Adam Demasi

I remember when a JetBrains dev advocate told me on Bluesky that they’re just trying to be helpful by enabling their built-in code completion model by default without asking. I disable it because it disrupts my thinking flow.

After installing Rider 2026.1, it reset to enabled. Thank you for knowingly ignoring my preference, I feel so very convenienced.

I know RAM is worth a lot right now but did you really need to desolder it off my SoC?

Still can’t believe that to delete an accidental screenshot, you don’t press the ❎, you press the ✅

@lapcatsoftware@mastodon.social I really do wish we were there. The world decided it’s easier to let people figure out computer literacy for themselves, and if anything goes wrong it’s your fault for not knowing the ever-changing rules nobody teaches properly (and legit companies regularly break).

The UK and Australia now make banks liable for losses to wire transfer scams, and surprise, now those banks bother to proactively prevent scams. Until this spreads to other countries/sectors, people will keep pasting infostealer scripts into Terminal. Needs so much more of an effort than a warning dialog. That just made them pivot to this, which is worse because it seems more convincing.

Really hope I’m wrong about this, but this app for speech-to-text transcription appears to be constantly using 200% - 430% CPU to do nothing other than write progress to a SQLite database and update its UI. The transcription is happening in Apple’s localspeechrecognition process.

I took a few samples, and it seems to be receiving a stream of progress updates from Speech.framework, then writing json of each transcript line to SQLite, then SwiftUI fires a re-render, where it goes and queries thousands of rows from SQLite and decodes all that json. Happens even if no transcript is being shown. What a mess.

This is an app with tons of features, plenty of models supported, etc, which sells at $29.99/year or $99.99 for lifetime (USD). Do they even realise their app is doing this?

If anyone has suggestions for decent apps that can batch transcribe with Apple’s model and export to .srt/.vtt, would really appreciate it.

Making my contribution to Apple’s 50th anniversary:

One of the things that got me so interested in the inner workings of iOS is the Debug podcast. Guy English and Rene Ritchie interviewed former engineers about everything from shipping System 7, to OS X, Intel, iOS, and Swift. It also includes some great interviews with jailbreakers, the Iconfactory with Twitterrific, and my favorite, the team behind Workflow, which became Shortcuts. If you like stories from inside Apple, this is the podcast for it.

It ran from 2012 to 2016 and had 83 episodes. It was produced under iMore, who got absorbed into the Future plc mothership that buys smaller publications and then deletes everything that made them unique.

Fortunately, I had all of it downloaded years ago. So here’s all of it as an archive, which you can subscribe to in your podcast app.

http://archive.org/details/debugshow

#apple #iphone #mac #archive

Finally, a Linux kernel fit for @alyx@ipv6.camp https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-IPv6-IPv4-Legacy-Knobs

It never made sense to me that the Mac Pro “had” to change away from this general design. A well-designed computer can be respected as art, but its primary purpose is still to be a computer. An all-in-one box that can be thrown in the car between gigs. Just plug in a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and your audio inputs, cameras, whatever it is you do with it. No fiddly external devices needed. The only complaints I ever heard are that it’s a bit heavy and the handles dig into your hands.

Post-Steve Jobs comeback Apple was able to pull off making their towers an art piece *and* a functional workhorse. Why did Tim Cook-era Apple overlook and fail to make this balance? They killed the market for the product and only just started to win some of those customers back with Apple Silicon, but not without making a mess of the driver infrastructure, and making discrete GPUs impossible. This is after they broke the cadence of yearly Mac Pro refreshes to make way for 6 years of the Thermal Corner™ cylinder model, making a bet (dual GPUs with custom cooling) that wasn’t that useful to its customers, and would overheat and die.

Why spend more to invest in the Mac platform when Dell would love to sell you a boring Windows tower that’s unopinionated and does what you need?

#apple #mac #macpro

How much longer do I need to deal with eBay listings with Al-generated 6-sentence marketing copy descriptions? It usually gets specs wrong, and often contradicts the product spec fields. It also discourages the seller from explaining the condition of the item.

