Adam Demasi

I didn’t think this needed to be said, but don’t make up conspiracy theories about Linux projects complying with the age verification laws. You’re frustrated like we all are, but you’re directing it at the party that has little power other than to implement it as minimally as possible.

Instead, contact the lawmakers that passed this without listening to groups such as the EFF, who warned them about how it affects platforms other than Apple and Google’s. There’s still time before the laws come into effect.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/ab-1043s-internet-age-gates-hurt-everyone

#linux

Features nobody asked for: You can now subscribe to Legacy Update news as an Internet Explorer Web Slice. It adds a button to your Favorites bar that updates to show our latest news article.

Just click the green button in the toolbar (it’s green to show that Internet Explorer is really excited a website is actually using this feature), or the Add Web Slice link in our News section.

#legacyupdate

It never made sense to me that the Mac Pro “had” to change away from this general design. A well-designed computer can be respected as art, but its primary purpose is still to be a computer. An all-in-one box that can be thrown in the car between gigs. Just plug in a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and your audio inputs, cameras, whatever it is you do with it. No fiddly external devices needed. The only complaints I ever heard are that it’s a bit heavy and the handles dig into your hands.

Post-Steve Jobs comeback Apple was able to pull off making their towers an art piece *and* a functional workhorse. Why did Tim Cook-era Apple overlook and fail to make this balance? They killed the market for the product and only just started to win some of those customers back with Apple Silicon, but not without making a mess of the driver infrastructure, and making discrete GPUs impossible. This is after they broke the cadence of yearly Mac Pro refreshes to make way for 6 years of the Thermal Corner™ cylinder model, making a bet (dual GPUs with custom cooling) that wasn’t that useful to its customers, and would overheat and die.

Why spend more to invest in the Mac platform when Dell would love to sell you a boring Windows tower that’s unopinionated and does what you need?

#apple #mac #macpro

Finally, a Linux kernel fit for @alyx@ipv6.camp https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-IPv6-IPv4-Legacy-Knobs

Did people really not notice Chrome has been downloading a 4 GB+ model for the past 10 months?

#ai

What are you on about? I’m just trying to write a damn document, go away

#microsoft

Mozilla extended support for Firefox 115 ESR on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 and macOS 10.12 – 10.14 until August. It was due to end support last month, and they may consider extending it again.

Firefox ESRs are old versions that continue getting security updates, and Firefox 115 was released in 2023. https://support.mozilla.org/kb/firefox-users-windows-7-8-and-81-moving-extended-support

#firefox #mozilla #windows7

How much longer do I need to deal with eBay listings with Al-generated 6-sentence marketing copy descriptions? It usually gets specs wrong, and often contradicts the product spec fields. It also discourages the seller from explaining the condition of the item.

Buyers don’t scroll through eBay looking to be sold on products themselves - they usually know what they want and are trying to find the best deal. To learn more about the product, we’ve always had Google. I’d be surprised if they can find any correlation between listings where the seller pressed the AI button, and an increased conversion rate.

“My intention was to expand your brand. I really hope that at some point in the future you change your mind and see this as a positive growth for your brand.” is such clear manipulation. They’re saying, sure I violated your trademarks, but why aren’t you grateful that I did you a favor? I really hope that isn’t what this person intended. They got what they wanted though - a lot of attention for fairly little effort. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/05/unofficial-vibe-coded-notepad-for-mac-draws-objections-from-original-author/

#ai

🌎⬆️ Legacy Update 1.13 improves handling of some edge cases you might run into while using Legacy Update. It includes 23 fixes and improvements (and plenty more small changes). https://legacyupdate.net/news/2026/03/16/legacy-update-1-13

#legacyupdate

I remember when a JetBrains dev advocate told me on Bluesky that they’re just trying to be helpful by enabling their built-in code completion model by default without asking. I disable it because it disrupts my thinking flow.

After installing Rider 2026.1, it reset to enabled. Thank you for knowingly ignoring my preference, I feel so very convenienced.

I know RAM is worth a lot right now but did you really need to desolder it off my SoC?

“Why TUIs are back”

I can’t agree that Claude Code, btop, and lazygit are proof terminal UI apps are back. Don’t assume there’s a trend because one TUI app got very popular and spawned some competitors.

TUIs are inherently difficult to use because they constantly have inconsistent UX (e.g. Claude Code using the tab key to switch modes, not to move between controls), they have trouble passing non-text content around (Claude Code looks at the local clipboard for images - useless if you’re connected via SSH), they can’t consistently draw images and can’t cache them, and Unicode text rendering is ambiguous and inconsistent.

