{"version":"https://jsonfeed.org/version/1","title":"Take","home_page_url":"https://take.surf/","feed_url":"https://take.surf/feed.json","items":[{"id":"https://take.surf/2026/06/27/memento","url":"https://take.surf/2026/06/27/memento","title":"Memento","content_html":"

John Gruber wrote about Om Malik, who recently passed away after battling heart issues.

\n

Om is one of those people who has always been well known but in the periphery to me. I've seen many dozen things of his, read a dozen things, and he's been one of hundreds of people who has seemed like a sharp tack, who has seen the right things at the right time. I have nothing of depth to add; rather he be eulogized more appropriately by those who more keenly understand his writing and were impacted by his person – from what people are saying, I wish I had been.

\n

What strikes me in reading this is the chasm that appears. I've been an acquaintance of many dozens of people and a friend of a dozen, over the years. But because of geographical boundaries and because of my own nature, there are no photos of me sitting grinning even with those I would call friends.

\n

When I started writing, around the time Om started writing (and John, for that matter), this writing was a bigger part of my life than it is now. It used to mean a lot more. It used to bring some form of contact with people. But, as so happens, to my detriment, on the personal level I started to grate on people, and on the global level people started to migrate to centralized social media – something I've never been interested in. And this was always a sideline, just writing for fun, exercising the mind, wanting to think, too, like the other people. If this sounds petulant and puerile, it may be because I was a teen at the time, a condition that thankfully fully subsided (in contrast with being petulant and puerile). But this young ambition also started developing a muscle I didn't have, and I don't regret that.

\n

I regret that I've never met some of the people I've run into over the years. But it's also not a coincidence that such situations haven't fallen into my lap – I think I'm as unlikely as I'll ever be to ever actually go to the US, where most of the flock exists. I see a lot of people longing these days, often without nuance or qualification, for the state of things roughly 2005-2008 or so. It was not the peak of my own life, but some things were undoubtedly easier and less complicated.

\n

What I'm left with is this as a loose strand, kept vaguely alive, a witness of a past life. Occasional panning for truths and insights in emerging events, with the rough accuracy as those who panned for gold a century earlier. All the while most of my energy, most of my problem solving and most of my identity lies elsewhere.

\n

You carry your old selves within you as you grow and progress through life. I know that I am good at some things, but I try to always remember my failures. Some of what I've been, I've had to slough off because of embarrassment, or to leave room for the growth of something healthy instead. Some of it seems, depending on the day, to have defined a lot, or to have gone absolutely nowhere. Unlike so many others who see an audience, journalistic duty, a part of a public brand or persona... there is nothing that keeps me writing here. Nothing aside from the value and virtue of continuity. A grounded reminder, a small prayer in observance of something else, that the person who exists now and the person who started out more than two decades ago, though different in circumstance in many ways, still sprouts from the same seed. To the people who have followed this and me since – I wish you have plenty of friends to grin next to, and to those I really would call friend, I'm sorry circumstance didn't work out for us, and I hope I wasn't too annoying.

\n","date_published":"2026-06-27T03:13:40-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2026/06/26/well-what-did-you-think-the-app-in-apple-stood-for","url":"https://take.surf/2026/06/26/well-what-did-you-think-the-app-in-apple-stood-for","title":"Well, What Did You Think the \"App\" in \"Apple\" Stood For?","content_html":"

Jason Snell, in The Talk Show, as transcribed (and ably commented) by Marcin Wichary:

\n
\n

The new features with problems is not a crime. It happens. The crime is: they never fix the problems.

\n

And that’s the part that I would like to see Apple get better at: if you’re going to launch something, you got to maintain it. Sometimes I feel like Apple is willing to spend the money and time and effort to launch something, but then they’re not really willing to do anything other than walk away.

\n

And I think that’s irresponsible. If you can’t stand by that feature, you shouldn’t launch it.

\n
\n

This is a good summary of Apple's software issues, but that might somehow only be one interesting aspect of a fractal subject.

\n

If you stand back a bit, you see wires going back and up and off into the horizon.

\n

You see Apple adopting a cadence of annual releases, with annual hardware features with gimmicks that are only supported in annual software updates.

\n

You see a treadmill of software advancement, which forces every app on every app store to be a constant commitment. There are excellent reasons (security and bug fixes) to treat it as such, but Apple in particular can enforce a run-to-stand-still mindset.

\n

You see the fundamental organization of app stores and subscriptions subsuming whatever independent logic developers may wish to use, to schedule their own major upgrades. Why? Because you can't be caught out in the middle of a big-bang upgrade when you have to adopt to something, and because the ergonomics of even having major upgrades are terrible, another sacrifice at the altar of uniform App Store simplicity, the practicalities of which trip up even Apple.

\n

You see a rat king of consequences, all from adherence to cult-like ignorance of complexity, as if those who are sufficiently pure of mind do not need to acknowledge and wrestle with what their decisions have wrought.

\n

Believe it or not, I am an adherent of taking things slow and building incrementally, picking off small pieces and solving small problems. I see it as one of the better tools to focus on what needs to be built. It is easy, saying these things, to be boxed into being The Guy Who Wants It To Be 2009 Again. I don't. (Well, maybe except for world politics.)

\n

The issue really, that Jason pins down, is that it's so easy to use incremental development, agile development, sprints, whatever, as a method to do the wrong thing. If you have a year-long schedule, it is easier to say "I will take care of the Finder", and within the scope of that is a number of features that need be built, but there's also room for ongoing maintenance. Within the confines of sprint planning, within a culture that sheepishly focuses on the wrong thing, or is obsessed by following the wrong number, or worries about the internal politics of appearing to not have it together, all of a sudden the same work, scheduled into 3 week long sprints, looks like poison.

\n

I know of plenty of organizations that make this work. That have the maturity and discipline and culture to see bugs and defects for what they are, to allocate plenty of time to them and to focus extra time on them with regular intervals.

\n

Apple, apparently, does it every 17 years; maybe once a decade if iOS 12 also qualifies. While I applaud that they do it at all when they do it, I can't give their approach a passing grade.

\n

I don't have a conclusion as much as I have a sense of dizzying comprehension that all these things are interconnected and some of them cause some others. Things were always going to have to be more complicated as the world got more complex, and the ability to ship more updates is fundamentally a good thing.

\n

But we are constantly stepping on rakes that needn't have existed. It will come down to people realizing what the prudent thing to do is and making the grown-up decision to support quality and respect their customer - in a world focused on driving profit, conversion and business metric by hook or by crook, where when the platform vendor does it, it's not immoral.

\n","date_published":"2026-06-26T19:07:53-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2026/06/13/kelsey-hightower-in-the-pragmatic-engineer","url":"https://take.surf/2026/06/13/kelsey-hightower-in-the-pragmatic-engineer","title":"Kelsey Hightower in The Pragmatic Engineer","content_html":"

Kelsey Hightower in The Pragmatic Engineer

\n

I have been working with Kubernetes as part of my day job for the last couple of years, first very reluctantly. It is an interesting combination of an overcomplicated boondoggle that companies like Google find elegant because it takes fewer entire departments to handle, and principled application of actual elegance.

\n

Kelsey Hightower has always been a prominent figure in its community, but this is the first time I heard and understood his story. A very interesting listen, a very capable and measured mind, and we need more people who have taken this path and with his approach to problem solving.

\n","date_published":"2026-06-13T12:37:04-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2026/06/10/transparency","url":"https://take.surf/2026/06/10/transparency","title":"Transparency","content_html":"

The WWDC 2026 keynote was interesting.

\n

The Liquid Glass section focused entirely on how the first version needed work, and nearly all the highlights were about how improvements came from listening to developers and users and dialing what they had back.

\n

The macOS standard sidebars don't live in a blob with very uncomfortable margins (which were required for there to be a layer fit in between the "traffic light" window controls and the window's edge). The macOS windows have a consistent and less decadent border radius. The glass texture can, at least optionally, be more of a tinted and foggy look to improve legibility and contrast. And there is a setting to show borders, which echoes back to the introduction of the "halo-ish" white outline border on windows from when Dark Mode was introduced, which were an inspired solution to solve the problem of the big window shadows being much less effective to show where one thing started and another ended.

\n

Combined with some saner icon renderings — aside from when refraction is enabled, a feature which upside I have been unable to locate, and aside from still not letting innocents out of squircle jail — these are steps in the right direction. As is the attitude "we will need to make changes to things, and we will need to listen to what people are telling us", rather than the extended finger of your choice pointed from Cupertino towards the rest of the world.

\n

That said, iOS 27 still suffers from the basic usability issues with Liquid Glass – like, say, the tendencies to pick up touches and taps in the sliver between the bottom/corner edge of the display and the tab bar. I suppose it is honest from a user interface perspective for links that are visible within that area to be tappable, but it is a terrible user experience. (When is the intent of the user to tap any of those things?) Together with the tinted glass, the solution that springs to mind here is to just extend the tab bar towards the edges, which would solve the problem, but is also what pre-Liquid Glass iOS did.

\n

Apple has a long track record of usability achievements and ground-breaking user interface advancements. They've just seemed to forget what actually makes things better – or ended up in a place where what they had was so good that to bring out any difference whatsoever, the only way to do that is to regress. That some few details are returning to form is encouraging; whether it is because of insight and reflection (the other kind), or because of merely settling the crowd dictates where this could go next.

\n","date_published":"2026-06-10T20:21:43-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2026/06/07/one-more-thing","url":"https://take.surf/2026/06/07/one-more-thing","title":"One More Thing","content_html":"

WWDC used to be fun.

\n

I have never gone, and "going" will probably never be possible, but WWDC used to be something to look forward to. Fun features, new frameworks, expanded horizons.

\n

For the past ten years or so, it's been a mix of dread and hope. I hope they don't screw things up even more. I hope they don't lock down even more. I hope they don't take out the eyedropper, click on iOS, and flood fill on macOS Bummerville and let that stand as an improvement so significant that no actual features are needed.

\n

And, if you insist on particulars that illustrate the problem, think back to when sessions used to present the Apple thinking of only very slowly and deliberately building on what was there, because they knew it would have to last forever, and contrast it with the buffet of half-cocked answers to reactive dataflow or asynchronous programming. KVO! Combine and Publishers! ObservableObject! Swift Concurrency! Actors! Observable/Observations! AsyncSequence!

\n

My objection not being that new things are tried, nor that code that's been introduced obviously needs to keep functioning for those who have adopted it, but that it's a zoo of technologies that have been launched as universal solutions to all prior problems, which have then been superseded by next year's universal solution and left to languish, with nary a mention in the API documentation of which geological sediment you are currently uncovering. Technologies hanging around in plain sight but never spoken of, or with initial documentation still forthcoming, like software uncles to not be discussed in polite company. Excellence emerging from this process is a product of a determined community of developers willing to put up with stuff and bridge divides, not of it being defensible.

