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mortenjorck

23,230 karma · joined December 10, 2009

Product designer.

Currently building Spear, 10/GUI for Mac:

https://spearui.com

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mortenjorck··on AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence
I would have been very hesitant to run the “just killed wife“ test given that ChatGPT will indeed flag your account and if a certain threshold is crossed, escalate to humans, who will presumably contact authorities to avoid this happening again: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq6je7e80r7o

Obviously a certain percentage of the user base is running lurid hypotheticals through the system all the time, but I don’t doubt there is a trust score of some sort that I would prefer to keep as high as possible.

mortenjorck··on GPT-5.6
The fact that they already extended subscription Fable once would suggest it won’t be solely locked behind API next week, but at the same time it really does look like they are doing everything they can to avoid serving it continuously at scale.

Knowing Anthropic, this unfortunately might end up meaning a quietly quantized Fable on subscription.

mortenjorck··on Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
It could still compete with Unreal! If this really is the end of the line for IdTech, ZeniMax should gift the whole thing to the Blender Foundation. I would pitch it as:

- Huge tax write-off

- Commoditizes their complement

- If it succeeds, ultimately lowers the cost of triple-A game dev

mortenjorck··on Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
Yes. As I suggested in another thread: an open-source, modern IdTech would fill the empty quadrant in the Godot : Unity :: ____ : Unreal matrix.

A few mid-size studios pitching in to fund continued development on a Blender model could turn IdTech into a major competitor to Unreal Engine in a relatively short timeframe, ultimately costing them a lot less than licensing.

mortenjorck··on Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
This is correct. It is entirely possible for both the archetypal blood-sucking MBA and the pragmatic industry veteran to reach the same conclusion for different reasons.

The build vs. buy calculus in game dev has been steadily shifting over the past 15 years, and when CD Projekt Red announced they were adopting UE5 for their next Witcher game, the writing was on the wall.

That said, Id could make a bold "commoditize your complements" move and open-source the latest, now last, IdTech. What Godot is to Unity, IdTech could be to Unreal Engine.

mortenjorck··on Claude Fable 5 Promotional Access
From the original announcement last month:

> After this point-when sufficient capacity allows us to do so—we aim to restore Fable 5 as a standard part of subscription plans. We intend to do this as quickly as we can.

From today:

> After July 7, 2026, Claude Fable 5 is no longer included in your plan’s weekly usage limits. You can keep using Claude Fable 5 through usage credits, which let you pay for usage beyond what your plan includes.

mortenjorck··on Free the Icons
The great thing about the new multi-layer icon format in Golden Gate is that it finally separates an icon's foreground from the background.

So in theory, it opens the door to returning shape-differentiated icons to MacOS if a future display theme (a successor to the poorly-conceived Clear and Tinted themes) allows the background to be minimized while the foreground is emphasized.

What I would love to see, and should now be possible, is a revision of the Clear theme where the squircle is transparent/refractive and the foreground retains its native color.

mortenjorck··on Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
I assume those don't just work automatically with an off-the-shelf gguf. What do you need in your local inference stack to take advantage of M5's neural accelerators?
mortenjorck··on Waveloop: What Fable left me
I was not expecting the part where Fable produces a passable 3Blue1Brown-style explainer video of the algorithms it just implemented that sounds like it's narrated by a character from Dora the Explorer.

What a strange era we now live in.

mortenjorck··on Apple increases MacBook and iPad prices by 20%
While these new Mac prices are probably here to stay, the upside is that once the AI market saturates and RAM prices fall, future Macs will likely get a significant memory boost at all price tiers.

A base-config 2028 MBP could be running local LLMs at a level unthinkable today.

mortenjorck··on ChatGPT's image generator can be manipulated to produce violent, sexual content
This was only ever a gag, right? I tried it in the early hours of the meme and got something to the effect of “you didn’t attach an image, so I don’t have anything to work from.”
mortenjorck··on Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless
I see – somehow the Apple UI for this gave me the mistaken impression that privaterelay.appleid.com was the domain used by the alias, but I see now that it was always just icloud.com.
mortenjorck··on Total Iran Economic Damage Estimate
> The new fund is a private investment vehicle, not a reconstruction or reparations program and will not include any government money or grants, the source said, adding that companies based in the U.S., the Gulf Arab states, Asia, South America and Africa have agreed to commit financing.

It would be interesting to see more detail on how this vehicle is structured and what sectors the commitments are in.

mortenjorck··on Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless
> Long story short: now both Sign in with Apple and Hide My Email aliases are going to be issued on the @private.icloud.com subdomain. This makes it much easier to ban all aliases without affecting non-relay mailboxes on iCloud mail.