When you look closer at Claude Code, it gets worse, because its React TUI library redraws large regions at a time. That’s a waste of bandwidth, when a key feature of terminals back to the 70s is that they can carefully redraw only what’s needed, and even scroll a region of text up a line rather than wiping out the screen and sending the entire text again. TUI apps (and a sad number of GUI apps) also consistently ignore that screen reader users exist, and are difficult or impossible for them to navigate.

I’d say it’s even more refuted by Claude building out GUIs. There’s the web and mobile frontends now. They still suck for the same reasons. The guts of the app are still designed for the lowest common denominator, seemingly they value consistency over allowing the GUI to use its freedom to do things.

There are benefits to TUIs, no question about that. Getting access to powerful tools even over SSH is very useful. But just like how there’s people who like neovim over VSCode, whether it’s “better” is subjective - it’s just what the user values most. And it’s great to have tools like btop and lazygit, but GUI equivalents also exist when you want something easier to work with. VSCode Remote is popular and really useful.

There’s a reason not many Windows 1.0 and 2.0 apps were made - it didn’t do much in the way of graphics, it still feels like you’re in DOS. So you may as well just target DOS. Once Windows 3.0 brought in Macintosh-like bitmap graphics, there was a clear purpose to Windows, and the app market took off. (Yes I know there’s far more to Win1.0/2.0’s failure and Win3.0‘s success than this)

It seems fitting that Tim Cook will be leaving Apple after one of the most successful Mac product launches ever, owed in no small part to their most successful Mac revamp ever, while the iPad remains just as disappointing a productivity device as the day he started.

But it’s ok, Ternus pushed for iOS on the iPad to be renamed to iPadOS. So it’ll be good any day now.

#apple #timcook

The trick to block the Claude user on GitHub as a warning beacon is the gift that keeps on giving.

I’m not even that annoyed if people write code with AI, but letting the agent make commits for you feels like an admission that you haven’t reviewed its code.

A few weeks ago, a project I depend on broke some major behavior with a vibe coded commit. It’s been hard for me to trust repos with shamelessly LLM co-authored commits ever since.

(This post isn’t accusing Mermaid of anything, it’s just the latest repo I noticed it on)

Still can’t believe that to delete an accidental screenshot, you don’t press the ❎, you press the ✅

There was a brief era where we wrote

background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, right top, from(#fff), color-stop(50%, #fff), to(#c6d3f7));

rather than

background: linear-gradient(left, #fff, #fff 50%, #c6d3f7);

and to this day I still want to know how WebKit landed on such verbose syntax. Was it to be easier to parse? Easier to teach? CSS is known for being a terse syntax, so the old syntax feels so out of place.

#css #css3 #html5

Wild how we can be in a RAM and storage shortage and Apple just has enough of it on hand to be like yeah, our monitors that stream up to 5K pixels back and forth will have 8GB RAM and a 128GB SSD. Economies of scale go brrr https://fxtwitter.com/aaronp613/status/2031790731095167233

Making my contribution to Apple’s 50th anniversary:

One of the things that got me so interested in the inner workings of iOS is the Debug podcast. Guy English and Rene Ritchie interviewed former engineers about everything from shipping System 7, to OS X, Intel, iOS, and Swift. It also includes some great interviews with jailbreakers, the Iconfactory with Twitterrific, and my favorite, the team behind Workflow, which became Shortcuts. If you like stories from inside Apple, this is the podcast for it.

It ran from 2012 to 2016 and had 83 episodes. It was produced under iMore, who got absorbed into the Future plc mothership that buys smaller publications and then deletes everything that made them unique.

Fortunately, I had all of it downloaded years ago. So here’s all of it as an archive, which you can subscribe to in your podcast app.

http://archive.org/details/debugshow

#apple #iphone #mac #archive

The more that comes out from the new owners of the sinking Titanic known as Stack Overflow, the more I have to congratulate the original founders for selling not a moment earlier or later than they did.

$1.8 billion in June 2021, just enough time for GPT3.5 to be shamelessly trained on their dataset ahead of ChatGPT in November 2022. One of the most trafficked websites ever (#60 on Alexa in April 2022), now a ghost town, and the best they can do is a new logo and an unwanted redesign.

It hurts to see this all burn, but what can you even do except laugh at this point.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/417394/logo-updates-to-stack-overflows-visual-identity

@genericperson@hachyderm.io The comparison is to Legacy Update, which works around bugs in the update service so you can install the ones that do officially exist. It’s pretty understood by this audience that official support is finite, especially with Apple and especially on PowerPC.

I think we can leave this conversation here, we’ve made our points