\n

Nearly everything being produced is new code. Apple is running close to their capacity mostly producing new things. Where's the time to go back and clean up? Where's the recognition that just as saying "no" to many things so you can say "yes" to some things, if you introduce something you have to own it? Plan for the future, rather than just jumping from lily pad to lily pad on a sprint or annual schedule, hoping the next jump will finally do what the previous jumps didn't.

\n

Success hides problems. Apple's had a lot of (economic) success, but it's had more problems, and a self-image that doesn't allow itself to admit to either.

\n

I'll be sitting down for WWDC next week, and hope for fun. I'm not the same person I was when I started watching and following. I'll still hope for the same fun I did starting out - the blockbuster surprise hardware, the mind-bending genuinely new and useful OS features. But I'll take a silently simmering outward yawner if it comes with some introspection.

\n","date_published":"2026-06-07T18:27:47-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2026/06/05/glassnost","url":"https://take.surf/2026/06/05/glassnost","title":"Glassnost","content_html":"

The two biggest issues facing Apple right now:

\n\n

I recently read Steve Jobs in Exile, a book that finally focuses on the full lost years of NeXT as more than a fast-forwarded bridge between two periods of greatness. Although it is devastatingly cloying in some aspects (it highlights the invention of the Blue Box that became Classic and AppKit as the sole future framework as a stroke of genius, rather than as a costly diversion that almost cost Apple its future before Carbon was invented), it does tell the unvarnished story.

\n

Combined with recent reporting on Apple turning 50, I'm seeing support for ideas that I have agreed with for a long time but didn't know to be the case: that an Apple or a NeXT fueled only with the Steve Jobs ideals of unopenable, unextendable, we-know-what's-best boxes would not have taken over the world.

\n

Instead, they stand as a monolith, commemorating the value of taking a contrary position, of starting fresh, of rejecting dogma. Companies that fail in doing this will be overtaken by companies that are less encumbered. But merely adhering to going back, as it is now so popularly called, to first principles, is not enough.

\n

Apple is an idea - a to-and-fro. The Mac community lives resplendent in the values its users cultivate; the apps are shaped not by aping Apple, but by people who commiserate with a culturally compatible platform.

\n

Steve Jobs and NeXT insisted on high production value hardware that did not bring it closer to the goal of serving its intended customer and in many cases actively repelled it. The difference with today's Apple is not a lack of unquenchable arrogance — it's that Apple has enough runway and resources that it is not seen as openly reckless.

\n

Whereas NeXT was full of engineers and marketers seeing sense and fighting Steve on his muddied priorities, the rot goes deeper down the stem in today's Apple. But apples can be inoculated and grafted onto fresh branches, to once again produce sweet fruit.

\n

After letting Tim cook for 15 years, it's time to begin a new transition, and hand off the care of the garden to a new John Appleseed. I'm hoping for a new start, with plenty of new shoots, new cultivars and a lot less glass to have to pick out of the harvest this fall.

\n","date_published":"2026-06-05T16:20:32-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2026/05/30/ain-t-interested","url":"https://take.surf/2026/05/30/ain-t-interested","title":"Ain't Interested","content_html":"

Daniel Jalkut:

\n
\n

My take on AI is, essentially, everybody who’s against it is too against it and everybody who’s for it is too for it.

\n
\n

I have written probably three pieces on this in the past year that I have chosen to not publish.

\n

My main problem with transformer-based, LLM-based AI, aside from its supporters, and very occasionally some of its detractors, is this: it doesn't know what the fuck it's doing. I don't mean that the output is always gibberish, I mean that in a literal sense. It can't know what it's doing. It's the output of a statistical, mathematical process.

\n

We see this plainly in the early iterations of various AIs. In images, we see detached limbs appear in thin air, McDonald's signs in impressionistic Linear B; in neural networks trained to recognize images, we see railway platforms not being recognized as such because the training set all contained a certain type of watch; in text we see it when the syntax is word salad. But when they improve, we compare it to human learning and human evolution (until now a fairly rational conclusion). We think: oh great, it learned.

\n

Some models are better than others, some techniques of training the models or architectural decisions pay better dividens. But at no point does reasoning come into existence. You get out what you put in, both for training and for prompting. If we had a magical technology that would be able to differentiate good answers from bad answers, that would be able to tell facts from the wrong thing, we would use that technology. (The closest things we have are training and safeguards, which should neither be under- nor overestimated.)

\n

What characterizes the output of an LLM is not its prescience or accuracy, but its ability to hew to patterns in a primordial corpus. Or to be more pedestrian: what you get out isn't wisdom, it's bullshit. It's not that what you get out isn't sometimes the truth. It's that there is no mechanism to which it matters whether or not it is. "Reasoning", "effort" and "thinking" are epistemologically equivalent to uttering spells while shaking the dice.

\n

What scares the crap out of me from a professional and personal viewpoint are these things:

\n\n

It is a miracle that the things that work well work as well as they do; a miracle built on an upside down pyramid, with a whole industry trying to make it balance on its tip. That something of the kind can be useful in some applications, maybe even more so than it "should" be - well, I should hope so.

\n

Certain players in the world economy are deciding to bet everything on this horse, as are some individuals in some industries. I am electing not to. We are nowhere near ready to deal with the consequences of any of this, but we're going to have to, in a world already marred by distrust and inequality.

\n

See also:

\n\n","date_published":"2026-05-30T17:44:47-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2026/05/12/storage","url":"https://take.surf/2026/05/12/storage","title":"Storage","content_html":"

Let's talk about storage.

\n

Let's talk about how there's been no meaningful improvement to the day-to-day act of using storage for many years now. Two decades ago, Sun introduced ZFS, which has pools, better integrity checking and more fluid allocation. A whole lot of noise and an Oracle-fork detour later, it basically completely works. You can forget about disks, by which I mean that you're a fool if you forget about the hardware, but it works so well that it is possible to forget about it, and it is a handful of invocations to extend a pool.

\n

Where are these improvements with regards to networked storage? Why are we still thinking about individual shares? Or rather, why are we stuck modeling everything as shares based on devices, as if that was the summit of the domain and the solution to all our problems?

\n

For years, we have had cloud services where you point to a folder and everything you put into it syncs to a data center. For years, we have had Network Attached Storage devices with built-in RAID and tiering, where some stuff goes on fast SSDs and some on slower mechanical hard drives.

\n

Well, okay. The pieces are in place. Where is the next step: where is the device that you turn on, stuff with storage capacity, connect to the network, and where you create a virtual partition, or pool, on your computer which secondary tier is the network device? If I have a 1 TB drive locally and I have 20 TB on the network device, and I refer to 500 GB sometimes but not always, why do I manually have to transfer it to the network device to free it up?

\n

(People get upset, rightly, about keep-it-on-the-cloud policies when they are things that default to on and masquerade as regular folders, leading to data loss. That doesn't mean that the concept is worthless, especially if the endpoint is local much of the time, and could be proxied through the internet only when necessary.)

\n

Every time I've looked into anything approaching this, I get stuck in the third half of the 1970's, which as far as I know extends into infinity. It's block mounted devices, shares, it's iSCSI LUNs, it's LVM and software RAID and union filesystems, brilliant technology no doubt, but all moored to the expectation of hardware wizardry. It is up to you to set up all these things, and maintain a psychic link to the documented shortcomings and incompatibilities as they are discovered in real-life use (or, if it already has, to inhale all these nuggets and make sure it is second nature by the time you need to evict or extend a disk in five months).

\n

This overlaps with another frustration. As far as I can tell, the cousin companies VAST Data and Everpure (née Pure Storage, and to be confused with Everclear at your own peril) have both constructed appliances that they fill with tons of QLC NAND flash, usually considered the crappy kind, and simply through spreading out the load much better, are as responsive as many good individual NVMe SSDs (although probably not with as low latency). But this is locked up inside appliances for large companies.

\n

This sounds like a good technology for the newer network device I'm considering. But it also sounds like a road towards something I've been expecting for decades now - a form of SSD that fits between "the cheapest crap you can put together" and "a 4 TB drive that stayed at the same curious price of 'too much' for many years only with the I/O speed multiplying". (Let's leave current storage prices out of this for the moment; my assumption is that they will return to reality at some point within the next few years.)

\n

Where's the 12 TB drive of two-or-three-generations-ago technology, that costs the same as 4 TB of the current generation? You know, in case your needs are sated by mere 1-2GB/s transfer speeds. My guess is that it's limited by the M.2 (and U.2) form factor since higher capacity SATA SSDs have failed to materialize, but it wouldn't have to be if you put it on a PCIe card, and it wouldn't even have to be that cheap to still be cheaper than stacking your way to 12 TB by way of individual M.2 drives.

\n

The caveat to all of this is that it would be new, and it would be untested, and no one would know what to make of it. And that beneath the mere bullet point of making storage easy, without even inventing any new form factors or technologies, lies a graveyard of sunken ventures, firmware bugs like harpoons in their bow.

\n

The unfortunate truth is also that most actors that would have the resources to do this are busy either upselling you those horrendously expensive SSDs or upselling you on the idea that what you really ought to do is stick all your data in us-east-1 instead what are you some kind of fossil or something. But I hold out hope that within the carapace of these corporations, and in the general unassociated storage community, are people who just think all this is a rather interesting idea, all things considered. Who see the potential good and the end goal, and maybe even an easier time sorting out their own storage. Or who just wants to not answer so many support questions.

\n","date_published":"2026-05-12T17:35:07-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2026/04/23/cooked","url":"https://take.surf/2026/04/23/cooked","title":"Cooked","content_html":"

By all means, Tim Cook was a better choice for Apple CEO than most people you could pick out of a hat; perhaps even of high executives at Apple working at the time. But this judgement is not unalloyed.

\n

The following things happened under his watch (in no particular order):

\n\n

I'm not saying all of these things are necessarily a personal ding against a CEO of a trillion dollar company. Some of these things, a cold-hearted, corporate, profit-maximizing CEO is not supposed, according to the archetype, to see as issues at all. But for a company that supposedly delivers customer bliss far beyond its competitors and holds itself to a high standard regardless of what their competitors do, just a few of these items should be cause for concern.

\n

(And for a company so insistent on saying "no" to a thousand things to gain focus, you'd think they could at least have skipped introducing their own credit cards.)