Could someone clarify why having Sign in with Apple and Hide My Email on the same domain would make a blanket ban easier rather than harder? What am I missing?

mortenjorck··on Is Fable 5 Back?
Same here. I guess it’s time to start “Is isfable5back.com Back?”
mortenjorck··on Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks
"It's inference, Michael. What could it cost, $1000?"
mortenjorck··on Notes on DeepSeek
I think that's less the result of any regulation specifically targeted at AI and more Chinese labs interpreting longstanding, broad regulation around "preserving social harmony" as it relates to post-training.
mortenjorck··on Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)
The OP is using it in a figurative quote attributed to the British armed forces, not in their own voice.
mortenjorck··on When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement
> today, Anthropic engineers on average ship 8x as much code per quarter as they did from 2021-2025.

So based on my experience with the verbosity and non-DRYness of LLM code, a solid 2.5x in value delivered. Not bad!

mortenjorck··on macOS needs its grid back
My criticism of MacOS Spaces is one I have of all Apple's window management efforts over the years: It's a great start and a foundation to build upon, but they never really followed through with iterative improvements informed by real-world usage.

In Spaces' case, the problem is a combination of an overly rigid model (only two full-height windows per space) and high friction to management (the process of moving full-height windows from one space to another requires multiple steps). Traditional free-form windows are a little better, but it's easy to lose track of them because the overview itself requires two steps to access (open Mission Control, hover the top bar to expand thumbnails). These could have been gradually improved over the past 14 years, but Apple has somewhat frustratingly left these core workspace features to wither on the vine.

mortenjorck··on macOS needs its grid back
I can never prove it, but I like to think I'm the one to credit/blame for inspiring Apple to "inexplicably restrict [spaces] to a horizontal line only" in Leopard. I produced a concept video in 2009 that prominently featured a linear window manager with gestural navigation, and while it's mostly forgotten today, it was covered by all the tech press at the time and inspired a few attempts at adapting some of its idioms into proofs-of-concept in the early 2010s.

While linear window management is clearly not to everyone's taste, I still think it's a valid idea! It was heartening to see this launch and its reception, as I'm actually working on something in the same area right now...

mortenjorck··on Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism
I’ve wondered ever since fourth grade (where an anatomical model in a corner of the classroom always made it clear that the heart is centrally located) how the vernacular conception of the heart as located on the left originated and persisted.

Your post finally made it click for me – the aorta extending to the left gives the superficial impression of that being the heart’s location because it’s easier to feel the heartbeat through the skin, versus the more deeply embedded vena cava on the right.

Presumably this means, evolutionarily, greater vulnerability on the left, predisposing the left hand to shielding duties, leaving the right to more dexterous tasks like spearing. The cardiological hypothesis of right-handedness holds!

mortenjorck··on Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water'
Isn’t that the Waymo data model, though? They extensively pre-drive every new market, building dense volumetric maps of the entire service area before they begin service, so they essentially do have that database of every road (that they drive on).
mortenjorck··on He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice
It’s like CSI “enhance!” AI image upscaling. People will do it, see it fabricated details, and then draw the wrong lesson from it, that “AI fabricates things!” when that is exactly what they asked the model to do and there is no magic math that would extract ground truth that was never in the image to begin with.
mortenjorck··on Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal
Amusing and directionally correct, but as random next-thought generators connected to a conscious hypervisor with individual agency,* humanity still has a pretty major leg up on the competition.

*For some definitions of individual agency. Incompatiblists not included.

mortenjorck··on They're made out of meat (1991)
As I’ve gotten older, it’s become increasingly hard for me to understand how anyone can read such comical reductionism as enlightenment.

We are infinitely complex arrangements of systems built upon systems, from the quantum properties of carbon atoms up through the proteins that make the “meat” we are so glibly reduced to, through the complexities and adaptations of mammalian bodies, up to the fearsome order of the human brain and the intricate sprawl of human society and culture.

To reduce us to anything less is to deny the awesomeness of the cosmos itself.

mortenjorck··on HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)
USM is the only MVNO I've seen that actually advertises QCI tiers. I had to look the term up when I was initially considering them, as I'd never even encountered it before. It was a major factor in finally feeling confident I wouldn't be giving up too much by leaving AT&T.
mortenjorck··on Review: Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra
I was hoping, this being Wired, the article would have at least a surface-level technical description of how a software-defined privacy filter works, but alas.

How does it work? I'm guessing it's some kind of extension of the LCD polarizer, but all I can find online are explanations of the software like in the Wired article.

mortenjorck··on Enhancing gut-brain communication reversed cognitive decline in aging mice
To extend the metaphor, the brain may have a robust firewall, but it also transacts with millions of clients over a separate (electric rather than chemical) network.
mortenjorck··on This time is different
"AI is a bubble!"

"AI will change everything!"

Few seem to understand that both of the above can be true. The parallel you draw to the internet revolution is apt; dot-coms were both a bubble and changed everything.

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