also been nominated for two Brit Awards, and an Oscar. For this episode, I talked to her about the song "4 Degrees," fr...

[on the cheaper o3] Not quantized. Weights are the same.

If we did change the model, we'd release it as a new model with a new name in the API (e.g., o3-turbo-2025-06-10). It would be very annoying to API customers if we ever silently changed models, so we never do this [1].

[1] chatgpt-4o-latest being an explicit exception

— Ted Sanders, Research Manager, OpenAI

Tags: generative-ai, openai, o3, ai, llms

The staff here at Atlas Obscura answered an unsettling question for this episode: Where would you spend the last day before the apocalypse? Some interesting truths come out. 

Plus, we want to hear from you. Tell us where YOU would spend your last day before the hypothetical apocalypse. What connection do you have with this place? Why would you spend it there? What would you do if you had the whole place to yourself? Give us a call at 315-992-7902 and leave a message telling us your name and story. Or record a voice memo and email it to us at hello@atlasobscura.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

(People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes. It also uses about 0.000085 gallons of water; roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon.)

— Sam Altman, The Gentle Singularity

Tags: sam-altman, generative-ai, ai-energy-usage, openai, chatgpt, ai, llms

Tight 7-minute video at the WSJ (and also at YouTube):

Apple’s AI rollout has been rocky, from Siri delays to underwhelming Apple Intelligence features. WSJ’s Joanna Stern sits down with software chief Craig Federighi and marketing head Greg Joswiak to talk about the future of AI at Apple — and what the heck happened to that smarter Siri.

Update: Here’s the full 24-minute interview. Just an excellent job by Stern.

Link: wsj.com/video/series/joanna-stern-personal-technology/apple…