Buyers don’t scroll through eBay looking to be sold on products themselves - they usually know what they want and are trying to find the best deal. To learn more about the product, we’ve always had Google. I’d be surprised if they can find any correlation between listings where the seller pressed the AI button, and an increased conversion rate.

I didn’t think this needed to be said, but don’t make up conspiracy theories about Linux projects complying with the age verification laws. You’re frustrated like we all are, but you’re directing it at the party that has little power other than to implement it as minimally as possible.

Instead, contact the lawmakers that passed this without listening to groups such as the EFF, who warned them about how it affects platforms other than Apple and Google’s. There’s still time before the laws come into effect.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/ab-1043s-internet-age-gates-hurt-everyone

#linux

Getting pretty bored of my usual programming podcasts, which I’ve listened to for years, being about nothing but agents lately. Not going to call out any names, but they’ve existed for many years and found plenty of content to talk about for 30-60 mins every week.

Your audience isn’t all that interested in yet another story of you being lazy and telling the agent to build something for you and it not getting it exactly right and you eventually having to fix things manually and it’s not very good but it’s close enough.

We all know how these tools work, this isn’t very engaging content.

Features nobody asked for: You can now subscribe to Legacy Update news as an Internet Explorer Web Slice. It adds a button to your Favorites bar that updates to show our latest news article.

Just click the green button in the toolbar (it’s green to show that Internet Explorer is really excited a website is actually using this feature), or the Add Web Slice link in our News section.

#legacyupdate

🌎⬆️ Legacy Update 1.13 improves handling of some edge cases you might run into while using Legacy Update. It includes 23 fixes and improvements (and plenty more small changes). https://legacyupdate.net/news/2026/03/16/legacy-update-1-13

#legacyupdate

There was a brief era where we wrote

background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, right top, from(#fff), color-stop(50%, #fff), to(#c6d3f7));

rather than

background: linear-gradient(left, #fff, #fff 50%, #c6d3f7);

and to this day I still want to know how WebKit landed on such verbose syntax. Was it to be easier to parse? Easier to teach? CSS is known for being a terse syntax, so the old syntax feels so out of place.

#css #css3 #html5

Trying Sublime Text again for the first time since 2013. I fully blame @codecat@meow.social for making me nostalgic about it. She already talked me into buying Sublime Merge 🙃

Still as fast as ever, slowly trying to replicate my setup from back then, but it will take some real adjustment to not expect all the luxuries of VSCode. Probably will use it as a secondary editor when I don’t need every IDE-like feature.

The community around it has definitely died down, and it still lacks UI it really should have like a visual preferences editor, but it all still works well enough.

Mozilla extended support for Firefox 115 ESR on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 and macOS 10.12 – 10.14 until August. It was due to end support last month, and they may consider extending it again.

Firefox ESRs are old versions that continue getting security updates, and Firefox 115 was released in 2023. https://support.mozilla.org/kb/firefox-users-windows-7-8-and-81-moving-extended-support

#firefox #mozilla #windows7

Wild how we can be in a RAM and storage shortage and Apple just has enough of it on hand to be like yeah, our monitors that stream up to 5K pixels back and forth will have 8GB RAM and a 128GB SSD. Economies of scale go brrr https://fxtwitter.com/aaronp613/status/2031790731095167233

The trick to block the Claude user on GitHub as a warning beacon is the gift that keeps on giving.

I’m not even that annoyed if people write code with AI, but letting the agent make commits for you feels like an admission that you haven’t reviewed its code.

A few weeks ago, a project I depend on broke some major behavior with a vibe coded commit. It’s been hard for me to trust repos with shamelessly LLM co-authored commits ever since.

(This post isn’t accusing Mermaid of anything, it’s just the latest repo I noticed it on)

Why is the latest Sublime Merge update on Windows not signed? The previous version is signed.

I really don’t like that Windows takes unsigned code as such a whatever thing. I don’t want to guess whether your binary is unsigned because you forgot, or you don’t like that it shows everyone your legal name (Notepad++), or if it’s unsigned because your server really has been hacked.

The more that comes out from the new owners of the sinking Titanic known as Stack Overflow, the more I have to congratulate the original founders for selling not a moment earlier or later than they did.

