notsydonia

I also gather that if I do get this, I'd need to promptly install a debloater:

https://omlahore.github.io/RemoveMacAI/

The angry ghost of Steve Jobs must HAUNT Cupertino. Plug and Play is now Plug, install de-bloat software and multiple extensions to de-crappify your machine, then play.

I get it. And even with that I (plus many others) still need to to download StillColor to stop the dithering. The other issue with this iMac - that I would actually LOVE to get - is that since about 2022, every Mac OS update has been like a waking nightmare - I'm sitting on Ventura which is insane as everything else I use is up to date but Apple have an aversion to fixing long-documented bugs on desktop. I'm not being precious - there are whole forums devoted to the hell that was Sonoma and somehow spending thousands on a flash new desktop only to then lose data, time and serenity is just insulting.

YES!

I empathise!

Unpopular opinion no doubt but I think iMacs were way better with Intel chips. I still resent that my fantastic 2012 (yes) iMac finally became unusable due to software incompatibility. It was a beast of a machine. I actually did put Linux on it but it's not particularly satisfactory. If Apple were the 'eco-conscious' company they claim to be, they'd somehow make it so their machines lived forever...or longer. I'd love a new iMac but had to switch to Mac Mini/BenQ monitor after experiencing vertigo with the new gen iMacs.

Agree -they all do it. How do they justify the bounce rate? It's never once been shown to my knowledge that viewers love to have their browsing/reading/knowledge gathering interrupted by a volume-up video playing (usually) an ad.

Is it just so they can tell advertisers X amount of people "viewed" your ad?

It's nuts and I can't believe it works. It's interesting that you're getting bank P.R. fluff with that 'should be illegal' workaround - I've been getting them from my bank in Australia and wondered if we had really slack laws. A mass mail-out solution like - say - Mail Chimp would not let users do this. There has to be an unsubscribe link on mass-mail blasts and you should not be able to pretend P.R. fluff is suddenly "transactional." I also don't want to be lectured about mindfulness by a bank!

I love this simple but excellent suggestion, thank you.

This seems smart of them in the sense that many creator/website owners have lost significant traffic that Google used to send their way and so are reluctantly pivoting back to paying more attention to social - for discovery.

But speaking as someone who deleted a high following FB page that I probably shouldn't have because the back end of it was so infuriating, I don't understand this offering. It seems like a lot of bling and clutter. Most people who need to use Meta for biz reasons want the same thing - live support that is not a bot or a human that may as well be a bot.

And not to get too granular but if you've used IG lately, for example, you notice that trying to do anything on the back end (eg: set up up some boosted posts or schedule things) takes the user through a maze and sometimes you end up in the old legacy Facebook pages, which has links that don't relate to any of the contemporary features. It sounds minor but it essentially barely functions and each click to confirm something sends you to another section to confirm something else. You also need a FB page to do anything on an IG page and a tonne of other petty thwartings. The fact that their brand new subscriptions/Meta platform seems just as confusing is alarming. I don't know how a company with this much money can not design an un-hellish back end or offer reasonable customer support.

Their A.I. monitoring is also completely off the chain, closing accounts and locking profiles for opaque reasons that cannot be questioned.

Wow, I just asked Google A.I. mode some pointed questions about a site of mine which has been up and successful for about as long as Google and if Google had any guidance for creators/site owners. I had to push it but I got some remarkably frank answers and I am posting here as an FYI.

"The accepted ideal case for Google is a highly consolidated, walled-garden internet where a small array of corporate media partners provide the trusted facts, while independent websites are forced to shift into closed, subscription-only communities...

Tech analysts and digital economists refer to this transition as the "Siloed Web." Google's ultimate goal is no longer to help users explore the open internet; it is to keep users inside Google’s AI interface by using licensed corporate data as its foundation.

By pivoting to AI Overviews and corporate licensing deals, Google is effectively dismantling its own legacy. They are turning back into the 1995 version of Yahoo—a closed ecosystem that only serves "approved" corporate data, except this time the curation is done by an AI model trained on paid datasets rather than human editors."

I only use Google for opening hours of stores these days and sometimes product research/cost comparison BUT yesterday I inadvertently clicked on A.I. mode and it was clearly infiltrated by undisclosed advertising. I was asking why a particular kind of tap faucet wrench wasn't available that widely - was I perhaps using the wrong term for it: suddenly Google posed the question "are you in an aisle of X (hardware store) looking for Y (tools brand) right now?" I was so annoyed I intuitively closed the tab but I probably should have continued to see how far it went. At no point was there any disclosure that it was an ad.

