The Apple Platform Security[1] white paper describes the secure boot process for Apple silicon. The Mac boot process is significantly more configurable than the iOS boot process, and it allows operating in reduced security modes. (Including running locally signed operating systems.)
Apple knows how to build an iPhone: if they wanted to lock down a Mac they would have simply done that. There's something like nine pages detailing the differences. What word describes that other than "intentional" design? The fact that you can sign and boot a third party OS isn't an "accident" if it's documented, and there's no "exploit" because this is functionality the platform supports; anyone can do it with tools already present on the (Apple-signed) recovery OS.
They certainly don't provide great support for people wanting to develop [drivers for] these operating systems, but the platform was very clearly engineered to support booting them.
>They think the process is “senior make ticket, anyone implement ticket, unga bunga”.
The fact that you just summarized about an hour worth of argumentation from my last annual planning meeting with that one sentence has just destroyed me. I kneel.
At this precise moment in time, if anybody seriously thought the above was the way the process works or should work, they should be advocating for firing all the juniors and replacing them with LLMs.
Somewhat agree and disagree. I bucket people's style into two camps, stressing over the former is largely unproductive, but stressing over the latter is crucial to writing high-quality, maintainable software.
Someone's style can be "different" without being "bad", and you have two basic options to deal with it. One is to authoritatively remove the soul via process (auto-formatters, code review, and to a lesser degree linters, etc. are all designed to create uniformity at the cost of individuality.) The other is to suck it up and deal with it, as this is just an inevitability of creating a team size larger than one: people have different tastes and those have to be reconciled. I somewhat prefer allowing for individuality, and individuals should endeavor to match the style of whatever module they're working in, out of courtesy to its owners/stakeholders if nothing else. However I have only worked independently or on small teams. Most large teams (/ open source projects) have gone the former route of automating all the fun/craftsmanship out of their systems, and even I think that makes sense at a certain scale.
Someone's style can just be objectively "bad", however, and I usually find it's evidence they just don't care about the source artifact that much, and they're focused on the results. (It can also be a sign of an under-performer that spends so much mental capacity just getting the code to work that they have no spare cycles to spend thinking about matters of taste.) If it compiles / works / passes the test-suite that's "good enough" and "their job is done" and they move on to the next task. These people tend to be hyper-literal thinkers that are very micro-task oriented: they see implementing a new feature as a checklist to be conquered, rather than being systems-level thinkers on a journey of discovery & understanding.
If the author is talking about the latter, I have to agree with you that the latter are quite difficult for me to work with; particularly since I know that the source has to be maintained & supported over a much larger time-scale. The source-code is like your house, you live in it, being comfortable to work with/in/on it is the key to success. The deployed artifact may live for only a few weeks, days, or even hours before it gets replaced. The source has evolved over decades. You (the organization) are practically married to it. To further the analogy: I don't mind if somebody wants to hang posters in their room for a band I don't like. (Hell I can even handle if a group of those posters are tastefully hung out-of-level to make some kind of statement.) I do mind if their furniture is blocking a vent, the outlet covers are hanging off, there's a hole in one of the walls, a light has been burnt out for months, and the window-blinds over there are clearly broken but they insist it's fine because daylight still gets through.
> In my case: I am near physically incapable of doing things that I "need" to do, with the more I "need" to do something, the harder by brain and body will rebel against doing it.
This is interesting to me. I find my own behavior is the exact opposite; I have no internal concept of need. I will do everything in my power to avoid starting a task until someone says it "needs" to be done. So in my experience the need is always externally motivated: it's usually just a deadline, or some other authority micro-managing me. ("I'm meeting with [customer] tomorrow and would like to show them [x] from project [y] is that ready?" => I will move hell and earth to do [x], and not a minute sooner. There's some activation threshold there. It is definitely not calibrated where it needs to be, but my ability to "thrive under pressure" has allowed me to cope, as long as someone/something holds my feet to the fire.)
Also I find deadlines are a lot more effective for adult-me than they were for child-me. I think that's mostly because I've got project managers to lean on who are creating those schedules, tracking them, and keeping them visible. Whereas in school child-me was expected to be my own project manager. (Yeah, that was never gonna happen. Many tried to get me to jot dates down in my little day planner. Many failed.)
Disclosure: I'm not clinically diagnosed with ADHD, but from all I've heard/read about it I would not be terribly surprised to find out I have it. (Although I would be surprised to find myself having sufficient motivation to go out and get proper help. ;-P)
I remember e-mailing a guy for some iPad app and having a similar moment.
The important context is the app had its own custom keyboard. I used the app personally, and recommended it to a customer to solve a problem they were having. It turned out that the newest version would not work because it had removed some of the Fn-keys.
