Notices by Craig Hockenberry (chockenberry@mastodon.social)

Wait for it…

(Answers to the questions _everyone_ asks.)

https://blog.iconfactory.com/2025/02/enter-tapestry/

@WarnerCrocker Thank you!

We still have a ton of work to do, and I’ll have more to say about that as the week progresses, but after 20 months of working on this thing, it feels great that everyone can finally see it:

https://usetapestry.com

#TapestryApp

The first screenshot of what would become Tapestry.

You have to start somewhere, even if it’s labeled ????? and ugly as hell.

Fascists are going to need technology to succeed.

And we know more about that than they do.

Put dipsticks in your code.

https://jalopnik.com/citroen-sabotaged-wartime-nazi-truck-production-in-a-si-1836670685

Why is “Writing Tools” the first thing shown in Safari’s context menu? It’s pointless and makes it harder to get at the things I actually use: “Lookup” and “Translate”.

Some manager at Apple decided that showing off a new feature was more important than usability. That’s bullshit.

/cc @gruber

The only use case I can see for this feature is plagiarism.

Select a passage in Wikipedia or wherever, and change it to make it your “own”.

Geezus. What a thing to put front and center.

Normal folks are going to trust Apple to be making good choices, when in reality it’s just a machine doing some statistical analysis.

We’ll soon have another holiday task while visiting family. After you turn off the motion smoothing, you’ll be turning off the email summaries.

Apple is adding legitimacy where there is none.
https://mastodon.cloud/@markusms/113646640546326913

@film_girl You could say it was Seoul crushing.

@Gargron @jstepien Actually, it’s our new app in that screenshot. Sounds like we need to do some conversion on the source data.

Also, in the Mastodon web view it looks like the punycode is leaking through in the status text.

Unicode is hard!

@jstepien @Gargron And you can add Mastodon link previews now 😉

(The punycode is exposed in the preview, it’s fine in the status text.)

You know what would be a great feature on an iPhone?

The ability to turn off Silence Unknown Callers for a specific time period.

I turn it off all the time for callbacks, deliveries, and other random phone calls that I know are going to be happening in the next few hours. You have to turn off the firewall sometimes.

And then I forget to turn it back on and get a stupid telemarketer the next day.

Pretty sure this little computer could remember to do it for me.

It’s my opinion that generative AI will find a place where it aids in a task.

I don't want it to write a blog post for me; I want help rephrasing a passage.

I don't want it to produce code for me; I want assistance digging through the web for examples of what I need.

And contrary to what you may think, satisfying these human needs are at least a generation away:

https://stratechery.com/2024/enterprise-philosophy-and-the-first-wave-of-ai/

Here's something that happened yesterday:

My wife photoshopped a person's head onto another photo to make a funny image. Many of us have done something similar.

But here's the thing I noticed: she was laughing and giggling the WHOLE time she was making it. It was 20 minutes of pure fun.

Could she have made a better image in a fraction of the time using generative AI? Of course.

But often the journey is the reward.

And all of the folks who are promoting this technology just don't get that.

If it takes 10,000 hours to achieve expertise in a skill, you can cut that down to 20,000 hours with the help of AI.

Waking up this morning after a nice holiday weekend.

(via viralfrog on Tumblr)

Another week, another letter telling me about a “privacy event” (aka data breach).

Here's a simple way to fix this problem: legislation that says every customer who's affected gets a check for $100. No more of this check-your-credit weak sauce - instead, a real cost to the business.

If you have data on 100 million customers, paying out $10 BILLION is a hell of an incentive to keep your fucking data protected.

Or better yet, maybe it's not worth $100 to store it in the first place…

When you start seeking rent on the livelihood of artists, I don’t think you get to claim you work at the intersection of Technology and Liberal Arts anymore.

https://news.patreon.com/articles/understanding-apple-requirements-for-patreon

I’ve always been proud that xScope is a tool that sits quietly in the background, ready when you need it.

So much for the “quietly” part…

https://mastodon.online/@9to5Mac/112916905882020099