anonconformist

JP234 said:

This seems on the face of it to be nothing more than a slightly more intrusive form of autocorrect.

If this provides full access to Bing Chat, that’s an absurdly grossly overly-simplistic extreme understatement of what can be done.

I’ve created a working console version (in Swift) of my personal invention of a form of Solitaire by describing the rules and requirements for how it behaves. That took several sequential prompts for the first attempt. It included as close to an “Attract Mode” of it playing itself as feasible in a console application with Swift not having a standard way to check if a key has been pressed without waiting for input. I prompted for the Attract Mode, but it alerted me to the limitations with explanation. I asked it to specially print the possible valid moves during the turns.

I didn’t write a single line of code to do this, I did this all in English. This is a solitaire game that has run on only my own iOS and MacOS devices in the past, implemented in Objective-C, but not released to the world because I hadn’t spent the time to make it nice and shiny.

So, to a limited extent, calling it autocorrect on steroids is partially true, but in any case, it has generative capabilities that far exceed anything you’ve used for autocorrect before. Hell, I’ve had it create song parodies in the style of various characters, human and otherwise, I’ve prompted it to create 4-person love songs for a fictional race with 4 genders, and it did it. Yesterday I had it create a parody of “Thriller” incorporating “The Hokey Pokey” without it using the original “Thriller” lyrics explicitly. And no, it’s not limited to 4 characters/voices in a song, I’ve had it do more.

Within certain intentional constraints for not offending people somehow (guardrails) and other legalities, while it has an upper limit for the number of tokens (roughly equal to words, not always) in the context, if it has been trained via data how to do something, you can have it do that. That includes teaching it via prompts what to do: for example, I didn’t like the code formatting style it generated, so I asked it first to reformat the Swift code according to the WebKit C++ standard that it looked up online, and it told me Swift has certain requirements for syntax that’d be affected, so after I prompted a bit different, and it neatly fulfilled that code formatting style while (not what I had in mind!) translating the Swift code into C++ code, which I had to clarify wasn’t what I wanted, so it retranslated back into Swift. There were still some formatting style rule changes I wanted implemented, as that wasn’t completely the style I wanted: it did it.

no autocorrect is that capable: it was following directions as specified in English to generate code and reformat it in a way I’d hope a human would be able to do, but it was faster, no typos, and filled in details I didn’t painstakingly explain as well as the ones I did.

I regret upgrading to iPadOS/iOS 15.5 because it has resulted in Safari failing so many tabs in so many sites, where the page is rendering, or you thought it was stable, and something changes, and POOF! It disappears, and anything you were doing on it is gone, and it doesn't reload it: it usually results in going back to the most recent tab you used before that.

fastasleep said:

1984called said:

You have got to be kidding. Apple, seriously, putting out this statement and yet they allow facebook, twitter, reddit and just take a look at the top hip hop songs on Apple Music. Disgusting. Apple is spitting in your face and telling you it's raining. 

The other platforms actively moderate their content, even if they’re not perfect at it. I’m going to wager that Parler’s claims about their moderation are disingenuous at best, and Apple’s not stupid enough to fall for that. 
 
Hip hop? LOL

“Moderation” largely comes down to censoring views they don’t like FAR MORE than those they do that violate TOS by a huge margin.

If you haven’t been aware of that, at best, you’ve not remotely paid attention.

It will be interesting to see if they claim it’s for battery optimization and the reason why.

Truth of the matter is many applications are inefficient in how they’re designed to run, and burn through battery for no real good effect.  As much as that’s true all too often, users should make such choices as to whether they get better battery life versus speed, and not let it be decided other than by themselves.

dtoub said:

chelgrian said:

It’s an almost certainty it couldn’t be open sourced code bases this age tend to have all sorts of copyright issues and rights holders involved and it can be next to impossible track down all the right holders and to get the license changes needed. There are two relatively successful instances I know of which are Blender and Staroffice (which became open/libreoffice) I can’t think of any other successes.

For similar reasons it may be impossible to release a ‘sunset’ edition it’s very probable that they have third party licensed code or libraries which require periodic fees.

It’s very stupid but copyright law can make it prohibitively expensive or far too hard to allow software like Finale to continue vs forcing a hard end date.

Good points, and makes sense.

Been trying the free version of Dorico, and having followed it for some time, I am very much aware it is better software overall (Finale was underwhelming over the past few years in terms of updates) and has a very responsive team of developers and managers. But it is painfully hard for me to conform to its way of doing things. Just like I found Numbers not very useful for me personally compared with Excel, or various databases compared with Access. When you get to know a particular application, especially one as feature-packed as either Finale or Dorico, it's quite hard to make the switch. Compounding matters: many of us have a lot of recent and older Finale files, and sometimes we do need to go back to them and tweak them or use them to record audio; converting all of them to MusicXML is not the ideal solution. So I likely will try a virtual machine and use that for many years to come. Not perfect either, but at least it's future-proofed.

Let’s say for the sake of argument all the code had no such rights and financial entanglements: I’ve worked with such codebases of that size and almost certain decrepitude of technical debt and circular dependencies. Such snarled code is a horrendous task to build each time, and each time you make a minor change, it’s likely to require a full or nearly full build due to such dependencies. And if you thought it takes a long time to build it, it also takes an absolutely huge amount of time and energy to make sense of it, first to even properly define a proper set of tests to verify changes don’t break things, and second, to restructure it to both build faster and be more easily understood. On top of that, it’s a scenario where you need someone properly versed in the problem domain of music notation as well as software developers that know how to translate such snarled messes systematically over time into an orderly system, bit by bit, without breaking it along the way, and not being able to reasonably add new features in the process that may take several years. Yes, you *could* try to add new features as you try to restructure it, but that multiplies the complexity of both the new features and the restructuring.

