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dwaite

2,772 karma · joined February 27, 2011

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dwaite··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
That isn't really how it works, unfortunately.

The foundation models run on the device for access to the local graph database and to interact with local actions (intents).

Not everything runs locally, but a local model still needs to run to understand that it needs to recruit help, to package up a subset of data for the external agent, and to perform actions on its behalf as well as return results.

Without the local agent, you are shuttling off all your data to be persisted by an AI cloud provider in case they need it.

dwaite··on Kimi K3 (2.8T) at 1 token/s on a MacBook Pro, streamed from four SSDs
I think you are describing JavaScript web frameworks, and before that Java web frameworks.
dwaite··on Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users
it is a window that starts with usage and continues for five hours.

When I was doing an evaluation using a lower paid tier of Claude, I would have a service send a "hello" ping 4 hours before I started my work day, to reduce my first work-hours session window to 1 hour.

The goal was to have this be more of a "thinking" session for planning the next larger block of work, and then being able to use a lower cost model for implementation.

That said, if your 5 hour window quota is 15% of your weekly quota, this means you can be using 30% or more a day of the weekly quota.

dwaite··on Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users
Every project I have tends toward coding agents over time partly for this reason - if nothing else, I want have both control, visibility and portability over memory and a log of the reasoning that went into the current state of things.
dwaite··on Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users
The business model works by over provisioning, which means you actually do want to cap the people who will attempt fully utilize the service.

Once you know someone is going to use 100% of the service rather than 25%, you have to charge them full price. That's why you see them fail over to API pricing.

dwaite··on Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users
Why would it need to match Astra?

Software companies don't give up and fold because they can't hire one of the five best engineers in the world.

dwaite··on Asahi Linux on M3
Hmm, odd listing. Looks like an embedded linux job working on a BSP, but they don't have any hardware I know of which ships with Linux. Even their constrained environments use things like their own L4 variant or RTKit.
dwaite··on Asahi Linux on M3
Apple until a few years ago had killed off all first party monitors because they thought that business line was a distraction.

The challenge isn't finding an engineer. It is picking what project doesn't get done in its place.

dwaite··on Asahi Linux on M3
Also Apple stops supporting the hardware and the software at the same time. The case that Linux support lets hardware be used longer is a harder sell when the company stops manufacturing/stocking parts for servicing at the point where someone would consider Linux.
dwaite··on Asahi Linux on M3
If Apple doubled their Mac revenue, the financial benefit of Linux would remain the same. That means it would then be effectively half as important for their business, but the operational challenges and risks remain the same.

At some point the ongoing maintenance and support as well as coordination and organizational distraction mean it wouldn't get approved if internal engineers offered to start it off for free.

dwaite··on Muse Spark 1.3
is there a reason there are so many common base decorative elements across pelicans on bicycles? For instance, there's a lot hats/helmets and scarfs/capes across models.
dwaite··on Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
> another perfectly reasonable universe where 8 gigs was too much of a compromise and it flopped.

The target audience didn't evaluate that as a limitation - the majority of the market for Apple devices does trust that they will not produce and sell a computer incapable of support their use.

Professionals know there are tasks that a baseline computer cannot handle, and even common tasks that a more powerful computer does better, but those people weren't really the target demo for the laptop.

dwaite··on An ongoing 3D-printer AGPL violation
They also put in anti-reverse-engineering code in Studio, which I believe is also an AGPL violation.
dwaite··on New EU-wide product repair rules come into force
It is a nice thought, but there may not be a ton of effort in starting reverse engineering projects on a full custom silicon stack 7+ years after release (when Apple typically stops supporting hardware)
dwaite··on AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint
It is most likely this: https://wicg.github.io/local-network-access/

For a while there's been an anti-pattern where a piece of software leaves a localhost daemon running (often without proper security) for web integration.

One of the more famous abusers was Zoom: https://infosecwriteups.com/zoom-zero-day-4-million-webcams-...

XSRF vulns also have existed where e.g. a web page can blinding attempt to hit your router's page to change your DNS servers by knowing common router admin sites and default home network topologies. This isn't as useful in today's HTTPS world.

Browsers have been adding more partitioning between local and internet resources to prevent this sort of thing. But that does mean simply putting localhost entries in a hosts file to blackhole a site can now cause an issue.

dwaite··on Generic Methods in Go 1.27
Java has its own problems with generics, such as the near-lack of runtime representation or the lack of a This/Self type, as well as limited variance, leading to signatures like `public abstract class Enum<E extends Enum<E>>`.

IMHO these all go back to design compromises due to the desire to make generics optional - but now, over two decades later, are Java generics really optional?

