Somewhat alarmed that the LLM detritus seems to no longer have a toggle to be disabled in the iOS 27 and macOS betas. I hope, but do not expect, that it will come back in the final releases.

If I want to still be able to set a timer when I'm cooking with my voice, I probably need to accept a bunch of nonconsensual slop ("writing tools") being shoved in my face in every app.

Protesting LLMs by refusing to use any software that includes them feels like attempting to protest the introduction of tetraethyl lead into gasoline by refusing to breathe until everyone stops putting it in their cars. So I am drawing my personal moral lines in such a way that I will probably accept this.

But please don't mistake this for excitement about huffing a bunch of vaporized lead.

@glyph

As someone that maintained manufacturing plants for 30 years, I knew at least a dozen of the best people I worked with that succumbed to lead poisoning. It was total destruction of their lives and families. AI gives me that same dreadful feeling of the future...

@dianea That's just so horrible, for them, their families, for you, just in general. Of course I know in theory that lead poisoning is a serious problem, but I never imagined someone personally knowing that many people who died from it.

(And of course it's far from the only thing people die of in industrial contexts.)

@glyph

@amenonsen @glyph

So easy to get a disabling dose of lead poisoning from a single exposure. Working around lead acid batteries and forklifts, breathing any of that white dust. Not washing hands before eating a candy bar with that sweet white lead oxide powder on the fingers. Working in plastics production, heat or fire resistant plastics almost always have lead, antimony, or both. Electrical wire, PVC, probably has it, from experience as someone who maintained the extruders that made it. I know why they use it, as yellowed brittle plastics don't have it. Lead makes people go absolute batshit crazy in about two months. AI seems to have that ability too.

@dianea @glyph As someone with (domestic-scale) lots of lead-acid batteries, I am honestly terrified now at having read this just before going to sleep.