Hacker News: shantara

New comment by shantara in "macOS 15.8.2 Breaks OpenGL"

shantara — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 16:46:17 +0000

The window manager bugs have been present since the first macOS 27 beta, and have made it unchanged to the current stable release.

New comment by shantara in "Passkeys are not a trap"

shantara — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 16:52:08 +0000

It’s difficult to disentangle one from another, when the companies with the vested financial interest in locking you in are the board members of the consortium creating the standard.

New comment by shantara in "Passkeys are not a trap"

shantara — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 16:38:12 +0000

These links should be a mandatory reading in every passkey-related discussion.

New comment by shantara in "Passkeys are not a trap"

shantara — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 16:28:55 +0000

If you need a tutorial for something that’s supposed to be as simple and transparent as a website authentication, your standard has already failed the usability test.

New comment by shantara in "Apple HomeView"

shantara — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:40:53 +0000

“Certain Apple Intelligence features that rely on server-side models are subject to daily usage limits. Expanded access to such features will be available for a fee in the future”

New comment by shantara in "macOS 27 is so buggy"

shantara — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:10:38 +0000

The bugs related to switching between virtual desktops have been present since the first developer beta, which is wild given how smooth this feature has been on Mac for as long as I can recall. I've reported them, and yet they've somehow made it into the final release. Unbelievable!

New comment by shantara in "Xcode 27.1 Beta Release Notes"

shantara — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 09:33:29 +0000

iOS 27 SDK will ignore the liquid glass compatibility flag, so the developers are now being forced to adopt it, unless they choose to stay with an old SDK version and all the hassle it brings.

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/832710?answerId=89...

New comment by shantara in "Apple Watch Series 12"

shantara — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 18:27:17 +0000

Moved to Suunto, and I couldn't be happier.

I had an Apple Watch series 7, which I had to charge twice a day now. I was on a fence between buying a new AW or switching to another brand, but Apple dropping the software support for my model have made the choice for me. I

New comment by shantara in "The case for physical media ownership"

shantara — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 14:52:30 +0000

My go to example (that unfortunately wasn’t mentioned in the article) is the removal of a game called Oxenfree from everyone who bought a permanent license for it on Itch.io. This is the most egregious example I’m aware of, as the game wasn’t merely made unavoidable for new purchases, but removed from the players’ libraries. It’s not a theoretical example of what could possibly happen, but an actual precedent.

https://delistedgames.com/oxenfree/

New comment by shantara in "Steam Machine launches today"

shantara — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 10:14:14 +0000

The original price should have been in $700-800 range, pre-RAM and storage pricing escalation, which would have changed the equation drastically. I even considered getting it as a mostly streaming box for a living room, intending to play only the lighter games on device. But for the announced price and after delays, it just doesn't make sense financially. As is, you're grossly overpaying for the level of GPU performance Steam Machine offers.

New comment by shantara in "It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12"

shantara — Sat, 30 May 2026 10:52:00 +0000

Apple dropping 32-bit support resulted in me losing access to 3/4 of my Mac Steam library. Not every piece of software is built with an endless update treadmill in mind, no matter how much Apple would like to force the developers into one with their breaking changes and developer program subscription.

This would result in people losing access to a bunch of software just so Apple could shrug and shift the blame elsewhere. Because in the mind of an Apple fan, nothing is ever Apple’s fault.

New comment by shantara in "Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes"

shantara — Tue, 26 May 2026 08:22:58 +0000

I gifted my mom a Xiaomi phone a few years ago. Even after removing all the unnecessary apps and permissions, disabling all the privacy invasive settings and replacing the launcher with the stock Android, I was shocked when I checked the PiHole dashboard. The phone was constantly trying to communicate with dozens of different domains and endpoints, even when idle. None of these attempts had any sort of backoff, so they kept retrying every 30 seconds, draining the battery. Ultimately it generated several times more blocked requests than every other device on my network combined.

This was the first and only Xiaomi device I ever bought, no matter how attractive they might seem.

New comment by shantara in "Why the smart home bubble popped"

shantara — Tue, 26 May 2026 08:08:35 +0000

>Try to set the lights to turn on 10 minutes before your alarm goes off

I had a very similar use case: turn on my espresso machine (via smart plug) 20 minutes before I wake up. It should have been simple, as I already have a sleep schedule with a wake up alarm in the system. It turned out to be such a complicated hassle, that it put me off from using HomeKit for anything more complicated than “press a button to turn on a lamp”.

New comment by shantara in "Ads on Apple Maps"

shantara — Thu, 07 May 2026 08:34:54 +0000

The quality of Apple maps is highly dependent on where you live. Every time I check their release notes, I see “we’ve added a custom 3d model for this one landmark in a random US city”, which has zero impact on me or 99.99% of their users. Meanwhile, in my home city it took more than 3 months for a newly opened gym to appear of Apple maps, way way slower than on Google or OSM maps.

New comment by shantara in "Networking changes coming in macOS 27"

shantara — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:23:34 +0000

>Apple made SMB its primary file-sharing protocol in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, over 12 years ago…

…and yet SMB support in macOS remains slow and buggy to this day. I tried all combinations of server-side settings and obscure plist tweaks to make SMB navigation and search work as fast as they do on my Linux machine out of box before giving up. It is very obviously not a priority for their services revenue, so there’s no incentive for fixing any of the long standing problems.

New comment by shantara in "Framework Laptop 13 Pro: Major Upgrades and Linux Front and Center"

shantara — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 18:45:09 +0000

Not sure why would I preorder a laptop of all things. It looks interesting, but I’d rather wait until the reviews are out.

New comment by shantara in "Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica"

shantara — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:34:12 +0000

Interesting how different both the tone and the structure of the articles are compared to the modern texts.

Take the article about Copenhagen as an example: https://britannica11.org/article/07-0111-copenhagen/copenhag... The geography and key points of interest are described very accurately, but the authors aren’t shy about inserting emotionally charged adjectives and personal options on what they consider interesting or curious. Also, the huge portion about the Battle of Copenhagen in the bottom is a complete departure and shifts the genre from a geographical description to the shot-per-shot narration of a naval battle.

New comment by shantara in "You can't trust macOS Privacy and Security settings"

shantara — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:30:03 +0000

One of the worst cases happens immediately after logging into a fresh Mac, or after upgrading one. You’re instantly hit with a barrage of requests from all the installed apps and their various permissions. It makes for such a terrible initial user experience, it’s utterly baffling someone at Apple has signed it off. They used to poke fun at Windows in their ads, but UAC has never been that terrible in my experience.

New comment by shantara in "FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages"

shantara — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:22:35 +0000

Sorry, the “recommended” was a bad wording on my part. The recommendation comes from the 404 Media article who did the expose on this incident, not Signal itself.

I’ve checked the Signal documentation page, and there’s no mention of the privacy implications of the setting: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360043273491-In...

New comment by shantara in "FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages"

shantara — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:56:06 +0000

iOS stores the previously displayed notifications in an internal database, which was used to access the data. It’s outside of Signal’s control, they recommend disabling showing notification content in their settings to prevent this attack vector