indemnity

1Password?

The last year with it has been so bad I canceled our $80 Family subscription and switched to the native Apple one despite its feature gap, because 1Password just couldn’t do its basic job reliably (fill passwords without requiring 20 taps, constant unlocking disregarding lock timer settings or some other arcane dance like force killing Safari to reload the plugin).

Try mentioning AI in a remotely positive light on Mastodon, e.g. just as a side comment about how it let you finally finish a side project or something cool, and you’ll get a wave of neckbeards swarm in to tell you they are blocking you, you are a bad person, killing the earth, fascist supporter, etc.

Very strange, but I’ve seen the same folks dog pile in for other causes, so I guess it’s just a part of the identity now.

I know macOS is not considered a gamer platform, but I appreciate enough that he built for macOS too that I purchased a copy!

(Speaking as someone who also owns a Windows 11 RTX 4090/9950X3D gaming monster… sometimes I like gaming on my MBP!)

I run nixOS as well on my home infrastructure (gateway/firewall, a couple of internal servers).

But I have had, uh, non-trivial breakages happen also when I upgrade the system itself to the next yearly release. Non-bootable kernel kind of breakages.

But I will give you that I can just boot from the generation before the upgrade, and it works again. So there's that :)

I use Xcode, but just to run the app with Command-R so I can see log messages or stack traces if I need to drop it into the agent for analysis. Everything else is done by Claude Code / Codex.

I even read the source using Zed not Xcode :)

The apparent quality of our pull request messages and documentation is sky high (at least from a language and grammar perspective), but I do miss the days of hand crafted prose, it was easier to tell the low effort crap from the gold.

This is super hard for me as well.

I know that a part of why I did so well in programming was being forced to think about what to do and how things worked for so long, and it gave me a lot of stamina to brute force my way through problems.

But these days, I'll admit even I reach for an LLM more often than not, and I can feel my mental muscle memory atrophy.

I don't know how to give my son the same experience (currently at age 8, he still does not have any of his own devices, and has highly restricted access to the iPad).

But still...

I grew up in a similar environment, similar trajectory, but in Africa.

Dad was a teacher in a rural school, mum stayed at home.

Until I went to school I would stay outside all day with my friends, playing in and around the rivers and dams, making our own fun with abandoned cars and rusted out farming equipment.

Our school had one computer, and I was lucky enough to get to use it after hours from time to time.

I would study the manual from front to back so I could optimise my time while on the computer.

Practiced typing on a typewriter to type in code listings faster later (aging myself here ;)

Today I build AI agents and infrastructure to run them for a hyperscaler, and my car drives me around. Feels like another lifetime ago.

Yeah, no joke. For bald people like myself these headphones are unusable once the mesh stretches enough that the metal bands touch your skull.

I could go 30 minutes before the discomfort made me have to take it off.

No such issue with the WH-1000XM6, I can wear it the entire day.

This is 100% already happening. No need to worry about licensing or dependencies any more, just have the LLM launder it into a plausibly different structure!

There would also be no way China would admit to any breaches.

I had an Air with the same camera system as the 17e, I believe.

Coming from a 15 Pro Max, it was perfectly serviceable if you were happy with the limited zoom options and lack of wide angle shots.

I never realized how much I used those two features, so, regrettably had to go back to the chunky 17 Pro Max.

Maybe one day…

This is an insanely privileged post.

“Advice for my fellow Ivy/top 10 grads”, is more accurate.

Mate, no matter what you do, you will have at a minimum an upper middle class life and a good chance of moving in circles where opportunities frequently present themselves.

This isn’t envy, everyone has the cards they are dealt. But damn, I can’t relate to anything in this post, it reads like instructions to min/max your already great situation!

You can also add golangci-lint with the modernize linter and tell Claude in CLAUDE.md to run it on every code change as an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.

Won’t stop Claude from writing “old” style, but it will fix the lint errors.

Whenever I fly to Europe (from New Zealand), I always go via Singapore, I just zip through, everything is convenient and clean.

Transiting through the American shitshow that requires clearing immigration again on the other hand…

> That assumes LLMs are relevant and will be around a year from now. Let’s not forget NFTs.

These two things are not alike. At all.

His PDF toolkit was pretty solid and high quality if you were in the iOS space.

He’s not just a “vibe coder”.

In the age of LLMs I think we are going to see a Cambrian explosion of software.

Me personally, I’m writing tools for myself wouldn’t have bothered with before due the the time investment needed.

Do you feel that a terminal UX will remain your long term interface for Claude Code? Or would you consider a native interface like Codex has built?

What hardware? Up until a recent BIOS update my X870 board 9950X3D spent 3 minutes of a cold boot training the RAM… then booting up the OS in 4-8 seconds, so my Mac would always win these comparisons. Now it still takes a while at first boot, but subsequent reboots are snappy.

You’re still looking at the multi core score, you want this one:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/

Where the M5 (non-pro, the one that will be in the next MacBook Air) is on top.

When the M5 multicore scores arrive, the multi-core charts will be interesting.

Don’t worry, my new M4 doesn’t feel much faster either due to all the corporate crapware. Since Windows Defender got ported to Mac it’s become terrible in I/O and overall responsiveness. Any file operations will consume an entire core or two on Defender processes.

My personal M1 feels just as fast as the work M4 due to this.

We’re thinking of sending our son to a highly ranked local private school who has a policy of not doing anything like this with tech.

Students are also not allowed personal devices while school is in session, and social media ban for under 16s is hopefully coming here too (New Zealand).

AI music or AI-produced music sounds a bit boring and too-perfect, like auto-tune on steroids.

Needs significant human involvement to make it interesting.

How long that remains true is another question…

I had to go to Max, Pro is more like a taster.

At work tho we use Claude Code thru a proxy that uses the model hosted on AWS bedrock. It’s slower than consumer direct-to-Anthropic and you have to wait a bit for the latest models (Opus 4.5 took a while to get), but if our stats are to be believed it’s much much cheaper.

When really solid programmers who started skeptical (and even have a ban policy if PR submitters don’t disclose they used AI) now show how their workflows have been improved by AI agents, it may be worth trying to understand what they are doing and you are not.

https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey

My experience mirrors that of Mitchell. It absolutely is at the level now where AI can free up time to do the really interesting stuff.

Is there a plan like the $100 Claude Max? $200 for ChatGPT Pro is a little bit too much for me.

Whereas Claude Max 5x is enough that I don’t really run out with my usage patterns.

Enabling ADP breaks all kinds of things in Apple’s ecosystem subtly with incredibly arcane errors.

I was unable to use Apple Fitness+ on my TV due to it telling me my Watch couldn’t pair with the TV.

The problem went away when turning off ADP.

To turn off ADP required opening a support case with Apple which took three weeks to resolve, before this an attempt to turn off would just fail with no detailed error.

Other things like iCloud on the web were disabled with ADP on.

I just wanted encrypted backups, that was it.

Instead of speculating you could download and see for yourself that it’s not. It’s by Marcin Krzyzanowski who is all about native iOS and macOS apps.

Be scared if you want, I am looking forward to the impact it will have on EV cost when they start reaching LFP pack densities.

Living outside of the US, we will actually get this tech in our market.