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Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

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71–80 of 83 posts

Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't want tinkering or tinkerers. Apple is all about walled-off, locked-down, black box, just-works (when it does) etc. It's supposed to seem like magic. You're not supposed to tinker with magic, it makes it pedestrian. Apple as a brand is a lifestyle, a feeling. The slick, polished brand. Remember "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC"? PC is where you tinker, and there is screws and nuts and bolts and jargon and troublesh…

You're baffled because you appear to be uninformed and/or willfully ignorant. macOS is Unix-based and 90% functionally equivalent to Linux for software development and tinkering purposes. iOS, while less customizable than Android, is overall very good software for a phone. Apple hardware is superior across the board, especially for durability. Meanwhile, I'm baffled why any techie would voluntarily use an OS that for…

I once tried to put an mp3 on a relative's iPhone. I tried connecting it to our PC, and do it with iTunes, but it turned out I couldn't do it. Or it was some ridiculous contortion performance. I just told my relative that he shouldn't ask me to help with Apple devices. If you want one apple device you have to replace all your infra with apple devices, and learn to live in the walls built by apple and forget about files or any kind of agency independent of your apple overlords.

Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're baffled because you appear to be uninformed and/or willfully ignorant. macOS is Unix-based and 90% functionally equivalent to Linux for software development and tinkering purposes. iOS, while less customizable than Android, is overall very good software for a phone. Apple hardware is superior across the board, especially for durability. Meanwhile, I'm baffled why any techie would voluntarily use an OS that for…

As someone who came up in the Slashdot M$ era, if nothing else the PR and communication style of Satya is a masterclass is delivering a message to the public. The dude presents like a Zen master. The message is baffling and the strategy is nonexistent, but people think there’s a new gentle Microsoft. Somehow angry Europeans (at least in this thread) are running into the embrace of Windows as the defender of the tinke…

Windows is enshittifying too but at least carries some of the pre-walled-gardens mentality of computing, when users expected a bit more agency. I personally use Linux, but I also know it's not practical for average regular people like my family members. I tried. Unfortunately when they run into some problem they demand to get back their windows. It's not like they never have trouble with windows, but they are used to that shape of trouble and don't really see it as unusual or even if they are annoyed by it, they feel like it's just the nature of things like a muddy rainy day every once in a while.

Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a self-regulating loop that Apple users quickly learn not to "draw outside the lines" and just use the thing as designed and intended by Apple. If you use stuff like AdGuard, custom DNS etc, that's tinkerer tier stuff. A good Apple user either watches the ads or pays not to see them.

I haven’t seen a YouTube ad on my machine in years. I download all the videos that I watch and skip through the ads that content creators bake in. I control my dns and network to restrict what can get to my browser and other apps. I have a highly customized Bash environment (I see no reason to switch to zshell when I’ve got Homebrew). But paint the nerds who like MacOS and the wonderful third-party app ecosystem of d…

If it works, great. My comment was aimed at a person who seemed to want more freedom and troubleshooting possibility.

Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't want tinkering or tinkerers. Apple is all about walled-off, locked-down, black box, just-works (when it does) etc. It's supposed to seem like magic. You're not supposed to tinker with magic, it makes it pedestrian. Apple as a brand is a lifestyle, a feeling. The slick, polished brand. Remember "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC"? PC is where you tinker, and there is screws and nuts and bolts and jargon and troublesh…

> As a European I'm always baffled how Apple got so much market share among the actual techies and power users in the US. I know exactly how this happened, I was there. It filled a gap for a practical desktop UNIX when none existed. In the old days, there many flavors of proprietary UNIX, like Solaris, IRIX, HPUX, AIX, et al plus a few open source versions like FreeBSD and early Linux. The early Internet was a purely…

I think thats about the first era of Apple. They faded in the background in the consumer mind from the mid 90s to the mid 00s. It was the iPod/iPhone/iPad trilogy that brought Apple back to the mainstream. In ~2002 for regular people Apple and Mac had a dusty sound, like Commodore.

Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#75
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a European I'm always baffled how Apple got so much market share among the actual techies and power users in the US. You do it to yourself by buying this stuff. It's for people who don't want to spend one second thinking about actual technical issues. Why only the US? I'm in Europe and I've switched from Linux to Mac OS as my daily driver when I got tired of waiting for the mythical "linux on the desktop year".…

Ubuntu may have issues, but at least the logs are there and you have freedom to open up the hood and reconfigure things as you wish. This is effort but we are in a thread discussing the problem of opaque errors and the impossibility of troubleshooting. Yes troubleshooting is tinkering. It is effortful and nerdy and sweaty, not slick and effortless.

