I'm not a macOS dev, so not talking from
direct experience, but you can select a minimum deployment target in Xcode as low as macOS 10.13, I believe. There must be a reason some devs choose not to support that.
Well he explained the "reason": Apple makes it very easy for devs to choose the option they want, less work from the point of view of devs.
All because they are constantly deprecating API/framework when in general they are just moving things around and nothing really changes.
You have to be a hardcore believer to not find issue with the behavior, it's so convenient for their business model.
Meanwhile on the Windows side you can find obscure software from the Vista era and chances are it will work without issues.
When you say local files, do you mean files on a usb stick or hard drive plugged directly into the device?
I use Infuse on my Apple TV to access my videos on the network. It can pick up media from a samba share (or probably any other network share). There's more info on their site: https://firecore.com/infuse
It can also serve as a front end for a Plex server if you run that. While this isn't "local files", it works well and serves a similar purpose. Note: there is a very fair, cheap monthly/yearly/lifetime subscription required for any advanced features but it's free to try. I pay $12.99 for the yearly subscription and I'm incredibly satisfied. If this reads like an ad, it's not, I'm just really happy with it.
This is what I aspire to. Work will always be work, but if my interests could align at least somewhat with my day job, then acknowledging that I have to spend so much of my time working would be so much more tolerable. Happy to hear it's achievable.
I want to work in the world you described. I'm 28 and irritated by the pace of modern work, but I have nothing to compare it to and your comment made me ponder. I feel as if there's no room to breathe. Do you have any stories to share?
Get an Usenet account at https://www.eternal-september.org, roam around the comp.lang.* groups, setup slrn to fetch news offline and answer to the groups in 'batch' mode, there's slrnpull for that.
Learn the basics of C and Perl for automation, Perl can do tons of *unix stuff (awk/sed... but better).
Mark Burguess has books on Perl/C (ANSI C and GNU C) and the basics of C++ with systems' programming. I know today Golang would be more apt but if you know how the things work under the shiny stuff, you will apply most of the knowledge from Unix systems' programming to Go in a breeze.
Once you begin to automate scripting, testing and repetitive stuff, you will spend less time with computers.
I should say that that type of forced context switching could be very irritating too. It was a joyous time when laptops started booting in seconds...
This said, you can and should slow it down if you feel overwhelmed, generally speaking. Use reminders to break every 45 minutes or so, then stand up and walk around. Take longer lunches. Generally speaking, lower expectations about your productivity - which, in itself, should not be a life goal. The cult of productivity helps capital, not people. We should be kinder to ourselves.
I hear what you're saying, and I also tend to think this way. But it sounds like a very cynical view of the world. As an outsider to the field (I assume), how can you so quickly dismiss their study? Is there no value in observing human behavior?
I think the article does a pretty good job of dismissing itself.
The Shirkey principle is not necessarily true, but its a convenient catchall for articles like this one, which expends a lot of words being pithy and appearing clever, but not a lot of words on being right, which makes the reader believe that behavioral science important, without doing any of the necessary work of buttressing the claim with facts.
Behavioral science is very important for understanding e.g. why you can't simply model traffic flow as a fluid, or why you can't simply model economics as a system of oscillators or as analogous to chemical systems. But this article only manages to demonstrate that the author is very smugly self-satisfied, and lacks the introspection to actually chase down and verify their claims.
You should generally dismiss anyone who can't consistently predict outcomes over their chosen class of things they study better than others who have no familiarity with their theories. Ask the better predictors if they're intrigued by any of the ideas of the bad predictors if you want to look for reasons to redeem the dismissed.
> Is there no value in observing human behavior?
The current paradigms of behavioral science aren't the only ways to describe the observation of human behavior. You could in a similar way defend astrology by saying "Is there no value in tracing change over the passage of time? Does the origin of a thing say nothing about it? Is there no value in looking up at the sky, in the stars? Is there no wisdom in the legends of the past?"
The internal RAID is neat and I used it for a while, but lately I've had it configured as a JBOD and I let the VMS manage which drive it puts things on. But probably the best thing to do would be to configure it as JBOD (it has DIP switches to choose the mode) and use it with whatever software volume manager you prefer, lvm or btrfs or whatever.
First, I don’t make these decisions but sometimes have influence. These opinions are my own and not my intentionally unnamed employer, and might be flat out wrong. This list is very focused on big companies at stupid scale with a lot of legacy… applied tech.
Generally my rule is “except for their very core product.” But this is full “hate everything” that pops into my mind:
RedHat won’t accept gifted patches for critical bugs in their tools that they won’t troubleshoot themselves. Getting the patch upstream means you get to use it in the next major version years later. That predates IBM. I won’t use their distribution specific tooling anymore. Outside the OS sucks worse. If I hear ActiveMQ one more time… [caveat: I probably hate every commercial Linux distro and Windows because my nonexistent beard is grayer than my age]
IBM… kind of feel sad about it, but they now suck at everything.
Oracle has good support, but they’re predatory and require an army of humans to manage inherently hodgepodge systems. Also creates an organizational unit of certified admins that can’t transition to alternatives because they’ve only memorized the product. Cisco’s the same except the predatory part and without many good alternatives for core DC gear.
CA, Symantec were awful pre-Broadcom and even worse now that they’re Broadcom’s annuity. Where products go to die.
Trellix (ex McAffee) is like the new Symantec or something.
There’s more I wish I could list for you, but can’t for various reasons.
On the other end, Satya has made MS a reasonable choice in so many things. Still a lot that sucks or is immature, but still… I didn’t think that was possible. I had to shift my mindset.
I'll bite, I'm interested in the OSS dev tools field and I agree with your stance on investment money tending to corrupt good products. It's a big trade off. What are you working on? Do you have a website to share? Is it just you right now or do you have partners or employees?
One note: technically my software isn't quite Open Source; it's source available. [0]
I will have my first release in less than two months, hopefully. It will include a scripting language and a build system.
If the language gets interest, I'll expand it and build the standard library.
If the build system gets interest, I will expand it. The end goal is Nix for mere mortals.
If neither gets interest, I will have to move to my next idea: VCS with project management and that handles large, binary files.
Beyond that, we'll see.
I have a business website, but not yet for those projects. I will at release, including tutorials.
You can read an old commit of design docs at [1], [2], and [3].
It's just me; I want to run my business like Hwaci, the SQLite guys. That also reduces overhead and will let me provide excellent support [4] for paying clients.
However, there are rumblings that standards and liability will be imposed on the industry.
In that case, I would be well-positioned as someone who could accept that liability for a price. Your run-of-the-mill build system created by volunteers? Not so much.