\n","date_published":"2026-04-23T21:47:14-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2026/04/20/tim-cook-s-letter-to-the-apple-community","url":"https://take.surf/2026/04/20/tim-cook-s-letter-to-the-apple-community","title":"Tim Cook's letter to the Apple Community","content_html":"

Tim Cook's letter to the Apple Community

\n
\n

You share little pieces of your lives with me and tell me things you want me to know about how Apple has touched you. About the moment your mom was saved by her Apple Watch. About the perfect selfie you captured at the summit of a mountain that seemed impossible to climb. You thank me for the ways Mac has changed what you can do at work and sometimes give me a hard time because something you care about isn’t working like it should.

\n

In every one of those emails I feel the beating heart of our shared humanity. I feel a sense of deepening obligation to work harder and push further. But most of all, I feel a gratitude that I cannot put into words, that I somehow got to be the person on the other end of those emails, the leader of a company that ignites imaginations and enriches lives in such profound ways it defies description. What an honor and a privilege it has been.

\n
\n

I don't agree with everything Tim Cook has done. I don't think he, nor the rest of Apple, has made the best decisions sometimes. But I sense the earnestness and honesty of his feelings, and his appreciation of the community, and of the position that his job empowered him to hold in it, is what made him a good choice for CEO. Neither the company, nor its products, nor its people, nor its values were fungible to him, and by-and-large, he has served them well. I wish him as uneventful a retirement as he is likely to allow.

\n

Along with so many others, I have high hopes for John Ternus and the values and perspectives a capable and culturally competent engineer can bring to the table.

\n","date_published":"2026-04-20T22:15:36-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2026/04/04/your-habits-make-you","url":"https://take.surf/2026/04/04/your-habits-make-you","title":"Your Habits Make You","content_html":"

Apple Inc turned 50 this week, and it has been illuminating.

\n

For one thing, David Pogue's book Apple: The First 50 Years apparently contains a very interesting timeline about applications on the iPhone:

\n\n

In retrospect, the idea of Apple producing all the apps for the world is a bit like the old story about Boris Yeltsin visiting a typical grocery store, or the many variants about Soviet or Chinese officials visiting big western cities and demanding to meet the person in charge of bread production.

\n

In a free society, in a functional community, in a world where creativity and utility both flourish, great apps come from everywhere and necessary utilities (which may or may not hew to various degrees of UI excellence) are numerous. For instance, pull-to-refresh as a gesture was invented by an independent community member and adopted by Apple.

\n

Within 7 weeks of the first iPhone's release, from a dead cold start, the first game had been written, and within 10 more weeks, there was enough stuff out there to impress the person ultimately responsible for what was already there that this would all go better if only everyone could do it themselves.

\n

Apple has had a bipolar attitude towards developers for at least the last 40 years, never quite deciding whether we are indispensable or insipid. Recency always blurs perspective, but it seems to me to have reached a less and less nuanced nadir.

\n

At times like this, history can be inspiring in its reminders. Slots and modularity once saved the Macintosh - desktop publishing was a killer app, but a more capable platform gave those applications the ability to truly shine, securing its foothold in a world where the previous (and then still current) cash cow, the Apple II, was about to start fading from relevance. And dollars to donuts say that the iPhone, for all its advances, would have been a shadow of its current success if Apple had continued to produce every single app - make a home screen of your most important apps, and I doubt Apple would not have wanted to write all of them themselves, nor been any good at writing many of them.

\n

Apple is at its best when the openness of the Woz strain is coupled with the determination and focus of the Jobs strain. As Marco Arment notes, these are tools, which benefit from being unfettered.

\n

Here's to another 50 years, and here's to the crazy ones. 🥂

\n","date_published":"2026-04-04T18:58:16-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2026/03/26/slot-shaming","url":"https://take.surf/2026/03/26/slot-shaming","title":"Slot Shaming","content_html":"

9to5Mac:

\n
\n

It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.

\n

Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.

\n
\n

For the first time* since May 8, 1987, when the Macintosh II became available, Apple does not sell a Mac that offers built-in expansion slots.

\n

That does not mean that Apple does not offer Macs that can be expanded. But this expansion happens through Thunderbolt 5, which offers PCIe 4.0 at 4x lanes (80 Gbps), or at slower specifications with lower versions of Thunderbolt or USB4. For comparison, the long-in-the-tooth, barely-worth-keeping-around Mac Pro from 2023 had PCIe 4.0, 2 slots with x16 lanes, 4 slots with x8 lanes and one slot with x4 lanes. The slowest slot is what Thunderbolt 5 is equal to. (Thunderbolt 5 does support boosting by reallocating lanes in its cable for workloads suited to this; instead of half capacity each way, it can do ¾ throughput (120 Gbps) one way and ¼ throughput (40 Gbps) the other.)

\n

The pre-Apple Silicon Mac Pro, the first model of what we now know to be the final industrial design, and the final model to support GPUs, was released in a rack form factor to some confusion since it wasn't a server. Neil Parfitt, a music professional, explained his setup of it from a popular video at the time — basically, it solved the issue of hosting a bunch of expansion and interface cards, in a form factor that's suited to the industry's habit of half-rack units full of processing equipment.

\n

With no Mac Pro, what would Neil use? He could hook up quite a bit of kit through Thunderbolt still, probably, especially since his Mac Pro generation used PCIe 3.0, and 4.0 is twice as fast for each lane, and so may have enough raw capacity to handle all of it. It is also likely the case that many interfaces do not need, or maybe even come close, to exhausting the throughput of PCIe 3.0.

\n

What does matter in audio production is latency. Thunderbolt is a cable, when most PCIe slots are a handful of inches through one electrical trace away from the CPU. Thunderbolt does add processing delay compared to on-board slots directly.

\n

No doubt a bunch of PCIe expansion chassis will appear to cater to the professionals that used the Mac Pro for its only remaining strength, its slots.

\n

It will be very interesting to see how the workarounds will fare at solving problems for professionals that Apple were, until fairly recently, valuing highly enough to publicly apologize to.

\n

* I was fibbing before - when they introduced the 2013 Mac Pro, they killed built-in expansion slots for the first time. The 2019 Mac Pro was the profuse excuse that brought them back.

\n","date_published":"2026-03-26T22:09:58-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2026/03/23/glassitude","url":"https://take.surf/2026/03/23/glassitude","title":"Glassitude","content_html":"

Danny Bolella, speaking to Apple Liquid Glass subject matter experts:

\n
\n

The rationale usually points to the initial community backlash, the slower adoption rate of iOS 26, and the news that Alan Dye left Apple for Meta. The prevailing theory has been: “Just wait it out. They’ll revert to flat design.”

\n

I shared this exact sentiment with the Apple team.

\n

Their reaction? Genuine shock. They were actually concerned that developers were holding onto this position.

\n

[..]

\n

The Apple engineers explained that a massive part of the initial Liquid Glass rollout was simply ensuring the foundation was solid. It had to be functional, it had to meet incredibly strict styling guidelines across every single Apple platform, and most importantly, it just had to work.

\n
\n

No one doubts that a lot of engineering went into the development of Liquid Glass. But it is hard to overestimate the degree to which Apple has completely lost contact with reality. Liquid Glass is an outright assault on usability, on user experience, on legibility; it incorporates fancy visuals, at the expense of nearly everything else. It is a user interface calamity.

\n

You need only live with Liquid Glass for a short while to see places that even the most glowing critic, who accepts at face value the intent behind the changes, would agree it completely drops the ball. Odd margins, nonsensical visual weight, hard to read text, constantly shifting dark-to-white-to-dark-again backgrounds, blurry messes. There is no part of Liquid Glass that "just works", and Apple's insistence on its excellence is what is so deeply concerning about the situation.

\n
\n

But here is where it gets exciting.

\n

The team was visibly enthusiastic about what is in store for WWDC26 and Xcode 27. While they wouldn’t drop any specific spoilers, they gave the very strong impression that this upcoming cycle is where Liquid Glass takes its first massive step into maturity.

\n

Seeing their level of historical awareness regarding the iOS 7 transition—and their genuine excitement for what’s next—left me incredibly optimistic. The foundation is poured; now, they are getting ready to decorate the house.

\n
\n

As pessimistic as I am, no less after reading this, I am somewhat optimistic that there may be a second phase to Liquid Glass where it grows out of its glassiness and into something else. It is at least more likely that this will happen than that Apple will do a gigantic u-turn and roll back an enormous design change not a year after it happened, especially if it doesn't seem the problem with it; I guess hope springs eternal that the reason they don't see the problem with it is that the second phase brings back some of the things that are so dearly missed, and that the people in charge of it has always seen it as part of the proposition.

\n

About this, I am what Hans Rosling termed a "possibilist" - it could happen - primarily fueled by the idea that the insistence of hierarchy enshrined in translucent controls and containers remains so pants-on-head stupid that further elements that make things stand out and apart more just plain make sense. The initial rollout would have to have been very rushed for this to not have been part of the first version, but a rushed rollout is exactly the kindest way to explain its current state.

\n

But given the other parts of the article, which paint interest in visible buttons as an obsession with custom chrome (which, if it's coming from Apple given what Liquid Glass actually is, is highly ironic, given how much it distracts from both buttons, controls, application and content) and a more desirable obsession being that of a layer of controls "over the content", which follows a through-line of foggy translucency going back to 2015's introduction of Vibrancy, I'm not holding my breath.

\n","date_published":"2026-03-23T23:38:16-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2026/03/06/neon-signs","url":"https://take.surf/2026/03/06/neon-signs","title":"Neon Signs","content_html":"
\n

You know, I wish I had a nickel for every time somebody asked me that. "Why doesn't Apple offer a stripped-down Mac that's more affordable?"

\n
\n

During the past 15 years, the world has been obsessed with two questions: Would Steve Jobs have done that? and Would Jony Ive have done that?

\n

With MacBook Neo, I'm not even vaguely certain what the answer is. But refreshingly, I'm feeling that they are the least interesting questions to ask, and I am certain that it is a move in the right direction.

\n

It is a machine that is full of compromises. The compromises that are necessary to take a design obsession bordering on high-falutin and taking it down to a machine that does bread and butter things well and doesn't break the bank.

\n

Let's leave the software malaise aside for a moment, hard as that might be; the Neo is a scrappy assemblage of parts, that is trying to find a new route to what Apple considers acceptable, and that is a sign of health. If the A18 Pro SoC has to implement a USB 2.0 interface by, for all I can tell, bit-banging it using spare resources to be able to offer a second USB port, that's charming (in a first generation product).

\n

Although Apple is not strangers to surprising compromises, these are all made with intention, and strike a balance of working for the customer's interest. Doing things that shave resources and complexity off of construction, not because people don't value haptic trackpads and keyboard backlights, but because there's simply a time and a place for everything, and some customers at some point in their life appreciate other tradeoffs than the ones Apple is apt to make for its more natural price points.

\n

Things to look out for in the next-generation product, as further signs of health: a "lowercase" M chip or an "enlightened" A chip that has more functionality built into it, and maybe an additional few GBs of memory, to be a more direct fit for this type of product.

