Mysk: We’re super excited to finally launch Psylo, a new kind of private web browser for iOS and iPadOS. In Psylo, each tab is its own silo with isolated storage, cookies, and even its own IP address. Psylo introduces advanced anti-tracking and anti-fingerprinting features that go beyond what a VPN can offer, thanks to the […]

Sergey Mostsevenko (via Hacker News): Apple introduced advanced fingerprinting protection in Safari 17. Advanced fingerprinting protection aims to reduce fingerprinting accuracy by limiting available information or adding randomness.By default, the advanced protection is enabled in private (incognito) mode and disabled in normal mode. It affects both desktop and mobile platforms. Advanced fingerprinting protection also affects […]

Apple (MacRumors, 9to5Mac, Hacker News, Slashdot): Apple is opening up access for any app to tap directly into the on-device foundation model at the core of Apple Intelligence. With the Foundation Models framework, app developers will be able to build on Apple Intelligence to bring users new experiences that are intelligent, available when they’re offline, […]

Simon Willison, regarding the various rebuttals to “The Illusion of Thinking” research paper (which I linked to here) from Apple’s machine learning team:

I thought this paper got way more attention than it warranted — the title “The Illusion of Thinking” captured the attention of the “LLMs are over-hyped junk” crowd. I saw enough well-reasoned rebuttals that I didn’t feel it worth digging into.

And now, notable LLM skeptic Gary Marcus has saved me some time by aggregating the best of those rebuttals together in one place! [...]

And therein lies my disagreement. I’m not interested in whether or not LLMs are the “road to AGI”. I continue to care only about whether they have useful applications today, once you’ve understood their limitations. [...] They’re already useful to me today, whether or not they can reliably solve the Tower of Hanoi or River Crossing puzzles.

Count me in with Willison. I think it’s interesting what constitutes “reasoning”, but when it comes to these systems, I’m mostly just interested in whether they’re useful or not, and if so, how.

See also: Victor Martinez’s rebuttal to the most-cited rebuttal.

WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, back in 2012 (two years before Facebook acquired them for $19 billion, 13 years before this week’s introduction of ads into WhatsApp):

Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it’s all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out... And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.

Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.

At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That’s our product and that’s our passion. Your data isn’t even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.

When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say “Have you considered the alternative?”