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Audi Q4 E-Tron: Accidental Review
My Q5 has been sitting in the shop for about a month now waiting for a part from Germany and I’ve been driving a loaner Q4 from my local dealer. I’ve had it long enough that I feel like I can review it well enough! The Good My main car is a Q5 e-tron plug-in…
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Follow-up: macOS Messages Text Input Lags Less!
Almost a year ago I lamented that since macOS Sonoma was released, the Messages app suffered a serious performance regression with text input. I’m happy to say that with the release of macOS 15.2, it’s better! It’s not quite as smooth as text input in an AppKit app, but it’s back to being adequate.
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AI’s Threat To Software Developers
Disclosure: The company I work for is very heavily invested in generative AI, specifically developer tools. As a result, I have financially benefited from recent AI popularity and I’ve had involvement with building software products that incorporate modern generative AI. These are my opinions, but my closeness to AI has surely influenced these opinions. I’ve…
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2024 In Review
I take a pause at the end of each year to reflect. It’s a casual habit that got more deeply entrenched when I was in college and winter break was a rare occasion when the stresses of student life were truly lifted from me and I really had no responsibilities for a brief period. During…
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It’s the economy, stupid
I was depressed by the US election results this year, but initially I was just kind of surprised at the results. Harris ran a solid (if a little conventional) campaign against whatever Trump’s campaign was, and she underperformed Biden’s 2020 results by millions of votes. Trump picked up votes this year over 2020 (also deeply…
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Ghost Engineers: The Latest Bullshit Moral Panic
Hot off the presses the week while the US celebrated Thanksgiving, we’ve got a new report that a Stanford researcher has found that as much as 10% of software engineers may be “ghost engineers” who are allegedly around 10% as productive as the median engineer. In other words, this researcher claims to have discovered the…
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Biking Renewed My Love For Portland
In the summer of 2020, like a ton of people, I ordered en e-bike. In 2023, after installing a handlebar riser and eliminating the wrist pain I was experiencing riding, I got serious about biking as a hobby, biking over 250 miles, and this year I’ve biked a little over 320 miles so far (and…
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Democracy Is a Long Game
The Supreme Court issued a bunch of disappointing rulings this past week (and might well be slated to issue another one Monday morning). American voters from 1988 helped to shape those rulings because there are two justices on the Supreme court that were appointed by George H.W. Bush. And of course, it goes further back…
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Vision Pro: What’s next?
You don’t need me to explain to you that Vision Pro is a flop. It was never expected to sell in large volume this year because Apple was always bound by the number of displays that could be made for them, but Apple is not selling a ton of these things. It wouldn’t be my…
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The Untapped Potential Of Pro iPads
As Apple released its latest batch of iPad Pros, the reviews were a familiar refrain: “the hardware is awesome but held back by iPadOS.” But this time, a different idea has been getting floated around more: what if we could virtualize macOS on our iPads? After years of begging Apple to give iPadOS some more…