Bitsplitting.org

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Chasing the impossible with Daniel Jalkut

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AI Can’t Adulterate its Own Writing
Aug 17, 2026 · original
My friend John Gruber is incensed by the idea that AI watermarking schemes adjust the output of a given LLM so that the output can later be assessed as likely coming from it in particular: They say “imperceptible” and “doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability”. Their words. Not almost imperceptible. Not slightly changes the meaning, quality, or readability. That made sense to me, because that’s absolutely what I want — nay, demand — from any tools I use personally. I can understand why Gruber, a nearly-lifetime professional writer, would balk at the idea that the words in a given stretch of prose might be altered to satisfy such an unpoetic goal as watermarking. But to be offended by “the perversion of writing” you need actual writing to pervert. Even if you grant that whatever pops out of an LLM is “writing”, a watermarking process would have to take place after the writing w
Multinational Apple Accounts
Jul 10, 2026 · original
If you ever travel to other countries, particularly to the same ones repeatedly, register an Apple Account for each country with an easy to remember format. For example joe.uk@example.com, joe.es@example.com, joe.jp@example.com. Obviously this example only works if you own “example.com”, but you get the idea. Around the world, there are businesses whose services are available, intentionally or not, only to locals. These services often offer corresponding apps that you will be encouraged to install but, if you’re using your primary Apple Account, will appear as “Not available in this region.” Even though I’m not exactly a global jet-setter, I’ve run into this repeatedly over many years. The problem is getting worse as more and more businesses expect customers to install their apps in order to make the most of their services. Here’s where your local Apple Account comes in: switch the App S
Thirty Years
May 13, 2026 · original
Today marks the 30 year anniversary of my becoming a full-time employee of Apple Computer, Inc. When I was hired on May 13, 1996, I was 20 years old, a week shy of 21. I was hired on to the Mac System Integration team, which was responsible for “System Updates”: the kinds of OS upgrades fellow Mac old-timers will remember being associated with the file in your System Folder called the “System Enabler”. Essentially it was a collection of patches to the main System File (and ROM) that fixed bugs, added features, etc. At that time I had already worked in the same general area as a Quality Assurance engineer, contributing to the System 7.5 (“Capone”) release. It was called “Capone” in response to Microsoft giving Windows 95 the codename “Chicago”. Watch out, Chicago, we’re coming for you. Another project at the time alluded to Mrs. O’Leary , whose cow was wrongly accused of causing the great
The Beginning of Programming as We’ll Know It
Apr 1, 2026 · original
In the wake of AI coding assistants like Claude and Codex, which can seemingly perform the equivalent of a day’s work in a matter of minutes, many of us are wondering if the human role of “computer programmer” is coming to an end. Will the AI bots one day do all the programming for us? Maybe so, but not yet. At this particular moment, human developers are especially valuable, because of the transitional period we’re living through. Just a few years ago, AI essentially could not program at all. In the future, a given AI instance may “program better” than any single human in history. But for now, real programmers will always win. Why? Because we are uniquely positioned to harness most of the power of AI while augmenting it with human taste, wisdom, and caution, among other qualities that an AI is thus far incapable of possessing. There are many examples of stunned programmers who describe
Comfort Zone
Feb 12, 2026 · original
Once, in 1994 or so, I was sitting in a cafe with friends, and I had the crazy idea that I was going to write my own web browser. I was a college student at the time, and had played with Mosaic and … well, probably only Mosaic. But had also played with Gopher, and other protocols like SMTP, UUCP, and NNTP. In some ways I was perfectly situated to pursue something great, but I was only 19 years old and had plenty of doubts. Browsers are big. There’s a lot I don’t know. And jeez, on top of everything, I need to finish my schoolwork! As fate would have it, I never ended up building that browser. It wasn’t in my comfort zone. Instead I went to work for Apple. When I say I “went to work for Apple,” I mean that I threw myself at the mercy of a Cupertino staffing agency, convincing them that I knew the first thing about Macs (I didn’t), and insisting that the only contracts I would take were fo
Whither Help Scout?
