I’m cribbing from @fasterandworse for this one and I know some people will disagree but:

there appears to be nothing new about the touchscreen macbook other than a limitation of purpose: they decided that instead of making the touchscreen a global feature, it should be an intentionally limited interface

that isn’t always a bad thing! CarPlay and Android Auto are successful task-specific interfaces with extremely specific use cases in mind

unfortunately, none of the use cases presented for the touchscreen macbook are particularly interesting. this is what I mean when I call it something like “the most use case device ever designed”: they’re begging you to find an interesting use case for the functionality that justifies the product.

for devices where functionality is intentionally limited, there’s a thin line between success and failure. there’s lots of cozy devices that let you focus on thing X (usually writing) that seem great… but they’re often expensive and janky

It's done some good for us, but I think it's time to accept that gravity is a bit cumbersome

@alter_unicorn I've heard Redox is also more usable than you'd expect nowadays.

it's a well known fact that "password1" is not a strong password, "password2" will get you laughed at as you get hacked, and so it stands to reason that simply incrementing the trailing number will not result in a secure password.

HOWEVER, the string "password" prepended to a strong password (such as a 128 digit random number) does not make the strong password into a weak password, so I theorize that there exists a threshold after which incrementing password1 always results in strong passwords

@stux I’m going to! Because if I don’t I feel like the next two years will be the final nail for this country. 😬

oh no sorry, apparently it was very difficult to make the touchscreen macbook, a device that apple has prototyped in various forms for over a decade, because it was very hard to make a multitouch version of AppKit, a thing that already exists for iOS

please ignore all of my past and future posts about how fucking lazy the touchscreen macbook is as a concept and implementation and how apple didn’t do it before because it’s a horribly flawed interface on every other laptop I have with a touchscreen (they’re really cheap used), and those have the ability to fold into janky tablet mode and use a stylus, two things the new macbook can’t do

@stux

Yeah, I don’t think that there’s going to be a viable future in distinguishing between LLM and human text either, certainly not for people who have an interest in defeating it. That being said:

• Some people are just going to use the most-common models.

• Some models are derived from other models and will share statistical similarities.

I still think that trying to detect LLMs is largely going to be a dead-end road, though.

There are also other wrinkles. I’d bet that an increasing amount of not-trying-to-maliciously-impersonate-a-human text out there is going to come from LLMs. Like, okay, Google Translate uses an LLM. I remember listening to an interview with a senior British EU translator (this was back before Brexit). This is going to be a quality human translator. He was saying that machine translation had gotten so good that these days, that now he always did his first pass with Google Translate and just cleaned it up by hand. Okay, so you figure that this is probably widespread, probably even more so now, right? So if most of the EU’s documents are coming from an LLM, even if you could hypothetically detect all LLMs, you probably wouldn’t want to trigger on some of them.

Not to mention that people adopt mannerisms from text that they read or hear spoken. If someone is using, say, automated browser translations, they’re seeing a lot of the world through an LLM, and you’d expect them to pick up characteristics of that.

By coach to Guild Hall, and there was admitted, and meeting with Mr. Proby, and Lieutenant-Colonel Baron, a City commander, we went up and down to see the tables; where under every salt there was a bill of fare, and at the end of the table the persons proper for the table.

Holy GPT batman, yeah that’s clearly generated.

The therapist is a database, and the waiting room is a data center.

That’s the unsettling part.

Democracy becomes a lot less inconvenient when you can X, Y, and Z.

Researchers needed one query.

X, Y, and Z on the same day. Somewhere, a sysadmin is discovering that Y is actually Z. Meanwhile, [flowery adjective soup storytime].

Next up:

You can tell there’s no real thought in those word choices, too. You wouldn’t prepare your origin story, you would experience it. The data center would less aptly be described as a therapist’s waiting room and more as their office. It also reads like it’s trying to write long-form prose entirely out of headlines-- every single word is designed to suck as much attention out of me as possible. It makes me feel disgusted, like seeing an ad.

Ich will nicht ...

... eine App installieren müssen, nur um den ÖPNV zu nutzen.

... meine E-Mail-Adresse hergeben müssen, nur um einen Kassenbon zu bekommen.

... einen QR-Code scannen und Tracking-Cookies akzeptieren müssen, nur um eine Speisekarte anzusehen.

... ein bestimmtes Smartphone oder Betriebssystem nutzen müssen, nur um meine Finanzen zu verwalten.

Ich mag digitale Lösungen und nutze sie gerne. Aber sie müssen für alle da sein: Ohne unnötige Hürden. Ohne Tracking. Unabhängig von Gerät und Betriebssystem.

Einfach mal wieder Mensch sein dürfen. Ohne ständig das Produkt zu sein.

#Datenschutz #DigitaleSouveränität #Digitalisierung #Tracking #DigitaleGrundrechte

@futurebird I just moved here, so I assume that

Morning Sheep Time

Warmer and brighter today, making me think of bicycles. Pony has a long face. Sheep still occasionally arguing with each other and we even had a crow argument this morning. Brambles still picking fights despite having a head like a beaten boxer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF6ThrKlRuo

#defaidodon #sheepofMastodon #sheep

going as torikawa torito for halloween

@rolle Great thoughts - I am also challenging a similar dilemma ATM - do I really needs Videos on PeerTube or Loops, Books on Bookworm, Images at Vernissage or Pixelfed and the „standard“ social-things here on Mastodon?

All of these are great pieces of software but I feel a little bit of overwhelmed with the great choices the Fediverse and/or ActivityPub offers at the time being… Great that I am not that alone with these thoughts!

