deergomoo

Seriously why does seemingly every presenter from Tim Cook right down to the engineers in the tech-specific sessions speak with the exact same uncanny delivery in these videos? It's incredibly off-putting and sends my brain immediately into "you are being marketed at" mode.

I am incredibly annoyed that they’ve hidden all the camera controls behind an overflow button. Hiding functions is not the same as simplicity any more than shoving all the dirty laundry under your bed is cleaning.

Then why not just write it? You mention not having to write Markdown in the post, but c’mon dude, you’re a software developer.

Presumably the fact you have a personal blog means you must enjoy some aspect of writing, so what’s the end game here?

I mean you do you I guess—it’s your blog and I’m nobody. But if I’m reading someone’s thoughts I want _their_ words, not something filtered through a machine.

> Automate Content: Like this very post. I use Wispr Flow to talk with Claude, explain the topic and tell it to read my past blog posts to write in my style.

If you had any respect for your readers you’d put this as a disclaimer right at the top. I can’t be bothered to read anything you can’t be bothered to write.

Absurd take. Speed is not the issue! Optimising for speed of production is what got us into the utter quagmire that is modern software.

Lack of correctness, lack of understanding and ability to reason about behaviour, and poor design that builds up from commercial pressure to move quickly are the problems we need to be solving. We’re accelerating the rate at which we add levels to a building with utterly rotten foundations.

God damn it, I’m growing to loathe this industry.

Heidi was the default option on our work machines a few years ago and it’s one of the buggiest pieces of software I’ve ever used.

Does it still lock up the entire UI if a query takes longer than five seconds to return results? Does it still pop up exception dialogs every ten minutes when it’s been open for longer than a few hours?

> you end up in the interface's declaration so you have to jump through additional hoops to get to it

Bit of a tangent, but this really annoys me when I work on TypeScript (which isn't all that often, so maybe there's some trick I'm missing)—clicking through to check out the definition of a library function very often just takes me to a .d.ts file full of type definitions, even if the library is written in TypeScript to begin with.

In an ideal world I probably shouldn't really need to care how a library function is implemented, but the world is far from ideal.

I can’t rule out that at rush hour in either country it makes a difference, because I haven’t experienced it.

But I’m with you, with an express travel card set in Apple Pay (so you can just plop your phone down on the reader without opening anything) there is a beat for it to read on the Underground barriers, but it’s basically the same length of time as it takes to do the step and a half from the reader to the gate. At a normal walking speed I don’t feel as though I need to interrupt my stride.

I want a 7-10” central display that spends 99% of its time showing CarPlay but also has a radio if I need it, the backup camera when I’m in reverse, and lets me change a couple of settings for convenience features like auto locking etc. Everything else can be dials, knobs, and buttons. My Mazda3 is perfect for this and I’m quite sad that I’m almost certainly not going to be able to find anything like it by the time I come to replace it.

> "Android" but for cars.

Is this not just Android Automotive? A lot of Volvos use it, it’s a lower-level OS type thing that sits below Android Auto or CarPlay.

I bought a Mazda3 a few months ago and I love it. It is exactly what I want as a driver.

I even adore the scroll wheel and wish it could be in any car I own in future. Yeah it takes slightly longer to do certain actions in CarPlay, but I can do it so much more safely than I could in the Civic I had before. The infotainment boots basically instantly; as you mentioned CarPlay starts itself, and the patronising-but-mandated “don’t use this in motion” warning dismisses itself. In the Civic I would be half way down the road already by the time it booted, blindly prodding at the screen to try to dismiss that warning so I could pause the podcast that started playing itself because I plugged my phone in.

And, while my 2022 car predates the stupid auto-re-enabling ADAS requirement in Europe, the 2024+ models have single button deactivation. I dunno how, cause it’s supposed to require a minimum of two presses legally, but it sure makes me wanna stick with Mazda.

However that makes the upcoming 6E that much more disappointing. They’ve partnered with a Chinese manufacturer, I assume because they don’t have an EV platform of their own ready yet. Looks fantastic from the outside, but the inside is a sea of touch screens with barely a physical control in sight.

Yup, the web is a thoroughly mediocre application platform†, but the world’s best application distribution platform.

†I know this claim will rub some people the wrong way, but if you compare the capabilities of web tooling to build rich application UIs against desktop app tooling of even 20-30 years ago, there’s no comparison. The web is still primitive, and while JS and CSS are improving at a good pace, HTML is almost frozen in carbonite.

It’s insanely buggy. My wife has two user accounts, one for her work and one for everything else, so she can switch out of the work user at the end of the day to put it out of her mind.

She comes across bugs on the regular that I’ve never seen in 16 years of Mac use, but only when the other user account is logged in (i.e. quick user switching rather than a full log out).

Stuff that user accounts shouldn’t even make any difference to, like the menu bar disappearing or rendering too far up so it’s half off screen. Save dialogs stop appearing. Windows that are open but appear to be rendering off screen somewhere. It’s wild. This is on a < 1 year old MacBook Air running the latest OS. It’s an absolute shambles.

Don’t forget our old friend “The compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time”

I feel exactly the same way, it’s profoundly depressing.

I was concerned that I would still be semi-reliant on Google Search for things like local business opening hours etc. While it's true that Kagi doesn't return that stuff at the top of a search (I'm outside the US so YMMV), in practice it's been a non-issue because the top result—rather than an ad or some AI nonsense—is just that business' website. So at most it's one extra click.

I don't think I've deliberately done a Google search since I signed up, apart from to check that the !g option works as expected with the Safari extension (c'mon Apple, support custom search engines already)

In my experience, both SQL and real-world database schema are each complex enough beasts that to ensure everything is fetched reasonably optimally, you either need tons of entity-specific (i.e. not easily interface-able) methods for every little use case, or you need to expose some sort of builder, at which point why not just use the query builder you're almost certainly already calling underneath?

