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Doing work for computers means something is broken in your process, product, culture, or whatever else.

I agree.

When Marc Benioff was talking about how he spends like 3 hours a day chatting with AI, things made a bit more sense. I suspect that a lot of these guys are just chattering away with self-affirming LLMs and have just completely lost the plot.

I hadn’t considered that before Marc was talking about how much time he spends chatting to LLMs.

A lot of the younger Big Tech CEOs are notoriously averse to human interaction, so I’m sure there’s some of that at play.

Yes, it would.

Something I keep in mind is that the “goal” success/failure rate really needs to be appropriate in context. We sure can’t eliminate human error, but for my work a best case 80/20 would mean I’m losing customers and probably getting myself sued. I don’t have a problem “doing things by my own hand” in that case.

Probably depends on the user. Along with push notifications for almost every app on every one of my devices, I disable the summarization.

For me the notification is the point, and the point of notifications to me is that they deserve my attention. Of the vanishingly few apps I install these days, almost nothing can say it deserves my attention. Even my bank doesn’t get those privileges.

On iOS it wouldn’t even be that hard. There’s already a toggle to disable use of cellular connectivity. Add a separate one for non-cellular (iPadOS can connect via Ethernet), and/or a “disallow all” toggle.

We are partly there in spirit with App Transparency keeping track of the IPs and hostnames apps connect to.

You know, I would love a feature that lets me mark push notifications as spam, and optionally send them to Apple. The last part is important for a variety of reasons, one of which is that notifications can be end to end encrypted.

Spam filter push notifications.

Ideally enough spam reports for Uber Eat’s constant marketing abuse and they lose APNs access for the Bundle ID associated with the spam reports. For example.

Absolutely agreed.

How much time must everyone be asked to waste to “tune” a working set of applications to something reasonably sane for human beings.

Sure, what is sane for one human might not be for the next, but it’s not as if trends cannot be discerned.

How ridiculous would it be to be told “if you don’t want people constantly barging into your office, lock the door”?

I absolutely hate medical marketing. I recently decided to switch dermatology practices over a combination of bad data management, unwelcome marketing for cosmetic dermatology products, and unsolicited SMSs. I never consented to receive marketing or texts (or to lose my data in a data breach, or to be billed for the in person services by practices other than the one from which I received services and ignored unopened as spam because I didn’t recognize the sender, etc…)

But I digress.

This write-up is a shining example of why I’ve been rebuilding my business slowly away from Microsoft technology. Entra as IdP is one of the last projects. I’m probably not going to escape Exchange Online, but I’m going to be happy to finally federate the tenant to our internally managed IdP.

My spouse’s employer mandated that everyone move off AWS “because they’re a competitor” (they’re absolutely not), and Microsoft was happy to roll out discounts for Azure.

To say that has gone poorly would be generous. Azure is impressive in its own right, but it’s not comparable to AWS. (Which has its own problems, to be clear.)

The stagnation in Azure is apparent everywhere you look. The capacity issues have only gotten worse. There are still change advisory callouts in the Azure Portal with dates in the year 2020.

The Domain Capture process cannot be canceled once it’s started. It’s also not required, unless by your company policy.

The point is to make sure there’s not a mess on the other end when you enforce SSO for MAIDs.

Apple’s documentation for ABM and ABE is atrocious, but they do manage to document a bunch of footguns, just poorly and in seemingly bizarre places.

For example, ABE doesn’t support MDM migration (either as source or destination), despite the fact that the feature launched with macOS/iOS/iPadOS 26 and is supported by other MDM solutions.

And you cannot push custom config profiles with ABE which declare a non-Apple preference domain. Utter nonsense.

If you’re using the full ABM-with-ADE and MDM stack, it’s expected that you push apps to employees.

You can also use Munki to make apps available to users. You can just push only Munki via MDM if you want, and let it manage app installs and self service installs for you. There are caveats.

It really gives you a sense that no one at GitHub finds it necessary to search those logs.

Which I find…unusual.

You’re not supposed to do the math. You’re supposed to nod and say “oh, yes, that makes sense.”

This does require large players acting in good faith.

Or, at best, competently.

Sometimes both of those, or neither, are in evidence.

But I like the way you think. Make it a contract performance issue for legal teams to police internally.

I’d do that even in my personal capacity. Buy a new copy every major version release (where that’s applicable).

At least the new edition would be a worthwhile expense.

You can completely disable biometry if you wish to do so. Apple Pay without biometrics is somewhat annoying.

I can’t think of a single airline that can’t or won’t print a boarding pass. At least not based in North America.

I remember how Google's internal guidelines for travel circa 2011 required to remove any material under NDA from your laptop when traveling to China or Russia; you had to restore it over the VPN after a safe arrival.

I made this suggestion when I served on the security team at a major cybersecurity player.

