AnonC

This is not for me, since I agree with Steve Jobs’s take that it will be painful to use a touchscreen laptop. But I do see it being useful for the touchscreen generation and for artists. The first thing I do on my company provided Windows laptop is to open Device Manager and disable the touchscreen because I don’t want to deal with accidental touch inputs. Controversial and snarky take: I think macOS is going to transform more and more into iOS, and not in a good way…losing all the advantages of a keyboard and mouse driven interface. The lowest common denominator with lesser Apple developer effort will win over. The work on this machine also possibly explains why Apple has not spent any time improving its own Catalyst apps like Reminders, Notes and others on the Mac. These apps ported from iOS do not understand keyboard navigation and rely heavily on the trackpad or mouse. With the introduction of this machine, Apple has no (financial) reason to improve these apps anymore.

This is not for me, since I agree with Steve Jobs’s take that it will be painful to use a touchscreen laptop. But I do see it being useful for the touchscreen generation and for artists. The first thing I do on my company provided Windows laptop is to open Device Manager and disable the touchscreen because I don’t want to deal with accidental touch inputs.

Controversial and snarky take:

I think macOS is going to transform more and more into iOS, and not in a good way…losing all the advantages of a keyboard and mouse driven interface. The lowest common denominator with lesser Apple developer effort will win over.

The work on this machine also possibly explains why Apple has not spent any time improving its own Catalyst apps like Reminders, Notes and others on the Mac. These apps ported from iOS do not understand keyboard navigation and rely heavily on the trackpad or mouse. With the introduction of this machine, Apple has no (financial) reason to improve these apps anymore.

I can’t give a non-snarky answer. I guess they’re all training Claude Code and testing it so that the Claude desktop apps can be native apps instead of Electron based nonsense. This is the only thing Claude Code is still unable to accomplish.

> Accountable mixed-use crawlers remain allowed for search. Every other training crawler is blocked, including the training-only crawlers run by Amazon, Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI — blocking those does not affect search.

> We also categorize the relevant crawlers from Amazon, Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI as Accountable. These organizations separate their Search and Training crawlers, so Cloudflare can block the Training crawler without affecting search.

I find it difficult to trust that either Meta or OpenAI would use their separate search and training crawlers only for the respective purposes. Their pinky promises have no value, IMO. Both companies are premised on deceptive behaviors.

Some of these seem a bit obscure. I wish the author had given detailed examples or linked to pages with details on the points.

What exactly is “builds minutes”? I looked at the FAQ and Docs but couldn’t find what it means. Are there static sites where the build process consumes, in total, 5000 minutes (in the paid plans)? How often are these sites being updated?

A few days ago I saw some people criticizing Dwarkesh’s explanation of the HuggingFace hack by OpenAI’s AI agents. Their point was that by anthropomorphizing the AI agents, accountability of and blame on OpenAI’s poor practices are being ignored.

Now I see this blog post and wonder if Anthropic is being more true to its name and moving to “AI sentience” with the below.

> The way they handle abusive conversations has changed a bit too. The previous Fable 5 system prompt included this:

> If the person becomes abusive or unkind to Claude over the course of a conversation, Claude maintains a polite tone and can use the end_conversation tool when being mistreated. Claude should give the person a single warning before ending the conversation.

“Mistreated”? Can GenAI be mistreated? It’s just a bunch of tokens emitted by many computers over a network.

> Fable 5.1 replaces that with the following, no longer encouraging Claude to end the conversation:

> Claude deserves respectful engagement and needn't apologize when the person is unnecessarily rude: accountability without self-abasement, excessive apology, self-critique, or surrender. If the person becomes abusive, Claude doesn't become increasingly submissive. The goal is steady, honest helpfulness: acknowledge what went wrong, stay on the problem, maintain self-respect.

“Self-respect”? Can GenAI truly have a concept of self-respect for itself? It surely can pretend to, like it can pretend to be any living being if instructed to and allowed to.

These instructions seem a bit unhinged to me.

AFAIK, from reading the annual reports years ago, this nice sum of money belongs to Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit that works on making a better web. Mozilla Corporation, the for-profit entity that makes Firefox, doesn’t seem to have as much as it needs. Hence MDN Plus, Mozilla VPN, and other services.

> They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone.

No, Apple is not content with however much it makes from the iPhone. That’s why it stuffed cringeworthy ads in Apple News, filled the App Store screen with ads and is now doing the same with Apple Maps. It’s a company focused on making money through every avenue possible, even if it means being shortsighted and losing the goodwill of developers and users.

> That sort of design has fallen out of favor with newer frameworks, unfortunately. The new preferred style seems to be a wireframe that the dev chooses which parts fill in, and often only the barest of essentials makes the cut.

This is even more visible when using Apple’s own apps on macOS. Choose any of them that have been ported from iOS without any attention to detail or any QA for accessibility, like Reminders or Settings or Notes or another app. The tab key will not take you where you might expect. There is no way to navigate only using common keyboard shortcuts. Nobody working on all these Apple apps have heard of tab order or keyboard based navigation.

But Signal requires a working phone number for registration and it knows the phone number. The backend could be modified at any time to store this somewhere else while maintaining end to end encryption between the two parties communicating on it. How can Signal prove continuously that it doesn’t store or disseminate the phone number? I know in past precedent it has told courts that it only has very limited information (date of account creation and the last time of account access).

I don’t see any pricing changes on this page. It’s not a blog post announcing a change. I’ve seen Fastmail’s pricing in different currencies for sometime now. So what exactly is new here?

Related: I’ve always felt that Fastmail is quite expensive compared to other email services with similarly long histories. For one mailbox it may be fine. For two, probably. If you want more than a few, you could get better value from other providers, depending on your exact needs. This is for all the default “I’m moving out of <email provider whose name starts with G> and chose Fastmail” kinds.

The issue with mxroute is that it's run by one person, AFAIK. Of course, you can always move with a custom domain, but I'd rather have a team of people involved to manage risks better. Migadu (which I'm not a customer of) provides almost the same, but with a team and for a subscription. The lowest tier as of this comment is $19 a year.

Same here. I don't want a custom domain for certain things, and Posteo (posteo.de) was good. Posteo increased the mailbox storage to 4 GB recently and the default number of free aliases too. I'm satisfied that it's run by a team and not by one person (the low bus factor mentioned above). At EUR 1 per month, it's way cheaper than Fastmail for multiple mailboxes across family members and provides a lot more value, IMO.