bayindirh

I have paid a relatively big price for a software which does a simple thing: Drawing diagrams. The application? It's called OmniGraffle Pro. That simple looking program drawing diagrams can do flowcharts to scaled architectural or industrial diagrams and everything in between.

Try replicating it with a couple of agents. Not the capabilities, but the performance, stability and dependability and sustainability as well.

Same is true for my favorite text editor on macOS, BBEdit, or IDE of choice, Eclipse. I can increase the number of examples.

These tools are valuable not because they are expensive. They are valuable, or indeed priceless, because of the polish they have. The small features make no sense for a beginner or how they cope when things get absurdly haywire.

Immediate features make us excited and they are easier to replicate because they are visible, but things like performance, dependability, error recovery or the small tweaks they have gone through in the last decade are not, and this is what matters.

We're exploring computing via AI again, and we act as that we did nothing in the last 60 years or so. Software and computing is much deeper than it looks at the surface, and we'll learn this in a very very painful way, again.

I'm slightly aware of that, but I'm not sure how this works in real life where almost half of the "native" applications in macOS are Electron apps.

The worst part is, the value they get (monies) is not the same value you get (worse health all over).

Any app can has its extensive set of keyboard shortcuts, but when it comes to DE itself, it's not always the case.

Microsoft has Meta+ and Alt+ combinations dime a dozen, and it's consistent across versions. KDE has extensive programmability which allows you to design you own. Both allows you to pack so many features into a small number of keys and work across applications or in general without thinking.

A terminal? It appears. A window? You call it without thinking. Ran out of space, a new desktop is just an instinct...

> It wasn't that long ago they had terrible keyboard lifespans which...

Yes, their butterfly switch keyboards were really bad. I skipped that generation. I own machines from 2006, 2014 and 2020.

> and overheating CPUs which limited performance way behind spec...

Apple unfortunately does this sometimes, but interestingly just before changing CPU architectures (Power to Intel, Intel to ARM). I sometimes think whether it was semi-intentional. I don't blindly support them, however.

> that is the basic usability of the system and window manager (sway), which is something Apple will never match until we meaningfully switch interaction paradigms.

I'm way faster in my Debian + KDE system as well, but portables are always secondary machines for me, so Mac doesn't bother me much.

Also, I like running different operating systems and paradigms at the same time, so I can learn from all of them while developing some stuff for myself and others. However, as I said multiple times over the years, macOS is the "alternative" OS for me, not the primary one. Linux has that part for the last 20+ years.

a UNIX distro which interfaces well with Linux. A fact which makes life way easier in the interoperability department.

Same is possible in KDE. Combined with hot corners, you can become "blazingly fast".

Once a colleague seeing me work looked at my screen, lifted his head and pointed to my colleague saying "Have you seen how this guy work, he's a maniac!".

Mastering the tool you have always brings speed and smoothness into your process, one step at a time.

> but that is a small price to pay for an everyday peace of mind.

Running an AMD card on my Dekstop system. It's invisible as an Intel on-board graphics card, and this is a great thing.

Much greater than rebooting to a black screen because NVIDIA decided to not support your GPU anymore because it finished its economic life for the company, not you.

Also don't forget calibrated screens, great speakers, long-life (you can use one for a 7-8 years without even trying), and durable keyboards which doesn't become smeared wear-fests which defaces itself within a single heavy development session.

I always run Linux (Debian primarily) on my desktops and servers with a zealot-ish dedication, but what Mac and macOS brings to the table as a portable machine is irreplaceable with anything else.

Even a top end ThinkPad with a well groomed Linux distribution can't come close, sorry.

And you know what? That's OK! I don't expect my list of choices match other people, or dictate theirs in any capacity.

I'm just putting forward my perspective and choices, which are also not made of granite and subject to change to the scenario, needs and possibilities in any given moment.

I strongly advocate people work the way they feel comfortable happy. Because (even if slow), it's smooth, and smooth is fast.

> But whether this type of work will remain necessary in the long term im not sure.

Any and every capability AI can demonstrate today is the result of us, humans doing it in the first place for a very long time. The transfer method of these abilities is a subject of another comment, but as Microsoft and NVIDIA puts it, it's a theft of unprecedented scale [0].

AI labs dream of recursive self improvement as an escape from that, but until we arrive there, humans have to do something so AI can do it as well.

And, as of fully autonomous self driving which should have arrived 5 years ago, RSI and AGI is just around the corner, a corner with a radius so large that it never ends.

We dream of building utopias with these tools, but it's a path to dystopia paved with stones made from utopic dreams.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752056

> What will have been lost? Perhaps just "The pleasure of finding things out".

I'll kindly disagree on this front, because when I'm walking a path toward solving a solution, I mark a lot of steps for possible diversions to other paths hence solving adjacent or different problems with the method I have at hand.

Currently, AI takes us from A to B, and is improving on that front. However, the paths in science are not lines, but a trees. Methods are cross-pollinated from each other.

Human intuition enables this cross-pollination. AI works with a laser focus. Human intuition and resulting wide perspective sow the seeds for solutions in many areas at once.

I don't think so. Selectively running tests is not in my top 100 reasons to use an IDE list, even.

I like IDEs for all the code insight they provide. Running a named tests by typing its name is not a nuisance by any measurable distance (for me).

It's not my own IP, but our IP block. As an institution we have a couple of big networking related hats, so we have a couple of B blocks (/16 networks) for ourselves. The IP was from one of these blocks.

However, these network operations (and CDN related stuff) are not managed by us, but by a couple of high profile guys next door. I knew we had an Akamai node, because the machines were shipped recently and we had a chat about it.