When we had our company-wide annual internal conference it was always in person. This meant that basically everyone, with basically cumulative access to everything, and all our code, would be traveling across a multitude of borders at once. Some of which were less friendly than the US (at that time).

This was rejected as impractical for developers and redundant for everyone else. So I suggested locking the accounts of everyone who was traveling between the time they left and the time they arrived. This would have the side effect of signing them out of our most sensitive systems and removing certain highly confidential data from laptops. This was also rejected as “unnecessary”.

That company now counts a healthy proportion of the Fortune 500 amongst their customer base. I hope things are not so cavalier anymore.

“Spicy autocomplete” absolutely made my day. Thank you.

Exactly. The marketing makes this look like something general for deploying cloud stacks.

But what it seems to be is just a fast way to deploy resources to platform providers that use Stripe to bill you?

Or maybe the marketing is just confusing?

I don’t think this is for me though. I’m using things like AWS, Azure, and dedicated servers from companies that lease out dedicated servers. For my company Stripe is nothing more than a payment processor.

The former businesses don’t run technology stacks that might, inherently by design, regurgitate any given piece of information that they encounter.

They’re also purpose built to do tax/accounting work, and can’t go “off script” with filling in your tax return.

Speaking as someone who has used em-dashes and semicolons for years, it’s a shame what the AI companies have done with punctuation.

As someone who frequently says “don’t connect these $things” to the Internet, I appreciate the boost.

Half my compute vendors are raising prices because of this insanity.

You can enable Advanced Data Protection to address that issue with iMessages.

Giving users an option between both paths is usually best. Most users care a lot more that they can’t restore a usable backup of their messages than they do that their messages are unreadable by the company storing them.

I used to work at a company where our products were built around encryption. Users here on HN are not the norm. You can’t trust that most users will save recovery codes, encryption seed phrases, etc in a manner that will be both available and usable when they need them, and then they tend to care a lot less about the privacy properties that provides and a lot more that they no longer have their messages with {deceased spouse, best friend, business partner, etc}.

And it’s typically disclosed in one way or another.

Between buying a phone and reading the OS EULA to providing an E911 address to my carrier, I can count at least three disclosures of this feature.

Nothing is secret or magic here.

It isn’t restricted to Boost Mobile. It is only available on devices with the C1 or C1X modem, though. I assume this is because of specifics with the third party modems that most models in the wild have vs what Apple is doing in-house with their C1(X). If you call emergency services it will still provide precise location.

Thank you. Just bought StopTheMadness Pro and StopTheScript.

It’s technically possible, but it would be difficult and likely require breaching an NDA. A bit pedantic, perhaps, but it’s out there.

Apple makes available on a highly controlled basis iPhones which permit the user to disable “virtually all” of the security features. They’re available only to vetted security researchers who apply for one, often under some kind of sponsorship, and they’re designed to obviously announce what they are. For example they are engraved on the sides with “Confidential and Proprietary. Property of Apple”.

They’re loaned, not sold or given, remain Apple’s property, and are provided on a 12-month (optionally renewable) basis. You have to apply and be selected by Apple to receive one, and you have to agree to some (understandable but) onerous requirements laid out in an legal agreement.

I expect that if you were to interrogate these iPhones they would report that the CPU fuse state isn’t “Production” like the models that are sold.

They refer to these iPhones as Security Research Devices, or SRDs.

Anthropic at least has Amazon’s backing. OpenAI is where the industry is stuffing all of its bad debt and transparently bad deals. It’s the sacrificial company this time around.

I would dance on Oracle’s grave, but they have too much staying power because of their core database and ERP business.

Vivaldi might interest you as an alternative browser.

I’ve used iPhones exclusively as my daily driver phone for almost 20 years now.

It’s tempting to get a phone that GrapheneOS supports at my next refresh.

I generally like Apple’s technology. I like their high level stability - they don’t launch things as experiments in the same way other technology companies do. They seem to make a serious effort at only launching things they plan to keep around and refine. I think that’s the only user-friendly way to do it.

But I’m concerned about the post-Cook era particularly because in recent years the hardware has gotten better but the software has gotten worse. It is starting to feel like Apple is unable, unwilling, or incapable of focusing on two sides of the coin at once.

The software side is more data hungry than ever, no matter what they do with that data. They are seemingly desperate for services revenue on top of premium prices for devices. It was insane that any release, let alone how many releases, automatically enabled or re-enabled (after prior user disablement) Apple Intelligence. They finally stopped disrespecting asserted user choices but it took them awhile. That in particular really soured me. They had already learned that lesson (for some reason they had to learn that lesson period) with automatic OS update settings.

I’ve been working for a few years now on extricating myself from the connected services sides of both Microsoft and Apple so that it will be far easier to make the leap to GrapheneOS (or an analogue) when and if I decide to.