Like all analog workflows the attraction is the process itself. The decision path is one way, path dependency is permanent. You can think of it as a roguelike (the game genre) approach to creative expression. Working with constraints is an excellent way to develop your creative chops. Analog workflows, pen and ink, paint, wet plate photography, audio recording on tape, film photography, etc. all hem in the artist in different ways. It is the play inside the constraints and honing the craft that make them enjoyable to do.
There is also something to creating a physical thing that is immensely satisfying. Bits are bits and no matter how useful they may be they end up feeling very much the same as ever other undifferentiated bit in the trillions of photos, sounds, programs, spreadsheets, etc. Capturing light on film and then splashing them with chemicals results in something that you hold in your hand and now is a unique object.
So yes, digital photography is very useful and cost effective. Film photography is about fun or challenging yourself. It causes you to practice deliberate decision making in a creative process. If that sounds meaningless or stupid then it isn’t for you.
One example of benefiting creatively from working with constraints. Back in the 1980s, I read a comment from a newspaper sports editor that went something like this -- "Back when sports photographers used the big 4x5 Graflex camera, a guy would go out to a game with 5 plates and come back with 5 usable shots. Now guys use motorized 35 mm cameras, shoot several rolls, and often come back without a single good shot."
> Working with constraints is an excellent way to develop your creative chops
Exactly. As someone who DJs (I know - the most low-skill hobby in existence), beatmatching by ear rather than using computer displays is helpful because it teaches you to listen to the music you're playing and how your mix sounds (the main output of DJing) rather than doing something because a screen says it's optimal.
Give it up. People have been predicting this for 15 years.
You can’t have a development machine locked down like iOS. As long as the Mac is the development machine at apple it will need to be able to run arbitrary code.
What support? Asahi had to fight to exist, especially early on when they essentially had to reimplement much of the graphics pipeline. And now its in mainline linux - short of a complete hostile lockdown of the bootloader, it’s not like they support other OS’s very much as is.
Asahi appears to be dead. It wont even boot on anything apple released in the past 2 years.
Sure, their M1-M3 support is okay (as long as you're fine with no hibernate or sleep support, so have to plug in the laptop or risk losing all your open stuff), and it was a lot of work by lots of volunteers... But at this point it's starting to look more like a retrocomputing project. As time ticks on, it'll become less and less viable using an ancient laptop, especially if local AI becomes commonplace.
Wtf do you mean? They just enabled M3 in the official installer and they're working on M4 bringup too. Keep in mind it took them like 16 months to even support M1 at first. Then they supported M2 within a few months, then M3 threw in a wrench that they're still working on, but there is no evidence of death at all, just a lot of work left to do.
M4 has no support and was released in May 2024, over 2 years ago, and looks at least a year from usability - doesn't yet boot. M5 also has no support. M6 also has no support.
I did say they're working on M4 bringup, which means it doesn't boot yet, yes. I don't see how that means they're "dead" though. Or that they'll never catch up ever. In fact, the very recent progress in this area suggests the exact opposite.
It's also worth pointing out that the developers at Mozilla literally decided to make a brand new programming language (Rust) that eliminated an entire categories of bugs and started working on a new browser (Servo) where its components could be switched into firefox.
Then Mozilla fired the team working on it.
Lesson 1: Better tools and processes eliminate bugs.
Lesson 2: If you don't have the tools, make them.
Lesson 3: Mismanagement leads to security vulnerabilities.
Yes, and even after introducing and using Rust, there were still vulns in the remaining code.
FWIW, Rust is my main language, so I am grateful to the humans that created it, and it is indeed a monumental effort. But vuln finding is a different kind of creative endeavour, and one that is heavily weighted against defenders.
You would choose rust (from a security standpoint) because it massively reduces memory safety issues (which from a Microsoft study was responsible for around 70% of bugs).
Then you look at things like linting, fuzzing, design by contract, proofing, deterministic test runs, etc...
Yes, I should have been clear - I don't mind AI working on patches or vuln-hunting; my issue with MacOS 27 is the amount of AI included in the OS that is not opt-in. I use Claude Code everyday - but it doesn't run locally on my main production machines.
If Apple wanted to make the OS more secure, they would make the OS more modular, allowing users to reduce the surface risk by not installing bloated components
You have the same long list for Sequoia 15.8, so how is that better? Besides, newer OSes are also more likely to have uniquely knew bugs from both AI slop and in general all the shiny new broken features
It will work with the pencil. They were really vague on when that will happen. I wonder how much additional thickness was added to the phone to get pencil support on both screens.
