AnonC

This is not for me, since I agree with Steve Jobs’s take that it will be painful to use a touchscreen laptop. But I do see it being useful for the touchscreen generation and for artists. The first thing I do on my company provided Windows laptop is to open Device Manager and disable the touchscreen because I don’t want to deal with accidental touch inputs. Controversial and snarky take: I think macOS is going to transform more and more into iOS, and not in a good way…losing all the advantages of a keyboard and mouse driven interface. The lowest common denominator with lesser Apple developer effort will win over. The work on this machine also possibly explains why Apple has not spent any time improving its own Catalyst apps like Reminders, Notes and others on the Mac. These apps ported from iOS do not understand keyboard navigation and rely heavily on the trackpad or mouse. With the introduction of this machine, Apple has no (financial) reason to improve these apps anymore.

This is not for me, since I agree with Steve Jobs’s take that it will be painful to use a touchscreen laptop. But I do see it being useful for the touchscreen generation and for artists. The first thing I do on my company provided Windows laptop is to open Device Manager and disable the touchscreen because I don’t want to deal with accidental touch inputs.

Controversial and snarky take:

I think macOS is going to transform more and more into iOS, and not in a good way…losing all the advantages of a keyboard and mouse driven interface. The lowest common denominator with lesser Apple developer effort will win over.

The work on this machine also possibly explains why Apple has not spent any time improving its own Catalyst apps like Reminders, Notes and others on the Mac. These apps ported from iOS do not understand keyboard navigation and rely heavily on the trackpad or mouse. With the introduction of this machine, Apple has no (financial) reason to improve these apps anymore.

I can’t give a non-snarky answer. I guess they’re all training Claude Code and testing it so that the Claude desktop apps can be native apps instead of Electron based nonsense. This is the only thing Claude Code is still unable to accomplish.

I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.

But the Apple with ads is not the Apple that had some taste and discernment in the past. For a long time I’ve visited the App Store’s app update page directly (tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option). Anytime I inadvertently go to the App Store home page or the few times I search, it’s an ad filled disaster!

From this article

> repeatedly attempting to prod customers towards even more of the company’s products might seem cheap, even distasteful.

From a recent post by John Gruber:

> Steve Jobs in 2011: 'We Build Products That We Want for Ourselves, Too, and We Just Don't Want Ads' [1]

Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?

[1]: We don’t want ads https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/28/jobs-we-dont-wa...

> Accountable mixed-use crawlers remain allowed for search. Every other training crawler is blocked, including the training-only crawlers run by Amazon, Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI — blocking those does not affect search.

> We also categorize the relevant crawlers from Amazon, Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI as Accountable. These organizations separate their Search and Training crawlers, so Cloudflare can block the Training crawler without affecting search.

I find it difficult to trust that either Meta or OpenAI would use their separate search and training crawlers only for the respective purposes. Their pinky promises have no value, IMO. Both companies are premised on deceptive behaviors.

Some of these seem a bit obscure. I wish the author had given detailed examples or linked to pages with details on the points.

What exactly is “builds minutes”? I looked at the FAQ and Docs but couldn’t find what it means. Are there static sites where the build process consumes, in total, 5000 minutes (in the paid plans)? How often are these sites being updated?

A few days ago I saw some people criticizing Dwarkesh’s explanation of the HuggingFace hack by OpenAI’s AI agents. Their point was that by anthropomorphizing the AI agents, accountability of and blame on OpenAI’s poor practices are being ignored.

Now I see this blog post and wonder if Anthropic is being more true to its name and moving to “AI sentience” with the below.

> The way they handle abusive conversations has changed a bit too. The previous Fable 5 system prompt included this:

> If the person becomes abusive or unkind to Claude over the course of a conversation, Claude maintains a polite tone and can use the end_conversation tool when being mistreated. Claude should give the person a single warning before ending the conversation.

“Mistreated”? Can GenAI be mistreated? It’s just a bunch of tokens emitted by many computers over a network.

> Fable 5.1 replaces that with the following, no longer encouraging Claude to end the conversation:

> Claude deserves respectful engagement and needn't apologize when the person is unnecessarily rude: accountability without self-abasement, excessive apology, self-critique, or surrender. If the person becomes abusive, Claude doesn't become increasingly submissive. The goal is steady, honest helpfulness: acknowledge what went wrong, stay on the problem, maintain self-respect.

“Self-respect”? Can GenAI truly have a concept of self-respect for itself? It surely can pretend to, like it can pretend to be any living being if instructed to and allowed to.

These instructions seem a bit unhinged to me.

AFAIK, from reading the annual reports years ago, this nice sum of money belongs to Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit that works on making a better web. Mozilla Corporation, the for-profit entity that makes Firefox, doesn’t seem to have as much as it needs. Hence MDN Plus, Mozilla VPN, and other services.

