Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
They haven't fixed the bug I've had since Tahoe, where Dock icons render with no anti-aliasing. I thought they had as everything was rendering correctly when I first installed the update, but after my first reboot they're back to a pixelated mess. It looks awful.

What's worse is that, while I can find other reports online, it doesn't seem to be a particularly widespread bug (my work Mac doesn't exhibit it at all), which means I'm probably gonna have to wait for it to be fixed incidentally when some Apple engineer makes an unrelated change to the Dock codebase in about four years time.

Comment · 1 month ago
Are you sure it wasn’t just the TV? Unless someone put it into filmmaker mode or similar, it almost certainly would have had motion interpolation enabled, as well as a blue white-point, oversaturated colours, and probably some artificial sharpening and de-noising.
Comment · 1 month ago
It’s a common phrase in Indian English
Comment · 1 month ago
Yeah I used a Magic Keyboard myself for a while but I found it significantly impacted what I liked about the iPad. It doubled the weight, and removed the ability to hold it in my hand or in portrait (still the most common orientation I use mine). Sure you can take it out any time, but I found it just added a lot of extra friction to a device that previously had very little (iPadOS aside). Glad it’s working well for you though.
Comment · 1 month ago
Why do you think I put “free” in quotes? Realistically I was never going to keep the phone longer than the two year finance term anyway, because back when I started doing it a two-year old phone would be really starting to show its age running newer software. So I could either pay monthly and get a phone every two years, or pay monthly and get a phone every year.

Of course, these days a three or four or more year old phone is often still perfectly usable even for a tech enthusiast.

Comment · 1 month ago
I think the idea is the outside screen would be propped up, not on the ground. Though I do wonder if the outside-screen-down orientation is supported.
Comment · 1 month ago
The M1 Macs were a bit different because Apple had already been designing their own CPUs for years, and the machine designs themselves were almost identical to previous iterations with Intel CPUs. The only thing they needed to get right was the software, which they did (and which could have been updated after the fact if they didn’t).
Comment · 1 month ago
I’m in the exact same situation. Been upgrading every year for a long time (via the Upgrade Programme, making doing so more or less “free”). I was absolutely jazzed they finally did an orange phone, and this is the first year in a while that…I just don’t care. The Duo is far more expensive than I could ever entertain (plus buying a first-gen Apple product has never been a good idea), and there is quite literally nothing in the 18 Pro that makes me want to upgrade.

I may be swayed by a second gen Air in the spring, as I would like a lighter phone that feels less of an imposition in my pocket and my life in general. But it almost certainly won’t have the zoom camera, which has unexpectedly become one of my favourite and most used features of the 17 Pro. Why the two-camera phones all come with the ultrawide instead of the telephoto is baffling to me. Perhaps I’m an anomaly, but I never use the ultrawide lens.

Comment · 1 month ago
I’m not so sure personally. A MacBook Air is not that much less portable than an iPad, but is far more useful for work when not docked than an iPad because it still has a keyboard and a precision pointing device. And it can still be docked when you need a bigger screen.

The areas where the iPad beats the MacBook are still (imo) the same as the day it launched: web browsing, watching video, and reading. Workloads that are heavy on the Apple Pencil too, but that’s a fairly narrow slice compared to anything else you might do on a computer.

Comment · 3 months ago
> As for documentation, I've found this simple instruction to vastly improve LLMs' output:

> Never write READMEs, docstrings, or comments. I will write those myself later. And yes, I really mean this.

This is quite validating as I came to the exact same conclusion myself. We’re required to use an LLM for every task at work that touches code†, and I was really struggling to get Claude to stop with the long waffly comments that reiterate the next few lines of code in 3x as many characters, making contextless references to subtasks in whatever harness du jour we’re using this week.

No amount of examples or explanation of what I wanted would make it stop. And then I realised of course, I’m asking something which has no concept of meaning (or, indeed, anything) to only add meaningful comments. More fool me I guess.

Of course, it’s ultimately pointless given all of my colleagues are regularly opening PRs with more comments than code anyway. 80% of my code review responses these days are just increasingly exasperated “pointless comment, please remove”.

† This is just as infantilising as it sounds, by the way

Comment · 3 months ago
Cookie consent popups are only a scourge because publishers would rather further irritate their users than stop selling your data to their 936 “trusted partners”.
Comment · 3 months ago
Even in perfectly normal, common situations it fails horribly. The bottom stretch of the road I live on is about 2.5 cars wide, but one side is reserved for parking (it’s terraced housing so no off-street parking). That leaves 1.5 cars of width, so if you’re driving on the side with parked cars you give way and pass on the other side when there is nothing oncoming.

Before I turned it off, my car would regularly beep frantically and try to steer me into the parked cars. Thankfully it’s a 2022 model so now I’ve turned it off, it stays off.

Comment · 9 months ago
> AI is such a core part of the experience

For who? Regular people are quite famously not clamouring for more AI features in software. A Siri that is not so stupendously dumb would be nice, but I doubt it would even be a consideration for the vast majority of people choosing a phone.

Comment · 9 months ago
I would call the designing of the building art, yes. But I wouldn’t call it construction.

I would also call designing a system to be fed into an LLM designing. But I wouldn’t call it programming.

If people are more into the design and system architecture side of development, I of course have no problem with that.

What I do find baffling, as per my original comment, is all the people saying basically “programming is way more fun now I don’t have to do it”. Did you even actually like programming to begin with then?

Comment · 9 months ago
I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you.

But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone to paint what you describe. That’s not doing, it’s commissioning.

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