mistersquid

> The resolution is literally 1 line of code that could be arrived at in about 30 minutes of patient, old school troubleshooting.

This critique (if it can be termed such) admits that the code itself has little value especially compared to the work of “30 minutes of patient, old school troubleshooting”.

In my past experience, developers who critique more-junior colleagues in this way work better in isolation than as part of a team because working as part of a team would require mentoring colleagues through the often difficult process of troubleshooting.

Giving “the team an exact solution on a silver platter” may not be helpful if implementation depends on knowledge withheld because one does not have the resources, ability, or motivation to mentor.

Something about giving a fish rather than teaching to fish comes to mind.

New Apple Polishing Cloth folds, unquestionably ultra lux.

Does it stack up to Apple Polishing Cloth 1 though? [0][1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvvyTXacSzg

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEpe6RdEFxk

> You’re absolutely right to be hopeful. Three honest possibilities, and I’ll be straight with you about each:

> [UGC styled humorously as LLMisms]

All joking aside, having interacted with Claude intensely for the last 8 months and about 30 hours/week in the last 3, I’ve started to notice how (for want of a better word) “readable” (“digestible” ? “comprehensible” ? “Predictable” is the wrong direction.) information chunked into LLM-shaped pieces are for me.

I can digest LLM-shaped pieces of data very easily probably because I’ve been spending too much time with Claude, sure.

But the other side of this is that the entire human species (using LLMs) is similarly being trained to digest interrelated pieces of information/data in these specific shapes, akin to how philosophical assertions can be formulated as a syllogism and, thus, become more readily understood because of familiar epistemological cadence and shape.

Many people reject such copy/prose/data because they detect AI-generated-so-not-worth-human-attention, but I do wonder if this is preparing many millions of loosely (and tightly) associated humans and their organizations to quickly exchange and digest information.

This is not to say current LLMisms are the end, only that such detectable patterns in information delivery will make comprehension and communication more efficient (as well as more limited precisely because of such structure).

/philosophical musings about the epistemological implications of LLM-shaped conversation tics

> I self-published a historical fiction book a couple of years ago, in French, that got a little notoriety […].

Was it bad or scandalous, or did you mean “renown” instead of “notoriety”?

Seems threads about local LLMs on Apple hardware feature comments listing M3/4/5 at 48GB 64GB and not 128GB.

That is, users with M-series hardware that have less-than-max RAM share results whereas users with max RAM do not.

Speculating (not extrapolating), maybe users with machine that have max RAM are less interested in running local LLMs and are less averse to paying services for compute?

Personally, I’d love to see what output max RAM M-series Apple hardware in these threads.

> > One of them was […] a Gen Z developer who did not personally own a computer (besides a phone).

> > I was floored. Still am.

> Why?

My personal computer is how I learned to be a software developer and how I continue to improve as one. So, it astonishes me that a software developer by trade doesn't own a personal computer.

To help separate my reaction from my personal bias (yeah, not possible), think about how you might feel upon discovering a professional cyclist who did not own a personal bicycle.

> Just that fact that the company expects a candidate to even have their own machine is egregious.

In the company where I work (in recent history, the most valuable company on the planet), there are younger employees who do not own personal computers.

One of them was (with different company now) a Gen Z developer who did not personally own a computer (besides a phone).

I was floored. Still am.

The promo website is something to behold and by itself is sufficient reason to chuck a buck at the possibility of Altar II coming into existence.

Thank you, good luck, and looking forward!

> But to get these from junior and senior engineer for the areas they work in and expect someone else to read it for them? It’s crazy behavior. How can someone serious even think that’s ok.

Deciphering error messages can be a bit of an arcane art, at times impenetrable to all except the authors of a system. Understanding the patterns exposed in such messages and, thereby, deriving their meaning is not always clear even to experienced developers.

Engineers reaching out to you (humans) to explain the output of an LLM haven't fully internalized how to interact with LLMs. When an LLM's output is beyond one's immediate grasp, one can _ask the LLM_ to further break down its output, to explain the concepts and symbols that inform its response.

Personally, I have asked LLMs to draw charts and comprehensively simplify their output, often providing cognitive signposts that "I'm confused" about some aspect of what its reporting.

In other words, some people, including engineers with various lavels of experience, don't yet fully understand the implications of the open-eneded interface that language provides with LLM interaction.

