I agree, I always found the charging port location to be a total non-issue. The battery life is long, charging is fast, and you get warned that the battery level is low long before the mouse dies.
Does it depend on what type of programming you do? Doing Swift/SwiftUI work, I have exactly the opposite experience. I’ve been using both recently, and I want to use Claude alone (especially after the last week’s events), but Codex is just so much faster and better.
Swift/SwiftUI are two of the three experimental projects I'm using Codex on, the other is a physics simulation in python.
It keeps trying to re-invent the wheel, does a bad job of it.
The physics sim was supposed to be a thin wrapper around existing libraries, but instead of that it tried to write all the simulation code itself as a "fallback" (but it was broken), and never actually installed the real simulators that already did this stuff despite being told to use them in the first place. The last few dozen(!) prompts from me have been pairs of ~["Find all cases where you've re-invented the wheel, add them to the planning document", "now do them"]. And it's still not finished removing the original nonsense, so far as I can tell.
One of the two Swift experiments is just a dice roller, it took about 10 rounds of non-compiling metal shaders (I don't know metal, which is why I didn't give up and do that by hand after 4) before I managed to get that to work, and when it did work it immediately broke it again on the next four rounds. It wrote its own chart instead of using Swift Charts, and did it badly. It tried to put all the hamburger menu options into a UIAlertController. Something blocks the UI for several seconds when you change the dice font. I didn't count how many attempts it took to correctly label the D4.
The other Swift experiment was a musical instrument app, that got me to the prototype stage, eventually, but in a way that still felt like a student's project rather than a junior's project.
For the swift apps, at least half of the errors are of a type where I wouldn't expect to have needed to tell someone to not do it like that, and only a student could reasonably be expected to not know better.
For the python physics sim, step 1 was to generate the plan, the prompt included "I want actual plasma physics, including high-density, high-field regimes, externally applied fields, etc., so consider which FOSS libraries would suit this.", and then it proceeded itself to choose some existing libraries, and I made sure those specific named FOSS libraries actually ended up in the plan.
My first clue this wasn't going to work was that even from step 1 it was pushing for writing all the simulation code and not actually using e.g. WarpX despite that it itself had suggested WarpX. In fact, even when WarpX was in the plan, it was "integrate" rather than "just use this from the get-go".
I may well throw the whole thing out and try again with Claude when this trial expires. Most of the runs have been comically non-physical, to the extent you don't even need a physics degree to notice, or even a physics GCSE.
(Just outside edit window, I now realise I was ambiguous in this comment, it was more like "Find all cases where you've re-invented the wheel, add their removal to the planning document")
I find it very much matters. I find Gemini better for pretty frontends, Claude opus for planning. Gemini and opus for code reviews. Codex is great when I want the LLM do follow instructions more strictly- good if you already have a detailed design.
I honestly don’t understand why Liquid Glass provokes so strong reactions. To me it’s not that radically different from the old design. I don’t love it, and I don’t hate it. There is nothing new that in any way impacts how I use or experience my iPhone, my iPad or my Mac. My reaction to Liquid Glass was pretty much a neutral “looks a little bit different, I guess” before forgetting about it.
For me it was (or is) funny. After update I had a lot of controls in the same color as background. Wondering why I can’t do some actions I took my friends phone and built in apps looked different than mine.
Photos didn’t even show the top bar. Rebooted - I have it! Then photos started crashing every few days and I’m not heavy user.
Currently I’m fed up, because Camera starts up once per 20-30 runs for more than 10 seconds (I wait to see if it will start in the end).
I was hater of Apple, then switched around 2018 to be happy user until 2025. Looking for Android brand that allows loading clean system to not get bad experience after few months like with Shitsung.
As a native speaker of Swedish and Norwegian, I can mostly understand spoken Faroese (if they speak slowly). In spoken Icelandic, I understand some words, but rarely a complete sentence.
Phonetic spelling would perhaps make the language easier to learn for native speakers, but it would make it harder to learn for foreigners, at least those of us who come from Europe. Most words in written English resemble words in Germanic or Romance languages. If English was spelled phonetically, the resemblance would be significantly smaller.
People often say that the English spelling is weird or illogical. As a non-native speaker, I disagree. The English spelling makes perfect sense. It’s the English pronunciation which is really strange and inconsistent.
> Phonetic spelling would perhaps make the language easier to learn for native speakers, but it would make it harder to learn for foreigners, at least those of us who come from Europe.
BS. Phonetic alphabets are _much_ easier to learn for everyone. In Russia and Ukraine pretty much every child can read by the time they enter the first grade. It's _that_ easy because both alphabets are phonetic (although it's only one-way in case of Russian).
Meanwhile, when I was learning English there basically was one spelling rule: memorize. It was not at all helpful. I also ended up learning English as a mostly written language, so after moving to the US, I kept getting surprised by how familiar written words are actually pronounced.
E.g. it took me a while to explain to a nurse over the phone that I may have pneumonia and need an appointment. Why the heck that leading "p" is completely silent?!?
