that's a common issue. I worked on a Japanese product where most of the words were 2 characters and they had made horizontal menus that fit 5 buttons across (mobile). You can imagine that didn't work with anything other than Chinese. Yea, they had to redsign.
In the hope that someone else has the same issue as I do and knows a solution - for me, my eyes, I have a double image. It moves. I have 12 pairs of glasses I've gotten from 3 "doctors" and several visits to places like Warby Parker, Jins, ZOff.
In all cases, all the doctor did was stick me in the machine, read off the numbers, give me some glasses. They work 10% of the time. I don't mean one in 10 doctors gave me good glasses. I mean on Tuesday pair #3 works. On Wednesday pair #7 worked at 10am but then stopped working pair #11 worked at 5pm. More often than not, no pairs work.
I feel like I need some kind of adjustable lenses (I'm imagining something steampunk with multiple lenses or a dial so I can dial in what works AT THIS MOMENT) but AFAICT no such thing exists
Does any one else have this issue?
Note: I have no pain
Anecdotes
(1) A doctor in SF put me in the machines, measured my eyes, made me some glasses. I come back a week later and using them is worse than not using them. I tell them they don't work. They get upset and reprimand me. Finally they give in. Make a new appointment. A week later doctor sees me, makes a new prescription, orders glasses, a week later the same, using them is worse then not.
Again they get angry an berate me. They give my some BS about I should take them home and let your eyes get used to them. I respond, if that's the case then the doctor could not make a prescription with his machine because I'd need to take the machine home to "let my eyes get used them" before he'd know if it was working.
Anyway, they finally let me make another appointment. the doctor measures and claims he knows what must have happened (didn't tell me) and orders another pair. A week later I check. These ones are marginally better than than not wearing anything AT THAT MOMENT. It take them home, every time I try to use them they're worse than not using them. (oh, and they apparently charged the eye insurance $999)
(2) My previous SF doctor I had a similar experience in that their glasses didn't work. They didn't berate me. They re-ordered once. I was shy and didn't complain the second time even though they were no good and I never used them.
(3) I've bought lots of glasses at Jins (Japan) - They have fully automated machines for measurement. I've got 2 pairs from them that help the most often, though not always.
(4) Last time I bought glasses I was at ZOff in Japan (because the wait for Jins was too long). The "doctor" their claimed my eyes were fairly good - meaning the images are clear, it's only the double vision that's the issue (letters look like there's a ghost 15% as bright/dark) about 4cm down from the actual letters)
When I'm walking around S.E. Asia and it's 90 degrees and humid I care about every extra gram.
Even an Air is too heavy IMO compared to say an LG Gram. But, I need the specs and the screen so I lug around a MacBook Pro 16" at 4.6lbs - often I have to lug around 2, my corp one and my personal one.
Given an iPad Pro 13" is 1.3lbs they "could" (for some definition of "could") make a 16" device with keyboard closer to 2 lbs.
As others have said, they do this on purpose. It's the same with memory. I'd probably switch from a Pro to an Air if I could get 64gig ram (for LLM work) but they'd rather charge me $4800 instead of ~$3200 (guessing the price given the top end 32gig Air is $2800)
It's frustrating because I'd prefer a lighter device. In fact, even the Air isn't that light compared to its competition.
I'd happily pay +$500 ($5300) for Macbook Air PRO if it was effectively the same specs as Macbook Pro but 1.5lbs lighter.
I have absolutely no problem paying a premium for an upgraded display. The problem is that Apple does not offer that option for the MacBook Air.
The MacBook Pro has an amazing screen, which is why I bought the MBP. But the MBP compromises increased weight (which I don’t want) in exchange for more performance (that I simply don’t need). And we know this compromise is not needed to host a better display, as evidenced by the existence of the iPad Pro.
