rgovostes

Check out the National Technical Information Service, which publishes some federal data sets like the SSA Death Master File (https://dmf.ntis.gov). They charge $1,531 per seat per year to do online queries or $2,930 + fees to download. They are exempt from FOIA, but the products are still public domain.

Half of their links are dead but they've updated their website to say:

> We help agencies leverage new and innovative capabilities, including super intelligence, machine learning, and robotics.

> Gravity Linux vs Asahi Linux

> Gravity Linux and Asahi Linux are two independent projects working towards the shared goal of a strong, open OS ecosystem on Apple Silicon devices. Gravity Linux was initially forked from Asahi Linux over differences in policy, namely regarding LLM use. We have tremendous respect for the Asahi Linux project and emphasize our shared goal of running Linux on Apple Silicon.

Context: Asahi's Generative AI Policy (https://asahilinux.org/llm-policy/) prohibits LLM use.

The Adafruit post is just an LLM recap of the author's blog post, which is an LLM summary of the project, which was vibe coded with Claude. The signal:noise ratio is dropping off exponentially.

Speaking of old game frameworks, before developers used the Cocoa framework to create Mac apps, there was Apple's other Cocoa: https://www.engadget.com/2011-08-03-found-footage-apple-intr...

On a related note, has anyone modified a Mac Studio to run directly from DC power? I'd like to use one in a battery-powered system without an inverter.

"Appeal to personal responsibility" is not a fallacy. Get a different bingo card.

There are a handful of comments here rueing buggy behaviors. These days with nearly the same amount of effort to post a complaint you can delegate the task of reproducing the issue, diagnosing the root cause, and proposing a fix. Yes, it may incur a small to moderate cost, but it's a contribution to an open source project that apparently provides some value in return.

"AI researchers" have been having a "consciousness debate" since time immemorial. Here's Alan Turing on the subject in 1950: https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.803/pdf/turing.pdf (pp. 22-23)

I would use Cards while on vacation to send a spontaneous photo to elderly family members who weren’t online, and the experience was perfectly frictionless and very Apple. I don’t know if I ever saw the finished product.

I emailed Eddy Cue when the shutdown was announced and he agreed it was a great app but confirmed it wasn’t popular enough.

I don’t think I’ve sent a card since.

I watched the press briefing and then the Q&A in full, followed by part of the iPhone 4S announcement (Tim Cook's first keynote, and the day before Jobs's death). A couple of thoughts:

- Steve basically has 4 points to make during his prepared slides and he drags them out over 30 minutes. He's basically lecturing the press and just shy of scolding them for their vacuous reporting.

- Steve talks about how much they love their customers, and want to do right by them. The iPhone 4S keynote also features one of those Apple Store grand opening videos with crowds of happy customers. This has basically vanished from the brand persona... Tim may have said it in a monotone, but you don't feel it anymore.

- The members of the press do not come across as particularly competent in the Q&A. One of the questions is basically, "You previously shipped a software update that addressed cellular issues. Why are there still cellular issues?" They got really hung up on the fairly clear details of the free case program.

- The live Town Hall keynotes are so much more pleasant to watch. Not just pleasant but more comfortable to watch. The highly-produced modern keynotes are exhausting.

- I had no recollection of Apple releasing watch faces for the iPod nano* so it could be worn on the wrist, a few years before the Apple Watch. (*macOS autocorrect still enforces such capitalization of this 21-year-old product.)

You appear to have completely misinterpreted my comment.

Users of Mac OS X in the 2000s might remember the shareware company Unsanity and their Application Enhancer and "haxies" that modified system behaviors, like MightyMouse for custom cursors or ShapeShifter for UI themes.

Apple eventually waged war against code injection and by OS X 10.7, Unsanity's products were made obsolete.

Former Unsanity developer Rosyna Keller has recently revived two of their products for modern macOS: Xounds adds UI sound effects like OS 9's Platinum, and FruitMenu permits customization of the Apple menu.

In my macOS 27 System folder there are almost 500 local models across dozens of frameworks. Do you want to purge all of them? Or is there some distinguishing characteristic about which ones are unacceptable -- transformer models vs convolutional neural networks, generative models vs inference, etc.?

Philosophically, what is the difference between empty space and space that will be reclaimed when you need it?

The storage medium tracks whether a cell or sector is overwritable. The filesystem tracks whether a block is allocated. And the OS tracks whether a cache is evictable.

At what layer do you consider the space “claimed”?

