jfb

I mean that’s not abuse? That’s what mechanically checkable invariants are for! They constrain the space the model has to work in.

Talking one's own book is a grand and ancient American tradition!

The App Store vig with no exit is, if anything, even more distorting.

Absolutely true. Cook is an officer of the company, and has a responsibility to the company itself; and the current incentive structure that Apple operates in dictates a drive towards rents. Change needs to be exogenous, but there is a certain amount of pushback that even a fiduciary can use, and the evidence here is, to me, damning.

I don't know that it was always the strategy; there's a difference between openness and rent seeking.

The real problem, to me, isn't that Cook sold out Jobs; he sold out his customers, by the increasing rents extracted by the App Store and the services division in general. I'm a long time Apple user, and the idea that ads have any place in my computers is appalling, but now they're in Maps, and they're in the OS as non-dismissible upsells, and I mean, Windows is right over there, all of this is unnecessary strategy taxation on what Apple does well (hardware and software).

For specifically unified memory reasons, Apple machines are much, much better at running local LLMs.

Yeah, I have an MBP for Reasons, but it sits docked 90% of the time. I'd rather spend the engineering budget on better thermals and more ports; I always have it plugged into a fixed monitor and other peripherals.

I like that the author at least head fakes towards postage, which is how spam gets solved, for real. It's far too late for SMTP, but I don't mind folks thinking hard about it.

You can run macOS in a VM guest on a Mac host; Apple explicitly allows this.

The CalDigit TS5+. It's really nice!

Yeah, I use DAC for the desktop and fibre between floors. It's just the Mac's desktop that uses RJ45 copper.

Yeah, 10Gb ethernet runs hot. I just rewired the house with 10Gb (we have 8Gb FTTP) and it's kind of upsetting how hot my Thunderbolt dock gets.

It produces beautiful PDF output from org-mode!

Postage. Postage. Postage.

Yeah there’s a sense in which the approach is a bet on the commoditization of tokens, honestly.

Yep! There's a link in the prose, but also:

https://gitlab.com/tftio/tools

"cost code" for chrissakes. Sigh.

TIL! Thank you!

Some thoughts on a world of zero-marginal code code.

The tab key in BBEdit inserts a literal tab character, or advances to a tab stop. It doesn't indent the line, which is what I would argue it should do when writing code.

I wonder if it will ever get emacs tabs.

I think about this has having two separate but related concerns; how do we build tools that focus attention on the parts of the problem where human judgement is highest leverage; and how do we build harnesses that enforce invariants such that humans trust the attention focussing part. It's a challenge!

Definitely.

Some of my personal thoughts on path dependence in the world of zero marginal cost code.

Oh man. I used to use xv a lot. RIP, John.

Don't love it. But, I'm glad the Astral folks are getting the bag.