Posts in: tech

The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall is my second-favorite video game of all time and I love the entire series so the news yesterday that TES IV: Oblivion was out as a remaster for PS5 (and others) was very good news indeed. Now to find the time…

A(G)I and slop

Tyler Cowen on ChatGPT’s o3 model being Artificial General Intelligence:

I don’t mind if you don’t want to call it AGI. And no it doesn’t get everything right, and there are some ways to trick it, typically with quite simple (for humans) questions. But let’s not fool ourselves about what is going on here. On a vast array of topics and methods, it wipes the floor with the humans. It is time to just fess up and admit that.

Jacob Silverman on internet slop:

The influx of hallucinating chatbots is just the latest sign of the wider internet’s descent into hostility. The internet is now optimised for metrics that have nothing to do with human enjoyment, or convenience, or the profits of anyone except the platform overseers. And it’s only getting worse, as our dependence on these flawed tools grows daily.

Cowen is interested in peak performance, and good for him. He showed the same trait in his conversation with Jonathan Haidt, where all he cared about was that the really smart young people can do wonders with social media, externalities be damned.

Meanwhile, the median Internet user is exposed to reams of crap made by humans and AIs alike (Silverman’s article goes into more detail on the burgeoning field of paranoid schizophrenics boosting their own X posts for no particular purpose and the paragraph describing it is the closest I have seen real life come to an M. John Harrison novel which, if you know his prose, is somewhat concerning… and this is not the first time Harrison came to mind).

Note that for all the stories of the Internet’s demise it is still fairly easy to find good things. Look at micro.blog. Look at indieblog.page. Heck, look at reddit. You may have a website or two you visit out of habit — one you likely acquired before 2016 — which have since become chumbox-laden garbage. Delete those bookmarks: people who thought having clickbait adds was a good idea will have other ideas just as good.

If the world wasn’t chaotic enough, get ready for an invasion of the home humanoid robots. My cynical side predicts mechanical Turks, or rather Cambodians and Vietnamese, controlling these remotely as a service that is not (yet) subject to tariffs.

Release of DEVONthink 4 public beta imminent

Big news: DEVONthink 4 is almost out as a public beta. A Reddit user got an early look at the announcement and a few things stick out:

  • As expected (and hoped for), AI features prominently, with options to integrate your preferred online model
  • There now seems to be built-in version control
  • Purchase (or upgrade from v3) gets you updates for a year, after that you pay for continuous updates

I wish AI integration was on-device only as online integration will limit the types of data I can use it on, but still, sign me up! (↬r/devonthink)

Apple developer statistics, or the lack thereof, and their implications for user privacy

Listening to the most recent episode of ATP, I learned a surprising fact about how Apple developers see their user statistics: the number of people who opt out of sharing is not available, and the only statistics developers get is about the users who opted in. This may make naïve sense — hey, they don’t want you to know about them so we’ll erase them from existence Soviet-style — but is in fact statistical malpractice. The numbers Apple does share are only a sample of the total user base, which is fine as long as you know or can estimate the size of the population you are sampling. Without a way to estimate the denominator, the numbers are meaningless.

The bare minimum that Apple could and should do, without breaking any privacy rules, is to share the number of people who opted out. With this number in hand, a developer would be able to project worst-case scenarios and likely ranges for each statistic of interest. If Apple dedicated just a tiny bit more resources to developer relations, they could automate this step and build in worst-case numbers into the interface. A more sophisticated company that cares about the developer ecosystem could even create complex predictions models that would give both worst-case numbers and the 95% confidence intervals for each statistic in question.

Why should Apple care, other than doing a solid to their developer ecosystem with a minimal investment? Well, by making their default user statistics useless they are in fact incentivizing developers large and small to track their users by other means. Large developers may do that anyway since they are likely to have a could component to their app. But an indie developer may turn to third party services: if I am a teenager working on my first big app I will probably turn to the fastest and cheapest way to track, and not knowing anything about anything I am going to guess some of the offerings in that part of the price-value spectrum are going to be less than scrupulous.

So this is how Apple’s privacy-minded view combined with thriftiness and lack of care towards developer experience can lead directly to worse overall privacy for their users. What a surprise.

Happy Friday! A few links for the week’s end:

ChatGPT can now take any photo you send it and create an image of any style based on it (↬Stratechery). The results range from OK to spectacular, particularly if the style is simple, and the Internet is now awash with famous photos done in the style of Studio Ghibli.

Miyazaki would be horrified and out of respect to him I won’t link to any of it, but this update has immediate and great effect on our household as we will now have all of our family photos redone in his style, for personal and private use.

A few changes to my iPhone setup, courtesy of a YouTube video which is itself c/o r/dumbphones:

  1. Dumbify, which is exquisite.
  2. SocialFocus is quite good as well.
  3. Only Tot remains in the dock, and thank goodness it has a grayscale icon.
  4. Goodbye, silicone case — I’ve gone case-less.

So far so good.

A brief Q&A:

A less hopeful harbinger of the future: someone in Serbia — most likely the government — seems to have used sonic weapons to disperse a 100K+ strong crowd of peaceful protestors. Here is a convincing audio analysis, and here are a few videos. Coming soon to a protest near you.