FeedCity

Scharon Harding, Ars Technica: Unlike with previous versions of macOS, macOS 27 Golden Gate doesn’t have a toggle for turning off Apple Intelligence. That makes disabling AI features that you may not want more difficult. It also means that the AI models necessary for run...

This is the era of very powerful bozos.

Kate Knibbs, Wired: Verifact Markets, a new startup that bills itself as a “prediction market for disputed facts,” is betting that people will be eager to weigh in on questions like these. The company’s premise is so quirky it sounds like something a couple of philosophy and economics majors dreamed after too many bong rips […]⌥ Permalink

What an apt photo, today of all days. What a gift Make Something Wonderful is.

Wes and I looking out over the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (2005). It’s one of those places that doesn’t look real in photographs — but doesn’t look real when you’re there either. 

Gorgeous postcards by Laura Serra 

How can B2B software be so friggin’ delicious? Early access drops 10/19. Spread the love.

OpenAI, today: The EU AI Act requires generative AI providers to make generated text identifiable in a machine-readable way. Text watermarking and detection remain early technologies with significant limitations, and views about their benefits and responsible uses are st...

Currently listening: Duke Ellington, Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band. These discs have great healing powers, I’m telling you. 🎵

Currently reading: A Sand County Almanac and Other Writings On Ecology And Conservation by Aldo Leopold. Re: Leopold’s “land ethic” and his emphasis on the “biotic community,” I think: I just don’t know how to convince people who care only about money to care even a little bit about anything else. 📚

Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors, Lobsters, TidBITS-Talk): Full Disk Access largely sidesteps these controls in order to allow backup apps to function properly on the Mac. Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems—including files, mail, messages, and even browsing history—without users’ full knowledge […]

Cory Miller:

So how do we understand an intelligence radically different from our own? The same way we understand this phenomenon in dogs: ethology. Ethologists, who study animal behavior, have confronted this problem for decades. They begin with behavior, guided by the core principle that similar behaviors can arise from very different minds.

Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen argued that understanding behavior requires asking four core questions: What mechanisms produce it? How does it develop? What purpose does it serve? How does it compare across species? Those questions translate well to AI. What computations produce an agent’s behavior? How have changes in its training shaped that behavior over time? What is the behavior designed to accomplish? And how does it compare with that of other forms of intelligence?

John Ternus, posting on X:

The way Steve taught us to care about every detail, every experience, every person, still guides our work today. Forever grateful.

Tim Cook, also on X (with a photo I don’t recall seeing before):

There are people who leave a mark on the world, and then there are people who change it entirely. Steve changed the world and so many lives in the process. He certainly changed my life forever. His spirit lives on in everything he created and everyone he inspired.

Senja, Norway, August 2022.

From the video A rainy day in Senja, Norway.

Hey technical question. What's the best way to block a browser from a website? Is there a meta code for that? Like Firefox is fine, but Google is blocked. That ought to be on the FTC's feature request list for Google once we get a real non-oligarch-pwned government in the US.

I love what Claude Code does, but hate working with it. It doesn't have any sense of how a human thinks, and its way of working with us is incompatible with what I can do. And it has to relearn the basics every session, and getting the rules into its memory doesn't work, they...

Francis Young: In the end, I do not think Christianity will go the same way as Europe’s pre-Christian religions. Even if you don’t believe it is sustained by divine promises and by God’s grace, Christianity is conceptually resilient to a high degree, and its Scriptures ensu...

If you’re in the Chicago area, there will be performances this weekend at Wheaton College of The Cook-Off, a small comic opera composed by my friend and former colleague Shawn Okpebholo. It’ll be wonderful music in a lovely space. 

I started blogging on October 7, 1994. Thirty-two years on Wednesday. The longest running blog, and it's still even worse than it appears.