Funnily, some of the performance optimizations on Akamai's disk access algorithms (SSDs were not dime a dozen back then, so people were still optimizing for spinning drives) was apparently developed by a friend of mine, but I don't know any details about that.

Didn't UK had "The Snooper's Charter" as well?

Encryption backdoors is not a case of extending reach for a government, but an effort to get the capabilities back.

They were able to do that before. They just want to be able to continue now.

Note: No, I don't support the idea of backdoors. On the contrary.

When you have barely the upstream bandwidth to send the ACK stream of your downloads, anything sending something becomes a big burden on your system.

Not everyone has the luxury of fully symmetric internet connections even in this age. Yes, my uplink speeds are absurd when compared to a decade ago, but when I ratio it to my downlink, it's still slow.

I have no comment on residential proxies. Somebody doing something in my name is unacceptable to put it very mildly.

For me, both are equally impressive actually. Europe has some great clean-energy countries.

Interestingly Turkey passed 50% mark apparently. That's also an out of left field revelation for me.

> China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.

Despite all of that, Electricitymaps predicts that they can generate 48% of their total energy from carbon-free sources at noon-hours.

Now, this is impressive, despite building 50 new coal plants in 2025 alone.

> Climate Change is a big industrial-complex.

Can you tell us more about it, honestly, sounds interesting.

Because it'll create value.

Value which won't bring anything to anyone. I mean, a couple of people can be more richerer, but we and them won't have a planet to spend or enjoy these theoretical riches at the end.

So, no biggie.

You implement something essential in a different programming language, tout that it's better than its GPL counterpart, and lobby for a change.

For me, the biggest example is uutils. Started as a "homework", then turned into a "hobby project", then turned into a complete Rust rewrite of the GNU Coreutils. It even once touted they were planning to replace all util-linux as well. When you look into uutil org, it's a systemd-like project with tons of sub-projects.

For the lobby part, the same project touts "Debian might switch, soon". Debian-developers got angry, created a pull request to remove that line from the site, it just got denied, and the maintainer lashed out "This is my site, this is my project, don't bug me". The relevant thread starts at [0].

This is not always with AI, but companies can use AI to license-wash something with a "reverse engineer this, and reimplement it in X" type of prompts.

Chardet has been relicensed in a hostile manner as well [1] [2].

[0]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/06/msg00315.html

[1]: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177

Oh, story time:

Once I was using Blizzard's downloader to install something (StarCraft, Diablo, I don't remember), and it was kinda slow. I disabled P2P downloads and speed skyrocketed, and I said "Huh, this was unexpected".

When P2P downloads disabled you could see the list of CDNs you're downloading from and mine had a single IP on that list. It looked familiar. Then it dawned on to me. It was the Akamai server which we were hosting in our system room, at 15 minutes of driving distance. After a chuckle, I went to get a cup of tea, because that was entertaining than the game itself.

Then of course, I dived into whatever I was installing that night.

Edit: From the screenshots in the wiki, I remembered that the progress bar was red. It was possibly Diablo 3, then. However, I'm still not 100% sure about it.

Looks like you have some reading to do. Let me start with two:

    - The Machine Stops
    - Pump Six

These are short stories. If you want to get into more stuff, you can go through Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons.

For anyone wondering, yes, a good Sci-Fi novel(la) is also a great philosophical piece. It's not only robots vs. humans, all the time.

> ... it is basically turning any software into Free Software.

And the opposite is true, as well. Many groups with deep pockets are rewriting Free Software packages with permissive licenses to kill the GPL counterparts, so the companies can sell closed source software built on the effort of thousands.

So it's not all pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows.

Drobpox has an AI backend running on their own clusters. IOW, Dropbox runs their own local models, integrated to their offerings. As their AI offerings get more features, I believe they want to be on the safe side, so they increased the age limit.

I don't understand this mentality. Growth must be explosively exponential or things are bad, so company must sell out, close shop and go.

So, Google should sell Google Drive, Box shall close down, PCloud must cease to exist, Mega shall sell itself to a three letter agency a-la Crypto AG, Sugarsync shall vanish, etc...

Yet we are here. These are all stable products chugging along.

Depends. I'm a huge fan of Eclipse (yes, that one) and use it heavily for my C++ and Python projects, yet I have no problems with hitting a couple of more keys to run some named tests when required (i.e. Go).

When I'm in my flow state, I find reaching for a pointing device is taking longer than typing something in, BTW. Keyboard driven interfaces and terminals are underrated.

You can run any number of named tests, from what I understood?

The pricing got very complicated, that part is true. On the other hand, service quality didn’t go down. They added many small features which makes things easier, on the other hand.

I use a bunch of additional services they offer. They work well, make me spend less money and save my time (e.g.: send, transcription, advanced sharing controls).

We’re about the same age, probably. On this side of the pond, all of this stuff was rooted in inability to get something legally first, and if it was possible to get, it was prohibitively expensive to buy for us. So we got it for “free”. The thing is we were not using the software to earn money, so companies don’t care (this what I heard from a couple of companies directly). Music was in a similar position.

It was a righteous moral stand because we wanted to get things relatively affordable for us.

I for one prefer to buy my software and music nowadays, because it’s affordable and I can get it at the quality I want.

For your other question, the answer is probably 1800s, because the current model was not entrenched everywhere and creators had sane rights for what they created. So creators had to get what they made out to masses to show it, but lost their rights in relatively shorter times, so things were free to use for everyone. So you can’t excessively milk something till proverbial eternity.