signal11

> the outgoing 128GB model was already $250 after the price hikes earlier this year

This is a great point, a lot of the press coverage missed this.

Not having a cheaper alternative (eg a stick) was curious though. The baseline price of $300 might cause sticker shock.

I recently got myself a Lenovo P-series Thinkpad to test something. My main machine's an MBP, so I was prepared for some pain, but honestly even an old Windows 10 box feels less laggy than the Thinkpad's fully-patched 25H2. Using PopOS on an old Thinkpad easily beats this experience. (And omg the power draw on the P-series!)

I also concur with the "Updates for days" sub-head in the article. That's exactly what it felt like.

I'd love to see some competition in the commercial personal OS space. Windows 11 25H2 isn't a serious contender, I'd love to see what their recent efforts to refocus on native apps will bring.

I'm going to apply the Costco Test: grab a Windows 11 Surface Laptop at Costco and press Win+E to open Explorer. If it takes ages to paint, you've failed the test. Ditto for other bundled apps, including Edge.

For the MS folk reading this: native zsh on Windows, please?

WSL2 is great, but native POSIX is even better. Of course it’s a big undertaking, but it makes Windows a first-class dev platform for those who need POSIX in production.

Does this explain the numerous password reset messages I’ve received over the past year?

Yes, I was wondering about this. Old iPads running iPad OS 15 received updates last month. So even an iPad Air 2 from 2014 could receive updates in 2026.

The big issue with old iPads though is that apps drop support for older iPad OS versions. Usually their older versions do keep working, though.

I was using poetry pretty happily before uv came along. I’d probably go back.

Note that uv is fast because — yes, Rust, but also because it doesn’t have to handle a lot of legacy that pip does[1], and some smart language independent design choices.

If uv became unavailable, it’d suck but the world would move on.

[1] https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/26/how-uv-got-so-fast.html

If you believe the rumor mill, Touch-enabled Macs may launch this year[1].

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/08/apple-planning-macbook-...

> There's so much extra padding and rounding now

I don’t like it either, but I wonder if that’s to support the touch-enabled Macs that the rumor mill is reporting about right now.

In any case, Tahoe has many other issues beyond padding.

Liquid Glass is Apple’s Windows Vista. They had a ton of fun with Vista in their “switch” ads, if the Windows team were in better shape they could have a field day just screenshotting Tahoe on Social Media. Lucky they’re distracted with their own challenges.

Liquid Glass does have some good points, but it feels like someone turned in C- level work.

The EU’s tech regulation has always been a bit “off”, like they don’t really understand tech or how to encourage improved behaviour. Eg cookie popups, those are a blight and it’s the EU’s fault — to the point they’re working to roll them back[1] after all these years, because informed consent is impossible at the scale at which cookie popups hit users.

Then there was the whole “pay or okay” controversy around paywalls or tracking ads.

My observation is: saying no to tech rarely works. Building a more compelling alternative does. But the EU would rather regulate than build.

[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-cookie-law-messed-up-...

Last I checked, they were working on interop so you can move your keys from one provider to another without creating CSV files or equivalent[1].

However from my PoV — if the user or an open source project wants to create CSV files, they should be free to do so. That’s part of putting the user in control.

For me, KeePass XC is the canary in the coal mine that helps me figure out what FIDO’s priorities are. I don’t have a problem with crypto around passkeys. They’re great. The non-functionals though (including shipping passkeys without good import/export) are a bit of a mess.

[1] https://fidoalliance.org/fido-alliance-publishes-new-specifi...

Shafting open source projects that implement your spec is not okay, and is terrible optics.

Tech journalists should ask the FIDO Alliance if they’re just Google+Apple+Microsoft in a trenchcoat. Definitely not very open!

Yes, UIDocumentPickerViewController is 10+ years old at this point.

There’s also a similar photos picker (PHPicker) which is especially good from 2023 on. Signal uses this for instance.

If you work with macOS or iOS users, you won’t be super surprised to see lots of “curly quotes”. They’re part of base macOS, no extra software required (I cannot remember if they need to be switched on or they’re on by default), and of course mass-market software like Word will create “smart” quotes on Mac and Windows.

I ended up implementing smart quotes on an internal blogging platform because I couldn’t bear "straight quotes". It’s just a few lines of code and makes my inner typography nerd twitch less.

I’ve been using em-dashes since high school — publishing the school paper and everything. I remain slightly bemused by people discovering em-dashes for the first time thanks to LLMs.

Also, “em-dashes are something only LLMs use” comes perilously close to “huh, proper grammar, must’ve run this by a grammar checker”.

>> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all

> I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

You can repro this on demo Surface laptops at Costco. It’s not a good look when expensive laptops render their darn File Explorer slowly.

Also re endpoint management, corporate Macs also have endpoint management and still provide better experience vs corporate Windows PCs.

