This is an elaboration of a post I made in a Swift Forums thread, SE-0419: Swift Backtracing API. The question was raised whether an official Swift backtracer should try to support code that doesn’t use frame pointers. Which immediately raised the question – in my mind – of if anyone is still using the “optimisation”… Read more
I’ve been getting this notification every morning, on both my Macs, for several days now. System Settings says Private Relay is active like normal, even so. Yet Mail refuses to load any images in emails. Yet Safari works fine. So it’s not at all apparent if Private Relay actually is working or not. Sometime during… Read more
Tonight I decided to give Kagi a try, after hearing John Gruber mention it a few times on Daring Fireball. I’ve used a mix of DuckDuckGo and Bing for over a decade now, and occasionally will still try Google in desperation. What I’ve noticed is a decade-long trend – accelerating in the last year or… Read more
I just read up a bit on io_uring, prompted by a Swift Forums thread relating to it, and it made me laugh. To a lot of people it’s an amazing new[ish] high-performance I/O system for Linux. Which it is (albeit with some serious security concerns, apparently). A lot of people are very excited by it.… Read more
macOS Sonoma is in so many ways a dumpster fire. It’s the worst Apple OS update I can remember (although admittedly there’s been some real stinkers over the years, so maybe I’m overlooking some repressed memories). There was of course the bug whereby encrypted external drives no longer mounted automatically. That was pretty special, because… Read more
The M1 was announced in November 2020. The M1 Ultra wasn’t announced for another sixteen months, in March 2022. It was clearly late. Very late. The M2 was presumed right around the corner (and it was, released just four months later). Why would anyone buy an M1 Ultra, using a two year old CPU architecture… Read more
I don’t know if it’s genuinely on the uptick, or just coincidence, or merely runaway pattern recognition on my part, but I keep seeing the same logical fallacy applied over and over again: if I add more layers to a system it will become more reliable. A recent example: this set of services have poor… Read more