The sounds in #BaldursGate3 are amazing. The voice acting, the music, but especially the spells, they feel powerful and substantial ☄️
Google Podcasts is going away — here are some alternatives
Barbara Krasnoff writing for The Verge (Apple News)
According to the YouTube blog, Google will be discontinuing the Podcasts app “later in 2024.”
Add another one to the Google graveyard.
I wish I could play #BaldursGate3 on my iPad. I think the game would lend itself very well to a touch interface.
Baldur’s Gate 3 Mac countdown: Exact release date and time
Max Miceli writing for DOT ESPORTS (Apple News)
Baldur’s Gate 3 officially launches for Mac on Thursday, Sept. 21. The launch will coincide with the release of the game’s third patch. Larian Studios has not yet released an exact time for the launch.
I’ve been playing the pre-release version on my Mac for a couple of weeks now, just trying to get a sense of the gameplay, controls and classes. Can’t wait to dive into the full thing!
Remember when Google’s motto was don’t be evil? Now their latest initiatives are to slurp up as much data as possible to train their generative AI, track the websites their users visit to package up and provide to advertisers, and allow websites to refuse to load content if they don’t like something running on the user’s computer.
Chrome’s “Topics” advertising system is here, whether you want it or not
Ron Amadeo writing for Ars Technica (Apple News)
Google seems to view user tracking as a mandatory part of Internet usage, and instead of third-party cookies, it wants to build a user-tracking system directly into its Chrome browser.
Now’s the time to stop using Chrome.
Love seeing console level games on iPhone. I want to be able to play #BaldursGate3 on my iPad, so seeing this gives me hope.
Chrome is the new IE
Bought #BaldursGate3 on MacOS assuming it was coming out Sep 6. When I found out it wasn’t coming out until later in Sep I decided I’d wait to play until the full game was released. Well, today I decided to just play around in the character creator, then I started playing the starting mission, and man, I just wish the full game was released for Mac already!
Elon Musk can filter offensive tweets for advertisers. Why not for users?
Chris Taylor writing for Mashable (Apple News)
But there’s another reason why the advertising options are self-defeating: Because they bring up another troubling question for users who are sick of the site’s lack of content moderation. If Twitter/X can identify and filter out content such as hate speech “with a 99% efficacy rate,” according to the company’s blog, why only offer that service to advertisers? Plenty of users would also prefer a version of Twitter that is 99% Nazi free, too. By offering that option to advertisers but not caring about the potential customers they’re trying to reach, Musk’s company is drawing attention to the fact in a way that serves neither.
Physicists achieve fusion with net energy gain for second time
Tim Wilson and Alice Hancock writing for Ars Technical (Apple News)
US government scientists have achieved net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the second time, a result that is set to fuel optimism that progress is being made toward the dream of limitless, zero-carbon power.
Wouldn’t that be amazing, limitless, zero-carbon power.
Size of data
Saw this on Mastodon, great way to understand the different sizes of data.
A jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work
Timothy B. Lee and Sean Trott writing for Ars Technical (Apple News)
Why use such a baroque notation? Here’s an analogy. Washington, DC, is located at 38.9 degrees north and 77 degrees west. We can represent this using a vector notation:
Washington, DC, is at [38.9, 77] New York is at [40.7, 74] London is at [51.5, 0.1] Paris is at [48.9, -2.4] This is useful for reasoning about spatial relationships. You can tell New York is close to Washington, DC, because 38.9 is close to 40.7 and 77 is close to 74. By the same token, Paris is close to London. But Paris is far from Washington, DC.
Twitter commandeers @X username from man who had it since 2007
Jon Brodkin writing for Ars Technica
Hwang is still on Twitter with the new handle of @x12345678998765. “Alls well that ends well,” he tweeted last night. He told Ars that @x12345678998765 is the handle Twitter moved him to temporarily before he picks a new name.
GM announces a new Ultium-based Chevrolet Bolt during Q2 report
Jonathan M. Gitlin writing for ArsTechnica
Since the Bolt, GM has gone on to develop a new battery platform called Ultium, with much lower costs per kWh than the LG cells that power the Bolt. And it will use those cells in the next Bolt, although GM says we need to wait until a later date for anything more specific.
I’d love for #AppleNotes to get #markdown support. Maybe next year 🤞🏼
Whimsical Chaos on macOS Sonoma
Greg Morris - Apple Notes Is Just About Perfect in iOS17
Greg Morris writing on his blog
The biggest update to Apple Notes is linking between notes easily, and it’s not an exaggeration to say Apple absolutely nailed the implementation. You can tap link and just type out the name of the note you want to link to, there’s no double bracket or back linking bandwagon joining, it’s simple, elegant and exactly what is needed.
I’m really looking forward to this update to Notes. I have over 2,000 notes in Apple Notes, so I think I’m a fairly heavy user. This new feature coupled with tags, which were introduced a couple of years ago, and folders, will make organizing and navigating all those notes much easier. The improvements to Notes over the years has been great, I hope Apple keeps it up.
Breakfast at Epcot
Met some friends at breakfast this morning.
Magic Kingdom Fireworks
Magic Kingdom fireworks always impress! 🎇
Some thoughts on Apple’s New Vision Pro
Some thoughts on Apple’s new Vision Pro
I’m surprised the FaceTime avatar isn’t your Memoji. I’m assuming it’ll be an option, but the 3D digital face thing has some room to improve. The hardware they’ve put into this thing is amazing! The screens, the cameras, the eye tracking, the M2 and R1 chips, just 🤯 When I saw the R1 I immediately thought car. I think Eye Sight (the outward facing screen showing the wearer’s eyes) is really well done and a key component to making this something you can wear and still interact with other people. Now some questions
Not as much smoke today as the past few days. Not sure how long it’ll last.
I wouldn’t buy a new car without #CarPlay to begin with, but if GM’s iOS app is any indication of their future infotainment systems, they have a long way to go!
The app is just terrible.
They plugged GPT-4 into Minecraft—and unearthed new potential for AI
Will Knight writing at Ars Technica (Apple News)
The Nvidia team, which included Anima Anandkumar, the company’s director of machine learning and a professor at Caltech, created a Minecraft bot called Voyager that uses GPT-4 to solve problems inside the game. The language model generates objectives that help the agent explore the game, and code that improves the bot’s skill at the game over time.
Voyager doesn’t play the game like a person, but it can read the state of the game directly, via an API. It might see a fishing rod in its inventory and a river nearby, for instance, and use GPT-4 to suggest the goal of doing some fishing to gain experience. It will then use this goal to have GPT-4 generate the code needed to have the character achieve it.