Apparently Apple Music for Mac has rabid fanbois (they are all men. All of them) and they are on Threads?! Of all the truly shitty products to stan, you want to defend Apple Music on the Mac?! I’ll defend Apple Music on iOS, even tho sync is a shit show, but on the desktop?! Man normies are weird.
@marcoarment Catching up on ATP…when I first head your describe the blurry mess of the AVP, I thought you were being picky or something. But then I went to the store for a demo. I 100% had rheumatologist blurry mess experience. Every slight head movement made every edge and fringe a mess. The store rep said it might be “the motion blur” and said he thought it was being fixed in an update. No proof of that though.
Have decided to try to do a 1.0 release on a useful but neglected piece of code. Oops, poor test coverage. Filling it in, expectedly finding bugs.
Wondering if this is a good place for an LLM code extruder? “Write unit tests that cover as many possible lines of code.” You wouldn’t get smart unit tests, but even dumb coverage is immensely better than none. Because a lot of the bugs unit tests find are dumb shit anyhow. And retroactively improving test coverage is boring.
@timbray I’d be very interested in seeing that linked with a mutation testing framework. Coverage is …something… but an automated way of ensuring the tests would fail if the code wasn’t in its current form would be better.
Curious how your LLM practice turns out. I still feel like there is a jwz joke to make. “So you’ve decided to use an LLM to write a regex. Now…”
Honest question for white people that don't consider themselves racist:
White nationalists have been vocal about their attacks on DEI. These are literally the same people that talk about Charlottesville, Jan 6th, and ethnic cleansing.
They've laid out exactly how they plan to destroy DEI.
Make false claims that DEI is about giving unqualified Black people an unfair advantage
Work with racist politicians to use this as a pretext to make all DEI programs illegal.
@mekkaokereke Yes. One on one. Because I work in an “enlightened” company and so we never talk about it and I wanted them to know I was a safe place rather than someone who just assumes racism is over. I learned more than I shared, and need to follow up. I was hesitant to look like I want a “black friend”, but I was amazed to find instead that even now I get so little of my co-worker’s authentic self because we are so “inclusive” that they cannot talk about their true life.
@mekkaokereke I think most good white people either “don’t want to make a big deal of things” or think “racism is over”. The silence is usually one or the other: don’t talk about it because you don’t want to embarrass a coworker about race, or don’t talk because privilege means it looks like we are all treated equally (but treating everyone like white men is not actually the same as treating everyone inclusively)
@actuallyautistic The hardest part of my job as a manager is leading the team meeting each week. I'm really good with all of my employees one on one, but I am awkward and anxious when presenting to the whole group at once.
My team is fully remote, so the team meeting is over the phone. Everyone puts themselves on Mute so I can talk, which makes it worse because I don't hear any reactions, no laughs for my jokes, no nothing.
Every week after the meeting, I am pacing and muttering to myself about how bad I am (I work from home, so no one sees this). Hopefully my team thinks I have it together, but this meeting is just crushing for me.
@VeeRat@actuallyautistic Presiming you are doing well and being appreciated is an important service you are providing your team. They won’t or can’t help you with that. They need you to “be confident” (even if you aren’t). You just need to pretend, even to yourself.
Also, I very much recommend booking and blocking out time to be kind to yourself after that meeting. Schedule a call with a soothing friend, listen to an album, watch a treat movie. Running those meetings can be traumatic, and you should know that you are going to have a pleasant recovery afterward. Every time. Don’t just stew and worry. Take care of yourself so you can take care of your people.
I’m gonna jot down a couple to do items for Monday, and then that’s it for work this week.
I just need to figure out where to put them: Microsoft To Do, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft OneNote, Microsoft Lists, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Sticky Notes, Microsoft Planner, or Microsoft Loop?
@Migueldeicaza I don’t see how you think it is easier to compete and add value against a huge company with access to unlimited capital for near zero cost and willing to give product away for free. Now that products cost money again, I can imagine selling something better for less and creating a business. You can’t undercut free.
@pluralistic I rarely think you express one directional thinking, but on this topic you make a lot of points that only are sustainable from prior agreement with your conclusion. I frequently disagree with and dislike Apple and I know their interests do not align with mine in many cases. On the other hand, I do not want alternative app stores to exist for iPhone. I do not want my friends, family, and children to be running code from marketplaces run by Facebook, Google, Tencent, and Epic. I do not want my platform and network security invariants to be under constant exploit by such code. App Store is not a panacea, but it is better than downloading pirated wares from torrentz…and “alternative” app stores will quickly slide down that slope.