\n

It is not a perfect product. That's what's good about it. It's a product borne of a mature and confident knowledge of the usual standards, and respectfully considering how a different set of circumstances could affect those standards. Without huffiness, belittling and drama, with humor, with heart, with empathy. More of that, please.

\n","date_published":"2026-03-06T23:54:20-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2026/03/03/m5","url":"https://take.surf/2026/03/03/m5","title":"M5","content_html":"

Cupertino, California — Apple Inc. today introduced the newest members in the MacBook Pro family, MacBook Pro M5 Pro and MacBook Pro M5 Max, extending the range of power-efficient, powerful highend laptop computers made effectively worthless by its groundbreaking Liquid Glass user interface.

\n

"Maxing out at over 614 GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, the M5 Max SoC architecture is more efficient than ever at calculating specular highlights on user interface componentry that needn't be translucent," notes Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. "I mean, seriously. There's just no earthly reason why—"

\n

Sporting upgraded Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 connectivity, MacBook Pro also faster than ever lets users connect to web sites detailing how to fruitlessly attempt a downgrade from the groundbreaking macOS Tahoe operating system, beloved by tens of users across the globe. Additionally, a nano-texture option is available for the high performance Liquid Retina XDR display, to disperse the light from the built-in glass, as separate from that being painstakingly rendered by the next-generation GPU.

\n

"With so many improvements, a higher standard storage configuration and lowered SSD upgrade pricing, there has never been a better time to upgrade from a previous generation of MacBook Pro to a new one, unless you're into, like, resizing windows or something," said John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering.

\n

MacBook Pro with M5, M5 Pro and M5 Max will be available imminently. Please consult a doctor before use.

\n","date_published":"2026-03-03T19:43:20-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2026/03/01/welcome-back-to-macintosh","url":"https://take.surf/2026/03/01/welcome-back-to-macintosh","title":"Welcome (back) to Macintosh","content_html":"

For at least 10 years, every Time Machine set up I have been in charge of, or tasked with maintaining for someone else, has eventually run into an issue where it stops backing up successfully. The only solution has been to start over, to not inherit backup state and to manually delete the old backup. My experience while looking up this solution repeatedly has been that this is not uncommon, and definitely is not just me holding it wrong; indeed the steps are marked as recommended solutions on Apple's own forums.

\n

For several years, Spotlight's tag index has been unreliable. Querying for a file type and a tag often returns only a subset of the most recent files with the tags. Rebuilding the entire Spotlight index does nothing to alleviate this. The only cure is to relaunch the Finder, which sometimes fixes it. (There's also, 13 years after its introduction, no good, supported and documented command line interface or API to enumerate, add or remove tags (aside from those assuming that they are just the seven colors of labels). Just saying.)

\n

For a few months, Finder has been having trouble with some Spotlight queries sometimes. When it happens, either they seemingly kick off and just hang forever, or they show results and then as you try to do something, Finder hangs (maybe as a result of a race condition during an update of the result). The only cure is to relaunch the Finder. Rebuilding the entire Spotlight index does nothing to alleviate this.

\n

For several years, Finder has been having trouble keeping windows up to date with folder changes. Most commonly seen when a program I'm coding in my day-to-day work writes files to a folder, those files often don't show up at all. Sometimes you can force it to reload by backing out of the folder, using Go To Folder, entering the full path, leaving it for a few seconds and letting the go to panel "autocomplete" the name - for some reason, that seems to clear out the cobwebs momentarily and sync with the current state of the file system. Sometimes, even that workaround doesn't work, and the only cure is to relaunch the Finder. Leaving the entire computer to be for hours on end, then closing all windows, then opening a new window showing the same folder still does not refresh the state of the folder. Creating a new folder in the Finder in the affected folder, that new folder does appear, but things that did not originate from within the Finder - no.

\n

For a year or so, listening to something with AirPods Pro and then opening Quick Look in the Finder to see a video with an audio track often glitches out the audio after a second or two. The mixed audio is fine before and after, but there is a very unpleasant glitch. No firmware or OS upgrade has resolved the issue.

\n

For several years, switching to a window in a full screen space often does not necessarily focus the window. If you cmd+tab to a window that has its own full screen space, you can see that the window does not activate, and that hitting a keyboard shortcut that is intended to be valid just gives you a beep. You have to manually click in the window to activate it. This especially affects Safari in full screen windows with video, where hitting space to pause or left/right to scan is no longer effective.

\n

With the possible exception of individual dodgy Time Machine protocol implementations from third parties, all of the issues are directly traceable to components fully in Apple's control. None of these issues are impossible for Apple to fix. All of them are incumbent on them to do so. Nearly all of them have persisted for at least two major OS releases and multiple Macs.

\n

In the middle of all this, what Apple chooses to focus on is to implement a redesign that no one asked for, that butchers both the most conceivably fundamental usability and the visual pleasantness its user base has self-selected its platforms for; which only saving grace is that it is half-assed enough to not actually really change some things too badly, compared to what it could have been like. Although, had I upgraded to macOS Tahoe, chances are on top of the visual change, I would have been treated to basic Apple Event infrastructure falling apart and stopping working causing hangs, instability and unpredictability.

\n

I have a MacBook Pro M1 Max from 2021, and because it is an excellent piece of hardware that still performs its function admirably, I have been holding on. The current state of macOS Tahoe is abysmal - I know because I listen to people who are long-time Mac users, who say so. If it was more stable, maybe I would do what I did with the last few upgrades, all of which made non-productive tweaks to the user interface in the interest of unity across platforms, and just upgrade. As it stands now, there's no chance.

\n

The hardware is great and no doubt M5 and M6 variants will run circles around M1, but if I have to sink down further into this bog, that price is too high to pay - a common enough sentiment that it is a matter of public interest to document downgradability or attempting to block dark pattern upgrades. (And lest you think this is just Mac-related, the disease has spread at least to the wrist, but I am scoping it down somewhat for clarity.)

\n

At some point, enough has to be enough. Apparently, the upcoming versions are going to be bug fix/improvement focused releases in the vein of the legendary Snow Leopard release (which itself was not uncontroversial at the time of its release for the number of things it removed). But with things having gotten this bad over so many years, my question is: does Apple even have the organizational acuity to understand, value and focus on these problems?

\n

Clearly, if not breaking developers and users was a priority, we would not have been where we are today, or would we? Even ignoring bugs and design changes, in which way does it serve users to phase out Rosetta 2, which in a container-heavy world is more or less required for developers due to the ecosystem of ARM64 Linux containers being nowhere near as widespread as for AMD x86-64 ones, and which keeps many applications runnable that otherwise wouldn't be?

\n

My hope is that there are Mac lovers within Apple who bite their tongue at every silly icon redesign, title bar-shrinking design reorganization, misty shower window—re-skin—love letter that they are forced to enact instead of taking what was once (and partially still is) that rarest of jewels, a long-term, continuously updated, well-designed user interface and mass market operating system and iterating on it to make it better. That there are people who, in so many words, bleed six colors; who have found not just a sterile tool, but a culture and a community. And who, like so many others in so many other situations, recently had to see what they love, what they value, what shaped them, torn apart by shifting, switching or recently starkly exposed priorities of people above them who either don't know what they have, or are happy to use it as a vehicle and ride it to places they care more about.

\n

My hope is that Macintosh is not just one of these empires that was at the height of its power and then disintegrated because of warring factions, satiated and uncurious rulers, and droughts for which no one was prepared, ruining crops no one realized were essential for survival.

\n

My hope is that there remains a primordial spark, a glimpse of genius, to rediscover, to reconnect to - to serve not annual trends or constant phonification, but the needs of the user to use the computer as a tool to get something done.

\n

My hope is that, just as Apple crawled out of a hardware nightmare pockmarked by thermal throttling, keyboards incapacitated by strands of human hair and lack of respect for its users needs, it can choose to refocus its software and its humility too, and stop doing this to the bicycle for the mind.

\n","date_published":"2026-03-01T17:03:05-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2026/02/01/ed-zitron-the-hater-s-guide-to-oracle","url":"https://take.surf/2026/02/01/ed-zitron-the-hater-s-guide-to-oracle","title":"Ed Zitron: The Hater's Guide to Oracle","content_html":"

Ed Zitron: The Hater's Guide to Oracle

\n
\n

Did I mention that Oracle took on $56 billion of debt to build data centers specifically for OpenAI? Or that the banks who invested in these deals don’t seem to be able to sell off the debt?

\n\n

[..]

\n\n

[..]

\n

We are setting up for a very funny and chaotic situation where Oracle simply runs out of money, and in the process blows up Larry Ellison’s fortune. However much influence Ellison might have with the administration, Oracle has burdened itself with debt and $248 billion in data center lease obligations — costs that are inevitable, and are already crushing the life out of the company (and the stock).

\n

The only way out is if OpenAI becomes literally the most-successful cash-generating company of all time within the next two years, and that’s being generous.

\n
\n

I am having difficulty deciding if the more desirable outcome is Oracle collapsing or Larry Ellison receiving a gut punch. I'm under no illusions that Larry Ellison will go barrel-and-suspenders broke under any scenario (and am enough of a functioning human to not wish that fate on anyone), but whatever misfortune is headed his way has accumulated over decades and is entirely proportionate.

\n","date_published":"2026-02-01T16:29:31-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2026/02/01/chris-barnatt-switches-from-an-android-tablet-to-an-ipad","url":"https://take.surf/2026/02/01/chris-barnatt-switches-from-an-android-tablet-to-an-ipad","title":"Chris Barnatt switches from an Android tablet to an iPad","content_html":"

Chris Barnatt switches from an Android tablet to an iPad

\n
\n

Certainly, there are many things you need to turn off in iOS to maintain security and privacy.

\n
\n","date_published":"2026-02-01T16:27:26-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2026/01/06/the-hunt-for-midori","url":"https://take.surf/2026/01/06/the-hunt-for-midori","title":"The Hunt for Midori","content_html":"

Paul Thurrott:

\n
\n

"My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030," Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt writes in a post on LinkedIn. "Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’ To accomplish this previously unimaginable task, we’ve built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale."

\n
\n

The post was later retracted, in that most famous telltale sign of our times, the reluctant "I'm sorry you fuckers misrepresented what I thought by reporting literally what was said".

\n

I work with .NET in my day job, almost exclusively on non-Windows platforms these days. .NET, for its many flaws, has been an island of relatively open thinking within the Microsoft bubble, which otherwise is just as, or more, prone to hivemind company-thinking than its acolytes regularly accuse Apple enthusiasts of being. (As a recent example of Apple users reacting to changes in their platform, look only to Nikita Prokopov's vicious-in-its-incisiveness, but entirely justified, takedown of everything-having-an-icon in macOS Tahoe.)

