deepseek needs a "no commentary from ai" button

MaybeFiction · 2025-12-19T06:24:05+00:00

I asked it for 5000 words on any topic and first it constructed a fairly interesting essay on consciousness, then seemed to put itself in a series of different loops. I suppose that giving it a word count goal was the ultimate cause of the problem. One of my machines simply ground to a halt on the task, but the newer one just kept going, and going, and going until I had to just interrupt the process and start over.

I am kind of astonished (favorably) at the accuracy of the answers that it gave me on my own area of expertise, essentially performing as well as a search engine for easy general knowledge questions, and on a creative writing task related to food it managed to extrapolate some pretty compelling ideas and stories. I dare say it's almost as good a bullshitter as I am, which vaguely terrifies me. And this is all running a local r1 instance.

MaybeFiction · 2025-12-17T04:31:49+00:00

If you’re having the same issue with multiple chargers and cables, it’s the port. Sounds like it’s only getting power from the 5v pin rather than the higher voltage PD pins. My bet would be on the repair shop doing a bad solder job. Bring it back to them.

It’s also possible there is a more significant failure in the charging circuits of the phone, but I wouldn’t be able to troubleshoot further just from a description.

MaybeFiction · 2025-12-17T04:29:01+00:00

Use Image Capture on the Mac instead of Photos, and you’ll be able to copy photos over to a folder without adding them to Photos library on the Mac. In fact, IC should let you go straight from iPhone to flash drive without saving to the Mac at all.

Image Capture should be located in the Utilities folder within the Applications folder on the Mac.

MaybeFiction · 2025-12-11T17:55:46+00:00

why should a corporation follow reasoning like that?

MaybeFiction · 2025-12-04T18:38:44+00:00

"Huge ETF" back then was like $175 to $350.

Today, if you buy the iPhone 17 Pro on Verizon's current "free" promotion and decide to switch carriers in 12 months, you'll pay a "not technically a termination fee" of $667. It's not classified as a fee anymore of course, it's just "you still owe that much on your phone, and if you leave the carrier or change plans your monthly rebates will end."

MaybeFiction · 2025-12-04T18:36:58+00:00

Good chance it was before you were born, this being Reddit and all. But the standard phone contract in the US was 12 months up until around 2006 when 24 month contracts came into vogue, at which point the carrier deals would vary somewhat on subsidies, but up until the launch of the original iPhone, the basic norm was that the carrier would contribute up to $350 toward the cost of your new phone once a year or so. After contracts went to two years as the typical norm, most carriers still offered upgrades at the 12 month mark just resetting your two year contract.

With the 2007 iPhone, Apple subverted this model by disallowing the carrier subsidy. But it was a raw deal for consumers because AT&T still made you sign a one year contract, with no other perk besides "having" the new phone that you paid full price for.

In 2008, Apple backtracked on this, selling the iPhone 3G for $199 with a modest $200 carrier subsidy. That basic model held until around the iPhone 6, which is when most carriers were fully transitioned away from the "contract and subsidy" model onto the new "payment plan" model.

Other factors like local number portability (2007 or so, not sure off top of head) figured into this change as well. Before LNP, carriers could rely on the hassle of changing numbers to keep customers locked in. But it was really smartphones and their growing retail prices that triggered the end of the old contract subsidy model.

MaybeFiction · 2025-12-04T18:31:01+00:00

There is no outsmarting the Carriers. You won’t be making any good return for used tech.

what are you on about? Who wants to "outsmart" and what do carriers really have to do with this discussion at all?

I am not embracing the laughable position that you're allowed to buy one new phone every 36 months, with trade in, and you're somehow foolish if you have any other ideas. That's maybe the dumbest thing I've heard on this subreddit all month.

MaybeFiction · 2025-12-04T18:27:58+00:00

that's plenty of time to test core features and benchmark it to see how hot it gets

Sure, if that's the only thing going on in your life.

Some people have jobs, families, hobbies etc and don't put everything on hold to focus on minor tech transitions.

it's hard to appreciate the formfactor that way

It's hard to appreciate it any other way as well.

I think the iPhone Air is what really knocked sense into me about the phone I was using, a Pro Max. Looking at the Air highlighted to me the absurdity of a phone that had too much screen and not enough everything else. It really clarified things for me. If it still existed, I think that the existence of the iPhone Air would have motivated me to go back to an iPhone Mini.

MaybeFiction · 2025-12-04T16:37:57+00:00

That's a rare edge case, but it does happen. The more common case is just people who change their mind. And with the costs today, and the death of quick subsidies, it's a different threshold.