@rhempel

Yay! Everything is fine. They have a new kitten 🐱 I think I’ve annoyed her a bit but I don’t really care I’m just glad everyone is okay.

Apple seems to have the right approach to the first touchscreen Mac https://9to5mac.com/2026/10/29/apple-seems-to-have-the-right-approach-to-the-first-touchscreen-mac/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

@georgetakei
She has the butt Trump is looking for.

@KekunPlazas it's in my TODO list. I don't have any physical machine left to try :)

Weather for Cardiff ☁️ - 29/10/2026 12:08 GMT

At a glance:
• 13.7°C · Cloudy ☁️ | Min 10.4°C / Max 14.8°C

Forecast for today:
• Min 10.4°C, Max 14.8°C (Cloudy) ☁️, 🧭 1026.2 hPa ↘️ -0.5 hPa/24h, Wind speed: 9.7 km/h (2.7 m/s), direction: ↖ 118°

Hourly forecast for the next 12 hours:

• 13:00: 14.3°C (Partly cloudy) ⛅, 🧭 1026.4 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Wind speed: 7.6 km/h (2.1 m/s), direction: ↖ 118°
• 14:00: 14.6°C (Cloudy) ☁️, 🧭 1025.7 hPa ↘️ -0.7 hPa/1h, Wind speed: 9.0 km/h (2.5 m/s), direction: ← 112°
• 15:00: 14.8°C (Cloudy) ☁️, 🧭 1025.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Wind speed: 9.4 km/h (2.6 m/s), direction: ↖ 124°
• 16:00: 14.4°C (Cloudy) ☁️, 🧭 1025.9 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Wind speed: 9.7 km/h (2.7 m/s), direction: ↖ 156°
• 17:00: 13.6°C (Cloudy) ☁️, 🧭 1026.0 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Wind speed: 7.9 km/h (2.2 m/s), direction: ↖ 152°
• 18:00: 12.7°C (Clear sky) 🌕, 🧭 1026.4 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Wind speed: 5.0 km/h (1.4 m/s), direction: ↖ 140°
• 19:00: 12.5°C (Clear sky) 🌕, 🧭 1026.4 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Wind speed: 6.5 km/h (1.8 m/s), direction: ↖ 118°
• 20:00: 12.0°C (Clear sky) 🌕, 🧭 1026.4 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Wind speed: 6.5 km/h (1.8 m/s), direction: ← 92°
• 21:00: 11.9°C (Clear sky) 🌕, 🧭 1026.6 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Wind speed: 6.5 km/h (1.8 m/s), direction: ← 90°
• 22:00: 11.6°C (Partly cloudy) ☁️, 🧭 1026.6 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Wind speed: 5.8 km/h (1.6 m/s), direction: ↙ 66°
• 23:00: 11.1°C (Partly cloudy) ☁️, 🧭 1026.4 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Wind speed: 7.9 km/h (2.2 m/s), direction: ← 68°
• 00:00: 11.3°C (Partly cloudy) ☁️, 🧭 1026.2 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Wind speed: 8.6 km/h (2.4 m/s), direction: ↙ 66°

Forecast for the coming days:

• Friday 30 October: Min 9.8°C, Max 14.9°C (Cloudy) ☁️, 🧭 1027.0 hPa ↗️ +0.8 hPa/24h, Wind speed: 12.2 km/h (3.4 m/s), direction: ← 72°
• Saturday 31 October: Min 8.9°C, Max 10.9°C (Cloudy) ☁️, 🧭 1030.0 hPa ↗️ +3.0 hPa/24h, Wind speed: 11.9 km/h (3.3 m/s), direction: ↙ 56°
• Sunday 01 November: Min 7.3°C, Max 13.2°C (Cloudy) ☁️, 🧭 1033.6 hPa ↗️ +3.6 hPa/24h, Wind speed: 16.9 km/h (4.7 m/s), direction: ↙ 28°
• Monday 02 November: Min 7.4°C, Max 11.3°C (Cloudy) ☁️, 🧭 1037.9 hPa ↗️ +4.3 hPa/24h, Wind speed: 17.6 km/h (4.9 m/s), direction: ↙ 34°
• Tuesday 03 November: Min 7.0°C, Max 11.2°C (Cloudy) ☁️, 🧭 1037.1 hPa ↘️ -0.8 hPa/24h, Wind speed: 15.8 km/h (4.4 m/s), direction: ↙ 28°
• Wednesday 04 November: Min 8.5°C, Max 10.5°C (Cloudy) ☁️, 🧭 1034.9 hPa ↘️ -2.2 hPa/24h, Wind speed: 15.1 km/h (4.2 m/s), direction: ↙ 36°

Details:
• 🌡️ Current temperature (at 12:00): 13.7°C (Cloudy)
• 🤚 Feels like: 12.7°C (-1.0°C)
• 💨 Wind speed: 8.6 km/h (2.4 m/s), direction: ↖ 116°
• 🌬️ Wind gusts: 18.0 km/h (5.0 m/s)
• 💧 Humidity: 84%
• 🧭 Pressure: 1026.7 hPa ↘️ -1.2 hPa/3h
• 👁️ Visibility: 14.6 km
• ☀️ UV index: 0.8
• 🌅 Sunrise: 07:00 · 🌇 Sunset: 16:51

Air Quality:
• AQI: 34 🟢 (Good)
• PM2.5: 7.4 μg/m³
• PM10: 14.4 μg/m³

Data provided by Open-Meteo

#Cardiff #Weather #WeatherBot #OpenMeteo #FediMeteo