Yet another one. Been up on the software page for a week or so. Inevitably not yet on the App Store, like predecessor Lapidary, for the usual reasons of bureaucratic exhaustion. I will get around to it, probably, but it’s hard to feel motivated.
Elsewhere, it’s that transitional time of year when current students are barreling towards their final essay crisis while a whole new batch are prowling toward their first. And their teachers are grappling with both. Another year looms and I am not fucking ready.
In yet other news, The Vampire Lestat is just fabulous. I am rationing it, currently on ep 4. I laugh out loud watching. That title sequence is a work of genius.
It’s back to the world of effects after recent detours. And hardly a radical stylistic departure, though with a granular veneer this time.
Does the world need this? Probably not. But I find grinding it out sort of soothing in trying times. And it’s a useful test of the capabilities of some AI tooling.
I have to grudgingly admit that Fable 5 is pretty remarkable. Not sure it’ll be enough to keep me on board when it goes to usage based pricing next week. Those tokens rack up fast. But I admit I’m tempted.
At the same time as trying out Fable in Claude Code, I’ve also reawakened piclaw to experiment with some other recent cheaper but still extremely capable models, including GLM 5.2 and MiniMax M3. These are also very good, and I do like pi a bit more than Claude Code. I’m pretty sure I’ll keep those around even if Fable also makes the cut.
As a dyed-in-the-wool AI curmudgeon, this is all very galling. It does not for one second excuse the swirling circular financed hype maelstrom that’s gearing up to immanentise the eschaton, nor does it mean I have any fucking time for the likes of desiccated scamlord Sam Altman, but there’s some fascinating tech wrapped up in this bubble.1
In totally unrelated news, I’ve lost count of which heatwave we’re in at this point.
I’m also running an app called Cotypist on my Mac, about which I am predictably ambivalent. But it does a pretty good job of guessing what I’m going to type, as evidenced by the fact that when I typed “nor does it mean I have any fucking time for” its suggestion was “Sam Altman”. (When I added “desiccated” the suggestion changed to “Elon Musk”, which, fair.) And when I just typed “about which I am predictably” it suggested “ambivalent”. I am really such a caricature of myself. ↩︎
Mac version downloadable now from the software page. And I have actually overcome the ennui barrier and submitted this to the App Store — it can run as a standalone app, so there’s at least a chance it’ll sidestep some of the App Review shenanigans that plugins incur. It embeds Twelve too — with a bit of luck we’ll be able to kill two birds with one synth.
Update: Ha ha ha, it is to laugh. Let the shenanigans begin.
Yet another new thing hit the software page a week or two back.
Twelve, seen here hosted in Logic Pro, is only a pre-release and still needs some tweaking and polishing, but it should run okay. Mac only for now. The iOS version exists and may find its way to the App Store eventually, but I’m finding it hard to force myself to go through that palaver lately, and this isn’t quite at that stage yet.
Eagle-eyed viewers — were such creatures to exist, which I’m confident they don’t — might spot that Auxotroph also has not yet made it to the store, despite being ready ages ago, and the App Store version of Osculatrix is lagging behind the Mac one posted here. In theory I want to get all these apps up there. In practice the prospect of boarding the App Review treadmill again makes me want to crawl under a table and hide. It’s not even that painful, it just seems so pointless and exhausting.
Or maybe it’s old age. The timer flipped over again last week. I was mostly too busy marking exam scripts to enjoy it, though the day itself was pleasant enough.
Big one next year. Not really looking forward to that.
For the record: heatwave; aircon; rescaling; cheese and wine; antipodean voices but hapless failure to facetime back. Fleeting landmarks that future me probably won’t remember how to decrypt. But maybe they’ll spark something, I don’t know.
