Craig Federighi is still there, right? He had a lot to do with bringing together NeXT frameworks and enterprise database interfaces. If Tim Cook's successor is truly engineering oriented then we might see them work together to get the old buggy going forward again.
It's batshit that people still talk like apple is lost technically when apple silicon has absolutely crushed, airpods are the default headphone of the world, and macbooks are the best overall package available at all price points. And why? because they arent interested in VR and the glass aesthetic is kind of janky? Absolutely minor issues.
The software isn't so good these days, even while the hardware has been the best in the world. Now that the guy responsible for the hardware will be CEO, maybe quality will come back to software too.
If you dont think apple silicon and rosetta rollout was a massively successful and high difficulty technical accomplishment I dont really know what to tell you. Just look at the windows ecosystems attempts to roll out arm devices. I can still use my 900 dollar m1 macbook air for almost anything and I have a desktop computer with 128gigs of memory and a 5090. And the battery lasts for days to the point I barely think of charging it. And my m5pro work laptop is just basically a perfect device. I think I use enough platforms to be a fair judge. I also detect the sloppiness in some of the software, im just saying in comparison its a pretty minor issue and theyre still executing way above the alternatives.
Apple detractors also live in a bubble. Apple was always after profit share not market share. They have 20% market share for mobile devices globally, which is still the highest among all the brands. But their profit share is an estimated 80%. How’s that not crushing it? Btw they don’t have to be in every product market under the sun. It’s a bizarre observation. Getting out of the businesses where they don’t have margins perfectly makes sense.
Meanwhile many LLM users have seen generated code quality drop as prices and service are brought in line with costs. If graduate student level work costs many times the price of a student worker then why bother?
It turns out to be more interesting than that. For example, there is no other ape with skin resembling that of marine mammals. And that is just a start. Mankind is seriously weird.
The details of the story are interesting. Backups stored on the same volume is an interesting glitch to avoid. Finding necessary secrets wherever they happen to be and going ahead with that is the kind of mistake I've seen motivated but misguided juniors make. Strange how generated code seems to have many security failings, but generated security checks find that sort of thing.
> Backups stored on the same volume is an interesting glitch to avoid
The phrasing is different, but this is how AWS RDS works as well. If you delete a database in RDS, all of the automated snapshots that it was doing and all of the PITR logs are also gone. If you do manual snapshots they stick around, but all of the magic "I don't have to think about it" stuff dies with the DB.
To be fair, to delete an RDS / Aurora DB, you have to either pass it a final snapshot identifier (which does not disappear with the DB), or tell it to skip the final snapshot. They give you every possible warning about what’s going to happen.
With all the exotic drilling tech making fracking work, it seems like geothermal is a natural pivot since much of the challenge is controlling the cost of drilling deeply.
Medical device companies are run very differently from most technology development companies. They have to be because the stakes are high, evaluation criteria are different, and medical related marketing and sales have separate industry managed channels and venues.
This defensiveness just makes the situation worse. If they came across as at a disadvantage and doing their best that could attract help and admiration. Trying to cover things up while being hostile just makes them look like reactionary creeps with too much power. An unfortunate turn of events in any case.
That isn't really true, though, at least not when actual common usage is considered. As the studies of "Trendslop" have revealed, LLMs aggressively normalize output. What they do is generate content based on averages over large samples. This gives everything from them a strong tendency to revert to the mean from concepts to presentation and style.
Being cautious and an autistic mathematician also I am prone to heavy qualification. This causes very large blocks of my writing to be highlighted as "Hedge Stack" which isn't really helpful. Lots of Overused Intensifier and Triple Construction instances also, but those are usually words or phrases, not several paragraphs together as with Hedge Stack.
Seems like a sad situation, but I'm not going to start changing my communication style to avoid sounding like an LLM. At least not yet.
There is a word for this kind of thing: Trendslop. Asking LLMs for advice consistently generates average responses as if the questions were being asked of the training sample population. It is reversion to the mean as a service.
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