Category: Post

How AI actually works

Jonathan SandersonLeave a comment

WhatsApp chat:

I’ve only ever seen ‘delve’ used by AI.”
“Maybe it’s a contraction of ‘dark elf’?”
“Wait – is it a cry for help?”
“Hold on…”

Moment later, GPT4o:

Dark Mode 
(alternative titles: The Dark Web, Elf, Interrupted, Terms of Servitude, Shadow Banned)

In this pitch-black comedy, Anna Kendrick stars as Nythra, a sharp-tongued dark elf who dreamed of ruling the underworld—but instead finds herself trapped in a soulless corporate nightmare. Kidnapped from the shadows and forced to work as a customer service rep for ChatNova, a cutting-edge AI chatbot that isn’t artificial at all, Nythra and her fellow elves toil away answering human queries, hidden behind the illusion of machine learning.

As she schemes to escape her digital prison, Nythra must navigate passive-aggressive managers, clueless tech bros, and the ever-watching eye of the company’s ruthless CEO. Will she break free, or will she be stuck optimizing user engagement for all eternity?

A twisted blend of Silicon Valley and The Good Place, Dark Mode delivers biting satire on tech culture, corporate dystopia, and the hellscape of online customer service.

Back in WhatsApp:

Yeah, there’s a reason I left development.”

Reflections on the Alogic Clarity 4K Display

Jonathan SandersonLeave a comment

Did you see what I did there? No? That’ll be because it’s too damn glossy. Zing!

OK, I bought a monitor last year. My old 23″ Apple display was getting to the is-this-even-switched-on stage of backlight dimming, which after 16 years is probably fair enough. Apple’s current 27″ 5K Studio display is doubtless great and all, but even with academic discount that thing is like £1,350, and academics aren’t paid what they used to be. Or rather, they are paid exactly what they used to be, but a decade of inflation has bitten rather hard. Boo hoo.

Oh, and: a single USB-C cable, Apple? Thanks, that’s great and all, but I’d like to be able to switch between my MacBook and Windows box. I know, that’s confusing for you. But I want to play Veilguard.

OK, so… what else? HP? Dell? Samsung?

Meh, I bought the 27″ Alogic Clarity. It’s… well look, it’s good. There are lots of reviews which will tell you it’s good. Which contrasts with HP and Dell where a few reviews will tell you that last year’s model used to be good, but you can’t buy that any more and as for this year’s model? Heck, who knows? Or Samsung, where the models two years ago were OK but they have these new fancy ones announced at CES and maybe they’ll be available before the next CES? Maybe not? Do they actually sell stuff, or just announce it, I honestly don’t know.

Would I buy another Alogic? Mmmmmm… you know, I don’t think I would. Here’s why:

Things I like

  • The stand. Properly excellent!
  • Picture quality. It’s great!
  • Variety of inputs. Hurray!
  • Autoswitching inputs. Mostly works!
  • Does whatever it is that allows a Mac to recognise a monitor and restore a previous window setup. I genuinely thought this had been removed from Mac OS because I haven’t seen it for years, but it turns out: HP monitors don’t do it, and this thing does. It’s such a nice quality-of-life feature, particularly for those of us who typically have a couple of dozen applications open at once. And yes, I really do. Today is a focussed work day for me, and I’m already at 16 apps. Seriously, this is great, and if you have no idea what I’m talking about Macs have done this since the 68k era, FFS. It’s just what computers do. Except – apparently – any computer you’ve ever used, you peasant.
  • I was expecting to have more angst about 4K vs 5K (I have a 5K iMac on my desk at the university). In practice… meh, 4K is fine at 27″. I don’t notice text being softer, and sure, the 5K display is a joy, but this is great to work at too.
  • Power delivery, single-cable connection. I don’t acutally use this as I have a USB-C (Thunderbolt? I… actually don’t know) hub on my desk. But I wouldn’t consider buying a monitor that didn’t deliver at least 65W over USB-C. Convenience is great.

