How is it the browser extension doesn't have a local cache? It seems like basic functionality. I'm having to copy passwords by hand from the mobile app, which does have a local cache.
Anyway, it's a good reminder: self-host all the things!
Mine does. I am able to login to the browser extension with my password and see all my passwords. I think there was a setting to enable local caching somewhere.
Reviews are typically in conjunction with junior colleagues and the senior person is involved in the discussion and held responsible for the outcome. The junior folks then end up in the proceedings as external reviewers. In my experience anyway. I don't see an issue here. How else do you train junior researchers to review? Its how I learned and all those around me as well.
Can you extrapolate a bit? Why is GOG an undesirable platform to be on, especially as you seem to be fine with DRM-free releases elsewhere (which is awesome, btw)
Finally, thank you for SpaceChem! Still great, even after all these years
My understanding is that GOG is not necessarily undesirable, but they are very selective: Unlike Steam or Itch, you have to convince them that it's worth their while to sell your game. And their choices of what (not) to sell are not infrequently baffling. Lots of developers have gotten burned by that, including Zachtronics
I have a hard time believing that GOG rejected a Zachtronics game. They're popular, high quality, and a good match for the GOG audience. An GOG already sells several of them (I own SHENZHEN I/O and Spacechem on GOG).
The rejection of Opus Magnum got a lot of attention at the time, which probably caused GOG to reconsider. But most developers don't get that kind of attention, if a game of theirs is rejected. I've seen multiple developers of games that I like, saying that they've given up on GOG because of the curation
I'm not quite sure what the expectations of semi-privacy are here, but he's talked about it on the TC Discord, in the #development-branch-feedback channel (a search for 'unprofessional' should find it).
There's your problem. Everyone wants to live in the same set of well established well resourced neighbourhoods. But there's too many of us. Go out in the 'burbs and accept that owning a house implies a commute you will dislike (among a host of other compromises).
I’d have to move a thousand kilometres to some shit hole country town to afford a house on a salary I earn by working as a principal consultant in the central business district!
Now imagine the same scenario but with a school teacher, nanny, gardener, or inset job title here that is tied to a specific location.
When “existence here with the rest of us who have pulled the ladder up after us” becomes untenable for entire generations then you don’t get to complain when nobody is around to clean your gutters or wiper your arse when you’re too old to it for yourself.
Our children our are our future and they’re being told to jump through flaming hoops… that aren’t even in the same city as their parents!
> I’d have to move a thousand kilometres to some shit hole country town to afford a house on a salary I earn by working as a principal consultant in the central business district!
I didn't suggest anyone should quit their job. What I said was consider making tradeoffs. Space and affordability in exchange for a longer commute and other distance-related headaches.
>Our children our are our future and they’re being told to jump through flaming hoops… that aren’t even in the same city as their parents!
Nobody is owed the same opportunity as their parents. If the children of the well off have the right to live where they grew up then entire suburbs become enclaves of generational rights-holders.
Many of these problems would go away if cities de-centralised; from one central hub business district to many business districts. The problem, as I see it anyway, is unwillingness to invest in resources and infrastructure, to make satellite developments attractive for business and residents.
Why should it have to? Other countries build vertically in the urban cores. Many places in Europe even build small towns this way. One of the only good things about Europe is that I get to live really close to where I work, and not even have a commute.
Where in Europe should that be? I live in Germany and for example Stuttgart has a shortage of nurses because they can't afford living in a 1 hour commuting range (one way).
Weighing up a Neo vs Framework 12 for my kids. The Neo is nicer, but I'll probably get the Framework even though it's more expensive. Apple products seem to have a fixed shelf life; a certain number of years of support and then the machine is slowly incompatible with apps that have since moved on to newer versions of macOS. Meanwhile Framework supports Linux and is still providing hardware/software upgrade paths for their old machines.
Just my personal perspective, every Apple laptop I've ever owned has lasted 10+ years. Their phones may have some planned obsolescence, but I don't find that to be the case at all with their computers.
