dewme

Apple still hasn't fixed macOS Ventura's network bug

dewme

March 2023

It probably won’t make you feel any better, but the prioritization of software anomalies is just as difficult for those on the other side of the problem. Most software products of the magnitude of macOS have tens of thousands of anomalies in their backlog.

Note that not all anomalies are bugs in the classical sense, many are things that aren’t broken but don’t work as intended. In any case, managing the backlog and establishing priorities of what gets resources assigned to each item is a continuous process that never really ends.

There are many opinions and drivers for setting the priorities. Zero day security issues undoubtedly get pushed to the top of the stack, but everything is still competing for resources, and usually competing against new feature requests.

I don’t know what a better system would be because no software organization has unlimited resources and the anomalies and new feature requests keep rolling in. Even if Apple or any development organization exposed some sort of prediction for when a particular issue would be worked on, much less resolved, they’d constantly be changing the date and/or release target because higher priority issues keep coming and features currently being worked on often get deferred and the resources redirected to other priorities.

The only thing that’s certain in software development is uncertainty.

Publishers demand to be paid for AI using their work

dewme

March 2023

This does bring up some interesting scenarios. If the creators of the AI are skirting responsibility for citation and attribution of others' works because, in their mind at least, conventional standards for doing those things do not apply to AI, how are we going to reconcile cases when AI is the direct cause of something that leads to injury or death of a human?

Who will be held responsible for AI gone bad? I'm not talking about Alexa Astro choking you out with a pillow, I'm talking about AI presenting advice, a recipe, our suggesting an action that appears to be based on data the AI considers to be knowledge but is instead based on faulty logic or reasoning from the source, faulty logic or inferences in the AI processing itself, or a source that turns out to be nothing more than the demented musings of a psychopath?

Until we get to the point where we can clearly answer the question: "Who are you going to sue when AI does the wrong thing?" we're stumbling blindly into uncharted territory.

Two good car antitheft measures are AirTags and stick shifts

dewme

March 2023

I vastly prefer manual transmissions over automatics. Most of the cars I've owned throughout my driving years have been equipped with a manual transmission. I like having the far greater control over the vehicle and the more engaged driving experience. I think there would be far fewer distracted driving issues if all cars had manual transmissions. The ability to push-start or roll-start a car with a manual transmission has kept me from getting stranded a few times. Clutches have come a long way in the past few decades. You don't need a body builder's left leg to manage the clutch like on some older muscle cars used to require. I still had some hair raising experiences switching between manual and automatic cars when my left leg buries the brake pedal on the automatic when pulling up to a light or stop sign.

Unfortunately it is getting much more difficult to find newer cars equipped with manual transmissions. Of course manual transmissions aren't a panacea, especially if you're driving in stop & go traffic or uncomfortable with stopping and starting on hills.

BenQ PD2725U review: Not even close to a Studio Display substitute

dewme

March 2023

chutzpah said:

I've been using a Dell 4k monitor with my Mac for years and have no idea what you're talking about with "non-native resolution." Sure, 5k at the same size would be better, but you're making shit up.

No, they’re not making stuff up but they should have used the word “default display scaling” rather than “native resolution.” The default display scaling for Apple’s 5K 27” display renders to a 2560 x 1440 presentation, which provides excellent readability. This is an excellent scaling for the onboard video processing for a 27” display and is processed easily using pixel doubling. A 4K display’s equivalent default display scaling is 1920 x 1080, which provides the equivalent on-screen presentation (fonts, windows, menus, etc.) as the Studio Display but on a smaller 24” screen.

Using a 27” 5K and a 27” 4K monitor side by side with both using default scaling would have the 5K display desktop with fonts, menus, and windows scaled to 2560 and the 27” 4K monitor scaled to 1920 and the latter (4K) would have fonts, windows, menus, etc., that are noticeably larger.

To overcome the differences in presentation between the 4K display and the 5K display the video for the 4K display can be scaled to a non-default setting to make it perfectly match the scaling of fonts, windows, menus, etc. as the 5K display. The downside is that doing non-default scaling requires more GPU processing and resources since it is no longer a relatively simple pixel doubling. The end result of non-default scaling, at least on Macs, is quite excellent visually but puts more load on the GPU. This extra load may be an impediment for graphics intensive applications.

I use non-default scaling on my 27” 4K secondary monitor to exactly match the default scaling of the 27” 5K Studio Display. It works wonderfully and I can drag screen elements between the screens as if the two screens are one big screen. Windows can be straddled between the two screens without a problem, even if one screen is in a different orientation and the screen element is in the view portal of both monitors. If both screens were are at different equivalent DPIs I don’t think you could straddle anything across the two screens.

I’ve never run into any issues with display scaling on Macs. I’ve been using it on the built-in screens on all of my MacBook Pros to get more desktop real estate. Access to this setting is in the macOS Display preferences.