It’s the camera and Face ID. The camera on the iPhone 6 is nowhere near as capable current cameras. Even the much improved camera on the last iPhone SE was considered a huge issue by most people. Cameras are too important to go back to something that thin. The current Air is leaps and bounds better in every way to the iPhone 6 but it doesn’t sell. Why? The battery life and camera. Imagine shrinking the iPhone Air and having even less battery life. Critics would howl and even fewer people would buy it.
Smaller phones can’t fit as much stuff in them as larger phones. Shrink the phone and something has to give. People in the aggregate do not want to make those compromises unless the price is noticeably less. But then it can’t have any of the premium features that are expected from Apple. Small phones are compromises that don’t pay off for Apple.
We’ve come close to doubling battery capacity per volume in that time.
The battery was the single largest module by a long shot in an iPhone 6, and now you can get the same capacity in a much smaller volume. We’ve also lost other bulky items like the home button and headphone jack.
The camera on the current gen has its own expanded volume area of the case, so I don’t buy that they couldn’t just use the same hump they use on literally all of their phones. Sure Face ID is new, but I’ve seen the size of that module, and it is only slightly larger than the selfie camera from back then that it replaced.
And which they could not charge anyone for. Unless these were extra resources that would otherwise go unused it cost them the amount they could have charged for them. Normally I would expect most businesses to make reasonable tradeoffs when it comes to how to allocate resources. I’m not convinced that any of the AI providers should be given that benefit of the doubt.
My biggest problem letter is mim. It essentially disappears in a lot of styles. If I was more fluent I’m sure I’d recognize the words more readily and know when to look for it. I don’t find the rest of the letters too difficult even at my basic level.
I was struck by the lack of books in the homes of even educated people in Yemen. I once went to a book fair in Sana’a that was well attended. Think it was on a college campus. I don’t remember seeing many novels in Arabic, they were mostly in English and French. I had been told that if someone sent me any books in the mail they would have to be cleared by the censor before I would get them. That pretty much equated to never getting them. The book fair was a relief. I picked up David Copperfield and Women in Love and that was enough to last me until I made a trip out of the country.
The lack of books and therefore lack of reading leads to reduce vocabulary. I read somewhere the average of known words by an Arabic speaker was substantially lower than English speakers.
When I switch to speaking Arabic (poorly) I struggle to find words because my vocab level is so bad. Imagine for an every day person, not being able to effectively express themselves. It would lead to a ton of frustration, miscommunication and misunderstanding.
To be fair, modern "English" is a nebulous smorgasbord of words from a lot of different languages. I'm sure we could afford to drop a lot of the words from clusters of synonyms.
> we could afford to drop a lot of the words from clusters of synonyms
Not really, because every synonym imparts a slightly different meaning, usually perceptable only to native speakers. That's why they persist, because they are useful even if not strictly necessary.
I recall a team working on machine translation starting by translating English into a simpler form before translating that into the target languages. This was a couple of decades ago. Perhaps not a new idea even then.
The sad thing is that current Macs are perfect machines for DF. The recommendation was always to get as fast a single threaded machine as possible with the biggest cache. Even the least expensive Macs are monsters in those regards. The game is more multi-threaded than before but still is dominated by single threaded performance.
I disagree. Developer machines have to be open, others maybe yes maybe not. Users can choose their security model by the machine they buy.
The closed model has been very good for both developers and consumers. If we use Android as a counterfactual to iOS there are entire swaths of apps that are available on one that are not on the other. Android is more amenable to open source apps and whatever Apple doesn’t on its store. But it is also easier to pirate and download cracked software.
My own interest in making music exposed me to a stark difference between Android and iOS. There is an enormous number of audio apps available on iOS that simply don’t exist in Android. There are a fair number of apps that mirror windows and Mac apps but are far far cheaper on iOS. I am convinced that the console approach to iOS apps is responsible for the existence of a lot of apps that wouldn’t be offered otherwise.
We are better off with a mix of platform types. I can’t imagine any real way a development machine could be completely locked down. They have to be able to run arbitrary code.
Following this to its logical conclusion… “Sorry, you didn’t buy a Development Pro Guitar. Please bring it in to your nearest Apple repair shop to get it retuned or restringed”
See? “Development machine” just means the ability to do what you want with your own machine. No third party interference.
Let Timmy Can’t-Tune bring his guitar to someone who can. Let grandma have her new phone be setup by her grandson appropriately so she can’t install malware.
There is also something to creating a physical thing that is immensely satisfying. Bits are bits and no matter how useful they may be they end up feeling very much the same as ever other undifferentiated bit in the trillions of photos, sounds, programs, spreadsheets, etc. Capturing light on film and then splashing them with chemicals results in something that you hold in your hand and now is a unique object.
So yes, digital photography is very useful and cost effective. Film photography is about fun or challenging yourself. It causes you to practice deliberate decision making in a creative process. If that sounds meaningless or stupid then it isn’t for you.