Whenever I read about poisoning LLM inputs, I'm reminded of a bit in Neal Stephenson's Anathem, where businesses poisoned the the internet by publishing bad data, which only their tools could filter out:
> So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum [internet] deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out.
When I'm in a tinfoil hat sort of mood, it feels like this is not too far away.
EDIT: There's more in the book talking about "bad crap", which might be random gibberish, and "good crap" which is an almost perfect document with one important error in it.
And I welcome the feedback, even if I probably won’t follow it.
If everyone thought like you do, then it’d be far nicer to publish the code and maybe charge for support. I’m fairly confident that not enough people feel the same way to make it work.
As to pricing, I need to be able to financially justify the time spent working on the app, and the price is one that I hope will let me do that.
If the code were available I would 100% expect that someone else would distribute a binary with the paywalled features unlocked and that my original version would be relegated to secondary.
I know you could make the argument “the right license wouldn’t allow that”, but that would only be enforced if you follow up through the courts, perhaps internationally. I just can’t be doing with the hassle unfortunately.
There’s two main reasons. One is that this is the first paid update in 14 years. The second is that it’s just such a pain to do that on the App Store and I don’t want to have a two-tier system. I’ve tried to strike a balance on the price bearing this in mind.
To add to what xmprt and msephton have said, people have told me they use it for:
- Storing results for scientific research
- Local analysis of data exported from server-based databases
- Experimenting with database designs before exporting SQL to codebases
- Maintaining relational data where a website or app are not needed (eg. tutors keeping client records)
- Recovering data from databases used by other products (eg. phone backups, discontinued apps)
Because I don't have the capacity for maintaining compatibility between too many versions of macOS. For v3, I've stated the goal - not guarantee - of supporting the current and previous versions of macOS.
Since Tahoe is likely to be released in the next month or so, I judged it better to start with Sequoia and keep it supported rather than start with Sonoma and risk needing to drop it shortly after launch.
> So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum [internet] deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out.
When I'm in a tinfoil hat sort of mood, it feels like this is not too far away.
EDIT: There's more in the book talking about "bad crap", which might be random gibberish, and "good crap" which is an almost perfect document with one important error in it.
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