Notices by James Thomson (jamesthomson@mastodon.social)

Computers didn’t pass the Turing Test, humans failed it.

Thanks Google, very helpful.

Doesn't he look tired?

If everything is truly amazing, nothing is.

"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

This is the most impressive deep dive into the settings of the Mac that exists. It not only emulates each era and lets you play around with it, but it knows what you are doing within the emulated systems.
https://mastodon.online/@mwichary/114820239407493679

@Gargron @stroughtonsmith @siracusa @marcoarment Yes, new users, but always following exactly 40 people. I’m not entirely convinced these are real people. I don’t have a problem being recommended - that is flattering!

This is the least important thing happening in the world right now, but I am still getting followed by tons of bots a day on Mastodon, that all fit the same pattern of having zero followers, and following exactly 40 people. Usually the same combination of people, including @stroughtonsmith, @siracusa, @marcoarment, and sometimes @Gargron himself.

It takes great skill to produce a cool new graphics effect. It takes great wisdom to dial it down a bit.

It's called iOS 26 because it will take 26 months to explain to your parents how to use their phone again.

@BenRiceM When we asked Apple for more transparency, this is not what we meant.

I hope buttons look like buttons again.

Could we maybe stop talking about LLMs like they are becoming sentient? Amongst other stolen data, they have been trained on a whole bunch of text from science fiction stories about computers becoming sentient, and statistically know how to write that kind of thing.

You're not creating Skynet here, it's just seen The Terminator a hundred times and is quoting your favourite lines at you.

If I ever meet the person who introduced spammers to LLMs, we are going to have a problem.

Well, I guess I won’t be filing any more bugs then.

I can see some _maybe_ semi-legitimate uses for training an LLM on developer content - like _potentially_ on dev forums or something like that. But not on my sysdiagnose logs that in the same dialog it says might contain sensitive information, and with apparently no opt-out.
https://hachyderm.io/@cocoafrog/114355281286615868

“Updating all your devices” is the new “setting all your clocks”.

Dice by PCalc 2.8 is out now (finally)!

This release of my #ttrpg dice rolling app adds support for iOS 18 and macOS 15, including Control Center buttons for quick rolling, and dark and tinted icons.

As well as four new themes, there’s also a new picker which makes it easier to see all the visual options for dice in one place.

iOS:
https://pcalc.com/store/dice

Mac:
https://pcalc.com/store/dicemac

I regret to inform you that three babies were given the name Elon in Scotland in 2024, up from zero for the last fifty years.

https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/publications/babies-first-names-2024/

I would bet a non-trivial amount of money that Apple will also switch off Advanced Data Protection in the US within the year, because they just handed a blueprint to every government around the world that wants to spy on their citizens.

Strangely, this BBC article doesn't use the phrase “human shield" once.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgerr2jvkgo