Yes, there's a fee to get access to the App Store, but almost nobody on the Mac uses the App Store... the fee is mainly for putting stuff on iOS (and likely watchOS, tvOS).

The fee also gets you the absolute latest Xcode, but go back one version, and it's entirely free.

On Mac, you can install brew, and use it to install gcc, clang, qemu, whatever utilities you want.

You used to need the developer fee to put stuff on your iOS device at all, but these days you can put stuff on your personal devices without a fee, but the binary expires in a week... enough to learn and debug, but not ideal for a personal tool. That's about the only annoyance where the fee comes up... long term deployment to iOS.

Liked the first Locked Tomb, didn't really enjoy the remainder of the series.

The Witch King (from the Murderbot author), was alright.

The Time Travellers Almanac. Time Travellers Almanac was meh. A set of short stories, but many retreads of the same ideas we've seen over the decades. There was one good story, and one other interesting concept...

Road to Roswell and Crosstalk. Connie Willis' books were great, as usual.

Brzrkr. Keanu's book was meh.

The first five of the Kate Daniels Series: - Magic Bites - Magic Burns - Magic Strikes - Magic Bleeds - Magic Slays

Kate Daniels is doing an acceptable job filling in for Dresen's absence, though book 3 and 4 go a bit heavy on the romance side.

Pre-orders pending on the next Murderbot book (Platform Decay), and Dresden (Twelve Months)

I have no idea what input events zooming generates. Perhaps an option in the URL could be used to turn on a log of input events that people can copy/paste and submit back to you, so you can get a sense of what events are coming from various devices and input methods without having to find devices to try them all yourself.

Plenty of map sites have spent years broken on Macs, not handling smooth pinch-zoom or Magic Mouse smooth scroll wheel events. A slight 3mm movement of a finger going from fully zoomed in street view to fully zoomed out planet view. I'm assuming every micro-movement event is treated as a Windows scroll wheel event where you expect to move a decent chunk on each event.

However you're treating zoom inputs, you've got the opposite effect. A full zoom motion barely does anything.

Minor usability note, zooming by pinch on a MacBook trackpad is painfully slow.

If you've got a decent tech job in Canada your marginal tax rate will be near 50%. Any new income is taxed at that rate, so that 3% COL raise, is really a 1.5% raise in your purchasing power, which typically makes you worse off.

Until you're at a very comfortable salary, you're better off job hopping to boost your salary. I'm pretty sure all the financial people are well aware they're eroding their employees salaries over time, and are hoping you are not aware.

And? Are you saying neither Intel nor AMD engineers were able to determine that this was a bottleneck worth chasing? The point was, anybody could add more cache, rename, reorder or whatever buffers they wanted to... it's not Apple secret-sauce.

If all the competition knew they were leaving all this performance/efficiency on the table despite there being a relatively simple fix, that's on them. They got overtaken by a competitor with a better offering.

If all the competition didn't realize they were leaving all this performance/efficiency on the table despite there being a relatively simple fix, that's also on them. They got overtaken by a competitor with better offering AND more effective engineers.

At some point I just moved on, and solved the next word, Chess, in like 2 seconds. The results claimed I spent a whole pile of time on Chess, since it has no idea which result I'm thinking of solving (though all the wrong guesses for Catan should have been a clue that the time should have gone towards Catan.)

I'm not sure the per-word time values are useful if they can't be trusted to be accurate.

I was alive for both amber and green screens too.

Please don't suggest people are making things up from times before their birth simply because you have a different view.

We haven't yet had a glowing-white paper.

Traditional-normal for computing was a dark background.

There was likely a technological limit in the use of pure white at the start when "emulating" paper. VGA 16-color mode likely meant that the choice was between bright white and medium grey, which was too dark. Configurability has lagged behind though.

Windows adopting the "paper"-white background and whole world drooling over the arrival of Windows 3.1 and 95 is when it became the standard, I think.

From early green or amber text on black mono displays. Grey on black DOS text mode. Light Blue on Dark Blue C-64. Apple 2's grey/white (I don't recall) on black. Even GUI wise, Amiga used a dark-blue background as the default Workbench, with user selectable palettes for everything.

It was Microsoft Windows that changed the paradigm to default to a searing white display with black text in most apps, like Notepad, Word, etc., because "it's more like paper". Sure, paper is white, but it's not glowing white. That transition was painful.

I'm glad to see dark-modes return, I agree there needs to be an option, not just forced dark-mode. Preferably light mode options to use a not-as-bright-as-possible white too.

It worked fine on Mac. On Windows though, if you let it use as many threads as there were CPUs, it would nearly 100% of the time fail before making it through our test suite. Something in scheduling the work would deadlock. It was more likely to fail if anything was open besides the app. Basically, a brush stoke that should complete in a tenth of a second would stall. If you waited 30-60 minutes (yes minutes), it would recover and continue.

I vaguely recall we used the Intel compiler implementation of OpenMP, not what comes with MSVC, so the fault wasn't necessarily a Microsoft issue, but could still be a kernel issue.

I left that company later that year, and MS rolled out Windows 8. No idea how long that bug stuck around.

I took photos of both Jupiter and Saturn w/ a Canon R7 and the RF 100-500mm lens, with a 1.4x extender. The 1.4x extender make the lens act like 700mm instead of 500mm. The R7 being an APS-C sensor adds another 1.6x factor, making the combo the equivalent of 1120mm. In these photos the planets are still just dots. The camera takes 32.5 megapixel photos. When zoomed in to the pixel level, both planets were still tiny, about 50 pixels wide. It was enough to see Saturn had a ring and some color striping on Jupiter, but that's it.

The iPhone main camera is like 26mm (42x less zoom). The iPhone 13 Pro's telephoto lens is 77mm (14.5x less zoom), and the iPhone 15 Pro Max is 120mm (9.3x less zoom)... so you're unlikely to get much more than what looks like an out of focus few pixel wide dot even on the zoomiest of iPhones, but with that wider 26mm lens, you just might be able to capture them all in one shot.

To me, what's more technically impressive than the fact I took pictures of the planets with readily available camera gear was that I did with 1/125s shutter speed, handheld, standing in my yard. The accuracy of the image stabilization needed to pull that off is what astounded me the most.

> There are no memory management capabilities on the LC-3, no MMU, no paging, no segmentation. In turn there are no memory-related exceptions, page faults or protection faults.

Sounds an awful lot like a Commodore 64, where I got my start. There's plenty to learn before needing to worry about paging, protection, virtualization, device discovery, bus faults, etc.

It sounds like it's not teaching the wrong things like your GTA driving example, but teaching a valid subset, but not the subset you'd prefer.

Apple taking your data privacy seriously seems a worthy exception to me. You're free to disagree, and buy an Android.

Getting hardware to enable faster AI processing on phones should be good thing if used for useful tasks, LLM or not.

When my daughter was studying Chinese, I could use the live-video translation app and see the lesson text translated to English, and see her hand-written answers also translated to English. I could see this being more broadly useful when travelling, along with live translation of spoken words.