MacOS major version release are so underwhelming to me. They're not so much OS updates as they're updates to built-in apps I don't use or use at a very surface level: Safari, Facetime, Apple Maps, Messages, etc.
I'm not really sure what I'd want out of a new MacOS, though. It's been stable and (for my purposes) feature-complete for many years now. I don't remember the last time a MacOS upgrade added a feature I wanted but didn't yet have, nor the last time they added a feature I didn't realize I wanted because I'd never imagined it. The latter used to be what made Apple products stand out to me.
I'm impressed. People really will never be satisfied.
A relatively low-key, under-the-hood Mac release? "Man I miss when the Mac was innovative. These releases are a snooze fest."
A big release, packed with features? "Man I miss when Apple cared about their OS stability. We need a new zero features snooze fest like 10.6. Take me back to Snow Leopard :("
Only HN can pull off such astounding mood swings. I know this site isn't a monolith of opinions, but come on.
You can do both things at the same time, add new features that don't alienate their powerusers while also having a stable OS. Maybe if Apple delivered on both counts more in recent years people wouldn't feel the need to complain so much. It was complaining after all that got them to wake up and kill the touchbar and that butterfly keyboard.
I would love a more detailed change log of the actual OS level changes because sometimes there’s useful tidbits but you often have to be watching the WWDC content in order to see what will be in the upcoming OS. There have been some under the hood things like the APFS switch, Rosetta, and other under the hood changes that can significantly impact the OS. In this release I saw that there is a new copy mechanism in the finder which seems pretty significant but there isn’t a lot of detail about the technology behind it. I am also interested in the universal control and the ability to use your mac as an airplay device so now you can stream another Mac which used to be some thing then I did using a lunar display adapter. I also saw there’s a built in TOTP feature now which might be handy. I agree though most changes seem like app changes and services that could be decoupled from an OS update.
I personally prefer the incremental yearly updates to huge changes on a longer timeframe. I'm pretty excited about Live Text, personally. I've been getting a lot of great use out of it on iOS.
If we're talking about other recent releases, ARM (/iOS app interoperability) support was definitely a huge change :)
At least they've managed to optimize and make the OS faster. Mojave feels faster on my 2014 MPB than previous installations did. Would wish they would focus on the apps and not revamping the system each time they do an update.
I find them worse than underwhelming. Generally, the thing that usually pushes me to upgrade is EOL of the OS I'm on, or escaping some abomination perpetrated by the OS I'm on. It's almost never a compelling feature, because I need an OS to run applications, mostly.
The abomination that would get me off of Big Sur is the ridiculously low contrast difference for titlebars between foreground and background apps. Turning on the contrast accessibility option looks horrible. However, it's looking like thanks to HazeOver, this is a wait-for-EOL cycle.
Same here. Looking through recent release highlights, Mojave adding Dark Mode is the mot recent stand-out I spotted, and even that I don't really care about all that much.
Maybe we should let each state run the way they see fit... you know kind of like how the Constitution assumed things should be done until the Commerce Clause was used by the Federal Government to hammer every state into submission.
Alabama has a higher GDP per capita than Germany, Belgium, Israel, France, Japan, the U.K. and...I could go on.
Alabama is doing well. We live in such an enormously wealthy country that it only looks bad by comparison. But not by comparison to basically anywhere else on Earth.
I can't find the number of Alabama, but considering that it's generally in one of the last places in the US, I can't imagine it being higher than the US average, so I wouldn't be shocked to see it somewhere around Croatia's level.
You realized you just dismissed GDP per capita, a quantitative metric, as too “flawed”, then instead relied on HDI which entirely a made up metric based on subjective measures?
You might not like the magic numbers in the formula or the things they choose to weigh, but GDP is much, much too coarse to evaluate anything about the greater well-being of a population, especially in developed countries.
In the very least you'd have to adjust for purchasing power parity and look at the median rather than the mean, to say anything useful about quality of life for normal people.
Yes, I agree. GDP is a very rough measure. I'd prefer PPP, but I couldn't find it for individual states after a cursory search. (I still think most readers will be surprised by Alabama's GDP, relative to wealthy European nations, so it's not totally useless.)
Agreed, PPP would be better, but my cursory search didn't turn up a convenient list like the one I linked for GDP. (This is a bit like the old joke about a guy searching for his keys 20 feet from where he dropped them, because that's where the streetlight is.)
In response to my claim that Alabama only looks bad by comparison to other U.S. states because of how rich the U.S. is, but that it's in fact a very wealthy place by comparison to everywhere else -- in response to this you offered...a ranking of U.S. states?
Most of our screen time is spent working. 8+ hours staring at a screen is bad enough for our eyes and brains. Imagine how much worse it will be when that screen is an inch from your eyeballs. I highly doubt that VR will be replacing screens for anything but occasional recreation anytime soon.
I don't find there's too much difference between staring at a computer screen and using VR. VR headsets do provide a motivation to create displays that can allow your eyes to focus on closer or further objects though since they aim to reproduce reality and a big sticking point is the fixed focus nature of all current headsets. We'll have to see if there are any announcements at the next Connect event since they've been working on this technology https://uploadvr.com/half-dome-3-prime-time/
The only character in the first book who exhibited any kind of personality was the gruff cop who swears, doesn't care if he's not allowed to smoke inside, and takes no shit from anyone. It's almost laughable how bad the author is at characterization.
But a manual reviewer in Cupertino or elsewhere still gets access to your personal (possibly very intimate or otherwise private) photos. Privacy from law enforcement is hardly the only privacy that people value.
If you desire privacy, never upload your images to any cloud service that doesn't offer true end-to-end encryption of the data (that is, one where they do not have the key). Use a service where data is only decryptable on your own devices or devices that you personally authorize. Which is, presently, none of the popular services that I'm aware of.
It's even probably the right choice for a popular service to have made.
Full E2E encryption is going to trigger nightmare "I lost all my photos" customer-service stories when people forget their passwords... which is acceptable when you deliberately signed up for a service where security was the selling point, but not great for someone who bought a mass-market phone.
Yep. See the perennial complaint about Signal as a demonstration of that. They don't persist your messages across devices on privacy/security grounds. That's fine, it's why I use it (or one motivation for me to use it). But it's contrary to what many people expect from that kind of service.
Of course. But the second you enable iCloud Photo Library and want to upload your private photos to Apple's servers than you need to comply with their Terms & Conditions.
Which includes them scanning your photos for CSAM.
Right. Requiring exact matches for this kind of material is absurd as a single pixel change would foil any detection. So everyone, practically speaking, trying to detect it is going to use some form of hash algorithms. And every hash algorithm, by definition, permits potential collisions and false positives. Which is why any sensible program will use a manual review process before pushing anything forward to law enforcement. Apple's system, requiring ~30 matches, means that you'd have to have 30 or so false positives that also happen to look like CSAM to manual reviewers to end up getting a false case sent off to law enforcement.
First time I read about Prefect, can you briefly share why you would use prefect over airflow if using only python? (that's what I am about to be doing soon...)
Have been a Prefect user since their first release. In a nutshell, it's a native pythonic DAG tool, where Airflow is a DAG tool that happens to be written in Python.
