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pico303

783 karma · joined March 22, 2011

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pico303··on Bye, Bye GitHub
Heck, if I just want effective, I guess I can also email or text patches.
pico303··on Bye, Bye GitHub
The problem is nothing competes with GitHub.

I know, GitLab. Gitea. Bitbucket. They have some features, but it’s like suggesting I drive a Nissan Sentra because my BMW breaks down once in a while.

pico303··on Stopping the smart TV from being used against you
The solution for smart TVs is to not connect it to the Internet and attach an Apple TV. Sure they’ve gotten expensive, but how much is your privacy worth?
pico303··on SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?
Reminds me of the time our “security” team fought with me for a year to fix an issue in a third-party dependency that was failing their scanners. The issue was only a problem for and intentionally left in to not break support for Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP, neither of which anyone at the company had used in 10 years, and everyone using this software was on a Mac anyway.

My condolences to anyone who’s got to deal with all these slop-y CVEs on one side and brain dead security teams on the other.

pico303··on The myth of Snow Leopard
There’s red flags I look for in articles like this, and a FreeBSD partition on your MacBook Pro is one of them. Tells me the author is probably hypercritical of MacOS because it’s not a GPL OS. That’s fine, but as someone who likes MacOS, I don’t share the pessimism.

Snow Leopard was a great experience for me. So much more stable, and the OS felt tighter, like lots of the little wonky things got sorted out. It well deserves its credit and more operating systems should focus on bug fix releases once in a while.

pico303··on Sam Neill has died
One of my favorite actors of all time. If you haven’t seen it, watch The Dish.
pico303··on TerraPower in deal with Meta for eight Natrium 345 MW nuclear plants
If they’ve never completed a single project in 20 years, yes.
pico303··on PlayStation Is Deleting 551 Movies from Customers' Accounts
I found a local store that specializes in used movies on DVD, BluRay, 4K discs and video games from Atari to PS5. I’ve started picking up hard copies of everything so I’m (a) not tracked and (b) can’t have my stuff taken away.
pico303··on TerraPower in deal with Meta for eight Natrium 345 MW nuclear plants
Their first demonstration reactor is scheduled to go online in 2031. But they’re going to build 8 production reactors, with all the regulatory hurdles, in any reasonable length of time? Right.

The headline should probably be, “Meta invests in nuclear startup” and leave it there. My guess is this deal is quietly swept under the rug when the first reactor fails to go fully online by 2032.

pico303··on Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra
Not a phone, but I use my old first gen AirPods Pro with my Windows laptop for work just fine using Bluetooth. I haven’t had any problems at all with them.

One thing I did was completely remove them from my Apple account and factory reset them, so they didn’t try to join my iPhone or my personal laptop. Maybe try that to see if it helps with your issues?

pico303··on Halt and Catch Fire
Don’t forget Fire in the Valley.
pico303··on I switched from Mac to a Lenovo Chromebook
Or just develop your app on macOS and run it on Linux. I’ve been doing that ever since OSX came out and had no problems. Worst case these days I have a virtual machine build an app or library for x86, but I still do all the dev on the Mac.

I find people who make these complaints about Linux just like Linux better. Totally fine. From my perspective, sure, some things are slightly different or need a homebrew install, but there’s plenty about Linux that’s as big or bigger pain as some of the stuff on the Mac.

That said, if Liquid Glass is the complaint and your solution is a Chromebook, wow. Just, wow.

pico303··on The Death of Scrum – Built for a slower world, performed by those who left
If you're having meetings about meetings, you're not doing scrum or agile. You're probably trapped in "agilefall."
pico303··on The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
I think you’re missing the underlying point. The Zig team is focused on the contributor and their relationship to the project, not on the correctness of the work. People, not product. Yes, an LLM can help you better understand your code and pick up on things you may have missed before you submit your change. But I think they look at it as you’ve then robbed the Zig team of that interaction with the contributor. They lost the opportunity to learn about how that person thinks, and that person lost the opportunity to be mentored and learn from other members of the Zig team. Sure, your code is better, but did you or the team grow from the experience or simply churn out more code?

I’m not saying whether or not that’s good or bad. I agree with their approach, but that’s just my opinion and who am I to say what’s right or wrong? I think there’s value to LLMs as a tool to search and learn, but I’m also worried that LLMs make it really easy to focus on only the result and not the process. That process can be really valuable in building good teams, while LLMs can be really good at churning out an assembly line of code.

pico303··on Ghostty is leaving GitHub
And here I thought I was doing well at 47979. That was January 2009, so not too bad.
pico303··on Bitwarden CLI compromised in ongoing Checkmarx supply chain campaign
Not to mention a culture of basically one-line packages ad infinitum. I downloaded a JS tool the other day to generate test reports and it had around 300 dependencies.

Needless to say I’m running all my JS tools in a Docker container these days.

pico303··on If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?
I have no information to back this up or suggest this isn't anything but anecdotal, but from my perspective, we have a Federal government that stopped promoting the well-being of its people. We've twisted the message and convinced people that promoting business and wealth at the cost of everything else is good for everyone. So we drop every social safety net in favor of unregulated growth, which leaves the poor and middle class struggling to get by with a promise of good fortune sometime in the future, while the wealthy ride high on the hog.

