8,767 karma · joined July 12, 2010
I sporadically rant at http://masonmark.com and usually see email sent to mason at that domain.
Even if you don't care about racial politics, or even good-vs-evil or legal-vs-criminal, the fact that that entire LLM got (obviously, and ineptly) tuned to the whim of one rich individual — even if he wasn't as creepy as he is — should be a deal-breaker, shouldn't it?
But I agree with you about the most important feature that Apple failed on.
I lament Apple's failure to secure ZFS as much as the next Mac user, but I understood that ship to have sailed when it did, around a decade ago.
But as a desktop user, I almost threw up in my mouth when APFS came out with no checksums for user data. I'd assumed if they were going to pass on ZFS they would reimplement the most critical feature. But they didn't. I know I've lost data because of it, and if you have a few TB of data, I suspect you have, too.
Not lost permanently, because I had manually-checksummed backups. But lost in the sense that the copies of the data made on macOS were corrupted and different, and the OS/filesystem simply didn't notice. Oops!
Once you've used ZFS, that's unforgivable. I mean, ZFS has had some bugs, over the years (well mainly just last year lol), and a small number of users have lost data due to that. But to silently lose data by design? Fuck all the way off. It's 2025, not 1985.
So while APFS has some cool modern features (or at least two), it's an embarassment. (And all my non-ephemeral storage is now on Linux.)
OK, yes, I agree; we should stop, as the disagrement seems to boil down to semantics.
I think "open source" is basically binary (modulo the usual free-as-in-beer or free-as-in-beer-but-also-you-can't-do-stuff-I-don't-like ambiguity).
But some nuance does come into play around "VS Code" — what is it? It feels the same as Chrome to me, but it's harder to see where the VS Code equivalent of Chromium is. (Not super hard, mind you, but Chrome/Chromium make it explicit, whereas VS Code does not.)
Anyway, I agree that VS Code is (while still, IMO, "open-source") is not "open-source to the point of maximal awesomeness".
Is it the most awesome, selfless, altruistic version of open source? Clearly not.
But is it better than being proprietary closed-source software? Well, that's a value judgement, so we can each decide that for ourselves. Personally, I think so, but maybe it depends. Regardless, though, it's open source, and if it weren't the software landscape would look very different.
Cursor, Windsurf, etc. would presumably not be as far along as they are, because they'd have to invest in basic editor functionality. Among many other projects, both open-source and otherwise.
VS Code itself does not work without various propriety stuff, but that is a different thing. A large number of open-source projects work that way. If you don’t like the proprietary stuff, the recourse is to fork it, modify it, and implement the remaining stuff yourself.
const foo = something()
.hoge()
.hige()
.hage();
let foo = something();
foo = foo.hoge();
foo = foo.hige();
foo = foo.hage();
(I also often see similar-ish problems in languages where the debuggers just aren't that advanced, due to lack of popularity, or whatever.)
Particularly with web apps, though, we often want to attach to the current production app for initial debugging instead of modifying the app and running it locally, usually because somebody has reported a bug that happens in production (but how to reproduce it locally is not yet clear).
Alternatively stated, I guess, I believe readability is important, and maybe the "second most important thing", but nevertheless we should not prefer fancy/elegant code that feels nice to us to write and read, but makes debugging more difficult (with the prevailing debuggers) in any significant way.
In an ideal world, a difference like the above wouldn't be harder to debug, in which case I would also prefer the first version.
(And probably in the real world, the problems would be with async functions less conducive to the pithy hypothetical example. I'm a stalwart opponent of libraries like RxJs for the sole reason that you pay back with interest all of the gains you realized during development, the first time you have to debug something weird.)
I myself agree, and find myself doing that too, especially in frontend code that executes in a browser. Debuggability is much more important than marginally-better readability, for production code.
