Aside from some difficulty with mastering environment variables, I’ve been delighted with the change and will probably not look back.

The entire industry is run by actual journalists, it's one of the few industries where people who know how to do the job still rise to the top. Unlike most other industries, where the top brass are MBAs who don't actually know how to do things like build airplanes or write software or what have you. Which is honestly great except when it's not.

The web has never found a way to make journalism as profitable as it was back in the print days, so they mostly see technologists as people who get in their way, as disposable or replaceable.

So imagine the state of their tech stack — CMS's integrated with the front end, if not Wordpress then something like that, nothing headless. “Hey you should remove this plugin" what's a plugin? "look… this Bonzai Buddy, who installed it?" Some guy who left twenty years ago. And it's not in a template, it's in the articles and executed by an eval().

They have no motivation to fix any of it, because again, web sites for newspapers aren't profitable. Subscriptions are profitable. I think the real reason why Substack is successful is not that email is a good format for journalism — in fact it’s terrible — but because you generally cannot inject javascript into it. Which comes back to Gruber’s point — javascript was a disaster for the web as a document standard.

(personally, I haven't read news on the web in something like twenty years — RSS ftw)

her review: “this thing is HUGE :( :P ”

- Was there a lab where they tested beating people to death with IBM hardware?

- Where did they find subjects? Volunteers, interns, exit-interviews from layoff rounds?

- Now that you can't beat people to death with IBM hardware, what do you use instead?

I have the last-gen Studio Display, pretty great during the day (the nano-texture is astonishing), but just looks like trash at night when the backlight overwhelms the blacks.

My guess was that the “Studio Display 2” would introduce Mini-LED, and then a “Pro Display 2” would have the high-refresh and maybe 32". Wake me up in five years, I guess.

(source: keeping an eye out on the NY subway, which I have found to be a pretty damned good gauge of consumer electronics popularity)

an every-two-or-three year release cycle would be fine, ideal even

There has to be some fresh-out-of-college graphic designer in Berlin ready to make their name by designing a custom icon library for a project like this, ask around.

To be realistic, this design needs more weirdly sexual etsy garbage, “one weird tip,” and “punch the monkey”

One of the friends asked Claude-AI "what are the top five space opera novels of all time," and it ranked Hyperion as #2, only behind Dune.

I personally think LLM "knowledge" is… kind of stupid… but I have to admit it speaks to Simmons legacy that even the word swamp recognizes Hyperion as an all-time classic.

(it ranked Stars Are Legion by K. Hurley as #5, which I unconditionally agree with, but am also kind of shocked, I've never heard of this book so much as referenced in any kind of article or conversation. But yeah, read it. Star Wars meets Alien — the Death Star is the alien)

I would wager that Stripe has already put together a consumer-cash platform, and is weighing whether to deploy it as "Stripe Cash" or "Paypal 2.0". The former strategy would require a slow rollout that would compete with Paypal, Apple Cash, whatever Google and Samsung’s offerings are called… The latter branding would make them the dominant player overnight.

Still have no idea what it actually means, or why it takes so crazy long.

If they have to update symbols upon every OS version bump, are they cleaning out the old ones? It's so frustratingly opaque.

First, the performance is just bad. The responsiveness compared to apps like VSC or Panic’s Nova is night-and-day.

The attention given to the design of new features is piss-poor. Placing the AI functionality on the left sidebar makes no sense; all the other tools on the left are project management; the "let me run weird functions and interact with stuff" UIs like terminal, debug and logs are in the bottom panel. Or maybe a new tab in the main workspace area?

The SwiftUI preview canvas can't be floated as a separate window, making it all but useless on anything smaller than a 16" MBP (and only barely usable there). In fact, I think it might be impossible to use Xcode in multiple screens altogether…?

Old simulator versions and cache files hang around forever, you need a third-party app like DevCleaner just to keep your storage from filling with nonsense. Cryptic messages like "copying symbols to device"… clear-cache that doesn't seem to clear-cache, that stupid list UI for info.plist…

I never thought I'd have anything nice to say about PNPM package management, but you can always just delete `node_modules` and reinstall and count on things working. Swift package management is a cryptic mess, and their insistence on using a GUI instead of a basic JSON manifest just compounds it. Like the info.plist thing, a lot of Xcode is based on a developer UI philosophy from the Mac Classic days that has mostly been abandoned by the rest of the world.

Mostly, I think the vitriol surrounding Xcode is that Apple seems to think they're doing a good job; meanwhile their most ardent and adept users are insisting that they are not. Same boat as MacOS, really.

… so I’ve been kind of biting my tongue on this thread because “works fine for me” is not interesting or helpful, but: it’s been working great for me since it was introduced in 2007.

Periodically a disk will get flaky or go bad, maybe once every 2-3 years. I’ll erase the drive and start over. I always have two backups running so there’s never danger of being completely unprotected.

I don't doubt the people having Time Machine problems, but they usually seem to involve some unusual setup like a NAS. But for every one person who has a problem and speaks up, I suspect there are hundreds or thousands who are just humming along without a hitch.

(and yeah, I do pray for a "Snow Tahoe," "oops all bug-fixes" MacOS release, and I’d love to hear that there’s a team working not just to make Time Machine more resilient, but to expand it to do local backups of iPhones and iPads… a guy can dream)