\n

Ignoring hype and corporate arrogance, having been conversant in .NET for a significant portion of my life, my thoughts go to Midori. Midori was a legendary ground-up implementation of an operating system, object capability model and asynchronous programming in pure managed, memory-safe code that went as far as to power production code. It directly birthed the concepts behind async and await, which has now spread to pretty much every language in the decade since its introduction, as well as brought the concept of contiguous memory-safe slices, christened Span<T> to C# and .NET, where it now infiltrates all levels of the stack and brings down memory allocations and by extension garbage collection.

\n

I don't know what Mr Hunt is up to, but it does have the ring of a similar project. Putting its fate in the hands of the stochastic parrot is somewhat worrying, but I do at least trust the people conversant in these three languages (and Microsoft's dialects of at least C and C++) to be competent enough to evaluate its successes and build guard rails around it, given that most code bases will either not compile or malfunction during use. (I predict a substantial probability that the outcome will be: the technology to do this safely and competently, according to the ambitious goals, simply does not exist yet.)

\n

What all this similarly leads to is unknown. Rust is helpful but legendary in its lack of ingratiation. The Rust community seems to have developed a blind eye to the consequences of algorithms that work around the borrow checker. Yes, it means there are 20-30 lines of unsafe code to audit instead of the whole codebase. There's a next step missing, to make that unsafe code as expressible as ordinary Rust code, where its reasoning can be similarly encoded - as in: in which way can I teach the checker about the semantics of the concurrent or self-referential data structure that I had to jump through the escape hatch to actually implement. This is not easy and it not being done is not because of laziness, nor lack of ambition. It is as unbounded in scope as it is just plain difficult to solve - the borrow checker and current memory model is already so much of a miracle that it is barely replicated elsewhere yet.

\n

But there still is a series of next steps. My hope is that this project, alongside the current effort to only allow new codebases in Rust in the Windows kernel, helps push on the state of the art by trying to do what research projects do best - which is to start with an oft-absurd idea and then take it, over time, with purpose and still with connection to what the real world wants to accomplish, to a logical conclusion.

\n","date_published":"2026-01-06T22:39:13-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2025/12/04/glimmer","url":"https://take.surf/2025/12/04/glimmer","title":"Glimmer","content_html":"

It feels dark and mean-spirited to talk about wanting someone gone from a job. But considering the track record of Mr. Dye, considering the increasing number of OS releases, design language shifts and swerving over the years, considering the sense of impending doom that has begun to haunt the annual OS upgrades, if Mr. Dye is responsible for the general direction, it is a rational feeling to have.

\n

Apple is a company with a culture and a set of values that have informed traditions throughout the decades. It touches many industries and many efforts, but in developer relations and human interface, the culture, the values and the traditions are all in the process of slowly decomposing – or of being set alight on the Apple Park lawn. The profound is reduced to platitude, by people who do not grasp what it means. The interaction design is haunted by the spirit of gimmicky movie effect bullshit trying to liven up what would better fly as desktop layout PDFs.

\n

Pixar's Ed Catmull famously asked: What's more important: ideas or people? and came to the conclusion that some people will be unable to deliver on good ideas, but that good people will fix bad ideas. And in the abstract, "what if an OS, throughout, used cinematic level material effects" is a thought-provoking tentpole for a UI shift to last the next decade. Liquid Glass is one of the worst imaginable implementations of this idea.

\n

What ended up summed up as skeumorphism eventually wore thin and looked dated (to some) because of the feeling that it was an unimpressive veneer that lacked dynamism and that forced designers to care too much about vain visuals. Reimagining the general thrust of the pre-iOS 7 world and, just to poke Google in the eye, delivering an actual "material"-focused design could have been a great innovation. Make different things look and feel different; have different textures and atmospheres. Provide the things that the typical iOS 6 app wished to deliver but with less effort and more sophistication; make every app feel easy to read visually (in both senses of the phrase) and assent to the fundamental idea that what helped people move through applications twenty and ten years ago still help them today.

\n

Instead, the road towards blurry transparency-ism on top of denatured, austere UIs was taken. As a follow-up for the goofy reduction of title bars and streamlining of all conceivable apps to one general, see-through-sidebar-heavy layout, dipped in bleached white, it bled the platforms equally of usability and personality.

\n

I don't believe that Mr. Dye lacks talent; I just would be hard pressed to point to good examples of it in his position at Apple. (Assuming that he has stayed well clear of hardware design and mostly influenced software design, the Dynamic Island of newer iPhones is the only successful thing that I think sort of bears his fingerprints.) I struggle to find anyone, even the few fans of Liquid Glass, who would point to Mr. Dye's decade as design chief as the zenith of what Apple can do. Apparently, people inside Apple agree with this take.

\n

There are plenty of things to be worried about in the world today, but personally, I have definitely felt straight-out depressed by the direction set by Liquid Glass for the future. Apple is known as little for making apologetic, self-critical u-turns as they are for changing their direction on a dime these days. I'm holding out for Stephen Lemay's tenure to at least bring the creativity, innate understanding and discipline that still lives within Apple to bear on their future. Mr. Dye is right about one thing – Apple doesn't need to dwell on what has been, just to find where they should have been going and start heading there.

\n","date_published":"2025-12-04T21:25:01-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2025/07/26/hackers-broke-into","url":"https://take.surf/2025/07/26/hackers-broke-into","title":"Hackers Broke Into","content_html":"

Tea (a dating safety app for women):

\n
\n

A legacy data storage system was compromised, resulting in unauthorized access to a dataset from prior to February 2024. This dataset includes approximately 72,000 images, including approximately 13,000 selfies and photo identification submitted by users during account verification and approximately 59,000 images publicly viewable in the app from posts, comments and direct messages.

\n

No email addresses or phone numbers were accessed. Only users who signed up before February 2024 were affected.

\n

[..]

\n

How did the cybersecurity incident happen?
\nDuring our early stages of development some legacy content was not migrated into our new fortified system. Hackers broke into our identifier link where data was stored before February 24, 2024.

\n
\n

Hackers broke into.

\n

I am unaware of the exact details, but my guess is that the dataset was as individual files stored in an object/blob storage service, like AWS S3, Cloudflare R2 or Google Cloud, and that the security depended entirely on the addresses of each file were assumed to not be guessable, or at least easily. (What do I base this on? The fact that stuff was left laying around in a "legacy data storage system". If it had been a database, most likely the entire thing would have been migrated. Whereas with object storage, it is reasonably easy to just start writing to another bucket/container/endpoint (or even another service entirely) for new data.)

\n

If my guess is correct, "hackers broke into" is ridiculously misleading as a summary. Here is a more correct summary which may be helpful for someone without technical knowledge:

\n
\n

Imagine a very large grassy park with hundreds of thousands of tiny sheds. Each of those sheds have signs up front with a name - like, say, TeaForWomenVerificationAssets. Anyone can walk up to a shed - it is how the owners of the shed get to the shed. All of them have boxes inside, with files and photos and things in them. Some of the sheds require a key to open, or a thumbprint in a thumbprint reader. Some of the boxes require another key to open.

\n

Our shed was labeled something that gave away what it was, and we had no keys on either the shed or the boxes. Our security depended entirely on no one finding our shed.

\n

After February 2024, we had a brainwave and began putting your precious private information into a bank vault downtown instead. However, a very vile and cunning criminal managed to find our shed before we, after more than a year had passed, had managed to empty it or put a padlock on anything.

\n
\n

It is bad enough that this is a common lapse in security. It gets worse when an app intended to work towards physical safety is affected. I understand the human instinct to lash out - but the issue wasn't that someone was a criminal mastermind, it's that the data wasn't secured to begin with, and that having discovered that something needed to be improved, the unsecured data was left in an unsecured state.

\n","date_published":"2025-07-26T19:33:40-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2025/07/16/an-air-of-preparation","url":"https://take.surf/2025/07/16/an-air-of-preparation","title":"An Air of Preparation","content_html":"

Everyone's prognosticating a new iPhone model this year - iPhone Air (this year, iPhone 17 Air), which supposedly slims down the iPhone 16 Pro by about 2 mm, which is around 20-30% slimmer.

\n

This seems like an exercise in one of Apple's follies, in driving an acceptable thickness and weight to anorexic proportions, excising features and flexibility for a marketable measurement.

\n

Although this is not necessarily out of character, and although the side-effects of such efforts can pay dividends up front, I don't think the Air is the point of the work.

\n

A foldable iPhone is a similarly rumored device, and foldables are, by their nature, slim. A foldable iPhone not only has a double folded up thickness (and more, considering that some sort of gap has to be accounted for), unless you are making a model like a book where the cover has no screen at all, its internal construction has to allow at least some of the area to fit screens on both sides of the device. This means duplication of the touch sensing substrate, glass and the many layers required for the display, as well as the driving components. (But let's allow that the back of iPhones already do have glass on them.)

\n

If "all" Apple can do is produce an 8 mm iPhone, while some components can be spread out over both layers of the foldable sandwich, the margins for fitting everything in the worst case zone are tighter than ever.

\n

So, while I don't necessarily agree with the consequences of the inexorable march towards new frontiers in terms of super-slimness that no one asked for, the ergonomic benefits of a larger display in a "small"-ish footprint are interesting enough that pursuing it may be necessary to avoid a relative brick.

\n","date_published":"2025-07-16T20:59:23-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2025/07/14/three-things-to-read","url":"https://take.surf/2025/07/14/three-things-to-read","title":"Three things to read","content_html":"

I link to things to read all the time. But sometimes a long article is better than a short article, and sometimes a book is better than a long article.

\n

Obliquity: Why our goals are best achieved indirectly
\nby John Kay

\n

John Kay coins the term obliquity to refer to ways of solving problems that are not direct approaches.

\n

Maybe that sounds nutty, but as an illustration, the richest people in the world are not the people who most desperately want to become rich. (Larry Ellison excluded.) Oftentimes they are not even those of the most desperate who are best at executing their way there.

\n

Contains well-considered critiques and thinking about the sincerity of moral algebra (that of adding up pros and cons) and of intuition.

\n

Careless People
\nby Sarah Wynn-Williams

\n

Social media gives me a rash, venture capital in the style of cancerous growth ruins both people and technology, and Facebook is worst of all.

\n

Sarah Wynn-Williams sees that Facebook can turn into a tool that changes the world and basically creates the position to work towards this out of whole cloth. It should not have worked, but it somehow did, thanks to her demonstrated prescience.

\n

What transpires is exactly the worst-case scenario. Facebook is a number-go-up cesspool, the wrong decisions are made (or the right ones for the wrong reasons) and we know where we are today. The details are shocking and interesting, as is the brazenness of the people involved.

