FeedCity

In an item earlier this week observing that Swift Assist, the most ambitious Xcode-related Apple Intelligence feature shown at WWDC last year, not only hasn’t yet shipped but still is not in beta, I wondered whether Apple actually demoed it live last year. John Voorhees, wri...

Katie Notopoulos, writing at Business Insider (Apple News+ link): It’s possible that this strident defense is backfiring — creating a “Streisand Effect” that’s publicizing the book even more. Notopoulos isn’t one to pull punches or hedge, normally, but there’s no quest...

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter:

After more than a year of speculation, Apple TV+ has ordered a fourth season of its Emmy-winning comedy Ted Lasso. The pickup comes after co-creator and star Jason Sudeikis closed a deal to reprise his role as the title character, the manager of the fictional AFC Richmond soccer club in London.

I dig Ted Lasso but this is like 0.1 percent as interesting as When are we going to get Severance season 3?! Gimme gimme gimme. And we haven’t even gotten to next week’s season 2 finale yet.

CNBC story from 2016: At a recent public appearance at the Utah Tech Tour, in a conversation moderated by Utah’s Senator Orrin Hatch, Apple CEO Tim Cook pointed out that Microsoft had tablets on the market decades before Apple. Cook emphasized his company’s timing comin...

Jay Peters, last month for The Verge: Google’s next I/O developer conference will take place on May 20th and May 21st, the company announced today. The event will be “open to everyone online” and will include “livestreamed keynotes and sessions,” according to an FAQ. Lik...

I'd love to get a list of old school bloggers who are still at it. How would you go about that? I decided to give it to Gemini, limiting it at first to 100 bloggers. Here's the prompt I wrote. For a while I was wondering what "deep research" was for, but as it's starting the work, I'm thinking of resources that would fit in -- like blogtree.com -- a fascinating site, gives a clear picture how blogs emerge out of the community of an earlier blog. Anyway it's working on it while I write this post. 😄

An application ChatGPT is great it. You're staring at some code, it's really straightforward, you've done this a thousand times, but it doesn't work. Stare at it some more. Try re-entering it. Change the names of things. Still doesn't work. Copy and paste the problem code into ChatGPT and in an instant it tells you without you even having to ask that your comment isn't properly terminated, so the runtime was never seeing the code, and nothing I did made the slightest difference. The information was there. I had been staring at it, but humans see what we expect to see. Machines don't have that problem, at least not in this way (thinking of hallucinations).

Another BTW, I'm still thinking about how I want to transition from the public and open-to-anyone FeedLand servers. So if you're still using .org or .com, they're still on the air doing the same thing they've been doing all along.

BTW, these days the images are served via HTTPS so they don't show up in broken links in RSS readers, including my own FeedLand which is served over HTTPS.

I asked ChatGPT when Google started making HTTPS a requirement. Then I asked when was HTTPS first deployed, and was surprised it was in 1994 in Netscape Navigator. But apparently it was really buggy and wasn't codified until much later. Then I asked when HTTPS became the norm? 2017. So there's a lot of web out there that isn't being maintained by anyone, it just works, that predates HTTPS being widely adopted, if you believe the timelines ChatGPT produced.

Why is scripting.com not https? I hope you can see that I have no trouble deploying https sites here. I use Caddy on my Linux servers, and I don't see why anyone uses anything else. It's really easy and requires none of the work people complain about. Anyway the reason script...

My suggestion re Schumer et al. It's over -- remember the lessons, let's look forward, tonight's vote is already history. Let the Dems in the Senate take care of themselves. It's we, the people, who created this country, and we the people are the only ones who can make it work again.

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg today: Apple Inc.’s top executive overseeing its Siri virtual assistant told staff that delays to key features have been ugly and embarrassing, and a decision to publicly promote the technology before it was ready made matters worse. ...

As a postscript to that last item, it occurred to me that because we’re close friends, I have a lot of photos of Paul Kafasis in my library. Here’s one from a year ago you can use as a reference. I wondered how Genmoji would do with “An owl who looks like Paul Kafasis, wearing a Celtics jersey, holding a basketball.” Here’s the best one, from my Mac running MacOS 15.3.1 Sequoia.

It does resemble Paul. Not sure about how owl-like it is, the “holding” part, the slopping of “Celtics”, or the quality of orthodontia over in Genmojiworld.

Question for WordLand users. When you published your first post, were you surprised that the window didn't clear? Did you understand that you can make changes and update the public post? I was just talking with a friend who didn't expect it to behave the way it did.

I asked ChatGPT to write a blog post using the technology of 1993.

Paul Kafasis, on a seemingly local-to-Boston Genmoji billboard from Apple: Eventually, though, the penny dropped. After my umpteenth time passing the billboard, while trying to distract myself from the single-digit temperatures and the brutal wind chill, I realized what ...

I was looking over my blog archive for August 2006, which was when I started using Twitter, and came across this video of Jason Calacanis, at a Wikipedia conference in Cambridge. This is what videos were like back then, tiny and very short. I probably took it with a fairly expensive Nikon camera.

Saw an interview with Mark Cuban where they asked why would Elon Musk do something that would cause Tesla stock to tank. How could he say no? He's got the power to play with the biggest financial thing that has ever existed, and quite possibly that ever will exist. In compari...

Zack Whittaker, reporting for TechCrunch: A group of bipartisan U.S. lawmakers are urging the head of the U.K.’s surveillance court to hold an open hearing into Apple’s anticipated challenge of an alleged secret U.K. government legal demand. U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, alon...