The ten levels of parent classes is its own issue with Java - with interfaces and class inheritance being a good half of your mechanisms for abstractions in the code base, with adapters making up the other half.

dwaite··on Apple announces changes for apps in the European Union
I assume you mean on an open hardware platform, because underneath Apple's SDKs are just more Apple APIs until you get to Apple's IPC interfaces to talk to Apple-designed hardware register interfaces.

Unfortunately when it comes to technology licensing, it is rarely successful to say you should pay less because you purposely made your job harder.

dwaite··on Apple's App Tracking Transparency treated its own apps better than rivals
But you likely feel somewhat comfortable with them if you purchased an iPhone.

Purchasing an iPhone self-selects people who are comfortable with the idea of the features it is marketed as having, such as being able to take, store and manipulate photos out of the box.

This is also an issue primarily because there is no third-party photo picker extension point. A third party only gets photo picker support if they store their photos into the Photos library. If third party photo apps could have similar integration points based on them maintaining their own first-party library, they would not need to ask permission to manipulate another program's data store.

dwaite··on Controversial creators are benefiting from monetization programs run by Meta
The problem is not speech but amplification.

Facebook wants to get that speech in as many rooms as they can, because they figured out a way to profit off of the emotional reaction of the people who were already there. They offer free hosting for community groups of all sorts in order to bring people to the rooms they can profit from.

dwaite··on Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal from 2005
I actually consider the Sony BMG rootkit as the beginning of commercial malware. The antivirus companies knew it existed, but did not flag it partially because it was by a legitimate company with a legal department, and not an unknown developer or dubious organization like viruses up to that point.
dwaite··on The myth of Snow Leopard
One big source of both delays and bugs is the feeling that your work (which has compatibility impacting changes) _has_ to make it in the current release, because otherwise it will languish for years until the next train leaves.

Likewise, if a fix requires a behavioral change that impacts third party developers, that fix may not feasible to deploy until the next release. Apple had some pretty fundamental things like Cocoa outline views broken for multiple years because the fix required API changes.

dwaite··on SwiftUI After 7 Years
Would they want to?

If you were to build a system with no requirement for backward compatibility with cocoa or macOS, or even knowledge from such a thing existing, we have still moved forward three decades from not just NeXT, but the computing industry that NeXT was built to serve.

I'd assume their requirements would be drastically different, and the system they created would be drastically different as a result. The requirements aren't even easy to hypothesize, since iOS would never have existed.

dwaite··on SwiftUI After 7 Years
> and leave the archaic and the weird things behind.

The number one archiac/weird thing was message passing instead of methods. Number two was square brackets for message passing.

What would be left of Objective-C once these were left behind?

> and it is failing to gain any traction outside iOS / Apple's ecosystem.

Objective-C was on a path to gain serious traction outside of the Apple ecosystem?

dwaite··on JEP 401: Value Objects (Preview) merged to OpenJDK master
It is enabled by default in STP, so presumably it will launch alongside the 27 releases.

Note Temporal was in the Ecmascript 2026 release back in March.

dwaite··on Opaque, Interoperable Passkey Records (and a Go API)
I was unclear on that as well. WebAuthn uses an extended form of the U2F format, such that if you don't use any of the new features or extensions the two are binary compatible with compatible signatures.

So the U2F bits like authenticator data are in a bespoke format using section lengths, while the newer features and extensions are CBOR.

One could translate the bespoke bits to CBOR, but care would be needed if you want to round-trip back to the bespoke format (e.g. so that attestations could be verified in the future off of the registration record.) Since CBOR isn't really as usable as say JSON as being an abstract object access API, and since CBOR is going to take up more space, I don't think this would really provide value over leaving it in the WebAuthn format for tooling to work on directly.

dwaite··on Shinjuku Station in 3D
The problem I would typically have (not just in Shinjuku) was with directions that did not repeat/update as you continued on through junction points. It made navigation more stressful.
dwaite··on Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future
How much internal storage do you use for your full feature video editing, vs attached/network attached storage?
dwaite··on Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future
Apple has plenty of enterprise-specific features.

From a historic standpoint though Apple came back from near-death because they differentiated by focusing on the consumer first.

While other companies were recycling the same beige boxes meant to be tucked under desks for home use, Apple came out with products in candy colors.

While Microsoft was rolling out new business process tool SKUs, Apple came out with GarageBand and bundled it in for free.

Apple is not the company prioritizing going after a Fortune 500 company to replace their fleet with Macs. So their focus isn't going to be to design products and features to try to get that deal closed.

dwaite··on Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future
> Apple seriously thought the iPad would replace computers

...for some users. See their "Mac is a truck" analogy.

And it has. My parents haven't owned a Windows or Mac machine in six years, since they got rid of the one I gifted to them a decade ago. Its all iPad and iPhone.

dwaite··on The unbearable cheapness of open weight models
Where's a few good places to go to learn more about open weight models, both running hosted and running locally?
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