zerosleeps

Since 2010

"Background"

What the feckity feck is this?

Screenshot of Background Security Improvements section of macOS System Settings

What’s “background” about it if I have to restart? And why is it in “Privacy & Security”? Why is it not just a regular software update? It might be “enhanced in a future software update” anyway?

Ageless Linux

Strong agree with everything on the Ageless Linux home page.

Q: What if the AG actually fines you?

Then we will have accomplished something no amount of mailing list discussion could: a court record establishing what AB 1043 actually means when applied to the real world. Does “operating system provider” cover a bash script? Does “general purpose computing device” cover a Raspberry Pi Pico? Can you fine someone “per affected child” when no mechanism exists to count affected children? These are questions the legislature left unanswered. We’d like answers. A fine would be the fastest way to get them.

macOS release cadence

Jeff Johnson:

Sadly, I see no reason to believe that Apple has suddenly started to care again about software quality. The new year-based operating system numbering scheme is an overt sign and painful reminder to me that Apple has no intention to end the self-enforced yearly major OS update release schedule that is a primary cause of Apple’s software quality problems.

macOS system logs annoy other people too!

It’s always validating when you find other people on the internet who agree with you 🙂

Fifteen years ago, if an application started spinning or mail stopped coming in, you could open up Console.app and have reasonable confidence the app in question would have logged an easy to tag error diagnostic.

Now, those 600 processes and 2000 threads are blasting thousands of log entries per second, with dozens of errors happening in unrecognizable daemons doing thrice-delegated work.

In a response to the above, user ninkendo makes a terrific assertion:

Every event that’s scrolling by here, an engineer thought was a bad enough scenario to log it at Error level. There should be zero of these on a standard customer install.