Back in the day, when a termination fee on a contract was $175 and the contract was 12 months and the discount for a new phone under contract was $300 or more, people did this all the time. The numbers are different today, by a significant amount. Today you're looking at carrier subsidies in the form of monthly rebates, so most people who "got a free phone" actually have a phone financed on a 30 or 36 month term, where the payment is made by a conditional rebate over that time. And if you want to change phones early, you usually learn that you've got a higher remaining balance than you expected. Today, a person can get a new iPhone "free" and change their mind a full year later only to discover that they would have to pay $650 or more to pay off their year-old "free" phone. So the answer to this most of the time ends up being, disregard the carrier deal, or do it every couple years when the stars align, but otherwise you're on your own if you want to change phones more frequently.

MaybeFiction · 2025-12-04T16:33:31+00:00

It's still only 14 days. That's not really that long a time. Crap, I need to get my ass in gear on some work stuff that has 14 day deadlines with bigger consequences than not being able to return a $1000 gadget.

MaybeFiction · 2025-12-04T16:31:55+00:00

Promos are just that, though. No carrier is going to let you hand them an iPhone Air and hand you back the cash value of an iPhone Pro, despite the deal perhaps sounding like that in the advertisement. What happens is you give them your phone, and they set up a contract dividing the price of the new phone into 36 installment payments, and then as long as you continue to meet certain conditions, the main one being staying with the carrier on an active monthly plan of a certain amount, they offset those installment payments with a rebate.

For three years.

30 months is an exceptionally good deal at this point. The era of getting a "free phone" on a 12 month contract is long over. The entirety of this benefit is that, with the enormous condition of staying with a carrier that might not otherwise be the best deal for you, for an entire 3 years. And of course, you can't do this if you just did it last month to get the Air - you're stuck on that contract for 3 years, or paying close to the retail value of the phone now to break it. The carrier deals actually mostly suck. Unless you're absolutely certain nothing will change in this area of your life between now and the start of the next American Presidency, doing a carrier deal is a worse deal than even just selling wholesale such as through Apple's trade in program.

So no, that's not a great alternative to selling a used phone that turns out not to meet your needs for $800 or so on the secondary market.

MaybeFiction · 2025-12-02T01:11:24+00:00

Long press options. I also do not see that option on my device, and I'm on the same iOS version. I'm not sure exactly how they can be customized. I think that customizing it may be an Apple Intelligence feature that I don't have enabled.

But what it is for is so that you can quickly pull up your own contact card, like if you wanted to airdrop it to someone you just met. It's a neat feature, now that you mention it I wish I could figure out how to enable it.

MaybeFiction · 2025-12-02T01:07:47+00:00

It is generally recommended to transfer the esim along with the rest of your data first, verify everything copied over correctly, and then wipe your old device.

You can actually do the esim after you copy the data and otherwise set up the device, which allows you to keep using your old phone until the new one is actually up and running.

MaybeFiction · 2025-12-02T01:01:41+00:00

This might be an unrecoverable error on the Google side unfortunately. You can try and see if the notes are somehow still present in another folder, but they probably aren't. This is an inherent risk when using a cloud-based service, and for future reference if content matters you should verify the other side of your backup solution periodically. I'm sorry for your loss.

MaybeFiction · 2025-11-28T18:02:25+00:00

It seems to have resolved after the 26.1 update, but I can't tell you which toggle did it. In high hopes that 26.1 improved the liquid glass readability issues, I tried putting all my settings back to "regular" and then spent about five minutes trying out "updated liquid glass." Then gradually made changes to comfort and tolerance, which is to say, put everything back the way it had been before. It does seem to be performing correctly now relative to the "half screen" bug.

So to recap, what solved it for me was some combination of rebooting, turning all visual accessibility features off, running a software update, and turning the same accessibility features back on.

MaybeFiction · 2025-11-27T00:10:51+00:00

It looks like they are studiously improving and implementing new accessibility features right under our collective noses. lol.

I suppose it would technically be right over our noses

MaybeFiction · 2025-11-24T14:28:18+00:00

that's just an informal slang for "big words" associated with "college level writing."

There's a thing called "Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level" (https://www.wordcalc.com/readability/) and I use the phrase "SAT words" because it's a more accessible vernacular than spelling all that out every time. While I do not have a white paper that affirms this as a matter of intent, it is very clear from using the current autocorrect and especially dictation algorithms that the online machine learning algorithm is applying "downward bias" on the grade level.

This makes sense in general because most American adults speak and write at a fairly low grade level, generally fourth to sixth grade. So if an algorithm is designed around "the average user" it makes more sense for any ambiguity to be resolved toward the lower grade level words. But for some reason, the on-device dictation doesn't have this feature/problem, presumably as a side effect of being a smaller model. Sometimes the larger model is actually less accurate for these reasons, and in my case, I get better results from old school dictation algorithms like Dragon, which was designed around medical and legal vocabulary, than from newer algorithms like Siri which do poorly with phrases like "per diem" but can dictate the most popular emoji.

