Notices by Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe), page 3

@aral Not a clue. I’m guessing that it’s a (yet another) bug in their autocomplete system so it must have been affecting everything of theirs that uses it.

“Apple Releases iOS 17.3.1 With Fix for Text Bug - MacRumors”

"could cause text to unexpectedly duplicate or overlap while typing."

Could? COULD? This happens in every single fucking sentence I write on the iPad! How did this garbage ever get shipped. WTF is going on at Apple? https://www.macrumors.com/2024/02/08/apple-releases-ios-17-3-1-with-fix-for-text-bug/

@aral Yeah, PWA installed to the home screen are essential if you want actually working offline apps. Hard to see how this isn’t malicious compliance esp. since that’t their play for everything else they’re doing (alt app store requirements, weird web engine reqs, etc.)

“Apple broke web apps in iOS 17 beta and hasn’t fixed them • The Register”

What a fucking shit show. With shenanigans like this Apple is punishing both the end users and—if we are to be honest—the Safari team, because it’s their hard work that’s being disabled https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/08/apple_web_apps_eu/

“Serious New Warning As Google AI Targets Billions Of Private Messages”

The AI Bubble is anti-privacy, anti-labour, anti-quality, and in an all-out war against anything resembling a creative practice. This is who you’re siding with when you’re using these tools. https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2024/01/28/new-details-free-ai-upgrade-for-google-and-samsung-android-users-leaks/?sh=3396b4317a94

“Television: one of the most audacious pranks in history was hidden in a hit TV show for years.”

I genuinely love this. https://slate.com/culture/2023/12/melrose-place-abortion-art-gala-committee-mel-chin.html

“Google’s New Gmail Tool Is Hallucinating Emails That Don’t Exist”

This tech is just so incredibly broken. https://futurism.com/the-byte/google-gmail-tool-hallucinating-emails

@aral Thanks for that 🙂 Let me know what you think.

Keep your browser fresh for dev, last day of the bundle offer, and links: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/keep-your-browser-fresh/

Today is the last day of the bundle sale! $49 USD for everything. Over $100 USD discount.

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- Yellow, an oddball audio/video series

“You are not updating Node.js”

Not sure what to do with the fact that people aren’t updating node, except maybe to say that of course they aren’t. Node is a pain in the ass, through and through. Of course people don’t update it. https://adventures.nodeland.dev/archive/you-are-not-updating-nodejs/

“htmx ~ Why I Tend Not To Use Content Negotiation” https://htmx.org/essays/why-tend-not-to-use-content-negotiation/

Just be really REALLY careful when you read anything from web.dev or a domain with Chrome or Google in the name about exciting new standard web APIs. Much too often what they are promoting is effectively a proprietary API that other browser vendors have serious concerns about.

It's absolutely irresponsible of Google to continue to promote Chromium-only APIs such as the File System Access API as if they were standard APIs you can use with the expectation that cross-browser support will come eventually

Glossing over the difference between APIs that have genuine cross-browser implementation interest and Chrome-only APIs that are unlikely to ever get implemented in Firefox or Safari is tantamount to tricking devs into making their projects Chrome-only.

“Tech experts are starting to doubt that ChatGPT and A.I. ‘hallucinations’ will ever go away: ‘This isn’t fixable’”

More accurately, AI researchers have always said that this isn’t fixable but y’all were too obsessed with listening to con artists to pay attention but now the con is wearing thin. https://fortune.com/2023/08/01/can-ai-chatgpt-hallucinations-be-fixed-experts-doubt-altman-openai/

“AI’s Electricity Use Is Spiking So Fast It’ll Soon Use as Much Power as an Entire Country”

Side-eyeing every single one of you who is enabling this. https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-electricity-use-spiking-power-entire-country

“Scrollbars are becoming a problem”

The current state of scrollbars is, on the face of it, objective evidence that the people who run tech do not give a single solitary fuck about usability or UX https://artemis.sh/2023/10/12/scrollbars.html

“WebKit Features in Safari 17.0 | WebKit”

Looks like a solid release. https://www.webkit.org/blog/14445/webkit-features-in-safari-17-0/

@pluralistic

That's a really useful post but I think they're wrong on one point.

Training data leakage actually seems to be _the norm_. Most of the field ignores the cardinal rule of not testing on your training data, and it's caused a reproducibility crisis in ML-based science https://reproducible.cs.princeton.edu/

That OpenAI pulled this stunt isn't a mistake. It's par for the course. This is how the AI industry oversells the capabilities of its products.

I thought we'd spent the past few years digging into issues and looking for ways to use these systems on problems they can handle, like data and media conversion and modification.

But, no, we're going straight for the dystopian nightmare stuff:

* Knowledgebases that straight up lie.
* Creating an underclass that's only served by mediocre AIs instead of actual lawyers or doctors
* Summarisers that hallucinate _in their summaries_
* Decision-making systems rife with shortcuts and biases