All of the Apple operating systems have a more granular build number that changes for alphas, betas, and release candidates too. Looked at my version details on my iPhone and it's iOS 18.5 (22F76). I'm sure iOS 26 will end up having a build number that starts with 23.

Sit back on the site that inspired the word Slashdotting and set the wayback machine for 1999. Substitute the word Google for OpenAI, and this is the same thing.

Aside from whether OpenAI should be scraping at all, mistakes happen, unexpected traffic happens.

When using AWS, make sure to avail yourself of logging, alarms, and most importantly, the billing cost controls. Better to be offline and have to figure out what happened than to have an enormous bill.

The one thing that I haven't pointed out to the Bluesky crowd: They're having a discussion with the person who made the dataset. Rather than pushing the guy to block the dataset (which anybody else can secretly make anyway), it's an opportunity to have some grass-roots discussions about ethical use, like "Hey, it's OK, but please anonymize user names, etc."

No casual user without a legal budget has a chance at having a discussion with Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic or Google about their data collection procedures. Yeah, maybe they can shout into the wind at forums...but nothing substantial.

(The site is sometimes so rabidly anti-AI that I fear my reasoned and nuanced comments will get me moderation-listed, so I don't talk about AI there. I don't mind having a lively discussion about AI ethics, but the emotion level is pretty high.)

Reminds me of high school days. A friend got a job maintaining a PDP-8 that controlled CNC machining equipment at a small factory.

Sometimes the PDP-8 would get wedged. The problem is that turning the power off and on didn't help because the wedged state was preserved in the magnetic core memory.

So he would rapidly cycle the power until a power glitch invalidated some of the memory, then the computer would crash and could be rebooted.

I think you might not have all the information:

Productivity apps: Vision Pro-native Microsoft Office apps were announced day one.

iPad and iPhone apps: It runs them. All of them. Unless the app developer specifically opted out (Netflix, YouTube, Dropbox are the few that did). There's a way to make an iPad app a native Vision Pro app, adding a few affordances like infinite screen aspect, but compatible iPad apps run quite well out of the box.

Steam VR games: Runs 'em via ALVR (game hosted on PC).

Being a 96" virtual screen for an MMO on my Windows gaming machine: check, via Sunlight (server) and Moonshine (app). 90 fps, 3 ms latency.

Porn: Web browsers.

Keyboard and trackpad are supported.

Cost in adjusted dollars: Half of the original Macintosh. (Seriously, we're spoiled by cheap computers)

Will I be called a fanboi? Most certainly, but I own one, use it every day, productively, so I speak from experience. It's not perfect, but I don't think it's as dismal as people think. I compare it to the original Macintosh, which started out limited and was originally a bit of a niche product.

I will admit the product was rushed to launch, has rough edges, and is most definitely in early days, but you gotta start somewhere, and I'm glad that Apple, as usual, started with something a cut above.

I have a friend who has a Sony D-1 deck and a friend who's limping it along so they can recover some old tapes.

The D-1 decks always had digital video I/O of some sort, and I believe the one I've laid hands on had SDI, so they should be to recover the video data stream from the tape fairly directly.

Part of the point of the D-1 was using a digital format both on tape and in the signal paths. That frees you from generational losses, losses along the signal path, and so forth. Plus, it's 4:2:2 uncompressed video, so while the chrominance is subsampled, it has no compression artifacts. That's what made it a great mastering and archival format. What it was was insanely expensive, both the equipment and the tapes.

Of course, these days, almost all video is digital video on a disk or solid state storage medium, but back in the day, the quality of the video on that D-1 was jawdropping, especially viewing it on properly calibrated studio monitors.

Another thing to remember is that the pilot is not just an "airplane driver." They're trained on the aircraft's systems so that they take remedial action if something breaks in flight. When there's an emergency, tasks are divided between the pilot flying and the pilot not flying...the most important thing in an emergency is to keep flying the airplane. Who's going to do that if the one pilot has to tend to some technical problem? What if the problem includes the autopilot being out of commission?

See Eastern Air Lines Flight 401, where three cockpit crew were diagnosing a landing gear issue, and nobody was flying the plane. The autopilot disconnected...and nobody noticed. The plane flew into the Everglades, killing 101. Turns out it was only a burned-out lamp. Part of the aftermath was implementing crew resource management to ensure that emergencies are handled efficiently.

Source: I'm not a commercial pilot, but I have friends who are.

