Some Of the Reasons Why I Haven't Really Used My Macbook Pro Since Tahoe Which Are Mainly "Fuck This Bullshit."

My M1 Max Macbook Pro is relegated to the floor beneath my desk since the Tahoe 'upgrade'. Seriously, I played around for a couple of hours afterwards and shut that shit down. Wait, I think I fired it up for a job interview via Teams once since then but otherwise the powerful machine with 32G of RAM and a 1TB hard drive I bought a few years back for way too many dollars sits idle. I pulled the upgrade trigger shortly after Tahoe was released for dumb reasons:

  1. Nothing to Lose, Right?: Despite spending a fucking fortune in 2022 dollars, I really only use macOS exclusively for a couple of things and they're mainly application related. Logic Pro is the main application that I use/adore and for a long time was completely worth being proprietary to a particular platform. If you throw enough RAM at Logic, it just does what it is supposed to without any real surprises or excessive drama. The included instruments are all great and the automations are the only DAW automations that make sense to me. For my biased and perverted sense of what an audio workflow should feel like, it's a slam dunk. I was also a huge fan of MarsEdit for a long time because it's as close to a perfect application as I've found as it does one general thing very, very well. Since switching over to dotclear and not feeling like fighting my OS just to make blog posts, I've switched to a text editor buffer and pasting into the source editor in the application. I still love MarsEdit but can't deal with booting up the machine it will run on.
  2. Although macOS is awful now, I genuinely hate most operating systems anyway. Linux is to me what Windows is to other folks. When something disruptive happens on another operating system, I can fall comfortably back into my old familiar favorite. The Linux desktop is good enough these days to be my old and familiar friend. Does it sometimes break? Yes, but that is always the fault of a single application that acts buggy after an upgrade which I can fix. Tahoe felt more the portrayals of desktop Linux that every trade magazine fearfully hallucinates. I get it: you don't want to learn anything new and documentation terrifies you so you go slouching back to MSFT any time you don't understand something and your AI assistant doesn't supply a one-liner solution that actually makes things worse. Cool. Since I have zero emotional attachment to my Logic Pro appliance computer, I don't bother trying to mitigate issues with ApplianceOS and just move the fuck on until FruitCo realizes that releasing updates for the sake of releasing things is not the best way to retain enthusiasm. I don't imagine that premptively knuckling under to Trump toadies won over many either. Maybe it's time to consider your actual product as a priority instead of just shareholder value?
  3. As an IT less-fessional and definitely-not-free-lancer, I'm semi-obligated to eat someone else's dogfood. Since the idiots I work for users are going to click the shiny upgrade button, I'm going to need more than crime scene photos. Being the punchable face of software has never been quite as annoying as this. "Seems really slow" and "I can't find anything now" are typically associated with Windows users. The easier option isn't so much anymore. When I'm working full time and not ambulance chasing to make money I will argue pretty strenuously for MDM on all platforms and purposefully set up a delay of 30+ days on OS upgrades because nobody has time for early adopters breaking shit in hopes of seeing something new at work. Fuck that. I still remember the bad old days when some trigger happy developers that of course need admin access to their local machines broke their AD binding with Mojave. That was a great way to burn a couple of days. ROI and all. My reply to the "experience with Apple?" has changed considerably since Tahoe's release. I'd rather not deal with that. "My advice is to hit that Report button every single time it pops up."

Linkdump: The Name of This Game is Exhaustion

Hoo boy. Maybe things have utterly changed but I'm hard pressed to see the point in Microsoft horse before the cart-ing yet another animated character. In my somewhat limited experiment, I've found Copilot something to disable as soon as humanly possible and allows end users to go on crazy goose chases to avoid knowing where any of their files and applications actually live. Super useful for me if I were to somehow enjoy the word salad supplied when I ask someone what the issue is. The apparent sales strategy for paid subscriptions to Copilot Pro or whatever they're calling it at the moment which isn't going great. The desperation in pimping Copilot is palpable: your company won't buy you a paid subscription? Just bring your own from your personal account. There are absolutely no potential data leakage issues or anything. Best of luck, MSFT. Ugh.

This piece on the enshittification of Oklahoma publice schools to align with Trump's batshit idea that race and sex do not belong in classrooms and OK's own ideas about making biblical stories and assumed familiarity with them part of the curriculum. It's worked out super awesome jesus great so far:

But while Oklahoma made these shifts, it has consistently ranked near the bottom on national measures of student performance. Scores on eighth grade reading and math in national evaluations are abysmal. Only New Mexico’s proficiency rates rank lower. The high school dropout rate is one of the highest in the country, while spending on education is one of the lowest. Only three other states — Utah, Idaho and Arizona — spend less per pupil. And in the most recent federal data about average teacher pay, Oklahoma tied with Mississippi for dead last.

