aggregator-ios

I wrote this to navigate the confusing and dizzying array of ad blocking technologies available on Apple’s platforms. I really dislike the dirty web where apps and sites and plastered with advertisements, especially since most if not all ads are also privacy violating trackers. Unfortunately some ad blockers themselves also violate your privacy by reporting back or working with ad providers to whitelist.

Let me know what you think, happy to take feedback.

My thoughts exactly. I don't mind AI coding, but I'm not really sure on the viability of anyone using or even hearing of TSON. This is just not something you do without an RFC and adoption.

Apple has been very good about public perception of its products and privacy. They just spent a lot of this year’s WWDC talking about the latter so I’m sure someone at Apple is aware of this.

I have not spent a lot of time thinking about why certain things like 50 apps install queries, boot volume timestamps, etc are provided to developers. But I think Apple will close these loopholes.

Also love the idea of outbound network connections being disabled by the user per app

One correction to some comments here: an iOS app cannot list all apps that are installed. You can only check for specific apps/schemes (LSApplicationQueriesSchemes) by specifying apps you are looking to query for installation status or open. You cannot provide a large list of unrelated applications since Apple rejects that during app review.

Apple added these restrictions because installed app lists can be used for fingerprinting and privacy invasive profiling.

Wow, this is impressive. 60FPS, MacBook Air M1. I was instantly hooked and so much nostalgia.

This is my take on it too. And I built BetterGit (https://www.satishmaha.com/BetterGit/) before agent capabilities became widespread. A lot of things in Git and existing GUIs are just cumbersome, and my app makes it better to handle the most common tasks and makes them easier. It's really meant for newcomers to Git.

BUT! You can simply ask an agent to commit every meaningful block of work. Or just ask any agent to create a JIRA ticket and start work on that named branch. Or ask it to create work trees and create a PR. Life has gotten much easier without having to fight the command line or confusing GUI UX.

Thank you for sharing this. I have a thing to say that may help. First, I'm glad to hear that your experience pushed you to the left, because a lot of people who experience this injustice tend to go hard right and keep going right.

I agree that extreme individualization in the last few decades has resulted in some really bad actions. We're starting to see Western societal decline because of this, whereas collectivist cultures are thriving. It takes tremendous emotional labor to care for the well being of your community, so it's easier to just worry about only yourself. This is unsustainable just like you mentioned that enablers of authoritarians are never protected. Leaning right and being selfish will eventually hurt that person. It may not hurt them now, or tomorrow, or until 1-2 generations from now, but that course will be corrected. They are prioritizing short term gains over long term benefits, and the good part about this is that a lot of smart hard working people are choosing the long term.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" -MLK

On another note: I wanted to shared something about the word "mediocre". I once made a comment to a coworker and friend that we are all just average mediocre people doing mediocre things at work and that is OK. During this same time, another coworker called me a superstar for solving his problem.

The original coworker I had made the mediocre comment to was so offended that they went home, designed a T-shirt and wore it work "Mediocre man. Because not everyone can be a superstar". I saw it. I felt bad and commented to him that I did not mean to call him mediocre or offend him, but the damage was already done. At this same time, I kept getting called superstar by everyone on the team, including by the manager of our team (in retrospect, yikes!). We had a (toxic) culture of nicknames, and this too was going to stick for a while.

At some point, the coworker who made the t-shirt had raised concerns with the manager and eventually the manager pulled us all aside and said "no more superstar, it ends today, we're done with that nickname". Ok, cool.

However, in subsequent conversations, the tshirt coworker would share some of his views of the world with me. He had a very difficult life growing up, so one of his takes was "why do black people get to say black lives matter, but why can't I say white lives matter, my life is difficult too, do I not matter?". I was shocked, but also unsurprised by this. I work in tech, and these kinds of takes are widely prevalent. I don't remember how I tried explaining to them, but I walked away disappointed that they had taken all of the injustice and difficulty of life and instead decided to take something away from a group of people who faced the same :(

And the worst part is that it gets upvoted to the front page, while other hard work projects and articles don't. There's tons of vote scam sites where you can purchase mass upvotes on here as well as other platforms. There's no real repercussions if caught doing that :/

A simple search for "neo" is now up to 32 results, up from 6 at the time of this comment :) Somewhere someone said why Neo when Googlebook would be 1/2 the cost, but I highly doubt its going to be $250. No official pricing has been released.

Branding is way off. Marketed as an AI laptop sounds like local inference to engineers, but no. The general public are weary of AI. The Neo is selling so well that Apple is running out of the A18 Pro chips. Rumors are that Apple may have 2 steps: mark as sold out, or upgrade to the latest iPhone SOC which comes with an upgrade to 12GB of RAM. I also suspect this is Ternus' first product launch as CEO (not officially until Sept 1).