This is interesting to me at the margins, because one of the things I learned when my wife got pregnant the first time was that the womb is not exactly the warm cradle of nurturing that I had always (without thinking much about it) imagined, but in many ways a blast door or containment vessel to protect the mother (host) from the fetus (roughly, xenomorph) that would otherwise explode like an aggressive parasite (killing them both).
So I mean, you probably don't want to have any leaks or weak stitches in your uterus transplant...
Keywords: fetal microchimerism, placental barrier, trophoblast invasion
This is a pure klept move. Who knows if he understands that the US manufacturing iPhones and cars-with-no-foreign-parts isn't possible in his lifetime (or most of ours), but regardless, he understands that this is his chance to finally get rich for real after all that cosplayin', and doesn't need to understand the rest.
I think it's helpful to ask "What if this president actually doesn't care one way or the other what happens to the US economy, the world economy, or even geopolitical stability (beyond the US not getting nuked, causing him to die), and everything is just a grifter's instinct for how to benefit personally?"
In that light, literally everything this administration does makes perfect sense.
This is a man whose main accomplishment before the presidency was "being famous" — starring in a reality TV show and professional wrestling (the fake/scripted kind), and he clearly wants to be the center of attention in the media.
Although his tariffs are widely mocked by knowledgeable people as "insane", "stupid", or as the Financial Times put it, "one of the greatest acts of self-harm in American economic history", imposing them gives the man himself the opportunity for corruption on a scale unprecedented in modern US history.
He can easily (very easily) benefit financially and otherwise because heads of state, captains of industry, and the ultra-wealthy have to come to him to beg, flatter, or do something — buy his memecoin, rent out his hotels, buy his otherwise-failed social network for billions, the list is near-infinite — to get out from under his tariffs.
So I don't think there is any upside of the kind you are talking about. But there is substantial upside for the man himself, and it is enough to explain all of his actions.
They only seem nonsensical if you believe he is trying to act in the best interests of the nation.
Sure, the TV and social media will tell you that every year's crisis is "the most important of our lifetimes", and that isn't true. But obviously, it sometimes has to be true, right? I mean, at least once, and probably several times, depending from when to when we are alive.
"Important" is a matter of perspective, and also desired outcome, so YMMV but in my 50+ years of life there have been 3 such events driven by or pertaining to the US government:
- the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War
- response to 9/11 and the aftermath
- 2025 US table-flip of the post-WW2 world order, pursuit of autocracy, and assault on the rule of law
Every government is corrupt; it's a matter of degree, and the reason you can't name a US government as corrupt as this one is because there hasn't been one. Watergate? Iran/Contra? B.J. Clinton? It's not close to the same degree.
Lesser disruptions have included the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2007 financial crisis, the internet, AIDS, maybe crack cocaine in the 80s, ... but those are more emergent side effects of human behavior than things done with intent. Things we deal with, not things we do.
Everything is fine? Disagree. Everything is going to be fine? Well, whew, good to know.
But I understood your point to be that everything is the same, and will be the same, broadly speaking, as it's been for the past 5 decades.
But it's not. It's wildly different, already. And even if, as you suggest, the 2026 elections somehow happened without egregious interference from the ruling administration (unlikely), and flipped control of congress to the opposition (maybe) — there's still no way to go back to the "before" times.
I am honestly curious. If you are willing to go as far as they have, why not go that relatively tiny extra step?
I think it is a problem with the regulator. The cookie agreement mandate has legitimately fucked up the web for everybody. It's also done it in a way that mostly neutralizes the intended benefit of the law (because everybody just clicks the "fine! stuff your cookies up my arse or whatever, just get on with it!" button).
But a competent regulator must both measure the impacts of their regulations, and take action based on that data. It seems a weird place to stop.
At the same time, they complained about Europe not doing enough and shouldering enough of the burden, and I find it plausible that they legitimately did wish Europe would do that, the above paragraph notwithstanding.
> In reality, the US government is one of the most static, unchanging organizations on the planet.
The changes in that past couple of months are, objectively, enormous disruptions to the previous status quo (of the last 50+ years).
