shac ron ₪‎

Kernel engineer, software architect, time traveler (forward only)

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Last Notes

2026-09-11 23:15:04 UTC

Someone wasn’t responsible enough to tell people not to check in compiled firmware into the source tree and now every checkout has 4.5 GB of binaries that are frequently updated.

2026-08-28 21:49:31 UTC

My doctor wants me to deliver documents to them via a burned CD ROM sent in the mail. Oh, this is noted Silicon Valley computer science school Stanford University’s hospital.

2026-08-16 02:28:57 UTC

nᴠɪᴅɪᴀ can build a pedestrian bridge across San Tomas Expressway, but Apple refuses to install a ski lift between IL and AP.

2026-08-06 00:58:19 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/@cultofmac/117045754026473790
Attempting to avoid spoilers for Silo and Peacemaker but 🤷, so don’t read further if you’re concerned.
Some shows debut new seasons that undo a big chunk of what was accomplished in the previous season. This is when I check out of the show. #silo and #peacemaker are both shows I thought were great that did this recently. I didn’t make it past episode 1 of the newest season of either one.
#note1yya…na7a

2026-08-01 20:33:10 UTC

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That works with an added amp.
What I really want is a device that takes several usb / hdmi inputs, digitally mixes them, and has a DAC and stereo amplifier integrated. But with good quality sound.

2026-08-01 18:54:02 UTC

What’s the sane way to pipe audio from three desktop computers into one pair of stereo speakers? Ideally mixed and low-ish latency. Don’t say Bluetooth.

2026-07-27 16:48:01 UTC

Panics on memory error detection is not memory safety. If your application is memory-safe then your users will never encounter the effects of memory errors.

2026-06-21 05:37:04 UTC

A fun side effect of the RAM shortage is that the quality of available memory is dropping significantly. This hits all segments of computing.

2026-06-12 18:04:52 UTC

#macOS Golden Gate’s Container Machines feature looks like a great step forward. This is an improvement to Containers introduced in Tahoe for tighter integration with the host. Clearly someone at Apple is taking WSL seriously.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/389/

2026-06-01 01:28:12 UTC

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Back when going on a surfin’ safari was a reference people understood

2026-06-01 01:06:09 UTC

Get bent, haberdashers
https://files.ioc.exchange/iocexchange/media_attachments/files/116/672/164/769/941/167/original/21ac1f5f9f4f7050.jpeg

2026-05-31 15:11:54 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/@appleinsider/116669750494330029
I scheduled an appointment to try out the Apple Vision Pro back when that was a thing. At the Apple Store the employee scanned my glasses to find a matching set of lenses. She failed to do this. She got someone else to assist who else failed. Then a more senior employee. After about 15 minutes of trying they told me that they don’t know what to do and I will have to reschedule.
There’s nothing unusual about my glasses, other than being a strong prescription, so the experience makes me less than confident about Apple’s glasses plans. I never did get to try an AVP.
#note10ct…670d

2026-05-31 14:32:24 UTC

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Steve Sinofsky loves to recall his visionary genius and claim credit for products coming out today. He fails to mention that the product was an utter failure due to his (as head of Windows) terrible OS decisions. Windows RT being very limited, the disastrous Metro/Modern UI, the forced app store, and the company’s failure to port much of its stack to ARM all led to a bad product that nobody wanted.

2026-05-31 00:46:29 UTC

RE: https://flipboard.com/@thenewsdesk/technology-shjum1jiz/-/a-T0sauGO-StOqbtdIkTZUoA%3Aa%3A43591897-%2F0
Alternate headline: Eric Schmidt Continues Long Streak of Being an Asshole
#note1qll…8zk9

2026-05-31 00:37:03 UTC

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The 2006 model has a habit of collecting crumbs in the lucite tray. Fortunately it’s easy to disassemble to clean it out. Even better, you can keep using it without the tray.

