zerosleeps

More Australians need to know about this because it’s bullshit and it sets a dangerous precedence. Does nobody in government understand the internet? You can’t hide things from anyone - the technology and entire premise of the internet relies on everything being publicly available. You definitely can’t hide stuff from a subset of users.

And why is it always Google that takes the heat for this kind of thing? Do these people not know that Google doesn’t host the “bad stuff”, it just makes it findable? This is like putting a padlock on the phone book - you can still dial the phone numbers!

I don’t know what we’re supposed to do about this. Write to your Member of Parliament I guess.

Also, The Hon Anika Wells MP is our Minister for Communications and Minister for Sport?? I don’t think you could pair up two industries that are further apart from each other than those two. Jack of all trades, master of none…

Jake Archibald writes:

You, the reader, encounter a tiny number within some prose. This indicates to you that I, the writer, have something more to say on this topic. And, for your inconvenience, I’ve put it way down at the bottom of the page.

The choice is yours: do you skip over it, and stay in the flow of the article, or do you set off on a side-quest to discover the extra wisdom I have to offer?

Yes! Either put what you have to say in the body of your content or don’t say it at all!

A refurbished one, but still…

Previously on zerosleeps.com: first post in what has become a series, second post, and third post.

Shortly before starting this post my MacBook had been up for 9 hours and 8 minutes. Activity Monitor reports that mediaanalysisd has used 6 hours 22 minutes of CPU time (whatever that means in today’s multi-core multi-threaded world) and has read 38.69 GB of data from storage.

log stats --process mediaanalysisd --last 9h reports 1.8 million errors, 93% of which are “Embedding version: 0 not supported, skip embedding publishing”. That’s an average of 55 errors a second when you divide one thing by the other.

And all of this is with “Images” and “Movies” disabled in System Settings → Spotlight, by the way. At the weekend, I moved my Apple Photos library off my Mac just to see if that had some gremlin but it made no difference. (Again, the files mediaanalysisd errors on are never in my Photos library, but I’m trying anything I think of.)

And what would I gain even if it wasn’t behaving like this? Buggered if I know. I’m not playing with Spotlight exceptions any more - whenever I add an exclusion the thing just gets fixated on another location, so I’ve disabled my entire drive from being indexed. Spotlight is now useless, which makes my Mac a little bit more useless too.

Now look, bugs happen. I’m a developer and I’ve written some doozies. But that has never really been my issue with all of this - my issues are lack of control over my own device, and the complete absence of official support. Read my previous posts and tell me what sensible options remain. A visit to my nearest Apple Store where they’ll tell me to try a new user profile (done that) or reinstall (done that) or some other nonsense that will never explain the cause? No thanks.

Between all of this, an awful experience I had with HomeKit a few weeks ago (which I didn’t blog about but the outcome was the same - something wasn’t working and Apple’s “it just works” arrogance doesn’t make it possible to find out what’s going on when it does not just work), the shitshow that is “Apple Intelligence” (does anyone want that - I don’t), and the trust-destroying decision this weekend to use Apple Wallet to push a notification advertising a movie to customers, I need to look around and see what else is out there.

So I’ve ordered a 4-year old Thinkpad T490s just to see. I am under no illusion - I’ve been here before. macOS on it’s worst day is almost certainly better than Windows or Linux on their very best days, but we should poke our heads over the parapet every now and again, right? I have no reservations about the hardware: AUD$400 for a slightly used flagship laptop with 32GB of RAM, touchscreen, a plethora of modern ports, and status-lights-my-gawd-I-miss-status-lights is astonishing.

It’ll come down to the software. Stay tuned.

Well I’ve run out of things to try and people to ask. I have even gone as far as rebuilding my Mac from bare metal and carefully restoring files. I’ve checked permissions, I’ve checked extended attributes, I’ve looked for patterns. Apart from it being the same 20-ish image files, they have nothing in common. Yet these 20 files are causing mediaanalysisd (and in turn the mds stuff that drives Spotlight) to hammer my CPU and thrash my SSD during system idle.

I have contacted Apple, but the only path I could find to do that was a form that gave me a text box with a limit of about 500 characters. I am under no illusion - that has been yeeted into a black hole and will never be seen by a human. Certainly not one who has ever heard of mediaanlysisd.

I posted my summary and asked my questions in the Apple Support Community and got some well meaning responses, but it was waving-the-rubber-chicken stuff, and even if they had worked I still wouldn’t have a root cause.

I asked the author of the Mastodon thread I mentioned in my first post - which is the only instance of the error message that I’m interested in that can be found by Kagi or Google - if they ever found a solution, and they didn’t. It sounds like they might have had a different root problem from me anyway, but come on, macOS must have hundreds of millions of users. We are not the only people with this issue.

So now I don’t fucking know. It’s not like it’s causing any functional problems that I’m aware of. Apart from probably killing the lifespan of my SSD (it’s reading and writing tens of gigabytes an hour) but this has really triggered something in me. I am not in control of the tool I use to make my living and that is not acceptable. It has also brought to the fore the complete and absolute disinterest Apple has in me. Those folk in the Apple Support Community don’t work for Apple: Apple has outsourced “support” to their own customers at no cost to themselves, and it doesn’t work.

Somewhere inside those towering walls that were built with help from the tens of thousands of dollars I’ve spent on Apple products, there is at least one tremendously talented developer who knows exactly what my problem is and would love to help me and/or fix the underlying bug. Engineer-to-engineer. I could give them anything they asked for and try anything they wanted. But those folk will never know I exist.

Probably because some fucking middle manager has decided it’s more important to piss about with “a stunning new design” instead.

I was so confident I’d found a workaround and tamed macOS in my last post but I’m frustrated to say it is not so. Everything appeared fine for a day or two, but at the start of this week I woke my displays up and found mediaanalysisd chewing through my electricity and apparently generating nothing except huge amounts of errors in the system log. It’s been like that ever since.

I used my fs_usage trick to try and see what it’s problem is this time, and yep, it’s hitting the same few random image files hundreds of times a minute (but not files I added to Spotlight’s exclusion list last time).

I have no idea what value mediaanalysisd brings me when it is working, but disabling it requires jumping through some hoops that I’m not prepared to do on my production Mac.

I also started down the path of trying to see what all the “<private>” stuff in the macOS system log is hiding, but the steps required for that are just as awful.

I don’t feel like I own this computer anymore.