I have never been so glad that I talked myself out of buying the new iPhone this year! Siri is the primary input method I use for my iPhone. I would say I make around 20-30 vocal requests a day. It will be so nice to be able to do things like create a meeting on a calendar with a conversation instead of having to frame the request in a single sentence! I hope they do this rollout well.

In 2005 or so, I got a tip about an application called LaunchBar, which would later be copied by Apple to replace the Sherlock search tool, and later by Microsoft in its PowerToys suite. The machine learning LaunchBar used to tailor its responses based on my previous behavior was life-changing. Instead of configuring an application, I just had to use it to change how it behaved.

This is how language models and AI are going to improve your products. Subtly. Behind the scenes. Slightly improving a thousand different use cases, only a fraction of which your regular usage patterns are going to intersect with.

Star Trek celebrates the diversity of humanity. The extremes of genetic engineering and (on the other side of the spectrum, perhaps) the Borg are symbolic of the corruption of that diversity.

For an in-universe explanation, I suppose you could just look at the degree to which cybernetics are tolerated. Rutherford-level cybernetics? No problem! Borg Queen-level cybernetics? Helm, warp nine, full reverse!

It took me a lot longer than I’d like to admit for me to figure out that this was a reference to SNW, and not someone trying to push a far-right conspiracy theory. I think I need to take a break from the internet for a while.

Maybe it’s time for a DS9 rewatch…

That title makes me chuckle. He should go set up a fresh install of Windows and see what the default security experience is like. Mac OS makes it smooth and fast, and relatively unobtrusive in comparison.

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I’ve just spent a few weeks continually enhancing a script in a language I’m not all that familiar with, exclusively using ChatGPT 4. The experience leaves a LOT to be desired.

The first few prompts are nothing short of amazing. You go from blank page to something that mostly works in a few seconds. Inevitably, though, something needs to change. That’s where things start to go awry.

You’ll get a few changes in, and things will be going well. Then you’ll ask for another change, and the resulting code will eliminate one of your earlier changes. For example, I asked ChatGPT to write a quick python script that does fuzzy matching. I wanted to feed it a list of filenames from a file and have it find the closest match on my hard drive. I asked for a progress bar, which it added. By the time I was done having it generate code, the progress bar had been removed a couple of times, and changed out for a different progress bar at least three times. (On the bright side, I now know of multiple progress bar solutions in Python!)

If you continue on long enough, the “memory” of ChatGPT isn’t sufficient to remember everything you’ve been doing. You get to a point where you need to feed it your script very frequently to give it the context it needs to answer a question or implement a change.

And on top of all that, it doesn’t often implement the best change. In one instance, I wanted it to write a function that would parse a CSV, count up duplicate values in a particular field, and add that value to each row of the CSV. I could tell right away that the first solution was not an efficient way to accomplish the task. I had to question ChatGPT in another prompt about whether it was efficient. (I was soundly impressed that it recognized the problem after I brought it up and gave me something that ended up being quite fast and efficient.)

Moral of the story: you can’t do this effectively without an understanding of computer science.

Thanks for posting this! I was going to buy this on blu ray very soon after launch, but now I think I’ll give it some time. The only thing I worry about is that the incorrect version will be sold to retailers, who will just sell me that when I go to buy it next year.

Season 1 has a couple fun extras on the disc. One in particular shows how they use the LED walls to create rich set environments.

Voyager episodes 1-4 all display in 4:3 on Paramount Plus for me on PC and iPhone.

Oh yeah, I bet it’s the latter. It would make sense to lock the database before a migration, too!

I’m curious how you actually turn a Lemmy site read-only!

I’m making my way through the special features and commentaries in the Blu Ray edition. It amazes me that so much of the bonus content is apologizing for/explaining the bad quality of the show. I’ve never seen anything like it, really.

I have watched this series several times. There was one way to watch it that makes it pretty good: follow the skippables list. It tells you which episodes to omit and which to watch to get the full story. It’s pretty incredible what it does to the experience of binging the show. Suddenly it feels Voyager-like.

