Amazing. Apple broke the 'NSDocument.isDocumentEdited' state in macOS 27, and they responded to my radar by saying that it is “working as designed”. It is not working as designed!

The thing about AI “empowerment” is: a lot of people felt that LLMs would turn the cranks into scientists. What has actually happened is two things:

1. LLMs have turned some scientists into cranks.
2. LLMs have helped some scientists do better work—e.g. I think the Jacobian Conjecture was recently refuted by Claude Fable, which (if true) is a good thing so people don't waste their time on results that assume the conjecture.

I think there are vanishingly few cases where the LLM has empowered non-experts to do *anything*.

What I find really frustrating about the present moment is — if you say something like “It is not a good thing for airplanes to be enhanced into birds by cameras”, you get all these people coming out of the woodwork saying things like “Boy, if you think that your phone wasn't changing your picture before AI, you are really mistaken” or something.

It's true that cameras do an immense amount of processing of raw data in order to make it look like something that resembles our memory of the event. Putting aside the fact that a some of this processing actually is excessive and makes photographs look weird, there's a huge qualitative difference between that kind of processing and something that adds feathers to an airplane or inserts a new picture of the moon.

It's the same as when we talk about generative AI and people say things like "Guess calculators are destroying the brain too huh!!". It's such a Low Brain Energy take.

After messing around a bit with the macOS 27 in a virtual machine, I can really see the potential for professional-friendly software being developed for this UI. It’s not perfect and there are many problems still. But things like clearly separated toolbars, better corner radius, etc. are such a big improvement. I wish we could get full-width toolbars back, though, in the System apps.

My wife asked me to tweet out the following: “The X-Files is the Law And Order of science fiction”

WTF: "textunderstandingd" is taking 76GB memory and 99% CPU on macOS right now... god Tahoe is such shit.

Tons of work today on Pterodactyl.

I haven't written weeknotes for a few weeks... To be honest, I have felt a bit blocked in the writing department.