The DOGE Boys are apparently going to rewrite the software that runs Social Security in six months, according to Makena Kelly’s reporting at WIRED.

“Move Fast and Break Things” is such a scourge upon the software industry. It’s one thing to iterate rapidly to find product-market fit for your startup. It’s quite another to reimplement a decades-old system whose success or failure literally has life-or-death outcomes.

Years and many functioning hair follicles ago, I was a small part of a project team to change out the ERP system for my alma mater. This was, essentially, the system that kept the college running, from tuition payments to transcripts and everything in-between. The system we were leaving was a DEC Alpha-based system that had gone out of support, and we were moving to Banner (IYKYK). It was certainly showing its age in an era of 24/7 web services (the system had operating hours, which was remarkable and occasionally made it the butt of jokes). The project was rightly described as “changing out the engine of the car while driving.” It took years of planning and very careful implementation to make sure that the engine was changed out responsibly and with as few hiccups as possible. Overall, it worked out, but it was an incredibly stressful endeavor at times even with advance planning. In fact, at the time I left in fall of 2009, the project was still moving full speed ahead with just a couple components launched.

The point of that story was to note that even for a system that did not have life-or-death implications and was at a scale that was a fraction of the entire Social Security system, it took years. Put another way, the DOGE Boys are delusional if they think they can reimplement decades and decades of code in six months, even with generative AI (which will honestly probably make things much worse). Worse yet, there seems to be no good reason for it other than “the code is old and written in a language we don’t know,” which is an absolutely terrible reason to rewrite a system like this. One of my big gripes about the software engineering discipline (at least based on what I’ve been exposed to, and even my own biases as I’ve grown in my career) is how the longevity of a system doesn’t seem to be terribly valued and appreciated. “Good” code is not necessarily clever code or code based on the new hotness of the month — it’s the code that is flexible enough to withstand change while still performing well and reliably, and I just don’t see where the Social Security system falls short in this regard. But then again, I’m not a late-teens/early twenties tech bro that knows everything, either.

The actual way to disable these suggestions in Messages on MacOS:

In System Settings: Apple Intelligence & Siri, click the “About Siri, Dictation & Privacy…” button.

In the panel that opens, go to Messages. Turn off “Show Siri Suggestions in application”.

(When I turned this off, an already-generated suggestion in Messages continued to be shown to me in a chat thread. But new suggestions stopped being generated and shown.)

This kind of lack of attention to detail is getting maddening. What is happening at Apple?

Personal nerd and poor financial decision milestones were achieved today: I got a VESA-mountable Apple Studio Display to pair with my M2 Pro Mac mini. This is my first-ever Apple desktop display of my own. It’s been just a few hours, and I haven’t had much time with it, but so far, so good. I’m coming from a 27" 4K LG monitor that I was upscaling to 5K to get more breathing room in the UI, and there’s definitely an improvement not only in text sharpness, but even in system graphics performance now that the GPU doesn’t have to upconvert every UI frame.

Interestingly, with the Studio Display supporting True Tone, I thought for sure that it would go into a color temperature mismatch with my secondary 24" LG 4K display. That’s not the case, though: the True Tone support on the Studio Display also extends out to the monitor that doesn’t support it. That’s pretty nifty, IMO.

I’ve not really used the webcam yet (though my tests show that the firmware updates seem to have helped at least in my environment). The speakers are excellent, though, and I’m looking forward to trying the microphone on calls.

Having the three USB 3.1 ports available is quite nice, with plenty of bandwidth to go around. I have both of my FaceCams (one a FaceCam Pro, another a FaceCam Mk. 2) plugged into the monitor now, and I’m getting hitch-free uncompressed video from both. In the previous configuration, the hub on the LG monitor only supported USB2 speeds because I was using DisplayPort-over-USB, so I got MJPEG compression from the Mk. 2. The Pro was plugged directly into the Mac. The other bright side here is that I was able to free up a Thunderbolt 4 port directly on the Mac.