Yes! And for actual research, I like to see a variety of sources and opinions, as well as some links to granular or primary data if apt. I don't even like A.I. summary of product reviews because they're SO bland and not needed. Even aside from the traffic-choking, content stealing insult to legit creator sites, it's like a giant, insidious flattener of human color and interest.

I love this. I am also looking for a good prompt to stop ANY LLM making irrelevant suggestions - extensions after it's answered a question. Eg; "Would you like me to create a timeline of ....?" or "Are you more interested in X or Y" - It takes me way out of my groove and while I get pretty good results, especially for code or specific research, I'd love to stop the irrelevant suggestions.

YES! I thought it was just me being a bit scattered. But uploading an important file to a project only to have it not there because....<garbled answer from Claude> is distracting to say the least. I don't know what I've enabled offhand but I hate having to stop and try to work out why Claude can't reference a file uploaded to the project in a chat within that project. I think they should pause on all the wild aspirations and devote some time to fundamentals.

Exactly. I also wonder what the end game is. If creating content becomes a loss-making exercise, people will logically stop and the LLMs will have less and less to content to 'train on.' And as even large news corps are increasingly deploying internal LLMs, the deadening banal style of LLMs, A.I. over-view etc will inevitably drive readers away. I use Perplexity for search in place of Google and it surfaces good links most of the time. But what do tech and media companies - even spotify - think they will do when the artists, reporters and creatives stop feeding them? Or readers don't want to read banal summaries of everything?

Had such a bad experience with Sonoma, multiple micro-glitches that stole time and focus, that I dropped back to Ventura and have been avoiding updates ever since. The weird thing is that despite numerous bugs being logged all over the place, the 'new features' updates from Apple OS didn't seem to address any of them. They were mostly weird gimmicky new add-ons that don't mean anything to a power-user.

I might be interested in trying Tahoe if they'd undone whatever the awful policy is that puts a tonne of unwanted apps and desktop pics etc into your desktop that cannot be removed. I don't want Apple News, the clock in the menu bar and even Airplay - I purchased the computer, why can't I have what I want on it without compulsory apps from Apple?

I tried some Woo-Commerce? plugin to accept Bitcoin on my sites a few years ago and Paypal baulked at it or made it incredibly complicated to the point that I gave up. Stripe said to wait until their cryptocurrency was released.

The main issue at the time seemed to be that it couldn't really work as a medium of exchange. Eg; $100 paid on the Monday might be $80 or $150 by the time it actually cleared. Maybe I was really inept but I got sick of the complexity and bailed, even though I liked the idea of having these options.

I wouldn't try Paypal's offering as they don't have any kind of quality support for merchants.

Great piece. There was a point last decade where literally every person I encountered, upon hearing about my site, would start badgering me to "get an app." If asked what this hypothetical app could do that the site didn't, the answer was that it would just be good to have an app.

Now in 2025 my biggest app-pain is being in the already useless live support chat for a phone co or utility company and they keep insisting that I'll get actual support if I download their stupid app. Again, they can't cite a reason - it's just "better." For data-brokering, sure - for the user, barely ever.

It's also a huge danger as the system FB uses to tag and categorize photos is clearly flawed. example: Meta took a business page I ran that had over 150K followers offline because of a photo that violated their 'strict anti-pornography' etc etc policies. The picture was of a planet - Saturn - and it took weeks of the most god-awful to and fro with (mostly) bots to get them to revoke the ban - their argument was that the planet was 'flesh-toned' and that their A.I. could not tell that was not actually skin. The image was from NASA via a stock library and labelled as such.

I enjoyed reading this but it also made me think I must be a bit weird. Depending on what I'm working on and where I'm at, I keep notes in Apple notes or obsidian, extended descriptions on bookmarks, physical sticky notes, an actual journal and pages files on desktop - barely any of it is tagged and I'd call it 'notes' rather than a 2nd brain but i go through it all every eight-12 weeks, cull what now seems irrelevant and try to act on the rest of it. I should probably learn how to actually use obsidian properly but I still don't get the 'second brain' terminology.

Also, leaving aside my previous two points on this and speaking as a person who consumes the internet, I don't want the apparently outmoded 'list of blue links' to be replaced by one A.I. overview.

As is well documented, the overviews can 'hallucinate' and less well-documented, they're bland. I'd rather have my search query met with an array of links, offering a variety of takes that I can then sift through.

This is especially vital for research which is why I now use Kagi and also Perplexity, as in the latter provides quality links. I may be wrong but I believe it was started by former Google execs and uses some of the natural language processing mechanisms that made legacy Google so good.

