Sync Now

A macOS button labelled "Sync Now" surrounded by love hearts.

I’m very glad Apple’s Messages team somehow snuck this one little button past the corporate bureaucracy (Apple infamously likes to pretend their software is infallible and therefore doesn’t need things like useful error messages or rectification tools). It’s of course not great that iMessages don’t reliably sync between Apple devices to begin with, but at… Read more

Bipolar customer support

Consider these two examples involving Flickr, that occurred within just one day of each other. Nice gal Amanda I submitted the following feedback, not really expecting much of it. In fact, I fully expected some useless, boilerplate response that completely ignored the point and directed me to the upload requirements page (despite it being the… Read more

A short update on getting answers on the modern internet

Rob Napier‘s short anecdote intrigued me, and I was curious if anything has changed in the fourteen months since. After all, that’s supposed to be eons in “AI” terms, right? Spoiler: not much has changed. Kagi does a bit better, but Bing is still the best, Google still sucks, and ChatGPT (when considering Bing Copilot… Read more

When all you have is a Core Data, everything looks likeā€¦

Still from the scene in Orgazmo with the Mormon Missionaries greeting a homeowner at their door and asking "Have you heard the good news about Core Data?".

Reading SwiftData vs Realm: Performance Comparison reminded me of an anecdote from my days working on Shark, at Apple. I don’t really remember the timing – sometime between 2006 and 2010 – but presumably around 2006 as I recall it was when Core Data was still relatively new. For whatever reason, there was a huge… Read more

Swift on a Raspberry Pi (in 2024)

Five years ago installing Swift on a Raspberry Pi – or really any non-Apple platform – was fairly involved. Compared to getting a Raspberry Pi working to begin with it was easy, but still a far cry from apt install swift. Sadly it’s still not quite that easy (and some Python package is squatting on… Read more