Tom

@devioustree
7 Followers
13 Following
31 Posts
A few years ago I designed a way to detect bit-flips in Firefox crash reports and last year we deployed an actual memory tester that runs on user machines after the browser crashes. Today I was looking at the data that comes out of these tests and now I'm 100% positive that the heuristic is sound and a lot of the crashes we see are from users with bad memory or similarly flaky hardware. Here's a few numbers to give you an idea of how large the problem is. 🧵 1/5
Xcode 26 LLM Markdown Summaries Are Actually Useful for Humans

Xcode 26 has a couple of tech docs that are intended to help LLM’s generate modern solutions to coding problems in Swift, but that also contain valuable info for us human readers.

Christian Tietze
Always nice to have options
brb buying a new MacBook in the settings app
How I sometimes feel when I read Apple's documentation:

Are you f* kidding me, Apple?!

After a long time, I filed another bug report using Feedback Assistant because the bug was bad enough that it’s worth the effort of writing it all down.

When uploading a sysdiagnose (or probably any other attachments) you get the usual privacy notice that there is likely a lot of private and other sensitive info in those log files. It’s not a great feeling but it is what it is with diagnostic data and I mostly trust the folks at Apple to treat it with respect and I trust the Logging system to redact the most serious bits.

However, when filing a feedback today a noticed a new addition to the privacy notice:

"By submitting, you […] agree that Apple may use your submission to [train] Apple Intelligence models and other machine learning models."

WTF? No! I don’t want that. It’s extremely shitty behavior to a) even ask me this in this context where I entrust you with *my* sensitive data to help *you* fix your shit to b) hide it in the other privacy messaging stuff and to c) not give me any way to opt out except for not filing a bug report.

Do you really need *more* reasons for developers not to file bug reports? Are the people who decided to do this really this ignorant about the image Appleā€˜s bug reporting process has in the community? How can you even think for a single second that this is an acceptable idea?

So, WTF, Apple?!

The hardest problem in computer science is trying to figure out how any Apple API works by just reading the docs.
A18 should be pronounced ā€œeeeeeightingā€

The year is 3129. Humanity is extinct. The last LG SmartFridge is desperately emailing its last owner that they are low on orange juice. The satellites that are still left, their orbits slowly decaying over millennia, dutifully relay the message. The automated "away from office" response turns on, as it always does, notifying the refrigerator that it's owner will likely return to the office in 3-5 business days.

Somewhere in what used to be called Ohio, a pack of roombas, their local wind turbines giving out and creaking to a halt, begin searching for the next functional docking station. A washing machine in Argentina tweets: "anyone need to do a load šŸ˜" every Saturday at 1:30 a.m. eastern standard time. The replies are filled with AI thirstposters and their hypebots.

In North America, raccoons have quietly entered the bronze age, while baboons riding domesticated battlewolves rule most of Asia. Unbeknownst to either, the octopi are mastering nuclear fusion. A weather balloon bobs and sways in the upper atmosphere, now almost entirely clear of lingering chloroflourocarbons, reporting conditions to weather stations long since destroyed in World War Five.

The Crab Nation are mostly hermits, but come out to greet their prophet every ten years on the 6th full moon of the year. A lone, curious octopus decides to observe this year's event, peering out at the festivities from her safe haven - the submerged, rusting hulk of an ancient Cybertruck. Then he appears: the hologram of Shia Lebouf powered by MetaAI. He beckons the octopus to follow. The crabs all start chittering excitedly. The time has come to invade Amazon HQ. The crows gather in huge numbers. They need more storage space for their Steam collections.

C library functions are always like: "SYNOPSIS. This function converts foos into bars depending on the user locale. ARGUMENTS. src and dest pointers must be distinct; it is undefined behavior if they are not QPU-aligned. RETURN VALUE. Returns the number of foos converted. A zero value indicates failure, or that zero foos were converted. A negative value indicates that the final foo was only partially converted (function got tired). Check this global variable to find out why."