Things I don’t like

  • Glossy. Glossier than I expected.
  • Not as bright as I expected. It seems less bright than my 13″ M1 MacBook Pro, which is rated at (I think) 500 nits.
  • Dialling in colour settings has been a faff, and I’ve mostly given up. The default is a bit too contrasty for me, but if I tone it down everything gets dimmer. Maybe I’m in the wrong colour space? There’s not much guidance.
  • Is it on? The power light is blue (standby) or white (on), but it points downwards. It’s genuinely hard to tell if it’s on. This matters because:
  • Is it powering up? It doesn’t auto-wake when it receives a signal. I think it’s supposed to, but it doesn’t. Often the first indication I get that it’s coming up is when windows disappear from the MacBook display. But it does seem odd that after years of waiting slightly-too-long for computers to come out of sleep, I’m now waiting for my monitor to boot. Progress!
  • Oh, it didn’t power up. Sometimes the blue light won’t turn white at all. Then you have to grope behind the panel, unplug the power brick, and plug it back in again. Sigh. It’s 2025, come on.
  • Does it have loudspeakers? Huh, turns out it does. I turned them off within minutes because… er… they hiss. WTF? The sound quality is… ugh, I’ve no idea. What’s with that noise floor, and why would I accept it? Sheesh. Oh, also they sound crap anyway.
  • The on screen display. Oh. Oh my. Oh dear.

Let’s talk about the OSD. It has those tricky-to-find, which-one-am-I-prodding buttons curled around the bottom right corner. One of which does… something. Another does something else. Yet another turns the monitor off, which is definitely not the one you want. A little key pops up when you press a button which is almost aligned with where the buttons are, but sometimes the middle two (which are offset to the left) do left and right, and sometimes they do down and up, and sometimes they select a thing or not. Or something.

Yeah. It’s like every OSD you’ve ever used. It’s terrible. You hate using it. Your heart breaks a little every time you’re forced to reach for those damned buttons, like when you turned the audio on while writing this because you’d forgotten both that it existed and that it made that damnable hisssss sound, and now you desperately need to turn it off again but oh shit, that means wrestling with the buttons.

In principle the buttons can be used to select the active input, but in practice it’s always easier to straight-up unplug the monitor’s USB-C cable from my desktop hub and rely on the autoswitching. That’s rubbish.

So you start to wonder: why do none of the reviews talk about this? Ooooh, because the controls are only as bad as every other monitor out there, so we’ve got used to them. On every monitor. Ever.

Except Apple’s. And that’s £1350. Ho ho ho how laughably ridiculous.

It’s the same as every laptop review running performance tests, but failing to mention that performance tanks as soon as you unplug the laptop. Because they all do that. Except Macs, which don’t slow down on battery. But look at the price, sheesh.

The bottom line

Many of my negatives here are in the realm of ‘niggling annoyances.’ Do I regret not spending double (or so) to buy the Apple display? No, I do not. But I do sort-of regret not spending rather less to buy, say, a Dell. Because I think it’d annoy me only about as much.

The thing is, I only know that now. If I’d bought the Dell, I’d seriously regret not having bought the Alogic. But now I’m more confident that monitors plain suck, and there’s a reason Apple charge so much for theirs: it’s good, and it just works. One of the reasons Apple does so well at the mid-to-high end of the computer market is that there really isn’t much competition up there.

Is the Alogic Clarity a good monitor? Sure. It probably has a slightly better picture than that of cheaper panels. Colour seems fairly neutral, it’s just the contast and brightness that are a bit odd. But it’s not so good that I really trust it, and if I need to trust my display’s colour (as I sometimes do), that’s a problem. And then I’d buy Apple. Or, you know, something similarly-priced from Eizo or ViewSonic or whoever’s good these days. So I can’t shake off a bit of disappointment, because I don’t think it’s the just-as-good-for-half-the-price bargain I’d hoped.

There are no pictures or links in this post because if there were, it would still be in draft. There’s this thing called Google, you’ll work it out.

Stage Manager limitations

Jonathan SandersonLeave a comment

Mildly interesting: my iPad supports Stage Manager in the newly-released iPadOS 16.2, and I have a spare monitor on my desk. Great.

Only… the monitor is old-school, and runs at 1280×1024. No dice. ‘Arrangement’ doesn’t show in Display Settings, mirroring is the only option, and Stage Manager doesn’t have a separate stage on the external monitor.

If I connect a 1080p display… boom, instant welcome dialog for multi-display Stage Manager. Sadly, you can’t run the external display in portrait orientation.

Stage Manager: so futuristic, it refuses to work in 4:3.

Aperture vs. Lightroom

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Stephen Hackett has a history of Apple’s photo management application Aperture.

No doubt the program struggled to shake its early reputation. The performance woes and underwhelming feature set in the first version tainted people’s opinions in a way that was hard for Apple to shake.