Don’t get me wrong, the MacBook Pro is a fantastic product and I don’t regret buying it. It just feels like a huge missed opportunity on Apple’s part that their only ultra-lightweight laptop is so far behind in display tech vs their other non-laptop products (like the iPad Pro which is lighter still, just crippled due to iOS limitations).
I would gladly pay even more than the price of my MacBook Pro for a MacBook Air with a screen on par with the iPad Pro or MacBook Pro. Or even for an iPad Pro that runs OSX!
A pro will still be a good 2.5x the speed compared to the Air due to memory bandwidth. It would be rather silly to spring for that amount of memory for that purpose, anything more than say a 14B param model will be painful.
> it's amazing to use Claude to prompt an app into existence, and pretty frustrating when that app doesn't work right and Claude is all thumbs fixing the problem.
Such an in interesting sentence. App that doesn't work doesn't seem like it's yet come into existence.
This has been my (limited) experience so far. I haven't been able to get an AI/LLM to help me build an app. Even React apps it fails at. I have been able to get an LLM to help with coding questions similar to Stack Overflow questions though (though not always)
lol agreed, also I’m of the opinion that if you want a working app it’s much more frustrating to debug a heap of code generated by an AI than it is to build yourself (maybe with the help of AI, if you really need it). at least with the latter if you really built it yourself you understand all the components (to a certain abstraction point at least)
I've made a lot of apps with claude.e.g I made a pretty complex swiftui app recently even though I don't know swift. Usually you have to help Claude debug them and sometimes point it in the right direction.
Since the vast majority of Swift and SwiftUI documentation online is outdated, I've found that concatenating the best of "what's new in Swift 5.x / 6.x" blogs then asking it to organize that into a prompt for itself, then adding that to the system prompt, helps the LLM produce idiomatic and current code.
While these changes may require "new ways of thinking" in humans, the LLM seems to have these conceptual approaches embedded already thanks to other languages that did these things earlier. The what's new just shows it the syntax for these concepts in Swift.
I tend to agree but, playing devil's advocate, is this true for other roles? Does a movie director need to know how to build sets? How to sew costumes? How to use Blender/Maya/Houdini? My manager can code, used to code, sometimes does code, but they aren't familiar with their team's current work.
Like imagine you were a coding manager 10 years ago with AI experience. Sometime over the last 10 years your team does AI infra. You, as a manager and as an IC, have zero AI experience (you've never trained a model, never used a trained model, never using any of the various AI frameworks). Are you still okay to manage this team or should you be replaced with someone who does have that experience?
Toyota calls it the gemba walk. Managers need to see how the factory is running with their own eyes. Not just live behind a desk and listen to what they hear in meetings.
A movie director can see the sets with their own eyes. But you can't see the state of a software codebase without reading and understanding the code, and the most surefire way to do that is to try to write something, even just documentation.
You don't assess the state of your software by walking around the office and looking at hands on keyboards. You look at the codebase.
> I tend to agree but, playing devil's advocate, is this true for other roles? Does a movie director need to know how to build sets? How to sew costumes? How to use Blender/Maya/Houdini?
I don't know that much about movie making, but my understanding is that there would be managers and/or leads within each specialty, who are (among other things) managing the interaction between their specialty and the director / producers.
That seems pretty comparable to what's being discussed here.
In any industry, if you want a team to work well, you have to have someone with both authority and hands-on experience who’s responsible for providing day-to-day guidance. Sometimes that person is called a “supervisor” or “tech lead” instead of “manager”, although this typically implies some division of responsibilities as well; no reason the person providing guidance necessarily has to be the same person reporting to leadership or hiring and firing.
> I tend to agree but, playing devil's advocate, is this true for other roles? Does a movie director need to know how to build sets? How to sew costumes? How to use Blender/Maya/Houdini? My manager can code, used to code, sometimes does code, but they aren't familiar with their team's current work.
Many directors started in other roles in the movie industry, typically as writers, PAs, or other subspecialties. Chad Stahelski was a stuntman and stunt coordinator before he started directing John Wick, and it really shows.
