The exciting thing to me is that if there is enough demand, someone can make a keyboard module without having to make a whole laptop.

Thinkpad-style? Sure! Ortholinear? Why not!

This was already true with the smaller Framework laptop, someone could make an alternative keyboard module.

This makes it easier to make a "DIY hack on the side", not needing to manufacture a complete keyboard.

Given the title I was expecting some kind of surprise, but everything works exactly as you would expect.

I like my Macs precisely because they are boring and almost never surprise me.

TBH, the only reason my Linux boxes surprise me is because I try stupid things such as mounting /var/log as a tmpfs to reduce write loads (mostly on RPis SD cards and eMMC devices).

I don't know about that — macs have enough weird behaviours that it wouldn't totally surprise me if, soon, they required a network connection, or the lack of one would at least make things awkward. For example, the inability to use clamshell mode without AC power.

Amphetamine[0] lets you prevent sleep on lid close. I presume it lets you do so without AC power (but I might be wrong on that), but one of the techniques they use to do that (setting the IOKit key that indicates the system is currently in clamshell mode) definitely does work without AC power. I made a command line utility[1] for myself a while back that does that if you're interested. It works fairly well, but the clamshell state tends to reset upon gaining/losing AC power. That's fine if the lid is open at the time (as the utility just applies the change again), but if the lid is closed, the system sleeps until the lid is opened again (at which point, it reapplies the change and you can close the lid again).

[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amphetamine/id937984704?mt=12 [1]: https://github.com/Aaron-Rumpler/CDM

I like Macs, but was pretty surprised the first time a package needed xcode, and I saw the size needed to download (several GB)

you dont need xcode normally unless you are doing mac native dev, you can get by with just installing dev tools `xcode-select --install`

Q. a local mac repair shop installed "new OSX" on a laptop by request .. but it is version 10.12.6 (?) ..

Later, when downloading several common desktop applications, upon opening them.. it says "this software requires v10.13 or later" .. I assume this is completely on purpose to get the legions of happy Mac owners off of their stable OS and into the upgrade churn ? I assume (US here) you have to have to buy OSX 10.13, register an ID with Apple, to get new software (according to them) ?

macOS upgrades have been free since OS X Mavericks[0] (10.9, released in 2013). macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) came out in 2017, so is a 5 year old OS at this point[1]. It also supports all Macs that macOS 10.12 (Sierra) supports[1]. And you don't need an Apple ID for anything other than Apple services and the Mac App Store. OS Upgrades don't need an Apple ID (even on older versions of macOS where they're installed through the Mac App Store), and you can even network boot a recovery image and install the latest version over the network[2] (Intel Macs only).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X_Mavericks

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_High_Sierra

[2]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/mac-help/mchl338cf9a8/...

I'm a bit confused by the question and might be misunderstanding but there is no need to buy OS X upgrades, they're free. But you do need to register with Apple to get them.

No you don't need to be registered or even logged in with an appleid to install updates or download them from the app store.

It’s all free. No registering or buying. Guides are everywhere.

I would swear I needed it sometimes when installing packages with brew, but I could be wrong.

You’re not entirely wrong; you do need “Xcode Command Line Tools”. Thankfully, that’s a much smaller bundle than Xcode. It contains a bunch of tools for building code, such as llvm, ld, make, and git.

According to many commenters in the linked thread, it's fixed in MacOS 13.2.1. Not great that it happened at all, but good to see that it was a software issue.

Is it a software issue, or a hardware issue that could be worked around in software... (sorry for the rant as an embedded system developer).

The latter is very common in the desktop/server space, too. If you ever write or work on drivers, you know.

> If you ever write or work on drivers, you know.

Especially when the hardware vendor doesn't provide public documentation on the correct workaround.

To the end user, and doesn't impair performance, and covers all edge cases, then it doesn't matter if something is a workaround.

But we're not being end users here, we're trying to look at what went wrong. And we don't know if the other two are true either.

And, if it's something that's worked around in software (meaning, it was a hardware issue), that might have issues for things like Asahi Linux, which probably won't have that workaround in place.

I have MacOS 13.2.1 and it's definitely not completely fixed -- but better.

I did a ping test against my home router and I still get about 10% packet loss. Much better than the 40% when I first plugged it in.

Uff yeah it's still horrible!

PING fritz.box (192.168.1.1): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=11.845 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=24.287 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=3.120 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=2.630 ms Request timeout for icmp_seq 4 Request timeout for icmp_seq 5 Request timeout for icmp_seq 6 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=0.801 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=1.139 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=64 time=0.772 ms Request timeout for icmp_seq 10 Request timeout for icmp_seq 11 Request timeout for icmp_seq 12 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=13 ttl=64 time=0.784 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=14 ttl=64 time=0.674 ms

The above suggestion fixes it, hopefully permanently: settings->network-><ethernet interface>->details->hardware "change anything, safe and undo"

Can you try a speed test? That level of packet loss will make TCP connections perform incredibly poorly.

10% loss inside your home network is bonkers bad.

Absolutely. I had ~2% loss on an old cable modem and it would drop my upload speeds to single digit megabits.

If Copilot and ChatGPT cost the same and I could only have one, I'd pick Copilot.

T3 stack (Next.js, tRPC, Prisma with MySQL, NextAuth, either Tailwind or a component library depending on the project), deployed to Vercel. Maybe swap Prisma for Kysely if cold starts become an issue.

Disclaimer: I maintain an init tool for this stack so I'm somewhat biased

At age 31 I was was working as a part-time university lecturer in a non-stem field plus constantly struggling to find any additional freelance work, couldn't really see a realistic path forward in that career. Had also just become a father, so being broke felt even worse than before. I spent about 18 months learning web dev (just free resources online), and successfully made the career change. Required a lot of sacrifices in that time period though as well as a bit of luck, and I don't think my path is representative of the average person who tries this.

CS50x and CS50web are fantastic. web is a bit outdated but it doesn't matter because the projects are so good.

I got a bit frustrated at YouTube dev videos being aimed primarily at entry-level developers, so I tried to record some more mid-level content. There is definitely room for improvement on the production values, but hopefully the content itself makes up for it. Any feedback appreciated :)

tRPC is awesome, but it will teach you about typescript wizardry and how to write a library, not how to write an application.

I need to use PHP at work sometimes. After working in it for a while I still don't love the language and would never pick it for a project myself, but it's overall decent a few quirks aside, and I think a lot of people have built up a habit of disparaging it without actually knowing much about it.

That being said, one issue I've found is that while I can use VSCode for every other language, using PHP feels terrible if I'm not using a JetBrains IDE. I tried installing the PHP extension pack, but it was still leagues behind. Is there any guide someone can recommend for making PHP a first-class language in VSCode, or am I stuck in phpStorm?

> I think a lot of people have built up a habit of disparaging it without actually knowing much about it.

It's possible that PHP's ubiquity and the core language's poor architecture/design (for decades now) are the source, not the ignorance of those complaining. PHP was the very first programming language I learned, in 1997. If anything, I mostly stopped disparaging it because I simply moved on in my career enough to be able to choose languages that aren't constantly fighting me.

I'm a consultant so I get asked about unfucking PHP codebases every few years, and I check in on the ecosystem and language. It's better but (unsurprisingly) still not great. Meanwhile, languages a decade+ younger avoided PHP's mistakes.