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jd3

738 karma · joined January 30, 2015

https://dataswamp.org/~john/
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jd3··on Ghostty 1.4
iTerm2 feels overwhelming to me. I think the default Terminal.app is good enough.
jd3··on Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone
I agree with your point, though I can easily modify ~/Library/Messages/Attachments or ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.MobileSMS/Data on macOS, which is a platform similarly secure to an iPhone when you take sandboxing, sip, etc. into account. So Apple already supports macOS, which can be tinkered, no? I guess the argument is that by locking down iOS, a platform which was never open, they just never needed to handle that class of security risks which are introduced when customers have more freedom.

I did actually discover a bug in iOS (related to photos which have failed to sync to icloud for the past four years) by investigating why there were over 23k empty folders in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.photos.ImageConversionService/Data/tmp/, fwiw.

jd3··on Apple ML Research: Muse Spark Open with MLX on Mac Studio
tl;dr — free up disk space and delete ~/Library spotlight index and medianalaysisd caches

There's a really nasty bug in Golden Gate 27.0.1 which causes ANECompileService, mediaanalysisd, duetexpertd, and other apple intelligence-related features to thrash and permanently spike your CPU. I tested this yesterday on a machine with ~12GB of space left and the result was launchd writing 163 GB and ANECompilerService writing 70 GB in less than 24 hours. The noticeable effect is that the AI text-recognition for photos in QuickLook will not work and repeatedly download and compile ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mediaanalysisd/Data/Library/Caches/com.apple.mediaanalysisd/com.apple.e5rt.e5bundlecache items. One in particular repeatedly fails and downloads a 69.9 MB file with model.mil and weights1.bin inside of the package folder. This will happen every 6 minutes, which further compounds the severity of the issue since the bug itself is due to low disk space. This folder has risen to 2–5 GB for me before, which I had to just delete manually. The filenames are <HASH>.tmp.<number which increases every time>.<random>.bundle.

I figured this out by watching `$ log stream` and seeing what was happening, which was lack of disk space while ANECompilerService was compiling ai features after opening a file in Preview or in Quick Look in Finder.

I fixed this by freeing up ~10GB (bringing me up to 20GB) and deleting the ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight and ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mediaanalysisd/Data/Library/Caches/com.apple.mediaanalysisd/com.apple.e5rt.e5bundlecache/. After rebooting, I left it on overnight to reindex everything.

jd3··on macOS 15.8.2 Breaks OpenGL
XQuartz performance has been broken for a couple of years now and I believe it is primarily due to an OpenGL issue.
jd3··on Pele – Mermaid diagrams as themeable SVG
I don't even bother writing mermaid by hand when I'm making decision trees. Instead of visualizing it using PrecisionTree in excel (I just use that for the actual data modeling), I've been first modeling the tree in plaintext, then pipe it through claude with a previous tree I've made as reference. I then ask it to use the content of the current tree and match it to the style of the previous one.
jd3··on Resurrecting iChat audio and video conferencing
TIL! Fascinating they bothered recompiling the driver at all up until then.
jd3··on Resurrecting iChat audio and video conferencing
That overengineered isight camera worked through multiple adapters up until the introduction of the M1, when they sadly finally removed the driver. I used to use it connected to my intel macbook pro for meetings in the the late 2010s for fun.
jd3··on Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged
> You contribute to projects run by others with the understanding that others run the project, is this not the default assumption others have too when contributing to FOSS?

There are certain unspoken rules you don't break out of a of tradition of process and decorum — this decision broke that rule, overturning 5+ years of accrued experience and institutional memory, so I can understand why this might feel like a rugpull which would reasonably upset the average contributor.

These antics are acceptable in a BDFL project where the stakes are low, but try this in an actual major project with thousands of contributors and see how it goes.

I think the best case scenario I can think of is the microsoft typescript js->go conversion, whereas the bun zig->rust is probably the worst case.

jd3··on Maryland citizens hit with $2B power grid upgrade for out-of-state AI
I wrote a multi-page essay about this for our condo association last year. There's lots of complexity and externalities here — Pepco grid modernization, PJM interconnection cap auctions, AI buildouts in NOVA, etc; it's a really complicated issue.
jd3··on The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew
The US app is still laggy (even on the iPhone 17 Pro) and constantly logs you out. My theory is that they set the login timeout to a low number to make it harder to accrue points.
jd3··on GitHub Stacked PRs
We dealt with this headache for 7+ years at my former employer. Thanks so much for this.
jd3··on Tailscale's new macOS home
> ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home network)

Should note that Tailscale does not work natively with hdhr for mpeg television streams b/c wireguard doesn't natively support udp multicast/broadcast. Also can't directly port forward b/c hdhr sets a default ttl of 2.