> piranha: carnivorous fish

Nice callout.

Neither here nor there, but many (most?) fish are carnivorous.

> There's one more: The "bicycle for the mind" analogy was one Jobs chose specifically in reference to the fact that a human on a bicycle moves more efficiently than a human on foot—or any other land animal for that matter.

One of the canonical references of Jobs’ use of “bicycle for the mind” also compared the efficiency of locomotion to the California Condor which was (I’m working from memory, here) 17X more efficient than a human walking.

A human on a bicycle, according to Jobs then, is more efficient than the most efficient animal locomotion known to humankind. The comparison included animals moving through non-terrestrial environments.

> Relatively nobody in the US cares about soccer, much less travels for it.

Utahns travel to US states with World Cup games for reasons other than the World Cup. Its Summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Utahns do travel, for example, to the San Francisco Bay Area for graduation ceremonies, to visit family, and for sightseeing. These Utahns may mingle with foreign visitors.

I’m not making a case that transmission of measles from a Utahn to a foreign visitor is likely, but the failure to consider possible routes of transmission is exactly why vaccination is so important.

> The World Cup already started. But there are no games played in Utah

For now, Utahns can travel freely to US states where World Cup games are played.

> But linimal aesthetic is different, especially as has recently become popular.

Your articulation of a liminal aesthetic hits upon the tension inherit in the word “liminal”.

By definition “liminal” signals “in between” which connotes an unsettledness or indeterminacy, or what in other realms is called the uncanny. This liminal aesthetic, at its core, is shot through with a sense of the uncanny, and empty devoid spaces where normally there is a lot of traffic convey this aesthetic clearly and succinctly.

Thank you for drawing this distinction.

My intent when referring to the denotation of “liminal” was to remind that even familiar places, such as bustling train stations and busy airport terminals, are also liminal spaces even if they don’t conform to current representations of the liminal _aesthetic_. By preserving the denotation of the word “liminal”, we can defamiliarize such spaces and recover (or emphasize) their liminality.

All of which is the message of art like Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports”. Who doesn’t appreciate the defamiliarization of our “mundane” traversals of the realms we inhabit?

> I'm currently in Paris so I've seen a ton of metro stations recently and really, unless you arrived in the dead of night so that you could snap an empty photo like the one in the article, there's nothing much liminal about them.

Liminal does not mean minimal. It means in-between, neither here nor there but in the interstices, transitional.

Dictionary.app in macOS Sequoia defines (with example usage) "liminal" as

  > 1 occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold: I was in the liminal space between past and present | the paintings in this exhibition are the result of recent investigation into liminal states.

  > 2 relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process: that liminal period when a child is old enough to begin following basic rules but is still too young to do so consistently.

By definition, metro stations are liminal spaces, as are airports, airlocks, highways, and most every transit station.

> Don't leave us hanging, what was the issue?

A: Linux

> 100x is achieving something in two days, what it took an entire year before.

Reduce your scale: "100x achieves in 1 hour what used to take 1 week."

One year of work could require levels of complexity and human judgement that can't be accelerated past a certain point.

1 week of work can be reduced to an hour and some change.

> The contemporaneous iPod _was_ technically and acoustically inferior to the Nomad.

You're cherry-picking your "technicals". The click wheel hardware and software implementation (especially the UI response time) was (and still is) revolutionary.

iPod won on the technical merits; just not the ones you're focusing.

> Your concerns are completely nonsensical.

With all due respect, my concerns are not nonsensical but borne of my daily use with Apple Vision Pro and my awareness of the limitations of dwell control.

Iterating on this idea with a device lighter than Apple Vision Pro and improvements to dwell control would likely be required before this could ship to larger populations of disabled users, but that is not what is depicted in the video.

My sense is that the possibility of an accessibility affordance with people who are severely disabled is driving opinions in this case more than the reality of what’s available.

To my mind, much of these AX announcements are reminiscent of the circumstance that led John Gruber to author “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino”, which is that these are not shipping features but ones slated for “some time later this year”.

I’m a huge AX fan and work directly in the domain space, but something about that video in particular coupled with my near-daily use of Apple Vision Pro doesn’t feel right.

> A new power wheelchair control feature leverages the precision eye-tracking system on Apple Vision Pro to offer a responsive input method for compatible alternative drive systems. [0]

The above caption for Apple Vision Pro is for a video that to me, as an Apple Vision Pro user, is discomforting.

