Like many, I’ve been a member from the first word. I’ve always found interesting TidBITS (ha ha) of news, help with problems, and I just flat out enjoy the chatter that goes on here. (Yes, sometimes my life is dull, err, quiet.) 
Congrats on 33 years, and looking forward to whatever you bring to all of us in the future.
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Adam, like others I have long appreciated the work you and Tanya have done for the Apple community with TidBITS and other work. Reading this article motivated me to renew my subscription.
I am sorry we didn’t meet during your time at Cornell. In 1984 I spearheaded an effort to get student services offices to computerize, and I suggested networking some Macs with AppleTalk. IBM’s System 36 won the approval of the computer services’ mavens, so we went that route, but I have been a Mac user since the beginning, always dependent upon advice from people like you to make the best use of new technology.
Thank you for your 33+ years of service. Keep up your excellent work.
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Thanks so much to all of you for the kind comments and support for my renewed enthusiasm for making TidBITS feel more personal. It does mean a lot to me because, as I’ve discovered as I’ve aged, I really like helping people (well, at least when they’re appreciative, which is never a problem here). TidBITS is a great way to scale that desire to a larger group.
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Thank you for that attention to detail, which is sadly lacking many other places (and apparently banned on some social media sites, to judge by the content).
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Congratulations Adam, and thank you! My subscription to TidBITS is one that I never hesitate to renew. Please keep on keeping on!
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33 years! I found you, Adam, when I bought your Internet Starter Kit for Mac in the early 90s. When I finally got my Mac SE30 and a hulking Hayes 300 baud dialup modem working, I realized there was a whole universe of not much content out there, and the time spent waiting for things to load made the internet more of a hobby than what it is now, indispensable.
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Been a reader for most of your 33 years. I started when I was working on the ISS program at McDonnell Douglas and had the good fortune to be supporting all Macs. I can’t tell you how many times TidBITS pointed me to solutions I might not have discovered on my own. Like someone said above, your subscription is an automatic when it comes due.
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Congratulations on 33 years, and this is great news! After Josh left, I noticed you were writing more articles. I have greatly enjoyed them, but in the back of my head I was concerned this was a stop-gap measure and it was extra work you wouldn’t be able to maintain. I’m very glad to hear that this is what you actually find joy in and will continue doing. Like others, it’s the unusual and niche topics, along with the detail and depth, that make TidBITS my favourite Mac publication. And the only one I read regularly and exhaustively. There’s too many ways to get Mac news these days (who could have predicted that in the late 90s!), and most of the time just seeing a headline is enough. Detailed exploration of the intricacies of the Mac (and other Apple platforms) is a lot less common, and no one does it better than TidBITS.
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Bring back the HyperCard stack!
In all seriousness, congratulations to you and all of TidBITS. I don’t really read TidBITS for Apple news, as much as for opinionated editorial content. I do value the quarterly Apple results summaries, because they’re not about driving the stck price. But I really value the current return to the TidBITS roots. I’d be interested in an opinionated Podcast, and/or an occasional link post about interesting reading (not just about Apple; I valued Twitter in part for recipes!).
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That excerpt was mean! It just showed, “After 33 years of publishing TidBITS, Adam Engst is” and I yelled “Nooooo!” and then opened it and breathed a sigh of relief. I love that you’re writing about the fun, passionate, and sometimes weird things you’re doing with tech. Great move.
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Oh, for the days of yore!
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I was discussing this with one of our sons and he responded:
“ I’m not sure it’s actually true that they “can’t begin to develop original ideas.”
They actually compress some representation of knowledge (encoded as patterns they find in the data they’re trained on) into their mathematical basis. If you poke the basis somewhere new it actually could come out with a new idea…”
I think this is an interesting thought!
And in fact my son Tristan (getting his PhD in computer vision) suggested in relation to my use of “understanding” that:
It’s not clear that humans have understanding, or how to disambiguate their understanding from the methodology by which it comes about
When we discussed this in my computational psycholinguistics class, what you sort of come up with is that intelligence and simulated intelligence are equivalent to any outside observer
(It’s sort of like quantum, thematically)
So I think arguments about LLMs being not intelligent today work really well in the sense of clearly it generates dumb outputs
But not in the sense of it being completely not intelligent, because we don’t actually know what intelligence is
And then he pointed me here.
This is getting well into the realm of the philosophers. Although Tristan eschewed humanities classes when he was at Cornell, he would have been really dangerous in a philosophy major.
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I used to have students try to tell when they were engaging with Eliza for fifteen minute sessions, and when it was a human. Mostly they couldn’t.
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Yeah, I always wondered what the Turing test specified in terms of the human trying to discern whether the other party was a computer or not. Some people will take almost anything at face value.
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As I understand it, the Turing test (the original, not the watered-down form researchers use today to claim that their software passes it) requires the investigator to be a trained psychologist, not a random member of the public.
I think the idea is that it needs to be able to fool someone who is well trained on the subject and therefore (supposedly) knows what to look for.
Of course, by this standard, I think there are lots of humans that wouldn’t pass either.
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Besides ChatGPT doesn’t even want the work. 