Anyway, this will be fun to see price point, manufacturer differentiation (surprised that Google isn't building this themselves) and reviews. Hard to see how it competes with the Neo at $499 that can run a full Desktop OS and integrates well with the ecosystem.

If I am understanding this correctly, the $99/year Apple Developer Program allows you to notarize applications for macOS so users do not receive the warning/damaged binary dialog. I simply had AI generate the signing code, and you can run that script on any CICD or on your machine and push the artifacts to a CDN. Works wonderfully for macOS, and users of my app have had no issues with it.

Let me know by replying here if you want me to share the build+sign code or have any questions.

I would’ve read what the site was about if I didn’t get the most complicated cookie consent modal. Just backed out and won’t be visiting that now.

I was introduced to the 83 Plus and it was simply the most mindblowing device at the time. We were given a sheet to share with our parents on why it was an important device to own/borrow. Me and several friends would trade apps through the TI-Link cable, and we would play games, write software for it and there was even a popularity rank in school about whose program was installed on more calculators.

For a lot of people it introduced them to TI-Basic which was quite capable, and for others you could get into Assembly which allowed for more powerful applications. There were 2 parts of the memory, BASIC programs were in regular memory that could be easily erased, and another part which was Flash Apps.

I later upgraded to the 89 which had a better CPU, screen resolution and processing power and it was phenomenal in helping me understand every single math class, including EE/EECS. It made me sad to see them banned in exams, because having a 83+/89/any calculator was in no way helpful in any of the exams I took, but it was more of a "control the students" thing in college. The Math department determined that because they couldn't prove that people were not using the internet/portable PC's in their calculators, that they could not guarantee the fairness of it all.

Weird argument to make knowing that a 20 year old student was engineering a full internet capable PC into a calculator at the time would have been the envy of the world (and every engineering program).

This all depends on the quality of education and not simply handing out problems that require rote memorization of the methods to solve an equation and instead derive or figure out the equation yourself after understanding the problem after which you're free to use the calculator to "plug and chug".

Was the card $10 or are you saying that the chip is a $10 part?

Yup.

Thank you, I was suspecting the same but was not sure.

For those that read the article and are still confused (as I was) about what Apple hardware would give you the full 10GbE speeds:

- 10GbE Thunderbolt adapter is still the best. Full symmetrical 10GbE on laptops as far back as the 2018 MacBook Pro 13" (Intel) and every laptop since. Including the Airs starting with the M1 chip (Not sure about Neo).

- No Apple hardware supports the 3.2 v2x2 standard (20Gbps) and your connection will be downgraded to 10Gbps on these RTL8159 chips. Because of processing overhead, you will only get 5-7Gbps of total Ethernet throughput.

- Upgraded Mac Mini or Apple Studio base models have builtin 10GbE ports

For now, thunderbolt adapters are still the most reliable 10GbE for Apple laptops.

I'm building https://jsonquery.app to query, store, and organize JSONs, with natural language querying so you don't have to learn another query language.

Also building BetterGit: (https://www.satishmaha.com/BetterGit/) A simpler, cross platform Git GUI where all the commonly used actions are right in front of you

And also Crush Depth: A remake (from 13y ago) of a tower defense game for Apple's platforms (iOS, iPadOS, and macOS). Checkout the TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/gkD5c2U1

Love it! I was instantly hooked and its a lot of fun to play. And it's so smooth and easy to pick up!

I tested the E2B and E4B models and they get close but inaccurate (non working) results when generating jq queries from natural language.

This is of importance to me as I work on https://jsonquery.app and would prefer to use a model that works well with browser inference.

gemma-4-26b-a4b-it and gemma-4-31b-it produced accurate results in a few of my tests. But those are 50-60GB in size. Chrome has a developer preview that bundles Gemini Nano (under 2GB) and it used to work really well, but requires a few switches to be manually switched on, and has recently gotten worse in quality when testing for jq generation.

I knew I should have put a trigger warning, because I was thinking of this as I was typing it. Sorry!

What CRDT's solve is conflicts at the system level. Not at the semantic level. 2 or more engineers setting a var to a different value cannot be handled by a CRDT.

Engineer A intended value = 1

Engineer B intended value = 2

CRDT picks 2

The outcome could be semantically wrong. It doesn't reflect the intent.

I think the primary issue with git and every other version control is the terrible names for everything. pull, push, merge, fast forward, stash, squash, rebase, theirs, ours, origin, upstream and that's just a subset. And the GUI's. They're all very confusing even to engineers who have been doing this for a decade. On top of this, conflict resolution is confusing because you don't have any prior warnings.