Apple already makes an M2 iPad that runs Xcode. It's even got a built-in keyboard and trackpad, and is around the same weight as a iPad with a Magic Keyboard. It's got more memory, and more ports, too! https://www.apple.com/macbook-...

(Seriously, most of the innards are the same, so why cobble together a tablet and accessories to do the job of a really small, light, powerful notebook...?)

I have a UniFi network set up in my apartment, and looked at the detected Neighboring Access Points.

I'm finding SSIDs like myChevrolet, myCadillac, Toyota Sienna. Most everybody goes past my home on their way into the neighborhood, so the access points see their cars going by. Some people have even put their real names on their car!

I've got logs with the SSID, BSSID (like a MAC address), and the last seen time. I know when the bus went by because of SSIDs like Free WiFi on Bus 3231.

So yeah, turn on that convenient In-Vehicle WiFi and you can be tracked.

Specifically, from the similar Facebook lawsuit, I just deposited my $397 settlement check. In that case, the judge even rejected the original settlement, because it was too small.

Illinois has a pretty strict biometrics law. I've always been curious about Sony's Aibo, but it's not for sale or use in Illinois or Baltimore, MD presumably because of the biometric laws in those two areas.

I would base nothing on Tesla's report. A proper assessment of the system's safety should be carried out by an independent third party using proper statistical models, and subject to peer review.

RAND Corporation published a blog article with a link to a research report that found, among other results, that "Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries."

You can't just look at 4.31 million miles with one crash in one quarter, and do the division and come up with the probably. Yes, you get a number, but the sample size is too small, and thus, the confidence in the number is hardly there either.

If that were the case, I haven't had an at-fault accident in 42 years, and maybe a quarter-million miles of driving, so obviously, I'm practically 100% safe! We know this isn't true...I'm just a moderately good driver who's had a long run of luck, is all.

You did, live long enough, sort of. The IBM i operating system, originally OS/400, introduced in 1988, had a single-level store. There was no "disk" or "memory", just "storage". Sure, it was backed up by hard drives. But from the view of the application programs, it was just one huge piece of (virtual) memory, with a single address space.

All the magic happened in the code in the operating system. How the storage was apportioned between RAM and disk, how programs weren't able to look at objects belong to other programs, etc. Even the CPU was abstracted away. You could move your programs from System/38 based hardware to Power based hardware, and the system would translate the program from the intermediate representation that the compiler produced to the machine code for the hardware.

Really elegant system, way ahead of its time.

I've read the usual reactive screed in comments about "oh, gosh, don't let Alexa into your house!" Instead I gave it a try.

"Alexa, give me a challenge!"

It's not a built-in skill. Alexa offered to install a skill, and the first one on the list turned out to be a Fortnite challenge skill that told me to use the first weapon I found, presumably in the game.

Ok, let's see if we can bias this. It's a TikTok challenge, huh? I *manually* installed the TikTok skill. "Alexa, ask TikTok for today's challenges." It wants me to ask on my mobile device.

Ok, run the Alexa app. "Ask TikTok for today's challenges." "To do this, you have to install the TikTok app. Here it is on the App Store." I didn't install it.

The problem is probably not Alexa. The problem is probably letting your kids get on TikTok. It's a parent's responsibility to guide their children in responsible use of the internet and social media. When I was a kid, we told each other to do stupid things in person, face to face. We had to learn common sense, which saved us from injury or worse.

It's not entirely clear how to start docker-engine and have it use HyperKit on macOS. Not having to research/tinker with that plus easy installation plus update notifications is worth $5/mo. Even if using the command line for everything else.

To me, saving $5/mo by making installation more complicated, taking up time that could be spent developing, and creating a requirement for more internal developer support is a false economy.

If I'm using software for something important, I like it to have a visible and sustainable business model, so I'm not that worried about the small charges. Anybody paying more than $5/mo/dev was probably already using the enhanced features of the higher-priced plans.

Back in 2017, with a little prodding, I got my Technician class Amateur Radio License. Now I do a little long distance radio in the field, but that's not the important part.

I ended up in a few radio clubs. They've got well-situated VHF/UHF repeaters downtown. Two of the clubs run a "net" every night, where people check in and chat. Kind of like my Grandpa going to the tavern after work.

I just got back from going out to the woods with a friend from one of the clubs. Brought the radios, tried to make some DX contacts, try out some new equipment. But the best part is we sat around and talked.

That's one way out of isolation. Find a hobby that works even under COVID.