jmbwell

I definitely owe this guy a beer or coffee and hope to have a chance to make good on it.

My daily driver on macOS now for almost a year. Very happy with it.

Used to be, with a scope, you could watch it working

It’s about the change from endeavoring to produce a product people want regardless of profit, to making profit regardless of what people want.

Anyone interested in better understanding a complex system can benefit from a qualified professional’s collaboration, often and especially when an outside perspective can help find different approaches than what appear to be available from inside the system.

Any field has hacks. Telling someone what they want to hear and helping get someone where they want to be are different things. Quality professionals help people reach their goals without judgment or presumption. That goes for mental health professionals as well as any professional field.

The point I was waiting for them to get to was saved for last: entails completion.

Try to do something, you might or might not do it. “I’m going to try to persuade them to decide in my favor.”

Try and do something, you expect to get it done one way or another. “I’m goin down there to try and straighten them out.”

I don’t have a long history of research in this going back to the 1500s, but I grew up in southeast Texas, and this is how I’ve always understood it to be used around here, when it is used with any intention at least.

All of this, plus, writing the documentation before building the app. I remember a Dilbert cartoon making fun of this being about the time I started realizing Dilbert wasn’t as smart as I had thought.

If you can’t write the documentation before you’ve written the code, you don’t understand well enough what you’re building the code for.

It’s one thing to jump into code because it’s fun to write code. But writing code is not designing software, and vice versa.

Same goes for APIs. Writing docs for an API that doesn’t yet exist can help create a much more complete and coherent API.

This is why I’m often trying to help stakeholders understand that the vast majority of software development has very little to do with actually writing code.

Herein also lies a concern I have about AI assisted development. It can be a powerful aid to the design stages, and it can be a powerful aid to writing code, but I’m not sure it enables skipping the design aspects altogether and somehow coming up with a complete, coherent product.

I once had hotel staff show up right after I checked in saying they needed to check on my fridge. They spent a weird amount of time going over it. I hadn’t even looked at it, but it turned out to be one of these. Later I began to suspect they suspected me of messing with it. Now I kinda wish I had been

I’ve run through a bunch of ZXplore and it’s more fun than I expected.

They have it hooked in to VS Code now. It’s weirdly modern. And you get to play on a real z machine.

Recommendable summer/holiday tinkering project. It’s amazing how much and yet how little has changed in computing and transaction processing.

Looking at public profiles is one thing… requiring people to switch their profiles to “Public” so they can be looked at seems like another thing. How is that even enforceable? What if they find some profile that happens to have my name and is private, but isn’t mine? To say nothing of the legitimate reasons to have a private profile in the first place. And who defines “hostility?”

It’s hard not to see this as another “freedom of speech (but only for the kind of speech we like)” situation.

Makes sense. The protocol is certainly local only. And I guess once added, there’s no need to rip HomeKit support out. My iHome devices have been similarly abandoned but still work just fine.

I guess I’m conditioned to expect this stuff to die one way or another when something like this happens. I shall cautiously reframe my expectations…

If they do in fact continue supporting HomeKit, this isn’t the worst way to EOL the product. I’d love to see them all updated to support matter before being put out to pasture, though I’m sure Belkin feels that’s difficult or impossible for some reason.

Nice! I clearly made an assumption that you were an Old like me :D

I figured other way around… Kids These Days might be more likely to have heard of a “flip phone” than “t9” and thus “engage” with this “content”

A wise elder once advised me that if I learned to work quickly and comfortably with an application’s defaults, I would be just as quick and comfortable on any system I would likely encounter. Very zen. Great advice.

I was visiting my kid’s class one day. They were using some YouTube product that seemed oriented at schools, that I’d never seen before. An ad would pop up, and one of the kids (whosever turn it was next?) would run up and tap the skip ad button.

So even if you’re trying to use YouTube for something of value, you’re battling ads. Or at least our kids are.

I appreciate that you are taking the time not only to do the work but to document your experience and share it.

It was pretty easy for orgs with affected systems to produce concrete examples for themselves. Maybe to everyone else it seemed vague, but for the people who had to deal with it, it was taken pretty seriously from top to bottom.

It was thankless work that is still glossed over and waved away today, but it was all a very big deal throughout the late 90s.

I said “Freznul” for Fresnel in front of a lighting designer. He said “ah! So you’ve been reading!”

I remember that now when someone pronounces something as it’s spelled. They’ve likely been studying by actually reading something, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Counteranecdata: I use Orion every day as my daily driver on my work machine, together with Bitwarden for passwords and a couple simple extensions. I can’t remember it crashing or failing to render a page, and at least on my apple silicon machine, it has been very polite with resources.

Trying to use Kagi with other browsers lays bare the depth of collusion between browser makers and search providers. Getting out from under all that makes Kagi a whole lot more seamless and useful.

It’s ironic that it is its own tight collusion, with the difference that you can use Orion just as well with any other search providers as with Kagi.

So yeah, it seems like a departure from search, until you consider that for the features that make Kagi a worthwhile search product (privacy, neutrality, etc), “you can’t get there from here” with the other browsers.

Careening back to inetd and /etc/services …

I'm still in the habit of granting Cloudflare a presumption of good faith. Developers frequently make assumptions about things like browsers that can cause problems like this. Something somewhere gets over-optimized, or someone somewhere does some 80/20 calculation, or something gets copy-pasted or (these days) produced by an LLM. There are plenty of reasons why this might be entirely unintentional, or that the severity of the impacts of a change were underestimated.

I agree that this exposes the risk of relying overmuch on handful of large, opaque, unaccountable companies. And as long as Cloudflare's customers are web operators (rather than users), there isn't a lot of incentive for them to be concerned about the user if their customers aren't.

One idea might be to approach web site operators who use Cloudflare and whose sites trigger these captchas more than you'd like. Explain the situation to the web site operator. If the web site operator cares enough about you, they might complain to Cloudflare. And if not, well, you have your answer.

Is it correct that iCloud backups can lead to officials being able to unlock your physical device? That’s not consistent with my understanding of Apple’s circle of trust implementation.

I get that the backups can potentially be compromised, and of course having the backup means having most of what would be on the phone, but I would love to know more about how having a copy of a backup can compromise the physical device via iCloud.

Thanks, I hate it

No its “intellectual property” “protection” based on some capitalist or whatever ideology

Same thing, different beneficiaries in power

If only things like kids getting shot in their classrooms or people dying while insurance companies profited was as compelling as whatever was in that classified briefing

You gotta go to people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours — Yogi Berra

I’m not saying who or when or whether this ever actually happened, but there were kids in my hometown who would do this but announce to each location “please hold for a call from the regional manager” or something equally officious, then put them on and say something ridiculous but plausible enough to get them going. Ahh a different time.

Allegedly