Repository patterns are fine for CRUD but don't really stretch to those endpoints where you really need the query with the two CTEs and the four joins onto a query selecting from another query based on the output of a window function.

My gripe is that iCloud Tabs haven’t worked right for years. Everything else that syncs in Safari works perfectly fine: tab groups, bookmarks, reading list. But iCloud Tabs, the feature that shows what you have open on other devices, is always either empty or showing things I had open literally months ago.

> redirecting to the sign-in page if you don’t have a session

Is this not access control?

> Now, unfortunately, Apple is on a rigid yearly OS update schedule

I cannot think of anything that less needs yearly major updates than macOS. It's a mature, 25 year old OS that, unlike iOS, is used for an enormous range of professional work. I need to it be fast, stable, and predictable. The last thing I want is change for the sake of change, which largely describes the last 5-10 years of the OS.

Wanna make Notes.app compatible with the new features in this year's iOS? Just update Notes. I don't need a whole new OS to get new features for a notepad.

Apple doesn't fix bugs†, they just eventually replace the feature or ship a different way of doing the same thing, whose bugs hopefully don't overlap those of the first feature.

We're on Sequoia 15.3.2 now and the keyboard shortcuts of the big new window tiling feature still don't work on non-Apple keyboards (or Apple keyboards, if you happen to have remapped the globe key to something else, like Caps Lock).

† Hyperbole, in case it wasn't obvious

I find Apple Maps to be a much more pleasant app to use, though that's at least partially down to it being permitted to do things Google aren't on iOS (nav on the lock screen, syncing with the Watch etc.)

In my experience it also has more accurate lane guidance and, as you say, better delivery of audible driving directions ("go through these lights then, at the roundabout, take the first exit"). Google Maps also has an annoying habit of choosing the quickest route at all costs which, in certain parts of the country, involves going miles down single-track country lanes (which legally have a speed limit of 60 but more than 30 would put you through a hedge or into an oncoming tractor) when a dual carriageway A-road would be only 2-3 minutes slower. I can't say Apple Maps doesn't do this, but anecdotally it seems to do it less.

However the business info is still way behind Google, particularly regarding things like temporary closures.

> Promote Craig Federighi, after all these years I am still not convinced he is the right person for the job

Yeah I wonder about Federighi. He doesn't seem to catch much criticism from the Apple pundits—I assume because he's one of the few SVPs that seems like a real human in interviews and videos and not a stilted robot like the rest of them. But Apple's software, and macOS in particular, seems to be rotting from the inside out. Changes ship and everyone says "boy this is a step backwards, I hope they iterate quickly" and then it sits, almost entirely unchanged, for years on end. e.g. new Settings in macOS, Stage Manager on the iPad.

With how much the hardware team has been knocking it out of the park since the ARM transition it's really starting to feel like the software is the weak link. This rumoured massive redesign this year has me feeling very anxious.

> its type system has historically been an afterthought

This is a rather outdated view. PHPs type system isn't the most expressive thing out there, but it's very achievable to have end-to-end type safety these days. For a start it's possible to delineate between nullable and non-nullable types, something many more "serious" languages don't support.

It has the weakness that, not being compiled, you need an additional static analysis tool to catch these things before runtime. But at least it has the good graces to crash if you tell it you're expecting a Foo and you try to pass a Bar, unlike e.g. Python.

Modern PHP is a completely different thing to the 5.x days. Yeah you still have the inconsistent stdlib, but everything has a few warts after 30 years.

MAM vs MDM. MAM is good when you want your developers to be reachable on Slack but they all (for good reason) refuse to install an MDM on a personal device—at least that seems to be how my employer feels.

I lump modern TV bullshit (crappy "smart" features, motion smoothing, horrible default settings) in with modern car bullshit (huge touchscreens everywhere, the near total death of real physical controls).

Everyone you speak to at best is ambivalent and at worst vehemently hates it. And yet there's no sign of it slowing down. It's baffling.

> My strategy is to buy cheapest TV on the market

Unfortunately if you're a stickler for image quality this isn't an option. You can still not connect it to the internet of course, but if you're buying a high end TV there's no way to avoid all the other modern TV bullshit.

Namely needing to change the settings on every input for every source type. The first few days of a new TV is a regular trip into five layers of menus as you watch a new source combination for the first time (HDR Blu-Ray, Dolby Vision streaming movie, high framerate game) and have to turn off motion smoothing, turn off sharpening, turn the whites back down from basically blue to 6500K. I mean christ, there are still TVs out there shipping today that turn on overscan by default. Analogue TV broadcasts ended in 2012 here!

I find it appalling that no matter how much money you spend on a Samsung TV, you'll get banner ads in the fucking source switcher. Absolute total disregard for their users.

LG still has bits that are ultimately ads, but at least they're less egregious, presented as suggested content in a Home view that already aggregates content from various sources. Not ads for fucking McDonalds and similar. At least that was the case as of a couple of years ago—I disconnected my LG from the internet the day I got an Apple TV and never looked back.

Just let me buy a large class leading display without trying to insert yourself into my life, please. I'm already paying through the nose for it.

I used the Kagi free trial when I was doing Advent of Code in a somewhat unfamiliar language (Swift) last year, as well as ChatGPT occasionally.

The LLM was obviously much faster and the information was much higher density, but it had quite literally about a 20% rate of just making up APIs from my limited experiment. But I was very impressed with Kagi’s results and ended up signing up, now using it as my primary search engine.

Slightly weird that the logo seems to have copy-pasted the "ravel" part of the Laravel logotype too (the hard-right-angle "r"), just changing the colour to blue.