This is a real danger that I think a lot of people will run into as prices go up more and more in the future.
Completely outside of the productivity debate, offloading cognitive tasks to LLMs leaves you less practiced in them and less ready to do them when the LLM isn't available. When you have to delegate only certain tasks to the LLM for financial reasons, you may find yourself very frustrated.
Annoyingly it doesn't even maximize properly. You have to use alt-click for sensible behaviour.
They also decided about 10? years ago to make it behave as a "fullscreen" button which was really useless to me on a Mac Pro with 2 screens, where it would only ever "zoom" to one screen and then make the other screen display the desktop wallpaper - not the actual desktop - the wallpaper.
I have a lot of complaints but I would say my three big gripes are:
- Window navigation within (rather than between) open programs. Mainly if one is on an external monitor, this is just a nightmare and I end up using expose and clicking the window instead.
- Window positioning (I installed 3rd party software called Rectangle for this last year so it’s kind of solved but if we’re talking about the vanilla experience this is a big one)
- Having to switch focus to the dock and navigate one by one through shortcuts to open them instead of the Super+Dock position shortcuts that Windows and KDE expose
Interesting, those are problems I don't have, I guess due to my work and workflow.
Command-` works for window switching as I expect, probably simply due to being used to it so I know exactly how It works.
Window positioning is an interesting one. I can't stand windows being positioned through tools, I stack them like you would with papers and shuffle through so the edge overlap is really important. Probably showing my age there!
And I never use the dock. Spotlight gets me everything I'd need from there.
They kinda added window positioning with Tahoe -- there are things I like more about it than Rectangle (resizing), but I found that it was janky enough I switched back to Rectangle.
I rarely use the Dock, it's somewhat eye candy I leave up, or add stacks for folders that I use, but typically for keyboard action I reach for spotlight (cmd+space). Now, spotlight occasionally shitting the bed, that's another issue...
I still don’t think the model is quite great until the bandwidth problem is solved in a way that doesn’t make it prohibitively expensive for alternative appview hosting.
It’s the one part of the whole system I think needs a lot of work.
If you are looking at it from a business perspective, there is little value to fixing a bug that is not impacting your revenue.
Of course, the developers should be determining if the bug may have a greater impact that will or does cause a problem that impacts revenue before closing it - not doing that is negligent.
My experience with AI-driven and AI-assisted development so far is that it has actually enhanced my workflow despite how much I dislike it.
With a caveat.
If you were to compare my workflow to a decade ago, you wouldn’t see much difference other than my natural skill growth.
The rub is that the tools, communities and services I learned to rely on over my career as a developer have been slowly getting worse and worse, and I have found that I can leverage AI tools to make up for where those resources now fall short.
That doesn't work very well on a humid day outside in the summer.
And the payphones in the city I grew up in didn't operate using ground-start signalling, so the paper clip/safety pin/pull-tab/static trick didn't work there at all.
But an innocuous walkman with a cassette tape that had some red box tones on it, with a bonus of having the rest of the cassette available for music to listen to? That worked great.
This was in the late 1950's for me, in the San Fernando Valley where summertime humidity was very low. But a few years later the phone company put shields in the headsets so you could no longer puncture the foil.
I'm old enough to remember payphones being completely ubiquitous (with whole banks of them inside of each entrance for one large department store, usually with one or two more outside), but I'm not old enough to remember the 1950s. :)
I did find one old phone at a state park not too far out that could be tricked by grounding it, but that was in GTE territory instead of the Ohio Bell BOC that I was more familiar with.
Which is mostly insane amounts of debt leveraged entirely on the moonshot that they will find a way to turn a profit on it within the next couple years.
Apple’s bet is intelligent, the “presumed winners” are hedging our economic stability on a miracle, like a shaking gambling addict at a horse race who just withdrew his rent money.
Reading through this reminds me of how bot farms will regularly consist of stripped down phones that are essentially just the mainboard hooked up to a controller that simulates the externals.
When struggling with failing to reverse engineer mobile apps for smart home devices, I’ve considered trying to set something like this up for a single device.
Sure, but it’s a great example of the reason RSS readers are so great. No matter how much you enjoy the work of particular authors - their editorial oversight might make it too miserable to enjoy.
Completely outside of the productivity debate, offloading cognitive tasks to LLMs leaves you less practiced in them and less ready to do them when the LLM isn't available. When you have to delegate only certain tasks to the LLM for financial reasons, you may find yourself very frustrated.
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