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Never mind "vibecoding" (whatever it is) - quite a few free, paid or subscription apps can actually be improved for your own purposes by recreating them in a spreadsheet.

Could it actually be significantly lower than $5? Isn't the real benefit not the money, but that the payment creates a bit of friction plus a paper trail tied to an individual?

You could then build a reputation system, much like a spam blocklist, using some sort of hash of the payment details.

Hmm - that's a point. Thanks.

> IRL you can actually grab the middle of the plate to move it

Really wouldn't recommend it though, all sorts of consequences for the food (if present), your hand, the hygiene of the plate and potential damage to underlying surfaces. Generally preferable to pick it up and put it down again.

It's not just that I haven't upgraded my Mac, but also I'm actively avoiding buying a new or refurbished one until (if) they fix all this stuff, because there will be no way to downgrade to an earlier version…

Although I don't use iNaturalist that often (because I don't want the hassle of photographing the species I definitely know) I'm always conscious of the fact it has a relatively modern stack (Rails and PostgresSQL) whereas iRecord is still limping along on Drupal (very sub-optimal DB schema and quite a few front-end annoyances due to module limitations).

Firstly, I really liked the way you wrote your blog post.

FWIW, I experimented with dark theme extensions (paid and free) and gave up on them after a while: it just all felt a bit too clunky and unreliable, the flashes of unstyled pages were annoying too.

I've now standardised (this is in Firefox) on a combination of:

- Reader mode

- a very simple extension that allows per-domain custom CSS…

- …and another that lets you disable Javascript completely per site (which adds a bit of security, generally improves the experience, including the side effect of removing cookie popups.)

If this really is attributable to ADHD (and I’m sceptical) perhaps the opposite is those of us with (very mild, undiagnosed) OCD who insist on cleaning our tabs up several times a day?

I can fully understand “hoarding” for people who don’t understand how tabs work, or that they can slow things down/get in the way, so don’t realise (on iOS Safari for instance), they have dozens of old tabs in the background.

What I don’t understand is:

(a) as I see it, surely the default behaviour is… you’re working on some project or other, gradually accumulating more and more tabs, the space for each starts to get a bit small, you can’t tell what they are, you know you don’t need most of them, your computer starts to feel a bit sluggish (and frankly something will be hogging memory, I can’t imagine how bad it would get with hundreds of them, never mind figures like 7,800 in the comments) so… therefore “oh I have too many tabs open, let’s close a few / them all”

(b) why don’t more people make use of History? That’s got me out of a hole many times, especially as I can often remember roughly when looked at something and Firefox offers a filtered search by page title.

c) Tab Groups make my head hurt every time I’ve tried to use them, it feels like more effort organising the groups, and knowing that sooner or later i will place a tab in The Wrong Group, and then I have to move it to the correct one, and mentally debate if I should even still have that group at all, get distracted by the stuff in those tabs instead of what I should be working on etc.

Some Moleskine cahier notebooks are wrapped in a paper sleeve that has a ruler printed on the back. Inches on one edge; centimetres on the other (a slight improvement for non-American users over Field Notes notebooks, with a ruler on the inside back cover that’s inches only - also the sleeve is rather longer, 28cm in fact).

EDIT: hmm, actually the screenshots on Apple.com show a card with a chip, so how come contactless doesn’t work? Deliberately disabled?

—-

Wearing my ecology hat, you could argue if barely any of their customers will use it for contactless, then it’s a waste of resources manufacturing a chip.

(Of course there are plenty of other areas of Apple’s business where they thoroughly undermine this - persuading people to buy wireless in-ear headphones, iPads that have so much glue inside when you ‘replace’ the battery they just give you a new device because it’s too much hassle etc.)

Or… maybe insisting on using Titanium means it’s an PITA adding a chip as well, versus plastic? (At least one of my UK cards claims “made from 100% recycled plastic” now).

(UK reader here too).

You could well be right, though I have a couple of theories why they Apple haven't rolled it out here:

- maybe they think it'll just be too messy, having to market different cashback reward rates and so on for the US and UK, due to the capped interchange fees - too much "it's not fair" style moaning like everyone did about Black Friday, even though we don't even celebrate Thanksgiving here.

- Apple have somewhat de-prioritised UK/Europe generally given their dealings with the EU

- (as others have hinted) most banks simply aren't interested

From the outside it does seem as though there was basically nothing in it for Goldman Sachs, other than perhaps useful spending data (they must surely have got some data, regardless of Apple's privacy claims) and a bit of industry prestige for being the ones to work with Apple?

What's also sad about this is all the e-waste; everything is massively over engineered, loads of unnecessary radio chips, having to build it all to handle pairing, wifi logins, firmware upgrades etc.

Yes.. bought a Miele Complete C3 Auto Comfort Boost getting on for a decade ago. Really nicely designed. The one bit of 'questionable' tech it has is a remote control in the handle for power and controlling the suction level.

However you quickly realise that's logical, as otherwise you'd need a second cable, or to embed it in the tube somehow.

What's less defensible is not duplicating the +/- buttons on the vacuum itself, so if the coin cell battery fails you can only turn it on and off.

There's a lot of interesting stuff in here – e.g. the Polish trains and the ventilators.

Though I wish he'd tone it down a little occasionally. (This is why I'm not an activist.)

It's interesting as for the first time I've found myself mildly encumbered by DRM, notably some old Apple FairPlay files I bought prior to 2007 (or 2009) - which I can't play in non-Apple software.

But these are minor inconveniences compared to servicing costs of trains, tractors and so on, which get passed on to the rest of us indirectly.

I'm not sure if "disenshittificatory" will ever catch on. I'd propose d17n for disenshittification, except there's already a d18n for a project that masks sensitive fields in databases..

On the one hand, this was a lab based study, so doesn't reflect their diet in the real world.

Let's hope nothing further up the food chain eats crickets in large quantities. You know, like birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, inverts...