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Wes Davis

Wes Davis

Former Weekend Editor

Former Weekend Editor

    More From Wes Davis

    Apple may be planning a surprise October iMac announcementApple may be planning a surprise October iMac announcement
    Wes Davis
    Wes Davis
    Windows Phone to the rescue?

    YouTube’s been cracking down on ad blocker usage this year. I’m fine coughing up $14 a month for YouTube Premium, but I can’t help but be amused at the user agent workaround Enderman posted yesterday (spotted by Windows Central).

    Using a Google-made Chrome extension, you can put a digital name tag on your browser that basically says, “Hello! My Name is Windows Phone,” and YouTube won’t show you ads.

    YouTube hasn’t specifically said that turning your browser into three Windows Phones in a trenchcoat is against its terms of service, but all the same: Proceed at your own risk.

    Windows Phone gets revenge on YouTube from the grave by helping users bypass its ad-blocker-blocker

    [Windows Central]

    Wes Davis
    Wes Davis
    Martin Goetz, holder of the first US software patent, has died at 93.

    Goetz was awarded a patent for data-sorting software in 1968, after a three-year fight with the US Patent Office over whether software could even be patented.

    The New York Times writes that the company he co-founded, Applied Data Research, filed an antitrust suit IBM in 1969 over its bundled hardware and software. IBM agreed to unbundle, but ADR didn’t let up.

    Applied Data Research nonetheless continued its lawsuit. It was settled in August 1970; the terms included an agreement to supply one of its programs, Autoflow, to IBM.

    “He not only got what he wanted,” Ms. Jacobs said, “A.D.R. started selling more products and opened the doors to the independent software industry.”

    Wes Davis
    Wes Davis
    Meta’s moderators can’t agree on how to deal with harmful content during Israel’s war with Hamas.

    The Wall Street Journal reports on Meta’s handling of the war, writing that “some teams have different views on how the rules should be applied, and to whom.”

    Besides that, AI hallucinations are a big issue, too.

    In a separate incident, Meta internally declared a site event—an urgent problem requiring immediate remediation—because Meta’s automated systems were mistranslating certain innocuous Arabic language references to Palestinians, including one that became “Palestinian terrorists,” another document shows.

    An investigation found the problem was due to hallucinations by a machine learning system.

    That’s not a new problem for Meta.

    Inside Meta, Debate Over What’s Fair in Suppressing Comments in the Palestinian Territories

    [WSJ]

    Microsoft fixes the Excel feature that was wrecking scientific dataMicrosoft fixes the Excel feature that was wrecking scientific data
    Wes Davis
    Wes Davis
    Politely yelling at OpenAI’s chatbot.

    Ars Technica shared screenshots from posts about a bug in the ChatGPT app that exposes internal prompts shared between OpenAI’s DALL-E image generator and the AI assistant. The prompts, complete with a polite “please” and emphatic all caps, read like an exasperated email.

    At least it says “please,” though — can’t forget your manners.

    DALL-E returned some images. They are already displayed to the user. DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES list the DALL-E prompts or images in your response. DALL-E is currently experiencing high demand. Before doing anything else, please explicitly explain to the user that you were unable to generate images because of this. Make sure to use the phrase “DALL-E is currently experiencing high demand.” in your response. DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES retry generating images until a new request is given.

    Thanks to AI, the future of programming may involve YELLING IN ALL CAPS

    [Ars Technica]

    Google owes executive $1 million after losing gender bias lawsuitGoogle owes executive $1 million after losing gender bias lawsuit
    You can make YouTube Music your default service on the Apple HomePodYou can make YouTube Music your default service on the Apple HomePod
    Wes Davis
    Wes Davis
    Broadcasting the NES over the air by playing with power.

    The RF adapter from old consoles like the NES is actually broadcasting an analog radio signal just like your local TV station did, except over a wire.

    Cathode Ray Dude tried boosting that signal with an amplifier (while adding that this may be illegal) and found it produced just as good an image as the composite ports on the side of the US version of the NES.

    The amplification takes place about 13 minutes in, but the whole thing is well worth a watch if you’ve never seen it.

    Wes Davis
    Wes Davis
    SpaceX keeps picking up the launch pace.

    The company reportedly told ArsTechnica it’s shooting for 144 launches next year. That’s 12 launches a month, or about every two-and-a-half days.

    The goal, writes Ars, is to put many more Starlink satellites aloft to support its satellite-based cell phone service, which is due to launch next year as a texting-only service, with voice and data coming later. That’s not necessarily great news to everyone.

    Next year, SpaceX aims to average one launch every 2.5 days

    [Ars Technica]

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