> They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone.

No, Apple is not content with however much it makes from the iPhone. That’s why it stuffed cringeworthy ads in Apple News, filled the App Store screen with ads and is now doing the same with Apple Maps. It’s a company focused on making money through every avenue possible, even if it means being shortsighted and losing the goodwill of developers and users.

> That sort of design has fallen out of favor with newer frameworks, unfortunately. The new preferred style seems to be a wireframe that the dev chooses which parts fill in, and often only the barest of essentials makes the cut.

This is even more visible when using Apple’s own apps on macOS. Choose any of them that have been ported from iOS without any attention to detail or any QA for accessibility, like Reminders or Settings or Notes or another app. The tab key will not take you where you might expect. There is no way to navigate only using common keyboard shortcuts. Nobody working on all these Apple apps have heard of tab order or keyboard based navigation.

But Signal requires a working phone number for registration and it knows the phone number. The backend could be modified at any time to store this somewhere else while maintaining end to end encryption between the two parties communicating on it. How can Signal prove continuously that it doesn’t store or disseminate the phone number? I know in past precedent it has told courts that it only has very limited information (date of account creation and the last time of account access).

The issue with mxroute is that it's run by one person, AFAIK. Of course, you can always move with a custom domain, but I'd rather have a team of people involved to manage risks better. Migadu (which I'm not a customer of) provides almost the same, but with a team and for a subscription. The lowest tier as of this comment is $19 a year.

Same here. I don't want a custom domain for certain things, and Posteo (posteo.de) was good. Posteo increased the mailbox storage to 4 GB recently and the default number of free aliases too. I'm satisfied that it's run by a team and not by one person (the low bus factor mentioned above). At EUR 1 per month, it's way cheaper than Fastmail for multiple mailboxes across family members and provides a lot more value, IMO.

This has been the case even before AI. One can never keep up with everything and catch every interesting or useful story.

What I’ve been doing for several years is to use hckrnews.com as my default first level filter. I rarely go to the HN front page directly. I never visit the New or other pages either.

Sometimes I notice, after weeks or months or years, that there was a very interesting topic I missed out on. But such is life. It’s ok not to keep up with anything.

I tried SuperDuper! long ago (yeah, the application’s name has an exclamation mark), but shifted to Carbon Copy Cloner as a paid user since the latter was advancing and keeping up much faster (with the Mac OS changes) and better than SuperDuper! seemed to.

But I like this new design in SuperDuper! 4.

I always wondered about the pricing and upgrades, but this is impressive:

> In all the years SuperDuper has been on the market, we’ve never charged for updates and never even raised the price. That’s 22 years of free updates.

Talk about value for money for the end user!

> SuperDuper 4 is a totally new version, far more capable than before, and as such, I’ve decided this is going to be its first paid upgrade. I’ve also adjusted the price for inflation since 2004. So it’s still the same bargain it was back when it was first released, but in today’s dollars.

The price to buy it as a new user is above the price that Carbon Copy Cloner charges (and that has paid upgrades at half the buying price every two or three years). But if this keeps up with Apple’s changes faster, it may be a bargain again. I’ll be trying this and probably buying this soon.

> If the App Store delivers on its promise of discoverability, that should be enough to see some kind of traffic…right?

As a consumer, I’ve never seen the App Store on iOS or macOS provide discoverability for anything other than apps that are already popular among millions or billions of people. If a developer or company gets their app downloads surging by their own effort, then it could get the attention of the “app store editors” to be featured in some pointless and useless listicle.

If this had been an iOS app, with the half screen ads on the iOS App Store (such an insipid and rapacious move, Tim Cook and John Ternus), there is no way the app would be seen even if someone searched for it by name. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mac App Store has or will have half page ads either.

Apple under Tim Cook is a company looking to extract every possible penny. If an app is somehow discoverable, it would only be because it has subscriptions that give Apple a constant stream of revenue.

I never thought I’d compare Meta and Apple on the same lines, but here it is. Just like how Meta turns a blind eye towards things that bring money, Apple does the same with the App Store and scammy apps that rob people.

> If discoverability isn't a part of the App Store deal, what exactly is the benefit?

The only benefit is a single click (or two click) installation for the crowd that has never downloaded and installed anything before. There is no other benefit for the consumer, and there’s every possible downside for the developer.

I don’t buy things from the Mac App Store if there is an option to buy directly from the developer (which usually has a lower price, better support and sometimes better offers too).

As a user of Apple devices, I can’t wait for side loading to be forced by regulators worldwide on devices where it’s not possible now. (I’m not interested in Android)

Claude isn’t even good enough for Anthropic to release native desktop applications for each OS. As someone said in a comment in a different post here, it seems like these tools are good at web and web related (like Electron) development.