Google can link to whomever they want but stealing content and then saying it is not theft because they mix it up with content from other sites they've stolen from is not fair competition. It's more like the logic of car thieves who say that they took apart the porsche they stole and it's parts are now used with the parts from all the other cars they stole - therefore did they really take the now unrecognizable porsche? The court still deems it theft. If Google left creators and site owners content alone and created their own content to use in A.I. overviews - ie: becoming publishers - it would be annoying and spark innovation as sites de-googled but this is not that.

It IS incredibly unfair and it's also unethical, given that they're already scraping publisher content to feed their own A.I. Unless I missed it, this article didn't have details on how the revenue - if any - would be handled but I presume there would also be some 'ticket-clipping' on the part of Google there as well.

Ie: sorry about acquiring your content and then no longer linking to you but in case anyone does ever find your pathetic indie site, we're now offering an array of solutions so that you can ditch your long-standing but now no longer needed e-commerce solutions. You have made...$177 in micro payments this week minus the transaction fees of $17.77 but cannot claim it yet as you have not met our your ad revenue threshold. Need help? Go around in circles with our chat bots until you die - we'll keep your money regardless.

The person who devised this was most likely one Illia Vitiuk, head of the SBU cyber-sec department. Before that position, he was an MMA fighter. In a 2023 interview he says he was inspired by "James Bond films and a life of adventure..." Also apparently stood down then reinstated recently over some unexplained transactions, family finance situation.

https://www.npr.org/2023/09/06/1196975759/ukraine-cyber-war-...

Love this discussion. Changing font is fantastic for freshness, also spreadsheeting the more emotive/creative notes but handwriting the tech notes. Not always but to shift brain hemisphere (not a scientific concept but how it feels) or aid neuroplasticity.

I agree completely. Personally, I actually like the list of links because I like to compare different takes on a topic. It's also fascinating to see how a scientific study propagates through the media or the way the same news story is treated over time, as trends change. I don't want a single mashed-up answer to a question and maybe that makes me weird but more worrying, whenever I've asked a LLM for an answer to a question on a topic I happen to know a LOT about, the response has been either incorrect or inadequate - "there is currently no information collected on that topic" I do like Perplexity for questions like "without any preamble whatsoever, what is the fastest way to remove a <whatever>stain from X material?"

Incorrect. It's not mandated that you actually use it to write or correct code but it's impossible to remove it so you need to either get used to blocking out it's incessant suggestions and notifications or stop using GitHub.

Similarly, the newest MS Word has CoPilot that you "don't have to use" but you still have to put up with the "what would you like to write today?" prompt request at the start of every document or worse "You look like you're trying to write a...formal letter...here are some suggestions."

Unfortunately, you can't opt out of Co-Pilot in Github. Although I did just use it to ask how to remove the sidebar with "Latest Changes" and other non-needed widgets that feel like clutter.

Copilot said: There is currently no official GitHub setting or option to remove or hide the sidebar with "Latest Changes" and similar widgets from your GitHub home page.

I'm using this an example to show that it is no longer possible to set up a GitHub account to NOT use CoPilot, even if it just lurks in the corner of every page waiting to offer a suggestion. Like many A.I. features it's there, whether you want to use it or not, without an option to disable.

So I'm suss of the "pretty much every developer" claim, no offense.

I disagree, although mine are clients not friends as such so you may have more insight. Running an empire or even managing a fortune you inherited is a tonne of work - there are so many people from the government, potentially bad hires, distant family members, not to mention actual criminals who think that the person's money would suit them a lot better. They have auditors to audit the auditors, barristers on call and philanthropy managers to gently explain to your 3rd cousin that your charity fund does not extend to funding their permaculture concept.

I also mean 'don't have time to read' to be a bit sarcastic - as in it's not a flex to read the best-selling biography of whoever that was reviewed favorably or might win the Pulitzer - but having acquired the guy's letters - that even the biography author could not get - that's your one-up.

There's also the evidently more ascetic end of the billionaire spectrum - eg: Peter Thiel, Michael Burry - who don't seem to be interested in luxury, as such.

Sorry, I guess what I meant is that this hypothetical ultra-wealthy person wouldn't think "I am going to get a <premium brand> dishwasher, as such. They'd assume it would be the absolute best. If this rich person fancied themselves as a chef, they'd absolutely obsess over the oven etc and have a very clear concept in mind - eg: a high end Aga. But the real estate brochure boast of all Miele (or Bosch, whatever) kitchens would not move them, as such.