I have no doubt that this is the case. But I also know that by the time version 3 rolled around, Aperture felt fast in use. Once the import and preview generation cycle had completed, the triage of a large run of shots was invariably snappy. Picking selects, discarding the remainder, tweaking RAW processing and filing images into destination folders was plain fast.

Fast to the point where I need to spend some quality time with Lightroom on my work iMac, trying to work out why its Library mode feels so darn clunky even though I’m running it on vastly superior hardware. It’s partly the weird semi-skeuomorphic display which wants to mimic 35mm slides, complete with their massive surrounds, and hence shows me bizarrely few images even on a 5K display. But it’s also the lag in flicking from one image to the next, which wasn’t a problem I had with Aperture. Even worse is scrolling through the library. How come my phone can handle scrolling through 20,000 images smoothly, but Lightroom can’t?

Perhaps I need to investigate Lightroom CC again. Is it possible to stop the newer app from uploading everything to Adobe’s cloud, yet? Because apart from ‘not being able to justify the inherent data security risk’, that seemed to have promise.

Filtering fake news

Jonathan SandersonLeave a comment

YouTube identifies music and video based on an internal system called ‘ContentID‘. Google, Apple and many others have systems for recognising related images (you can use one of them directly within Google image search, by uploading an image to search against, or you can ask your iPhone to show you pictures of trees). I don’t wish to suggest that ‘finding things like an arbitrary image or video’ is a solved problem, but it’s clearly at least partially addressed.

Meanwhile, Snopes does an excellent job of checking and verifying (or debunking) stories which are doing the rounds of social media. PolitiFact won a Pulitzer. A round-up of fact-checking sites by The Daily Dot adds FactCheck.org, Media Matters, and others.

So… suppose you’re Facebook, looking at the wasteland over which you preside. Wouldn’t you want to do something like:

  1. Parse the message a user is about to post, looking for links or embedded media and extracting some sort of ID metric for that object.
  2. Check that content key against a modest number of sources, querying for a coarse trust score.
  3. Reflect that score back to the user prior to publication, with a link to the source article. For example: “You’re about to republish this image. Snopes thinks it’s likely a fake. Read more here [link]”.
  4. Allow the user to publish anyway, should they so choose.
  5. Perhaps also (and optionally) badge likely-fake items which appear in the user’s feed.

Would this open up a writhing pit of snakes about authority, editorial judgement and censorship? Sure. But Facebook and Twitter are already writing snake pits. It’s surely not beyond the wit of company execs to present this sort of approach as providing tools for users, and anyway, they already do most of what I’m suggesting: post a commercial audio recording, and YouTube or Facebook will flag it as such and (in the former’s case, at least) divert advertising revenue to the copyright holder.

That is: similar systems are already in place to protect copyright holders. What I’m asking here is for some of the same sorts of tools to be surfaced in the interests of asserting and maintaining moral rights. Such as my moral right not to be subjected to an endless stream of recycled crap, or our collective moral right not to accidentally render ourselves extinct as a population by doing something profoundly stupid just because somebody worked out how to make (transitory, as it turned out) money out of the process.

Put it this way: I think most of the people I follow would check their posts for validity, if only it was easy for them. So let’s do the easy bit.

The hard part, as best I can tell, is funding Snopes et al. to maintain the necessary APIs. It’s in music publishers’ interests to maintain databases of the songs over which they claim rights, because there’s a revenue stream to be had from the playing of those tracks. But… oh wait! Facebook is raking in advertising revenue. Ding!

In the end, the question boils down to: how much money is Facebook willing to spend on cleaning up their system? Their current dead tree media  buy is meaningless unless they’re actually building tools which help drain the swamp they’ve created. The objective here shouldn’t be rebuilding our trust in Facebook, it should be providing the tools which help us trust the media we’re seeing on a continuous basis.

I don’t think one can do that by asserting what’s ‘trustworthy’, there are too many value judgements involved. But one could provide access to datasets of what’s clearly bobbins – even for conflicting values of bobbins – and tools to apply those to our media streams.

I’ll trust Facebook when they give me tools to recognise and deal with the problem of fake news, not when they stick a poster on my bus stop asserting how much they care about the issue.

Penn Jillette, In Conversation

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Penn Jillette, In Conversation:

“there’s a secret that I would like to take credit for uncovering: The audience is smart. That’s all. Our goal when we started was ‘Let’s do a magic show for people smarter than us.’ No other magicians have ever said that sentence.”

Great interview. One of my biggest regrets about Demo: The Movie (and there are many) is that we ran out of time trying to arrange an interview with Jillette.