> In Russia and Ukraine pretty much every child can read by the time they enter the first grade.
In the US too, reading is generally handled in Kindergarten, the year before first grade. If your parents didn't teach you before that, like mine did.
> Meanwhile, when I was learning English there basically was one spelling rule: memorize.
There are rules though, that we're ad-hoc taught as kids, or just absorb through exposure. Just because there's a lot of exceptions doesn't mean they don't exist. Here's an attempt at listing them out: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html
To be technical: the term is phonemic, not phonetic. If we spelled phonetically, we'd have different symbols for the p in 'spin' and the p+h in 'pin'. Similarly for 'tick' and 'stick', and 'scale' and 'kale'. Native English speakers generally don't notice the differences, just like speakers of many oriental languages don't easily recognize the difference between English /l/ and /r/.
It depends on a writer, but it can be very legible.
I used to be able to jot down notes during lectures almost as fast as the normal spoken speed. We often traded notebooks when preparing for the exams, and I rarely had problems reading other people's notes.
It's also really nice to write, once you learn it. I was surprised after moving to the US that almost nobody here knows how to write in cursive anymore.
The usual pictures of и / п / т / ш ambiguity that you see are exaggerated in that they show forms that are nominally “standard” but basically impossible to reproduce without a fountain (or, even better, dip) pen (think round hand or, as 'cyberax mentions, Spencerian script), yet use a constant stroke width that such an implement wouldn’t produce. For the latter two, people who actually write m and not т will often resolve the ambiguity with ш with an over- resp. underbar (the same ones that Serbian uses even in print[1]). It’s also pretty normal to exaggerate letter joins when they come out looking too similar to parts of other letters, etc. Overall, modern Russian cursive is about as legible as the modern French one, and I don’t think people complain much about the latter.
I also find the hand-wringing about English accents somewhat surprising. Yes, different accents exist, and yes, English has a much wider variation than (urban) Russian (there are things in the countryside that urban dwellers haven’t heard for a century), but phonemic orthographies are a thing, and though children in e.g. Moscow may perpetually struggle with orthographic distinctions that no longer correspond to anything in their accent, the idea of a spelling competition remains about as laughable as that of a shoelace-tying one. Nobody makes you represent the many mergers of English with a single letter in your new orthography (though it would be funny).
> The Spanish I understand most easily is the heavily accented Spanish of non-native Spanish speakers.
Are you sure this is because of their accent? I have the same experience with French (the non-native speakers are easier to understand), but I always thought that was because they use fewer and simpler words.
As an ESL I'd say it depends on the native language of who's speaking. I'll have no trouble with a thick spanish, italian or romanian language (I'm french), but indians speaking english are completely incomprehensible to me.
It took months of being exposed to Indian English on a regular basis for me to start to understand it (and I still find it requires significant mental effort). Context: I'm a Swede who regularly thinks and dreams in English (and when I did an English language test for exchange student purposes I got top marks in all categories).
My college had a lot of Indian & Pakistani students & instructors, and the first few semesters were rough, but by junior year, their accents were totally understandable to me. It was a very useful experience to have, as someone who became a software developer.
If you want to be able to understand them, you should probably stop thinking of them as a monolithic groupd of "Indians". Individual states in India are comparable in size and greater in population than Spain or Italy; and some cities and their suburbs are comparable to Romania. Overall, India's population is more than 3x that of Europe.
A lot of Indians have English that's influenced by the specific region they come from and the native language. A couple examples:
- Specific regions of Northwestern India have the "e-" prefixing (e.g. "stop" turns into "estop") while speaking English
- Southern Indians tend to y-prefix due to their native languages having more of that sound (e.g. "LLM" can turn into "yell-ell-em").
as a native English speaker in California, this is funny to read. I was standing in a crowd of undergraduates at UC Berkeley, shoulder to shoulder, during a break in a movie. Two guys were talking Very Fast right next to me, I mean 0.5 meter in a crowd. I decided to run an experiment because I could not pick out any of what they said. So I turned and spoke slowly in an ever so slight British formal version of California English "excuse me, do you know what time it is?' . One stopped and answered -- almost exactly as I spoke -- the current time (around 18:00). Then they went back to their talk! it was English!
Slack as an independent app is easy to find, and the icon shows when I have unread messages. Slack in a browser tab is one tab among the hundred or so open in one of my three browser windows. And there's no icon to show unread messages.
I also find it hard to agree with that part. Perhaps it depends on what type of software you write, but in my experience finding good test cases is one of those things that often requires a deep level of domain knowledge. I haven’t had much luck making LLMs write interesting, non-trivial tests.
I agree with your general complaints about the decline of Apple’s software quality, but what’s your problem with Safari? I’ve never found another macOS browser I like half as much.
On MacOS it is way better than the crippled hacked-together thing that is on iOS. Google was right to move from WebKit to Blink for Chrome. It is far more stable and impressive.
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