I miss more on iOS because if that. The eight things I cared about are mixed in with the 94 that I don’t.

As an internal implementation detail, it’s fine and pretty standard. Exposing it to the end user so that they have to know whatever janky-ass domain and capitalization you picked to run your application is braindead.

I feel like this would result in so many broken phones that most companies would not want to enter this market. Wouldn’t be surprised if you could find something on Alibaba or Amazon, but I doubt it’s much of a market.

I agree with you. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing how to do something. We all start basically every endeavor not knowing how to do it. My complaint is specifically with people who march into that thing they haven’t learned yet with an attitude of “and you’re all wrong and stupid for not fixing it for me”.

Well, we’re here on a web site discussing it, and the top two recommendations are “build one yourself from parts” and “buy a used one in cash”.

Seems to me that it’s the very definition of unrealistic if the real world has almost no examples that do it.

Or just use their built in sync and sign in one time, and all your addons will be installed and enabled for you.

If your argument boils down to “none of the browsers are exactly pre-configured for me, one of the 7 billion not special people on the planet”, I’m not sure there’s a productive conversation to be had here.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t want companies to obey the laws. I’m specifically responding to the idea of “if your business relies on companies breaking the law, you have bigger problems”. The idea that you’ll dramatically tear apart and rebuild your supply chain literally every week as one company or another is sued for something that doesn’t concern you is what’s naive. Even just looking at patents, every company that writes software is a time bomb, because there are hundreds of thousands of bullshit patents that cover extremely broad and obvious ideas. This can’t be your problem, or you’ll never actually get around to doing the thing your company does.

If your livelihood depends on a company breaking the law, you’ve got other issues.

That’s a pretty naive view of the world. If I buy 50,000 Android devices to support my company’s field sales operation, I’m not going to collect them all and put them in a trash compactor just because Oracle decides to pick a copyright fight with Google. If you work for any large-ish company, your employer is probably engaged in dozens of active lawsuits right now. That’s just how the world works.

There are lots of problems here. First, if you have to “hack” something to get the code, then it likely invalidates your own defense that you thought you were allowed to release it. Second, even if you can prove that nVidia knows that they should have to GPL their code, you still have no legal right to hack something to get it. If the hacking is illegal, then it’s illegal, even if it’s done to enable an otherwise legal activity.

For most people, principle takes a backseat to pragmatics. If your livelihood is training ML models on thousands of nVidia cards or whatever, you care less about who to be mad at and more about not laying off your staff and shutting the doors. You can’t replace nVidia. You can replace the latest kernel.

The userland differences are not too great, but I would assume a kernel module as significant as a modern GPU driver is pretty deeply tied to Linux’s kernel internals.

That’s definitely not the norm. Used to be that installing Windows would wreck Grub, but you just needed to but a rescue disk and reinstall Grub one time to fix it. Most people dual booted for decades without any issue there.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a Windows machine, but doesn’t Windows index the content of files as well as their names? If so, that would have fairly profound differences from slocate.

I think the main issue with Arch comes if you try to use it like Debian Stable. Like, if you don’t run pacman -Syu for a year, you probably won’t have a bootable system the next time you try. How about six months? My guess is you’d still be stuck fixing shit. Where is the safe “X” in “as long as I update every X, I’ll be fine?” Who knows. That’s not a very well-defined problem.

I sort of understand the issue here. I use Arch because I’m picky about system things, and it seems to require going against the fewest strongly held platform opinions in order to get it the way I want it. In an ideal world, I’d get it set up that way and not need to touch it very much afterwards. Arch requires frequent touches. Fortunately, almost none of them require any real mental energy, and I’m willing to do the occasional bit of “real work” if needed to keep it going, but that’s a trade-off that may be more painful for some than others.

So your solution on Windows requires me to move all my files out of where they belong to process them? How do I get them all back when I’m done?

I knew how to write that find command. Didn’t need to search for anything. And because I know how to do that, I can also search for every pdf file modified since last month. I can spit out a list of the gps coordinates for every photo I’ve taken, ordered by latitude. I can find every Python script on my computer that uses Pandas. I can do a million things that boil down to “find every file that matches some complex filter and do something to it”, and I learned one tool. I don’t need to learn one point and click app that converts comics, one that messes with photo metadata, etc.

I can sympathize with the idea that there’s a high learning curve. And there’s nothing wrong with trying to provide ways for people to use their computer that require less knowledge. But recognize that you’re asking for a crutch here.

That all depends on Apple’s ability to run it effectively, and they have basically no demonstrated ability to do that.

App Review is an absolute joke. Listen to last week’s Accidental Tech Podcast. One of the hosts is developing an IMDB competitor app, and he’s been rejected three times as of that episode. One rejection was for playing copyrighted video without permission – in an app that doesn’t have any code that can play a video. One was for not having a link to his T&Cs in a field in the app store that can’t render links. And the third was for displaying copyrighted media in his screenshots (maybe? no one really knows), and that media was the cover art for movie and TV shows. None of those even pass the sniff test. We all know that you’re allowed to show the cover art for a movie in an app that has information about movies. We all know that’s Fair Use, but beyond that, a third grader knows that literally everything in the world that presents information about movies does it. At the exact same time that all this is happening, Apple happily published some scammer’s app called “Threads” and let it collect 300,000 people’s information who thought they were downloading the actual Threads app from Meta.

It’s always been this way. I personally wrote the original iPhone app for a large US retailer in 2008 – the first year the App Store existed. App Review’s only purpose then was to detect your use of private APIs, usually because that would let you build things Apple didn’t want you to build. That’s the only purpose it serves today, 15 years later. Everything else is random noise that just punishes you unpredictably for no reason. I had an update of that app rejected once for using our own company logo as the icon. They don’t catch obvious scams. They never have. The people doing these reviews know nothing or are given so little time that the way to game their metrics is to just randomly reject sometimes without analysis. Unless they change something, it’ll just be a thing that scammers fill out however they want with no consequence to them at all, and a random 5% of legitimate developers will waste a few weeks arguing over when it’s applied to them with no logical basis in reality.

I think there are probably some ways to cross over a bit, but really, LLMs aren’t necessarily aimed at the kind of things we want a virtual assistant to do today. Siri falls down mostly on its ability to correctly do things quickly and reliably. Generating 5000 words of convincingly human sounding explanations isn’t what I want from a thing I quickly trigger on my phone. What I want is very short or no reply accompanying the action I wanted to take. Call this person. Start navigation to an address. Turn on the lights. Play the version of a song I like from this specific live album. Some of those things are things Siri really sucks at today, and none of them are likely to get a lot better with an LLM in place. Maybe playing music benefits from a more robust understanding of the language of my query, but the rest of it are things where the suckage is more that Siri takes 8 seconds for the server to respond or just inexplicably decides that today it doesn’t know how to turn on a light.

At this point it feels like a great LLM would let Siri fail to respond to a much more varied set of ways for me to ask my question in English, but that’s not really the target we’re shooting for here.

You could do it with custom development work – write your own iOS and/or Mac app that uses Apple’s Maps API, but this becomes a fairly substantial software project that you need a programmer to create. It’s not doable just using the Maps app on your device as a user.

You can set MAKEFLAGS in /etc/makepkg.conf to something like “-j8” (where “8” should be something like the number of cores you have or maybe number of cores minus one or two if you want to leave some CPU capacity available.

However, the build instructions for a specific package can override these defaults. You’d have to look at the resolve-davinci package files to see if it does that for some reason that might be important.

Mostly you’re paying so that never getting any resolution is someone else’s fault.