Apr 30, 2025 · original
Three years ago, when I abandoned FogBugz after having used it for nearly 20 years, I landed on Help Scout , a fantastic support system offered by a company that seems to have a positive spirit and, cherry on top, is based locally to me in Boston. There are few companies I’ve been as happy to spend money with. As a one-person support team, $22/month ($264 paid annually) gets me a reliable service that ticks all the boxes for my needs. This simple pricing system was a breath of fresh air compared to many other services, which often require minimum user counts of five or more, have overly-complex user interfaces, or which seem unlikely to remain a going business concern. Since I switched to Help Scout, I have been convinced that they are the best at what they do, and that I’d be in a real pickle if I were compelled to switch to anything else. A Real Pickle Over the past few weeks, many Hel
Apple Intelligence
May 25, 2023 · original
As WWDC draws near, anticipation of Apple’s long-rumored VR headset is high. The company is widely expected to announce an impressive, albeit expensive new product at the June 5 Keynote event. In short: people expect Apple to make a strong showing in this field. People are justifiably less confident about Apple’s prospective plans in the area of artificial intelligence (AI), and particularly in the realm of large language models: the technology behind such imagination-captivating products as OpenAI’s ChatGPT , and GitHub Copilot (which itself uses another OpenAI language model). I zeroed in on ChatGPT and Copilot because it’s easy to imagine the functionality of these services shining in the context of two important Apple products: Siri, and its Xcode developer tools. In fact, technology is advancing so quickly that the absence of something like ChatGPT and something like Copilot in thes
52 Floppy Pickup
May 1, 2023 · original
On the latest Accidental Tech Podcast , John reminisced about the early days of the Mac, when a single 3.5″ floppy disk drive was typically used not only to boot a Mac, but also to run any applications, and to save any user data. He described the painstaking process of needing to insert a different disk whenever programs required access to specific executable code or data. Depending on the complexity of a workflow, you might be prompted to swap disks once, twice, or potentially dozens of times. The conversation reminded me of one of my first jobs at Apple. I was hired to work as a QA tester with the engineering team that shipped Mac OS system software updates. The first release I worked on was Mac OS 7.5, which was released in 1994. By this time hard drives had become commonplace and the kind of floppy-swapping John described had become a lot less common for most users. But when it came
Spelunking Apple’s Open Source
Mar 17, 2023 · original
Since the earliest days of Mac OS X, Apple has complied with the licenses for the dozens of open source components it includes in the OS by posting (sometimes a little belatedly) updated versions of the source code to its Open Source at Apple web page. This resource is useful primarily to developers, but may also interest curious technophiles who want to take a peek “behind the curtain” to see how much of the magic just beneath our fingertips is made. If you visit the page today, you’ll see a new emphasis on Apple’s high-level projects, such as Swift and WebKit . At first glance you might wonder if the extensive list of all the open source projects has been removed from the site. There’s no need to worry: the whole list, indexed by the pertinent platform and OS release to which they belong, is still available on a separate Releases page. Even better, each of these releases now has a corr
Disciplined Innovation
Aug 16, 2022 · original
