I pissed off a crow once, not a good idea. It got its revenge and it was crazy how its murder group would destroy my property. Luckily they have moved on but I make friends with them now and understand them much better.
There's a classic "This American Life" episode along those lines. Poor sap ended up wearing a fake beard and glasses on the back of his head just be be able to leave the house. Bonkers.-
I wonder how subscription breakage (people who pay, but don't use a fraction of their subscribe-for-paid-token-count) plays into the frontier labs gross margins. A number we will likely understand if/when they go public and something users can track locally if they choose.
Log all codas to a blockchain (with actual audio) would be cool. I like how this researcher only releases peer reviewed data and doesn't over-promise. Very cool. I think most of knew this was happening but could never prove it like he has.
I had 3 big ass fans in one of my offices and when I would turn them on full speed, i would make sure people weren't under them. It was a cool party trick but fans at speed can be a little distracting.
I went from pre windows operating systems -> Slackware -> Apple as my main squeeze in 2001 since it was based on BSD -> And in 2026 I'm back to Linux full time. Apple's Intelligence is so bad, their operating system SO BLOATED, and their products SO LOCKED DOWN, they no longer fit my digital needs. Good bye Apple, I really don't miss you.
For weeks I used Safari to access some homelab stuff that only have IPs because Firefox wouldn't work. I must have been through all possible settings in Firefox, nothing worked. Turns out macOS decided that Firefox didn't need access to the local network. I guess I was asked at some point and said "No" because Firefox shouldn't roam around on my network unsupervised, not in my wildest imagination would I have guessed that this "No" extend to things I type into the URL bar.
Apple continues to lock down things I need, there isn't a good package manager (NO! Brew sucks.) and terminal stuff just breaks across upgrades.
Sorry, this one's on you. You denied your browser access to local network devices and then complain that it didn't have access to local network devices.
Requiring users to independently remember small decisions from months ago is bad UI. The error message should’ve been correct, and maybe the OS should be surfacing a log or something.
This under the top-level comment stating they're switching to linux? Linux behaves the exact same. If you edit a config file, expect the configuration to be set accordingly.
Is this a mac user thing? "Apple should know better than to trust the configuration the users try to set" lol
I’m honestly having a hard time understanding you through all the tribalism.
Asking who to blame is simplistic and unproductive, the right question is what to do. As a user, obviously that involves things like updating your understanding of the network stack and the many different places config is stored. I was commenting from a UI designer’s perspective, because I am one and I find that more interesting.
I think Linux for consumers has been historically quite bad at this, and Apple has at least recently also been bad at it. “You’re holding it wrong” is the same mistake.
> Requiring users to independently remember small decisions from months ago is bad UI. The error message should’ve been correct, and maybe the OS should be surfacing a log or something.
What was Firefox's error message?
macOS does have local network access logging:
log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.networkextension"
OR eventMessage CONTAINS[c] "local network"' --info --last 1h
But what macOS doesn't have is an API for an application to query whether it has 'local network' access or not. If it did, Firefox could report a proper error message.
Safari of course get 'local network' access automatically, with no permission asked of the user. Special treatment for Apple's own apps of course.
While I know this is a situation that may not last, I am grateful for ChromeOS in this regard.
My Chromebook has so few settings. Just the bare minimum of control panels and switches to get things running, and so few preferences to set and tweak and fiddle all day with. It was really the #1 reason I chose Chromebook over a Windows notebook at my last purchase.
I was just so relieved to be done with the endless riding-herd on my system like a Windows or Linux admin. I don't run Apple, no, but I can't imagine it is any less complex. My Android too suffers from so many bewildering settings, and most of those are the per-app tweaks that we simply can't keep up with.
On ChromeOS I can be certain that day by day, week by week, I won't need to drop to a shell, open up preferences, or tweak a bunch of settings just desperately trying to get something else working. And when I set up a new system, there won't be that daunting, arduous setup (albeit ChromeOS settings are not stashed in a Google account yet...)
It is much like my apartment. It pains me to read homeowners going over their endless woes of DIY and self-maintenance, and how much it costs to call in a guy to fix stuff; even my parents do this. A good landlord simply keeps everything working for me. Something breaks, I call it in, it gets fixed and we carry on. And no endless tweaking, installing, landscaping, gardening, fixing stuff around the house.
In my youth I tinkered endlessly with computers. I loved breaking them and repairing them. I learned all the internals and acted as professional sysadmin plenty of times. But in my old age and retirement, I just want a system that works, and that won't screw with me. The "Just Works" trophy has been passed from Apple to ChromeOS.
