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macintuxon Show HN: I turned my iPhone and a $20 smart plug into an f-stop timer

I upgraded to an Apple Watch Ultra because it offered a face with only red and black. It’s been long enough now that I don’t remember all the details, but I appreciated being able to monitor time in the darkroom (using DND to avoid flashes of light).

macintuxon Gleam doesn't compile to Erlang source anymore

I was fortunate enough to use Erlang professionally for a couple of years. I agree: the syntax is quite comfortable.

macintuxon Automating my 35mm film scanning pipeline

Heh, I don’t think I even have any film cameras with batteries.

macintuxon Automating my 35mm film scanning pipeline

Speaking for myself, I like film for a few reasons.

The wide variety of form factors keeps things interesting. Yesterday I went to shoot a sunrise, and I took a panoramic 6x17, a pinhole 6x12, and my TLR (which I didn’t shoot) at 6x6.

Everything about shooting film is more deliberate. Simply loading a medium format is typically time-consuming, developing the negatives, and if you’re lucky enough to have access to an enlarger, creating your own prints is very satisfying.

Slow but rewarding.

And I spend all day in front of a computer; it’s nice to have a very analog hobby.

macintuxon Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back

I wish I could revert to the old Siri on my iPhone 15 Pro. “Remind me in 2 hours to do XYZ” is dramatically slower now: not only does the operation take longer, but Siri consistently forgets the action and asks what I want to do in 2 hours.

macintuxon Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'

I don’t have control over my freedom of speech, either, but I still appreciate it.

Just because the founding fathers 250 years ago couldn’t conceive of a panopticon doesn’t mean that we have to accept it today.

macintuxon September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy

Heck, 80 years ago it wasn't obvious there would still be a Poland. Absolutely understandable that pessimism is a normal state of mind.

macintuxon September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy

> The US can absolutely conquer or decimate Iran

Decimate? Sure. Conquer? Absolutely not.

Iran is a huge country with dispersed command and control and generations of people raised to hate the U.S.

macintuxon macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess

Man, on my iPhone (15 Pro), it's been a letdown.

"Please play this song on my HomePod". "Now playing"

Prolonged silence.

"Nothing is playing?"

"Now playing" (but on my iPhone, not my HomePod)

I should be writing these down, because pretty much every interaction ends in disappointment.

Feels like it's just as mediocre as old Siri, only more ambitious when it fails, and slower.

macintuxon On caring for user data: NeoVim caused Vim undo files to be deleted

> Then gave it away so people who share their opinion, had the opportunity to choose to use it.

How many neovim users were made aware that the software would proactively delete their decade-long file history?

macintuxon LA Metro has some of the slowest escalators on Earth

Well, Chernobyl...

macintuxon I'm the mom in that viral Giants clip. Let me tell you about my husband

Isn't this story pretty much all about jumping to conclusions and pissing on people who you don't know?

macintuxon The Copilot+ PC brand is dead

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49844896

macintuxon Show HN: I discovered roads in the US across > 1000 themes

My favorite juxtaposition of street names exists in Brooklyn, Indiana, a small town of ~2600 people.

On the south side you face a stark choice: when you leave Home Avenue, you can either head west to Church Street, or east to Hooker Street.

macintuxon Classified estimates show the NSA is paying billions to test AI models

Plus the inherent unreliability of AI combined with the blind willingness of people to trust the results from AI. What a mess we're in.

macintuxon Federal judge orders Texas to air condition all prisons by the end of 2029

> I would much prefer they not commit crime, and that there be no need for the punishment.

Because our justice system is notoriously good at convicting only people who actually committed a crime.

macintuxon Pentagon says overreliance on AI contributed to missile strike on Iran school

Related: the U.S. nearly boarded a Chinese boat that AI incorrectly flagged as carrying nuclear weapons materiel.

https://gizmodo.com/almost-started-a-war-us-military-nearly-...

macintuxon US halts flights at busy East Coast airports, says fiber line cut

Deploying first to DC? Yeah, that’ll end well.

macintuxon Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices

Apple has, for most of its existence, been a distant second choice, because IBM and Microsoft captured the enterprise, which trickled down into consumer buying habits.

It survived, then thrived, by making its products so appealing that customers would buy them anyway.

So, effectively, both.

macintuxon Warren Buffett Steps Down as Berkshire Chairman, Names Son to Replace Him

https://www.investopedia.com/warren-buffett-paid-billions-to...

macintuxon Fed hikes rates as inflation worries push up bond yields

> since Bush nearly doubled the size of the Federal Government and blew up our finances with simultaneous tax cuts + massive spending expansion

We were 10 years from paying off the national debt when Clinton left office. 10 years!

macintuxon There's a 100% Chance AI Agents Are Ruining the Internet

Some of us resent the assumption that we're AI because we know how to use the language, and use them more often.

macintuxon Oracle’s 6am layoff emails hit staff amid new wave of cuts

Not for the employees, obvs. I'm not going to celebrate misery, especially if that misery makes an already-tough job market that much worse.

macintuxon Distributed Systems Classics (2017)

I haven't updated this in quite a while, so probably more than a few broken links: my list of distributed systems reading lists.

https://gist.github.com/macintux/6227368

macintuxon Apple's Dimensional Drawings

For years, I've felt my dream application for my iPad would be a wireframe view of my vehicle that allowed me to explore the mechanical functionality as it moved. See the clutch interact with the transmission, see the 4-wheel drive engage, all while in motion.

macintuxon I think I hate the internet

This is the part that I feel the “just turn it off” crowd don’t think enough about.

The algorithms helped give us the single most dysfunctional and corrupt US administration since the 1800s.

macintuxon How I advertise malicious software on Google Ads

> I've now uploaded my drivers licence, a photo of my passport and still apparently that's not good enough for them.

After the recent news about >150 million drivers' license photos being stolen from an ID verification service, I'd be very hesitant to do this for anything I didn't absolutely need. ID theft is a lot easier when someone has a photo of your sensitive documents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49561320

macintuxon How I advertise malicious software on Google Ads

I just changed the hours on a business nearby, took ~3 days. Your experience is not universal, but definitely frustrating.

macintuxon AirPods 5

My lone claim to fame, now harder to track down because Twitter decided my lack of activity was somehow suspicious and killed my account, was a brief exchange with Phil Schiller about pluralization of Apple devices.

> One need never pluralize Apple product names. Ex: Mr. Evans used two iPad Pro devices.

https://www.iphoneantidote.com/blog/dont-pluralize/