Apple’s macOS 13 “Ventura” beta features a major redesign of the System Preferences application. In addition to renaming it “System Settings,” Apple revamped the interface with an organization style that is far more reminiscent of the iOS “table view” organization than of the macOS status quo: At first blush, there are apparent advantages to this design. Perhaps most significantly, the resemblance to iOS in both appearance and function may make the interface more navigable, and easier to understand, for users who are more familiar with iOS than with the Mac. The familiar “stack based” approach to delving deeper into the details of a particular preference pane has some advantages to the typical Mac approach of presenting detail as modal panels, which sometimes beg to be awkwardly nested in a pile of secondary or tertiary panels. On second, third, and many blushes beyond, however, the desi
Dump FogBugz
Jul 21, 2022 · original
Once upon a time, there was a fabulous service called FogBugz . Well, technically it still exists, but over the past many years, since it was sold off by Fog Creek Software, it has both stagnated and diminished in reliability as a substantial number of us long-time users has grudgingly continued to use it. Several months ago, the whiff of abandonment became too great for me to bear any longer, so I devised a plan to migrate my data out of FogBugz, and into more reliably maintained services. FogBugz effectively served as both a customer-service database, and a bug-tracking system. Most apps don’t strive to achieve this, so I had to plan for two new services to fill the shoes of this app. I settled on HelpScout for customer service, and GitHub Issues for bug-tracking. HelpScout has turned out to be more of a solid home run than GitHub issues, but I’m happy with both. Whether you’re also lo
Purgeable Mac Apps
Jun 18, 2022 · original
For months now, I have been scratching my head over a small but persistent number of “crash reports” affecting a few of my apps. The issue is most prevalent in MarsEdit , where I have a handful of users who run into the issue multiple times per day. Luckily, one of these users is my good friend and colleague, Manton Reece . I’ve been peppering him with questions about the issue for weeks, while he stoicly puts up with the behavior. Even with the assistance of a highly technical friend who can reproduce the issue at will, I had thrown my arms up in despair several times. I put “crash reports” in quotes above, because although my in-app crash reporter notices the app abruptly terminates, the system doesn’t create any obvious artifacts. No crash or hang reports. No “Quit Unexpectedly” dialog. The app is just … gone. I wrote a question in the Apple Developer Forums , which turned into a kind
NetNewsWire 6.1 for Mac: Subscribe to Feed
Apr 19, 2022 · original
Nearly ten years ago, inspired by Apple’s removal of the “RSS” button from Safari 6, I released a standalone Safari extension called Subscribe to Feed . The extension simply replaced the functionality of having an easy way to subscribe to the RSS feed of any web site you might be viewing. This worked great for many years, until Apple’s ever-increasing security controls changed the behavior of Safari extensions such that they couldn’t call out to desktop apps (such as a news reader) without requiring approval from the user each and every time . This made the process of subscribing to a feed more cumbersome, albeit still easier than manually searching for the feed URL, copying, and pasting it into an RSS reader app. When Brent Simmons resurrected NetNewsWire , I saw it as a perfect opportunity to carry on the mission of the Subscribe to Feed extension. Native applications on the Mac can of
The Talk Show 327: Giddy with Mac-ness
Nov 1, 2021 · original
I had a blast chatting with John Gruber on the latest episode of The Talk Show . The timing worked out perfectly for us to abandon our usual jaded attitudes and just fully dote on the new MacBook Pros.