My understanding is that most VPNs in general don't support udp multicast due to operating on the network layer rather than data link, though iirc OpenVPN supports multicast traffic through its virtual TAP (Layer 2) rather than TUN (Layer 3).

Tailscale does create a TUN/TAP virtual network[0], though udp multicast is still not natively supported.

[0]: https://tailscale.com/docs/concepts/tailscale-osi#data-link-...

https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/1013

https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/11134

jd3··on 60 Minutes Havana Syndrome report finds U.S. government tested energy weapon
The effects aren't too far off from reports of the maduro raid, though my understanding is that the US just used a standard LRAD
jd3··on Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product
I stopped reading when I realized it wasn't a deep dive into the most interesting question I had, which is the technical hardware design process and finding a factory to actually take your design and manufacture it.
jd3··on What's up with all those equals signs anyway?
I discovered X-Face[0] through gmane! Such a blast from the past.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Face

jd3··on The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe
I noticed this and modified the .car to just make window corners sharp. It looks a bit jarring, but functionally speaking, it feels like a big improvement.
jd3··on Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)
Thanks, typo; updated.
jd3··on Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)
Dennis Ritchie running Rob Pike's acme editor on Windows back in July 2002.

https://anders.unix.se/images/dmr_screenshot.gif

https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developer...

jd3··on Asbestosis
My mom's father died in his early 30's while working as an engineer for Mack Trucks in Hagerstown, Maryland in the '50s and '60s and my mom, to this day, attributes his rapid health decline to mesothelioma/industrial asbestos exposure.
jd3··on I only use Google Sheets
We bought a Google Workspace subscription for a building I help manage and I was shocked when I found out that you can't archive emails for discovery/legal purposes unless you buy a more expensive subscription that has access to the "vault."

We already pay nearly $90/mo for 6 seats!

jd3··on Plugin System
Tried using the "Online Media" built-in plugin for a couple of trivial test cases — Youtube and archive.org — the former worked, while the latter failed, so I disabled it and switched back to yt-dlp in

  Settings => Network => Enable youtube-dl => Custom youtube-dl path => "~/.local/bin/"
because I installed yt-dlp globally through uv

  uv tool install yt-dlp
jd3··on I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AyEzA5ziE0
jd3··on FFmpeg 8.0 adds Whisper support
took me longer than i'd care to admit to figure out how to install whisper as a user/system package on macOS w/o brew (which pulls in all of llvm@16 during install)

    brew install uv
    uv tool install openai-whisper
    then add ~/.local/bin/ to $PATH
jd3··on The Israeli "art student" mystery (2002)
> What is especially remarkable, however, is how quickly the Fox News report appeared and then vanished. Internet sources say that when someone stumbles upon evidence of a possible conspiracy, such as the ones noted above, most journalists say it’s nothing but trouble to pursue it. Even if leads are developed, editors tend to ignore them. Some make it clear that such leads can hurt the writers professionally. Eyewitness reports regarding the Israeli peddlers from authoritative sources, however, make the story of the Israeli squads impossible to dismiss.

https://www.wrmea.org/2002-may/israeli-trainees-and-mossad-a...

jd3··on Benzene at 200
Was going to make the same comment.

https://i.imgur.com/EGyYmkX.jpg

https://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/16/science/the-benzene-ring-...

jd3··on Twin – A Textmode WINdow Environment
I'm a fan of the tiles/patterns from DESQView/X

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16044021

jd3··on I created Perfect Wiki and reached $250k in annual revenue without investors
When working for my former employer, we rolled our own help center, but after awhile, it was deemed easier and cheaper to just cut it and transfer everything to zendesk.
jd3··on What made the Irish famine so deadly
I'm Irish and this is the correct answer
jd3··on Tailscale is pretty useful
I tried using tailscale to share my hdhomerun prime tuners over the internet, but sadly, it doesn't seem to work due to Tailscale's lack of support for mDNS lookups[0][1]. You can't just forward the port b/c the hdhr device packets have a ttl of 1 hop (and, while you could change the ttl through iptables, that seems like a lot of trouble).

I can open a stream manually through http://192.168.1.189:5004/auto/v600 while connected to tailscale (w/ my apple tv in-home as an exit node) on my laptop outside of the house, but when I open the HDHR/Channels apps, they can't detect the HDHR tuner itself.

Apparently this "just works" with openvpn, so I've been thinking about just switching back to that.

[0]: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/1013

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/HDHR/comments/z8byns/watching_remot...

jd3··on I still like Sublime Text
sublime still has the lowest latency compared to any other major text editor i've tried
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