mymacbook

Wow. I could not disagree more with this author, but I was looking for any evidence he could offer other than his credentials (he's from Harvard and 26) and being part of the Generation that author Jonathan Haidt of, "The Anxious Generation" indicated was struggling the most with screens and social media.

I was part of an in-between generation (originally tail end of Gen X) and raised as a latchkey kid. It was the early 90s and thankfully I was able to travel without parents at 12 on airplanes very effortlessly. This allowed me to get out of my midwest (Wisconsin) bubble and meet in SF every year around New Years for MacWorld and SF2600 gatherings. It was a magical time. I'm not at all against communicating online and meeting people there, but social media as controlled by a singleton (e.g. Meta, Weixin, Weibo, Twitter/X, etc) seems awful. Sometimes I miss the fun of IRC (Dalnet and others), BBSes, and even AOL Chatrooms. It's hard to put the genie back in the bottle, so many people have adopted Facebook for small business and rural communities in the US rather than having a website they control. I can't find out what specials are happening at my local restaurant (Ember) or my favorite food truck (Chairman Bao & Eat on Monday) without having an Instagram account. I still resist Meta.

This author misses the point that some parents value critical thinking and independence. Not everyone joined the greek system in college! Same for social media, not everyone needs to be "connected" in social media before age 16. The algorithms at these singletons, often end up restricting and narrowing the world for many young minds (echo chambers for their cohort). It's not about censorship, but a little guidance and oversight reviewing social media from a 20,000 foot level rather than in the weeds.

I fully expected this author to talk about the importance of computing access for education and development, but it seemed to just be about arguing for this hot mess we have now. Yikes!

100% I wish Alan and Meta well. I look at what happened to System Preferences (I mean Settings) and it’s a disaster. Some apps have title bars and many don’t (AppleTV). Just trying to enjoy Apple Music is so painful compared to the old iTunes. I am struggling to enjoy my Mac as much as I did during the M1 transition when I thought finally they got rid of the HW bottlenecks brought by Jony like the dreaded MacBook keyboard and touch bar. Not the greatest hardware. But, now the software experience is so subpar, especially the HI (I mean UX).

I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. I also don’t know what he’s looking for, as someone who worked at Apple during this time quality improved substantially in 10.6 Snow Leopard and continued. Most bug fixes don’t get a marketing line item or even much fanfare. We were all users of what the OSX guys were doing and lived on the dogfood while we made our own mistakes on iOS.

As I age I realize you need to entice the user with more value and service - anew features. It cannot just be quality, but quality is table stakes and the minimum expectation. When things get out of hand organizationally it makes sense to call for a snow leopard, but it comes at great cost so you better make big changes in the system so the same mistakes are not repeated.

This was really cool to see life as a kid in '84 for some of these stories/games and how you convinced a young kid to copy page after page of BASIC and adapt for various machines. I loved the, "don't look at this unless you really need to cheat" and the text was mirrored (right-to-left) so you had to use a mirror to reveal or become dyslexic.

Thanks for sharing this, it's getting my creative engines going for what to do TODAY that would be fun and engaging for my daughter. :)

Thank you! After Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland's Ars Technica article they published using AI (while saying they didn't), and all the while their article was about an AI agent publishing a hit piece on Scott Shambaugh (matplotlib maintainer), I feel like I now assume journalists are using AI and things need to be fact-checked just as we do for our AI interactions.

I appreciate hearing about details like this and getting the source directly. I hope Kristina Armitage and Michael Kanyongolo from Quanta Magazine respond and you can update us!

Scott's Blog on Hit Piece: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on... Ars Editor Note: https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio... Ars Retraction: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-reje...

I don’t think this is true, wherever I’ve traveled the opposite has held - the finest materials are exported which is sad for the locals. Right away Wool stuck out as an example from Peru. I naively thought that going to Peru would guarantee me the finest wool at the best prices. Anyway I’d like to see some data that backs up the claim that junk Swiss cheese is exported to the US market successfully.

I thought I was alone, until today!!

This is what drives crazy when browsing google search results on Mobile Safari!

It sounds like you had to opt-out of arbitration, which is a gotcha.

Why is everyone jumping on the blame the victims bandwagon?! This is not the fault of users whether they were scientists publishing papers or the fault of the general public sharing links. This is absolutely 100% on Alphabet/Google.

When you blame your customer, you have failed.

The valley is small. Loyalty to your peers and friends will outlast the companies you stop at to work throughout your career. It’s all about the people you surround yourself with.

Loved this! I took my child to work even when it wasn’t the specific holiday so she could see what a real exec review looked like or how boring work could seem to be. The experiment is still running, so I can’t tell you the outcome... yet! ;)

I live on the west coast near San Luis Obispo, we get at least monthly rocket launches from so many vantage points I wouldn't bother traveling to Florida and dealing with all the crowds. Vandenberg Space Force Base is where the rockets launch on this side at the moment. You'll see SpaceX and ULA rockets.

Can you cite your sources on the no tech there [manufacturing]?

As someone who worked for Apple for nearly a decade on the engineering teams launching the iPhone and iPad, I beg to differ. While not the most "exciting" to those of us in Silicon Valley, Apple is a behemoth when it comes to factory. The engineering there is outstanding and even for those of us working higher up in the stack we didn't fully appreciate it until traveling oversees and intimately working within hw ops.