$1.8 billion in June 2021, just enough time for GPT3.5 to be shamelessly trained on their dataset ahead of ChatGPT in November 2022. One of the most trafficked websites ever (#60 on Alexa in April 2022), now a ghost town, and the best they can do is a new logo and an unwanted redesign.

It hurts to see this all burn, but what can you even do except laugh at this point.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/417394/logo-updates-to-stack-overflows-visual-identity

@genericperson@hachyderm.io The comparison is to Legacy Update, which works around bugs in the update service so you can install the ones that do officially exist. It’s pretty understood by this audience that official support is finite, especially with Apple and especially on PowerPC.

I think we can leave this conversation here, we’ve made our points

Just came across this GitHub post from a few weeks ago. Why are these features shipping only now? These controls have been overdue for well over 10 years.

I appreciate that they’re making these changes, but the vibe is so off on this post. Even starting from the title, it’s telling us slop is the new normal, and to solve it, you’re getting everything except a straightforward setting to disable random people pointing Copilot at your repo. They would rather you close all PRs from the public, than to just block Copilot PRs.

Sure, every reasonably popular repo got PRs from people doing it just for vanity. They were usually simple enough to tell. But as GitHub say themselves, “Today, a pull request can be generated in seconds”. That’s where it becomes deceptive, consuming time reviewing code that likely hasn’t been tested, and the submitter can’t explain any of the details of.

https://github.blog/open-source/maintainers/welcome-to-the-eternal-september-of-open-source-heres-what-we-plan-to-do-for-maintainers/

#github #microsoft #copilot #slop

Why isn’t there a Legacy Update for OS X? Well, that’s because it doesn’t need it! https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1r8900z/macos_which_officially_supports_27_year_old/

#vintagecomputing #vintageapple #macos

Something really, really makes me think someone was trying to prove a point about the lack of value of image models (other than fraud) by releasing a diagram this broken. Like, this went through a pull request and someone approved it. But it’s really hard to say with this company at the moment… https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/introduction-to-github/3-components-of-github-flow#git-flow

#microsoft #ai #slop

RE: @osnews@mstdn.social

People don’t like when I say the Microsoft Store is a very nice way to manage your apps/tools, but it does make your filesystem more tidy, and solves the problem of every app having their own idea of how updates should work. (Projects will continue to roll their own update systems and get it wrong. Refer to Notepad++ for a perfect example.)

One of the many gifts we got out of the Epstein files is details of Steve Sinofsky’s exit from Microsoft in 2012. We learn that the Surface RT was selling only 10% of the low-end of their predicted sales numbers, he was being pushed out, and Epstein was coaching him on negotiating an exit package. He leaked internal Microsoft email threads to Epstein, where they were discussing the $900 million write-off of unsold Surface RTs. He negotiated to exit with $14 million in stock, which we knew about at the time, but it’s absolutely wild to learn who was involved, and the inner workings of it. Windows 8 is the first product launch I properly remember. I was sick on the day of the Build 2011 keynote, so I stayed home and watched it. I ran all the betas and was excited for how Windows was changing. We were promised a new era with nicely-designed apps and a far better experience for developers, but they utterly flubbed all of it by being so confident in selfish things. They were so sure the entire 27-year-old Windows ecosystem would magically reconfigure itself around Windows 8-only full-screen apps. They were even more sure they could sell tablets that could ONLY run apps from the Store that didn’t exist yet - or ever. Of course it wasn’t going to work. Why would it? All of those RT tablets, which other brands also sold, are ewaste now. The Store is shut down, you can’t sideload apps because the licensing server is also gone. They pulled the plug on releasing Windows 10 for them. Without jailbreaking, you can’t do anything other than doodle in Paint or write a document in Word. It’s maddening that someone can cost the company almost $1 billion on a product ANYONE could have told you wasn’t it. It’s even more maddening they can get a $14 million+ reward for so obviously missing the mark. Yeah, there’s so much more that’s way more serious out of the files, but this one was relevant to my life. It adds another piece to the story of how I first learned that companies with all the capital in the world will get greedy and let you down. https://www.neowin.net/news/former-windows-chief-shared-internal-secrets-with-jeffrey-epstein-documents-reveal/ #epstein #windows