I'd argue that you generally wouldn't expect that to include IPs you manually enter into the URL bar. In every other case what that does is prevent applications from going out and doing stuff in the background, so that's going to be the assumption for browsers as well. Now that's not how the safety feature is designed, but that's how I as a user experience it working.
Also it doesn't really work does it, because Firefox can still do a DNS lookup, from a DNS server, which is just an IP.
Clearly not, as it took me weeks to figure out. I don't think macOS informs the application that it's being restricted, so Firefox can't really tell me that somethings up. Now I get that macOS can really do that either, otherwise users would be spammed with "This application tried accessing the network", but there should be some feedback mechanism that informs the user that something is probably wrong. Maybe there is and I've haven't found it.
> I don't think macOS informs the application that it's being restricted, so Firefox can't really tell me that somethings up.
What APIs is Firefox using? If it's using the Unix/POSIX-y stuff, I don't think there's a way for that kind of feedback. Not sure about the Objective-C/Swift APIs.
FYI, a few months ago Firefox finally put local network access behind a per-site permission, so websites can’t port scan you even if Firefox itself has this perm. Chrome has had this forever. There’s also a uBlock Origin filter list to block LAN access, which I think would not prevent top level navigation to it.
When Apple started soldering their RAMs and SSDs, I predicted that Macs and macOS would be slowly locked down like other iDevices. I was mocked here and elsewhere for pointing this out. With Apple Silicon, Mac hardware is now like iPhones and iPads (with only the bootloader remaining to be locked). With it, they have ensured that all non-Apple OSes can only run crippled on Macs. So now they've also started taking away our control through the ios-ification of macOS.
Intel and AMD CPUs seem to do fine, and still are better than Apple Silicon in performance, without needing to resort to any "unified memory" architecture. And the newer replaceable / upgradeable CAMM2 (Compression Attached Memory Module) RAM is a good compromise to it with even more RAM bandwidth, and lower power requirements. (Sure, they may not be as fast as on-package DRAM or HBMs, but as everyone is now finding out, sacrificing our computing freedom to the whims and mercies of corporates is not in our best interest).
macOS went from a very prominently Linux-alike (Snow Leopard era) to locked down North Korean iOSification over the span of 15 years. I agree, it's in such a bad state right now. Can't do much of anything in the OS without having to jump through 5-10 consent prompts.
Funny. I was happy to leave Linux to Apple for things that just worked. I need an ecosystem. Phone. Pad. Photos. Storage. Works out of the box with Apple. If didn’t have a life I would spend all my time configuring Linux to be half of what Apple provides. But I have a life.
Honestly, how do you experience those two? Because my personal experience is opposite.
What does it mean for you for a product to be 'locked down'? Mac OS has amazing range of customizability, with endless options to change it with APIs and third party apps. So far I didn't encounter behaviour I don't like and wasn't able to change. What is your list? Or it means something different for you?
And what does "bloated" means for you? I understand what it means in regards to Windows. It constantly gives me options I didn't ask for. Like when I press Start button I feel like I am at the Time Square with ads and stuff I didn't ask for yelling at me. I don't have such expericense with macOS. And apple intelligence fits right in - if you don't ask for it it won't show itself.
I don't want to navigate a dark pattern to avoid accidentally deleting a downloaded program, followed by opening settings and entering my password just to run it.
And if there is a way to stop Mac OS from spamming hidden dot-underscore files everywhere, I haven't found it yet.
What is not bloat about creating a hidden file for every file in every visited directory? It clutters up outputs, causes needless work for various tools, and deleting them is pointless as the system will just instantly recreate them.
Given the "endless options to change it" as you said, where is the option to turn that off?
I have an iPad so I can get all the apps (like banking and governments ID stuff), but other than that it's GrapheneOS and Linux. I only miss things that are put on only the closed platforms (iOS and Android). Other than that I experience clean minimalism all day. Bless Gnome, bless NixOS, Bless GrapheneOS. They just get out of my way on the road to being productive.
...Ok there is bliss... and the pain of having to use MS365 through the browser which "just doesn't work" [tm] (constant log-outs, you're logged out but you don't get an error until 5 minutes of wondering where chats are going, you're a guest in an org but that works 20% of the time in 20% of browsers, etc, etc , etc)
If the desktop-mode on GrapheneOS (Android 17) would have a bit less papercuts that would be a nice platform for my MS365 stuff, but is suffers from stuff like the keyboard taking half my ultra-wide in some apps, and poor window management. It's really is close to being a viable work env imho though. That'd be so cool... The dream since Ubuntu's Convergence...
I remember watching him on PBS. There was something great about turning on the TV and finding someone who thought computers, and the people behind them, were interesting enough to spend a whole evening on. Sorta rare at that time.
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