Simon Willison’s Weblog

openelm/README-pretraining.md. Apple released something big three hours ago, and I’m still trying to get my head around exactly what it is.

The parent project is called CoreNet, described as “A library for training deep neural networks”. Part of the release is a new LLM called OpenELM, which includes completely open source training code and a large number of published training checkpoint.

I’m linking here to the best documentation I’ve found of that training data: it looks like the bulk of it comes from RefinedWeb, RedPajama, The Pile and Dolma. # 24th April 2024, 2:57 am

iOS 17.4 Introduces Alternative App Marketplaces With No Commission in EU. The most exciting detail tucked away in this story about new EU policies from iOS 17.4 onwards: “Apple is giving app developers in the EU access to NFC and allowing for alternative browser engines, so WebKit will not be required for third-party browser apps.”

Finally, browser engine competition on iOS! I really hope this results in a future worldwide policy allowing such engines. # 25th January 2024, 8:19 pm

Through the Ages: Apple CPU Architecture (via) I enjoyed this review of Apple’s various CPU migrations—Motorola 68k to PowerPC to Intel x86 to Apple Silicon—by Jacob Bartlett. # 30th October 2023, 10:56 pm

First Impressions of Vision Pro and VisionOS. John Gruber’s description of his thirty minute Vision Pro demo includes a bunch of details I haven’t seen described anywhere else, including how calibration and corrective lenses work and how precise and stable the overlays of additional information are. # 8th June 2023, 6:16 am

apple-notes-to-sqlite (via) With the help of ChatGPT I finally figured out just enough AppleScript to automate the export of my notes to a SQLite database. AppleScript is a notoriously read-only language, which is turns out makes it a killer app for LLM-assisted coding. # 9th March 2023, 6:04 am

Notes on Notes.app. Apple’s Notes app keeps its data in a SQLite database at ~/Library/Group\ Containers/group.com.apple.notes/NoteStore.sqlite—but it’s pretty difficult to extract data from. It turns out the note text is stored as a gzipped protocol buffers object in the ZICNOTEDATA.ZDATA column. Steve Dunham did the hard work of figuring out how it all works—the complexity stems from Apple’s use of CRDT’s to support seamless multiple edits from different devices. # 9th December 2021, 10:39 pm

Why is Apple’s M1 Chip So Fast? (via) This explanation by Erik Engheim is exactly the right level of nerdery for me. # 30th November 2020, 11:20 pm

Apple password-manager-resources (via) Apple maintain on open source repository full of heuristics for implementing smart password managers. It lists password rules for different sites (e.g. min/max length, special characters required), change password URLs for different services and sites that share credential backends—like icloud.com and apple.com. They accept pull requests! # 9th June 2020, 4:21 am

Using SQL to Look Through All of Your iMessage Text Messages (via) Dan Kelch shows how to access the iMessage SQLite database at ~/Library/Messages/chat.db—it’s protected under macOS Catalina so you have to enable Full Disk Access in the privacy settings first. I usually use the macOS terminal app but I installed iTerm for this because I’d rather enable full disk access to a separate terminal program than let anything I’m running in my regular terminal take advantage of it. It worked! Now I can run “datasette ~/Library/Messages/chat.db” to browse my messages. # 22nd May 2020, 4:45 pm

Jeremiah Grossman: I know who your name, where you work, and live. Appalling unfixed vulnerability in Safari 4 and 5 —if you have the “AutoFill web forms using info from my Address Book card” feature enabled (it’s on by default) malicious JavaScript on any site can steal your name, company, state and e-mail address—and would be able to get your phone number too if there wasn’t a bug involving strings that start with a number. The temporary fix is to disable that preference. # 22nd July 2010, 8:44 am

Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes? John Gruber makes the case for the fading significance of Flash, brought about by Apple’s point-blank refusal to support it on the iPhone or iPad. “Flash is no longer ubiquitous. There’s a big difference between “everywhere” and “almost everywhere”.” # 31st January 2010, 12:05 pm

Why the iPad may be just what we need for Digital Inclusion. Chris Thorpe: “It may not be a Jesus phone, a Moses tablet or something that lives up to hype and hyperbole, but if it does something for the digital inclusion agenda it might live up to Steve Jobs saying it’s the most important thing he’s ever done.” # 28th January 2010, 9:03 pm

The Tablet. John Gruber further demonstrates his mastery of long-form blogging. It’s reassuring to know that he started putting the notes for this entry together way back on the 24th of September. # 1st January 2010, 3:49 am

