The setting is (intentionally) confusing too: "download and keep" implies that photos always have to transit via iCloud first, and the default is ambiguously named "optimise storage" rather than something more explicit like "move photos to iCloud".

I have seen the following scenario play out twice already:

- The free iCloud tier runs out of storage because of the photo backups

- Apple spams the user with warning notifications and emails and incentives to upgrade

- User sees that nonsense and decides they don't really need iCloud backups (sometimes they didn't even know it was on) and turn it off

- But oops, turns out iOS had "helpfully" removed the original photos from the local device to "save space", and now the photos are inaccessible

- User tries to turn iCloud back on to access their photos but iOS now refuses to do it because the account is out of storage space (but don't worry, you can still upgrade to a paid plan!)

- The photos are now held hostage by Apple

You can access the photos from the iCloud website, but the download interface is clunky because it is not made for mass exports. And in this age of smartphones and apps, how many people know this is even an option? When this happened to an elderly family member of mine, it was only sheer luck that he had his iCloud password written down somewhere and I was able to rescue his photos from Apple's jaws.

Now, over decade later, I am in the middle of re-reading every book in the Cantos series back to back (this time in their original language), and still loving them.

Rest in peace Mr Simmons. You had the words of a poet and the mind of a dreamer.

This is obviously an attempt to get more traffic to facebook.com, but the chat UI there is just so much worse.

They’re the very obvious, very obnoxious kind of spam, and Gmail still correctly sends them to the junk bin, so I wonder if they were shadowbanned before and Google simply decided to make the process more explicit (which I don’t hate on principle).

Either that or my address was scrapped from somewhere by a spam bot and the timing is coincidental.

If they mean "machine learning", then sure there are application in cancer detection and the like, but development there has been moving at a steady pace for decades and has nothing to do with the current hype wave of GenAI, so there's no reason to assume it's suddenly going to go exponential. I used to work in that field and I'm confident it's not going to change overnight: progress there is slow not because of the models, but because data is sparse and noisy, labels are even sparser and noisier, deployment procedures are rigid and legal compliance is a nightmare.

If they mean "generative AI", then how is that supposed to work exactly? Asking LLMs for medical diagnosis is no better than asking "the Internet at large". They only return the most statistically likely output given their training corpus (that corpus being the Internet as a whole), so it's more likely your diagnosis will be based on a random Reddit comment that the LLMs has ingested somewhere, than an actual medical paper.

The only plausible applications I can think of are tasks such as summarizing papers, acting as augmented search engines for datasets and papers, or maybe automating some menial administrative tasks. Useful, for sure, but not revolutionary.

So it's basically adding "don't delete my files pretty please" to the prompt?

EDIT: I misread, the natural language description of the rule is just a shortcut to generate the actual rule which is based on regexp patterns.

Still, it only protects you against very specific commands. Won't help you if the LLM decides to fill your disk with `cat /dev/urandom > foo` for example.

Because that's exactly what they are. An LLM is just a big optimization function with the objective "return the most probabilistically plausible sequence of words in a given context".

There is no higher thinking. They were literally built as a mimicry of intelligence.

* One of those IKEA wall-mounted grate things (SKÅDIS) that you can hang stuff to. IKEA sells hooks for it that turn out to be the perfect size to hold a PS4 controller securely, plus various boxes and mini-shelves that have helped declutter my desk.

* A cheap bluetooth-connected Xiaomi temperature/humidity sensor. You're supposed to use it with the Xiaomi app, but turns out those devices just broadcast their data as an unencrypted BLE feed, so I can just intercept it with a Raspberry Pi and redirect the data to my own Postgres+Grafana setup for recording and monitoring.

That’s about the time I would have given up on the investigation and called in an exorcist.