"Apple may record and keep this conversation for quality control and training purposes"
"Training purposes" hits differently these days doesn't it?
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Steve Tibbett
@stevex@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Software developer from Brantford, Ontario
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Joined August 14, 2018
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A new app, something I wrote for myself and think is probably generally useful. Paid up front, $1.99, so I'm obviously not trying to get rich.
SwiftUI! For all my beefing about SwiftUI, it was pretty good for this. Sync via NSUbiquitousKeyValueStore. I even left running the iOS app on macOS turned on.
Similar apps have silly pricing. $1.99 USD one time seems like a fair price for the value you get, to me.
It’s wild how many iOS apps that look like less than a months’s work have “lifetime” subscriptions of $99, $149, $199. Doing the math against a $4.99 monthly subscription may make sense, but that’s a huge increase in cost for value.
Replying to
@drewmccormack@mastodon.cloud All the formality in languages like Java isn't for the experts, it's for the amateurs. I've seen a lot of bad code from contractors who just want to get paid working for people who can't tell the difference. Eliminating classes of bugs helps in situations like that. But it does feel like unnecessary guardrails when you don't need them.
Replying to
@colincornaby I've seen the security researchers trying to write this off as no big deal, that much smaller models could have done this. Question I have is, why haven't they?
Yeah, security is a good way to charge more for an LLM that's difficult to scale. There's probably some of that. But I do believe it's also genuinely more capable of finding these vulnerabilities. Both things can be true.
Replying to
@ccgus Weird thing to me is it's the only macOS app I think I've seen that doesn't have a Help menu (and thus no searching the menus with Cmd-?). I didn't realize how much I use that until I find it's not there.
YNAB <-> RBC is broken again; conveniently just a few days before renewal. Time to try Actual Budget again.
I’m confused by the ADA nominee icons. A lot of these just aren’t good. Am I out of touch with modern design?
@atpfm@mastodon.social Building a personal app or an app to share with a few friends is fine on macOS with notarization but difficult or impossible on iOS. I wonder what Apple will do here.
I think there's some analogue between "AI is making me a worse coder", and coders who move into management and lose touch with the code. You are working at a higher level, and your work becomes less about the code.
This trend where sites show a 3 second looping preview of the start of a video .. I guess some stat must show it increases engagement or click through, but it's so obviously manipulative that I don't trust any site that does it.
I was worried that if I went near Apple Business with my main Apple account, something bad would happen.
And of course, it did. When I try to log in to acount.apple.com with my main Apple account now, I get this.
Crimson Desert is quite good.
When I think back on the last few years of macOS releases, what sticks in my mind is important things getting worse (Settings, Notifications), new apps that are half-baked (News, Journal) and Privacy and Security becoming more in-your-face Windows Vista style with little concern for user experience.
The "Go to settings to enable something, then restart the app" workflow for things like screen capture permissions is indefensible.
A Claude QA project would be interesting. Automated testing fits well with LLM capabilities, and using English instructions to produce test artifacts that can be compared with expected values should make it predictable.
There are a few "AI for QA" companies out there, but I expect the big labs are coming for them.
Not sure how Google decided we're open from midnight to 8am, closed for 2 hours, and then open again until midnight. https://maps.app.goo.gl/VfuoinUzDuQ5JgZq7
Our escape room business is open by appointment only. Apple Maps and Google Maps really want you to provide hours of operation.
If you list the hours you're available for booking, they show "Open" and people drop by expecting to play.
If you list the hours as closed, then you look like you're out of business.
So I try to leave it unspecified, but they keep trying to use AI to guess at our hours, and getting it wrong.
I could create something like a hiragana learning app in no time and add it to the store, but 80% chance Apple rejects it as a crowded category. Doesn’t matter that the category is crowded with poor quality apps or apps with predatory pricing
Replying to
@shayman@cosocial.ca I had a McDonalds refuse to sell me a Kiddie Cone when I ordered it for myself. Seemed ridiculous.
Replying to on mastodon.social
@finestructure@mastodon.social @stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social Google Translate is also trained on people's writing without consent but I haven't seen the same level of moral concern about that. And it's mostly eliminated the translation industry.
Replying to
@finestructure@mastodon.social @stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social They do shape the world we live in. Living in our society today involves accepting that we disagree with a lot of how we got here.
Replying to on mastodon.social
@marcoarment@mastodon.social Yeah maybe. The last few have not gotten the kind of widespread adoption that C++ or Java have, and things are getting more fragmented. I'd say the last one was Typescript (behind most of the web and desktop via Electron).
Replying to
@corbet@social.kernel.org What a rotten thing to do. I’m sure someone else would be willing to take over running that if it’s too hard or too expensive for Google.