2026-05-30 15:33:58 UTC

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I had a colleague who was colorblind and his theme did look like that. Everyone else responded in horror when they saw his screen

2026-05-30 01:43:15 UTC

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S^P 500

2026-05-29 20:12:00 UTC

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I realize this may be implicit in physical steering wheel controls, but with automakers we can’t take that for granted.

2026-05-29 20:10:19 UTC

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I approve all of these. You forgot to specifically call out a physical volume button, which is the bare minimum for usability of the entertainment system.

2026-05-29 16:09:49 UTC

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Wow, a cheap Windows laptop. This could open up whole new markets for the previously premium Windows laptop family. Hold on, I’m getting handed a note here…

2026-05-28 19:12:35 UTC

There’s a concept that I struggle to explain to people, which is that doing a quick hack that adds a constraint to software has a cost. That cost is hurting future use of that code because its behavior is more complex, has special exceptions that must be understood, dependent on unexpected things. It compounds over multiple hacks until the software is so constrained that making changes is painful or impossible.
Is there a formal name for this? It’s not just technical debt. It’s layers of poorly-conceived hacks that constrain the direction of development in increasingly narrow paths.

2026-05-27 20:05:40 UTC

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Do not buy an AVP. It will never get more apps.

2026-05-26 20:42:03 UTC

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I generally pay for quality, but $5000 was more than I am willing to spend on a display. Regardless, it’s discontinued now.
I think I may return this for a (5K) Studio Display, which is more expensive than this 6K LG.

2026-05-26 20:30:47 UTC

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The XDR was $5,000 without a stand. This thing cost me $1,200.

2026-05-26 20:27:57 UTC

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The display itself is matte and does not look as good as the old LG Ultrafine 5K. It looks okay, but black levels are not as good and it’s less crisp despite having the same DPI. When light sources hit it, the matte coating actually makes it worse compared to a glossy display, with indirect light in the room washing it out. I really wish there was a non-matte option.
On the plus side no image retention so far, unlike the 5K.

2026-05-26 20:16:59 UTC

Thread of things I hate about the LG 6K monitor (32U990A). Updated as I encounter them.
There is no metal on this thing, it is all painted plastic. Gross. Correction, the base of the stand is made of metal. It does not match the painted plastic stand.
The stand is too high. I’ve set my desk as low as possible and my eye level still makes looking at the top of the display a strain.
Controls are via a little joystick on the back of the monitor. It feels very flimsy and cheap and will probably break soon. It is also very awkward to use.
macOS software audio controls do not work with this monitor. The volume output is at a fixed volume (digital “line” level), and the monitor expects to adjust the volume using the above flimsy joystick. This is very bad.
The speakers are terrible. I expected this.

2026-05-26 17:46:28 UTC

The most stressful part of my job is scheduling meetings.

2026-05-26 15:44:01 UTC

Somewhere in the dark matter universe scientists are speculating about a missing tiny fraction of the universe’s mass that is throwing their calculations off.

2026-05-26 02:59:58 UTC

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The punishment for going viral is to be subjected to the opinions of others.

2026-05-25 15:46:39 UTC

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Thanks for the detailed answer. launchd is pretty tightly coupled to XNU and Darwin tech and I doubt they will take BSD’s needs into consideration when making changes.
This was more of a flippant joke about how to make people who are angry at systemd even more angry.

2026-05-25 01:11:40 UTC

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Why do that when they can adopt Apple’s Launchd?

2026-05-24 19:57:11 UTC

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It’s a Zoox

2026-05-24 19:49:42 UTC

The icon is for VS Code, which is an entirely different product from Visual Studio.
https://files.ioc.exchange/iocexchange/media_attachments/files/116/631/280/535/351/318/original/652923c0c0386c99.jpeg

2026-05-24 18:52:13 UTC

I thought I got over the silliness of the Rivian front fascia, but then I see them with the daytime running lights on and nope.

2026-05-24 14:46:39 UTC

Posting images without alt text so that all the #alttext warriors immediately jump on it and annotate it. Then using their output to train an image classifier #AI model.

