About a month ago, my iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015) crashed very hard. It would no longer restart into anything but the recovery console. It seemed pretty clear that something was very corrupt and I found myself facing a system reinstall, at the very least.

Time Machine to the rescue

Since it’s a desktop, I have a backup drive attached to it at all times. Time Machine runs several times per day. My latest backup was from about ten minutes before the system crashed. I cannot stress how... [More]

The pair of articles survivorship bias and the algorithmic gaze by The Etymology Nerd (Substack) and when everything becomes a fragment by The Etymology Nerd (Substack) expresses, for me, a good argument for caution about the tools that you’re using.[1]

AI is definitely a paradigm-shift for programming, but I think in a way that’s not discussed very much. We focus very much on how AI enables people who couldn’t program anything before to be able to program something. The scope of what it allows them to program grows with each version. Until it doesn’t. That is,... [More]

I follow Simon Willison for news about all things LLM and he’s generally quite balanced. Even though he has drifted farther and farther toward what might be optimistically called “unquestioning fanboy,” that’s probably an inevitable effect of actually enjoying something. He seems to get a lot of value out of using these tools. I think he might be spending too little time wondering what he would have been producing had he not been grabbing all of the low-hanging fruit that the LLM is delivering... [More]

The discussion Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino (Reddit) is about the article Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino by John Gruber (Daring Fireball), which was a much-longer post than usual, discussing the failure of Apple Intelligence features and the failure to focus on software-quality that it illustrates.

MacOS Apps are not great

Although Gruber focuses on Apple’s iOS, a decrease in quality in user experience has become endemic in their auxiliary products on MacOS as well. I added a few quick examples to my... [More]

The article Adding AI-generated descriptions to my tools collection by Simon Willison includes the following snippet,

“I decided that the descriptions were too long, so I modified the script to add “Keep it to 2-3 sentences” to the end of the system prompt. These new, shorter descriptions are now live—here’s the diff. Total usage was 283,528 input tokens and 6,010 output tokens for a cost of 94 cents.”

First of all, I’m not surprised that he asked it to shorten its descriptions. The initial versions were... [More]

The upshot of the video linked below is that prompt injection has not really been addressed in any significant way because the LLM, by its nature, doesn’t give us a good way of doing so without neutering the main advantage of it.

Generative AI's Greatest Flaw by Computerphile / Mike Pound (YouTube)

The problem boils down to the inability to distinguish between query and parameters. The prompt is the prompt. It’s all just arranged in a way that will hopefully influence the result of pouring it all into the same funnel. There is no analogue in LLM prompts to... [More]

A while back, during the Super Bowl, I paused to see whether a player’s foot was really out of bounds when he caught the ball.

NOT ALLOWED. READ THIS ADVERT INSTEAD, PEASANT.

This is the state of German cable television

I managed to do something that got rid of the advert, but ended up showing a bunch of extra chrome on the screen instead, nearly but not entirely obscuring the thing that I wanted to see. #Enshittification

Next up, I was greeted a couple of weeks later with the message, “The order of your TV channels now matches your... [More]