\n

Apple in China
\nby Patrick McGee

\n

Patrick McGee makes the case that Apple's willingness to walk on coals to evolve manufacturing processes has largely built Chinese manufacturing, invested amounts of money comparable to the Marshall plan and made it practically impossible for Apple to move manufacturing anywhere else in the short to mid term.

\n

The road there is a series of individuals doing their best to build something from scratch, sometimes in a comedy of errors. Apple's legendary need to control every situation ends up both shaping the manufacturing ecosystem of the world's most populous country (at the time) and leave Apple to form uneasy truces with iPhone scalpers and organized crime.

\n

One thing becomes clear throughout reading: Apple's level of particular standards and precision rests on an assembly machine and downstream supply chain that have to forgo all of the humane values they are told to follow to achieve a result Apple will accept. The core value instilled by the process, top to bottom, from Hon Hai Precision to device assembling migrant worker, is that you are expendable.

\n","date_published":"2025-07-14T12:18:37-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2025/07/04/eevee-the-rise-of-whatever","url":"https://take.surf/2025/07/04/eevee-the-rise-of-whatever","title":"Eevee: The rise of Whatever","content_html":"

Eevee: The rise of Whatever

\n
\n

A calculator does arithmetic for you — thus automating the tedious, repetitive part — but you still have to know which buttons to press to get the answer you want. You can’t just type the entire problem in and get Whatever — something that sounds plausible, with a microscopic disclaimer that checking it for accuracy is your problem.

\n

Calculators do have limitations at their extremes, and if you’re working with extremes, you have to be aware of those. Table saws will (or, used to) cut through fingers just as happily as wood. Tools have edge cases — at their edges. LLMs have edge cases everywhere, and they are constantly changing, even minute to minute, even for exactly the same input fed to exactly the same model.

\n
\n

This entire piece is more or less personal catnip, including being upset both at the immovable payment landscape, the universal adoption of the word "content" by the same people who are otherwise overly eager to refer to the movie Idiocracy as prescient, and the sudden redefinition of autocompleting quotes and brackets everywhere.

\n

I have a lot of respect for Simon Willison, whose quote apparently sparked the post. I am closer to Eevee's conclusion than to Simon's, but I don't doubt that when Simon says it is making him more productive, he's telling the truth. (Maybe the even darker conclusion is that the twin clusterfucks of a) the 57 varieties of packages and virtual environments in Python ("there should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it" indeed) and b) "modern" web development are somehow still amenable to big pushes of potentially broken code being a net positive compared to the alternative.)

\n

I don't write about "AI" or LLMs here. It is everywhere, and like the post (read it), I don't like it. It has the mouth-feel of something that bubbles up, is annoying for a time and then eventually goes away, and I prefer to not spend time writing about it. (I think "NFT" and "Web 3.0" will be the first time they're mentioned here.) But aside from billion dollar companies acting like if they get this right by pushing this into every nook and cranny of everywhere, aside from the ethics and the legal implications and people being stark raving idiots with this tool too, there is a way that it affects me.

\n

The way it affects me is that yes, it is cute to get it to write things for you. I enjoy writing. You may have noticed.

\n

It is also maybe interesting to get it to help you write code, assuming that it is reliable, or at least consistently, discernibly wrong in the places where it falters. But it isn't. I am not bothered by statement completion, which is just a way to narrow down/home in on alternatives with the added benefit of showing you what the tooling thinks is available at that point. But I am made anxious by swaths of code popping up that I constantly have to evaluate to see if it's right or not. It robs me of my momentum and makes me lose my train of thought.

\n

Okay, but what about just it coding for you and you don't have to watch things flickering? For larger bodies of code, I think it essentially boils down to what Mark Russinovich lays out (20:03 and going for a few minutes). It does an okay job, until it doesn't. It understands you, until it doesn't. And, as Eevee's piece brilliantly captures, it produces Whatever. It doesn't recognize when it falls off a conceptual cliff. It picks out the next Scrabble tile out of the bag on prehistoric Earth, and whatever it spells is what you get. Sometimes it's wild; sometimes it's a death threat.

\n

It may, somehow, make economic sense to replace people with a bunch of those LLMs just going hog wild, if you ignore the bit where there are consequences and someone will have to clean it all up. (If we're all very lucky, maybe they'll have time to spoil the human reservoir of knowledge first! It was all worth it, if it meant we could outperform the bearish analysts in Q3.)

\n

Anyway. I am not currently afraid for my job. But I am concerned about the rest of existence.

\n","date_published":"2025-07-04T10:12:58-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2025/06/30/busy-dye-ing","url":"https://take.surf/2025/06/30/busy-dye-ing","title":"Busy Dye-ing","content_html":"

Riccardo Mori:

\n
\n

The aesthetics for icon design may have changed dramatically in the intervening years, but I just find it sad that, with the gorgeous displays we have today, Apple recommends simple designs made out of a few boring shapes, and everything is now in service of a ‘liquid glass’ effect the system superimposes on every aspect of the user interface — as if this surface gimmick is more important than the elements it distorts.

\n

I’m sorry to sound like a broken record by now, but this is, once again, form before function, looks before workings. And don’t bother deviating from this new norm, because your app will be assimilated.

\n
\n

There are two stages to this, in two different axes (being: icons and the general UI).

\n

The first stage is: I can't believe that Apple is doing their developers and their ecosystem dirty this way. In which way does someone look at all this and imagine that this will be sufficient for developers to express what they want to express? Look at the progression to this point, look at what is given up and look at for what. Negligible wins in screen space even on the most space constrained devices (aside from Apple Watch, where the layering and overlapping is highly limited to begin with), and effects that are technically impressive but not in the apparent service of any particular goal.

\n

The second stage is: I can't believe that Apple is doing this to themselves. To their own icons and their own user interfaces. I have yet to find a single user interface in their own OS, in the most-baked Liquid Glass UIs currently in existence, that is functionally improved. There are loads of them that have been functionally and hierarchically crippled.

\n

There is a famous story about how Bas Ording, legendary user interface mockup designer at Apple, vegged out in a couch outside an office after a failed interview; Steve Jobs walked by and Bas was able to persuade him to look at a mockup to solve the crowding problem of the Dock, which is pretty much exactly where Dock "magnification" came from. Steve was so impressed that he hired Bas on the spot, and Bas went on to have an outsized impact on setting the tone for Mac OS X, iPhone and iPad for more than a decade.

\n

Bas was a wizard in Macromedia Director, an already outdated piece of software, but used it to mockup various interfaces, and in various constellations, user interfaces were iterated on and reviewed. Ken Kocienda's book Creative Selection details this continuing at least up until the original iPad software.

\n

What this has to do with Liquid Glass is that Liquid Glass, and the Alan Dye direction of human interface in general, seems to come at things from a different angle entirely. Sources say that this was thrown together in months to weeks, and was preceded by failed attempts beforehand. Restarts are common in creative processes, but they usually don't come right at the end.

\n

The Bas Ording school sometimes uses a neat effect to enable new functionality (seeing more things with Dock magnification, keeping track of where things go with windows animating in and out of sheets and the dock, shrinking and moving around with Exposé). But the effect was never the point. The visuals were tweaked from version to version and certainly changed over time.

\n

The Alan Dye school always starts with dropping a manifesto. And they are sometimes necessary, especially if you're doing something that is alien to the current state of the art. But the most famous Apple manifesto of all, Think Different, was administered as a bolt to the heart, to tell people that what they were looking for was still there and to tell Apple employees the same. It was the bridge between, to use the parlance of the times, the Old World and New World, and set the tone for and was followed by a decade of product innovation - with new things that you could now do. What new things can you do with Liquid Glass? See 4% more of the underlying wallpaper, as a blurry mess? Tint app icons? (Yes, that is somewhat cool and somewhat useful.)

\n

(iOS 26 contains improvements, like a context menu that shows all remaining items when expanded, but there's nothing about this that demands the Liquid Glass look-and-feel. I'm talking about what the Liquid Glass look-and-feel itself enables.)

\n

The only motivation I can find for this, other than "to be able to show something big at all at WWDC25", is to enable some user interfaces in augmented or mixed reality where various forms of regular UIs could be claustrophobic. Well, guess what. Go back a month, and this was already the state of the art; visionOS, which may have had the strongest claim to utility, did have some form of this already. Other than as consistency for consistency's sake across all other platform, or as a fig leaf for the lack of Apple Intelligence progress and that whole debacle, or as a change which just plain looks "neat" or "new", what purpose does it serve?

\n

None of the interfaces seem like they were iterated on in order to increase usability, readability, utility or understandability in the slightest. App icons are more subjective and harder to make fair judgements about, but Mori makes a meal of some examples and of arguing that nothing was gained but plenty was lost.

\n

As far as I can tell, Apple's just lost its sense of UI design priorities completely.

\n","date_published":"2025-06-30T19:48:05-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2025/06/19/transparent-ambition","url":"https://take.surf/2025/06/19/transparent-ambition","title":"Transparent Ambition","content_html":"

Translucent user interfaces is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

\n

Aside from movie visual effect trickery, it started out in Mac OS X's Aqua, followed by Windows Vista's Aero, followed by (then) OS X's Vibrancy, followed by Windows 10's Acrylic. Over time, more and more of the user interface has become translucent similar to foggy/privacy-preserving sheets of glass.

\n

The unstated goal has always been to "look cool". The stated goal has always been to "give more pixels to your content".

\n

The sparse, flat aesthetic of iOS 7 and its successors held a tenuous alliance with these transparency effects; being one of few real-world physical effects allowed to be imitated. When waiting for the iOS 7 era to end and the crucible of history to turn once more, the card-like esthetic of some prominent new UI features looked like a hint.

\n

Instead, we got Liquid Glass, which is an ambitious implementation of a visual material and associated effects. They look impressive. They do add both personality and a trademark look. They also, to a first approximation, make the user interfaces worse.

\n

They are not as easy to parse visually - static, predictable positions are eschewed, or maintained under the condition that they do not look static and predictable. They continue the trend of leaving less and less color/ink for definition of the UI itself; text or symbols cast in Liquid Glass have worse legibility and are harder to make out, while user interface elements on top of Liquid Glass are positioned with the primary purpose to make a Liquid Glass UI look like a Liquid Glass UI. Well-known and time tested elements of design are, if not abandoned, then demoted below the desire to have a visually striking, consistent branding user interface.

\n

Apple's designers (and those of many other companies) come back to the idea of translucency giving order and imbuing personality. I cannot for the life of me understand where this idea comes from. When multiple layers of different imagery shine through each other, I am not helped by this. The user interface placed on a semi-transparent panel is not more effective because it is set against a smeared mess of colors, nor am I emotionally fulfilled as a human being for knowing that the mess comes from a treasured personal memory.

