“Mastering Machine Learning: From Basics to Advanced” by Govindakumar Madhavan was published in April by Springer Nature. It’s $169 as an ebook, or $219 as a hardback. [Springer, archive]

Retraction Watch heard from a reader who was cited in the book — but his cited papers didn’t … exist. A lot of citations in the book don’t exist. [Retraction Watch]

Retraction Watch asked Madhavan to comment on whether he’d written his book on AI with an AI. Madhavan answered this yes-or-no question as follows:

reliably determining whether content (or an issue) is AI generated remains a challenge, as even human-written text can appear ‘AI-like.’ This challenge is only expected to grow, as LLMs continue to advance in fluency and sophistication.

That’s great, thanks.

Madhavan is the founder and CEO of SeaportAI, which offers services dealing with the risks of AI fraud. [SITE]

The book warns to take care with ChatGPT:

the technology raises important ethical questions about the use and misuse of AI-generated text.

Retraction Watch commenter Peter Vamplew says:

I wouldn’t expect an answer from Springer any time soon. I reported a similar case of a book chapter which contained hallucinated references, including one which it attributed to me which doesn’t match anything I’ve actually written. It’s been 4 months now and I’m still waiting for their investigation to reach a conclusion.

Springer publishes 14,000 books a year with 9,000 employees. Nobody at Springer even looks at the books. Springer concerns itself with the important part — charging $200 for a pile of chatbot spew.

• Video version

An internal Microsoft memo has leaked. It was written by Julia Liuson, president of the Developer Division at Microsoft and GitHub. The memo tells managers to evaluate employees based on how much they use internal AI tools like the various Copilots: [Business Insider]

AI is now a fundamental part of how we work. Just like collaboration, data-driven thinking, and effective communication, using AI is no longer optional — it’s core to every role and every level.

Liuson told managers that AI “should be part of your holistic reflections on an individual’s performance and impact.”

Let’s be clear: this is a confession of abject failure.

Microsoft’s AI tools don’t work. Microsoft AI doesn’t make you more effective. Microsoft AI won’t do the job better.

If it did, Microsoft staff would be using it already. The competition inside Microsoft is vicious. If AI would get them ahead of the other guy, they’d use it.

We already know that when AI saves someone time at work, it’s because they can fob work off onto someone else. Total work doesn’t go down, and total productivity doesn’t go up.

But Microsoft is desperate to sell AI to anyone it can, because the CEO, Satya Nadella, has a bee in his bonnet. Nadella has decreed: everyone will use AI.

Even though it doesn’t work.

We should expect some enterprising Microsoft coder to come up with an automated AI agent system that racks up chatbot metrics for them — while they get on with their actual job.

• Video version

🕹️ Decker is, in my opinion, the best way to get started at any skill level.

Think of it like the MS Paint of game development. Easy to pick up and always fun to use.

Enjoy it while it lasts. Read here.

Last Friday’s newsletter begins:

My favorite thing about reading “the classics” is that they’re almost always weirder than you think they are. For example: within 50 pages of War and Peace, a bunch of drunks tie a policeman to a bear and throw them in the river. (I try to read a big book every summer, so I figured why not read one of the biggest?)

With backup from Italo Calvino’s Why Read The Classics:

“Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them…”

Read more: “The classics are weird.”

A couple of months ago, I wrote:

I was replying to a comment by Charlie Stross, who noted that LLMs are trained on existing data and therefore are biased against recognizing new phenomena. My point was that in tech, we look forward to learning about new inventions -- new phenomena by definition. Are AI coding tools going to roadblock that?

Already happening! Here's Kyle Hughes last week:

That's not even a new language, it's just a new major version. Is C++26 going to run into the same problem?

Hat tip to John Gruber, who quotes more dev comments as we swing into WWDC week.

Speaking of WWDC, the new "liquid glass" UI is now announced. (Screenshots everywhere.) I like it, although I haven't installed the betas to play with it myself.

Joseph Humphrey has, and he notes that existing app icons are being glassified by default:

Kinda shocked to see these 3rd party app icons having been liquid-glassed already. Is this some kind of automatic filter, or did Apple & 3rd parties prep them in advance?? --@joethephish, June 10 (thread)

The icon auto-glassification uses non-obvious heuristics, and Joe's screenshots show some weird artifacts.

I was surprised too! For the iOS7 "flatten it all" UI transition, existing apps did not get the new look -- either in their icons or their internal buttons, etc -- until the developer recompiled with the new SDK. (And thus had a chance to redesign their icons for the new style.) As I wrote a couple of months ago:

[In 2012] Apple put in a lot of work to ensure that OS upgrades didn't break apps for users. Not even visually. (It goes without saying that Apple considers visual design part of an app's functionality.) The toolkit continued to support old APIs, and it also secretly retained the old UI style for every widget.

-- me, April 9

Are they really going to bag that policy for this fall? I guess they already sort of did. Last year's "tint mode" squashed existing icons to tinted monochrome whether they liked it or not. But that was a user option, and not a very popular one, I suspect.

