mercutio2

Digital transit passes work fine for under 13 year olds with iPhones.

Matt Yglesias wants digital transit passes to work on Apple Watch for Kids watches.

This is a much more niche feature, but I agree it’s an annoying Apple Wallet gap. It’s likely a syncing issue; Apple Watch for Kids has a parent’s phone configure the watch in proximity initially, then does most things via sync thereafter, and Wallet isn’t focused on sync.

So MY’s title there is being deliberately provocative.

That raw statement is completely and totally false.

“Not as fully staffed as some people might hope” or “Developer Relations isn’t as responsive as I’d like” are both at least not obviously false.

I’m doing the same!

Do you find that CoreML manages to fill up your drive with so many tiny files that a reboot takes hours to clean them up? I keep meaning to get my friends still inside the spaceship to file a radar about that.

What game are you building?

Of course! About plot, not scenery.

For me, just different, not harder. But maybe the problem is you got some gray blobs, and I got nothing? If anything, my sense is that the absence of imagery makes book reading much easier for me. At least for plot and abstractions.

I'll confess I always skip over the described imagery in most written works, though, so it's not like I'm missing zero.

I do read about 6x faster than my wife, with better recall for the (non-visual) details. Not sure how much of that is my wife reading slow, I have many non-aphantasiac friends who read as fast as I do.

I have a strong sense of the geometry of things, which helps a lot with navigating in buildings.

So when people describe a flattened dodecahedron wrapping into its regular form, I have no trouble conceptualizing (I was going to say visualizing, but it's frankly not at all visual; I got nothing, when it comes to visualizing anything but what's in front of my eyes). But if you ask me to think about alternating solid colors on the dodecahedron, I can't do it.

Clearly there are many different variations on the theme, not just one modal experience! But it's nice to know we're not alone.

“Just” is doing a lot of work in your argument.

The government grocery store tender is filled with exceptionally bad ideas.

When he’s a normal politician doing normal things, he seems great. When he’s sticking to his guns on naive populist things he’s part of a worrying affection for counterproductive government programs.

You don't need to pay Apple $99.

You can make perfectly good apps that run great with a free account. They expire in a week instead of 3 months (for TestFlight builds). That's it. You can redeploy with minimal effort. You have to reauth with Apple every ~30 days. The reauth is the only part of that you can't have a cron job run (you need to authenticate the keychain).

For normie folks, the hoops here are mildly annoying. But if you're someone making vibe-coded apps, we're talking about two scripts and a cron job, here. Or just run Sideloadly, which I hear works pretty well.

There exist reasons to be annoyed by Apple's iOS security posture, but "I can't run my vibecoded apps" isn't an especially good one.

Have you gone around and surveyed Apple corporate employees to gather this insight? I’m amazed that your manager didn’t get a call from Apple security, if so.

They weren't handing out dev fused AVPs in sufficient number for anyone to do this when I left. And Apple software developers rarely buy their own hardware, why would you, when you get most of the hardware for free (and dev fused)?

It is true that buying one for use as an extra monitor was pretty niche at Apple Park. And it’s also true that everyone is crammed into shared offices where it would feel anti-social to be wearing one all the time.

So I’m vaguely aligned with you on the utility to the average dev, but your argument for why makes little sense.

FWIW almost none of my direct reports used HomePods, from your list of freely available devices, and grabbing an iPad for anything other than testing was maybe 50/50. And I don’t think you’d claim the iPad isn’t popular.

Wow. The reactions here. So negative!

I skimmed various sections. I found the animations pleasant, the text readable, and the content clearly not slop.

The historical context of the telegraph was interesting, and the treatment of bandwidth vs. latency was thoughtful.

I think it’s too long; I don’t think many people who don’t already know most of this material will read it, but I enjoyed the parts I read. Nice work!

LEO is not the place to worry about Kessler syndrome.

Mostly, Kessler syndrome isn’t something to worry about at all; there are just a lot of orbital planes available. But in LEO, the mechanics don’t even apply.

For agentic work, you just cache the prefill kv cache of the relevant system prompts. TTFT is a little slow (10s of seconds, oh no!) the first time you boot up a new harness.