As large and complex as such a thing is, it may actually be easier to document how it is meant to function, and rewrite from scratch: maybe. That’s not without risks, because the best set of tests one can come up with will almost certainly miss things users have counted on, breaking their files. New crashing/hanging bugs may also be introduced due to an imperfect understanding. And something of that complexity, even with a complete set of tests (you hope!) won’t be fully functional for a very long time.

One fun point not mentioned or even really hinted at: Apple Silicon Macs will very effectively kill any would-be hackintoshes, as niche as they are, from existing.

Sure, old Intel-based hackintoshes will continue to exist, but they’ll fade in any chance of updated applications shortly enough, even with serious alt-mac developers that write drivers for hardware and by pass kernel code signing requirements. With Apple using truly custom and self-consistent features in their hardware, while in theory the Apple Silicon hardware can be done software with a regular CPU and drivers be written to use it, the performance won’t be viable for the costs.

I can’t discount people sufficiently skilled and dedicated to using FPGAs or even designing and manufacturing custom chips to improve the capacity to approach Apple Silicon Mac performance, but even with no legal issues being discussed, it just won’t be financially-viable: it’s only something you would bother doing for the sake of doing it, perhaps as something to brag about.  Even then, Apple has been developing enough custom purpose-made silicon for their SoCs that it’d require a lot of time, a sufficiently large team, and lots of money: Apple Silicon is the deepest and widest moat Apple has ever had for cloners to overcome.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing for anyone (other than cheapskates trying to spend less money to run MacOS), it’s just a readily-obvious truth.

dasanman69 said:

anonconformist said:

Soli said:

anonconformist said:

I hate it when people call people being let go "firing" when the people being "fired" have merely been let go due to business reasons, or things that aren't their fault.

At least in the US, being "fired" means it had something to do with your performance or something you clearly did wrong: there is a requirement that the employee was not fulfilling their end of the deal as they should, as an employee, whether it's poor performance, dishonesty/insubordination or theft or something else.

When a company lets someone go for business reasons (a change of plans, financial reasons, anything that has nothing to do with the affected employee other than the fact that they get let go) that's called a layoff.

The reason these terms are important to get correct is because this affects how readily ex-employees can be rehired, as well as their ability (depending on the state) to collect unemployment benefits, long-term.  It's not remotely fair to say "so-and-so got fired from XYZ company." when it had nothing to do with their behavior: that puts a black mark on that person because you were careless and/or stupid.  The facts are that companies make business decisions to pivot towards something else, either because of lack of money to pursue something, perhaps because they think they have some better use of their resources, or they conclude that what they were working towards just won't work out as well as intended, so it's simply time to pull the plug.  Companies would ideally repurpose employees towards some other project rather than letting them go, but we don't live in an ideal world; if this were absolutely required of companies, people would be employed far beyond what makes sense for either the company or the employees, and the company would be financially more susceptible to things going wrong and not being able to reduce expenses, which would also result in even less job security overall for employees.  I say this as someone that has been laid off from multiple places through no fault of my own, and yes, I've been fired at least once in my history: it is what it is.

In the US you can use fired to refer to any discharge from a position. The NOAD simply states, "the dismissal of an employee from a job."

There's what something you refer to as NOAD calls it (New Oxford American Dictionary? Nobody Owes Anyone Dollars?  You didn't spell it out) but from a legal point of view, and what people that aren't kids in the US have used it as, being "fired" is NOT the same as a layoff, as explained: the unemployment office treats being fired as a negative, being laid off as just business.

For those that have been fired, they'd want "fired" to be a distinction without a difference from being let go through no fault of their own: for those that have not been fired, but laid off (i.e. employment terminated through no fault of their own) it's a very important distinction with a HUGE difference that affects their ability to potentially collect unemployment benefits immediately, and potentially future employment.

Precision in how things are used matters.  What's used in the real world for how things are decided matters far more than some arbitrary dictionary or some other silly academic thing.  Words can be destructive when used incorrectly.

Words only have the power that we give them. Ask a person if they feel any better being laid off versus fired, and they'll answer with a resounding "No". 

How you personally feel about whether you've been fired or laid off is only your personal opinion, and you only speak for yourself in this matter.  Your personal opinion has no bearing on the fact that:
Lawyers
Governments
Potential employers

All make the distinction as to their meaning, in ways that affect your ability to be paid unemployment benefits or not, more readily find your next employment, and, as much as you'd not want to think it to be true, making untrue statements about others regarding their ability to do their work (claiming they were fired when they were laid off) can count as defamation of character in many jurisdictions.

You went out of your way to dispute verifiable facts with personal opinion.  How can I be certain?  Simple: I don't feel nearly as bad about being laid off for things not attributable to bad performance or something else that's legally allowable to fire someone for, because you don't need to worry nearly as much about getting your next employment.  If you're a contractor, getting laid off at the end of the contract is normal and expected, and it may happen before the full hoped-for term is completed.  In such cases, you may very well work another contract at that employer, or even hired full-time after that, if you were laid off: if you were fired, that typically removes you from ever working there again.

I have worked multiple contracts, and in 2 cases, twice at 2 well-known software/tech companies, and been asked to interview for FTE roles at both of them, and got hired FTE at the most recent one.

Precise language usage matters!