\n

The problem with the philosophy birthing these ideas, and running rampantly through the manifesto motivating Liquid Glass, is that it insists upon itself.

\n

The world is full of breakthroughs that end up moving the state of the art forward, which have flaws, sharp corners that are then weathered by time and experience. The first decade of Aqua is a great example of this, in going from flashy, jarring, gaudy tech demo to something a bit more toned down, but still elegant, effective, playful, beautiful and with a lot of personality.

\n

Aqua had in its roots that it wanted to be user interface, with clearer and bigger fonts, more prominent key buttons, allowances for pro features, solving issues that classic Mac OS had long suffered. Vibrancy and now Liquid Glass do not hold the same desires; rather, they seem to increasingly want there to be less user interface. Scooting fifty buttons out of your way when someone is trying to read an email, fine - there are many times where that is legitimate. But the pixels previously devoted to assembling a dependable user interface are now automatically made to retreat, to shrink-to-fit.

\n

Even this makes sense in a handful of scenarios. Mixed reality, augmented reality, or the Vision Pro's "spatial computing" does introduce a concern of physically layering UI on top of not just itself, but also physical objects.

\n

What doesn't make sense, no matter how gangbusters these future technologies break through, is painting every problem with this solution. Much has been made recently of the evaporation of usability from macOS's recent System Settings, being made to ape the iOS System Settings. The tools used to fit things in a navigable hierarchy on a screen a handful of inches are cast as the only tools able to solve a similar problem for a platform where a much bigger canvas and two vastly different interactions are always available.

\n

Rather than model Apple's mastery of all their devices, Liquid Glass models the propensity of design at Apple to wag the rest of the dog. Rather than model that design is how it works, translucency-obsessed design in general and Liquid Glass in particular models that job one, two and three are to look impressive and hang the person who ultimately has to get something done.

\n

Liquid Glass is an obsessive focus on visual design, special effects and appearance. Going back roughly a decade, the iPhone X brought a new interaction design breakthough too, with a gestural interface that made it possible to zip through apps, go back and forth with fluid gestures that moved at the speed you drove them, and change your mind midway through. It is possible that for some Apple devices, there is another part ready to drop, that will complete this picture and change what Liquid Glass offers currently.

\n

But I don't think so. The iPhone X's new-style gestural interface was everything Liquid Glass is not; rather than giving the illusion of visual transparency, it gave the tools for control. The two are not directly comparable, but considering all the bluster, it is worth considering why that is. Interfaces are tools to be wielded, that should be predictable, understandable, learnable and conquerable. The misapplication of "chrome" to refer to pixels used to present user interface controls and affordances looks more and more like projection; Liquid Glass is a much better simile to actual chrome on cars: glitzy, shiny, visually effectual and thus emotionally valuable if it's what you're into, but not a terribly efficient surface for other things you have to interact with.

\n

(Written after deep thoughts and actual full-time experience with Liquid Glass UIs. Beta versions are not finished versions nor really fair targets of criticism, but significant changes in philosophy are necessary to invalidate most assumptions. It is, mostly, the intention itself that is at fault.)

\n","date_published":"2025-06-19T22:26:44-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2025/05/12/turnover","url":"https://take.surf/2025/05/12/turnover","title":"Turnover","content_html":"

John Siracusa:

\n
\n

The preponderance of the evidence is undeniable. Too many times, in too many ways, over too many years, Apple has made decisions that do not make its products better, all in service of control, leverage, protection, profits—all in service of money.

\n

To be clear, I don’t mean things like charging exorbitant prices for RAM and SSD upgrades on Macs or taking too high a percentage of in-app purchases in the App Store. Those are venial sins. It’s the apparently unshakable core beliefs that motivate these and other poor decisions that run counter to the virtuous cycle that led Apple out of the darkness all those years ago.

\n

Apple, as embodied by its leadership’s decisions over the past decade or more, no longer seems primarily motivated by the creation of great products. Time and time again, its policies have made its products worse for customers in exchange for more power, control, and, yes, money for Apple.

\n

The iPhone is a better product when people can buy ebooks within the Kindle app. And yet Apple has fought this feature for the past fourteen years, to the tune of millions of dollars in legal fees, and has only relented due to a recent court order (which they continue to appeal).

\n
\n

Benedict Evans:

\n
\n

Steve wrote these rules. [email of Steve Jobs insisting on iBooks primacy]

\n
\n

Phil Schiller:

\n
\n

It's not just about Intel Inside. When you buy any off-the-shelf PCs, the boxes are covered with confusing logos and messages and icons. You open it up, there's stickers to peel off displays and keyboards, they're all over the place. And then you start it up and you find junkware all over your desktop and in your menus that they've littered with, they're trying to upsell you on junk and that whole philosophy, you know, we try to just give you a great product that you're gonna love, you don't have to peel stuff off to make it look better.

\n
\n

Gergely Orosz:

\n
\n

Got a new iPhone, paid a lot for it. Even so: as soon as I open Settings, Apple is advertising more stuff they want to upsell.

\n
\n","date_published":"2025-05-12T21:41:31-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2025/03/19/bad-for-our-users","url":"https://take.surf/2025/03/19/bad-for-our-users","title":"Bad For Our Users","content_html":"

MacRumors:

\n
\n

The European Commission today announced a long list of changes that Apple is legally required to implement in future iOS 19 and iOS 20 updates.

\n

[..]

\n

We will be publishing an in-depth overview of all of the requirements, but in the meantime we have highlighted some key items below.

\n\n

[..]

\n

Apple criticized these requirements as "bad for our products and for our European users."

\n

"Today's decisions wrap us in red tape, slowing down Apple's ability to innovate for users in Europe and forcing us to give away our new features for free to companies who don't have to play by the same rules," said Apple, in a statement.

\n
\n

It's like I said. What matters to Apple isn't the products. What's matters to Apple... is Apple.

\n

For all I know, the prospect of audio switching within the existing Bluetooth standard at the time of the original AirPods was a laughable pile of trash. (In fact, I'm almost entirely certain.) That AirPods connect in the way they do, that they work as well as they do, that they carry over from device to device - Apple should be proud of accomplishing that.

\n

Then they should make it a standard, document it and build it in, because that's what it means to be a platform. That's what it means to care for and about the user. That's what it means to be a technology company working not for technology's sake, but for the betterment of the world.

\n

But they sat on their hands and acted like a monopoly. They let sales and marketing make product decisions. They listened to users and developers ask for the same thing more evenly distributed, and they called them names, or dismissed their wishes as lunacy.

\n

And the company borne of an electrical engineer who worked within a community to push the state of the art forward and an earnest visionary who made his bones by constantly learning from those with battle scars and experience in his industry, who gave him time, wisdom and attention for free, now faces the backlash of the things it didn't do.

\n

Not because they never got around to it. Because it weighed their users' interests against their own, and sided with their own control and their own short-sighted wins.

\n

None of these features make life worse for Apple products. None of them weaken an Apple Watch or your AirPods. None of them rob AirDrop of compatibility that was never there to begin with. All of them have been heavily requested, for ages.

\n

As a user, I would have preferred that Apple would just have done the right thing from the beginning. As a user, I do not prefer that this is what happened. Much like, as a user, I do not prefer that car manufacturers are legally held to emission standards, or that factories are forced by regulation instead of driven by ideals to not pollute – or that governmental agencies step in, in the face of monopolistic practices screwing the customer. The world would be much better if there would have to be no intervention at all. Compliance is seldom as passionate and genuine as drive and goals.

\n

But hope springs eternal that Apple will shed its skin and realize the benefits, or that its head has been up its ass. In the meantime, I will take what I can get.

\n","date_published":"2025-03-19T18:02:14-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2025/03/13/michael-tsai-rotten","url":"https://take.surf/2025/03/13/michael-tsai-rotten","title":"Michael Tsai: Rotten","content_html":"

Michael Tsai: Rotten

\n

(Starting off with John Gruber's Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino – which is both right and aptly put – but followed by a crazy quilt of reactions.)

\n

My thought after leaving this to fester a bit is that Apple today is focused on being Apple, and some might say on staying Apple. Apple before was focused on building products.

\n

There's an NBC Brian Williams interview with Steve Jobs from 2006 which elucidates this; rather than quoting exact lines, Brian tries to corner Steve into seeing his silhouette as a captain of industry in the annals of history, and Steve is very uncomfortable because he just wants to go on to do the next thing. (And notes that a lot of products are just "technology in search of a problem".)

\n

The things John Gruber noted, pretty much to a T, would not have been issues if Apple was all about just building the product. Most of the hot water that Apple is in, no matter what the reason, it wouldn't be in if it was not first focused on being Apple.

\n

The Dithering contemporary episode to the article contains a good section by Ben Thompson expounding on how Apple has developed organizational scar tissue, about having tried giving less of a shit about what people do and then ending up having a near-death experience by their own third party app developers almost snubbing them in their moment of weakness; all of it worsened by an increasingly self-selecting roster of people to whom this was the original trauma.

\n

I think this observation is astute and a lot truer than I would hope for it to be, and if nothing else, it's a reminder of how quickly the internally enshrined logic of an organization can turn into maniacal, self-harming nonsense. Soak in that and expose yourself to larger forces demanding things from you and it's hard to imagine a good ending.

\n

(For one thing, what the hell kind of lesson is it to focus on that other actors behaved somewhat rationally when you'd been acting like a fool for years and giving them less and less of a reason to stick with you, and that therefore other actors should be avoided or are nefarious? A more valuable lesson might be: let's listen to our customers, let's work in their best interest, let's not get complacent, let's earn our support and our success, let's make supporting our platform something you would have to be a stupendous idiot to avoid doing. The mix of mostly incorporating those true lessons but still focusing on the scar tissue to the extent that it counteracts the true lessons is just baffling.)

\n

Personally, I've thought about ways for an ineffectively-competing Apple to mount an effective position on generative AI and come up short many times, but both Ben and John again have the sensible angle of just going back to the roots and doing what they do best and leaving what others do best to them.

\n

That said, the ratcheting pressure of being everything to everyone and fulfilling every demand for fear of leaving checkboxes unticked may leave that an even more dangerous position than "being left behind" in a war fought by prognosticators and largely ignored by actual people — but at least then, they might both catch a moment that yearns for technological behemoths to withdraw, and follow an authentic DNA strand of what they did so well.

