Links
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The New York Post broke the story, but I’m a fan of supporting that rag with even a single link on my minuscule blog, so I’m linking to the Daily Beast re-write. You’ll find the Post link there easily enough if you want it. ↩︎
🔗 Apple Will Revamp Siri to Catch Up to Its Chatbot Competitors
Tripp Mickle, Brian X. Chen and Cade Metz report at The New York Times that:
The decision came after the executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT. The product’s use of generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry, create computer code and answer complex questions, made Siri look antiquated, said two people familiar with the company’s work, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly.
Apple can’t be serious here. My earliest IFTTT recipes made Siri look antiquated. Siri has been, to put it as politely as Siri deserves, trash for years. The user experience of the earliest Echo Auto was head and shoulders above Siri. If you need a reminder set, Siri will work more often than not. But that’s been its only viable use case since release.
Apple has been marketing off of machine learning since 2018 and probably earlier, so it’s just bonkers that they didn’t decide to scrap Siri at least that long ago and turn their machine learning resources toward something better.
🔗 Does the Statute of Limitations Ever Apply in Legal Malpractice?
Hey look, my employer has a blog about the kind of work I do, and I wrote a thing for it.
🔗 Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book | Books | The Guardian
I’m not quoting from the review or her memoir because Noem is deplorable, and because, somehow, it’s worse than the headline suggests.
When people tell you who they are, believe them.
🔗 Some legal malpractice cases are bogus, and many are defensible. But some are, well, not, which is apparently how State Bar Court Judge Yvette D. Roland in California viewed the misconduct proceedings against John Eastman, the now-disbarred architect of the 2020 fake electors nonsense. (PDF)
🔗 Manton Reece - An update on the pricing update
Micro.blog is such a great value. Like omg.lol, Micro.blog is a positive community built by people who didn’t see exactly what they wanted on the web, so they decided to make it.
I do something similar (even in name), with quicklinks.lol, but Floh Gro’s solution using an action in Drafts for iOS is faster, and private.
🔗 Manton Reece - Recommendations and blogrolls on Micro.blog
I’ve long meant to get a blogroll up on this site, and it’s another testament to the fact that I’ve chosen the right community that it was recently integrated into Micro.blog, including auto-updating, public OPML and JSON exports.
🔗 U.S. versus Apple: A first reaction – Six Colors
I haven’t read the complaint yet, but this was… not what I expected Attorney General Merrick Garland to have his people focused on…
🔗 Scholarfy | Google Scholar bookmarklet by Johan Ugander
This is a useful bookmarklet to move a standard Google search to Google Scholar. I use it with modified version I made with ChatGPT to search an exact phrase, for use in searching for legal opinions.
Here’s “my” code:
javascript:location = ‘scholar.google.com/scholar"’ escape(document.forms[0].elements[‘q’].value) ‘"';
The best part about the 32-Bit Cafe is that we’re trying to move the internet forward productively in the ways we can make an impact, participating in the creation of web services, websites, and weird, wacky web projects. We want to bring back the idea of personal websites to the many of us who have been stuck in social media cycles since the emergence of Web 2.0. Not to mention, we’re not just helping people build their first websites; we’re also making our own hosted services for anyone to use and participate in to help with decentralizing hosted services.
This is exactly the kind of thing I love to see.
Chris Geidner at Law Dork has the best explanation of why the 5th Circuit’s jurisprudence has become so, to use a legal term of art, whacky:
At the end of the day, there are essentially three groups of active judges on the Fifth Circuit: There are “mad vibes” judges, legally conservative judges, and legally moderate (or more left) judges.
Geidner is so insightful and prolific that, and I mean this as a high compliment, it irritates me a little.
🔗 Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice
Bill Toulas, writing at Bleeping Computer:
Targeting open-source software developers tends to backfire for companies, as others fork or clone the code repositories to prevent the projects from disappearing.
At this time, the Haier home assistant plugins have been forked 228 times, many occurring since the news of the legal threats.
Now?
1,462 forks.
These were niche plugins for niche software for a niche audience before Haier let the lawyers loose.
Hey Haier, Ms. Streisand called… she wants her effect back.
List of Indie Dev Sales Events
Matt Corey put together a list of developers holding sales in an indie software version of Amazon’s Prime Day:
Below, you’ll find a list of over 100 (🤯) Indie apps that are offering discounts for Indie App Sales, July 11-12! Each of these apps is developed by an Indie App Developer - that can mean a lot of different things, but generally speaking, these are built by very small teams, or individuals either full time or part time. Indie App Developers are the epitome of small businesses, and sure do appreciate your support!
Mark Frauenfelder, writing at Boing Boing:
A recent study of sleep loss and depression found that one night of total sleep deprivation generally worsens mood and emotional regulation in healthy individuals, but induces a temporary lift in spirits for some individuals with depression. . . . The findings were remarkable: lack of sleep escalated negative mood among the healthy subjects, but eased depressive symptoms in 43% of the patients with depression.
Presented without comment. 😐
Here’s a link to the study itself. Let me know if any copies fall off the back of any trucks, because i don’t have access to PNAS.
Firefox address bar modifiers - the tilde.institute wiki:
The address bar has become our entry point to the internet these days. Firefox in its default configuration does some sort of smart guess on what you type there. If it resembles a URL then the browser makes that request. If not, it sends the string you typed to your default search engine. It also includes some fuzzy search matches from your history and all that, which is fine 90% of the time, but sometimes you need a bit more control over what results it shows you.
I had no idea. These are super-useful.
(via Hacker News)
CEO Steve Huffman’s bumbling, slow-motion destruction of reddit would be a huge loss to collective knowledge on the web.
Without the ability to append “reddit” to most queries, Google Search is mostly worthless unless you’re looking for sponsored content or SEO-abusing nonsense results.
“Lawyers’ vile emails exposed”
Sometimes I write a long, angry blog post about a thing, fully intending to post it all for the world to see, but then I save it to my journaling app, and just post a link to what prompted the angry draft while I decide if I should make my angry thoughts public, whether I should edit them a bit, whether the anger is productive or will just be seen as virtue signaling.
This is one of those links. 1
Oldest Search - Search for the oldest result on internet
This is one of those things I just love about the internet, a fun, simple thing, done well. The oldest result for my name is a 1982 NY Times obituary on Joe E. Ross, another New Jersey native, of Car 54 fame.
Markdown images are an anti-pattern | daverupert.com
Dave Rupert doesn’t see a place in Markdown for images, and I agree. Just use an img tag. But his good point and my agreement with it aren’t really the reason I’m sharing a link to his post.
I’m sharing it because he writes with the voice of a sage but slightly jaded manager who’s just trying to save new developers from bad habits and messy code. It’s refreshingly devoid of arrogance, and refreshingly full of practical examples of why his position makes sense.
It’s also how I try to approach working with less experienced lawyers. Just replace “developers” with “lawyers” and “code” with “argumentation.”
Thanks to Eric Meyer for linking to Rupert’s post on Mastodon, where I found it.
Craig Hockenberry, announces ‘Blank’ for Apple tvOS
I’m happy to announce the release of a new tvOS app called Blank. It turns your screen black and keeps it that way until you press any button on a remote. Seriously, that’s all it does.
Simple and useful.