Steve turning in his grave
1,053 karma · joined November 25, 2025
https://gitlab.com/qsoe/nq/-/blob/bfe5337676ee3818d24db4101b...
Is this Claude going unsupervised? There are also references to CLAUDE.md ("see CLAUDE.md for scope") which is nowhere to be found.
Been there, done that, but I wouldn't put the blame on engineers. You said there it yourself:
> Too few engineers working with overly vague requirements with not enough time always results in the same thing. We are all churning out products we should be embarrassed about. [...] They have like 100,000 engineers. Can they not spare a dozen of them to keep that product from being abject shit?
You know the big O thing. If your algorithm is inefficient, it will ultimately slow down to a crawl at one point, no matter how many cores you throw at it. Now replace 'algorithm' and 'cores' with 'corporate processes' and 'employees' and you get a picture of what is exactly happening at large bureaucracies. Even worse so now that they can no longer afford to infinitely expand and have to cut costs (through LLMs and offshoring) while maintaining an illusion of growth for stakeholders.
The funny thing is that, despite all of this, the core problem (IMO) of managers playing political games and reaching for short-sighted quick fixes like "new agile methodologies" [0] instead of doing their jobs well remains unaddressed. Meta has been recently letting go of middle managers in a (frantic?) attempt to tame the explosion of bureaucracy and the associated loss of efficiency, but the rest of the industry just appears to be repeating "AI" like a mantra. Even though coding itself has already been the most "over-optimized" part of the whole software development process and optimizing (the costs of) it further only results in further "Outlookization" of software.
[0] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/project-managemen...
THAT'S how low the ball has been dropped.
The save dialog, albeit a little shakey, is nowhere as chaotic as in your example. The buttons in Notes move between panes in a perfect seamless manner. Albeit the animation occasionally glitches out when you repeatedly focus and deselect the Safari bar, the cursor is perfectly timed with the text, only fading in after the text is done moving to the left. The Preview bug must be something recent too, I can't reproduce this.
I miss it when companies like Apple, Sony, and IBM paid attention to the smallest details. Apple in particular earned its current valuation with the iPhone, an all-touch device that did nothing extraordinary compared to Windows Mobile and Symbian PDAs of the time (and was in fact functionally lagging behind compared, failing to even match the then-contemporary feature phones in some areas) BUT one that you didn't actually want to smash against a wall after a few minutes of use. Now these animations are bringing back exactly the Windows Mobile and Symbian vibes.
Remember how happy Steve used to be with OS X animations? He would replay them on stage multiple times, in slow motion. These though, these would have the people behind them face the fate of the iPhone 4 antenna man.
Not sure if I should take this as a joke or a sign of an internal power struggle. If it's the former, there's still some catching up to do before you can match Samsung's "Upcycle", but you're on the right track.
Combine that with the operator's rather obvious lack of understanding of what DN42 is revealed at the end, and you get the bigger picture.
> I doubt multiple routing tables are a problem.
The lack of them is a limitation for me (complex VM + VPN setup), which requires me to do pretty unholy static routing and address rewriting with pf.
I think even Apple has come across this; they added "scoped routing" (which IMO is a hacky workaround providing some of the functionality you'd get with multiple routing tables) just before iOS shipped with MMS support. Android, for comparison, uses Linux's routing policies and tables to send and receive MMS.
If they're investing resources into it regardless, they might at least try making something that Docker for macOS and co. haven't solved the same exact way already. Something that, due to their almost unhealthy obsession with "system integrity", only they can realistically make. Like native containers.
That being said, my point isn't that Apple should absolutely focus on making a server OS again. It just saddens me how far behind macOS has fallen as they stopped caring about the fundamentals; back in the day, it would be Linux trailing behind macOS. Nowadays, you can't even have multiple routing tables on the latter, the firewall code was probably last updated in Snow Leopard, and what Apple happily shows off on WWDC is a wrapper around Linux. Something functionally equal can be cobbled up together by anyone sufficiently experienced in minutes, using just Bash, OpenSSH, and QEMU.
I really wish macOS would let me have a similar level of control over applications as Linux with namespaces, without me having to do all the heavy lifting.
A lot of other Python implementations don't have the ability to spin up new processes at all too.
Rsync has to be one of the worst spaghetti projects I've worked with. It's an incredibly decent tool built around a well-though out algorithm, but its code is an exact opposite of what you'd expect. And it's written in C.
I'm not surprised letting Claude loose on it for roughly 2 months already caused visible breakage. The question is, with it being very obviously a bad idea, can the maintainer still be trusted if he let something like this happen?
If our hypothetical developer hasn't used any accessibility-related tags before, what chance is there that those parts of the website will receive adequate testing?
The end result is more crunch and a sharp decline in software quality, maybe even job satisfaction in general. As an (unfortunately anecdotal) example, I started to find myself fixing up broken websites or removing elements that get in the way with dev tools and uBlock every once in a while, and have heard from other people on here that they have been doing the same (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042747). All to restore basic functionality of websites I go on. This was never required back in the day, Flash and early web browsers didn't even have the option to do this.