Anthropic intentionally missed the opportunity to show that its models can develop really good native applications.

OpenAI’s latest desktop applications seem to be worse than before too.

Emphasis mine:

> Each invocation runs in a lightweight V8 isolate, close to Telegram's own systems, so calls to the Bot API and your database are quick and reliable.

Telegram’s servers are distributed worldwide. I understand that the calls to the Bot API may be quick because the serverless code would be propagated to the edge, but how does it handle an SQLite DB? Is that also replicated to guarantee quick access from anywhere?

I clearly remember many years ago that this wasn’t the case with Gmail, when looking for the source IP address in a case involving harassment of a person. I could only get Gmail’s own IP address in the headers from the multiple emails I examined at that time.

Nevertheless, as js2 said in another comment, it’s your mail provider (in this case Gmail) deciding whether to include the sender’s IP address or not.

Not for me. I don’t even remember when (or since how many years ago) I turned off Protect My Email and turned on both Hide IP Address and Block All Remote Content. I still have these toggles as they are, despite the fact that I use beta releases as and when they’re released (currently still on iOS 26.x).

I think it would be uncharacteristic of Apple to raise prices anytime from now till new products are announced in September. It doesn’t match Apple’s brand image (like the author says). As pointed in another post by John Gruber, Apple kept selling the trash can Mac Pro for a very high price for years without any updates. So it can certainly afford to bear this pain for a couple of more months and bundle all the price hikes together.

The threat of a price hike may increase sales in the near term (especially the back to school sale) and could tamper down the drop in profits a bit. After all, the hardware bill of materials is not the only thing deciding the product price.

A bigger hike now could have a snowballing effect on “switchers” and the potential services revenues they could bring.

I’m guessing that Apple will increase the prices of all products with the iPhone and Apple Watch launches in September. The increase in prices for currently selling products will be a store update, without any press release or news or tweet or any notification. That’s the (quiet) Apple way of doing things.

I read somewhere (don’t recall where) that Apple typically enters into contracts for RAM on a six-monthly basis and avoids longer term ones. Even in the current situation since last year, it has avoided getting into multi-year contracts like the AI companies have.

It’s certainly possible that the AI companies and their prospects may get a true reality check and then memory prices could cool down in a year or two. If that happens (I personally believe there is a good enough probability), then Apple will come out looking prescient for not getting locked into long term costly contracts.

It remains to be seen for how long the investors in the AI companies are willing to wait for total market capture and/or growing profits.

> A vouch option for Flagged submissions would be appreciated.

AFAIK, upvoting a flagged submission cancels out the flagging to some extent. I don’t know the internals of how this process works. I’ve upvoted the submission in an effort to get it unflagged (it still may not get to the front page or may rapidly drop down though).

> United States using its military to keep international waters open

Being a little pedantic, as per my knowledge, the Strait of Hormuz is not “international waters”. It’s territorial waters belonging to Iran and Oman. AFAIK, Iran hasn’t ratified UNCLOS either, and claims it is not subject to it.

I feel glad that I never went paid (though I do pay for software and services). Bitwarden always seemed laggy: both the development pace and the iOS app (though the latter improved a bit only in the last two years). The moment Bitwarden took VC funding ($100 million?), it was clear that it would “pivot” to enterprise, raise prices for consumers and do other things that describe enshittification. It’s probably in the same league as 1Password (another scummy company with similar practices and deteriorating applications).

On password managers, anyone using ProtonPass want to chime in on how it is? I’ve read online that Proton (as a company) has a tendency to start working on new things all the time and let the ones they created remain half baked and languishing (to some extent).

I’m not into KeePass and other local password managers since I need a shared solution for multiple people using the same vault.

The BitLocker exploit seems simple and very dangerous. Companies and individuals have been relying on BitLocker to protect information if the device is lost. Despite promises, Microsoft doesn’t seem to be serious about security.

What will it take for more companies to truly understand their risks with Windows and being locked into Microsoft’s platforms?

I’m subscribed to Infuse Pro for several years now, and I agree it’s one of the top purchases I’ve made (and keep paying for).

The lists, drive shares and libraries on Infuse are more than enough for me. I didn’t have an interest in adding Plex or Jellyfin (or Emby?) to the mix.

Quite impressive, indeed. OP/sleepingNomad, can I have this on MacPorts, please? Thank you.

> It's a wonder that cells get anything done at all.

> The first time I did these calculations, I felt an intense appreciation for biology. And now, I want everyone else to feel the same. We ought to teach students of biology to think as mathematicians: to carefully quantify biology, to think in absolute units, and to develop a feeling for the organism.

It was interesting to read this article, but I think I would’ve understood a lot more if this entire piece had been (or were) an animated video that described it. Text and a few animations don’t do enough justice for the passion, knowledge and detail that’s in this article, IMO.