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Then you made the right choice, and it's only unfortunate that not enough of you made the same to tip the scales in favour of mercurial, or at least to avoid the monopolistic situation we are in now.

I might say that I stopped thinking too hard about this many years ago: now I use hg-git whenever I must interact with git, but do regret that the more sophisticated/qol features of hg (branches, evolve, phases, topics, ...) don't exist in git, and that's the real bummer: the more limiting alternative won, then stagnated, and we are all worse off as a result.

Do they? They came to the realisation that they control a sufficient fraction of the market that your preference as a consumer no longer matters to them.

> select a rectangle and perform OCR

You get that out of the box on an up to date KDE, from the screenshoting application Spectacle.

https://www.scala-js.org/ is quite phenomenal.

> never use code that can stop working until you pay ransom

Funny because that describes pretty much exactly "cloud-first" software architecture, and people jumping on it in troves, unexplainably.

ok, now bring-up a photo and datasheet of the flagship model from each of those brands, and articulate how they effectively depart from one another on metrics such as ergonomics, operating system, and hardware specs such as CPU/GPU/modem.

- The ergonomics story is: all those devices look and handle the same

- operating system is: a duopoly between Android and iOS

- chips: a triopoly between Qualcomm, Samsung and Apple

those manufacturers are not innovating as much as copying each-other's formula, using a very short list of identical suppliers, with no room for error. If that's not the definition of consolidation, please show it to me.

> This should be for the market to decide, not EU bureaucrats.

Ohh sweet summer child... We are in an era of obscene consolidation, in pretty much every sector, wealth is being consolidated to degrees unseen before, oligopolies enshrine their dominance via regulatory capture and a plethora of unfair practices. There's just no competition left to suggest that "markets can decide" of anything beneficial for our skinny bottom lines..

Not sure I agree. You can "blind type" on a physical keyboard, and even if it has less sophistication in the way of inputting large amounts of text (lack of auto complete, lack of fuzzy typing/auto correct), a calculator is purpose built with tons of shortcuts and contextual menus that you access from muscle memory without second guessing yourself. Right now, if I've got a mildly complicated mathematical expression to type, I'd rather do it on a last-century calculator rather than e.g. on Android's GeoGebra.

> MacOS by far has the least bugs and kinda just works.

MacOS is sometimes so weird and inconsistent that it's hard to tell whether it's a bug of Apple usual's "you are not smart/cool-enough to understand" kind of feature.

> But the sad reality is that x86 processors are falling behind in performance. The Intel Core Ultra X7 358H is a whopping 35% slower than the M5 Pro

35% is the generational difference between the M4 pro to the M5 pro¹. Don't drink Apple marketing koolaid: this has less to do with x86 falling behind than it has to do with Apple using their stash of gold to outbid the intel/AMD competition out of the latest TSMC capacity.

An M4 Pro 12c gets 32731 out of TSMC's 2nm-E².

An AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 gets 35093 out of TSMC's 4nm³.

The true unsung hero of the "Apple M miracle" is TSMC, not ARM, and Apple mostly in the sense that it has the deepest pockets.

With the first M chips, anyone who could afford to wait 18-24 months was pretty much where Apple was at. This decreased to 12-18 months in the last couple years. Panther lake signifies that it could further decrease to 9-12 months.

¹: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6346vs6345vs7230vs6397v...

²: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M4-Pro-12-cores-Processo...

³: https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/ryzen-ai-9-hx-370.c365...

I happen to have a pair of airpod pro 2 and some Sony's (the airpods being a gift). Nothing about the airpods strikes me as being clearly superior, which is surprisingly rare for Apple products: they tend to all stand out in one way or another, whether that's essential to the experience or not (I have no use for an iPad, but I can tell a good display when I see one, I wouldn't keep a MacBook if one was gifted to me, but I can appreciate a good trackpad, …).

Airpods? I have nothing bad to say about them, but nothing good either (I rather take the Sony's with better NC and battery life on a flight, better audio quality and painless equalizer).

> Or is it more likely that some consumers judge the utility differently from you?

That's possibly the case, so help me, what I am missing?

> Siri is STILL utter garbage.

Always was. If Apple had an easy trick to make it any good or useful, they would have already. LLMs aren't that, so Siri remains what it is.

Does the Dolby treatment carry into Linux with comparable performance, or does "best sound" require Windows?

30% slower than a M5 is a M3/M4. I will take that, thank, and not concern myself with MacOS or the thousand cuts of leaving x86.

3. Is what I call a smart move. Sometimes the game is won by not playing, and it's increasingly obvious that the LLM race leads to nowhere (there is no moat, there is nothing unique or clever that Apple can build out of it that can't be mimicked by others, made better, with Apple looking bad as a result, the tech is flawed, with clear diminishing returns, ...). If anything worth of the Apple logo comes out of this, it will be bought for scraps after the unsustainable race has run its course.