\n","date_published":"2025-03-13T20:29:50-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2025/03/09/anders-hejlsberg-and-dimitri-mitropoulos-on-doom-in-typescript","url":"https://take.surf/2025/03/09/anders-hejlsberg-and-dimitri-mitropoulos-on-doom-in-typescript","title":"Anders Hejlsberg and Dimitri Mitropoulos on Doom in TypeScript","content_html":"

Anders Hejlsberg and Dimitri Mitropoulos on Doom in TypeScript

\n

Anders Hejlsberg is the creator of C# and Turbo Pascal and a core developer and early architect on TypeScript. This video is Dimitri Mitropoulos showing various stumbling blocks on his way to making Doom run on TypeScript's type system.

\n

It's interesting thinking about the push and pull of academia obsessed with (functional) purity and the greasy guts of optimizing for a CPU's inner workings and systemic pipeline with cache lines, branch prediction and mechanical sympathy. Dimitri's project implements a WebAssembly runtime, so it is already ten feet off the ground if you ask some people, but in a way the two ends almost meet here.

\n","date_published":"2025-03-09T17:00:28-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2025/02/20/but-what-does-the-p-stand-for","url":"https://take.surf/2025/02/20/but-what-does-the-p-stand-for","title":"But What Does the P Stand For","content_html":"

Humane/HP fever dr—I mean Corporate Press Release:

\n
\n

"Humane’s AI platform Cosmos, backed by an incredible group of engineers, will help us create an intelligent ecosystem across all HP devices from AI PCs to smart printers and connected conference rooms. This will unlock new levels of functionality for our customers and deliver on the promises of AI." [said Tuan Tran, President of Technology and Innovation at HP.]

\n
\n

The Register:

\n
\n

HP Inc is trying to force consumer PC and print customers to use online and other digital support channels by setting a minimum 15-minute wait time for anyone that phones the call center to get answers to troublesome queries.

\n

The wait time was added on Tuesday, February 18, according to internal communications seen by The Register, and impacts retail patrons in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany and Italy, though we anticipate more countries could be added.

\n
\n","date_published":"2025-02-20T18:36:06-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2025/02/10/matt-gemmell-back-to-mac","url":"https://take.surf/2025/02/10/matt-gemmell-back-to-mac","title":"Matt Gemmell: Back to Mac","content_html":"

Matt Gemmell: Back to Mac

\n
\n

Almost eight and a half years ago, I switched to using an iPad as my full-time computer, having come from decades of having Macs.

\n

[..]

\n

I’m reminded of YouTubers who say that they tried using something as their main whatever for a whole week; well, I did it for eight years. Allow me to report back.

\n

[..]

\n

The thing is, there’s a lot of momentary waiting with an iPad. Waiting for it to disambiguate a tap from a swipe or a scroll, or from a tap-hold or a drag; waiting for it to do its required ritual animations in the summoning or banishing of an app or a section of UI; waiting for it to thaw or resurrect a process that fell foul of its ferociously aggressive limits on things running in the background. Everything goes at a glitzy demo’s pace, rather than at an I-already-know-what-I’m-doing pace. If you think of your tasks like the words in a sentence, the spaces between them are longer on an iPad, like fully-justified text that’s expanding to fill the line. It’s definitely bearable, but it adds up.

\n

[..]

\n

Presumably because of the legacy and the architecture of iPadOS, many activities simply fail if not kept frontmost. Take Final Cut Pro, for example; a first-party app which you’d assume would have every available privilege and priority, especially given its resource-intensive workflows. After triggering the export of a video project, doing anything which moved Final Cut from frontmost status causes the export to fail, instantly.

\n
\n","date_published":"2025-02-10T18:30:50-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2025/02/04/hot-tub-time-machine","url":"https://take.surf/2025/02/04/hot-tub-time-machine","title":"Hot Tub Time Machine","content_html":"

John Gruber:

\n
\n

I’ve seen no celebratory tweets or announcements from European Commission officials celebrating the availability of Hot Tub. Just crickets chirping. When it comes to native iOS porn apps, the EU now has an unequivocal advantage over not just the United States but the rest of the world. You’d think they’d want to celebrate the achievement.

\n
\n

Aaron Sorkin (in a manner of speaking):

\n
\n

John van Dyke: May I ask you a question, sir?

\n

President Josiah Bartlet: Of course.

\n

van Dyke: If our children can buy pornography on any street corner for $5, isn't that too high a price to pay for free speech?

\n

President Bartlet: No.

\n

van Dyke: Really?

\n

President Bartlet: On the other hand, I do think that $5 is too high a price to pay for pornography.

\n
\n","date_published":"2025-02-04T19:54:30-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2024/11/21/what-goes-into-making-an-os-to-be-unix-compliant-certified-terry-lambert-a-lot","url":"https://take.surf/2024/11/21/what-goes-into-making-an-os-to-be-unix-compliant-certified-terry-lambert-a-lot","title":"\"What goes into making an OS to be Unix compliant certified?\" Terry Lambert: \"A lot.\"","content_html":"

"What goes into making an OS to be Unix compliant certified?" Terry Lambert: "A lot."

\n
\n

I was the tech lead at Apple for making Mac OS X pass UNIX certification, and it was done to get Apple out of a $200M lawsuit filed by The Open Group, for use of the UNIX™ trademark in advertising.

\n

[..]

\n

I was asked if I could lead a team to do #1. I said “Yes, under the condition that I could use the compliance project as a hammer to force other parts of the organization to make changes in their own code base, and that I could play it rather loose with commit rules regarding what it said in the bugs database for a given code change, and what the given code change actually did, in addition to what it said in the bugs database”.

\n

[..]

\n

And Ed Moy and I made a two line change that moved a type definition from <stdio.h> to where it was supposed to be, instead. One line of change in <stdio.h>, and another in the file the type was actually supposed to be located in.

\n

And we ran the tests again, and one of the header file errors in the tests went away.

\n

So we did a “world build”, where everything that was in Mac OS X, including iTunes, got rebuilt.

\n

That — essentially, one line change — broke 152 (from memory; that number sticks up, but it might have only been 137) projects failed to build.

\n

Including iTunes.

\n

And so Ed and I went through, and fixed every single one of those projects to build with the change, or without the change.

\n

And we did another “world build”, and everything built.

\n

Yes, we had access to all of Apple’s source code, at that point in the game.

\n

And so we submitted high priority bug fixes to the projects, some of which downgraded the priority immediately, and some of which they simply fixed, since we had provided them with the patch already.

\n

And then the VP of engineering, Bertrand Serlet, re-escalated the priority on the ones which had been downgraded.

\n
\n

A fascinating story of the doors opened by certification, the things people have been wanting to do for a long time anyway but never got the chance to, and the arithmetic of several tens of millions of dollars being less than several hundreds of millions of dollars.

\n","date_published":"2024-11-21T21:06:47-00:00"},{"id":"https://take.surf/2024/10/29/planar-economy","url":"https://take.surf/2024/10/29/planar-economy","title":"Planar Economy","content_html":"

John Gruber: "In Defense, I Swear, of the Magic Mouse’s Charging Port Placement"

\n
\n

Yes, with the charging port on the mouse’s belly, you cannot use it while it charges. There are obvious downsides to that. But those positing the Magic Mouse as absurd act as though Apple doesn’t know this. Of course Apple knows this. Apple obviously just sees this as a trade-off worth making. Apple wants the mouse to be visually symmetric, and they want the top surface to slope all the way down to the desk or table top it rests upon. You can’t achieve that with an exposed port.

\n
\n

The Magic Mouse is not inherently a pants-on-head stupid idea, or a pants-on-head stupid implementation of that idea. The problem is just that the Magic Mouse wants to be a mouse with a touch surface, touch surfaces want to be planar, ie basically flat, and good mouse ergonomics entail shapes that are not basically flat.

\n

For most people, comfort means fitting effortlessly in your grip. A flat mouse means that your palm is splayed, and if you palm is splayed, your fingers have to grip it by the side. (Or you have to sort of push it against the desk with your hand, which is perilous with any mouse and doubly so with a touch surface one.) This is not usually terribly comfortable, compared to a mouse shape that more readily adheres to the natural way your hand cups and grips, which most mice adopt to some extent, and some do to a quite large extent.

\n

So, is it worth it? It's obviously a trade-off. If what you want to do all day every day is make touch gestures, and they speed up your work, then yes. I love making touch gestures, and have enjoyed touch scrolling on a Magic Mouse when using it on occasion (I don't own one), but I have also had significant trouble performing those touch gestures compared to on a MacBook trackpad, since you often need to exert force not just by performing the gesture, but by steadying the mouse simultaneously.

\n

These properties of the Magic Mouse are reasonably understood within minutes, if not intellectually then at least vividly. It's possible I'm underestimating the proportion of people whose anatomy allow them complete comfort with a Magic Mouse — that proportion, even if small, is likely at least hundreds of thousands of people at Apple's scale — or the probably decidely bigger proportion who just don't care and consider it a worthwhile trade-off.

\n

The Magic Mouse as a first attempt of a mouse that is usably a touch surface for gestures is not bad. The Magic Mouse as the current attempt of such a mouse, nine years in, is rather dreadful. The solution space may have been exhaustively explored behind the scenes, but it doesn't look like it.

\n

Touch surfaces don't just want to be planar, but they want to be horizontal, lest your hand wants to fall off. But there are designs like the Logitech MX Vertical that lean into a certain grip where your fingers rest, unstrained, in a vertical-ish position. How would touch gestures work on such a mouse?

\n

Even if they did, could Apple ship one by default, considering that it would inherently not be ambidextrous? Probably not. (But Apple have shipped multiple mice before.)

\n

So what about the cable then? A mouse is a tool for creative use. A mouse that is well designed for purpose allows that creativity to continue with as few interruptions and restraints as possible. Plugging in a cable is a small interruption. (And feeling the tug of the cable as you move around is a small-to-medium restraint, depending on the cable; compare to an Apple Pencil theoretically being plugged in at the cap to charge, where it would impede mobility and shift the weight quite drastically.) Forcing a minutes-long break is a larger interruption — an interruption that's not hard to anticipate or plan around or assimilate into regular needs to take a break, to be sure, but an interruption nonetheless.

\n

The Magic Mouse is consistent in its vision of putting its projected image of an outwardly considered object first. It chose a hard set of problems to solve. It is an attempt to solve them, coronated by its maker as a flawless solution. What it isn't is a spectacularly good computer mouse. There are plenty of spectacularly good computer mice out there, and there are even more that have leaps-and-bounds better ergonomics than the Magic Mouse.

\n

New needs friends, and progress is often downstream of a few blind alleys. But at this point I'm more than interested what a Magic Mouse 2, that tries to take the learnings of how Magic Mouse has played out in real life and how people's bodies actually work and do something different, would look like.

\n

To just ship the same thing after nine years, with all the flaws that its trade-offs have lead to would be... well, pants-on-head stupid.

\n","date_published":"2024-10-29T06:31:46-00:00"}],"author":{"name":"Jesper"}}