I think the clear distinction is between someone who understands a part of the job, and someone who is good at part of the job. If you don't understand how costuming works, as a director, you're going to have a hard time getting good costumes, but by no means does that mean you're able to pinch hit in that role. I personally believe that it's difficult to replace hands on experience as a way to truly understand something.
In software engineering, I think there's a huge gap between managers who worked in some other industry and transferred over, versus having previously been an engineer, even a mediocre one. Knowing how the sausage is made is hard to replace.
Though the fact that directors have certain biases from how they working into the role does also highlight an issue with this kind of effect: when you have technical leads or project managers on a big multi-disciplinary project, they will have a natural tendency to favor the areas they are more familiar with, and bias the decision-making and planning of the project around that. It can be difficult to step back and optimize for the project/system as a whole.
Oh god please don't get me started on Airplay bugs.
I honestly have some work to do this month.
"Hey, let's rewrite the framework again and not do any regression testing or test against old implementations or see what happens with any codec that is not exactly what we are expecting for any reason." - Airplay devs, every year.
As someone who works on both I don't notice a difference. Mac sucks just as much as Windows (or visa versa). There's things each does better and things each does worse.
Once people start saying "forced to use [...] for work" you've got to analyse platforms from a different angle.
Namely: How good is this platform after Corporate IT cheaps out on hardware, and loads as much 'security' crapware as possible?
On Windows, there are incredibly cheap laptops available, and corporate IT has loads of crapware like antivirus and crowdstrike and profiles and enterprise endpoint management to slow it down.
On Mac, there aren't any cheap hardware options, and there's a medium amount of "security" crapware.
On Linux, corporate IT let you manage it yourself, because they don't know how to. They can't develop the skills either, because anyone who can manage Linux gets promoted out the set-up-new-users-laptops department.
Great point. I use both Mac and windows. Love my windows pc, but I have certainly used corporate windows laptops that make me want to throw them out the window - minutes to boot, minutes to open anything, etc. between Mac and windows, they've each got their pros and cons but nothing that would make me choose one over the other.
The answer with any discussion of this nature is to immediately disregard any and all answer that doesn't come in, unprompted, with an explanation.
Which is about 90% of the comments here. Not a joke. I have counted 18 and see only 2 with specific gripes. Worthless comment section. (Sorry, but I did include yours too)
I was 16 when I first met the first big "Mac is better than Windows" argument in person. I asked why, and they mentioned a number of things that didn't feel relevant to the people at the table, but the one that stood out was a particular feature that was indeed quite useful. Well, I didn't know how to respond at the time, but as soon as I got home, I checked with windows and the feature was right there.
I don't think they were wrong for their preference. In fact, back then there was a lot of major differences in the workflow for these OS that isn't as big nowadays, specially if you're someone who can actually use google for more than 20 seconds. But the interaction proved to me the importance of being able to back your stance, because, if you don't, you may as well be just another 16 year old idiot with 0 technical or practical knowledge of the stuff that dictated your preference. They don't learn how to resolve their problems with them either, if they hide the reasons from others. So, again, worthless - take up screen space that could have better comments, while informing nothing and helping no one.
You alluded to this but I wanted to emphasize that a lot of this is just legacy baggage in terms of reputation that windows will have to carry for a long time
I think that when people talk about how shitty windows is compared to Mac/apple they are talking about stuff that was probably true at some point
For many, memories of using windows include blue screens of death, programs crashing often and windows itself crashing often. On top of that, windows was a cesspool for a hot minute while Microsoft got its act together and put better security in place to address malware as the internet got popular.
