zerosleeps

This comic from The Oatmeal applies almost exactly to my art - software development - as well.

It was rendered by a computer, sure, but artists and engineers made the creative choices that built that dinosaur. It was an expression of human beings making human decisions. It was the product of discipline, talent, and imagination.

I had a moment a couple of months ago where I whipped up a little utility for a local business exactly as specified. Almost immediately the customer realised they needed the tool to do something a little differently, but rather than ask me to make the change they threw the code into an LLM and out popped version 2.

There was no agreement between me and this company because it was such a small little bit of work, but that was my code. It had my name at the top. I never gave anyone permission to let an LLM eat it up. I didn’t give permission for anyone not to do that, but the situation irritated me.

I find it hard to explain. I’m happy with the outcome: everyone got what they needed and nobody lost anything. It’s amazing that non-coders now have this superpower. But there’s just something ungracious about the way it’s being delivered and seized upon. We’re training these things using my comrade’s skills and experience, without our permissions, and then having that very same thing manipulate our art.

Oof this is pretty brutal but also very funny.

I think my mediaanalysisd problem has been fixed in macOS 26. After I upgraded yesterday I removed all exceptions from Spotlight preferences and let Spotlight and friends settle down. Everything has been delightfully quiet since then.

The unified log still contains a couple of thousand occurrences of “Embedding version: 0 not supported, skip embedding publishing”, but mediaanalysisd no longer seems to continually hit the same files and throw the same errors.

Yay?

A round-up of my tanty about this:

1. mediaanalysisd has gone rogue
2. mediaanalysisd continues to piss me off
3. I don’t like macOS as much as I used to
4. I ordered a ThinkPad
5. Does macOS 15.6 fix mediaanalysisd?
6. Keeping macOS logs private from who?
7. I need to get serious about leaving macOS

Episode 641 of 99% Invisible is excellent. I love the way Roman Mars’ mind works. Here’s one of the questions he was asked during this episode:

A city hires you to make their residents’ lives 10% better without spending any money. You could only rearrange, remove, or repurpose things that already exist. What do you do?

When applying this to Melbourne city and its immediate surroundings I didn’t even have to think about my answer: give trams priority at all junctions. Simple as that. It’s stupid how much time cars get at junctions while a tram with 200+ people on board is made to sit and wait. And of course the overwhelming majority of cars have one person in them. Stupid.

I reckon this would have some lovely knock-on effects: it would make driving in the city even less tolerable than it already is, reducing road traffic and in turn making the city much easier for pedestrians as well.

Bonus answer which applies to the whole of Australia but isn’t low-cost because it would require a massive public-awareness component: eliminate the practice of allowing cars to turn into junctions when pedestrians are allowed to cross. In other words, if pedestrians have a green or flashing red light, give cars turning into their path a red. Not a day goes by where I don’t witness a driver ignoring give-way rules, or even worse not seeing pedestrians already in the crossing. I don’t often play the “in the UK” card, but this rule-of-the-road continues to piss me off. It’s bad at junctions where cars can turn left into an active pedestrian crossing, but it’s terrifying at junctions where cars can turn right into an active crossing.

Unease about the direction macOS is heading continues to get louder. Craig Hockenberry:

And along comes Alan Dye with his standard cockpit, that is beautiful to look at and fun to use on curvy roads. But also completely wrong for the jobs we’re doing.

Jason Snell in their comments on that article:

I don’t know what the answer is, and Hockenberry’s suggestion that it might lead technical users like him to look for an exit from the Mac platform is deeply troubling.