I've had to put a fair chunk of effort in to skills that will run deterministic mechanisms to unslop a codebase (cyclomatic complexity grading has been really helpful here) as invariably some amount of guidance around principles will be missed over time. I've found it does help, though. Certainly I'm getting overall better results from Flash and Sonnet over multiple runs for fairly modest token increases. GPT 5.5 less so, but that's because it scores better in a first pass. I won't really know until I gauge it at the end of my sub month which has been more cost efficient for me all things considered.
You had me until Proton. I bang this drum every so often when it comes up but I’ve had terrible experiences with Proton locking me out of email permanently without warning or explanation in a way that made not just the email address but the accounts linked to it completely unrecoverable.
Don’t play around with email. It’s not communication, it’s critical digital infrastructure - quite possibly your primary key on the internet. The consequences of getting locked out by a faceless provider for reasons you’ll never hear about are probably a lot bigger than you think.
I think the retail market is maybe dead but datacenters are still a fairly large customer I’d think. HDDs really shine at scale where they can be fronted by flash and DRAM cache layers.
They are still cheaper than flash for cold data, but that’s not going to hold for long. Flash is so much denser the acquisition cost difference for a multi-petabyte store becomes small next to the datacenter space and power needed by HDDs. HDDs require research for increasing density while flash can rely on silicon manufacturing advances for that - not that it doesn’t require specific research, but being able to apply the IP across a vast space makes better economical sense.
I get this pain with Apple in a bunch of different areas. The things they do well, they do better than anyone, but part of the design language is to never admit defeat so very few of the interfaces will ever show you an error message of any kind. The silent failure modes everywhere gets really frustrating.
> The silent failure modes everywhere gets really frustrating.
I literally just experienced this with RCS failing to activate. No failure message, dug into logs, says userinteractionrequired. Front page of HN, nobody knows, apple corp response, 'thats interesting no you cant talk to engineering'.
Read the RCS spec definition document to fall asleep to after the board swap and the call saying they won't work on it since issue resolved, answers exactly what that meant, Apple never implemented handling for it, my followup post: https://wt.gd/working-rcs-messaging
Bingo. My wife’s phone failed to backup to iCloud. To be fair, there’s an error message. However, the list of what takes up space does not show what’s actually taking up space. Such as videos texted to or from you (can easily be multiple gigs as they add up over a year or two)
The list didn’t show the god damn GoPro app, which was taking up 20GB of space from downloaded videos. I guessed it was the problem because it showed up in the device storage list, but literally not reported when you look at the list of data to backup.
iMessage is another great example of a failure. I changed my iMessage email and didn’t receive messages in a family group chat until I noticed — I had to text the chat before stuff started coning through. Previously sent messages were never delivered. And they all have my phone number, which has been my primary iMessage for LITERALLY over a decade. iMessage’s identity system is seriously messed up on a fundamental level. (I’ve had numerous other issues with it, but I’ll digress.)
It’s messed up, but it can be fixed by turning off iMessage and MMS in settings.app and then turning it back on. It’s an old bug. Since it hasn’t been fixed, I’m guessing the solution introduces more problems than it a solves for whatever reason.
I don't even use Photos, except in extreme situation. It was such a major UX downgrade from iPhoto that I could never get it to work without lots of mystery meat guessing, and every interaction with it was so unpleasant because of that.
Knowing that a company had competent product designers that made a good product, but then shitcanned the working product for a bunch of amateur output from people that don't understand dry very basics of UI, from the one company that made good UI its primary feature for decades... well it just felt like full on betrayal. The same thing happened with absolutely shitty Apple Music, which I never, ever use, because it's so painful to remember what could have been with iTunes...
Just think that they marketed Photos as a worthwhile replacement for Aperture as well.
I remember advising many photographs friends on using Aperture for photo library management. Now I feel so bad for ever recommending that. I mean Lightroom now has a stupid subscription, but using Apple software was kind of the point: avoiding the risk of software becoming too expensive or bad because the hardware premium funds the development of good software.
Now you get to pay more for the hardware but you have to deal with shitty or expensive software as well. Makes no sense.
My biggest pet peeve with macOS Music is that you can't go back a track in the "infinite play" mode. Not only can you not go back to the previous track, but you can't even go back to the beginning of the song - the button is just greyed out. It's a purely arbitrary limitation because the same functionality works fine in iOS.
I don't know why it bugs me so much, but I'm at the point of moving my library into a self-hosted Navidrome instance so I can stop using Music.
Photos is horrific for this. No progress, no indicators. And what little status you get has no connection to reality.
Will it sync? When? Who knows? You’re on WiFi with a full battery and charging? So? Might be a minute, might be an hour. Oh, you restarted Photos? Who cares? Not Photos.
Agree that new Photos is abysmal compared to what it was before. And that's before the macOS only features that you don't know are macOS only features (like naming photos! Seriously!)
There's a lot of arcane lore about how to get it to sync. Closing all applications, restarting, then starting photos, then hiding the photos main window, then waiting, was how I got it to work last time. It worked twice, YMMV. If there's a cli alternative, please tell me.
You're not saying it, but ugh, yeah, anything along those lines of magic incantations and this is all the very antithesis of what Apple claims to embody.
The budget offering is a used MacBook from the massive aftermarket stock, but I take your point - it doesn't scale and some people are averse to buying used goods.
Having just switched up to the M4 air you're not wrong. Unless you have the 8GB version and it's causing you memory pressure (which it may not be), or you really need that extra display output (I did), it's a wonder machine still 5 years later.
Also, that wedge design might be peak laptop. It's just soooo nice when lifting off a surface. I know that sounds ridiculous but the attention to detail that went into that design is next level.
Even though I'm not in the market, part of me really hopes the MacBook SE (or whatever they call it) uses the wedge design to clear chassis parts like they did with the SE iphones (although I doubt it).
I've had to put a fair chunk of effort in to skills that will run deterministic mechanisms to unslop a codebase (cyclomatic complexity grading has been really helpful here) as invariably some amount of guidance around principles will be missed over time. I've found it does help, though. Certainly I'm getting overall better results from Flash and Sonnet over multiple runs for fairly modest token increases. GPT 5.5 less so, but that's because it scores better in a first pass. I won't really know until I gauge it at the end of my sub month which has been more cost efficient for me all things considered.
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