There is no actual feature called "Apple Intelligence", it's a marketing term for a handful of disparate features that they are applying everywhere.

Is the excellent OCR that lets me select text within an image Apple Intelligence? It uses local models. Or the prediction engine that optimizes battery life by backgrounding apps you're less likely to use, or applies updates while you're sleeping? What about the Latent Semantic Mapping text classification framework, which uses language models for fuzzy document search -- and has been around since 2007?

It wouldn't have made sense in the past to add a master kill switch for all these features, and it doesn't really make sense now to have one for the latest iteration.

Have you used a social network in the past year? Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, et al. have become increasingly hostile to blockers with techniques that break pattern-matching on hostnames and element selectors. It may be inevitable that adblockers move toward visual identification.

Amazon's hardware development subsidiary in Sunnyvale, California is Lab126. (Hi Mars!)

A young relative of mine is having a miserable time cashing Treasury bonds that were gifted to her through TreasuryDirect for her tuition.

Treasury is requiring she get a medallion signature guarantee from a bank to access her funds but, like 40%+ of her generation, she uses online banking with no accessible branch. Treasury insists she can get this from any bank, but as the guarantor is liable for a loss, there's no way they will provide this to a non-client. They generally won't even make their ordinary notary public available.

So she is now switching financial institutions simply to access a modest amount in her TreasuryDirect account. If you are thinking about gifting saving bonds to someone: do them a favor and don't.

Ironically, "No feeds. No algorithms. No likes." reads like copy that is, well, not handwritten.

Flexify (http://www.flamingpear.com/flexify-2.html) is an incredible decades-old Photoshop plugin for making these. I made a mobile for a grade school math project using Flexify and NASA's equirectangular planetary maps, turning Mercury into a tetrahedron, Venus a pentahedron, etc.

The gallery of output projections is neat: http://www.flamingpear.com/flexify-output-modes.html

See also: Black Hole Vision for iOS from Vanderbilt University. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/black-hole-vision/id6737292448

Infuse is a nice app but note that it does not use the media server's transcoding service, so it can work poorly trying to stream remotely, while Jellyfin's transcoding-aware web client works better. The Jellyfin app for Apple TV was pretty unusable last time I tried it, though.

This sort of underscores the ancestor's complaint: It's not exactly dead simple to set up and understand, the community recommends third-party apps that have only partial support, etc.

A website dedicated to promoting LASIK says the surgery “boasts a success rate of at least 96%”, and a satisfaction rate of 95%. “Long-term or chronic dry eye affects only a small minority (about 4%)” while cases requiring follow-up treatments are “typically under 5%”.

These numbers have never been particularly reassuring to me.

I've recently been test driving SPR[1] which is a security-oriented distro for Wi-Fi routers. The team behind it are serious about Wi-Fi security and have a research lab[2] that has been credited with several CVEs in the likes of Apple's network stack. The headline feature is strong device isolation for semi-trusted guest and home automation devices, and the software stack is based around containerized and audited Go daemons.

It ran pretty well for me as a travel router I cobbled together from a Raspberry Pi and Netgear A7500 USB dongle for a stay in a short-term rental where the infrastructure network was shared with other units. More recently I have been trialing their CM5-based model with Wi-Fi 7 and 2.5GbE PoE for use as primary home Wi-Fi.

1: https://www.supernetworks.org 2: https://www.supernetworks.org/security-labs.html

I've been using Podman on Mac and Linux for 3 years, and unfortunately, I have found this to be perennially true. I am willing to doggedly pursue the root cause and file bugs, but for many people it will just seem broken.

Most recently: Netavark doesn't match Docker's behavior with accepting broadcast traffic on a published port.

I've successfully tinkered with USB/IP with Apple containers, but it does require loading a custom kernel (which they make pretty easy, thankfully). On the host side, macOS also doesn't make it easy to unload a driver that attaches automatically.

Related: Gus Mueller (of the excellent macOS image editor Acorn) has a parametric pizza dough calculator: https://maybepizza.com/calc/

Once upon a time, or perhaps in an alternative universe in which the iPhone did not take over the world, there was Peek: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peek_(mobile_Internet_device)

Great comment, thank you.

I have only seen The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) once, but fifteen years on I distinctly remember a scene where Daniel Craig is trying to use a Mac and accidentally drags Safari off the Dock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W84AhBMRNOY#t=1m25s

Apple Vision Pro's hand tracking was first alluded to in a section of their first machine learning research publication. It was about using GANs to add realistic sensor noise to synthetic datasets. The bulk of the article is about eye tracking.