Three Podcasts and a Blog
Sep 19, 2020 · original
I’ve been wanting to create my own crossword puzzles since I was a kid, but never quite got around to it. Earlier this year I decided to renew my commitment, and tweeted a bold claim: Mark my words: within 3 months I'm going to publish my first self-constructed crossword puzzle, and within 3 years I'm going to have one published in the New York Times. — Daniel Jalkut (@danielpunkass) May 26, 2020 Let’s see, June, July, August. Yup, I missed that target. But FOUR months later, I’m ready to catch up, and share the very first puzzle I’ve ever completed. I call it “Three Podcasts and a Blog” because I set out to build a puzzle around the “theme” of names of podcasts in the Apple developer/technophile scene. Only after I was almost done with the puzzle did I realize I’d included one blog that, in fact, has no podcasting counterpart. You’ll see the clue marked “oops!” If you want to solve the
Apple News Encourages Frequent Blogging
Feb 7, 2020 · original
When Apple News debuted, I was intrigued to learn that virtually anybody can submit their own blogs for inclusion in the service. Why not allow Bitsplitting, the Red Sweater Blog , and Indie Stack to be part of this service? For reader who enjoy Apple News, it could serve as a kind of substitute RSS reader. Apple did, in fact, accept my news sources, and for the past several years these articles have been available through the service. I guess I’ve dropped the ball a bit as a blogger, though, because this week I received a terse email from Apple: Dear Daniel Jalkut, We noticed that you have not published to your Bitsplitting channel in three months or more. Your channel will be removed in one week. Regards, The Apple News Team Regards, indeed. Apple will drop me in one week if I don’t publish something, or maybe even if I do; the wording is ambiguous. I’m a little annoyed at this, but I’
Catalina’s Custom Keyboard Viewers
Oct 5, 2019 · original
Long-time Mac users will remember an app called “Key Caps”, which later become “Keyboard Viewer”, a feature of the Mac that is now accessible via the menu bar’s “Input Methods” item. If you’ve never played with this, I encourage you to enable it and check it out. Apple has detailed instructions for configuring the menu and these options. I don’t use the Keyboard Viewer often, but when I do, it’s a real life-saver. I brought it up recently while I was debugging an issue with keyboard shortcuts in FastScripts , my scripting utility app. The Keyboard Viewer not only reflects every bona fide keystroke you make on a hardware keyboard, but also allows you to simulate keystrokes by tapping on the keys of the on-screen keyboard. On macOS 10.15 Catalina, Apple has evidently dramatically overhauled the Keyboard Viewer. I don’t see any hint of this on the Apple marketing sheet for the OS, but this
A Real Gatekeeper
Jul 22, 2019 · original
Update: Since I first published this article, feedback from folks at Apple who should know has led me to believe the issue is not as dire as I laid it out below. The crude “contracts need to be signed” error message may be returned for any account type that has not yet agreed to the latest “Apple Developer Program License Agreement.” While this contract could change, and require an updated agreement, it seems less likely to change as frequently as the App Store agreement. I believe it was a mistake for me to assume that shipping apps with Developer ID + notarization would require agreeing to “App Store” contracts. In the years since Apple released the iPhone, with its “locked-down-by-nature” approach to application security, the company has progressively chipped away at the freedoms Mac developers have historically had to do, more or less, whatever the heck they wanted. With the introduc
Unloved Patches
May 24, 2019 · original
For a long time I have admired the WordPress project, for developing such a robust blogging platform that is ultimately open, and free, and anybody can contribute improvements to it. I encourage many of my customers to use WordPress with MarsEdit , because it seems like a “safe bet” going forward. My admiration has diminished a bit in the past 7 months because … I haven’t succeeded in contributing to it. For a long time, I heard reports from my customers that dates were being set wrong in posts to WordPress. The issue in summary is that if you have a draft post on WordPress, changing its status to “Published” doesn’t update the publish date from the time the draft was originally saved. I didn’t really get a handle on this problem until it started affecting me. Sometimes I write the show notes for my podcast, Core Intuition , ahead of the time the podcast actually goes public. In these si
Blog a Little
May 24, 2019 · original
Over on Twitter today, I was inspired to ask people to write “just one blog post” today: Everybody, join me in writing just one blog post today, to get that independent feeling back. https://t.co/bDFpxiVfqO — Daniel Jalkut (@danielpunkass) May 24, 2019 Later, it occurred to me that after 10+ years on Twitter, I am privileged to have a substantial following. I thought I would take the opportunity to help promote some folks who don’t have as much immediate reach: Did you write a blog post TODAY? Tweet it to me within then next hour, and if it's not offensive, I will retweet it. Long live the indie/open web! — Daniel Jalkut (@danielpunkass) May 24, 2019 I tagged all my retweets to those responses with #LongLiveTheOpenWeb . I think it turned out to be a pretty cool cross-section of bloggers, and I sort of editorialized the kind of blogging that people were doing. I think people neglect to wr

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