I use a 2012 Samsung ultrabook with Arch for light coding, web and limited image editing sometimes while traveling; while fairly beat up, recently I replaced the battery in it for 10 bucks in 20 minutes; it was also probably like a fifth of the price. And with Linux you don't have to worry about a specific kit lasting a long time - it just runs anyway.
Cool. I wasn’t trying to posture. I was just mentioning my own experience.
My experience, for the last 40 years, has been people automatically attacking me, for using Apple kit. I think that Linux folks had the same, for a while, but these days, it’s a lot more accepted.
People just blindly hate Apple, and drop all semblance of reason, when considering the platform (and people who program for it).
I don't think many people blindly hate Apple, but it's fair to point out your Catalina install is obsolete.
If I could install Linux on the Neo, I'd probably buy one. My daily-driver is also from 2012 (XPS L321X). It's not hobbled by the OS like your Air or the Neo, however, and happily runs the latest release from Debian.
In my experience their phones last far longer than Androids. Only in the last few years Samsung and Pixel have switched to at least 7 years (now it's the question of whether the hardware will suffice).
Until it broke, I was still using my 2018 iPad just last year.
My personal perspective: 2 out of 3 MacBook Pro, I worked with, had expanding batteries after about 5 years. Replacement was a big hassle and the new no-name batteries are nowhere near as good as the original ones.
I sure wish it was as easy as a battery replacement on a Framework laptop (with an original part).
I know the Neo has easier battery replacement (not glued in), but still it has an iFixit rating of 6/10 whereas the Framework 12 has a 10/10.
I think this is less true than it used to be? I ran my MBP2013 into the ground after 10+ years, but my circa 2018 imac retina is stuck on pre-Catalina, installing which requires opencore patcher anyway. Hardware is fine, but it's increasingly less useful as a daily driver on account of software.
You're absolutely right; the Apple Silicon transition really lowered the years of support of their later Intel machines. The same thing happened with the G5 machines, and the last Motorola 68000 Macintoshes in the early 90s.
I still use my 2015 macbook air (purchased in 2015) as a secondary computer. I installed linux on it last year as it was not getting software updates anymore.
Other than one of the USB ports being a bit flaky it works perfectly fine.
As someone who keeps apple laptops for 7 or so years but also has encountered numerous macbook pro meltdowns both applecare covered and not, 10+ is a crazy number and you'll probably need to provide some proof for that to be reasonable.
The M1 was sold right up until last year in new devices so it presumably has another decade of support left - that'll be a 15 year span! It certainly wouldn't make sense to declare M1 devices trash while supporting the Neo with almost directly equivalent performance.
The M5 is so much more powerful it may still be useful throughout the 2040s.
Anecdotally, my path was 2010 macbook pro -> 2015 macbook pro -> 2021 M1, with each device lasting about 10 years, and keeping 2 in flight at once. The 2015 one is showing it's age, and is likely to be replaced this year or next. Running linux on it isn't an option due to all the nonsense involved in suspend/sleep and the effect it has on battery life.
I also have a 2007 Intel mac with firewire that I use for some audio stuff that's still going strong with just an SSD swap.
> every Apple laptop I've ever owned has lasted 10+ years
.. as long as you avoided the emoji keyboard era, or never used an emoji keyboard laptop outdoors or even with your windo open :)
I have laptops much older than the ~2018 that work perfectly. But not only the 2018's keyboard broke, but to add insult to the injury they used a display cable that was too short in that generation and that broke too.
There are ways to patch around arbitrary "unsupported" status. What tends to reduce the real support time is the hardware itself (e.g. non-Metal supporting GPUs). However, M series SoC are likely to have support for a very long time. It's not like the Intel days when the underlying hardware was changing drastically from generation to generation with a multitude of CPUs and GPUs that all had to be supported in the OS. Apple has a dozen SoCs to support in Mac OS and that's it.
As such, if you buy a M5 MacBook Air today you are very likely to get software support that lasts until the laptop is physically falling apart.
