2025-12-20 01:00:00
From the Anthropic blog: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size
It remains unclear how far this trend will hold as we keep scaling up models. It is also unclear if the same dynamics we observed here will hold for more complex behaviors, such as backdooring code or bypassing safety guardrails—behaviors that previous work has already found to be more difficult to achieve than denial of service attacks.
I'm sharing this because I've seen it posted a few times on social as proof that LLMs are fundamentally flawed, but reading past the headline reveals a much more nuanced finding. Basically, this is something to be aware of if you're building LLMs and to protect against, but it's not exactly a deal-breaker.
2025-12-19 23:00:00
Mitchell Hashimoto: Ghostty Is Now Non-Profit
I believe infrastructure of this kind should be stewarded by a mission-driven, non-commercial entity that prioritizes public benefit over private profit. That structure increases trust, encourages adoption, and creates the conditions for Ghostty to grow into a widely used and impactful piece of open-source infrastructure.
I love Ghostty, it's my favorite terminal emulator by a mile, and I'm happy to see Hashimoto commit to it being a net good for the world.
2025-12-19 23:00:00
Last Friday, Paris Buttfield-Addison posted 20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple, which kind of blew up.
A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse.
Yeah, effectively, they got a $500 Apple gift card, tried to add it to their account, and this triggered a high enough severity fraud alert in Apple's system that it automatically locked their Apple account. Not good.
The post is a good reminder of how tied to these large companies we really are. I assume most people reading this post have an Apple account, and it's a good exercise to consider how much of your digital life would become inaccessible if you suddenly lost access to that account. Would you lose all your photos? All of your contacts? All of your files? Obviously, the odds of you losing access to your Apple account are exceptionally low, and Buttfield-Addison's experience is the exception, but I think it is a good reminder that completely benign behavior can occasionally lead to serious consequences you would not see coming.
This leads me to three main thoughts on the topic.
First, companies like Apple and Google have over 1 billion users, and their automated systems are likely correct far more often than they are wrong, and I don't think they need to go away. However, a good appeals process is necessary to have, and what happened in this person's case is not ideal. How would someone without a blog and ability to reach an audience have gotten this solved?
Second, when you're locked out of your Apple ID, you should be able to download effectively everything from your account. This would mean that if I was locked out of my Apple ID, maybe I wouldn't be able to use it or add new data to that account. But if I still was able to authenticate, I should be able to download my photos, my files, and other relevant information that I may want to get out. This would make it so that even if I wasn't able to get the attention that this person did and resolve the issue, at least I could still get a backup of my information.
And third, I strongly think that everyone should have some level of redundancy in as much of their digital life as they can. Photos are the big one that I think everyone should be considering. A lot of the things on my computer can be replaced or recreated if they're lost, but not my photos; I can never recreate those moments that I've captured. I personally treat Apple Photos as my de facto photo library, and it works great, but for many years, I had Google Photos also backing up those images, which gave me a second online backup. In the event that my Apple ID was locked, I would still have all of my photos in Google. Since getting a Synology NAS last year, I've actually switched that to having the Synology Photos app automatically back up my photo library to the NAS so that I have local access to all of my photos. Now those photos aren't tied to any online account, they're literally on a hard drive in my house. Consider what's important to you and figure out a solution that works for you.
This story has a happy ending, with Buttfield-Addison posting an update yesterday:
We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my account was caught by that. Obviously it’s unacceptable that this can happen, and I’m still trying to get more information out of him, but at least things are now mostly working.
Great news, but again, would someone without a blog and a few thousand social media followers have been able to get here? I don't know…
2025-12-19 09:53:26
Stephanie Vee: Delete Spotify? Sure, But Don't Just Replace it With Another Subscription
streaming music sucks for almost everyone involved. I believe we only do it because we’ve allowed ourselves to be convinced that renting music indefinitely is cheaper than purchasing it outright – especially since streaming companies grant us the equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet with our subscriptions.
Spoilers for an upcoming Cozy Zone episode, but I've come to the conclusion that streaming music platforms are a shared lie we all agree to that suggests we're paying for music when we're actually may as well be pirating it, we just pay $10 a month to keep the cops away.
To me, a music streaming subscription only really makes sense if you’re at that impressionable stage of your life where you still live and breathe new music – or if you’re one of those rare people who continue to seek out new music as you age. As for the rest of us? I think we should maybe just own our shit and stop paying tech CEOs to rent it. Chances are, I’ll still be rocking out to Hot Fuss in my retirement home, so why should I rent it from the likes of Daniel Ek for the next four decades (or longer)?
As one of the seemingly rare 40-year-olds who still checks the new music releases every week, this resonates with me as well. I kind of feel like I want to buy all of the music I listen to in 2026…we'll see.
2025-12-19 05:50:38
I didn't really set out to do it, but my Quick Subtitles app actually makes for a pretty interesting benchmark tool. Back in October I compared sustained performance between the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air by using the app's batch feature, but it wasn't much work to tweak that feature to build a bespoke benchmarking mode into the app, so that's what I did.
This benchmark is pretty simple, you give it an audio or video file and it transcribes the file using Apple's on-device language model over and over and over again. I maxed everything out by giving it a Cozy Zone podcast episode to transcribe 20 times in a row. After each run, it logs how many words per minute it transcribed in that specific run, and begins again.