> craftsmanship

What marketing does to people

I mean, why not? Fairphones showed it can be done, to an extent. At least this should be pursued. One step at a time, though.

Yes, what about airpods? Little reason to buy them if you are not in the Apple ecosystem, and if you are, and you are a careful buyer, you'll probably settle with other brands which are technically ahead (in either of build, sound or ANR quality, or all, Apple being on the Pareto front of neither). I'm not dismissing the marketing forces behind airpods selling by the millions as a "status symbol", but that's very much a "high cost of living country" thing, Apple is inexistent elsewhere, which is most places.

This is actually one thing I think will be great as AI coding agents get better. Companies whose main expertise is code reviewing might start producing better software.

I haven't used a touchpad in recent years that wasn't "good enough", I really don't obsess about those (but I acknowledge that many do here), but I profoundly dislike MacBooks' keyboards. Anyhow, let's not pretend that it matters as much as the broken mess of a desktop environment/windows manager that the OS sitting on top is.

If history is a lesson (of going from lower level to higher level programming languages), the exact opposite will happen: there'll just be so much stuff out there that any eventual gain in efficiency will be dwarfed in the grand scheme of things.

I was rather hostile towards WebUSB/Bluetooth for ideological reasons, until I came across some cool apps like a climbing board control app (Bluetooth) or a netMD (to transfer to minidisks, via USB), which I would have found overkill to install a "hard App" for. I'm glad that there's an option for Firefox at last.

Disagree. I want a replaceable battery in my phone. They can get to extensible memory next. And it's not because you don't care about something that you should remove this freedom from me. And don't tell me that the market will self regulate in the best interests of the consumer or other nonsense like that.

> Reality check, they are already astoundingly meaningful and transformative AI

The onus of the proof regarding their meaningful and transformative nature is on you.

The largest niche LLMs have so far managed to carve for themselves is software code, with the jury still on the fence as whether the productivity needle actually moved in one direction or the other, and the other, literal jury, enshrining the fact that vibe-coded software is not copyrightable and becomes a public good, that should give pause to any company living of selling software or software-related services as whether they want to poison their well.

Web search hasn't been disrupted very much either with users being quick to realise how hallucinogenic LLM summaries are (with the fact that it's baked in the tech and practically unsolvable being one of the reasons I don't consider LLMs a significant stepping stone towards actual AI).

The age of computers that respond to voice orders was 10 years ago, with Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, nobody could care less then, and the fact the same systems became less capable after re-inventing themselves on top of LLMs probably won't have people care more now.

And I'm not an AI doomer, but hell no, give me another space program/station over this every single time and pretty please. We are not pioneering new engineering science or creating a pipeline of hard research and innovation that will spread in and better our everyday lives for the decades to come. We are overbuilding boring data centers packed with single-purpose chips that WILL BE obsolete within a couple years, for what? For the unhinged hope that LLM chatbots will somehow develop intelligence, and/or that people by the billions will want to pay a hefty price for dressed-up plagiarism machines. There is no indication that LLMs are a pathway to meaningful and transformative AI. Without that, there is no technical merit for the data centers being built currently to constitute future-proof infrastructure like highways and railroad networks did. There is no economical framework in which this somehow trickles down to or directly empowers the individual. This is a sham of ludicrous proportions, a sickening waste.

> It wouldn't surprise me if in 2-3 years the "max" plan is $800 or $2000 even.

I'd rather be surprised if they are still doing business by then.

By the nature of LLMs, there's no reason to think it would.

That's why I miss the days of old fashioned GUI toolkits (before the web thought of itself as an application distribution platform): you would just design any app as a bag of typical controls in typical containers, and you and your users would live with the expectation that they would look and feel just like the rest of the operating system, nothing more, nothing less. Frivolity would be generally frowned upon, with the result that applications were overall more homogeneous, effective, discoverable and efficient (also in dev time).

It's because you are holding it wrong!

--courtesy for all the LLM pushers so they don't have to bother commenting on this one

> Sure, but since commits have a branch attribute attached to them, "rebasing" does not appear to be "first class".

Again, that's orthogonal: you may or may not use "named branches" (the kind of which persists at commit level), rebasing works either way consistently and predictably.

> It is something that has to be bolted on with an extension.

The extension ships in core, UX is why it's not enabled by default.

> IIUC Git also does not care much about the rebase target being a "branch".

Indeed, it's just that things likely get weird (for no good reason) when you don't (detached head, "unreachable" commits)

> I can live with Git because Git is "enough" if used carefully and after coming to terms with the non-intutive UI.

That's our sad state of affairs. JJ helps a bit, though.