These are obviously not the same, not nearly as bad as they were back then
I mostly enjoyed windows, and to a lesser degree Linux until a few years ago when an employer made me switch to Mac - which for the sake of my brain’s plasticity I readily embraced
The main differences I noticed at the time were: a much better window manager, a much saner way of installing applications, an overall hard to explain smoothness along with the ability to bring over some of my favorite little Linux tools
Fast forward to today and it’s really just a matter of preference. Mac helped Linux a ton, but nowadays they are all so customizable that you can more or less achieve what you’re trying to do most of the time on any of them
Today, I use all three out of necessity - Mac and Linux for work, windows for gaming, but I can surely tell you that overall my best decision was to just not get involved in holy wars lol
What did it for me was a period of: “I see you are delivering an important presentation. Let me force install an update and reboot three times. Right now.” I’ve spent too long watching reboots to have Windows in my life for my limited time on the planet.
Yeah one wart about Windows is that you always have to lookup these weird registry hacks after getting a fresh install. Disabling this automatic reboot was one of them. Otherwise that would make your computer completely useless for things like
- gaming
- watching movies
- presentations
- anything where you want to let some calculation run unattended for a few hours
- anything where you really don't want your PC to shut down unexpectedly while you’re working…
Well that covers pretty much everything I guess.
And to add insult to injury, Windows 10 for a while took away the ability to Update & shut down. It’d go into some sort of hybrid sleep so you’d keep getting a reboot prompt right after starting up again.
Damn you're worked up. Some of my gripes with Windows come down to peripherals, where I'll spend a lot of time troubleshooting why my bluetooth device or speakers or mic don't work. There also seems to be no way to bypass using a password or PIN on startup without changing the registry. I'd like my computer to just stay on at all times so I can remotely connect to it, but what do you know, a forced update caused it to restart, and because it requires a passeord to get to the desktop I have no way of getting Parsec to connect. Yeah I tried to disable automatic updates but nothing seems to stick. Why is the mic on my PS5 controller connecting and disconnecting ten times a second. Ok let me just try to unpair the controller, oh it just... won't unpair.
Are the ps5 controllers supported without having to buy software? If not, then I sarcastically say "I'm shocked that a competitor's peripheral works poorly on their product"
Macs come working. When something breaks, it is impossible to fix, because they didn’t include a button to fix it. But it comes working!
Windows PCs come broken out of the box, but the user adapts and eventually gains a pile of workarounds, which is sort of like the windows equivalent of a UX.
Until fairly recently, I would have agreed, but Microsoft is actively enshittifying Windows now by pushing things like cloud-only logins and ads in Start while simultaneously removing configurability (e.g. vertical taskbar was removed in Win11). I'm not a fan of macOS, but at least Apple is not all in on ads the way Microsoft seems to be these days.
Everything that I described above, I observed personally. The no-vertical-taskbar thing has been an open issue in the tracker for many years; if it works now, I'm glad to hear it.
Regarding local accounts, it is supported by Windows, but the installer will straight up refuse to let you create such an account now (so you have to install using a cloud account and log into it at least once to create a local account). Previously, there used to be workarounds like installing without Internet, or certain incantations you could do in the "recovery" terminal during installation, but they have been killed off one by one. If you haven't seen this yourself, it just means that you haven't installed Windows 11 recently.
Just to let you know i am booting a VM to install windows 11 while recording with OBS studio. Check this space for updates. I'll admit if i am wrong.
looks like this is correct. I didn't have to do this before, so there's some software switch in the iso i have that triggered a "must update" - which makes sense.
Not to shift the goalposts, but you can disable the microsoft login after you set it up. I'm 99% sure that apple and google both require you to give them a username and password, as well.
I am getting the 24H2 disk image now. The one i was using is `Win11_22H2_English_x64v2.iso` - which is real old. It makes sense to me that microsoft wouldn't want you to use an old installer without being connected to the internet.
The download is probably going to take longer than my edit timeout, if so and anything changes about my comment i'll make a reply
> I'm 99% sure that apple and google both require you to give them a username and password, as well.
