valleyer

I disagree. A lot of the problems come down to part A of the system not coordinating well with part B. Take the brouhaha about the Tahoe window corners: obviously there wasn't enough communication between folks designing the window frame art and the folks implementing the window resize logic.

You can hire the best, but coordination among a group of people scales quadratically.

As someone who witnessed a lot of the quality decline at Apple from the inside, hiring more people is decidedly not the answer. All that does is encourages management to engage in more churn, which is the source of these sorts of bugs.

The answer, unfortunately, is that features need to be sunsetted/removed, the engineering org shrunk, and for a smaller group to concentrate on a reliable product core.

No, this bill would be subject to the filibuster (since it's not a reconciliation bill under the Budget Act), so it's not a simple majority.

The Apple AirPort Extreme didn't by default until recently: https://support.apple.com/en-nz/103996

I must admit I somehow missed "at the motel" part of your post. I'm sorry!

(I still disagree with your broader point, since I don't think you can meaningfully draw a "has skin in the game" line.)

Big ships are hard to turn, even in the backwards direction.

Renters can also enroll their kids in public schools. And in terms of mobility, renters might be stuck in a one- or two-year lease, far longer than it might take to sell a house.

Maybe those transient homeowners are the ones who shouldn't get to vote...

That really sucks, but don't deprive yourself of something you think you might enjoy because of that one jackass. Chances are that next time you won't experience something like that.

Also, basically every pro and semi-pro sports stadium nowadays has cell-phone-contactable security that you can summon to handle situations like these. The threat of being kicked out of his $250 seats is way more of a threat than that of being confronted by a "mega-nerd".

I wouldn't make a habit of contacting security over every little annoyance, but if they're obnoxiously blocking an old lady, that's the time to use it.

P.S.: your karma is currently 1337, sweet

Yep, that's a great workaround, as long as you have third-party apps you're happy with.

The point is that Apple's own design team was.

But you cannot, in general, migrate your data backwards. Apple's system apps will upgrade their data stores forward only. This isn't a problem if you are willing to e.g. re-download all of your (Mail.app) mail.

You can view statements via the Web on <https://card.apple.com/> (though not for the associated savings account, if you choose to add that).

Nice. Reminds me of Rodent's Revenge.

Don't threaten me with a good time.

Lawyers, admins, and executives, sure. But what about the complexity on the engineers who now have to maintain an exploding matrix of modes? I can definitely see that becoming burdensome.

It's also the meaning used in the title of this very Web site.

Is this increasing complexity in the Web layout world worth it? Anyone who wants to use this is going to drop support for older browsers (and, in so doing, older machines that can't run newer OSes and newer browsers).

Personally, I use an 11-year-old machine and have had to add userscript hacks to certain major Web sites to work around bugs in CSS grid (not the "lanes" described here).

At least new JavaScript features can be "polyfilled" or whatever. Maybe sites could check for CSS feature support too? But they seem not to.

For example, the demo page linked in the article fails pretty unusably for me. All the images take up nearly the full viewport width.

> The first thing that blew my mind was how stupid the whole idea is. Think for one second. One full second. Why do you ever want to add a chatbot to a snack vending machine? The video states it clearly: the vending machine must be stocked by humans. Customers must order and take their snack by themselves. The AI has no value at all.

I fear the author has missed the point of the "Project Vend" experiments, the original write-ups of which are available here (and are, IMO, pretty level-headed about the whole thing):

https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1

https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-2

The former contains a section titled "Why did you have an LLM run a small business?" that attempts to explain the motivation behind the experiment.

POSIX does not specify the init/rc script system, so it's not a factor here at all. A POSIX-compliant system could use Python scripts. macOS (which is UNIX 03 certified) uses launchd. A POSIX system has to ship the shell, not use it.

And FreeBSD isn't actually POSIX-certified anyway!

The real consideration here is simply that there are tons of existing rc scripts for BSDs, and switching them all would be a large task.

That's fine; I just thought it was weird to say that we should check to see whether any shell scripts are used in the BSD init system. We know there are; it was a deliberate design decision at the time, even if we might now wish for it to be different.

You should not be getting notifications while driving.

I can't tell whether you're making a joke, seeing as the entire BSD init system is built on shell scripts.

Basically, I bought a physical Apple gift card via the Apple online store, and it was never delivered. UPS tracking (on Apple's own site) showed it never left the origin. I called to get it re-shipped, and they (in so many words) accused me of fraud, because apparently the gift card had been redeemed and drained.

Obviously someone either at Apple's gift card printing contractor or at UPS snatched it.

Apple's suggested "solution" was for me to issue a chargeback on my credit card -- yes, the vendor suggesting a chargeback. I refused, because the credit card in question was my Apple Card, and I have read elsewhere that doing something like this can lead to your Apple account getting locked.

The exec escalation was the only way I got it resolved. It was Kafkaesque.

I think one major lesson to take from this (and other physical gift card vulnerabilities, like people that go and peek at the numbers on unredeemed cards in stores and then wait for them to be loaded) is: don't use physical gift cards anymore.

From the RFC (note the "or businesses"):

   Name Space Within States:
   ------------------------

   "locality" - cities, counties, parishes, and townships.  Subdomains
   under the "locality" would be like CI.<city>.<state>.US,
   CO.<county>.<state>.US, or businesses. For example:
   Petville.Marvista.CA.US.

   "CI" - This branch is used for city government agencies and is a
   subdomain under the "locality" name (like Los Angeles). For example:
   Fire-Dept.CI.Los-Angeles.CA.US.

So you'd be counting on the sub-registrar of jacksonville.fl.us not to allow a registration for the fraudulent "business" of Sheriff, Inc. -- multiplied by every municipality across the country.

Not a single mention of the Instamatic?

Mine happened earlier this year, FWIW.

Believe me, I have no desire to defend Apple. Their behavior absolutely sucks. I just want a good resolution for the author of this blog post.

Good. Don't be afraid to follow up if they drag their feet. Be respectful but persistent. I'm sorry this is happening to you. It's a shitty feeling.

Send this in an e-mail to tcook@apple.com. He has a team that reads for stuff like this and can magically fix issues.

I've had to do it before, also for a gift-card-related problem (different from yours), and I was contacted by a member of the Apple executive escalations team a couple days later.

Sceptre is not in fact "a Wal-Mart brand" but rather an independent company.

https://www.sceptre.com

Westinghouse TVs are made by a company licensing the brand, not a "Pittsburgh-headquartered company".

These seem like easy mistakes to avoid.

I tried this out, and it's not passing the record (n.) vs. record (v.) test mentioned elsewhere in this thread. (I can ask it to repeat one, and it often repeats the other.) Am I not enabling the speech-to-speech-ness somehow?