 

As aware as we all are that there is a substantive amount of fuckery going on in all parts of the government it's still difficult to fathom how the fuck you could ever think brainwashing (hyperbole but only by centimeters) kids would have a positive outcome.

I've been around (read: I'm old as shit) long enough to observe enshittification happen in real time. I quit all things social media (excepting Bluesky) a few months ago and I didn't realize until a week or two post-socials that I didn't know where to go afterwards. The consolidation of everything into a mindless content mill had broken the parts of me that did my own discovery and exploration. Also, everything that I used to check out at least weekly has mostly disappeared entirely or been siloed into yet another thing you'll need to sign into in order to continue to read this article. I just skip things that otherwise look interesting if they're hosted on Medium. I've been running this self-hosted site for 20 years now and I absolutely refuse to let a 'service' that is kinda free-ish rope me in again. Anyway, I was reading this NPR article on Cory Doctorow's new book and the sort of feeding tubes that most social media platforms are these days: Here are the things we want you to see and, if we can help it, absolutely nothing else. This is made worse by the rapid proliferation of AI agents on top of the usual not-so-smart bots that fill our web server log files. I know that the Dead Internet theory is a conspiracy theory but it feels distressingly close to reality. At some point will the complexity of sorting human-made from AI slop become just too tiring? Am I writing this only to teach some fresh new monstrosity how to be ridiculous on the web?

Another Dump of Links Because Vivaldi Can Only Take So Much

The course mentioned in the introduction to this interview, The History of Fake News From the Flood to the Apocalypse, piqued my interest in the rest of the article about Bibliotheca Fictive Collection of Literary and Historical Forgery and the fine art of literary forgery.

I love and am deeply jealous of LitBox's book vending machines in D.C. This is a great example of ways to route around the damage of Orange It Can't Happen Here and his toadies. Fuck this administration and all of the good feels towards LitBox for figuring out a way forward.

Fuck this guy

A useful guide for disabling all of the bogus AI "features" on your various devices. I think the most important one is for Windows users because Copilot is a giant pile of make your life more complicated to simplify your life sold to you as a beneficial feature. It is not. It is a bug. Turn it off and get back to breaking your computer as god intended it: manually.

Zorin OS is a linux distribution dedicated to the idea of making it easy-ish to switch to and away from Windows and macOS. They had a big release timed perfectly for Windows 10's end of life. They have all of kinds of friendly features for simplifying your transition and, let's face it, Windows 11 is not a particularly appetizing choice given that they're removing most methods for creating local accounts which is a terrible, no good, and painful thing to see happen. This means the extinction of break glass accounts which can save your ass if whatever you authenticate against is unavailable. Given the recent outages with Entra ID, I'm guessing more people are looking for ways to, you know, use your computer while MSFT breaks shit. Pulling the plug on Copilot should probably be priority given MSFT's intent to have AI run your Windows machine seemingly whether you like it or not.

“We think we’re on the cusp of the next evolution, where AI happens not just in that chatbot and gets naturally integrated into the hundreds of millions of experiences that people use every day,” Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, told The Verge in a briefing. “The vision that we have is: let’s rewrite the entire operating system around AI, and build essentially what becomes truly the AI PC.”

 

I Guess You're The CEO For Now. Go Ahead and Drive The Company Into the Ground

There's that antique yet true belief that the CEO is typically the dumbest and most out of touch member of any payroll. In my imagination, most CEOs are effectively saved from interacting with the vox populi by a human shield of assistants and yes men who suck up enough to the assistant layer to have unscheduled access to the 63 year old white men that lead most corporations. Well, if you ever wanted a ridiculous example of how out of touch the C-suite is with not only rank and file employees but rank and file fellow humans then Impossible Foods CEO Peter McGuinness hit this note perfectly with his thesis that the only way out of the sales decline in meat synthetics was to combine them in a 'hybrid' burger that includes beef . Okay, weirdo. Feel free to simultaneously offend your consumer base (which is, and likely always might be vegans) and people who strenuously object to any attempt to include less decomposing corpses in their diets. Look upon the face of failure Dr. Funkenstein .