I have no idea about Google, but with Apple, they require you to create a local account when installing. After that, the Settings app will pester you to link it to your Apple ID, but this can be ignored, and only shows up when you are in Settings on your user account page.
i installed windows 11 without a cloud login. Without a CD key. I actually ran the windows installer 3 times since you commented and i first replied. So i kinda lost track of what it was doing this time - i didn't notice it said it was going to reboot before the screen went black, i missed that it was waiting for input with the language selection. But i didn't edit the video at all, so you can scrub around and make sure. Ignore my dig at the end, like i said, i installed windows 3 times.
https://github.com/memstechtips/UnattendedWinstall
you put the XML file in the iso. well, that's what i did. they have an automated thing that makes a bootable USB stick but i don't need that. I actually have a microsoft account because i use the xbox for windows and copilot. I don't use it to log in to windows - and even if i reinstalled i'd use the regular ISO and log in and then dis-associate my account with my windows install after it finished installing, as microsoft says you can do inside the installer
I gotta say i completely understand microsoft doing this, and had i been in the voting meeting where this was decided i probably would have voted to have the default be "cloud login" - the average person isn't going to be able to do anything if the forget their password, short of taking the computer to best buy to have it wiped and reinstalled (or whatever). in the video link, you can see it ask me security questions, which we all probably know are a poor way to ensure continuous access.
So this "drop an xml file on the iso" is proof positive that i take full responsibility for the data on this operating system - if i forget my password and my security questions, i'm locked out. period. Microsoft can't help because i told them i was smarter than the average user.
The question isn't the default but rather the ability to opt out. And no, "drop XML on your ISO image" is not an acceptable bar for that.
But, more importantly, it's not a given that this will continue working onwards. As things are, there have already been three different ways to force the installer into letting you use a local account, the most recent one of which involved using the recovery terminal when booted from ISO - that's already way past most users. And yet Microsoft methodically killed each and every method every time, so I fully expect your suggested workaround to stop working. They seem to be very determined to ensure that no "non-enterprise" version of Windows lets people do that.
what do you reckon it costs microsoft to support people that "opted out"? what amount of legal boilerplate would indemnify Microsoft against lawsuits over lost data because someone chose to opt out?
If the only option is to modify the installer the only people who are going to opt out are the sort of people that understand that microsoft has no responsibility to our data, and pretending they do is silly. It's pure CYA from Microsoft.
If you personally don't like it, then use their automated thumb-drive creation tool (at that same link) to make a new bootable USB stick that installs with the "opt out". I modified the ISO because i was installing on a Virtual Machine. If i was gunna do it on metal i'd use a USB stick because all my optical drives are USB and not that fast.
I don't think we disagree, i think we're coming at this from different sides. I don't expect microsoft to spend more money than they have to.
I need to remind here that the very notion of a cloud account didn't exist for literally decades in the past, and I don't recall anyone suing Microsoft about losing a password etc. The legal angle for such things is firmly covered by EULAs, anyway - I worked for Microsoft for 15 years, and I can assure you that the lawyers there are very adept at such things. And then, of course, Apple clearly doesn't have any legal issues despite only having local accounts on macOS even today. Nor are cloud accounts free of legal issues themselves, what with GDPR etc. In fact, I'm pretty sure that cloud accounts are more "legal heavy" on the whole.
I would believe that it was purely about costs if they simply removed the checkbox from the installer but still left the command line workaround - that is plenty sufficient to ensure that the user "understands that Microsoft has no responsibility", and generally to prevent the clueless from shooting themselves in the foot. But given that even such advanced techniques were removed shortly after they were discovered, I'm certain at this point that it is a concerted effort to drive all non-enterprise users towards cloud accounts. And given that Microsoft is heavily investing into ads, and generally has a Google envy for a very long time now, I think that it any product decision that clearly correlates with more ability to track users and collect their data is likely to be at least partially motivated by that, just as it is in case of Google.
