Yeah, look on the bright side.

I like that I can ask more nuanced questions without getting dumped to a web search, and I can have a back-and-forth conversation.

But timers and smart home actions are definitely less reliable and sometimes take absurdly long to respond (like 20-30 seconds p99).

Your experience is valid of course, but I never once have had the inclination to have a conversation with my phone. I'm not sure which of our experiences is more common.

It’s not a conversation like you’d have with a friend, it’s the type of interaction you’d have with a chatbot, just hands-free.

To give you an example, I was having coffee the other morning while unloading the dishwasher and asked the speaker if today was a good day to apply weed and feed on my lawn. This was not possible with the old assistant and was useful to me.

It seems like a lot (all?) of these use cases boil down to a dozen or so categorical requests. In this case, "what's today's weather forecast?".

MAWS is “Move to AWS”, the name of the internal campaign to get legacy services into a somewhat-retrofitted AWS environment. It was a single VPC at one point.

I just finished a nearly five year stint at amazon and didn't realize there was pre-maws stuff still around. Never encountered any of it. I was like two months from my yellow badge but, uh, life is really better outside amazon.

Congrats on finding life outside of AWS. Sucks to hear about all the turmoil going on in the US and at Amazon. I had a great time durning my tenure and almost boomoranged back.

many parts of AWS are not on AWS, and there's reasons to have bare metal but it's not as common and aws gives you good access in most cases.

Why does it exist?

Because some implementers will need or want to use it.

Reminds me of bacteria under a microscope.

I built a tower several years ago and it had CPU temp issues from the start. I RMA’d the cooler, reapplied the thermal paste a couple times, reassembled the whole build, etc. It wasn’t my main machine, but every time I sat down to use it the CPU would run hot and thermal-throttle. It’s an i9 with P/E cores, so I just chalked it up to Linux power management woes. A couple months ago I was on the brink of selling it for parts, but updated the BIOS as a Hail Mary. Totally fixed it.

I guess I did “ have a specific bug that needs fixed”; I just didn’t know it!

> Xcode…keeps around SDKs for a bunch of different OS's

Not a new problem, unfortunately. DevCleaner is commonly used to keep it under control: https://github.com/vashpan/xcode-dev-cleaner

Please contact your representative in Olympia and tell them to kill the bill that would exempt this footage from public record requests. It passed the Senate on Feb. 6.

This is the bill: https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=6002&Chamber=...

Find your reps: https://leg.wa.gov/legislators/

Washington State Legislative Hotline: 1-800-562-6000

To be fair, setting up a new iPhone (without restoring from backup) is a pretty long-winded process these days. You have to make about 50 decisions on various features, tap through numerous info screens, set up Face ID, Apple Pay, voice recognition, etc. etc. It feels like every team at Apple wants something in the onboarding flow.

All of those security related screens you listed is why I like Apple: security related things are local to secure enclave, not in cloud.

Keep in mind apple famously never fixes these bugs that let the phone be rooted via a 0click attack starting from imessage, which inexplicably runs with elevated privileges.

I mean they fix one when it gets known but keep the issue there, which is why there have been several of these.

And Apple sometimes re-asks you with minor point releases a selection of those questions even though you’ve already answered.

This often tells you a key has been invalidated due to updated security logic.

Interesting reasoning that I never thought of, though it doesn’t change the fact that this kind of stuff deters my non-technical family members from updating

Every update for them is like an exercise in anxiety and fear.

actually you can skip most of these, but get reduced functionality in return. You can skip faceID/touchID, unlock code, appleID. You can’t skip terms, some customization options and, data collection and privacy settings.

In theory you can use iPhone and iPad without apple account - basically as dumb phone. But of course you won’t get AppStore access.

I think the point is that you can skip all those, but it's still 50 screens. There's no "skip all and go directly to my home screen" button.

Autocorrect just cuts out for me pretty often, usually when I’m a couple sentences into a longer text entry. This is particularly annoying when using the Claude app or similar. The suggestion bar above the keyboard goes blank and I just stop getting any corrections.