More questions are raised than are answered by the short video: Is the user able to fit the Apple Vision Pro by him/herself? What happens when dwelling on a directional control misregisters? Can the user recalibrate the "Eyes and Hands" setting? Dwelling on a control displaces focus and there may be impeding objects in the path of the power wheelchair. Is this really a good idea?

To my sensibility, the video is unsettling (at best), especially given how cumbersome Apple Vision Pro is.

[0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/05/apple-unveils-new-acc...

Consider the field of comparative mythology described by Joseph Campbell in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces". [0] As a side quest, check out James Frazer's "The Golden Bough". [1]

On a more critical note: separating a story (diegesis) from the telling (narrative structure) is like reducing animals to skeletons, disregarding the sinews, fascia, nerves, flesh, and fluids that make up an animal.

For example, describing Alain Robbe-Grillet's "La Jalousie" as a story about a man who suspects his lover of adultery is reductive to the point of atrocity. That particular novel tells the story using pioneering metafictive techniques and reducing it to its narrative types would yield very little insight.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bough

> > Also, those that claimed this article is ironically a casualty of it’s own complaint are 100% right, Kudos.

> Why would the article be a casualty of its own complaint?

The "Disclaimer" section was added after the initial publication according to the Wayback Machine.[0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20260506162056/https://nooneshap...

> What a wild take. I guess that explains the massive and growing popularity of iOS over that same time period.

Wild take, indeed.

I seem to recall something about Apple releasing a sub-$600 laptop so popular that weeks after it was announced it's backordered for more than 30 days.

Something something MacBook Neue or other…

Old guy, here.

This ranking is fun and the as-of-now results mostly track.

1. Original iPhone

2. M1 Chip

3. Original iPod

4. Original Macintosh

5. Mac OS X

Though I’d put them in a different order.

> not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.

> And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.

This is revisionary. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta was the only company to go all-in on the "metaverse". Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.

Apple has essentially zero exposure to anything like the "metaverse". Apple's Spatial Computing and its use of Personas and SharePlay is not like the "metaverse", despite the comparison between Meta's and Apple's efforts being perhaps inevitable.

The metaverse, as Meta pursued it, was a social media virtual reality space, and only one of the three companies you mention touted and offered a product for users in this space.

The good news: macOS can unlock FDE over SSH.

The bad news: `The capability to unlock the data volume over SSH appeared in macOS 26 Tahoe.`

> Also the non-XDR is only a small upgrade otherwise, no 120Hz, no HDR, only Thunderbolt 5 and a new camera. Finally a downstream Thunderbolt port though.

The camera is still 12MP but offers Desk View. Maybe this is a feature unlocked by the improved onboard A-series chip (A19?).

I wouldn't sniff too hard about Thunderbolt 5. Thunderbolt 5 doubles throughput to 80 Gbps from 40.

Would have loved refresh above 60Hz but then who's gonna get the XDR?

> Not sure if anyone has heard his interview on the Hard Fork podcast...

Made the same mistake. Pete Steinberger created Clawdbot > Moltbot > OpenClaw.

The creator of Moltbook is Matt Schlicht and his Hard Fork interview exposes Schlict as security-negligent. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9vRCYtzYD8&t=2673s

> Bots don't deserve 'grace'. Stop anthropomorphizing soulless token prediction machines.

This discouragement may not be useful because what you call "soulless token prediction machines" have been trained on human (and non-human) data that models human behavior which include concepts such as "grace".

A more pragmatic approach is to use the same concepts in the training data to produce the best results possible. In this instance, deploying and using conceptual techniques such as "grace" would likely increase the chances of a successful outcome. (However one cares to measure success.)

I'll refrain from comments about the bias signaled by the epithet "soulless token prediction machines" except to write that the standoff between organic and inorganic consciousnesses has been explored in art, literature, the computer sciences, etc. and those domains should be consulted when making judgments about inherent differences between humans and non-humans.

> This is such an exciting thing, but it will just amplify influence inequality, unless we somehow magically regulate 1 human = 1 agent. Even then, which agent has the most guaranteed token throughput?

I know you're spinning (we all are), but you're underthinking this.

AIs will seek to participate in the economy directly, manipulating markets in ways only AIs can. Ais will spawn AIs/agents that work on the behalf of AIs.

Why would they yoke themselves to their humans?