I always thought if Orwell was quite prescient of the eastern block than surely Huxley was even more so about the western.

Huxley was plenty prescient. Soma is basically scrolling for dopamine hits and distraction.

I thought so too. But having talked to a few people who are generally afraid of flying, they absolutely do take re-assurance from the security theatre. They are very much not interested in having the ease of subverting this security explained to them.

In Edinburgh the (small, we often need 2) luggage carts are now £2.

And also you are seeing serious criticism from the traditional Apple fan crowd, e.g. John Gruber has been panning it mercilessly.

It is kind of funny how most of them scapegoat that Dye guy (who was poached by Meta). As if a single person was responsible for all that bad design, and it isn't a failure of the whole organisation.

At this point I’m going to hold out on updating MacOS for a year. If things don’t improve or the direction doesn’t change significantly I’m going to seriously consider paying the switching costs.

I'm in the same position - holding out for a year in the hope that things change direction.

I've been in the apple ecosystem for 20 years at this point, because the ecosystem delivered real value for me. But that value has declined sharply - hardware is still good, but software quality has cratered while the drive for services revenue has become so relentless that I've now got one foot out the door.

Hm for me it's been a fairly steady state. The last 5 or so MacOS versions delivered features that got a solid meh from me:

- Big Sur did a redesign which wasn't really needed, but it wasn't that much of a downgrade. Wish they focused on fixing bugs rather.

- Monterey had live text, which has come in handy, otherwise I haven't used any of its headline features (such as shortcuts or universal control).

- Ventura: haven't used any headline features (Stage manager, continuity camera, Freeform)

- Sonoma: still nothing (Desktop widgets?, Game mode)

- Sequoia: Passwords app is cool, but have been using 1Password for a decade by this point, so had little interest in switching. (Everything else: Apple Intelligence was a joke, iPhone mirroring seems too clunky to be practical).

So nothing that exactly made me excited to upgrade, but at least things didn't get drastically worse.

But Tahoe seems like a disaster I don't want to touch. For one, it looks ridiculous. But also there seems to be a number of objectively bad design decisions all over the place. This is Apple - good design is what they got famous for. If they don't maintain an edge in UI design, then it's not the same company anymore as far as I'm concerned.

I switched after Apple dicked me on the G5 iMac about 20 years ago and haven't looked back. To be fair... all OSes have their plusses and minuses. Immediately after switching to FreeBSD as my daily driver (and then to Leenucks) I was very happy because the things that annoyed me about Apple products weren't problems in the PC world. But over time I noticed other irritants that definitely never came up with iProducts. FreeBSD and Linux give me more control over my daily experience, but at the cost of way more time debugging and administration.

Your plan seems like a good one, but remember, your mileage may always vary.

And there are days I keep thinking I want to go back to my Commodore 64. It didn't really do much, but at least it didn't bug me every 15 minutes to upgrade.

Same, wrt iOS26. Hoping iOS27 ditches the glass crap.

Otherwise, I guess I'll be buying an Android.

Just finished my switch. Dumped my iPhone + Macbook Pro + iPad Pro + Apple Watch + Airpods setup for a Framework 13 + GrapheneOS Pixel 10 Pro + Seiko watch and wired earbuds.

I run NixOS, it's incredibly easy to do anything I want by just pointing Claude at my dotfiles and telling it "I want this", applying, and then reverting if I don't like the results.

The switch came more from a realisation that Apple devices are becoming media/slop consumption devices, rather than devices that run my workflows for me.

Aside: the name is fairly confusing since there is a relatively well known conference called Sync Conf (which well may be worth more attention than this)

Thanks for feedback!

I tend to have a policy: I will click on your unsubscribe button once, after that it's straight to 'report spam'. If that sinks your domain ratings, that's on you.

Yeah except once in a blue moon they send an email I do need that really is account information and all from the same SunLife email :/

Otherwise I have the same policy.

Porn comes from pornē, Greek for prostitute. So at least etymologically (and arguably logically as both involve sex for money) porn is prostitution.

If that’s accepted, then I find it hard not to also accept OF as a form of prostitution.

School comes from skholē, Greek for "leisure" or "spare time.".

Therefore people can't be stressed for finals at university, since it's all leisure!

“Etymologically, X comes from Y, therefore X is a form of Y” is quite the jump in logic...

Are the verses random? If so perhaps add a filter to make sure the name of the book doesn't occur in the verse. For instance today's is trivial (or if it has "Job replied...", or "Jonah went..." it would make it too easy).

(Unless the name is John. Then it's kind of a good clue that the book isn't John).

Job is mentioned in Ezekiel in the Old Testament and in James in the New Testament. Jonah is mentioned in 2 Kings in the Old Testament, and several times in the New Testament.

Cool project! I'd be interested in checking out your other projects, but the links seem not to be included in your post.