This year's icon change feels like a bigger rug-pull for developers. And developers have raw nerves these days.

This is supposed to be a prediction post. I guess I'll predict that Apple rolls this back, leaving old (third-party) icons alone for the iOS26 full release. Maybe.

(I see Marco Arment is doing a day of "it's a beta, calm down and send feedback". Listen to him, he knows his stuff.)

But the big lurking announcement was iPadOS gaining windows, a menu bar, and a more (though not completely) file-oriented environment. A lot of people have been waiting years for those features. Craig Federighi presented the news with an understated but real wince of apology.

Personally, not my thing. I don't tend to use my iPad for productive work. And it's not for want of windows and a menu bar; it's for want of a keyboard and a terminal window. I have a very terminal-centric work life. My current Mac desktop has nine terminal windows, two of which are running Emacs.

(No, I don't want to carry around an external keyboard for my iPad. If I carry another big thing, it'll be the MacBook, and then the problem is solved.)

But -- look. For more than a decade, people have been predicting that Apple would kill MacOS and force Macs to run some form of iOS. They predicted it when Apple launched Gatekeeper, they predicted it when Apple brought SwiftUI apps to MacOS, they predicted it when Apple redesigned the Settings app.

I never bought it before. Watching this week's keynote, I buy it. Now there is room for i(Pad)OS to replace MacOS.

Changing or locking down MacOS is a weak signal because people use MacOS. You can only do so much to it. Apple has been tightening the bolts on Gatekeeper at regular intervals, but you can still run unsigned apps on a Mac. The hoops still exist. You can install Linux packages with Homebrew.

But adding features to iPad is a different play! That's pushing the iPad UI in a direction where it could plausibly take over the desktop-OS role. And this direction isn't new, it's a well-established thing. The iPad has been acquiring keyboard/mouse features for years now.

So is Apple planning to eliminate MacOS entirely, and ship Macs with (more or less) iPadOS installed? Maybe! This is all finger-in-the-wind. I doubt it's happening soon. It may never happen. It could be that Apple wants iPad to stand on its own as a serious mobile productivity platform, as good as the Mac but separate from it.

But Apple thinks in terms of company strategy, not separate siloed platforms. And, as many people have pointed out, supporting two similar-but-separate OSes is a terrible business case. Surely Apple has better uses for that redundant budget line.

Abstractly, they could unify the two OSes rather than killing one of them. But, in practice, they would kill MacOS. Look at yesterday's announcements. iPad gets the new features; Mac gets nothing. (Except the universal shiny glass layer.) The writing is not on the wall but the wind is blowing, and we can see which way.

Say this happens, in 2028 or whenever. (If Apple still exists, if I haven't died in the food riots, etc etc.) Can my terminal-centric lifestyle make its way to an iPad-like world?

...Well, that depends on whether they add a terminal app, doesn't it? Fundamentally I don't care about MacOS as a brand. I just want to set up my home directory and my .emacs file and install Python and git and npm and all the other stuff that my habits have accumulated. You have no idea how many little Python scripts are involved in everyday tasks like, you know, writing this blog post.

(Okay, you do know that because my blogging tool is up on Github. The answer is four. Four vonderful Python scripts, ah ah ah!)

If I can't do all that in MacOS 28/29/whichever, it'll be time to pick a Linux distro. Not looking forward to that, honestly. (I fly Linux servers all the time, but the last time I used a Linux desktop environment it was GNOME 1.0? I think?)

Other notes from WWDC. (Not really predictions, sorry, I am failing my post title.)

• Tim Cook looks tired. I don't mean that in a Harriet Jones way! I assume he's run himself ragged trying to manage political crap. Craig Federighi is still having fun but I felt like he was over-playing it a lot of the time. Doesn't feel like a happy company. Eh, what do I know, I'm trying to read tea leaves from a scripted video.

• I said "Mac gets nothing" but that's unfair. The Spotlight update with integrated actions and shortcuts looks extremely sexy. Yes, this is about getting third-party devs to support App Intents so that Siri/AI can hook into them. But it will also be great for Automator and other non-AI scripting tools.

• WWDC is a software event; Apple never talks about new hardware there. I know it. You know it. But it sure was weird to have a whole VisionOS segment pushing new features when the rev1 Vision Pro is at a dead standstill. My sense is that the whole ecosystem is on hold waiting for a consumer-viable rev2 model.

• I think the consumer-viable rev2 model is coming this fall. There, that's a prediction. Worth what you paid for it.

• I'm enjoying the Murderbot show but damn if Gurathin isn't a low-key Vision Pro ad. He's got the offhand tap-fingers gesture right there.

• I'm excited about the liquid glass UI. I want to play with it. Fun is fun, dammit.

• I hate redesigning app icons for a new UI. Oh, well, I'll manage. (EDIT-ADD: Turns out Apple is pushing a new single-source process which generates all icon sizes and modes. Okay! Good news there.)