garyrob

I had cancer, it came back twice in 5 years, but now I'm 10 years out from the last time and my odds are good. Just mentioning it, in case it's helpful to hear a positive anecdote.

Sending my hopes for your recovery. You're right that new research is yielding fruit, but I don't have to tell you that.

I'm doing work with fairly complicated cryptographic algorithms and math. I'm finding Fable 5 to be a significant stop better than Opus 4.8, but that Opus occasionally comes up with something small but nontrivial that Fable missed. (The reverse is true much more often.)

"The final major downside is having to switch apps out of navigation to control music then switch back". That's no longer true for CarPlay. It now has a mode where you see Maps and Music at the same time.

The icons in menu items is one of the reasons I'm still on Sequoia. This settles it; I'll just stay on Sequoia until Golden Gate is released.

I can't say the following for sure, but there's evidence of it: One of Apple's real strengths and differentiators is that it listens to customer feedback to the point that it will say: "Hey, this was dumb. Customer feedback proves it. Let's just get rid of it like it never happened."

Other examples include getting rid of the earlier getting rid of Magsafe.

I don't know whether it's something taught in Apple School, but in the absence of not doing dumb things in the first place, which seems to be unavoidable in the real world with real people, it's probably the next best thing. And it may be enough better than the norm from tech companies that it's a real cultural differentiator.

For what it's worth:

I had an idea for a special reminder app I wanted for myself. It's complicated enough that it comes to 9,000+ lines of code. I wanted to write it using the C++ UI library wxWidgets, because I like that wxWidgets uses native widgets, and is cross-platform, and that it's easy to make an app look nice. And that it doesn't use tons of memory.

There's a wxPython library, but I didn't want my UI to be limited due to whatever gaps may exist in that wrapper.

So I had AI write it in C++. Took about a day for me to get it done. It's perfectly solid. It did hit a couple of memory errors when I first used it, but I could give the AI MacOS crash report and the AI fixed the bugs easily, with no other involvement from me. (I compiled in a debug-friendly mode; no downside to that because it was just for me and was plenty fast enough.)

25 years or so ago, I was a fairly good C++ programmer. Haven't touched it since. And that includes this application, which was completely AI-written.

I get that effect while walking, but also from multi-hour highway (not local) driving when the road isn't crowded. Somehow, having my body do something that takes only a slight amount of continuous awareness, but not zero, seems to enable me to escape mental ruts more easily. For me, it allows for deeper concentration in the creative realm than I can have while sitting.

Friedrich Nietzsche: "Only thoughts reached by walking have value."

This goes back a LONG way for me. I really enjoyed his Notes From The Field column in InfoWorld, which was both reliably funny and reliably interesting, from around 1987-1995.

The software isn't so good these days, even while the hardware has been the best in the world. Now that the guy responsible for the hardware will be CEO, maybe quality will come back to software too.

I wrote a lot of APL for my undergraduate Senior Project in 1978/1979.

I really enjoyed it because it was fun. You could do an incredible amount of work in a single line of code.

The only problem was, that line would then be almost impossible to read and understand! It could easily be used as a "write-only" language even without a separate obfuscation step.

When I become a professional programmer right after college, I never used it again, and learned to write code that was readable above all else.

It may have been, I never used it, but it was also a very early, innovative (at the time) product made by a company called Vermeer.

There is a truly fascinating, and even inspiring, book about the company and the sale of FrontPage to Microsoft: https://www.amazon.com/High-Stakes-No-Prisoners-Internet/dp/...

I used it when I was in college for my Senior Project. That would have been 1978/1979. I had a keyboard with the APL symbols molded onto the keypad.

"If you delete your account, we will delete your data within 30 days, except we may retain a limited set of data for longer where required or permitted by law."

"where required".... hmm, that seems OK. We don't want to violate the law!

"or permitted".... er...

[I wonder why this comment is being voted down. Do people here think it's NOT OK to comply with the law with respect to retaining data? Or is the reason somehow the opposite of that? Not sure. But my point was that the "where required" clause seems moot if they are going to retain data where "permitted", which in my book, is NOT OK.]

I'm 70. Most of my high school and college friends are on Facebook, and some other friends. So I use it (including its Messenger component) a lot to keep in touch! I know it's a generational thing. Just thought I'd mention it.

With external SSDs plugged directly into a USB port, it's worked 100% fine for me and saved my butt a few times.

But, I haven't installed Tahoe. I may skip it entirely, hoping that they do a Snow Leopard-like clean-up-the-mess release in September.

https://garyrobinson.net

Took a look at inkjet. It looks quite nice. I'm going to give it a try!

Whether any one country should be global police or not is a very difficult question to answer, but at the same time I could easily see situations where some of these could be beneficial for the greater good.

I would argue that it should be the UN that does something like this, if it's done at all. I would like to see a world in which there was a top-level body that would arrest a dictator, the same way the US government would arrest someone who tried to become dictator of an American state.

But it wouldn't be up to the governor of one of the other states to do it without the agreement of the rest of the country. That would be chaos.

I'm not aware of a single cynic who successfully predicted how things actually ended up turning out.

