5,986 karma · joined January 19, 2011
Apple doesn't received much credit for making iPhoto for iPad back in 2012 (https://www.macrumors.com/2012/03/07/apple-launches-iphoto-f...), or more recently Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. I think they really have invested in building pro software for iPads, probably on the order of millions of dollars, less for the vanishingly small segments of their user base but to make the case that the platform can be used for serious work.
The problem though is that the platform itself creates friction compared to macOS that, even at the best of times, makes the user at least slightly less productive. So I can't imagine myself picking up an iPad to do any actual creative work.
Not to mention the best-in-class keyboard cases, over-engineered stylus, mouse support, multitasking support, and on and on. It almost seems desperate that they keep trying to find "the thing" to crack this problem.
I prompted Claude 5 times with a simple "What do you think about <blog link>?" and the text it generated was remarkably similar. In fact in every response it used the adjective "genuinely", as in your "genuinely novel", which is the LLM glazing that initially struck me.
Claude goes on to hit several of the same notes, in the same tone, basically summarizing bits of the article (using `HTTP_PROXY/HTTPS_PROXY` as a compound; referencing iptables for containers, structured JSON escaping, request size caps). It used the phrase "blast radius" and a similar three-point attack sequence in one response.
I am confident you are using LLMs to write—the Grith.ai blog is basically entirely LLM slop. Please stop posting it here.
It’s not surprising it can “read” Base64 though; such was demonstrated back in GPT-3 days. Nontrivial obfuscation might not be one-shotted, but Claude has access to a code interpreter and can certainly extract and step through the decoder routine itself as a malware analyst would.
nftables is a different problem though. It’s apparent that if something isn’t well understood—i.e, there are tons of badly-formed examples on StackExchange—LLMs will fail to learn it too. I’ve seen this with things as “simple” as Bash string interpolation rules like ${var:+blah}. More often than not I’m humbled when I think I’ll learn it better and then find myself swearing at poorly-written documentation and patently false Q&A advice.
Maybe if you flood the market with 30% more housing units like Austin you get the Econ 101 effect. On the other hand, apartment owners realized intentional vacancy is a profitable strategy, which alone seems to defy that basic interpretation.
Thompson himself published a coffee table book about the find, "America's Lost Treasure."
— D. Richard Hipp
Obvious tells are repetitive numeric details: the number of lines of code (mentioned six times!), the number of pages in the manual, the ages of the developers, the age of the game, etc. The narrative itself also repeats, like the Steam rejection included verbatim twice, especially after the Prologue hit most of the beats in the first 400 words.
I did successfully use a backup editor, iMazing, to exclude the telephony data from a backup in order to fix it, but it cost me $30 and hours (transferring my Signal data to a second device and back). For 99.999% of their customers this would require a total erase-install. All because Apple has an off-by-one error somewhere.
The gist is that it allows a third-party seller to stock a bunch of identical, not-yet-locked phones and offer a choice of carrier plans. The phone binds to whichever carrier the user first activated on.
So if you’re buying a phone, verify it is not one of these units.
A few other apps that are only occasionally used support short-term paid activations, like Flighty and Oceanic+. I think that's a respectable business model, too.
On the less-reasonable end of the spectrum though are the $10/mo apps. Apple used to charge that much for the entire operating system.
I am pretty sure that if I tried to load up my phone with a handful of the kinds of apps I used to use (a word game, a third-party Twitter client, an SSH terminal, a calculator or to-do app with a trendy minimalist design) I would easily cross $100/mo for some marginally-useful features.
Script Editor still exists in modern macOS but sadly Apple never made the Record feature work particularly well on Mac OS X and hardly any developers prioritize AppleEvent support.
From 2008-12 it was genuinely exciting to see what new apps were being released every day. Mobile games from that era had cultural impact. I bought $2 apps without a thought.
But Apple incentivized monetization above all else and killed that excitement. Now you can’t find a tip calculator that doesn’t charge a monthly subscription. A popular flight tracker is $60/year (or a $300 purchase). A flash card app costs the same. Apple’s curated list of “essential utilities” includes a birthday countdown that costs $5/wk.
I know every app will cost me hundreds over the span of just a few years for marginal utility so I simply stopped buying them. And I wonder if Apple’s push for more ad revenue is a symptom of that trend.
Time Machine's job is to back up my data, it's not strictly to make a 1:1 copy of local storage. It should back up my cloud data too.
I haven't looked into the implementation details, but Photos lets you adjust the section of the video that is played back in slow motion. I thought if you share a slow-mo video, it gets re-encoded to bake this in (i.e., one second at 240fps gets exported as four seconds at 60fps).
It seems like an obvious improvement for Time Machine to support full backups while using optimized storage on the primary system.