I keep hearing people make this claim that TTFT is a problem, and… it just isn’t, if you’re running oMLX.

Folks in my camp keep saying this, and folks in your camp keep beating a drum we tell you isn’t resonating. Not sure why I keep bothering to argue; you can’t buy a high RAM Mac Studio like mine anymore.

This is one of those questions non-parents ask.

Kids come out as a person, with strong opinions and desires. You can shave off some rough edges, and maybe bend a few branches of their experience.

But if you present a kid with the opportunity to read, and they read, you can’t take much credit. That’s just who they are. Others are given the opportunity and don’t.

You can fail to provide the opportunity, but after that, it’s pretty much up to the kid.

As a life long reader, on my own, and to my kid, including many a night time baby -> toddler -> easy chapter -> harder chapter read, my kid doesn’t read books. Certainly competent to do so, but just doesn’t. Possibly we could have continued to deny access to Netflix until later (it was 1 hour a week until about 10). No YouTube allowed. Still, didn’t read. Other kids do, and I’m jealous.

Yup. $1/year is a great price point for avoiding squatters and proving there’s someone paying attention, truly de minimis.

I’m happy with my .xyz domain for my homelab.

Setting up split horizon DNS was more of a pain than I expected, but it works now over headscale.

The pacific northwest’s vast hydro capacity makes it maximally attractive to own an EV. The rest of the country isn’t nearly so lucky.

Before I drove an EV, I drove a 50 mpg Prius. At California prices of ~$4/gallon, that’s $.08/mile.

My post wildfires NEM2 off peak rate for electricity is $.40/kWh. My Bolt gets 4.5 miles/kWh. That’s $.1125/mile.

If I were driving a Tesla it would be worse (my wife’s Tesla lies mercilessly about its range when full; it’s like Elon Musk recapitulates himself; real world it gets about 3.5 miles/kWh), and if I drove a Rivian it would be MUCH worse.

So, in California, it isn’t true at all (mostly because rate payers are funding PG&E’s liability) that the most efficient EVs are cheaper than a good mileage gas car. No where near a 2x advantage (it was better, but not nearly 50%, when I bought it, more like 90% of the gas cost). At no point has it ever been close to 50% cheaper for fuel in California (which, as it happens, sells by far the most EVs).

Generally speaking, I think EV proponents (like me!) should spend a lot less time promoting “it’s cheaper”. It is, in practice, cheaper, because maintenance is cheaper. But Americans don’t care about levelized costs, they care about the highest salience variable expenses, and trying to convince them to do otherwise is a losing argument.

As a committed market-socialist, the extent that the HN commentariat has turned into a reflexively nihilistic anti-free-enterprise is a fairly astonishing turn. It’s like my belief system turned into the maximally idiotic version of itself.

“Externality” is thrown about as a term almost completely disconnected from any economic grounding of the term. If you make externality mean “anything I find aesthetically displeasing”, then yeah, sure, billionaires create and benefit from externalities, if your aesthetic is egalitarian comity.

But if you mean “legitimate societal goals, legislated and agreed on by a representative body” are being violated left and right by billionaires, gimme a break.

Go ahead and tax capital gains way more. Ending the estate step up in basis sounds great. Break up the “borrow” part of buy-borrow-die, while you’re at it, and treat encumbrance on capital as a taxable event, we could probably make that work, too, although the middle class might foam at the mouth if that was applied broadly.

But, man. The cynicism, confiscatory and controlling instincts on display are enough to make me upgrade Ayn Rand from “hypocritical nut” to “maybe she was on to something when the general population gets tall poppy syndrome.”

Markets work. There are externalities, but we can, and should, legislate fixes for social goals that we actually agree on. But stiflingly heavy regulation is really bad for incentivizing creation of new knowledge and wealth. You can still believe in caring about people, and building (incentive aligned) social safety nets without destroying people’s incentive, and thus, because intellectual capital formation depends heavily on network effects, people’s ability, to create many kinds of value in the world.

Actual socialists recognize that capital is incredibly useful, and incredibly valuable. Leveraging capital is incredibly beneficial to the world. Pretending that the people leveraging that capital are somehow guilty of an original sin just by leveraging capital markets, which is really what these screeds against anyone holding controlling interests in companies they were instrumental in creating, seem to be about, leads down a terrible path.