Another, less anecdotal example from a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945
It gets worse when you realize that most of the money saved through these cuts only benefits the very top of the hierarchy.
Wow, is this how things were before bureaucratic behemoths took over the tech industry?
At the same time, I very much dislike the layout. Masonry-style layouts, at least to me, feel more "artsy" than practical. Multiple rows being displayed at once, with the most crucial information being chaotically all over the place instead of arranged in a way that makes it easy to scan it with your eyes, make me feel like I'm bombarded with information. It's very hard to follow along and very easy to miss articles; almost anxiety-inducing, even. There's hardly any point to this on a website; it's not like you're wasting any paper.
https://uefi.org/specs/UEFI/2.10/22_EFI_Byte_Code_Virtual_Ma...
It also looks like there's a slight difference in the unwanted effect both companies have reported, despite the bug being seemingly triggered the same way (mov touching the high byte):
- Oodle reports that a low byte is occasionally stored in the intended location.
- Mozilla's fix suggests that a full 16-bit value is stored instead, corrupting an adjacent variable! This could have much more serious consequences.
Technically, this could still be the same exact bug. I found no mention of the order the output buffer was accessed in by the Huffman decoder debugged in the Oodle report, and, since it was a contiguous buffer, it's easy to mistake an occasional out-of-bounds copy there for a copy from a wrong location. But if both analyses are correct, the behavior of high byte accesses on Raptor Lake is way less predictable than those fixes suggest. Haven't managed to find an official erratum from Intel.
Figuring out where to put it and how to keep it mapped is another problem, though!
My bad! I mean, ehh, I guess you could maintain a breakpoint in the guest kernel's exception vector table or have QEMU inject its own "zero-level exception handler" whose only purpose would be to capture those HVCs, but that's not as straightforward as I originally thought. And since those PAC calls are expected to set a few Apple-specific registers anyway, using the entitlement or skipping Hypervisor.framework and talking straight to the kernel seem like the only viable options when macOS is the guest.
> There are some nightmare cases that SEPOS specifically triggers, such as doing isv=0 accesses to GICR... when using the Apple vGIC handling _that_ becomes truly bizarre.
Interesting! Are there any resources out there about virtualizing sepOS?
Ah, must be something else then.
> normal guests aren't supposed to do that
Oh how I wish Arm didn't let anything like this slip into the architecture spec to begin with! Massive source of pain, especially with protected memory/CCA guests. It's not macOS triggering this in isolation either. Most start up binaries for QNX do this too, somehow also in the GIC init path.
I've looked at how different hypervisors/VMMs handle this and, if this makes that patch set any less hacky, Virtualization.framework, QNX Hypervisor, and (I think) VMware all decode and emulate those instructions in software. Virtualization.framework is a remarkable spaghetti in this regard :)
> Or pre-patch them all to HVC #1 works too. Patching the host Hypervisor.framework sounds quite brittle especially after they moved to a pile of C++
Possibly! IIRC, if HCR_EL2.HCD==1, HVC should trap as undefined instruction. Not sure how much of HCR_EL2 can be set from the user-space, but perhaps this could be the least invasive way.
Simply ignoring the instruction, though, is not enough. I remember in my setup, with HVC handling stubbed out, secondary cores would always fail to start. I suspect this to be the culprit.
The SMP bring-up code would fail to pass pointer authentication on the first indirect branch. It would then immediately pivot into FLEH->SLEH->panic(). panic() shortly would attempt to make an indirect jump itself, hoping to crash the other processors, but instead, getting stuck in a loop of calling itself. This would eventually get caught by a stack overflow guard somewhere in FLEH/SLEH, which would place the core in an infinite loop, and... the system would continue to run with just the boot core. Yo dawg, I heard you like panics :)
I see the author of this patch set has run into a few similar issues as me. Strangely, not all of them: I don't see patches for the new PCI MSI-X device introduced somewhere in Sequoia (IIRC), a source of kernel panics for me; and there's still a bug in the PG MMIO path that casts all writes to 32-bit, this one caused me a lot of headaches (no errors but no video adapter detected). I'm somewhat surprised to hear that this works!
There's two significant problems that we both have came across:
- LLVM now favoring pre-indexed load/stores which trap with ISV=0 for MMIO accesses, and those ending up in the GIC initialization path of the newer macOS kernels (looks like there's a separate patch set for this [0]),
- Hypervisor.framework trapping PAC HVC calls.
It seems like the latter has been worked around here by signing QEMU with an Apple-private entitlement and running with SIP off, but there's actually a different way! While some HVCs are trapped right in the host kernel, the PAC trapping happens within Hypervisor.framework itself (at least in the host OSes I tested). It's possible to patch out this functionality without special privileges or talk to the in-kernel hypervisor directly. I originally tested with the former, and chose to implement the latter as a separate accel in the code I was planning to submit upstream, but the complexity of it exploded and, besides confirming that it would have worked, I haven't managed to finish my implementation.
Does the Tahoe crash you mentioned manifest itself in stage 2 iBoot panics? I must admit 26 was never quite my priority so I haven't looked into it, but if so, it might have been closer to booting than I thought :)
[0] https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2026-04/msg...