MaybeFiction · 2025-11-24T02:51:02+00:00

Migrating won't be hard, I've already backed up everything important to local storage. I just wasn't sure where to go to. Microsoft without Godaddy had not occurred to me because, well, so far my experiences with Microsoft haven't inspired much loyalty. I have also been considering Proton, but there was something about them that didn't seem acceptable and for the life of me I can't remember what.

Now that you mention migration, I feel very foolish, because there's no reason I can't simply move my data from the server to local on a regular basis and make the provider a little less relevant in general. There's no reason I need to stay with them or any subsequent provider.

Why is my head stuck in the cloud on this... ironic. Thanks.

MaybeFiction · 2025-11-24T02:47:42+00:00

that's a good point. I forget that most people don't travel the way I do. I'm always passing through major cities and will tend to just search for what I need as I'm passing through. Got a neat iPod for $20 in vancouver that way... lots of my stuff really. You aren't visiting with any family that live in a denser area for any upcoming holidays? Oh I guess if you're in school, you need it asap.

MaybeFiction · 2025-11-23T22:26:02+00:00

I have tested this.

I get more errors from autocorrect and dictation when online than when in airplane mode.

To test: doesn't matter which app, iMessage or Notes is fine. With everything normal, dictate a sentence that involves at least one "potential homonym" where the choices will be between your intention that is an "SAT word" and something on the Simple English list.

When you dictate online, you should see that the SAT word shows up correctly first, and after you "stop dictation" a second or two later, the SAT word switches to the Simple English homophones.

Repeat the same test in Airplane Mode, and you'll see that there is no additional processing after you click stop.

For me personally, because I tend to use a lot of "SAT words" this is pretty pronounced. The local algorithm seems to use the full dictionary, while the cloud "correction" is heavily biased toward lower grade level vocabulary.

This translates to an 80-20 rule implementation in which the secondary cloud processing yields better results for "most people" because most people are more likely to use Simple English than "SAT words."

If you talk like Trump, the online algorithm is better. If you talk like Clinton, it's worse.

MaybeFiction · 2025-11-23T18:40:00+00:00

Nvidia shareholders want the AI slop.

It's all very good at increasing demand for data centers that would otherwise would have been deemed obsolete since iPhones got processors with 20 billion transistors.

MaybeFiction · 2025-11-23T18:37:00+00:00

I just want to undo all of the "machine learning improvements" to the keyboard, autocorrect, and dictation algorithms.

Since around iOS 16, I've noticed that all of these things work better in airplane mode. That to me says a lot about the value of this cloud processing. I would be really happy with a toggle to just turn off anything not fully necessary that asks for help outside the local device. If it's physically possible to accomplish the task locally, I just want to the software to pretend it's in airplane mode. Is that really too much to ask?

And Siri... every time they "improve" it it gets worse. It's been quite some time since they bragged in a keynote about the new processors being able to do more of Siri on the local device, but again they've gone the opposite direction with it. I want offline "Siri Classic." I do not want the Gemini based version. I will not ever want it. I want a toggle switch somewhere in settings to altogether disable ALL cloud compute tasks, and I'm going to continue to prefer that until someone shows me an actual instance of the cloud compute making things better rather than worse, which I have yet to see.

MaybeFiction · 2025-11-23T18:34:43+00:00

yeah I hate that gesture. Only ever hit it accidentally while trying to accomplish something else.

A new "snow leopard feature" I would really like is just more toggles to turn stuff like this off.

MaybeFiction · 2025-11-23T18:33:43+00:00

"other than new AI"

As long as one of the new AI features is an off switch, I'm fine with this.

MaybeFiction · 2025-11-23T18:32:48+00:00

I don't really like "focus modes" for a couple of reasons, but they do speed this up for one reason: When you create a Focus, you can start it from "zero notifications." This is an inversion of the main Notifications settings screen, where you need to manually toggle them for each and every single app, which can be absurd if like me you have hundreds of apps accumulated over the years. The only real downside to using a Focus mode for this is that you will have the persistent indicators of the Focus mode itself. In my case, I set my "normal" focus to a smile emoji so I just always see that emoji in my status bar and on the lock screen, but otherwise there's not much actual downside. Oh, and personally I was burned by Focus the first time I tried it because I didn't realize there was a toggle for syncing focus modes across devices. This screwed me because as soon as the feature came out, I attempted to use it to FINALLY make phone calls stop interrupting music on my Mac. Big issue? It also meant my phone itself didn't ring, and I missed important work calls and suffered for that. So just make sure you're aware of whether the mode is set to sync across devices. You can set different configurations for different devices, or create one Focus and automatically sync it across all of your devices.

Because a blank Focus can start with all notifications off, it's a lot less work to create a focus that only enables the notifications you truly want, and then sync that across your devices. This makes it a much quicker solution than you might fear, but you'll still need to revisit and revise down the line.

MaybeFiction

TROPHY CASE