Oreb

I suppose doorman and porter would be considered more premium, but personally, my preference is definitely automatic door and elevator.

Doorman and porter means more awkward social interactions with strangers, and “premium” just makes me feel like I don’t belong there. I prefer my hotels to be simple and automatic. Airbnbs with self-service check-ins are ideal.

It seems to depend on the domain, and perhaps the tech stack? I’ve been disappointed by Astra, it’s worse than both Fable and Opus for me.

Shameless self promotion:

If you’re a Mac user and want something with native look and feel, there is also The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton (TestFlight beta):

https://testflight.apple.com/join/mqfhpmHY

There are also iOS and watchOS versions, but those can’t run 3rd party engines like Stockfish.

Some humans are much better at writing. Most humans are not. If you think they are, you are luckier than I am when it comes to the humans you need to communicate with.

As a non-native English speaker, I think the current LLMs write better English than me. I still write better than them in my native language (Norwegian), but the same cannot be said about most of my compatriots.

I’m working on The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton, a chess app for Apple platforms:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/mqfhpmHY

This work is motivated for my lifelong love for chess, my passion for Apple hardware and software (not as much as before, sadly), and my frustration of not having an Apple-native app comparable to ChessBase. My disappointment with the trend of recent macOS apps using Electron or other cross-platform frameworks instead of the native toolkits is also a factor. I miss the days when Apple users demanded more from macOS apps.

My aim with MBCA is to create a serious chess app that satisfies the needs of everyone from club players to professionals, with a native Apple look and feel and iCloud sync. Currently the app supports the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. I hope to make a visionOS port later. There is still a lot of work to do, but I’m having a lot of fun developing it, and I already find the current version very useful for my chess training.

The name, in case you wonder, is from a short story by Gene Wolfe, my favorite science fiction author.

> A year ago none of my normie friends new them, and when i suggested using Claude looked at me like when I recommend Linux.

Isn’t that still the case? Normies haven’t even heard about Claude, in my experience.

> The abstractions allow devs to build faster or work on things users care about

I care about native macOS look and feel. Sadly the entire industry has pretty much decided that this is no longer worth the effort. I miss the days when Mac users demanded more from their apps, even if it meant that some apps were not available for the platform.

Not really. The problem with the names in Dostoyevsky (and Russian literature more generally) isn’t that the names on their own are difficult to remember, it is that all names also have familiar forms, which are sometimes very different from the formal name. On page you get introduced to a character named Alexander, a few pages later the text talks about Sasha. For non-native speakers, it’s hard to guess that it’s the same person. An e-reader’s search function isn’t going to make this problem disappear.

My own experience from elementary school was that teachers being wrong was shockingly common. There is no subject in which I would trust any of my elementary school teachers more than a state of the art LLM. This was in Norway. I’m guessing you were privileged to grow up in a place with better quality elementary education.

At least for now, no, it is not possible. I agree that what you describe is how it ought to work in an ideal world, but it would probably require some serious rethinking of macOS UI/UX in order to make it work. For instance, it is not obvious what’s the best way to transfer the dock and the menu bar to a screen-less environment.

A hybrid solution I would love to see would be to have the current virtual screen, but with the option of dragging individual windows out of the screen.

Yes. I spend maybe half of the year (on average) away from home, traveling with my MacBook. I bought the Vision Pro to use as a portable display, and I’ve been extremely happy with it. I work in it about 8 hours per day whenever I’m away from my home office setup, and quite often even when I’m at home.

Having an enormous virtual screen is not the only benefit, I also feel that the immersion helps my focus. It’s easier to get into the zone than ever before. I remember someone describing the Vision Pro as the equivalent of noise-canceling headphones for the eyes, which is spot on. I suppose I am lucky that I don’t have any problems with the weight of the comfort, except on hot days.

I’ve been an Apple enthusiast since the 1980s, but I can’t even remember the last time I was as excited about an Apple product as I am about the Vision Pro. I hope it will survive, come down in price, and launch in more countries.

I don’t know much about the Baltics, but in the Nordic countries, dismissing employees is no easier than in France.

Posts like this makes me feel like I’m using a different World Wide Web than everybody else. Where are all these pages that don’t work in WebKit browsers?

I use Safari as my main browser, I open Chrome only when I encounter a web site that doesn’t work in Safari. It happens maybe once or twice per year, and half of the time, it turns out that it doesn’t work in Chrome either.

I vaguely remember that there was also TRES. EINE = Eine Is Not Emacs

ZWEI = Zwei Was Eine Initially

TRES = Tres Replaces Eine’s Successor

Not a cheese, despite the name.

> syntax is hard to read unless you spend a lot time getting used to it

That’s pretty much exactly the opposite of how I always felt. Perhaps because I’m not a programmer by education, I always struggle to remember the syntax of programming languages, unless I’m working in them all the time. After I return to a language after working in other languages for a while, I always have difficulties remembering the syntax, and I spend some time feeling very frustrated.

Clojure and Lisps more generally are the exception. There is very little syntax, and therefore nothing to remember. I can pick it up and feel at home immediately, no matter how long I’ve been away from the language.

I’m not sure I’m representative of “most people” in this respect (I have always used both n and m dashes), but I personally find the difference between n and m dashes bigger and more noticeable than the difference between regular and n dashes.

I agree, I always found the charging port location to be a total non-issue. The battery life is long, charging is fast, and you get warned that the battery level is low long before the mouse dies.

Does it depend on what type of programming you do? Doing Swift/SwiftUI work, I have exactly the opposite experience. I’ve been using both recently, and I want to use Claude alone (especially after the last week’s events), but Codex is just so much faster and better.

I honestly don’t understand why Liquid Glass provokes so strong reactions. To me it’s not that radically different from the old design. I don’t love it, and I don’t hate it. There is nothing new that in any way impacts how I use or experience my iPhone, my iPad or my Mac. My reaction to Liquid Glass was pretty much a neutral “looks a little bit different, I guess” before forgetting about it.

As a native speaker of Swedish and Norwegian, I can mostly understand spoken Faroese (if they speak slowly). In spoken Icelandic, I understand some words, but rarely a complete sentence.

Phonetic spelling would perhaps make the language easier to learn for native speakers, but it would make it harder to learn for foreigners, at least those of us who come from Europe. Most words in written English resemble words in Germanic or Romance languages. If English was spelled phonetically, the resemblance would be significantly smaller.

People often say that the English spelling is weird or illogical. As a non-native speaker, I disagree. The English spelling makes perfect sense. It’s the English pronunciation which is really strange and inconsistent.

> The Spanish I understand most easily is the heavily accented Spanish of non-native Spanish speakers.

Are you sure this is because of their accent? I have the same experience with French (the non-native speakers are easier to understand), but I always thought that was because they use fewer and simpler words.

Why do people even use the app? I never understood it. I always just run Slack in my browser.

I also find it hard to agree with that part. Perhaps it depends on what type of software you write, but in my experience finding good test cases is one of those things that often requires a deep level of domain knowledge. I haven’t had much luck making LLMs write interesting, non-trivial tests.

Why Sweden? Did you mean Norway, perhaps?

I agree with your general complaints about the decline of Apple’s software quality, but what’s your problem with Safari? I’ve never found another macOS browser I like half as much.

“Emacs Makes Any Computer Slow” is another one I remember from back in the days.

And astrophysics has MACHOs and WIMPs.

> Dark mode should be reserved for after sunset and before sunrise.

Isn’t that already how it works in all major operating systems?