NATO may still exist on paper, but not in the world. The US has estranged almost all of its closest allies that it's had for my entire lifetime — I'm 50 — and in ways that are offensive, threatening, and simultaneously weirdly petty, and which would take a decade or more to repair even in the unlikely event that somehow the current administration was somehow replaced today, and efforts began immediately.
The US president has also opened up avenues for corruption and out-in-the-open bribe-taking (meme coin, banks of hotel rooms, his wife's vanity projects, etc etc etc) that are absolutely unprecedented in US history, of the ilk historically seen more in places like Malaysia, Peru, or the Philippines under Marcos. (Even Silvio Berlusconi was substantially more tactful and less obvious about it.)
At the same time, the administration is performatively flouting the rule-of-law, in ways completely unprecedented in the past 50 years. Openly defying judicial orders. Disappearing people without due process (yes, like all fledgling autocracies, they are starting with the already marginalized; purported gang members, brown-skinned or Asian permanent residents).
The childhood parables like "The Emperor's New Clothes" never actually, like, literally occurred in the America I knew, until this guy. Last time it was just "my crowd was bigger than Obama's" but this time it's "Ukraine started the war" (somehow arranging to be invaded by a murderous dictatorship waging a campaign of rape, torture, and mass child abduction).
> Nothing is going to happen in the next 4 decades let alone the next 4 years.
Way more than "nothing" has already happened. More substantial, self-directed change has already happened in 2-3 months than in Trump's entire first term, or any term of any president, in 50-100 years. I strongly suspect this trend will continue.
As you can no doubt infer, I am not a huge fan of this administration. But neither am I a partisan; I would characterize this administration as worse than any administration, Republican or Democrat, of my lifetime — and by a lot. (I include Trump's first term in that, but only because that static, glacial-pace US government you think still exists did still exist then, so even though the graft and weird dictator-fetish/emulation was present then, too, it didn't have the impact that it's already had in this term.)
Whether you think it is worse or better, I mean, we all have different priorities but it is unarguably very different — and has already made the US government very different — than anything seen in the past 50+ years.
On the one hand, studies have suggested that nearly half of highly successful entrepreneurs/founders in the US are immigrants or children of immigrants. As the US becomes more authoritarian and more corrupt, its easy to imagine people choosing to do their new startup from, say, Berlin.
On the other hand, lots of people choose Singapore, too; rule-of-law-based country with relatively easy access to capital and relatively low taxes — but without actual democracy.
I'm aware of my own inherent bias of wanting democracy to be important to people when making this kind of calculation, but I'm not sure that we have any real evidence of that.
But I always tune in to a thread about this app to read the brutal commentary about its UI.
The juxtaposition of that and the app's complete dominance in its niche are always food for thought...
https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-does-ai-as-microsoft-did-mob...
The resuscitation was truly miraculous.
And I also remember 10.7 actually being better and where I thought Mac OS X (and its macOS rebrand) peaked, for interactive/workstation use.
However I ran a 10.6.x virtual machine (that yes, ran Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo v1.1[1] for the last decade of its service life) until 2021 for a bunch of long-timeline server functions, so I guess Snow Leopard was pretty good overall, in the end...
Can anybody square that circle?
https://www.jaxon.gg/ceres-fauna-graduation-announced-why-is...
The difference is now you get a Customs agent named CatFart69 and it's all up to him.
That is hugely important, and differentiating, because until this current administration, the incompetence (or willful white supremacism / pro-wrestling hero-worship) was at least centralized. Now it is outsourced to the lowest common moron/incel functionary.
Which is a truly fundamental difference.
Do not come. If you truly must, take similar precautions as you would when visiting Iran or North Korea.
But I don't think the magnitude or key charactersistics are quite the same. Post-9/11, I mean you had to expect a freak-out. Marginal victory in a peaceful election... there's no external threat here that makes it make sense beyond "democratic country regresses toward fascism".