@pluralistic I would like to see phone platforms that are the equivalent of the desktop platforms in openness and extensibility, but there are obviously big barriers to that being the situation. I’m happy to have places where the rules are the way you and I like them as expert technologists.
I am very uncomfortable allowing the equivalent of unsigned code to be distributed to users who often don’t know that Apps aren’t made by Apple employees or who one-star a browser extension because they are mad about Safari button changes.
@pluralistic
I think those users will be “forced” to use the alternative app stores. Or at least tricked. “You must install the Meta App Store to use the new version Facebook”. “Install the Google Play App Store for iOS, now with privacy protection!” For many people the iPhone was Facebook or Twitter or something. I have zero faith those app stores will not immediately ship dozens of apps with location trackers, provisioning profiles, and “Privacy Protection VPNs” that not only diminish the user’s privacy, but use every trick in the book to attack mine as well.
@pluralistic
Apple is not a sainted actor, but they were the ones that showed that TikTok was sending your clipboard to their servers many times a second and stopped it.
Show me a way that only small actors with limited reach can create boutique app stores and I’d be onboard, but third-party app stores sound to me exactly like airline deregulation and “Financial Services Modernization” and I fear the actions of the rich and powerful more than I anticipate the opportunities of an open installer.
@pluralistic
I don’t think the world should be forced to use closed ecosystems, but I think there are places where I prefer a closed ecosystem. I’d prefer it if my closed phone platform was controlled by a liberal democracy rather than a C-Corp, but functional trustworthy mass institutions are hard to come by these days. But that’s another problem and not a technology one.
@m1ke@pluralistic
*Second most valuable. The most valuable sells fancy autocomplete, insecure cloud services, and puts clickbait on your app launcher.
Apple is a big, money-grubbing bully. But for now, they are still a principled one. Show me a world where some guys in a bunch of garages can design and ship 225 million secure pocket touchscreen supercomputers a year and I’m with you. For now I need the benefits of a big, money-grubbing bully to oppose the constant efforts of Vizio, Meta, the CCP, and the Five Eyes.
@m1ke@pluralistic
I appreciate your discomfort making choices between perfection and pragmatism. I hope you find it useful to find any choice that has compromises to be equivalent to any other choice with compromises. I know I find it complicated and frustrating needing to express nuance rather than catchphrases.
@film_girl I keep meaning to tell you — apparently it took a complete rewrite of the TV app (why!!), but I can FINALLY (!!!) see my full library of purchased content in tvOS 17.2.
I have a number of question for people who report #aphantasia :
Do you daydream at all, and if you do, how does that work without visuals?
How does your memory work in general? Assuming you remember seeing things, being in places, meeting people, how does that work?
When you need to describe the appearance of something, how do you go about doing that? Do you plan ahead and memorize lists of features while the thing is in front of you?
Thanks! I’m trying to wrap my brain around this phenomenon I can’t experience myself so if you take some time to educate me I’ll be forever grateful.
@CynAq@actuallyautistic My “minds eye” is a 3d modeling environment. The things my eyeballs see that quickly get translated to that environment are dreamable and rememberable, but it is very lossy and I don’t know what my partner looks like if I look away. Features, not images.
My daydreams are changes in object relationships, location, or camera angle.
I give clear descriptions and directions because my spatial thinking is accurate and representative, but people are often confused by my words because I am not describing landmarks and pictures. It has always seemed weird to me.
@CynAq@actuallyautistic Everything you say here aligns for me. “Lossy” was a shortcut word for me. My internal representation can become very detailed if I associate enough symbols with the view, but ultimately it is (in analogy) a vector, not raster, image. Which is advantaged as well as disadvantaged.
@ivory Just now: on my device with Tap to Top off, I was not getting my last read position to sync. I probably should have force quit, since I think this makes that sync work, but I tried double-tapping on the Home icon (which sometimes brings the scroll position to the next unread post). This brought me all the way to the top of my feed, lost all the unread markers, and couldn’t not be undone with additional double taps to the home button.
@ivory last night I was able to accomplish the double-tap-home gesture to get to the next unread post. This morning on my iPhone the same gesture again took me to the latest post, with all unread markers cleared, and no undo.
if you're an infrequent command line user -- what text editor do you use if you need to occasionally edit a file on the command line (other than vim/emacs)?
curious about what people use to edit a git commit message etc
if you picked 'other', I'd love to hear what you do in the replies!