I'm more of a fan of the equally doomed Beyond Meat's burgers anyway. I did appreciate the ubiquity of vegan burgers at some national chain restaurants over the past few years but it's likely those days are over since people are more interested in super-duper high protein meals these days. I'm sure your septic tanks sincerely appreciate all of that unused protein that you continuously pee out. Enjoy the kidney stones, I guess.

Too Many Tabs, Must Resort To LinkDump

I'm sorta taking a day off from job seeking which means that I'm puttering around the web and playing TurtleWow Mysteries of Azeroth. Here are some things that were interesting at least to me. This is something that I wish I knew about a couple years ago: Docker Management Command Cheat Sheet as I don't have any real use for Docker containers and lord knows that developers seem to think that spinning up another Docker instance can fill in the gaps between questions like "Should I Was My Hands After I Use The Bathroom" and "I Seem To Have Accidentally Severed My Thumb While Opening This Can of Soup. What Should I Do Next?" My own favorite commands are docker ps which is usually followed at great speed by docker rm.

Another good take on the potential for an AI bubble collapse. My own is tied to the idea that AI will likely never be profitable due to the amount of resources its implementation consumes and the simple fact that it isn't very capable of doing much productively without having its output scrutinized by a knowledgable human. I think that somewhat ties into his thesis that the bubble will collapse when its ardent boosters are slightly disappointed. I lean towards thinking that this is inevitable unless all future markets fully adopt the brain-fully-off posture of venture capitalist but this would not be the first time that I've been utterly wrong about something that seems so damned obvious.

I'm just going to leave this here because it's too complicated a situation for me to comment on without sounding like an idiot mainly because I've always felt sort of indifferent towards Framework in the I like the idea but I'm not to pay that much for that sort of way. I'll even use the poster's title for the link text: Framework under fire for Omarchy/DHH/Hyprland support? It is a whole ass mess of how to handle a notable Ruby contributor who is politically toxic as a complete racist and transphobe. It's indefensible to be 'apolitical' right now. My minimal attention paid to this company is officially over. I'm somewhat convinced that the usage of 'Big Tent' to explain how communities are moderated is just plain cowardice. Also, fuck DHH.

I do enjoy tiling window managers although I simultaneously fight with them until I disappointedly go right on back to Plasma. I am more in line with the thinking of Paneru which gives you the neatness of tiling with the ability to scroll sideways in a way that reminds me a lot of the 'good old' days of virtual desktops that respected your configuration settings instead of operating on assumptions. It's built for macOS which had me a little bummed until I scrolled a little further on down their Github page and ran into a list of other projects that implemented similar concepts on other platforms. This led me to karousel which looked like it was exactly what the doctor ordered for my cranky ass until I realized that it doesn't support multiple monitors. Another dream shattered as I have 2 37" monitors on my desk. I'll keep an eye on this project although it sounds like this might be a KDE limitation at work.

But You Don't Post Much About Technology These Days

This is largely true. I don't write much about technology because, for the most part, technology as a subject is pretty fucking boring and has been for the last 4 years or so. The reason for my own personal tedium trap when talking about tech is that term becoming synonymous with AI and AI is a speculative shit show and likely always will be at least until the bubble ultimately pops and most of the investment dollars rapidly shoveled into it without scrutiny goes up in flames. All the investment money usually available to start ups is now being consumed by an incredibly expensive and unreliable technology that, in real life use, is largely used for incredibly awkward job interviews or for propping up your human communication acumen on dating apps

Anyway, to interrupt the several paragraph rant that my brain had on deck for the continuation of this post, I don't think boom times are going to last. I suspect that the reverberations from the pretty-sure-it's-coming apocalypse will completely crater the United States economy. Given the frail state of all things monetary at the present, I've got a hunch that we're going to be in for a very rough ride for the next decade or so. So, that speculative fiction market borne by circular investment is the reason that technology isn't exactly captivating for me as of late. I guess I'll see you on the median in the squeegee line at some point in the future. 

For much more coherent analysis of our dumb and likely future, please read as much of Ed Zitron's analysis of the current landscape as you can stand. It's lengthy and involved but it does not come from an explicitly technologist perspective and I'll bet that you'll learn something.  

Wherein A Bunch of Links Get Dumped

This is for my own memory as much as it is for anyone else. These are things I've seen recently (like the past 18 hours) that I thought were worthy of note. 

Cloudflare released a new RPC system called Cap'n Web. I understand some of the underlying principles that governed its creation but some folks are pretty fucking excited about it. That said, fuck Javascript. 

