MacBook Neo, the benchmarks

I wrote in my review that I didn't think benchmarks told the real story of using a Neo, and I specifically called out the Geekbench CPU single-core test as particularly misleading. That said, I do think the benchmarks are interesting academically, and in terms of what they say about the

Swift 6.3 Released

Swift is designed to be the language you reach for at every layer of the software stack. Whether you’re building embedded firmware, internet-scale services, or full-featured mobile apps, Swift delivers strong safety guarantees, performance control when you need it, and expressive language features and APIs.

Death of the IDE?

How Agent orchestration is replacing the editor as the center of developer work

The Day I Discovered Type Design

The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify’s AI DJ

Am I naïve in expecting Artificial Intelligence to be smart? Is my interpretation of the word “intelligence” too literal? And when an AI behaves stupidly, who’s to blame? The programmers or the AI entity itself? Is it even proper to make a distinction between the two? Or does the AI work in so mysterious a way that the programmers need no longer take responsibility?

Why does AI tell you to use Terminal so much?

When humans explain how to tackle a Mac problem, they usually prefer to use GUI apps when appropriate. AI much prefers you to enter commands into Terminal. This has consequences.

Carelessness versus craftsmanship in cryptography

Two popular AES libraries (aes-js and pyaes) provide dangerous default IVs that lead to key/IV reuse vulnerabilities affecting thousands of projects. One maintainer dismissed the issue, while strongSwan’s maintainer exemplified proper security response by comprehensively fixing the vulnerability in their VPN management tool.

Last Week on My Mac: Why E cores make Apple silicon fast

Apple silicon architecture is designed to get background processes out of the way of our apps running in the foreground, by using the E cores.

Can you slim macOS down?

In a quest to reduce the number of processes running in macOS Tahoe, consider the example of Time Machine backups, which can easily be replaced by 3rd party alternatives.

Building a Durable Execution Engine With SQLite

Update November 21: This post is being discussed on Hacker News Lately, there has been a lot of excitement around Durable Execution (DE) engines. The basic idea of DE is to take (potentially long-running) multi-step workflows, such as processing a purchase order or a user sign-up, and make their individual steps persistent. If a flow gets interrupted while running, for instance due to a machine failure, the DE engine can resume it from the last successfully executed step and drive it to completion.