watersb

WinDirStat on Windows, I am not at Windows machine right now but IIRC the original WinDirStat walks the whole filesystem, can take long time; faster forks of it use the NTFS Master File Table (MFT), which more like just looking up into already collected by the system.

https://www.idealsoftware.com/opensource/fast-windirstat.htm...

On the Mac, I've used Omni Disk Sweeper for pro a the last 20 years, and it still receives updates. Not open source, but no $$.

https://www.omnigroup.com/more/

(I used OmniWeb as my favorite web browser for NeXTStep, followed it to macOS. Also their pro diagramming tool, OmniGraffle - remember Visio before Microsoft bought it?)

Thanks. So it should read

"FISA court, post-9/11, is an insane secret tribunal..."

FISA court is an insane post-9/11 secret tribunal, a bad idea for these past 25 years.

But at least they were subject to Congressional oversight.

> the Trump administration is illegally withholding a secret court’s findings from Congress

Oops.

The text of this product's announcement really tries to sell it as a 10x AI performance upgrade for existing MacBook M1 users.

Ok, plausible number for that use case. Striking how it seems like the M-series Macs are almost too good enough for most people.

It's almost desperate prose.

(The AI image processing in Pixelmator Pro saved me hours of work on a recent project. Two button clicks vs a day of tweaking. But even that was on my M1 MacBook Air.)

The last few models of Intel Mac Pro that I used were mostly good at getting really hot.

Dropbox would fire up to do massive walks of the filesystem tree and the fans would take off. I think the thermal interface material on the GPU got cooked at some point. It would be a relatively easy fix, for me a couple of hours, but I chose to fix it with an M1 MacBook Air.

I'm not aware of any control over what gets backed up.

I'm assuming that all of my local work would be lost. But I'd still have the sixteen million duplicate photos.

iCloud's priorities are not a great fit for preserving my source code repos. Fortunately those aren't very big.

But when my son's Mac dies, his huge Logic Pro projects are toast. And he is a few thousand miles away now.

Seasonal reminder: many insect species need the shelter of fallen leaves now and until springtime.

Modern lawn-care practices amount to devastating habitat loss. You can learn more about good choices for your area from your local county extension office.

If your office has been defunded, you can also try your friendly neighborhood public librarian.

> The agency replied two months later, saying it had “competing priorities,”

Ah, the competition between doing their fucking job and obeying a monster.

The discussion here reminded me of one of my favorite demos, someone live coding Qt5 and QML on a first a generation Raspberry Pi, 1080p HDMI. Sort of a mashup of CSS and JavaScript for simple shaders. Fourteen years ago.

https://youtu.be/0j-Wakm5B84?is=7dU_EvFyk_nQNwjO

It's like a peek into a CSS future from a different timeline. Something we could have had.

I've found AVIF to be very effective at screenshots with lossy compression.

Text has lots of edges, hard transitions between bright and dark areas. So text requires lots of high-frequency detail, and JPEG adds a lot ringing as it bounces off all those lines and curves.

AVIF seems to follow contours, so it does a good job with line art.

Otherwise, it's hard to beat the Mozilla JPEG encoder.

JPEG XL can represent lossless images that exceed the limits of human vision. I don't expect it to replace FITS for astronomical images, but the future is weird.

(Super huge thanks to Jake Archibald for the SVGOMG web app. Which is also fantastic for line art.

https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/

Squoosh is a web app front end to various image encoders

https://squoosh.app

)

CLARUS THE DOGCOW

Hello, old friend.

There was also DesQView/X, an X Windows server for DOS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview#DESQview/X

The article discusses the court case, janitor at the observatory the accused.

Cyan shipped at least one Hypercard game, before Myst.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhole

1000x this.

The single most soul-crushing experience I have on today's tech is the whoopee cushion.

I type this on a touch device that randomly Cheevers the words. (It literally changed "changes" just now. Henceforth, my word for this shall be Cheevers.) it Cheevers the words. It offers suggested words that you can tap to complete the word you're typing, and milliseconds before your finger makes contact with the screen, the suggested word flips to Cheevers and your finger taps that.

Now with the new improved iOS Liquid Glass, and possibly with janky web app development kits, buttons can move as you try to click on them. UI animation was supposed to help the user. But helping the user is hard.

Pop ups. The web needs more pop ups. More "Are you enjoying this app?" in your face.

But on the desktop, I recall complaining to a Windows (the OS) developer about stealing focus... in 1995. At the time, classic macOS tended not to do this, but it happened quite often multitasking on Windows, and I couldn't offer any constructive feedback, no obvious solution.

The sheer unpredictability, at 100 millisecond time scale... a few hours of this and I'm literally shaking. Because it affects muscle response, a startle reaction. Keeps firing away at the limbic system.

If I wanted slot-machine online gambling levels of simulation, I'd go to a casino. I hate this stuff. I hate where "engagement" metrics and the quest for more clicks has brought us.