To be clear, this is a very specific benchmark that tests the performance of a combination of features of the system on a chip, including the neural engine, CPU, and memory. This is not a wide ranging, general benchmark.
But that's not what I'm using it for, I'm using it in this case to test thermal throttling. See, whatever combination of components this tests, it generates heat…a lot of heat. I wanted to know how quickly each device would thermally throttle. When it did throttle, how much performance did it lose?
This is the one you're probably least interested in, but here's our baseline.
As we can see, the first transcript hit 170 words per second, and by the 4th one we were about as throttled as we could get. Performance was around 66-70% of the max performance most of the run.
The iPhone Air is where things get more interesting.
This one was basically the same exact story, just with a higher starting point. We started at a very good 208 words per second to begin, but by the 4th run we were bottoming out around 130 words per second, or about 62% of the max performance.
Here's where we get to see the benefit of a vapor chamber.
This one starts at a highest-yet first run of 217 words per second, dropping to 151 in the 20th and final run. That's a drop to 70% of the performance, but you can see a pretty linear trend as it gets marginally slower each time. What this tells me is that the vapor chamber is doing some good work, but since it's not active cooling, it's just passive cooling, eventually we still get pretty darn hot and need to throttle.
These last two were especially interesting because back in October I did a similar test, and I suspected that the Air was indeed throttling due to worse thermals, but I didn't have enough granular data to prove it. I think this test shows pretty conclusively that its raw performance at this workload is comparable to the Pro phones, but only for a couple minutes.
Now let's get kind of unfair and bring a freaking laptop to the shootout.
There are a couple notable things with this test. First, in terms of throttling, buddy this thing doesn't throttle. Outside of the first run, which was oddly a bit slower than the rest, every single other test was almost exactly 227 words per second.
And second, while this is objectively faster than the iPhones, it's not that much faster. Its fastest time was only 5% faster than the iPhone 17 Pro's best time, which is pretty remarkable for the phone. Basically, if you need to transcribe a one-hour podcast, your phone and Mac will be about the same speed doing it, but if you need to transcribe a season all at once, do that on the Mac.
While were at it, how about an iPad Pro as well?
This looks just like the MacBook Pro chart: completely steady (besides an odd dip in the middle).
Benchmark mode will be in a Quick Subtitles update, which should be out before the end of the year. Shameless plug…More Birchtree subscribers get beta access to all of my apps, and it should be in the beta in the next day or two (depending on App Review time, which yes, also impacts TestFlight).
2025-12-18 03:22:00
The Information had a new report out this week that has a bunch of info about some upcoming Apple products. I'm not one to shy away from paying for news, but I still haven't been able to justify $1,000 per year, so thankfully MacRumors summarized the news for me. Here's my quick reactions to each item.
Specifically, the report said the iPhone 17e will support "magnetic wireless charging," which implies that the device will feature MagSafe for faster, magnetic wireless charging
I'm an iPhone 16e defender, but I think that MagSafe is the straw that broke the camel's back on this thing for a lot of people. The notch and single camera are sacrifices, but in my opinion, it's the lack of MagSafe that really pushed this over the edge to make a lot of people consider it a bad deal. The price might still be a bit high, but I strongly feel that the lack of MagSafe made this phone feel cheap.
Apple's first foldable iPhone will be equipped with a 7.7-inch inner display, and a 5.3-inch outer display
Now this is interesting. Both the Samsung and Google folding phones have 6.5" external displays and 8" internal displays. That means their external displays are very much like a normal phone (the iPhone Air is that size). Apple going with a 5.3" external display is really, really interesting. The iPhone 13 mini had a 5.4" screen, and it felt like an absolute baby, and apparently this one will be marginally smaller. Yikes! Those who love small phones for their deep pockets, this might be a dream device.
Apple is apparently considering adding a second rear camera to the device
And:
the report said Apple is considering lower pricing for the iPhone Air 2
I think both of these would help this phone immensely. The sales pitch for the iPhone Air is quite literally, "pay more to get less," and I don't think anyone should be surprised to hear that isn't the most compelling pitch to most people. And again, this is totally different than the iPhone X, which was an upgrade over the cheaper phones in literally every single spec from display to cameras to battery life: you paid more to get more.
As I I've been saying for a year now (I predicted it on Comfort Zone), I don't think the iPhone Air will be a middle ground iPhone for long, I think Apple's vision for it is to be the "normal iPhone" and they want to work the base iPhone out of the lineup. The only reason it wasn't that this year is because they couldn't get the features and price where they needed them to be (aka literally the situation the MacBook Air was in before it took over the MacBook's position as the entry-level Mac laptop). These changes would get them closer to being able to do that with the iPhone.
Apple plans to remove touch sensitivity and haptic feedback from the Camera Control on the standard iPhone 18 model, which suggests that it will be removing the button's capacitive layer. The report did not say if this change will extend to the iPhone 18 Pro models, but it seems likely for consistency.
This was already a rumor floating around out there, and the more we hear it the more likely it seems. I think Camera Control will go down much like 3D Touch: a cool, over-engineered feature that some people like, but most people find to be way too much and therefore will be retired shortly after being introduced. Cards on the table, I was a 3D Touch fanboy, and I actively dislike the Camera Control gestures.