> the logs are there and you have freedom to open up the hood and reconfigure things as you wish

I don't know. There's a lot of friction like gnome hiding or removing configuration options, kde becoming a third class citizen, different packaging systems every 2 years... app stores being pushed instead of apt-get install...

The command line and server side stuff is fine of course, I wouldn't dream of running anything but linux for that.

Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#76
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu may have issues, but at least the logs are there and you have freedom to open up the hood and reconfigure things as you wish. This is effort but we are in a thread discussing the problem of opaque errors and the impossibility of troubleshooting. Yes troubleshooting is tinkering. It is effortful and nerdy and sweaty, not slick and effortless.

> the logs are there and you have freedom to open up the hood and reconfigure things as you wish I don't know. There's a lot of friction like gnome hiding or removing configuration options, kde becoming a third class citizen, different packaging systems every 2 years... app stores being pushed instead of apt-get install... The command line and server side stuff is fine of course, I wouldn't dream of running anything…

True, snap annoys me as well, but it's possible to switch packages to apt. And it's just going to get easier to customize using AI agents.

Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#77
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the logs are there and you have freedom to open up the hood and reconfigure things as you wish I don't know. There's a lot of friction like gnome hiding or removing configuration options, kde becoming a third class citizen, different packaging systems every 2 years... app stores being pushed instead of apt-get install... The command line and server side stuff is fine of course, I wouldn't dream of running anything…

True, snap annoys me as well, but it's possible to switch packages to apt. And it's just going to get easier to customize using AI agents.

Tried late last year to set up a new linux server with the help of "AI". Unfortunately it couldn't decide what distribution it's talking about in spite of me specifying it in the prompt. And when it got it right it mixed LTS Ubuntu versions.

So... i don't know about "AI". Might have to still write the config files by hand.

Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#78
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, snap annoys me as well, but it's possible to switch packages to apt. And it's just going to get easier to customize using AI agents.

Tried late last year to set up a new linux server with the help of "AI". Unfortunately it couldn't decide what distribution it's talking about in spite of me specifying it in the prompt. And when it got it right it mixed LTS Ubuntu versions. So... i don't know about "AI". Might have to still write the config files by hand.

People have widely different experiences regarding this. All I can say is that Claude is working great for me for doing drudgery sysadmin stuff but I'm also somewhat experienced in these things and that helps in telling it specifically what I want. I think it depends on what model you tried, but also I know people are tired of being told that it's about the model or skill issue, so I'll just note that this is your experience and I'll just carry on living my own experience which is working well.

Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're baffled because you appear to be uninformed and/or willfully ignorant. macOS is Unix-based and 90% functionally equivalent to Linux for software development and tinkering purposes. iOS, while less customizable than Android, is overall very good software for a phone. Apple hardware is superior across the board, especially for durability. Meanwhile, I'm baffled why any techie would voluntarily use an OS that for…

I once tried to put an mp3 on a relative's iPhone. I tried connecting it to our PC, and do it with iTunes, but it turned out I couldn't do it. Or it was some ridiculous contortion performance. I just told my relative that he shouldn't ask me to help with Apple devices. If you want one apple device you have to replace all your infra with apple devices, and learn to live in the walls built by apple and forget about fil…

K. For future reference, you can transfer & play mp3s in a variety of ways on iPhone, such as VLC + Dropbox/Drive/iCloud/etc.

Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're baffled because you appear to be uninformed and/or willfully ignorant. macOS is Unix-based and 90% functionally equivalent to Linux for software development and tinkering purposes. iOS, while less customizable than Android, is overall very good software for a phone. Apple hardware is superior across the board, especially for durability. Meanwhile, I'm baffled why any techie would voluntarily use an OS that for…

Apple sends tens of megabytes of telemetry from first network connection and regularly: https://sneak.berlin/20210202/macos-11.2-network-privacy/ None of this able to be turned off, the boot volume is read-only. Can only be deactivated by jumping through hoops.

Yeah, that stuff is not great by any means either. Still, it's not as bad as Windows's telemetry, and it's not OS-native advertising like Windows, and it can be substantially mitigated with firewall software (call it a bit of tinkering, if you will).
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