2026-05-23 19:44:14 UTC

Smart phishing attack on my long-unused twitter account. They got the email registered to that account, which is not obvious to derive. So either twitter’s database was compromised or they got it from some other site that had that email associated with my twitter account (though I can’t think of any).

2026-05-22 21:07:46 UTC

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You’re absolutely right, I shouldn’t have done that.

2026-05-21 14:45:07 UTC

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I remember the VoiceOver work on iPod. It was a large effort, and they put the lead UI engineer on it for quite a while. This was back when the iPod was Apple’s biggest product.
This was under Jobs, btw. Steve ingrained accessibility into the company.

2026-05-20 23:29:09 UTC

Running a complex task with an AI agent is insane because it will do things differently every time.
Run 1: looks at environment variable for data it needs, works.
Run 2: tries to get same data by running utility that fails, dies.
This run decides it needs to edit .zshenv for some reason. It didn’t do it last time. It probably won’t next time.
This thing runs thousands of steps and every one of them is potentially like this. You can’t fix a thing and assume it will work.

2026-05-20 17:46:46 UTC

Creating a new version of #JSON called KSON that is 100% the same except it allows trailing commas in lists. I hope you will all join me in migrating.

2026-05-20 14:44:45 UTC

POSIX compatibility is the curse that kills every new OS effort in infancy.

2026-05-20 14:39:33 UTC

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Oh come on. This thing is obviously a scam. Yes, it can hover for a few seconds. It will never be close to a production vehicle of any kind.

2026-05-20 14:29:00 UTC

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The goal was to make something secure by default. POSIX is incompatible with the fuchsia security model (and syscall model), so yes, rewrite all of userland.
Several years later, they are now maintaining a unix compatibility runtime as a key component.

2026-05-20 03:39:31 UTC

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Well, the joke was that Fuchsia was a retirement home for frustrated Android engineers. They were doing the opposite of Android in every way to fix all the fundamental problems with the first OS. What they ended up with was essentially a meta-OS that could theoretically do anything but in practice did nothing.
The kernel (zircon) is pretty good though and has some good ideas.

2026-05-20 02:20:09 UTC

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Fuchsia was a classic second system, and as such a complete disaster. I spent 3 years working on it and it quickly became obvious this was not going to work.

2026-05-19 00:25:58 UTC

I did it, I found a Rust project that did not immediately mention it was written in Rust.

2026-05-18 23:19:14 UTC

Apple Containers, a lightweight container framework*
*requires full Xcode install (not just command line tools), 12.5 GB

2026-05-18 17:35:26 UTC

They say infinite monkeys banging on infinite typewriters will eventually produce Shakespeare. While true(-ish, ignoring the combinatorial size), it then becomes a problem of searching the output and filtering out good content from bad. This requires intelligence that the monkeys didn’t apply in the writing process.
Given the infinite output set, it’s more difficult than writing it yourself.
AI-generated writing works the same way. Today we specifically see the infinite monkey problem in AI-generated bug reports.

2026-05-18 15:09:19 UTC

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We’re on number four now.

2026-05-17 16:05:09 UTC

English:
Awe
Awesome
Awful <— missing e and also why is this a bad thing

2026-05-17 15:52:33 UTC

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There are much better reasons to boo Eric Schmidt than AI. Like his stance on privacy (nobody will have any) or his creepy sexual harassment history.

2026-05-15 18:30:19 UTC

Seeing a lot of cases of putting an AI agent to do a thing (repeatedly) where the better solution is to have an AI agent write a program to do the thing.

2026-05-15 15:59:51 UTC

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NoUptime

2026-05-14 19:50:41 UTC

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Claude is always remote, it is a huge model. Claude Code is a local harness (Node app) that invokes remote Claude, but performs local file system and network access.

2026-05-14 18:14:12 UTC

The Claude Code harness is a security disaster for many reasons. Here’s one example: if you configure and enable the sandbox, but the run can’t create a sandbox, sometimes it will just keep running without it.

