Listened to DHH on The Primeagen’s The Standup podcast - talking about how Macs are complete trash and can’t be used “for agents”. Like a dumb marketing droid parroting some inane talking points his VP has come up with to sound “AI relevant”.
DHH has always been a contrarian who speaks highly confidently in extremes. He does well in topics where he can show up and act like a beacon of sane and helpful takes in a world where everyone other than him is wrong.
Some times he’ll find a clear wedge topic and hook his message to that, appealing to people on one side of the wedge.
At other times he’ll manufacture some strawman arguments and present them as indisputable facts that he’s revealing to you, dear listener, as a trusted guide who has seen the light.
His sudden flip to being anti-Mac after years of being pro-Mac follows the pattern. He had some small real grievance at some point and saw an opportunity to become known for Omarchy, so he flipped to extreme takes like “Macs are complete trash” and saying weird things like how they can’t be used for agents.
I mean, I used Mac on ~every machine i touched for about a decade, got annoyed and haven't touched one in ~5 years now. It's not unheard of.
About calling Mac trash, I think he should have added “for engineers”. I like/use macOS and Omarchy both and they are meant for different audiences.
Whatever the merits of MacOS, and there are many, it is not the paradigm there that all your system settings and config are stored in text files. That's what he was talking about.
For example: https://macos-defaults.com/
I’m not watching a 31 minute video on X to figure out what this is about. Theo is another influencer who thrives on being contrarian, embellishing negative claims about things he’s not pumping right now, and trying to get everyone to ignore negative things about what he is pumping. I would not trust his judgment on topics like this without some third party benchmarks and deeper claims because the first priority of influencers in this category is to be contrarian and ride divisive topics. Being factually correct is secondary.
I use nix on macOS and any time it's making changes to /nix/store, the Finder and fsevents processes peg cpu.
IIRC his video shows fs-heavy ops like file deltions and pnpm install taking much longer on a macbook despite better specs.
Frankly, things like the lack of a universal cmd-c/v clipboard on linux has been 1000x worse for usability than slower bulk fs.
Maybe not, but the agent can call `defaults write` too, no?
This is inherently untrue. A .plist in XML is nothing but text. It might be formatted text, but it is still text nonetheless, like almost every other configuration file in existence.