A lot of Apple's new product process is now public, but when the hardware moves from EVT to DVT it is the first time both SW Dev and HW Ops are working together in the factory and while still "owned" by Dev, it will be up to HW Ops to scale, optimize, and propose any key changes that we would not have considered or planned for - dealing with low yields. Once DVT transitions to PVT, Dev is under Ops direction - it's their world and we are there to serve them!

Before dismissing Apple's manufacturing design, engineering, and operations I would recommend learning a lot more if you are at all interested in this space or shipping your own products. Many companies in the valley building HW have adopted most of the principals Apple pioneered and refined in manufacturing...

This impacted far more orgs including Maps/Search in addition to HW, AR, and Voice.

Maybe the problem with cheeseburgers is the bun and sugar more than the meat or cheese itself? I would imagine grass-fed (and finished) beef is better than ultra processed meat – especially if sugar ends up in the finished product!

Not yet, closest option now is a computer animation synced with the confirmation of touchdown at minute 44 of the video. :(

I agree, but why do we need to make it 50+ hours? What if they only worked 35 hours a week with horrible shifts at different times and no consistency at a non-physically demanding job? Work is still work unless you’re living your passion, the mainstream outside of tech work to put food on the table and they put up with a lot compared to the worst days we have in tech. Anyway just frustrated lately with this idea you have to work 60 or 80 hours a week instead of strategically.

Rotary? Otherwise loved this.

A year ago today on MLK day it was only available to those 75 and older. The vaccine in the US has not been available to the general public for a year! Healthcare providers yes, general public no.

Not many technical engineering leaders have a passion for leaving the world better than they found it, especially in an area where they consumed a lot of raw materials to make their life's greatest work.

Very few companies are doing more than lip service on the very difficult (sometimes impossible) task of dirty work to get recycled materials into the supply chain as a viable (and someday better) alternative than new raw materials from the earth.

This has so many implications if successful – you can compete with mining 1:1. It allows a company to handle disruptions in the traditional supply chain, etc. But, today this is hard to do and you often only see post-consumer recycled materials used behind-the-scenes (e.g. a plastic frame holding a non-essential chamber) or in packaging (e.g. bamboo ink, cardboard boxes without white paint), but it's rarely used in what the consumer sees (notable exception: The Google Nest Mini "fabric" is made from plastic bottles).

As more devices rely on batteries, we need to think about how we can start harvesting those materials for re-use ourselves and not just shipping overseas and closing our eyes. It's much more expensive to intentionally source recycled materials today and that is, unfortunately, a losing proposition for most manufacturers.

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https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/google-newest-nest...

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/04/18/apples-2019-envir...

I’m guessing NeXT is supposed to be Nest (given IoT and HVAC).

I don’t know was weird to see a Trump flag and I realized they were not part of recovery effort. Sounds like SpaceX announced they landing coordinates and that’s why they were able to get out there.

Those that did not take aspirin during the Spanish flu had far lower morbidity rates. Fever is not something I rush to suppress with drugs until I exceed 104.0 - same for my family and even when our daughter was a little tiny thing.

Preliminary unpublished information shows concerns on accelerating progression of SARS-CoV-2 virus to COVID-19 illness for ALL NSAIDs (not just aspirin). However, even with non-NSAIDs I exercise extreme caution when using (e.g. acetaminophen - Tylenol - 4000mg is considered VERY TOXIC for liver).

Link to actual study: http://emiguel.econ.berkeley.edu/assets/miguel_research/88/G...

Are you referring to alcohol or something else?

Having a status light ON for an outside camera seems smart for both sides – pro-privacy & communicating the property is under surveillance. What sounds frustrating is that when your network / wifi connection goes down the status light flashes amber – there was never a way to turn this feature off even if you had the status light off (previously). If you're a potential thief and you see am amber flashing light on a Drop/Nest cam, you know you're not being recorded. That's the bummer with cloud-only camera recording, there is no redundancy. I wish there was an option to "hide" error states in the status light and just keep it on as if nothing is wrong.

Of course the discussion so far has been limited to whether you should have a choice when your camera is inside the home and used for things like a nursery/baby cam? Should you have a choice "hiding" a camera to record anyone who breaks in?

I don't have good blanket answers, however I think it's illegal in Germany to record someone without consent, even if it's an intruder in your own home. Right now it seems the decision has been made for Google camera owners.

Reading that initial report is terrifying. I am so glad the NTSB set the record straight that the driver had his hands on the wheel for the majority of the final minute of travel. Really makes me feel like Tesla was out to blame the driver from the get go. To be clear the driver is absolutely partially at fault, but my goodness autopilot sped up into the barrier in the final seconds — totally unexpected when the car has automatic emergency breaking.

Emergency breaking feels not ready for prime time. I hope there are improvements there. Don’t want to see autopilot disabled as a result of this, would rather Tesla use this to double down and apply new learnings.

Just so sad to hear about this guys death on his way to work - not the way I want to go. :(

Tough loss, hope they are going to be OK and successful on the tech side.

I have to disagree as an owner/operator of a vehicle with this feature set. I consider it a major improvement to traditional cruise control, a modern iteration. When viewing it from the angle of full self-driving / autonomy (level 5) I can see how this argument can be framed, but that's not how us mere mortals view it.

Los Gatos: Oak and Rye is my favorite pizza from a brick oven and I want to re-create it. :)

I have to say in all the years of hacker news, this article was very welcome and makes this place feel all the more special and cozy!