2026-05-11 14:39:25 UTC

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This is clearly a product in maintenance mode. Nobody should buy one of these or build an app for it.

2026-05-11 02:23:20 UTC

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I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who had trouble with this.

2026-05-10 16:49:11 UTC

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The built-in Snake game not good enough?

2026-05-08 20:24:04 UTC

I wonder if Apple’s Intel deal includes an anti-disparagement clause in honor of Pat Gelsinger

2026-05-08 17:41:00 UTC

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This is a bad pattern to be stuck in. But “documentation is good” is difficult to fight against.

2026-05-08 17:38:42 UTC

The new world of AI means every project and proposal has a million pages of AI-generated documents that nobody can read. If you want to interface with something, it means parsing their docs and generating a matching set of docs that cross-reference them.
They’ve shifted the burden of software development forward into design. We must specify everything and then implement that spec. It turns software implementation into a design and verification problem. This is the classic outsourcing problem.

2026-05-08 17:38:42 UTC

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The outsourcing problem, summarized. There is a spectrum of development teams: on one side is the self-organizing group of smart people. On the other is the outsourced development team. The former does the right thing for the project. The latter implements a spec. To get good results from the outsourced team, the spec needs to be great, and their work needs to be verified to be consistent with it. Effectively this moves all of the intelligence and effort out of the implementation and into the specification. In general this does not end up saving time or labor, it just makes things more difficult. Fixing design mistakes in particular is extremely painful.

2026-05-07 21:22:40 UTC

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Starting to think multi-user systems were a bad idea

2026-05-06 00:21:16 UTC

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I’m not even writing python, I just have to run some script that came with a build system. Works fine unless invoked inside the vscode terminal

2026-05-05 23:52:06 UTC

vscode uses homebrew’s python, not the system python. Homebrew’s python can’t be managed with pip, it needs to download packages via ‘brew’. Brew doesn’t contain the package I need that is installed on my system python.
The whole python versioning world is a disaster and everyone involved should feel bad.

2026-05-05 19:03:37 UTC

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There are only two real Terminator movies. Everything else is junk.

2026-05-05 14:45:43 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/@macrumors/116522488320039447
One of the features is ads in Maps. Good riddance to Tim who enabled this.
#note18kl…cylw

2026-05-05 14:00:23 UTC

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I expect Apple will use third party compute services for training and will make their own hardware for inference.
The inference hardware will have something no one else can provide: Apple Secure Enclave-based privacy. If they want to privately process user data in the cloud, no other confidential compute platform is sufficient for this task.

2026-05-05 01:28:42 UTC

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I believe it will be seen as a very fortunate accident. They were never going to win the frontier model race, and they don’t need to. The value is in the integration, and they will have their choice of suppliers for intelligence.

2026-05-04 23:23:30 UTC

Sorry I made your editor automatically attribute your git changes to me. It was an accident and I thought you would appreciate it.

2026-05-04 17:42:13 UTC

I've been casually looking at jobs recently so this thread is just random things I encounter.
Today: “You will be expected to jump in quickly and provide important contributions from day one”
lmao. Especially since I know this company and no one can even get their permissions sorted on day one.

2026-05-04 15:47:53 UTC

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Sounds like I should upgrade this year

2026-05-03 19:28:26 UTC

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Safari is a reference to Surfin’ Safari, a song by the Beach Boys.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IMChBJZUDK8

2026-05-03 15:58:23 UTC

Mercedes to bring back some physical buttons. Car makers continue to be idiots but at least they’re starting to hear customer feedback.
Having rented an EQB last year, the controls alone were enough to make me hate the car.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/mercedes-benz-commits-to-bringing-back-phycial-buttons/

2026-05-02 21:23:37 UTC

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Things I say that make my wife exasperated.

2026-05-02 21:22:07 UTC

Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.

