Garoo

It’s been how many years? and adding a Google Nest speaker to your Home still fails if the language and region settings of your phone don’t match 🤦

Back when OpenAI announced “multimodal” ChatGPT I felt that their language was deliberately vague enough for it to be several layers functioning separately — e.g., a discrete image recognizer telling the LLM what’s in a picture.

They’ve finally confirmed that was the case, because *now* GPT-4o is a single, actually omnimodal neural network. And I find the idea that this works, and works so well and so fast, really impressive and terrifying (all over again).

The fact that OpenAI struck a surprisingly perfect chord with ChatGPT’s originaly tone, and suddenly decided to pivot to torment-nexussing the movie Her, is absolutely wild.

(On the other hand, damn is that thing fast 😲)

@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social

Some of the iPad angst isn't that we have to wait 'till WWDC to see if the software is improved.

It's that little birdies have strongly hinted to us not to expect iPad to really go anywhere from here, that Vision Pro has sucked up all the oxygen inside Apple.

That iPad never really had the resources to fulfill its promises, and much of what was there has now been diverted.

That Apple's design folks couldn't really understand why anybody would want to use an iPad for anything but Pencil work

@carnage4life@mas.to

I continue to be fascinated by the fact that when Jack Dorsey looks back at his time at Twitter, his only regret is that it was technically possible for him to ban the Nazis so people nagged him to do so.

So now his ideal social network is one where the moderators can’t ban Nazis.

Jack Dorsey claims Bluesky is ‘repeating all the mistakes’ he made at Twitter

Just in case there was any doubt about how Jack Dorsey really feels about Bluesky, the former Twitter CEO has offered new details on why he left the board and deleted his account.

@stevestreza@indieweb.social

The fact that Apple managed to infuriate and offend artists and musicians and creatives from so many fields and cultures, in the year 2024, and they didn’t even need to talk about generative AI to do it? Now THAT’S innovation.

@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange

finally, my soul can know peace. until I use one and then I’ll be anxious about running out of arrows again

I didn’t realize the USB-C Pencil was compatible with all USB-C iPads — naturally assumed it was only for the base model. Does that mean they all have the same sensors/trackers on the tablet side and the only difference justifying a laughably illegible Pencil compatibility chart is the inductive charger?

I suppose a $350 iPad must have the lowest profit margin of any Apple device, so every component counts, but still, what a choice to have made.

Oh, this is pretty. I can’t believe it didn’t even occur to me, when I first toured the ship, that it was so empty and oddly laid out because they ran out of time to implement custom decoration 🤦

Starfield | Starborn Guardian Decorated ( UPDATE 1.11.33 Ship Interiors)

The Starborn Guardian ship was always asking to be decorated, finally with the recent update you can. With other ships it works a little different, you need …

Oh no

"A key requirement for effective labour arbitrage is that the employees can be treated as interchangeable components. Jobs that require expertise lend themselves less to arbitrage than jobs that don’t.
MongoDB’s popularity among managers during its peak was largely down to the idea that you no longer needed a database expert. Electron, PhoneGap, and React Native promised to let companies replace their expensive platform specialists with more commodified generalists.”

React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity

The evolution of software development over the past decade has been very frustrating. Little of it seems to makes sense, even to those of us who are right in the middle of it.

Every time I use Procreate I’m surprised that brushes don’t rotate with the Pencil. As far as I remember it’s been a feature on Wacom tablets forever, so I half-assumed the Pencil ought to be capable and the lazy devs just didn't implement it.

Also, a 13-inch iPad Air wouldn't be half bad 😬

But I only use Procreate, like, twice a year.

And, well, I can't afford a new iPad anyway.

@josephcox@infosec.exchange

This new tool shows the approximate physical location of many Telegram users. It uses the API for Telegram’s “Find People Nearby” feature, which is opt-in. But the tool lets you search for locations globally (I did on multiple cities around the world)

This Tool Shows Some Telegram Users’ Approximate Physical Location

The tool relies on Telegram’s opt-in "Find People Nearby" feature, but allows searches for Telegram users globally.