Let's change that here and now! :)

I was one of the optimists in the very early 2000s when I attended a talk by Columbia professor Eli Noam. In 2002, he wrote an article in the Financial Times called "Why the internet is bad for democracy" which essentially predicted the world is we know it.

I immediately saw that he was right, at least with regard to the fact that it COULD turn out as it has, in fact, turned out. He fundamentally changed my view, way back then. In 2005 a version was published in a more academic context: “Why the Internet is bad for democracy.” Communications of the ACM 48(10): 57–58 (2005).

Here's the FT version: https://www.citicolumbia.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Why-...

It seems like the antivaxxers, and many people in general, seem to just think that whatever they hear from their friends and family and favorite TV talking heads, whether it has any research behind it or not, is automatically and magically true. So that even if the only real research that exists contradicts it, they just assume that the research must be the result of some kind of error or conspiracy.

I find that incredibly frustrating and dangerous, but as far as I can see, it's the way it is.

POTS = Plain Old Telephony System I worked for NY Telephone for years in the '80s, and it was referred to there as "Plain Old Telephone Service" not System. Not that it's a big deal at this point!

If you try 2N times to succeed in ventures which each have a 1/N chance of success, as N increases the probability of such as success quickly converges on about 86.5%.

(The limit is 1-e^(-2).)

So, if you have a LOT of chances to try things that are highly improbable but high upside, your odds are quite good.

As someone born in 1956, I and everyone I knew were great enjoyers of Peanuts, and I still appreciate those strips when I see them.

There's a combination of solace in the face of cruelty, humor, gentleness and truthfulness there that unique. Certainly, when I was older, I came to also love Watterson's and Larson's work. They have an edge that Shulz's work didn't. But his work had something theirs didn't.

I can understand how it could be hard for people who didn't grow up with Peanuts make their way into it. For people used to an edginess that Peanuts doesn't have, it looks merely cute. But it really isn't. There is a depth to the feelings Schulz portrayed.

Perhaps to really enjoy Peanuts, one had to have experienced the new strips coming out each day, which added a depth of knowledge about the relationships between the characters which was an essential background that is just not there when one sees a couple of strips now.

Watterson wrote:

“The wonder of ‘Peanuts’ is that it worked on so many levels simultaneously.… Children could enjoy the silly drawings … while adults could see the bleak undercurrent of cruelty, loneliness and failure, or the perpetual theme of unrequited love, or the strip’s stark visual beauty.

(Regarding that last, Peanuts was displayed at the Louvre....)

Machine language generated by compilers is compiler slop.

There is no hint that Apple intends to do anything with the Vision Pro, and they've already been scooped by Meta.

I expect that's exactly what they have in mind. If they're successful, Meta's project will be to Apple's what early MP3 players were to the original iPod.

The jury is out on whether Cook can pull it off.

Works for me in Firefox; fails in Safari.

The editor, JOE, has a WordStar mode that you bring up with jstar. I programmed in WordStar in the 80's, and it's fun to bring it back to life that way!

It appears that Cal Newport has decided to be the one to most publicly initiate the inevitable Trough Of Disillusionment stage of the Hype Cycle. I'm not sure it'll last very long, though, considering (for starters) Google DeepMind's gold medal at the recent International Math Olympiad. Also, while he criticizes the cost-cutting measure which is ChatGPT 5, he doesn't even mention ChatGPT 5 Pro, which is performing excellently.

I don't know. What if there happened to me some unimaginable pathogen that Earth animal life had no way of resisting, and that multiplied rapidly in the presence of our kind of life?

Extremely improbable. Astronomically improbable. Virtually impossible. All that is absolutely, 100% true.

But given the stakes, similarly astronomically high, I'm not sure it didn't actually make sense to do a quarantine for a few weeks. Yes, I know the indium seals didn't work. But the fact that we failed to create a quarantine doesn't mean it was worthless to at least make an attempt. It cost us virtually nothing in comparison to the stakes.

That's my personal response, anyway, and reflects the opinion I would have expressed at the time if I happened to have been involved in the project.

I am implementing a single Rust process to which you can connect a zero-knowledge proof of identity, such as can be created with ZKPassword from a physical passport. Each user ends up with a keypair which is:

1) Highly Sybil resistant. Neither the keypair owner nor anyone else can re-use the same underlying ID to link to another keypair.

2) Very high anonymity. While the Sybil resistance requires a nullifier representing the underlying ID to be present in a database (or stored in a public, decentralized form for blockchain use), there is no way to connect that nullifier with the keypair. Even if someone were to use brute force to successfully connect the nullifier with a specific underlying ID, such as a passport, there is no way to connect that ID with the keypair. (In the passport case, even merely brute-forcing the nullifier could only be done by the issuing government, someone who has hacked the government database, or someone with physical access to the passport. This is due to the fact that other passport information than the passport number is included in generating the underlying zero-knowledge proof.)

I understand that other technologies may have similar end-functionality, but this has the advantage that most of the functionality is encapsulated in a single Rust executable that could be easily used in any context, whether distributed or decentralized. (If anyone would like to know more, my contact info is at garyrobinson.net.)

I find transparency annoying enough that if it becomes more prevalent on MacOS in a way I can't turn off, I may switch to Linux for that reason alone.