Anthropic has posted a more technical explanation of watermarking. This analogy with Monopoly made me laugh:
On each turn, each player moves a random number of spaces around the board according to the roll of a die. Suppose that, instead of rolling the die to get this randomness, we decided to use a book of the digits of pi.
Replied to Apple about the latest rejection, including a video of where to find features in the app. I think app review is clearly overwhelmed or has new hires that are confused about obvious things. The whole system needs to be rethought. What sort of worked in 2008 no longer works.
John Voorhees has an initial look at ChatGPT’s Computer History feature. I enabled it this morning, but only for a few select apps like my web browser and text editors. It works well. I think I’ll keep it disabled for chat apps, since that’s a privacy can of worms that I’m not comfortable with yet.
I’ve made the first round of improvements to Micro.blog’s somewhat-complicated Sources page, now called Connections. A few things have been moved around and renamed. Should generally be a little simpler. Probably more to do later!
Craig Mod using AI to research his family history:
The article she saw, that led to that decision, that led to me having “Michael” as a middle name on my original birth certificate. A scan of the newspaper was in some obscure database and Claude ran it down like a pack of bloodhounds digging up a sack of livers in the backyard.
Congrats to Marco Arment on releasing his new app, Unforgetful! I love this part of the intro blog post:
Despite constantly being told that I’d never get a good job, computers provided a lucrative career path filled with even worse academic performers who couldn’t care less about my grades. What a stroke of luck! I’d be mediocre to terrible at most jobs, but I turned out to be very good at using computers to turn coffee and Phish into money.
Even for developers who’ve had some success, releasing a new app is no small thing. The app was hung up in app review for a while too.
Apple has proposed to the court a 15% link-out fee, 5% for small businesses. Still too high. The correct percentage for linking to a website is 0%.
Fun video with John Pomeroy talking to Andreas Deja and Aaron Blaise and Beauty and the Beast and Lion King. Some neat stories I hadn’t heard before.
We’ve rolled out a big update to listening to audio in the Micro.blog timeline. If you start listening to a podcast episode, it can now keep playing it in the corner as you scroll the timeline or browse other parts of Micro.blog. Thanks @vincent for all the work on this! It just looks way better.
ShieldFont is very clever, using a custom font to visually change what humans see vs. what bots see. But I strongly feel we shouldn’t make the web worse to combat AI. This font will break accessibility, search, and all sorts of other things.