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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Yes a million times. But it's not even just iCloud -- it's something fundamental to so much Apple software.

The same thing happens to me repeatedly when I'm highlighting PDF's using Books -- every so often, I go back to a PDF and discover multiple pages of my most recent highlights are missing. It saves highlights as you go along, but sometimes for whatever mystery reason, it decides that the version of your PDF from 11:35 is the newest main one, not the one from 11:45.

These problems, of Apple silently overwriting newer content with an older version, have been going on for at least a decade at this point.

And I just don't understand how such a fatal flaw was ever built into the system in the first place, and how it still hasn't been fixed.

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> And I just don't understand how such a fatal flaw was ever built into the system in the first place, and how it still hasn't been fixed.

Because the two hardest problems in software are cache invalidation, naming things, off by one errors, and buffer overflows from a lack of array index enforcement.

Surely a company stuffed with billions of dollars is incapable of solving this either by enabling conflict handling or some ingenious methods.

All those billions of dollars are focused on making sure you can't replace your screen with an aftermarket part.

Indeed it's not like there aren't better solutions out there as shown by dropbox. Just keep both versions for a month and text you a warning.

But what is the fifth problem?

I've had my fair share of highlighting/annotating shenanigans with macOS built-in software and I've found Skim (free, BSD licensed) to be a highly competent replacement, with the only caveat that you have to remember to export the annotated PDFs if you want to be able to see your changes from any other application.

Anyone tired of Apple's contrast-killing orangey background and missing a true yellow color for their highlights should give it a try. (No affiliation, just glad it exists.)

https://skim-app.sourceforge.io/

Interesting point. I have used Apple computers on and off over the years, most recently from 2015- earlier this year. I think you are on to something re: philosophy. On the hardware side I remember when they did away with floppy disks (I'm getting old), optical drives, whole cpu architectures (3x!), etc. They do cut pretty brutally, and I guess when it comes to iCloud this seemingly extends to your files.

I'm not going to say its all bad, but it is less and less my style (the older I get, especially).

The other thing about Apple's software is that it neither fails gracefully nor does it warn the user. They give an appearance of "everything is fine" even when it isn't. They'd rather have an app crash and throw you to the homescreen rather than give an "app not responding" warning.

Why is an “app not responding” message better?

Because it's not gaslighting

Confirms there is a known problem and could provide an option to terminate it

I seem to get such messages on v11.x. I also have applications that occasionally spontaneously exit, which I assume means bad error handling in the app, along the lines of "…else (exit);".

Most of their iCloud infra is built on instances of Cassandra. There’s a good paper on it which I can’t find right now.

Here is some HN on that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33124631

> decides that the version of your PDF from 11:35 is the newest main one, not the one from 11:45.

Wrong clock on some of the servers?

No because it's all local on my device. That's my point -- it's not just an iCloud thing, it's a local thing too.

(And I long ago turned off iCloud for Books hoping it would fix the problem, but it didn't. Which makes me suspect it's some kind of "local mode" for iCloud that's still open to these bugs.)

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