In the great POSIX, Windows vs. Apple filesystems debate, and iPad "what is a file", the great AI Overlords propose: "what if the filesystem was soup?". Manufacturer instructions, public data, and user's instructions and data, all sort of swimming together.
Could also phrase it "What if the filesystem was SOUP?"
Apple’s Developer Documentation is historically pretty terrible. So I’d be curious to see if they stepped it up for the agent instructions for the new API’s.
Apple's current docs suck, and they have, for a long time (SwiftUI was so bad, that someone came up with this[0], and it was a lifesaver).
But I'm old enough to remember Inside Macintosh[1], and that was a thing of beauty.
Apple used to take technical documentation very seriously. Many of their technical writers had better tech chops, than the engineers making the stuff they wrote about.
I really wish they still did, instead of focusing so much on trying to make it simple and obvious like in SwiftUI. Objective-C was a pinnacle of computing, and ever since Swift they've been devolving into the pursuit of oversimplifying and abstracting away the details such that they don't even feel necessary to teach anymore, even though as a new developer, I WANT TO KNOW THEM.
Unfortunately, during that time is when they screwed around with the gold confiscations. So the best option would have been to illegally hoard gold until they struck the statute down?
I'm shocked that more people don't know about this. It seems insane that the "land of the free" (yeah I know, not really, but that's the pitch anyway) would have such an obviously command-economy policy through the heart of the cold war.
My pessimistic take is it’s being optimized for the “numbers” users benchmark with. The 5G repeater towers that display on your phone as full-bars but the tower itself is constrained, to juicing the speedtests. Apple even changed how the RSSI translates to the bars. There are engineers doing great work, and the marketing teams muddle the waters (like ATT’s “5Ge”).
Is there a term for the design style of the plastic panels? I've been seeing it more often, for instance the robot wheeled base looks like an Amazon Delivery Van. Hidden screws, 45degree angles but with soft corner bends.
I took a peek into APFS a bit ago [1] because I (stupidly) yanked a usb SSD before it was unmounted and corrupted it. Reading the documentation, it seems to have many "cool" features which just aren't fully exposed/utilized in the OS, and there is a lack of API tooling.
For example: it is copy-on-write, and my corruption happened in the superblock checkpoint. There is no built-in command in Disk Utility to "mount" an older checkpoint (and accepting a small amount of dataloss). Also the "First Aid" command allegedly runs volume repair top-down when it is recommended to do it inside-out.
It took me quite a while to get used to the "save continuously, keep revision history" of Google Docs, but in that context I've gotten used to it. For something like code, or image edits, etc. I still prefer explicit "Save" or "Save As..." operations that I control, because quite often I get myself boxed into something that I just want to throw away and start over.
In IntelliJ you can look at local history of a file and see that the ide remembers your changes for a long time. It seems to take a snapshot on actions like test runs, build complete, or maybe every few minutes. This is on top of auto saving and git of course. It saved my ass when I ran the wrong git command more than once!
For me this is what I use Git for, even if I have no intention of pushing to a remote repository. So I suppose some of Git's functionality could be considered redundant if only the applications would be generous about saving history and deltas.
I've had my code editor's configuration set to auto save for at least 15 years at this point. I've never had the problem of not being able to throw something away that I wanted to throw away - either it's in the git history (broad edits), or it's in the undo-history (fine edits). It helps to have an undo history that survives restarts and that preserves branches, which I guess may not be a default for every editor
Well we're rapidly approaching a world going back to 256GB (or smaller) SSDs because VC money is being used to buy up all semiconductor and HDD output by AI hyperscalers. Everything will end up cloud storage, you'll own nothing and like it.
Also the minimum Word document is far larger than 2KB. IIRC it's about 10x that size for an empty Word document (docx).
Ironically, these are a distillation of the collective intelligence and efforts of a business that has ultimately failed. Would you hire the previous COO of Spirit? Or the CTO? Instead you’ll have an agent that is influenced by the way this company did things, architecture and business decisions. Not trying to be negative, just makes for an interesting thought.
I agree you cannot tie the success or failure to any single decision. I was just sharing a personal anecdote about the company.
I do know that Spirit Airlines was a lot scrappier and lean minded when they were based in Detroit. Course that is kind of a Midwest thing. Spirit grew a lot faster after moving to Florida but ultimately getting there involved taking financial risks that ultimately doomed them.
“You can think of Q collar as a baby version of health scams promoted by wealthy and powerful medical-adjacent celebrities such as Dr. Oz, Andrew Huberman, and RFK Jr.”
This sentence seems unnecessary and perhaps inflammatory, I think it detracts from the article.
Could also phrase it "What if the filesystem was SOUP?"
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