Multitouch on Unibody MacBooks. FingerMgt is a lovely little app that illustrates quite how sensitive the touchpad on modern MacBooks is —it can track up to 11 touch points and measure pressure as well as location. # 6th November 2009, 2:44 pm

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review. The essential review: 23 pages of information-dense but readable goodness. Pretty much everything I know about Mac OS X internals I learnt from reading John Siracusa’s reviews—this one is particularly juice when it gets to Grand Central Dispatch and blocks (aka closures) in C and Objective-C. # 1st September 2009, 7:05 pm

Fake Reviews. Now now kids, play nice... Not at all surprised to hear this—nefarious iPhone app developers (in this case the team behind “London Tube”, an inferior version of Malcolm Barclay’s marvellous “Tube Deluxe”) have been caught leaving fake negative reviews on rival applications in the App Store. This is an excellent argument for adding friends/followers or importing an existing social graph—I’d much rather see reviews from people in my social network than strangers who may turn out to be sock puppets. # 22nd May 2009, 12:49 am

Critical Mac OS X Java Vulnerabilities. There’s a five month old Java arbitrary code execution vulnerability which hasn’t yet been patched by Apple. Disable Java applets in your browser until it’s fixed, or random web pages could execute commands on your machine as your user account. # 19th May 2009, 7:07 pm

Apple shows us DRM’s true colors. The EFF reviews the various places that Apple still applies DRM (including locking iPhones to carriers, licensing authentication chips for iPod accessory vendors, preventing OS X from loading on generic PCs) and concludes that “the majority of these DRM efforts do not have even an arguable relation to ’piracy.’” # 18th January 2009, 10:16 am

Apple just gave out my Apple ID password because someone asked. “am forget my password of mac,did you give me password on new email marko.[redacted] @yahoo.com”. Classy. # 8th July 2008, 10:10 am

The Machine That Changed the World: The Paperback Computer. This third episode (the second has also been published) is awesome—Sketchpad (the first GUI), NLS, Xerox PARC, the Homebrew Computer Club, Apple and the Macintosh, Lotus 123, Microsoft, and Virtual Reality presented as the “future” of computing. Worth investing an hour to watch it. # 6th June 2008, 8:18 pm

Heavier than Air. Charles Miller points out that every time Apple breaks the mold with a new product (the iPod, the iPod Mini, the iMac and now the MacBook Air) they lose in feature matrix comparisons but win in the marketplace. # 22nd January 2008, 1:32 am

Poorly Macbook, ineffective error message design. Nat’s MacBook died the other day, throwing out some impressively meaningless error symbols. How exactly are you meant to Google for a circle with a line through it? # 13th January 2008, 11:31 pm

How Time Machine works. From John Siracusa’s Leopard review. The bad news is that Time Machine doesn’t deal well with huge files that have small changes made to them... such as Parallels VM images. # 29th October 2007, 9:56 am

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review. John Siracusa’s 17 page review of Leopard, covering everything from UI tweaks to DTrace sample code. Smart use of embedded video and audio too—I suggest setting aside at least an hour to work through it all. # 29th October 2007, 8:55 am

CSS Transforms. WebKit can now do transforms (scale, rotate, translate and skew) in CSS via a new -webkit-transform property. Transforms behave like position relative in that they don’t affect the layout of the page. You can also provide a full affine transform matrix as a shortcut. # 26th October 2007, 9:45 pm

WebKit Does HTML5 Client-side Database Storage. SQLite strikes again. The WebKit team have included a neat update to their Web Inspector that lets you browse and modify your client-side databases. # 20th October 2007, 12:03 pm

Apple—Web apps. Interesting (and slightly confusing) to see Apple choose “Web apps” as the term for applications targeted at the iPhone and iPod touch. # 11th October 2007, 8:40 pm

Ways in Which iTunes’s Just-Released Official Ringtone Support Is Weird, Rude, and/or Just Plain Buggy. I’ve long been saying that the existence of a ringtone “industry” is a bug, not a feature. # 12th September 2007, 10:08 am

The Tale of the Mechanical Virus. “What I had discovered, in essence, was a mechanical virus. It infects Mac laptops and speads via the DVI adapters.”—I really hope this isn’t why my DVI adapter is on the blink. # 9th September 2007, 12:11 pm

It Is Estimated That NBC Could Not Have Screwed This iTunes Thing Up Any Worse. NBC’s request that Apple “stiffen anti-piracy provisions” is down-right scary. # 3rd September 2007, 1:42 am