highwaylights

This matches my experience.

I've had to put a fair chunk of effort in to skills that will run deterministic mechanisms to unslop a codebase (cyclomatic complexity grading has been really helpful here) as invariably some amount of guidance around principles will be missed over time. I've found it does help, though. Certainly I'm getting overall better results from Flash and Sonnet over multiple runs for fairly modest token increases. GPT 5.5 less so, but that's because it scores better in a first pass. I won't really know until I gauge it at the end of my sub month which has been more cost efficient for me all things considered.

Am I allowed to say that pelican's little helmet is adorable? I can't provide a strong computational proof, or even a shred of anecdata...

...but that pelican's little helmet is adorable.

Coming up on 3 years here. I felt this. Can also confirm this is based advice.

You had me until Proton. I bang this drum every so often when it comes up but I’ve had terrible experiences with Proton locking me out of email permanently without warning or explanation in a way that made not just the email address but the accounts linked to it completely unrecoverable.

Don’t play around with email. It’s not communication, it’s critical digital infrastructure - quite possibly your primary key on the internet. The consequences of getting locked out by a faceless provider for reasons you’ll never hear about are probably a lot bigger than you think.

Again!?!!

YOU DESTROYED THE FABRIC OF SPACETIME.

I think the retail market is maybe dead but datacenters are still a fairly large customer I’d think. HDDs really shine at scale where they can be fronted by flash and DRAM cache layers.

I get this pain with Apple in a bunch of different areas. The things they do well, they do better than anyone, but part of the design language is to never admit defeat so very few of the interfaces will ever show you an error message of any kind. The silent failure modes everywhere gets really frustrating.

I’m looking at you, Photos sync.

EDIT: just noticed this exact problem is on the front page in its own right (https://eclecticlight.co/2025/11/30/last-week-on-my-mac-losi...)

It’s clearly for commercial reasons. It still doesn’t change the fact that it would be clunky, like Windows and Android tablets are today. The surface is a poor tablet and Android is a poor desktop OS. The metaphors are oil and water.

Sure, they could adapt macOS and iPadOS enough to make it sort of workable, but I tend to agree with them that it would ultimately be a master-of-none device.

Clearly the reason they don’t want to do it is that it’ll cannibalise other sales. If macOS were written from scratch today it wouldn’t allow apps outside of the App Store or even multiple users. They’re Apple.

Daddy chill. I was continuing the thread.

If you have a look around on the interwebs there are longstanding criticisms of how overpowered the iPad is relative to what you're actually empowered to do with it, and by extension the question of who is it supposed to be for. Like you said, Apple doing Apple.

I'm sure a lot of them sit idle because a constant complaint people have (again all over the interwebs) with them is that they aren't good at much besides media consumption, and are rarely people's first choice for that due to convenience.

Whatever though? It hardly matters. Enjoy your iPad I guess(?)

The budget offering is a used MacBook from the massive aftermarket stock, but I take your point - it doesn't scale and some people are averse to buying used goods.

Having just switched up to the M4 air you're not wrong. Unless you have the 8GB version and it's causing you memory pressure (which it may not be), or you really need that extra display output (I did), it's a wonder machine still 5 years later.

Also, that wedge design might be peak laptop. It's just soooo nice when lifting off a surface. I know that sounds ridiculous but the attention to detail that went into that design is next level.

Even though I'm not in the market, part of me really hopes the MacBook SE (or whatever they call it) uses the wedge design to clear chassis parts like they did with the SE iphones (although I doubt it).

Having just moved from my M1 Air to a M4 Air for the extra screen output and more ram, $330 for a M1 Air with a warranty is the deal of the century.

Fairly confident the CPU has never been the reason you can't install whatever you want on an iOS/iPadOS device. Also not the reason you can't install macOS on it either.

If you want macOS, you buy a Mac. You want iPadOS, you buy an iPad. And if you want an iPad Pro that can double up as a Mac in a pinch, you feel awkward while Tim Cook death stares at you until you empty your pockets.

In all seriousness though, I have an iPad Pro and a MacBook (as a lot of people here do I'm sure) and it would make a poor laptop. And how do you switch between macOS and iPadOS? I don't see a way to have that not be clunky because of all the different metaphors. I'd rather just have both (actually I'd rather just have the MacBook as the iPad sits largely idle, as I'm also sure a lot of people's do).

I sort of agree.

If you look at the UK through the MAGA lens you see that there’s a grain of truth in some of the comments about free speech.

Likewise terminology in the US is sometimes a little turned on its head - in the US “liberalism” means something completely different from actual liberalism (which would be closer to libertarianism).

Also “woke” has been used for so many things that its meaning has been warped from “don’t trust the system” to whatever the right dislikes on a given day, even though they’re ostensibly all about smaller government that stays out of your business.