Make it stop. I'm trying to work, here.

This is what addiction looks like.

I wonder what the average interest rate is these days... I just saw a credit card with a usual (non-penalty) annual interest rate of 28%. Perhaps credit cards and car loans are not comparable. But it's an indication of where we are at with consumer debt.

These numbers don't make sense.

> Nimitz’s first operational deployment to the Mediterranean began on July 7, 1976.

50 years.

My hot tale on the ground in 1990 was that Russia treated Estonia like an imperial colony. Forced mass relocation of Russian citizens into the country after World War II, all children taught a Russian curriculum in the (public, free, Soviet) schools.

The doctrine of cultural assimilation was at that time understood to be incorporation into a larger Russian society.

"The Singing Revolution" tells an Estonian side of this dynamic.

https://youtu.be/Ny8uCgJX_-g?is=dvTndU6nCx4LsIqz

I wonder if these planets are more conventional gas giants with extensive rings.

I'm trying to understand how they can role out occultation by ring systems but I haven't seen it yet.

When I first encountered this story, it felt like utter madness, something Philip K. Dick would write.

It's been wild to reflect upon this story during this past decade.

I was very fortunate to spend a few weeks in Tallinn in the summer of 1990, an astonishing time to be there.

Estonia emerged as a tech startup incubator in those first few years of independence, as a way of attracting capital and talent.

Now I need to learn about this game and book!

This 32-bit microcontroller has 1 kB of RAM.

The Apple Disk II Controller discussed yesterday used two 256-byte ROM chips and a shift register for dynamic memory.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48723102

The linked article of the Disk II Controller has great detail about the state machine encoded in one of the ROMs, and walks through the bootstrap code stored in the other one.

I haven't tried any microcontroller projects myself, but my first computer projects were on the small home micros of the early 1980s. I enjoy this kind of thinking.

We need "How to talk to your legislators about zero-knowledge proofs".

I'm reading through the comments here before reading the actual Atlantic story, so I didn't see the author's name until you mention it:

> Bogost's statement is akin to calling the Amiga 500 the only home computer to be called beautiful.

Oh! That's Ian Bogost, who is a great writer of how our relationship with technology can evoke truth and beauty. The canonical work is his deep dive on the Atari 2600 and the early 1980s revolution "Racing the Beam":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam

Bogost wrote a number of books while working with MIT, arguing that video games were a new medium of communication back when that was a controversial point of view.

(I will need to re-subscribe to The Atlantic at some point. It seems churlish, but it's been an expensive year...)

I think that people are still underestimating the technical merits of Intel's 18A fabrication process.

I haven't seen any competitor even try to address the backside power delivery of 18A. I suspect that Samsung,TSMC have something similar and doesn't talk about it.

The design rules for the standard cell (sort of corresponding to the die area required by a transistor) for the Intel 18A seem to target dense, high performance designs. That's not a particularly meaningful insight - of course Intel wants to have the highest performance of all the fabs.

Intel's packaging expertise used to be a generation ahead, and indeed their server chips currently use a mad mix of chiplets and through-silicon visas for direct stacking, all heaped onto a reticule-limited monster interposer die. All of this expensive complexity might be sustainable as long as Intel can keep its enterprise customers happy. That hasn't turned out too well for them.

AMD has found a mass-market winner with mainstream gaming CPU with extra level 3 cache die stacked on top. Compared to Intel servers, it's brutally simple. But extremely effective in its consumer market.

But the Intel chiplets and packaging could be a great toolbox for M7 generation of Apple Silicon. Now that the M5 Pro and Max are multi chip packages, they more resemble the Intel and AMD designs, with chiplets dedicated to I/O or GPU.

(Speculation and dreams. That's all I got, and I'm writing it in the face of an absolutely psychotic autocorrect on a tablet.)

Excellent!

This made me remember that I've still got a G4 Mac Mini! I was bringing up a current Linux on it, last time I had it running. 2019, perhaps.

I need to fire it up...

Former AnandTech editor Gavin Bonshor had reports that the M7 would be manufactured on Intel's 18A node.

https://bontechlabs.com/news/apple-is-reportedly-using-intel...

Given the risks involved in establishing Apple Silicon designs with a new fab, I would expect early M7 parts to be in test production right now.

The fundamental M7 design is already set in stone.

Mark Gurman's Bloomberg article does not mention fabrication partners or processes.

If anyone wants to buy a refurbished PowerPC Mac, I've had good luck in the past with Operator Headgap.

http://www.headgapstore.com

This is one of those hobby businesses that got out of hand and had to go full time.

But they seem to be selling old Macs, in 2026.

They were a great source for parts etc to keep my old Macs running.

MC6809 forever!

(The Hitachi clone is also quite nice.)

FGCS: the Fifth-Generation Computing System

I was really excited about this initiative at the time, just starting my computer science undergrad degree.

Hardware that ran Prolog as close to bare metal as possible.

Thanks for the reminder. 40 years ago.