We've been running this race, reaching for a carrot that's always poised just out of reach for 30 years, and I think we're all just getting really tired of it.

pico303··on Make macOS consistently bad unironically
I’ve been using Macs for development for 20 years, and even on a small laptop screen I don’t expand windows to fill the screen. So I guess, yes, there are a few weirdos out there at least?
pico303··on Physics Girl: Super-Kamiokande – Imaging the sun by detecting neutrinos [video]
The Neutrino collector bit was interesting, but the best part of this video is seeing the joy in her eyes educating the rest of us about science again.
pico303··on Welcome (back) to Macintosh
I didn’t want to be that guy, but pretty much same boat. M3 Max, no issues, no reboots except for updates. Everything seems fine.

I wonder if there’s an issue with older M-series chips? I would image development is done on the latest and greatest, and maybe they’ve unintentionally missed something in the older architectures?

Is the UI great? Eh. But having to work with Windows in my day job, maybe I’m more patient with my Mac?

pico303··on A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
The language in the bill says operating system “or” application store. Isn't that then implying any operating system that would download applications, even if it doesn’t come from a store. But IANAL.

Seems to me this would include TVs, cars, smart devices, etc. The Colorado version of this bill excludes devices used for physical purchase, so your gas pumps and POS systems would be excluded in CO. But I didn’t see that in the CA bill.

They’re both overly broad, ill-considered, frankly terrible bills that make as much sense as putting your birthday into a brewery site or Steam. Enter your birthday and we trust you. Now do that for every single one of those 100 VMs you just deployed…

pico303··on CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC
Someone already mentioned NPR. BBC also does a great job reporting on US and international issues. New York Times still does strong reporting. And there are local sources too, such as the Colorado Sun, LA Times, SF Chronicle, or SF Gate (obviously I’m in the US).
pico303··on Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload
Recall is a bloated waste of time that completely misses the point. Why not instead let me snapshot a set of apps and docs/projects that are open, then snapshot a different set of apps and what’s open, and let me flip between the two (or three or four)? This way I could sort out my setup for home versus work, or between multiple clients/customers, and be able to quickly jump between common layouts/apps depending on context. But to be honest, this is probably beyond what Windows APIs are capable of, since Windows can’t even remember what directories I was working in across apps.

I’m not sure why I need to know the history of screenshots that is Recall. Maybe this was simply the best they could do?

That said, Windows 11 is such an AI-fueled privacy dumpster fire that it’s getting replaced by Linux on my gaming PC this month. Then I’m only stuck on Windows for work, and even then I can still write code on Mac or Linux.

pico303··on Code is cheap. Show me the talk
Anyone who says with LLMs coding is over wasn’t that good at coding to begin with.
pico303··on Can you slim macOS down?
I love how we want to trim macOS down. I totally get it. I open Activity Monitor and think, "WTF?" At the same time, my current job requires I use a Windows laptop, and I have to admit, "Wow, we have it pretty good over here..."

Not saying this isn't a valiant effort, but I kind of feel like Mac users are stretched out on a lounge chair at the beach complaining the Bloody Mary could be a touch more spicy.

pico303··on Apple Creator Studio
That’s kind of funny you mention “quicker way to make a PPT.” Everyone at my company had been asking me how I make my presentations look so good. I’m no designer; I’m a lowly engineer. But I do them in Keynote and export them to PowerPoint, which is half the battle!

(Sadly, my work laptop is Windows. So I create them on my personal laptop then migrate to PPT and do my best to fix up the fonts on Windows.)

pico303··on Why we don’t use AI
I’d love to work for a company like this, but when you said, “by the time we finished our doctorates,” I knew you were way out of my league.
pico303··on Apple Creator Studio
Keynote is so much better for presentations that PowerPoint it's not even funny. But if you're not doing presentations, I can understand dumping it. I do like to have Pages because it means I don't have to bother with Word's annoying ribbon interface and Copilot AI when I'm writing...though sounds like that may be changing?
pico303··on AI is a business model stress test
I was thinking something similar, but not so much an ad as a citation. A good starting point might be a law stating that when an LLM produces an answer, it cite its sources, with a link back to the content. Ideally, though, the producer of that content should receive some amount of financial compensation as well, similar to how an author or an actor receives royalties. If the LLM is making money off of this, so should the person who provide the LLM the value.
pico303··on AI is a business model stress test
The problem is there was a social contract. Someone spent their time and money to create a product that they shared for free, provided you visit their site and see their offerings. In this way they could afford to keep making this free product that everyone benefited from.

LLMs broke that social contract. Now that product will likely go away.

People can twist themselves into knots about how LLMs create “value” and that makes all of this ok, but the truth is they stole information to generate a new product that generates revenue for themselves at the cost of other people’s work. This is literally theft. This is what copyright law is meant to protect. If LLM manufacturers are making money off someone’s work, they need to compensate people for that work, same as any client or customer.

LLMs are not doing this for the good of society. They themselves are making money off this. And I’m sure if someone comes along with LLM 2.0 and rips them off, they’re going to be screaming to governments and attorneys for protection.

The ironic part of all of this is that LLMs are literally killing the businesses they need to survive. When people stop visiting (and paying) Tailwind, Wikipedia, news sites, weather, and so on, and only use LLMs, those sites and services will die. Heck, there’s even good reason to think LLMs will kill the Internet at large, at least as an information source. Why in the hell would I publish news or a book or events on the Internet if it’s just going to be stolen and illegally republished through an LLM without compensating me for my work? Once this information goes away or is locked behind nothing but paywalls, I hope everyone is ready for the end of the free ride.

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