Great read, with some amusing asides.

Shots fired!

We probably have the same model - the one with the big oval stand. Every once in a while I wish it was OLED and/or higher resolution, but it’s not worth the expensive or all the modern “features” such as these.

There are some Linux users with iPhones, perhaps that’s what they meant?

Apple is almost the tale of two companies.

From the software usability perspective, they have the “it just works” reputation and that might be true if you’re doing really basic stuff. I’ve found both windows and Linux to be much more user friendly if you want to do mildly advanced things.

Their hardware is generally pretty solid but comes at a premium, especially once you start talking about increasing RAM/SSD capacity. I have both a MacBook pro M3 pro and a Snapdragon X Elite Lenovo Yoga slim 7x. The 7x can give great battery life, but is much more inconsistent in doing so. On the other hand, the 7x has an amszing 3k OLED screen, has a removable m3 SSD, and you can upgrade to 32 GB of RAM for around $100.

What I find interesting is that a large swath of developers have macs. I get it for some use cases (ARM emulation on ARM vs doing it on x86), but it seems like it’s a bit of a status symbol for others.

Clearly you’ve never used a Mac. It wasn’t until 2024 that you could snap windows, they have a built in dark mode but the word processor that ships with their computer requires you to use a dark page template if you want black background/white text, and lord forgive you if you want to take a screenshot.

Their low power compute hardware, very compact form factor, and OS/apps are the selling points.

There are both commercial and DIY alternatives, but I am not aware of any that really check all three boxes quite as well.

When my disk station eventually dies I’ll go the DIY route but that doesn’t mean I’ll be excited to do so.

I ran into this at work today. Proposed a very simple approach for something to an architect and an engineering lead. Engineering lead said this was a practical solution that solves a problem that’s been plaguing them for two years. The architect nearly immediately said, “well, the real source is a mainframe that was stood up in the very early 80s. Let’s ignore the fact that changing it takes an act of Congress or that we have multiple modern downstream systems between it and us that are a much better home for this new function.”

It really seemed to amount to, “I didn’t come up with this, therefore I don’t support it.”

Ah, corporate politics.

The old “privacy focused” setting made speech processing local. The new “privacy focused setting” means that processing will happen on a remote server, but Amazon won’t store the audio after it’s been processed. Amazon could still fingerprint voices with the new setting, to know if it was you or your parents/parter/kid/roommate/whomever and give a person specific response, but for now at least they appear to not be doing so.

This all seems like it’s missing the point to me. If you own one of these devices you’re giving up privacy for convenience. With the old privacy setting you were still sending your processed speech to a server nearly every time you interacted with one of those devices because they can’t always react/provide a response on their own. Other than trying to avoid voice fingerprinting, it doesn’t seem like the old setting would gain you much privacy. They still know the device associated to the interaction, know where the device is located, which accounts it’s associated with, what the interaction was, etc. They can then fuse this information with tons of other data collected from different devices, like a phone or computer. They don’t need your unprocessed speech to know way too much about you.

more than in any other industry that I have seen

I dunno, I work in auto and let me tell you some things. Granted, I’ve never worked in aviation.

That’s fair.

It’s one of the biggest repositories of human-to-human communication on the web.

I am showing my age and have spent decades on various web forums. These sites have thousands, or even tens of thousands, of users and huge quantities of threads some of which can be very deep. Yes, each individual site isn’t that big but there are tons of these things scattered around the web and I’m sure they’ve been crawled. One of the many, many, many manymanymany Ford Mustang forums has > 2 million replies. thirdgen.org, an 80s-early 90s Camaro/Firebird, forum has 763,427 threads with 6.45 million replies going back easily 20 years, which is well before bots.

Discord does have 154M monthly users, so you’re probably right that there is more content there than across all the various boards. It’s also probably a heck of a lot easier to crawl than a bunch of different web forums.

I don’t see that being worth much $$ given the massive quantities of that information already available on the web via forums and what not?

Lots of very general light chat and shit posts. It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of revenue potential there.

Moving from enshitified closed source to a different closed source that’s trying to position itself as user first isn’t necessarily bad.

Duckduckgo’s browser uses webview as it’s main engine, which means that on a phone it will simply use blink (chromium) on Android and Windows device or webkit on Apple devices.

This issue isn’t automatic brightness, it’s OLED, which can selectively light portions of the screen, vs LCD, which has the whole screen at the same brightness all the time and blocks light.

A LCD with a global light source won’t benefit from dark mod. A LCD with more localized lighting will benefit some. An OLED will benefit the most.

This probably isn’t a popular option, but a lot of the recent hate on Microsoft have been standard practice for Apple for a long time.

Windows 10 free update length? 10 years. Mac? 5-7 years.

Baked in cloud backup? Yeah, Apple has been doing that for a while and a lot of things go to the cloud by default. If you have an iPhone or iPad, things you download go to iCloud by default.

It seems like Microsoft is trying to follow Apple’s model.

I do get not wanting to support windows 10 anymore. The CPU limitations on Win 11 are very dumb, but it’s something Apple has been doing for decades. I will be installing mint on my old desktop.

I give them less grace with OneDrive. That rollout has been very naggy and shitty.

As a recent modern Mac user, this experience is so bizarre and is always a little different.

I grew up on macs (thanks mom) and built a PC as soon as I had my first real job in highschool. I recently bought a MacBook for the promise of battery life and cool running. If only it was easier to get my arm windows laptop to boot Linux…

Genuine question: do they make money from AOSP being used on third party devices? Obviously they get revenue via the Play store, but you can avoid that by either installing something like graphine or an alternative store (Fdroid, Amazon, etc).

We have a test environment but it’s a hot mess. All the data is made up and extremely low quality. All the things you would normally interface with are also in test, but getting other teams to coordinate testing in the test space is… a chore. We do the best we can with mock services, but without having real services or representative data some of the data pattern assumptions don’t play out. Leaders value writing code and our lack of architects that span teams mean that when team architects either don’t meet ahead of time, make assumptions, or don’t ever agree on a design then…

We always host UAT. We also track logins. Guess how many users even show up for UAT, let alone actually click on anything.

This is why the vast majority of our testing happens in prod when our users are doing real work.

Sorry for the baby rant :)

This can also be one of the frustrating parts of open source.

Find something you don’t like? Fix it. Will the repo owner approve your pull request? Who knows. Maybe they’re a bit absentee. Maybe they view the original behavior as working as designed. Maybe your design doesn’t fit their architectural model, so they’ll (eventually) heavily refactor your changes and merge them in.

You can always stand up a fork, but keeping those two at feature parity and going in the same general direction can become harder and harder with time.

That’s not to say not to try! But it also means reaching out to the repo owners/maintainers before making your first change.