@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social

sinspired by @jsr because it’s perfect.

John S Russell (@jsr@social.jsr.com)

A BILLIONAIRE CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A BILLIONAIRE MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION

I’m afraid if you’d told me when I was fifteen that tech billionaires would someday rule the world I’d have thought it must be paradise.

I love that X has simultaneously decided it's a video-first platform and made it so that videos stop playing at the slightest hint of user activity, because it can't afford the bandwidth costs of being a video platform.

@samhenrigold@hachyderm.io

the Nantucket Current has been chronicling the first cybertruck on the island and is making fun of them parking like a dick. this is the reason a free press is crucial to democracy.

Look, I don’t want to play Harold Halibut because the demo was tedious and if you really wanted to make a movie you should have made a movie rather than come up with boring chores to justify that it’s a “game.”

But an account with 400K subscribers posting a full playthrough of the game to YouTube just a week after release and titling it “This game took 14 years to make!” is so goddamn tasteless 🤦

@soren.iverson@threads.net

iOS reasonably sized buttons for incoming calls

@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social

The other axis Apple could tackle, easily at this point, is the ‘I want Mac features sometimes but iPad most of the time’ crowd. A hypervisor-based VM on iPadOS to run macOS when you really need it.

This would end the 14 year angst of iPad not being a 'real computer’ and let us move forward into new territory. All of that drama around the product gone, in an instant.

Every iPad chip since the M1 has supported Apple's hypervisor. Internal OS builds include virtualization frameworks. It's time

What an interesting theme for a factory builder! It’s a shame everything looks so square though — if they’d gone with a hexagonal grid they could have made it look a lot more organic.

Lifecraft on Steam

Survive and evolve as an organism with this simulation game in which you will literally start as a single cell and manage and organize all its functions to a fully fledged system! Assemble, breathe, eat, fight threats, produce energy, grow, anything is possible!

@timbray@cosocial.ca

Adobe Throws Photographers Under the Bus Again: ‘Skip the Photoshoot’ | PetaPixel

Adobe Throws Photographers Under the Bus Again: ‘Skip the Photoshoot’

Is Adobe ignoring photographers?

@jasonkoebler@mastodon.social

The publisher of a small imprint of roleplaying games magazines/speculative fiction shuts down after 22 years because their submissions have been flooded with AI to the extent they cannot wade through them:

“The problem with AI is the people who use AI. These are people who think their ‘ideas’ are more important than the actual craft of writing, so they churn out all these ‘ideas’ and enter their idea prompts and think the output is a story.”

Flood of AI-Generated Submissions ‘Final Straw’ for Small 22-Year-Old Publisher

“The problem with AI is the people who use AI. They don’t respect the written word,” the founder of Bards and Sages said.

Does Apple have to pay Disney for this or is it agreed to be mutually beneficial? (It *is* a good ad for both.)

iPhone 15 Precision Finding | Find Your Friends | Apple

"Find your friends with Precision Finding on iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro.Learn more about iPhone 15 at https://apple.co/2zOn11z and Find My at https://apple….

Last time I looked into RSS aggregators I’d bookmarked Inoreader but didn’t test it before I switched to NetNewsWire (which had the advantage of being free — and a native Mac app).

Well, I should have tried it at the time, because it’s great. A very good web app, with all the customizability one can wish for. I have to limit myself to 500 feeds to remain in the lower price tier, but all that took was removing hundreds of dead blogs from my subscriptions 😢

If I keep NetNewsWire open on my Mac for several days it silently stops refreshing until I quit and restart. If I don’t, by the time I remember to launch it again I’ve missed a whole bunch of posts in some high-frequency tech blogs.