I excitedly bought a Framework 12 when it first came out, since I figured it'd be a nice thing to travel with (my typical laptop is the 11th-gen 13). However the 12 has just sat under my bed since it arrived. It's actually the same size and weight as the 13 so there's no real reason to use it when traveling, and everything about the 13 feels better in general. Overall I'm fairly disappointed by the 12.
I haven't held a Neo myself, but it seems like a solid device. Personally I would probably go for the Neo.
Interesting! I was not aware of the framework laptops. I was more familiar with System76 and and Tuxedo laptops, but I wouldn't call those kids laptops.
No piano player can tune their instrument, they call in professionals. It's quite difficult.
Putting air in the tires is on the level of charging the battery.
But messing with drivers and config files and antivirus and RAM - that's not being creative or productive, that's being used by the machine instead of using the machine.
No specialist knowledge should be needed to use a computer, and thankfully Apple is providing that experience for people who are interested in what the computer can do for them. I remember when hardware had to be configured with COM ports and whatnot. Networks had to be configured with gateways and masks and whatnot. What a nightmare.
You cannot run Linux on the macbook neo at the time of writing, unless you mean in a VM, and the processor + memory are barely enough to reasonably manage that. Even a mid-sized rust project, or a nixos build, would OOM for a VM.
Environments foster certain behaviors, even restrictions foster certain behaviors, sometimes the opposite of what you try to restrict. There are no right answers :)
Similar experience here, started with the same G4 ("white") iBook. That was an amazing machine. Under the hood it was hard to distinguish many differences with Linux/BSD of the time. The UI on top (OSX Tiger) was peerless -- I recall being very excited for the introduction of Spotlight. I'd say the decline came around 2012-2013 or so. Hardware was still great, but they were no longer updating the GNU stuff and anti-features like SIP made it harder and harder to run the applications I want (gdb for example). I gave up not long after they introduced the touchbar
These days I'm happier (or at least content) without a Mac. My FW13+Linux setup may not be as nice as the latest macbook, but it does exactly what I want and if it doesn't, I have options.
Apple's current software is such a joke I almost regret ever having invested in the Mac ecosystem. I still run Mojave for its 32-bit app support for (apple's own) apps that have no contemporary equal.
Apple weathered the passing of Steve surprisingly well, however the cracks still show. Apple's very best is exclusively reserved for those products/devices/software with Jobs' fingerprints on them.
I still run an original iPhone SE as well. The entire tech sphere has gone in such a poor direction, I've increasingly divested myself from tech. If it no longer works with my system, I simply stop using it. It's a happy ("insecure") place.
> I'd say the decline came around 2012-2013 or so.
I think it started slightly earlier: 10.7 Lion in 2011 introduced the new full-screen mode that was completely broken on multi-monitor setups, as though Apple entirely failed to test on or even anticipate what was at most a moderately "power user" hardware configuration. They've introduced lots of useless features over the years (eg. Game Center), but that full-screen mode was the first time I recall OS X having such an in-your-face usability regression that was so obvious and avoidable.
10.7 also dropped Front Row, which was a disappointment to me, but is at least understandable in the context of Apple TV existing as a separate product they wanted to steer users toward. Losing Rosetta in 10.7 was also somewhat justifiable, and didn't hurt me much since my first Mac was an Intel machine and I didn't have much of a library of PPC-only applications.
I'm a Linux guy who doesn't really like Macs but has intermittently been required to use them. On the whole I have a grudging respect for Apple (their hardware is peerless), but seeing one screen turn to "brushed steel" when the app on the other was put into full screen mode kind of blew my mind because "UI is worse than Windows" was not, at the time, a failure mode I believed the company was capable of.
The problem is, in the age of the Internet, old operating systems decay. Even MacOS 10.13 is effectively unusable as a primary workstation, NOT because Apple has abandoned it, but because Firefox, Chrome and Homebrew have abandoned it. Yes there are alternatives, but my point stands.
SIP is anti-feature for a certain class of users, but the right tradeoff for most consumers. At least you can disable it. And even as a developer I leave it enabled.