Apple released a new version of macOS called Tahoe.  It has no new features, takes away some that people actually use (LaunchPad), and seems to have enraged a lot of people who do things like critique the alignment of pixels as if that were a perfectly normal thing to become furious about. I installed it on my rapidly aging M1 Max and shrugged my shoulders a bunch. UI just isn't important to me and I despised LaunchPad so I guess congratulations on releasing something entirely for the sake of saying that you've released something new. Logic Pro still functions normally (okay, so it fucking screams especially with 32G of RAM) and that is the predominant reason that I own that particular machine. Meh. 

Furi Labs is working on the FLXs which is yet another Linux smart phone. The specs for the model they tested weren't eye popping by any means but the fact they're including physical and discreet kill switches for microphone, camera, and network. I am too weirdly paranoid about my phone's dependability to even consider this but I really, really like the idea of having those kill switches because software is software and you should never trust it. Are you listening OnePlus? K-I-L-L S-W-I-T-C-H-E-S. 

TernFS is now free software. It's a Linux filesystem built to deal with exabytes (!!) of immutable files. The link is the general overview of what it does and why. Maybe something good will emerge from all of this speculative investment in AI and machine learning once the bubble pops. You and I are likely never going to need a file system to manage oceans of data that cannot be updated but, you know, just in case. I'm also curious what other folks will hack this into going forward. 

Well, fuck. I suppose it was only a matter of time before an owner with tall stacks of grifter money (that's my newest designation for tech bros, by the way) would allow AI software to manage a game.  The fans reactions were hilariously spot on: 

But the use of AI struck a nerve for Oakland fans, who see companies like OpenAI – which powered Distillery’s baseball AI – as enterprises that prioritize “winning” the AI race over shipping products that have been properly tested for safety. For many fans, the AI experiment felt like a betrayal, similar to the kind of corporate greed that pushed three professional sports franchises out of Oakland in five years.

Hello Again From The Bombed Out Shell That I Call Mine

What I intended to do was migrate the old version of this site over to a new host but that didn't end up working out so well. After being testy about all of the Wordpress import/export options completely and utterly failing me without a single useful error, I decided to just scrap everything and start anew. This will be the 3rd completely fresh start for Team Murder which I think has existed in one form or another since 2004(?) -ish. I'm also  generally just kind of sick of Wordpress . I migrated this site from Movable Type to Wordpress a very long time ago when the great licensing kerfuffle happened and intended to stay put on the platform forever given that WP was GPL and MT was total arglebargle. Since weblogs have fallen into the category of things that people spent time on in the distant past, I don't really give a shit about the specific platform quite so much anymore. Wordpress has turned into a weirder business than Ben and Mena ever could have imagined and I don't have enough time left in any day to fuck with trying to get the wack-ass editor working properly or dragging around blocks just to format things that won't be read on the internet. There aren't enough hours in the day to mess with overly complex things that are intended to essentially show words in a readable form in sequential form. These days it feels like a considerable ask and best left to people who want to subvert the current Etsy or whatever. 

The first time I scrapped everything was after an extended period of fading interest because social media was suddenly more interesting to a lot of folks. I was a participant moreso in social media early on then faded to mostly using those networks as a way to recieve messages from people I didn't really want to hear from to deleting all of my social accounts six or so months ago. My stated purpose for removing all of those barnacles splattered across my bow  was political because I didn't want to lend any credibility at all to what was rapidly devolving into a disordered stew of random stuff composed by robots and Nazis. It was far too much to deal with for something I had so little personal investment in. It got much noisier when social media transitioned from being the only thing that people really used computers for to smart phones and the frantic competition for attention went into hyperdrive. I've always generally thought that any single trying that hard to get me to pay attention to it was just mutated advertising and tried to avoid it. Weirdly, I feel the same way about most cultural phenonenon.  When I hear about a movie or television show too many times before being exposed to its source then I'll avoid it for years. So, I scrapped everything from the first version of Team Murder partially because it was full of links that terminated in 404s and partially because I was really pissed off at a lot of things that no longer seemed relevent back then. The one thing that I do miss is that when you raged about something back then people actually tended to hear about it and respond which lead to a veritable shit ton of unintentional hilarity. 

This time I just didn't care enough to spend a lot of time reviving the shell-shocked shit that I wrote about during the Pandemic. Seriously, like most everyone else in the world, I was in a very dark place for the majority of it and for years afterwards. I'm doomy enough without dragging all of that back out of the hazy years when everything was exactly the same for an eternity. I most definitely do not need it. Here we go again, I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