Politics has always been very subversive but it’s more entangled than ever now.

It’s not that the UK government believes censoring porn is a vote winner so much as they really want to use “think of the kids” as a cudgel to widespread surveillance.

In other countries (not least the US) there’s an expectation of privacy which doesn’t really exist in the UK. It’s not seen as a right by any major party or particularly valued by the public at large (“nothing to hide nothing to fear” etc). The government still really wants E2E encryption banned here (as nonsensical as that is).

They don’t see any of this as a vote loser, as none of the alternative parties see it any differently.

Personally I’m kind of happy about this gating even if I disagree on principle, but they’ve already indicated that they have no line. They’ve been very open about seeing everything you say and do.

Why would that only apply to abandoned wallets?

In a scenario where you have a powerful enough quantum computer and are able to break the encryption you can access any wallet (I.e. the system would be done, and the value would be zero).

I'm surprised this isn't a bigger concern given that:

For over a year now we've been at the point whereby a video of anyone saying or doing anything can be generated by anyone and put on the Internet, and it's only becoming more convincing (and rapidly)

We've been living in a post-truth world for almost ten years, so it's now become normalized

Almost half of the population has been conditioned to believe anything that supports their political alignment

People will actually believe incredibly far-fetched things, and when the original video has been debunked, will still hold the belief because by that point the Internet has filled up with more garbage to support something they really want to believe

It's a weird time to be alive

This.

Surprisingly few ER docs anywhere in the world have even a rudimentary understanding of the risks of CT scanning patients. There's a lot of information around about this, but my own first hand (anecdotal) experience is that I've had ER docs try to convince me that it's basically the same as an X-Ray and act like I'm a crazy person when I explain that it's orders of magnitude higher and cumulative over a lifetime. On one hand, it's not their job to care about your long term health - they need to rule out an emergency and get you out the door as quickly as possible - but it's very concerning.

It's a bit like how general practitioners aren't taught about nutrition at all, so give out really poor advice for heart disease patients (the leading cause of mortality in Western economies).

It depends on the original range surely?

Losing 30% of 120 miles is a lot more significant to most people than losing 30% of 300 miles (which >99% won’t within the life of the car).

In the UK the price of gas is currently around the equivalent of $7/gal at the cheapest due to how it’s taxed here and the absence of a subsidy.

Electricity is around 18c/kwh overnight.

I can’t understand how gas cars get sold here anymore at all.

Not really convinced the logic is right here. If the battery dies there’s still options before replacing it with a new one from the manufacturer at retail price.

Even then, batteries in EVs don’t have a 100% failure rate. There are still many 15 year old Leafs driving around on the original battery, and I’m not sure the out-and-out failures (I.e. not including gradual capacity loss) are a high number either.

Modern EVs (2016-present) have even lower failure rates again (below 1% within 200k miles including those replaced due to capacity loss)

Being new to Datastar and having seen some of the hype recently, I'm really not sold on it.

The patch statements on the server injecting HTML seems absolutely awful in terms of separation of concerns, and it would undoubtedly be an unwieldy nightmare on an application of any size when more HTML is being injected from the server.

CarPlay/Android Auto too!

Very mixed feelings about this as there’s a strong case for the decisions made here but it also moves .NET further away from WASMGC, which makes using it in the client a complete non-starter for whole categories of web apps.

It’s a missed opportunity and I can’t help but feel that if the .NET team had gotten more involved in the proposals early on then C# in the browser could have been much more viable.

The author needn't regret not publishing this two years ago, it's a thought that had occurred to pretty much everyone long before then. It's just not clear that anything can be done to stop the snowball from gathering speed.

What good deeds?

Isn’t this the guy that gives out cars to one random person on YouTube while their friends get nothing then films the reactions for megabucks?

If you haven’t tried openSUSE Aeon, I’ve been really impressed with it.

BTRFS I find is a more elegant solution than OSTree for this use case, and it’s got a very minimal and polished happy path.

Silverblue covers way more use cases (not least multiple users), but the setup and secure boot encryption setup is very slick and macOS-esque philosophically.

Same. I often need to use private windows (calm down, I need to sign in to multiple accounts for work on an app that doesn’t support them) and I immediately hate this experience.

It was kind of bad before where safari would just open the new tab in whatever mode you were in last, but you could see and switch if you wanted to. Now they’ve removed that info and are doing the same thing so I never know what mode I’m in until I come up and down through the menus.

I can’t understand how no-one vetoed these changes.

Also TvOS 26 has noticeably impacted my TV 4k and it lags just when browsing the menus (which it never did before).

Which is a bit sad. There were some choices that didn’t pan out in the last Intel era (butterfly, touchbar), but part of me loved those changes (the keyboard and the touchbar felt super premium, until you tried to work with them for any amount of time).