Microsoft isn’t a mute participant in the corporate device market. Their recommendations and best practices carry enormous weight. Windows division can work with security vendors and customers to improve UX. But they maybe haven’t done enough. Maybe because Windows is an increasingly small fraction of Microsoft’s bottom line? Who knows.

But today you’ll see increasing numbers of Macs in even super-Windows-heavy workplaces, especially in digital/cyber/AI/leadership roles. That’s not a one-company quirk.

Even “only” information funnels have value if they seek out valuable info, filter, curate. In reality some funnels in this context mutate the message they’re supposed to pass on :-)

In markets where Whatsapp is entrenched, it’s already begun to enshittify.

They have ads and spam already (sorry, no-consent messages from businesses). This isn’t even new. [0]

There’s a clear pattern, say “we’ve rolled out strict policies”[1] and then… nothing changes on the ground, and TechCrunch writes another “they’ve fixed it” article a year later.[2]

Also their Communities feature has pretty crap UX.

Yes it’s pervasive. But if pervasive was the end of the story, we’d all be using ICQ and AOL. The last thing any country needs is to hand over more of their lives to Facebook [sic].

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/10/in-india-businesses-are-in...

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/20/whatsapp-will-finally-let-...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/17/whatsapp-will-curb-the-num...

Is it practical to pay BT or HyperOptic to run fibre to you? If enough households commit to a contract they’ll sometimes do it for free.

Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista. If you’re from Apple and reading this, my feedback is pretty succinct: “I don’t recommend others upgrade. I wish I didn’t.”

Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers.

Let’s see if Apple can turn things around. iOS 8+ did improve on iOS 7’s worst bits.

I agree with the “enforce competition laws” sentiment, but in this context, enforced naively, all it’ll do is entrench the dominant browser engine, Blink, even more across the mobile ecosystem.

I’m sure some devs will love this. But equally, some may worry about the monoculture implications.

Many people forget — Google once used to penalise sites with some abusive behaviours, so webmasters had a vested interest in having decent web pages if they wanted good rankings.

Somewhere along the line (when Prabhakar Raghavan was running search maybe?) that seems to have changed. Part of it might be cookie popups (thanks EU*). Part of it might be giving networks using Google’s own ad networks a free pass. In any case, webmasters had no reason to stop abusive/dark UX any more.

*This is not an anti-EU jab. It’s a jab at an inadequate technical measure. Given how many sites people visit, cookie consent popups do not provide informed consent, and further legitimise popups.

Design patterns are language independent, but a lot of the ones many Java devs focus on are a bit meh.

In a world with only assembly language, for instance, it’s a bit like making a big deal about a “guarded repetition” pattern (aka a while loop).

Eg in Lisps, a lot of patterns become one-liners. At that point these patterns become a “can you write decent Lisp” question[1].

[1] https://mishadoff.com/blog/clojure-design-patterns/

I agree. Perl made sense as a “step up” in the world of *sh and awk.

Also the culture wasn’t hostile to me as a newcomer. The Perl books I read encouraged not writing overly terse, cryptic code, and I got helpful answers via mailing lists.

I still use Perl sometimes if my command pipeline gets too complicated.

You’re entitled to your opinion. All I’ll say is that in the context of the bald fact (French has an older literary tradition than English) presented by a previous commenter, “understandable by modern speakers” is moving the goalposts. In my opinion of course.

Also

> something understandable by modern French speakers

The Song of Roland, used as an example in a previous comment, doesn’t qualify, and actually is yet another reason why this line of argument is pretty sad.

This is a great example of moving the goalposts re the original (false) point that a previous comment made about French having a longer literary history than English.

If you’ve got a specific agenda, say x > y, you can be very selective about success criteria to suit yourself.

In this particular case of English and French, the reality is that few modern French speakers can read the Song of Roland. “Resembles x much more” is pretty irrelevant because it cherry-picks similarities while glossing over differences. One can equally say Old English’s “and forgyf us ure gyltas” is pretty readable, but really you’re scraping the bottom of the argument barrel.

Also glossing over an older literary tradition because the language mutated in response to a new political reality (conquest) is ... curious.

Heh. English actually has an older written tradition than French.

Not that it’s a competition or anything. But it’s interesting to see people make assumptions about easily-looked-up stuff.

Coincidentally, this site runs Arc[1] code.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)

> only downside is you have to upgrade every half year

LTS OpenJDK distributions from eg Eclipse (17, 21 etc) stick around for longer[1]. Heck, you can still get updates for JDK 11 and even 8.

You do have to update the runtime for security and other fixes, but that’s true for other languages too.

[1] https://adoptium.net/support

> Sadly modern java also tends to come with springboot and people who can't do anything, unless they use springboot

Spring Boot (and Spring generally) is more of a “Java culture” issue — someone on this thread used the term “framework fetishism” and it’s spot on.

Thankfully there are teams, typically in mobile or polyglot microservices environments, who are moving away from this. But yeah — still far too common.