Notices by Ian Betteridge (ianb@mastodon.well.com)

Oh oh is the answer “by continuing to publish the kind of transphobia which provides support to Trump’s culture wars agenda”?

Whoa.

https://www.pixelmator.com/blog/2024/11/01/a-new-home-for-pixelmator/

Siri, show me what happens when a company purges dissenting voices and becomes a cult of personality.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/28/wordcamp_password_sharing_requirement/

@FediThing @Polychrome @Colman That's impossible, but also... LLMs don't really store anything they have been trained on. It's an abstraction, not a database

@FediThing @Polychrome @Colman Ahh, not really true: Copilot links to sources when asked for factual queries.

One of the most laughable things about the LLM bubble has been the way it ignores about 50 years of cognitive science research, philosophy of mind, etc. Language models are not reasoning engines. Full stop.

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/llms-dont-do-formal-reasoning-and

Annoyingly, Apple Maps will not tell me how long it takes to walk from Milan to Canterbury. Just another example of Apple’s “we know best” attitude

Gosh this is really quite useful

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/croissant-cross-posting/id6670288979

No

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/technology/apple-social-apps-contacts-change.html

The strange and wonderful story of David Bowie’s ISP. https://www.techradar.com/pro/cyberspace-oddity-the-story-of-bowienet

Remember everyone: if your CEO insists that you can only work at the office, only work when you’re at the office. Leave when your contracted hours end. Do not work at home. Take whatever your contracted breaks are.

Oh and join a union.

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy-latest-update-on-amazon-return-to-office-manager-team-ratio

I am shocked, shocked I tell you that "go woke go broke" turned out to be nonsense made up by regressive right wing echo-chamber dwellers who are desperate to cling on to their right to be vile people at work.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/sep/15/go-woke-go-broke-not-true-for-brands-says-global-advertising-study

Another thing about the Apple Ireland tax case you won't read: Apple isn't the only company (and Ireland isn't the only country) that's been investigated for this kind of favourable deal. Both Starbucks (in the Netherlands) and Fiat (in Luxembourg) have been subject to the same kinds of investigation. Starbucks won its case, but the Netherlands is appealing.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_14_663

No.

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2024/08/25/telegram-is-not-really-an-encrypted-messaging-app/

Ah. This explains why my dual boot broke then.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/21/24225108/microsoft-security-update-windows-linux-dual-boot-errors

What irritates me quite a lot about Apple's increasing rent-seeker techno feudalist approach to their business is that they continue to make great products, which I would happily pay a premium for. But "make great products and sell them to people" no longer seems to be enough. It's "make great products, sell them to people, and force everyone on that platform to pay us a tithe, whether they want to or not".

I've been talking for quite a while about the existential threat to publishers represented by Google's move into AI, and this is one of the reasons why: no publisher can actually opt out of having their data scraped, which, as Joe Raggazzo says, represents a choice: "You drop out and you die immediately, or you partner with them and you probably just die slowly"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-15/google-s-search-dominance-leaves-sites-little-choice-on-ai-scraping

I just don’t know how we’ve ended up in this situation

I don't know who originally made this, but they are a genius.

Expect this line to be swallowed up as “proof" by the usual suspects that closed platforms are good and government regulation is bad.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/microsoft-tech-outage-role-crowdstrike-50917b90?st=pkas1bzrhcoj0os&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink