chipotle_coyote

Joined 14 years ago

Karma
9,634
Submissions
2,599
Member since
May 19
Former web developer, current technical writer and sf/fantasy author. Also former Apple-centric technical blogger, although I still post something vaguely technical once in a blue moon.
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Recent submissions

Comment · 2 days ago
To promote this to a top-level comment, because I think it's important context: nothing in the README file says the point is to be "beginner-friendly". As far as I can tell, that's something that Hacker News or whoever submitted this used as a description. Neither the word "beginner" nor the word "friendly" appear in the README; its goal is to "be the smallest functional Emacs in less than 2000 lines of C."

I think somebody incorrectly described Atto as comparable to nano/pico, and these comments are dragging it because it's not something that it was never intended as.

Comment · 2 days ago
Nothing in the README file says the point is to be "beginner-friendly"; as far as I can tell, that's something that Hacker News or whoever submitted this used as a description. Neither the word "beginner" nor the word "friendly" appear in the README; its goal is to "be the smallest fuctional Emacs in less than 2000 lines of C."

tl;dr: I think somebody incorrectly described Atto as comparable to nano/pico, and these comments are dragging it because it's not the thing that it was never meant to be.

Comment · 2 days ago
This article on the Google blog is about naming disputes between countries, not name changes driven by changing political winds within the same country. Of course, you know that and you're just trolling, which also explains why the comment is downvoted. You're welcome.
Comment · 2 days ago
No, it doesn't. Quoting the document: "If different countries dispute the proper name for a body of water, our policy is to display both names, with each label placed closer to the country or countries that use it" (emphasis in original).

This sounds to me like for all users it should display both names. Perhaps to US users it displays "Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)" and everywhere else it displays "Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)", although the literal text suggests it should say "Gulf of Mexico" in an area of the map closest to Mexico and "Gulf of America" in an area of the map closest to the US.

Comment · 18 days ago
As adamesque wrote, it's going to be more like the Watch or even CarPlay. And I think this is probably the right approach, market-wise: Apple ran with the idea that every device needs its own standalone app ecosystem, to the point where they even tried putting an app store in iMessage, and it didn't really work out. Apps on the Apple TV that aren't effectively "channels" (i.e., streaming services) have mostly fizzled, and I bet most readers even on Hacker News forgot that the Watch even had a standalone app store for a while. The HomeView absolutely seems like the kind of device that's going to do better with "companion apps": install them on your phone and let them install a little mini-app or widget on the HomeView. I don't need to manage a whole new set of apps on my smart home gadget---I just need to be able to futz with lights and the thermostat, listen to music and podcasts with the music and podcast app of my choice, and get to my recipe app if I'm going to be one of those monsters who puts one in the kitchen.

As for the battery, this doesn't look like a kind of device that's intended to travel with you room to room---but I agree it would have been smart for them to give people the option.

Comment · 27 days ago
If you're not running an Apple Silicon chip, you can't run macOS 27 at all.
Comment · 1 month ago
I don't know -- my conspiracy theory for many years has been that Apple isn't really very interested in multiple desktops at all, and there's just this one engineer who's made it his life's mission to bring the idea to the masses. But the masses also aren't really very interested in multiple desktops. So every two or three versions, he screws around with the UX and says "surely this time everyone will see the genius!" And they do not.

Personally, I almost never use more than two virtual desktops on macOS, which means most of the changes and bad decisions sail over my head. I don't think I really seriously used more than two virtual desktops on any OS later than BeOS, though -- which IIRC did it really well! -- which I suspect is less a function of macOS doing it badly than a simple function of rarely feeling like I'm cramped on a 27" 5K monitor. (Yes, I know half of you are like "I have three 24-inch monitors and each one needs nine virtual desktops to accommodate all of my windows." That's fine. You do you.)

Comment · 2 months ago
They don't pre-populate the feed, no. I believe they suggest users to follow (on Mastodon that's a per-instance choice based on the administrator), and have sort of generic popular feeds. If you want to see what that looks like on Bluesky, just open up "bsky.app" when you're not logged in. You absolutely do not see a parade of kinky socialist furries.
Comment · 2 months ago
"The average user has never used a website"? Really? The average user has never once, ever, opened their browser and gone to a website? Never read a newspaper online? Gone to LinkedIn or Facebook, done banking, made a doctor's appointment, found an AC repair shop on the web rather than through an app? Because I don't know what your definition of "average user" is, but I know a bunch of non-technical folks in ages ranging from thirty-something to eighty-something who do that all the time.

(Also, they sign up for mailing lists all the time, often whether they want to or not because everybody wants you to be on their damn mailing list. Email is absolutely still a viable broadcast medium, despite all the pundits declaring "email is dead" before they go back to, you know, checking their email.)

Comment · 2 months ago
> Until the EU forced them to use USB-C

I know this is the common wisdom (especially around these parts), and yes, I know the timing lines up, but I'm not convinced. Apple was actually on the USB-C steering committee, and they adopted USB-C as the One True Standard for Macs years before PC makers went whole hog on it. (One can argue they did it prematurely, or at least too aggressively, but that's a different post.)

So what's another explanation for sticking with Lightning so long?

1. When they changed from the original giant stupid fragile dock connector to Lightning, which was obviously a better connector, people screamed at them. A lot. For a very long time. It was all just a plot to make people buy new proprietary cables, you see. If USB-C had been fully finalized even a year earlier, they'd have probably gone with that instead of Lightning, but it wasn't, so they couldn't. Nerds like you and I might say, "Great, but why didn't Apple switch as soon as USB-C was widely available," to which the answer is: just try and imagine the shit they would get if they made people buy all new cables, again, just a few years later. Not gonna happen.

2. Your parentheses around "(inferior)" are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The two connectors are very similar conceptually, and have slightly different tradeoffs: a Lightning port is thinner than a USB-C port, but USB-C's design puts the spring pins that actually make the connection in the cable rather than in the port, which is probably a better idea. Even so, it's not as if USB-C is just overwhelmingly superior to Lightning the way either of them are compared to, say, the original giant stupid fragile dock connector. There wasn't a whole lot of pressure to switch quickly.

3. Having said that, switching over time made technical sense, particularly once the Macs started going all-in on USB-C. There's no convincing reason the rest of Apple's devices wouldn't have followed suit eventually even without external pressure. Yes, "but they make more money by being proprietary," but counterargument: c'mon, the amount of extra money Lightning brought in was loose change in the couch cushions on Apple's scale, and they knew full well that people were going to buy USB-C cables from them at inflated prices at the same time they were buying their iPhones/iPads anyway. They are literally making up the difference, and more, in volume.

Comment · 2 months ago
The retraction post from Gruber details ways in which he tried to fact-check this, including confirming that his understanding was correct with Mr. Godier and even running a draft of the post by him to make sure he'd stated the "facts" that Godier presented him correctly.

I'm not really sure what you're implicitly expecting him to have done "better" here. Ask Godier for a signed affidavit? Not publish this until he could get a statement from Apple to get their side of the story? (Which is to say, not publish it at all because the chances of Apple giving anyone "their side" of something like this is essentially zero.)

Comment · 2 months ago
I've seen a few people complain that the first trailer for the Neuromancer TV show looks "too bright" or "too clean." I think the real difference is that they're consciously trying to avoid that Blade Runner aesthetic, which includes avoiding the "never get brighter than dusk" trope.
Comment · 2 months ago
This is actually still a reasonable concern to have. Coincidentally, just yesterday I came across a reference to the book Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen, speculating on how a global thermonuclear war could start in modern times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War:_A_Scenario

The scenario she presents is fictional, but it’s all based on current nuclear arsenals and response protocols. While what I’ve read of it certainly makes it seem like a worst-case scenario in a “nearly everything that can go wrong does” sense, it’s disturbing how relatively few things going wrong it actually takes—in a span of under two hours—to reach “civilizational collapse” level outcomes.

Comment · 2 months ago
I remember mostly ignoring Kermit back in my BBSing days; by the time "SuperKermit" came along, which could get performance competitive with ZMODEM, it alreayd seemed ancient.

Then, around 1991, a friend gave me access to his college Unix account so I could play with Gopher, Archie, and TinyFugue (the world of MUDs/MUCKs/etc.). The catch: to get to his account from my home machine, I had to call into a Florida state network that let you dial in and connect to machines on various college campuses. The network ran on some IBM minicomputer. And, it didn't connect to the Unix machine, oh no. It connected to a VAX, which was then on the same local network as the Unix machine.

So I had to dial in to the IBM machine, connect from it to a VAX, and then telnet from the VAX to the Unix box.

Incredibly, this all worked with only mildly annoying lag...but then I tried to transfer a file from the Unix machine to my personal machine. ZMODEM didn't work. XMODEM didn't work. I think I tried one or two other things that I've forgotten.

Then I remembered Kermit, and its reputation for being able to handle difficult connections. It got the file through on its first try.

Comment · 3 months ago
When people who are rich and/or influential loudly and publicly share their political stances, and especially when they put their money toward those ends, it is not unreasonable to expect that to influence the opinions others have of those people, even to the point of saying "I would like to not be associated with them."

I get the impression that you are among the "stop bringing politics into these non-political places" crowd who believe that this stance is (a) exclusively taken by the left and (b) something that's only happened in the last ten years; I assure you neither of those things are true.

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