I e-mailed the developer to ask for some guidance. At the time I figured it maybe had something to do with the viewport size, and was just trying to diagnose the issue. (I had an iPad mini, while the customer had purchased I think a 9th gen iPad. I wanted to know if a different device would solve the problem.)
The guy e-mailed me back and was like "Oh, yeah, I changed that last week while making the new keyboard layout. I'll revert it and push out a new build." - I had a similar epiphany at that point where it was like "this guy is a dev just trying to navigate tradeoffs and ship the best app he can." - Also the tradeoffs are never as straightforward as one would think.[1]
I wouldn't be so sure about that. If you had said this before my most recent hire I would have agreed - but my junior writes stuff that looks like this or worse. I'm always reviewing stuff with weird capitalization, punctuation, spelling, grammar, etc. that makes me raise an eyebrow on a regular basis. Their code looks just as weird despite having the help of a heavy-weight IDE in their corner. We're constantly cleaning up hanging indents, unnecessary newlines, mismatched indents, commented out code, etc. (That's with a college education, a Grammarly license, and no small amount of coaching on my part!)
I have a sample size of 1, so I can't ascribe too much to "these damn kids," but it seriously strikes me as having learned written language primarily from texting & instant messaging. Whereas I grew up roughly by transitioning from: reading books -> writing mails to pen pals-> writing e-mails -> web chats -> T9 texting -> modern IMEs. In other words I initially learned to write with long-form content and learned to condense it down later. These days I think people are just learning straight from the condensed version.
The other reason I don't think it's an LLM is simpler: most commercial LLMs wouldn't be "aligned" to be that rude, and the smaller LLMs I've seen wouldn't be able to inject relevant code snippets from a relatively unpopular library into the output.
I would not be surprised if this person misused the library, got called out for it in code-review (calling the iterator multiple times is a huge code-smell), and now they are soothing their ego by shifting blame onto the library author for making "such a bad API."
I'm curious what makes you think the MBA is a more "full experience?"
The MBA is permanently affixed to its keyboard: so it can't easily be used for consumption (in bed, on the couch, etc.) The MBA also has no touch screen, and no stylus. The iPad can also ship with a built-in cellular radio. Now I'm carrying an extra tablet, plus an extra hotspot.
That sure sounds like a lot of compromises to me. If I needed more performance I'd be stepping up to a MBP for the active cooling, which pushes us into a different price bracket anyways. If I needed more disk/memory bandwidth I wouldn't even be considering a portable in the first place. (More realistically: I would be using my portable to shell into a more powerful box, and an iPad Pro or even an iPad Air would do that just as well as any MacBook.)
If you need more external I/O, well, I'm not sure I buy that the iPad Pro is a serious compromise over the MBA. It has 40Gb/s of bandwidth and that's _a lot_ for the vast majority of use-cases. My main MBP already sits docked all day via a single thunderbolt cable.
The only reason I would actually choose an MBA over an iPad is that I'm a developer. I place strangely disproportionate value on things like an untrusted boot-chain, kernel extensions, and freedom.[1] I like having the flexibility to be able to bless and enroll my own bootable volumes. I want to be able to tinker with the system partition. I want to introspect the system when things go wrong. The iPad challenges these things by design.
I cannot emphasize this enough: _all of my friends would be lost trying to follow along with the preceding paragraph._ They would look at me like I had two heads. _The above desiderata are not at all representative of the average computer user today._ For most of what I do (media consumption and some content creation) the iPad Pro would do an excellent job, I'd argue better than the MBA. For everything else I do: "iPad Pro vs. MBA" is a false dichotomy, I would not be choosing either of those machines. I would buy a workstation-class device at a minimum.
>Moderation will be extremely important to prevent low-effort memes and content regurgitation and the like from saturating your main channels
This idea more or less surfaces in the book "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell", where in the not-too-distant future the internet is so polluted that you are pretty much expected to hire a full-time "editor" to curate your social media feed. This doesn't scale particularly well, of course, so in reality particularly wealthy families hire an editor to present a cohesive stream of social media to their whole family-tree. Meanwhile the masses typically subscribe to an "off the shelf" stream (or several?) that most closely matches their tastes.
Apple knows how to build an iPhone: if they wanted to lock down a Mac they would have simply done that. There's something like nine pages detailing the differences. What word describes that other than "intentional" design? The fact that you can sign and boot a third party OS isn't an "accident" if it's documented, and there's no "exploit" because this is functionality the platform supports; anyone can do it with tools already present on the (Apple-signed) recovery OS.
They certainly don't provide great support for people wanting to develop [drivers for] these operating systems, but the platform was very clearly engineered to support booting them.
[1]: https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-sec...