2026-05-02 16:50:15 UTC

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imagine spending all that time and effort to turn a fun car into an utterly joyless one

2026-05-01 17:58:24 UTC

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How does one use the apps they purchased on their work Mac? Or play their Apple Music subscription music at work? Use iPhone mirroring or AirPods?
Apple needs two things:
1. Managed iCloud accounts tied into corporate authentication. Allow users to use the App Store apps the company buys, use iMessage, FaceTime, iCloud sync their devices, etc.
2. Delegate a personal account to that managed account. Allow it optional access to things like app store purchases, Apple Music, AirPod sync, maybe messages, but not other things like email and photos.

2026-05-01 17:49:17 UTC

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As a normal user (non-admin) of Apple products in the enterprise, the Apple ID situation remains a disaster. There’s no good managed way to have Apple IDs for work or to have those interact in a firewalled way with personal IDs.

2026-05-01 15:18:59 UTC

The experience of using passkeys and authenticator apps makes passwords with SMS 2-factor auth seem great in comparison.

2026-04-30 21:16:35 UTC

I asked the Confluence AI agent to fix a minor thing in a document and it just keeps making it worse. So about what you’d expect from Atlassian software

2026-04-29 20:26:39 UTC

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It is specifically to address this issue. It was apparently happening so much that it became a known problem. Clearly they can’t fix it at a lower level because they don’t understand it.

2026-04-29 19:16:12 UTC

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From the article:
The system prompt for OpenAl's Codex CLI contains a perplexing and repeated warning for the most recent GPT model to "never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query."

2026-04-29 19:14:58 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/116489539765228160
Makes sense, you don’t want your coding agent talking about goblins.
#note1stf…7cyw

2026-04-29 13:34:16 UTC

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This entire story can be summed up as:
Prices on all GPUs going up due to memory shortages. Framework’s 8GB modules prices will increase once current inventory is depleted. New 12GB modules start at the higher price.

2026-04-28 14:40:44 UTC

My company has access to Mythos, and I asked that they run it on one of my projects. I am waiting for results and am excited and anxious about it.

2026-04-27 16:40:31 UTC

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I know it can’t be done by humans

2026-04-27 16:39:51 UTC

Can an AI agent use scanf() correctly?

2026-04-27 16:06:24 UTC

OpenAI is working on a phone. The number of huge projects this company is funding at the same time is insane. I’m going to be very disappointed if they don’t vibe code the whole OS from scratch.
https://www.cultofmac.com/news/openai-secretly-developing-iphone-competitor

2026-04-27 15:46:38 UTC

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My favorite part of every story like this is when they ask the AI agent why it did the thing so it can feel bad about what it’s done.
https://files.ioc.exchange/iocexchange/media_attachments/files/116/477/441/098/185/629/original/d414ee3dd9483e2b.jpeg

2026-04-26 14:58:01 UTC

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A machine-generated transformation of existing material is considered a derivative work. The original license still applies. There is nothing clean room about it, it literally has access to the source code.

2026-04-26 00:51:31 UTC

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Just use scanf(). Now you have two problems.

2026-04-24 20:22:38 UTC

You’re telling me this gluten was free?

2026-04-23 15:26:31 UTC

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This is such blatant fraud that a functioning SEC would have cancelled this IPO and prosecuted its officials.

2026-04-21 20:51:46 UTC

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And if you accidentally sleep on it and it melts and smears all over the sheets then they act like it’s your fault.

2026-04-20 20:44:45 UTC

It’s official
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/04/tim-cook-to-become-apple-executive-chairman-john-ternus-to-become-apple-ceo/

2026-04-20 20:42:42 UTC

Ever leave a project or team because the way it was going offended your sense of proper engineering?

2026-04-20 18:56:22 UTC

Deleting the recipient list on this email reply so I can write what I really think without the risk of accidentally sending it until I’ve had a chance to edit it down.

2026-04-20 01:50:48 UTC

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I want a whole kernel, not just a subsystem. I want internet pedants to correct people that it’s actually GNU/sloppix

2026-04-20 01:38:25 UTC

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my dream job