It's really easy to fail to see this in the heat of things.
macOS has a feature where it puts an orange dot on the top right corner of your screen whenever your microphone is recording. That orange dot is normally part of the menu bar, and completely unobtrusive, but will still show up on top of full-screen windows (e.g. it'll show up on top of games if you're on Discord talking to friends), which is distracting as hell.
As horrendously annoying that little dot is, what's the alternative? Either you have an uncircumventable marker saying you're being recorded, or you don't. Any way to turn that thing off that doesn't involve disabling SIP would be trivial to exploit by anybody who managed to plant malicious recording software in the first place.
More annoying is when you use something like SoundSource (a paid app which adds per-app volume control and input/output redirection to macOS... a feature that by all rights should be built in in any reasonable OS) you get a permanent purple dot indicating a third party tool is intercepting audio.
Again, I get it, but as a power user this kind of stuff is just infuriating.
It's also annoying that macOS doesn't already have at least basic per-app volume mixing.
So much pain in macOS is in areas like this, trying to hack basic features back into the anemic OS.
Apple's "OS" updates typically focus on end-user applications that I don't use and never intend to. Meanwhile the core of the OS, and even the desktop environment, feels stagnant compared to many Linux distros.
Actually, the date was 29 June 2007. This is when GPLv3 was released and Apple could no long continue using the fruits of open source labor without giving anything back. That's when MacOS X's UNIX underlying began to ossify. Sure Apple kept backporting important security things, but it froze in time all of the GNU utilities that made UNIX on MacOS X good.
I’m honestly unconvinced that the “or later” clause of the GPLv2 license is legally valid. Can anyone think of any example where contract terms get to be reinvented by a self-interested third party whenever they choose?
IIRC, the FSF generally insists on getting assigned the copyrights on all GNU software, so the FSF can re-license any new version of their software under any license they choose to, which is currently GPLv3.
Users/vendors can still choose GPLv2 for the older versions of GNU software, which I think is what Apple does for the few remaining GNU software they ship.
I skimmed the paper a couple of times, hoping to find the promised (from the abstract)
> pathway to integrating AI into our most challenging and intellectually rigorous fields to the benefit of all humankind.
There's very little insight here though. It seems mostly a retread of conversations we've been having in the academic community for a few years now. In particular, I was hoping to see some discussion of how we might restructure our educational institutions around this technology, when the machines rob students of the opportunity to develop critical thinking skills. Right now our best idea seems to be a retreat to oral and written examinations; an idea which doesn't scale and which ignores the supposed benefits of human+AI reasoning. The alternative suggestion I've seen is to teach prompt engineering, which seems (a) hard for foundational subjects and (b) again, seems to outsource much of the thinking to the AI, instead of extending the reach of human thought.
Wait it seems like doing unscalable things - like face-to-face teaching/examination - is exactly the sort of things that humanity can afford to do as it benefits from the surplus free time generated by AI efficiently doing the scalable things.
> when the machines rob students of the opportunity to develop critical thinking skills
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. Machines don't rob people of critical thinking skills, people do. Mostly people do it to themselves, often inheriting it from their parents or social environment.
Indeed. Education isn't supposed to "scale". We've mucked around with education so much and subjected it to tech fad after tech fad that we hardly have anything resembling education.
Because this has been going on so long, most people's reference point for what constitutes "education" is simply off, mistaking "training" or something like that for it. But the purpose of education is intellectual formation, the ability to reason competently, and the comprehension of basic reality, which enables genuine intellectual freedom (there are moral presuppositions, too; immorality deranges the mind). This is what the classical liberal arts were about.
The very bare minimum criterion (and it is a very bare minimum) for someone to be able to claim to be educated is not only knowledge of their field, but knowledge of the intellectual nature, foundations, and basis of their field in the greater intellectual scope. I would not hold someone with only that bare minimum in especially high esteem vis-a-vis education, but even that bar is higher than what education today provides.
