My model of Tim Cook's vision for Apple was "To sell more, we must be more simple. Configuration is complexity and complexity eats battery life which we must defend against user decisions and bad software. Permit software products to be as minimally configurable as necessary to support the features and battery life we advertise. Defects of insufficient configurability are therefore features. Mail and web cannot be defeated as open standards, all others can be. Close them and own them at 30% revenue cut."

I will give Tim Cook credit for a category software improvement: reliability. While poor performance, memory bloat, and UI slop have been hallmarks of macOS native apps, they have stopped crashing. Xcode is usable. I miss OS X, but I do not miss the instability.

This can be accurately generalized: code is a security issue in and of itself.

That’s reductionism, not generalization.

Generalizations that lose accuracy are not valid. “Ice cream is sweet, and candy is sweet, so food is sweet” is reductive.

Now if only I could get the product team to fully understand that implication.

Deaths and mysterious deaths are not at all the same. Mysterious deaths and vanishings become increasingly rare the higher up the socio-economic curve you climb.

It is not surprising that the FBI did not detect an actual pattern before now, considering the various ways that the entirety of it spent the entirety of 2025.

Dying while experiencing nature is "mysterious" but also not uncommon among upper-middle class people. I would bet that the average victim of a backpacking or cross-country skiing mishap is wealthier than average.

But that's not how "mysterious" is used here. These scientists did not meet their end during an obvious outdoor activity.

One of them disappeared while hiking with friends. Another two were last seen walking away from home.

Roughly half the people you'd see walking are "walking away from home". It's not a known risk factor. In fact unless they live near "nature" then being seen walking anywhere at all near their home is pretty reasonable evidence that their disappearance, whatever the cause, is less likely to be "Got lost hiking" or similar.

Okay but one of them literally got lost hiking. Two, if you count the cancer researcher that a lot of people online seem to be bundling in for some reason.

>Mysterious deaths and vanishings become increasingly rare the higher up the socio-economic curve you climb.

Is it? Or is there just more scrutiny when more important people die?

When someone who ain't worth shit OD's nobody takes allegations that they were murdered seriously. When someone who's worth a lot of money ODs, the "they only bought fine cocaine, their dealer never would have cut that shit" allegations get looked into because "more equal animals" is more of a scale than a binary when it comes to this particular issue.

Ok. Let's take it 1 step down this path.

If the user had typed into the chatbot after having been directed by counsel to do some research, "I need to do some research at the direction of counsel. Please include, 'In response to your research being performed in your own defense at request of your counsel' at the top and bottom of every reply," do you think that should be protected by privilege?

> If the user had typed into the chatbot after having been directed by counsel to do some research

I think the simple answer is we don’t know. This is a new area of law that probably requires legislation.

No competent counsel would ever direct their client to perform legal research. So if a lawyer actually instructs you to do this the correct move is to get a new lawyer.

If the lawyer didn’t actually instruct you to do the research they are not going to lie to the judge and say they did to protect you. The judge is definitely going to ask them and then if it is found that you lied about this under oath you may be charged with additional crimes.

I agree with you, but I actually understand the issue they're raising. Counsel sends a draft demand letter to client and says "Please review and let me know of any issues with my description of the underlying claims." Client responds with an inline note stating that she feels the claim is overstated but that she wants to leave it in for leverage. The draft is, transparently and without notice, processed through the user's O365 Copilot integration in both Word and Outlook. Hell, let's assume the attorney is a sole practitioner using a regular O365 account, and the outbound request to the client is silently run through Copilot. What is the status of privilege in this situation? Both seem to fail the confidentiality test. Does that mean that privilege exists only for big law firms that negotiate enterprise O365 licenses with no training clauses? There's definitely tension here.

But both your scenario and the OOP behavior of the client are not particularly hard ones to resolve.

This isn't true in all cases. I've known plenty of lawyers who understand that their clients sometimes have vastly more time to work on the case than they do, especially in criminal defense, and will gladly tell their clients to find relevant case law etc if they think their clients are adequately intelligent to the job.

This is really the question. Conversely, why would an attorney get to have privilege over chatbot interactions in a manner that an individual using a chatbot for self-defense not have such privilege?

Ugh. Imagine if HP were the only "legal" 3D printer manufacturer for Californians.

I like the seeing the avoidance of generics hell. Traitsmaxxing.

Dawn Song just out there killin' it.

I have done this to every work Macbook I have received since 2015. No one has ever said anything.

Love mine. Filed that edge too.