Demonizing people creating things is petty and unbecoming for a political movement.

The idea that 1:1s with devs adding very little value to the team is… pretty wild.

If you think 1:1s don’t add value, your slice of the reality of what even modestly sized teams need to operate smoothly is so far from my experience I don’t think we’re likely to bridge the divide.

But to make a good faith effort: what is the job you think line managers are supposed to be doing, if not listening to devs, going to meetings you would prefer not to sit through, and writing up carefully documented feedback for the under-performers you seem convinced surround you at every turn?

There are many projects where one shot is the right answer!

But surely you aren’t suggesting literally every software project is composed of one-shot-able building blocks, or that the building blocks never require modifications to previous one-shots?

This is orthogonal to the Interchange Fee Settlement.

The settlement allows stores to decline different *classes* of Visa cards. It was always possible to accept Visa but not MasterCard, etc. What was not previously possible was to query, before the transaction “what will the fees be” and reject cardholders presenting high-fee cards from a network you have a relationship with.

That is now allowed, by consent decree. But so far no one is doing it.

Yes, but you’re perhaps missing OP’s point?

Incidence is very much on customers, but (high interchange fee) credit card users are getting a rebate of most, if not all, of that. It’s the cash users who AREN’T getting a rebate, and thus the incidence is on them (and people using other low-or-zero cashback payment methods).

This used to be true. But the 2025 Interchange Fee Settlement abolished the “Honor All Cards” regime. Perhaps, I know it’s crazy, but… perhaps segmenting the market into extremely high-spending customers, normal pay-every-month-relatively-low-fees, and no-frills, was a smart move by the big issuers? My sense is that alienating big spenders (whose interchange fees tend to be in the 4% range) is just not worth it?

All I can say for sure is no store I’ve ever encountered has operationalized the newfound ability to differentially reject some cards yet. I am starting to see grittier establishments offer 5% cash discounts more frequently than they used to, and I’m always happy to pay cash when they do.

But when there’s no discount, why would I forgo better accounting and 3-5% back in points?

Normies very bad at the concept of statistical calibration. News at 11!

But yes, I agree with you that it's surprising to hear people on Hacker News having the 180 degrees wrong impression that the general population appears to have taken away from the one thing normal people care about polling for: during presidential elections.

This is The Way.

I wasn't in the room when it happened, but this is very different than the story told internally about why Apple became allergic to Nvidia.

Arguably more petty. SJ has been dead for almost 15 year now, I imagine the C-suite might get over it at some point.

Cmd-W closes the current *document*. In tabbed apps, the document is the tab.

It is true that Finder is always running, you can’t quit it or kill it.

A 486 in 2003? Pentiums were shipping by the mid-90s, did you just have super old hardware lying around?

I retired my 486 in ‘95 or thereabouts…

Huh? Your conclusion does not follow. A large fraction of the interchange fee is kicked back to customers.

The size of the pie being so much bigger means the issuer’s tolerance for fraud is much larger, but it’s orthogonal to whether there’s actually more fraud. In practice credit cards fraud actually impacting customers is vanishingly rare at this point.

Because adding friction will deter many impulse purchases. Americans use credit cards constantly. The equilibrium would be perturbed in a way very much not advantageous for the credit card issuers if consumers became more cautious about using credit cards.

It’s the same reason credit card issuers are willing to pay Apple a few basis points to participate in Apple Pay: reducing friction has a non-linear impact on propensity to pay.

oMLX makes prefill effectively instantaneous on a Mac.

Storing an LRU KV Cache of all your conversations both in memory, and on (plenty fast enough) SSD, especially including the fixed agent context every conversation starts with, means we go from "painfully slow" to "faster than using Claude" most of the time. It's kind of shocking this much perf was lying on the ground waiting to be picked up.

Open models are still dumber than leading closed models, especially for editing existing code. But I use it as essentially free "analyze this code, look for problem <x|y|z>" which Claude is happy to do for an enormous amount of consumed tokens.

But speed is no longer a problem. It's pretty awesome over here in unified memory Mac land :)