Guess I have to go back to a hosted solution. I left Feedly when they started overtly advertising “fellow executives, here’s how to replace your peons with our AI” and I don’t intend to go back but it’s a shame, the web and native apps were so good.

@rmondello@hachyderm.io

i can see the future of computing and the future of computing is VC-backed phishing

What an extraordinarily creative way to make OAuth completely insecure. I’m amazed. This belongs in a museum.

Christina Warren (@film_girl@mastodon.social)

Attached: 2 images So when you go to https://hole.rabbit.tech for your configuration, that i a proper web app. But look at what happens when you click on one of the connect buttons. A VNC session opens up. Notice the URL is /uber-vnc

I’m intrigued by the phrasing of this alert — it’s almost like they went out of their way not to say they think it’s the customer calling them.

Makes me wonder if they designed this to be used in both cases, customer calling or bank calling, which would be extremely ill-advised. Or if it’s really just an unintentional lack of clarity, because it seemed obvious in the copywriter’s mind, with unfortunate consequences.

Terence Eden (@Edent@mastodon.social)

Attached: 1 image You receive a call on your phone. The caller says they’re from your bank and they’re calling about a suspected fraud. "Oh yeah," you think. Obvious scam, right? The caller says "I’ll send you an in-app notification to prove I’m calling from your bank." Your phone buzzes. You tap the notification This is what you see. Still think it is a scam? 1/3

Ooh, that would be fun, except for how a Pencil with the necessary hardware components to communicate with Vision Pro would be priced at $300.

@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social

Apple's taking another slice at the Core Technology Fee, which at first seems pretty reasonable — until you realize that three years after accepting the EU developer agreement terms you revert to the previous (poison pill) Core Technology Fee setup anyway

I still wouldn't risk signing up to this, which means I can’t access any of the rights won by the @EU_Commission’s DMA. 👎

developer.apple.com

I mean, it’s silly to complain that YouTube isn’t sticky and addictive enough.

But if I’m gonna spend time watching videos anyway I think I’d rather it was YouTube content than Instagram. If only because sticking with each topic for more than ten seconds is better for my brain. (But also because I hate Meta more than Google.)

Did the YouTube homepage get worse in the past few months, or have I just reached its limits because I’m watching it more?

My recommendations are half “you watched two videos from this channel last week, so here’s everything they ever posted” and half “oh you’re interested in a video game? boy do I have gaming content for you!”

Meanwhile there are channels I’m subscribed to that it just randomly stopped showing me 🤦

Contrast with Instagram that manages to get me scrolling for hours 🙃

@Faskil@mastodon.social

Turns Out That Extremely Impressive Sora Demo… Wasn’t Exactly Made With Sora

Turns Out That Extremely Impressive Sora Demo… Wasn’t Exactly Made With Sora

A viral two-minute short titled "Air Head," created in part by using OpenAI’s video-generating Sora tool, required a good bit human editing.

@Victor_el_DM@mastodon.art

[Finds out famous sci-fi author Larry Niven is still alive]

Me: Oh, I should check his Wikipedia entry, I want to know what he wrote and if…

[reads Larry Niven’s Politics section on Wikipedia]

Me: He can totally die now and it would actually improve the world.

@fanf@mendeddrum.org

had a fun conversation in the pub this evening about practical chemistry

TIL conical flasks are safety equipment!

when a reaction gets too energetic, a conical flask will blow its bottom out and drop the mess on the bench or the floor

instead of exploding in all directions

ie not towards the experimenter’s face and eyes

clever design!

@kaia@brotka.st

weekly reminder what they took from us: sealable USB sticks :sadcat:

Apple: CarPlay will just stream video right from the phone, car manufacturers can’t fuck it up.

Fiat: hard-wires Siri and satnav ouputs to a small speaker embedded in the console instead of the stereo, with no way to adjust the volume, so you have to drive with all windows closed in order to hear anything.

Like, I don’t support Apple’s attempt to take over the entire dashboard but… I think I can see where they’re coming from.