There are simply not enough teachers who can provide such an ideal, imagined education, at least not for the current rate of teacher salaries (and it's very far off). The educational strategy has to scale to real people, real teachers and real students as they are in the flesh, not some ivory tower pipe dream. We've had decades of this "we should teach how to think, not what to think".
Alternatively,if you don't care about scale, as in rolling out a system to the population at large, then yeah, this kind of advanced education exists, it's just very selective and is in advanced extracurricular or obtained through private tutors.
This also assumes that universal education is a sensible aim. I think that's doubtful and that it contributes to these sorts of burdens and waters down the quality of education in the process.
As a concrete example, for a few decades now, we're been pushing primary school students toward university education quite aggressively and broadly. It was quite common to scare students toward university by claiming that without a university degree, they would be flipping burgers at McDonalds. This, of course, is completely false and it is disgraceful that such dishonest and manipulative tactics were used. Today, because of rising university costs and the dubious value of most university education, we're seeing this idea challenged at the level of the university. Gen Z's interest in trades has increased by something like 1500%. I don't see this as a negative. In Germany, for instance, there is a more balanced distribution across trades and university.
Now, I admit that the situation is a bit different in the case of primary education, but here, too, I think we do well to think in terms of reform rather than technology and patching up a pedagogically and administratively broken system. The American education system spends an inordinate amount of money on each student with little to show for it. If, for instance, those funds were allocated wisely, then a number of problems would likely go away or become smaller issues.
Of course, what does "allocate wisely" mean? Education systems require a principled grasp of what education is for. If you don't have a sound anthropological grasp of what it means to be human and how education is supposed to enable one's humanity and serve human persons, then you are in no position to run an education system or decide school curricula. I cannot stress this enough. Our education system today is very "pragmatist"; we're constantly told we're being prepared for a career and a job market. That's not education: it's job training. Of course, schools are quite mediocre as training facilities, because they're sort of a halfway house between training and whatever residue of classical education still lingers. So that's one distinction: training vs. education. Now, if we simply accept this distinction, we should ask: how should one organize training on the one hand and education on the other to enable each to be successful within its own circumscribed domain? And what if we keep things as local and decentralized as possible? I guarantee you would not see the inept system we have today.
So, with this...
> There are simply not enough teachers who can provide such an ideal, imagined education
...I agree, but again, my view is that at best we are buying time with these sorts of technological gimmicks. We're also social animals. We cannot keep isolating ourselves behind technology under the pretext of "practicality".
Yes, Germany has different educational tracks that are decided fairly early, at 10 or 12 years old (with some opportunity to change tracks). I don't think Americans like this idea.
Still, 40% of young adults have a tertiary degree (https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/09/education-at-a-...) while it's 47% in the US, so I wouldn't say it's a huge difference. And its not just a US thing, Denmark stands at 45%. So I wouldn't spin too big of a narrative around this.
Education is a field where decade after decade they try some new fad which is basically the old fad re-dressed and never really learn much. That's because teachers and their methodologies don't really have that big of an effect. A stable non-chaotic learning environment and access to the learning material though any kind of presentation, and books gets you to pretty much as good as it gets. To have a real effect, you need private tutoring for the gifted or very small groups of talent nurturing, which goes far beyond the default curriculum. But again, these don't fit the current zeitgeist, so they will keep on pushing "critical thinking" and "how to think", no matter how much they fail.
I don't know if this is what the GP meant, but obviously classrooms do scale, in the sense that almost every kid in the world has access to a classroom. But arguably, for better or worse, this scaling was enabled by "cramming" many of those kids into relatively large classes, with little 1:1 attention from the teachers, and with standardized (mostly multiple-choice) testing, rather than old-school oral testing.
As I see it, it is a very salient question - what would the economics of global schooling look like if we decided that it's imperative for every student to get personal pedagogy and regular individual professional oral examinations for their schoolwork?
Yes. Tools like Khan Academy help lots of talented kids to progress in the curriculum beyond what's available in physical classrooms available to them.
Anyway, it's a good reminder: self-host all the things!