Okay, I have a lot of recommendations here.

how can I quit textEdit/close a textEdit document and either:

Choose not to save at all or

To my knowledge, this can’t be done. Choose a different text editor, such as BBEdit instead. In BBEdit, if I want to choose not to save, I press Command-W to close the window. The “Save changes before closing?” dialog box will accept Command-D as input for the “Don’t Save” button. BBEdit also has command line utilities, which I will come back to.

Choose to save somewhere and pick a location and filename to do so WITHOUT touching the mouse?

You have already answered this one. All application Save As dialog boxes accept the command-shift-G (Go to) command. You can then type the path to where you want to save your file and use tab-completion to make it go faster. Saving files in locations that can be accessed with tilde expansion will dramatically speed your workflow.

For example, I often work on little projects that involve editing lots of files. I will choose to put my project directory in my home directory so that I can access it with the following keystrokes:

1. Command-Shift-S (Save As)
2. Command-Shift-G (Go to)
3. ~/Rot(tab)/Proj(tab) (which tab-completes to /Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/)
4. (enter)

But what I keep thinking about while reading your post is how much you should be working with an open terminal window. The zsh commands you can use there will change your life. It requires learning unix, and it requires you changing the way you work a bit, but I can immediately think of approaches that would make it so that you never have to use the Go To command again. Let’s walk through that now.

In Linux/Unix, it is not uncommon to create your file in a location before you even edit it. For example, I can do this:

touch ~/Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/tutorial.py

This creates an empty file at that location. Now I can open the file, edit it, and save it, and I don’t have to specify where. My hands never have to leave the keyboard. But we can do better:

nano ~/Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/tutorial.py

Now I’ve opened the text editor nano. I can write in that file. When I save it, it will be saved at that location. But we can do even better.

Remember how I mentiuoned that BBEdit has command line tools? Once those are installed, we can use bbedit as the text editor instead of nano.

bbedit ~/Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/tutorial.py

As you might have guessed, this opens a new BBEdit text window. The BBEdit developers have gone the extra mile, though. That empty BBEdit window will have the name you passed to it in the title bar as well as the path to the file visible in the toolbar even though the file doesn’t even exist until you save it.

So far so good, right? Once you start using a terminal window in your workflow, you can begin to take advantage of things like environment variables, symbolic links, and commands like find and grep to rapidly increase your productivity.

Oh, one more thing: if you don’t know how to use regular expressions, set aside some time to learn how to use them. Regular Expressions are probably the single most life-changing thing I’ve ever come across for computers.

Commnad-option-C will copy the path of the currently-selected folder or file to the clipboard. If you use a finder replacement like PathFInder, you get this behavior with just command-C.

Nemesis above Undiscovered Country? That’s a shock!

I know this pain. This is why I have so many 49 minute timers

Paradoxically, Apple has regularly introduced features over the years that result in me needing to use my devices less. When I got my first iPhone (an iPhone 4, I believe), every little notification would light up my phone’s screen. These days that doesn’t happen, and Apple has further cut down on those intrusions with focus and bed time configurations. I’m big into using HomeKit for home automation. And while it annoys me that home automation is still such a simple application, Apple has done a good job of insulating me from the need to use my devices when I want things to happen in my home.

In short, letting myself take advantage of the Apple ecosystem reduces the touch-points of the technology I use. I just have to invest the time to learn about features and how they work, and to tune them to my preferred lifestyle.

You can do that, but it’s provided on iPhone without any internet connection, it integrates seamlessly with system events, there are no download or install requirements, and if you use Airpods Pro, you can mix in environmental sounds. Plus, as another user mentioned below, you can add a toggle for this setting in the control center. That’s a stellar implementation!

This is a great idea! I just added it, but it’s tricky. For anyone coming across this who wonders how it’s done, here are the steps:

1. Go to Settings > Control Center
2. Scroll down to Accessibility Shortcuts and tap the green + on the left to add it to the included controls
3. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut (all the way at the bottom in the General group)
4. Tap Background Sounds. A checkmark will appear on the left.

Now there will be a generic accessibility icon on the control center that will toggle the background sounds on and off.