Viewing profile — signal11

I recently got myself a Lenovo P-series Thinkpad to test something. My main machine's an MBP, so I was prepared for some pain, but honestly even an old Windows 10 box feels less la…

For the MS folk reading this: native zsh on Windows, please? WSL2 is great, but native POSIX is even better. Of course it’s a big undertaking, but it makes Windows a first-class de…

Does this explain the numerous password reset messages I’ve received over the past year?

Yes, I was wondering about this. Old iPads running iPad OS 15 received updates last month . So even an iPad Air 2 from 2014 could receive updates in 2026. The big issue with old iP…

I was using poetry pretty happily before uv came along. I’d probably go back. Note that uv is fast because — yes, Rust, but also because it doesn’t have to handle a lot of legacy t…

If you believe the rumor mill, Touch-enabled Macs may launch this year[1]. [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/08/apple-planning-macbook-...

> There's so much extra padding and rounding now I don’t like it either, but I wonder if that’s to support the touch-enabled Macs that the rumor mill is reporting about right now. …

Liquid Glass is Apple’s Windows Vista. They had a ton of fun with Vista in their “switch” ads, if the Windows team were in better shape they could have a field day just screenshott…

The EU’s tech regulation has always been a bit “off”, like they don’t really understand tech or how to encourage improved behaviour. Eg cookie popups, those are a blight and it’s t…

Last I checked, they were working on interop so you can move your keys from one provider to another without creating CSV files or equivalent[1]. However from my PoV — if the user o…

Shafting open source projects that implement your spec is not okay, and is terrible optics. Tech journalists should ask the FIDO Alliance if they’re just Google+Apple+Microsoft in …

Yes, UIDocumentPickerViewController is 10+ years old at this point. There’s also a similar photos picker (PHPicker) which is especially good from 2023 on. Signal uses this for inst…

If you work with macOS or iOS users, you won’t be super surprised to see lots of “curly quotes”. They’re part of base macOS, no extra software required (I cannot remember if they n…

I’ve been using em-dashes since high school — publishing the school paper and everything. I remain slightly bemused by people discovering em-dashes for the first time thanks to LLM…

>> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all > I can almost guarantee this …

Even “only” information funnels have value if they seek out valuable info, filter, curate. In reality some funnels in this context mutate the message they’re supposed to pass on :-…

In markets where Whatsapp is entrenched, it’s already begun to enshittify. They have ads and spam already (sorry, no-consent messages from businesses). This isn’t even new. [0] The…

Is it practical to pay BT or HyperOptic to run fibre to you? If enough households commit to a contract they’ll sometimes do it for free.

Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista. If you’re from Apple and reading this, my feedback is pretty succinct: “I don’t recommend others upgrade. I wish I…

I agree with the “enforce competition laws” sentiment, but in this context, enforced naively , all it’ll do is entrench the dominant browser engine, Blink, even more across the mob…

Many people forget — Google once used to penalise sites with some abusive behaviours, so webmasters had a vested interest in having decent web pages if they wanted good rankings. S…

Design patterns are language independent, but a lot of the ones many Java devs focus on are a bit meh. In a world with only assembly language, for instance, it’s a bit like making …

I agree. Perl made sense as a “step up” in the world of *sh and awk. Also the culture wasn’t hostile to me as a newcomer. The Perl books I read encouraged not writing overly terse,…

You’re entitled to your opinion. All I’ll say is that in the context of the bald fact (French has an older literary tradition than English) presented by a previous commenter, “unde…

This is a great example of moving the goalposts re the original (false) point that a previous comment made about French having a longer literary history than English. If you’ve got…