Wednesday,  25 June 2025

Toward new dances in the online marketplace. Dig CC Signals, from Creative Commons.  It's good stuff. Go read it. Also this, which calls it "A New Social Contract for the Age of AI." Here's a .pdf presenting current thinking and planning behind the project. The CC Signals Implementation page is where the work comes closest to what we're doing in parallel at Customer Commons with IEEE P7012, aka MyTerms. Where CC Signals work toward a new social contract, MyTerms provides a choice of actual contracts between persons and other entities, especially the sites and services of the world, that individuals proffer. This flips the script. They agree to your terms, not the reverse. And MyTerms provides for auditing of compliance and dispute resolution, which the current system (where you click on an 'accept' button that gives you no clue about where and how that action was recorded) does not.

A question: For iCloud Photos on Apple's Photos app (on the computer), what are the differences between what you get with Download Originals to this Mac and Optimize Mac Storage? I've tried it both ways, and the sizes of the photos are the same. I've asked this question to ChatGPT (which I pay) and Claude. ChatGPT seems not to be working at all for some reason, and Claude's answer is full of "it might be" possibilities. Nothing clear.



4 responses to “Wednesday,  25 June 2025”

  1. Doc,

    What do you mean by “the sizes of the photos are the same”?

    My understanding is that “Optimize Mac storage” means that Photos can (but does not have to, depending on your disk space) delete the main file for any photo it chooses, leaving metadata and thumbnails, but that it fetches it automatically when you interact with it.

    1. Thanks! I mean the file sizes are the same. For example, a pile of recent photos (shot with my iPhone 16 Pro Max) that I dragged to a directory on my laptop were all 3.7 to 4.7 MB, with identical EXIF (shown with command-i) data, when I did it either Download Originals to this Mac or Optimize Mac Storage modes.

    1. I got a very similar answer from Claude. When I pushed through more Q&A, it concluded with this: “Your test has essentially revealed that “Optimize Mac Storage” is much more of a conditional, smart feature than Apple lets on in their documentation. It’s not actively optimizing everything – it’s waiting for actual storage pressure or significantly larger files before it kicks in.”

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