It would be incredibly useful if before you were about to edit a file, the version control system would warn you that someone else has made changes to it already or are actively working on it. In large teams, this sort of automation would reduce conflicts, as long as humans agree to not touch the same file. This would also reduce the amount of quality regressions that result from bad conflict resolutions.

Shameless self plug: I am trying to solve both issues with a simpler UI around git that automates some of this and it's free. https://www.satishmaha.com/BetterGit

Absolutely. Cheaper Chromebooks are terrible machines. Those screens should be illegal and probably causes a lot of eye strain and headaches. Same with a lot of the sub $800 PC laptops. The colors aren't even... colors. The trackpad? Yuck. Everything else falls apart right outside of the warranty period of just 90 days or 1 year. Oh and good luck spending the first day just uninstalling/formatting everything from scratch and getting the vendor specific features to work again.

For people who have always wanted an Apple laptop, this is it. The niceties are not necessary, and perfect little things to cut out to bring the price down for the masses.

Surprised this didn't get a higher placement on the HN front page, only 34 points?

Absolutely impressive that this was done with $1100 in tokens and in 1 week. I agree, and so do a lot of my peers that code has quickly become nothing more than a tool to accomplish a task. Code never was and never should have been the product in and of itself. This is amazing news, and this is exactly where we should be as a civilization. The only people that have trouble with this development are the gatekeepers who think that code should be sacred and revered by itself. That is a perversion of computing, and we got the wrong group of people there.

While Vercel continues to be the #1 host for Next.js projects, others seem to claim that migrating to their platform is as easy as enabling the Github integration. It's not. Cloudflare even mentions that you can port your Next project to run on its infra, but I couldn't get it to work. Replit markets the same, and yet, Next fails to on there too. You have to go through several painful hacks and try-build-fail loops and eventually not worth it.

You know what took less time and frustration? I asked Claude Code with Opus 4.6 to convert the entire Next project to React+Vite. And as a shameless plug, I was able to get https://jsonquery.app fully up and running and the builds are lightning fast with Vite, and worked with just 2-3 tries on Cloudflare pages. If you don't need SSR and Next routing, I suggest you do the same.

Oh, and in Next.js land, Turbopack had severe edge cases, that I had to revert to Webpack. Esp when dealing with WASM, as JSON Query uses the jq dependency brought in as a wasm to run on the web. This is not an issue with Vite.

I wanted to believe this article, but the writing is difficult to follow, and the thread even harder. My main issue is the contradiction about frameworks and using what the large tech companies have built vs real engineering.

The author seems to think that coding agents and frameworks are mutually exclusive. The draw of Vercel/next.js/iOS/React/Firebase is allowing engineers to ship. You create a repo, point to it, and boom! instant CICD, instant delivery to customers in seconds. This is what you're complaining about!? You're moaning that it took 1 click to get this for free!? Do you have any idea how long it would take to setup just the CI part on Jenkins just a few years ago? Where are you going to host that thing? On your Mac mini?

There's a distinction between frameworks and libraries. Frameworks exist to make the entire development lifecycle easier. Libraries are for getting certain things that are better than you (encryption, networking, storage, sound, etc.) A framework like Next.js or React or iOS/macOS exist because they did the heavy work of building things that need to already exist when building an application. Not making use of it because you want to perform "real engineering" is not engineering at all, that's just called tinkering and shipping nothing.

Mixing coding agents with whatever framework or platform to get you the fastest shipping speed should be your #1 priority. Get that application out. Get that first paid customer. And if you achieve a million customers and your stuff is having scaling difficulties, then you already have teams of engineers to work on bringing some of this stuff in house like moving away from Firebase/Vercel etc. Until then, do what lets you ship ASAP.

You don't need a form fitting faraday cage. Want a free one? Find a food delivery bag that is insulated with foil. I believe some of the meal prep delivery services package their groceries in this. Stick your phone in there and wrap it up. All signals gone as far as I can tell.

Or, even more free or cheap: Wrap it in aluminum foil.

This is a good write up on the workings. However, in actual use, Turbopack has severe limitations when compared to Webpack. I’ve been working on https://jsonquery.app and rely on the jq WASM dependency for the queries. But, Turbopack cannot handle importing a WASM binary or the glue code for it directly. The workaround is to have a script copy the binary to the public directory. But that's not all. jq-wasm has a dependency on the ‘fs’ module, even though no fs functions are used. But trying to resolve this in Turbopack is not possible and 2 days of fighting this was a waste of time.

Webpack solved this problem with a few lines in the next.config.ts

For now, I’m back to using Webpack with NextJS 16 with the —Webpack flag. Hope they allow this for future versions.

There are plenty of complaints on the NextJS subreddit, and here is a open thread on complaints with Turbopack https://github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/77721

Looks the alternative is Rspack?

There is no reference for this, because it never happened.