Since 2010
Scott Larson in “Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft’s move towards a surveillance state”:
…I will be recommending Linux as a replacement for new computers I build for my customers.
Check out that numbered list in the middle of the post. Yikes. For all my moaning about macOS boy am I glad I don’t have any Windows in my life.
This is a good list from Daniel Bowen. My favourites are number 9, obviously, number 37, all the stuff about our stupidly confusing fares, and hell to the yes to number 46.
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: