“They’re thinking Jim, but not as we know it.”

Shojaee et al at Apple discover not much thinking is going on in the recent Large Reasoning (“thinking”) Models:

https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinking.pdf

TL;DR:🧵by @heygurisingh https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2025237896647901361.html?utm_campaign=topunroll

"You, the consumer, purchased your Android device believing in Google’s promise that it was an open computing platform and that you could run whatever software you choose on it. Instead, as of September 2026, they will be non-consensually pushing an update to your operating system that irrevocably blocks this right and leaves you at the mercy of their judgement over what software you are permitted to trust."

Keep Android Open
https://keepandroidopen.org/

#KeepAndroidOpen #Fdroid #NotOkayGoogle

Initial development isn't the most expensive part of software engineering. Maintenance is. Cutting corners in initial development results in a larger increase in maintenance cost.

Writing code isn't the most expensive part of initial development. Refining the requirements, designing, documenting, writing tests, and reviewing are more expensive that writing code. Cutting corners in those results in a larger increase in initial development and maintenance costs.

This is a post about vibe coding.

A Microsoft account bug recently locked a user out of Notepad. When basic local utilities require a cloud login, the "PC" starts to feel less like a personal computer and more like a rented terminal.

Open-source tools offer a path back to digital sovereignty. Fundamental software shouldn't have a kill switch controlled by a third party.

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-locked-me-out-of-notepad-is-the-thin-client-era-ruining-pcs #opensource #privacy

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@miketheman/116008792409955286

When I say TOTP is phishable and webauthn (“passkeys”) isn’t, this is a real-world example of what I am talking about

As much as I loathe LLM "AI" built from hoards of stolen data, machine learning "AI" has become terrifically useful.

This past week I had 10 audio recorders set out in the forest and nearby grassland, all recording non-stop from Monday afternoon to Friday morning. That was on our recent university field ecology field trip.

Today I downloaded all the files to a hard drive (156 GB of data) and then I set my little M1 Macbook Air to work, using the offline desktop BirdNet app to identify all of the birds in the recordings.

It took most of the day, and now I have a 42,284 row spreadsheet of birds detected.

It really feels like magic.

Here's a quick sorted lists of all the bird detections with species IDs with a confidence score >0.9.

Together with the students in the course, we'll later compare how birds have changed since we started doing this in 2020, and how the birds in the grassland differ from the forest.

#birds #BirdNet #ecology #nz #MachineLearning