developer2

This has already been a thing for Macs as well for many, many years. If you boot into recovery mode, there is a menu option to add a Firmware Password. You cannot access recovery mode or enter the boot selection menu without providing that password, which means a thief cannot reinstall any operating system or boot from a Linux thumb drive.

When you add a Firmware Password to a Mac, you get a long recovery code as a fallback safety in case you lose/forget the password. Apple, if provided with proof of purchase for the serial number being inquired about, can create a bootable USB stick with a certificate generated using public/private key crypto for which Apple holds the private keys.

I suspect much of this newer functionality acts as a replacement for the Firmware Password, giving more options and making it a bit more well-known.

> one of the problems common in big test suites: poorly factored tests that end up being the sort of expressive duplication that is a giant drag on improving existing code.

I feel like you just described every developer/codebase where mock testing is stupidly enforced. Where every single unit test mocks every single indirect object. 98% of the testing code is just exhaustive setup and teardown of objects not being tested by each test, and then a bunch of conditional checks to ensure that every deeper/indirect method is being called exactly the right number of times with exactly the right arguments and returning exactly the right value. Almost all of the test code is just hacking mock objects. The actual purpose of each test is buried so deep that it's impossible to even understand the business logic being applied.

I hate evangelical "mock testers" with a passion.

Yes, you've got it right.

Aha, what I was looking for was the "Library" popup, which allows drag-and-drop of new components onto the canvas. Now I understand; this latest iteration of Xcode has the code <-> canvas being bidirectional, so using the library or canvas inspector just edits your code anyway! Interesting. I'll have to run through some docs and tutorials to see if I can finally pick up macOS/iOS app development.

I'd be willing to pay, but it's not clear what is included. For an initial look before paying, I downloaded a pirated copy. It only contains the components' html (and alpine, react, vue) snippets, with no extra documentation. If I were to pay for a license, would I get access to log into an account that has a full component browser with examples and extended documentation? If so, can all of that be downloaded as an offline copy, so that it will still be available to me if/when the Tailwind UI product/site is discontinued? Losing access to that important piece of the product would be unacceptable; I suppose I could curl a mirror of the authenticated portal if necessary.

The "simplest" button apparently contains the following ridiculous number of css classes, which is not the kind of css composition I'm a fan of. It may be the most flexible in terms of customization, but it's a nightmare to mentally parse and maintain. I would not want to manage a code base where nearly every html tag looks like this. :/

<button type="button" class="inline-flex items-center px-2.5 py-1.5 border border-transparent text-xs font-medium rounded shadow-sm text-white bg-indigo-600 hover:bg-indigo-700 focus:outline-none focus:ring-2 focus:ring-offset-2 focus:ring-indigo-500"> Button text </button>

I tried to get into it recently, and I couldn't even manage a "hello world" app. The built-in demo/skeleton app creates a text label in code, and that's it. I couldn't even figure out how to get what is now called the "design canvas" to appear; ie. to create a UI visually. I feel like the introduction to Xcode in 2021 is much worse than Visual Basic 6 was 20 years ago. :'(

I remember finding this setting before, for myself and at least half a dozen other people in my life. Not seeing the full URL is something that Mozilla should have fucking understood was something their users want. Firefox is supposed to be the "Good Browser™", which includes technical users configuring the browser for other people in their lives.

Every single goddamn time Firefox tries to bring themselves to being the bottom of the barrel, where "naive users need apply", they alienate their user base and all the other people associated to those users. I know that trying to grab market share seems like an "appease more people in the population", but Mozilla repeatedly seems to forget how much we are evangelical for those who don't even know that Firefox exists. The more they try to dumb down their browser, the more market share they lose. They still haven't learned this, and it completely boggles the mind.

Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again… Mozilla makes the wrong choice in trying to dumb down their browser. I could repeat "over and over" another few dozen times. They need a change in management at some level, because we're back to this dumb crap… again, "over and over again".

> Their UI was somewhat lackluster

I remember looking at ProntonMail 3 years ago, before I settled on Fastmail instead. To be clear, I have no intention of leaving Fastmail; they have the perfect feature set for me, and have been forthright and competent when it comes to publishing details regarding the problems that have cropped up with their service. I have nothing but respect for the Fastmail team. Russia is in the top 3 countries for which the blocking of Fastmail doesn't concern me; no service is immune to this kind of government interference.

That said… just to refresh my memory, and in case anything ever does happen to Fastmail in my country… isn't ProtonMail the one that had the WORST UI I've ever seen, where every click within the settings was a new maze embedded within another maze? I remember the UI for one of these popular and "secure" email hosts being so ultimately gross, as if it was designed and coded by a 10 year old who just discovered HTML with no knowledge of CSS, where it was just pages after pages of checkboxes and radio buttons with no documentation? Was that ProtonMail, or one of the other very few and far between options?

I remember only having looked at a couple of the modern options to cut my ties with Google, and Fastmail was so far above and beyond the other "viable options", such that it wasn't even really a choice. One of the options clearly looked like a lot of low-level work had gone into security, but that it was effectively unusable from the perspective of the users–including admins–who had to contend with its interface?

> there is a pointless weather widget added to my taskbar, and clicking on it opens the news?

I reached the question mark at the end of that sentence… and I felt that single question mark so deep within my soul. Clicking the weather widget opens the news……… "?".

Hahah, that's actually awesome. Of course someone out there put in the leg work to work around the licensing issue, and then shared it to the (minor?) masses.