If there’s one caveat, I think it’s the panel’s response time – feels like my LG was a little quicker in this department. But it’s not a dealbreaker as I really don’t do any hardcore gaming on this machine. I leave that to the iMac G3 in the kitchen. :)

iPhone Mirroring in macOS Sequoia is very, very, very good. There’s not too much in the initial release of Sequoia and iOS 18 that I really care about, but this is one of those very nice quality of life improvements you didn’t know you needed until you got it.

I’ve been really impressed with how many of the details are just right. For instance, notifications that come through native to the Mac do not duplicate from the iPhone. That is huge in and of itself; could’ve been a real deal-breaker for folks! Being able to take action on notifications right from the Mac is a spot that Apple could have very easily half-assed, but they saw it through properly not only with opening the correct app on the mirrored iPhone when clicking on a notification, but also allowing for quick actions on the notification without invoking the Mirroring interface.

In future releases, I’d love the ability to invoke the Control Center from the Mac. I’d also like to see the notification about iPhone Mirroring being invoked collapse automatically when the phone is in StandBy mode. (It feels like it did this initially – not sure if I tweaked a setting that ultimately caused this behavior to change.) But beyond that…there’s not much I’d choose to improve at this point from my relatively limited (~2 weeks) experience with it.

Nobody asked, but I do have a small contribution to the 8GB RAM on MacBook Pro in the year of our lord 2023 discourse. (Coherence not 100% guaranteed.)

My first Apple silicon machine was a Mac mini M1 with 8GB of unified memory. I was quite pleased with its performance (and probably still would be!) especially compared to the 2015 MBP it replaced. However, I definitely ran into bottlenecks with my “pro” workflows with that little memory available. And when I hit those bottlenecks, it hurt: the system would become unresponsive, with beachballing and even the cursor becoming rather jumpy. It got to the point where I’d have to shut down Docker in order to run OBS, for instance…and I just grew weary of that limitation pretty quickly. (I’d at least feel like I could hit them, though, without feeling like the computer was about to launch into outer space, unlike the Intel machine!)

I traded it in for a Mac mini M2 Pro with 32 GB RAM when that model was introduced earlier this year, and I’ve not hit a hiccup since. I’ve been comfortable editing relatively complex GIS files, Docker containers, OBS…you name it, it runs it, and it runs it well. The Pro chip probably helps, but I know everything can fit because it’s got plenty of memory to work with.

I think there are a surprising amount of things that folks who get a base M3 with 8GB of RAM can do. I don’t totally poo-poo the notion that Apple Silicon can more efficiently manage memory, either – that M1 could certainly do quite a bit more multitasking more responsively than the Intel equivalent with the same RAM. And, of course, there’s the disclaimer that my workflow is generally out of the ordinary. But I still think that “Pro” means more than a base level of memory. Apple Silicon is pretty cool, but it can’t defy the foundational principles of computer science, either.

There’s a bug in rpm on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well as some versions of CentOS Stream that can stop packages from installing. (Convenient, right?) You’ll see messages such as signature hdr data BAD when trying to upgrade packages via dnf.

This is how I ended up solving it:

• I’d try to upgrade rpm in place via dnf using dnf upgrade rpm. This would fail, but it would cache the packages.
• Note the path to the cached packages. On my system, it was /var/cache/dnf/baseos-9a27fc7471a8d219/packages/, but yours may vary.
• Use rpm to force install the rpm and rpm-libs packages:
  • rpm -i --force /var/cache/dnf/baseos-9a27fc7471a8d219/packages/rpm-4.14.3-26.el8.x86_64.rpm
  • rpm -i --force /var/cache/dnf/baseos-9a27fc7471a8d219/packages/rpm-libs-4.14.3-26.el8.x86_64.rpm
• Then, try your dnf install or dnf upgrade procedure again, and it should be fine.

I upgraded my Mac mini’s monitor yesterday. I ended up going with a 27” LG 4K IPS panel.

First impressions are good. I’m hooked to the Mini via DisplayPort over USB-C. The USB-A ports are super-handy (and really a nice bonus), but are notably not rigged for high-power applications such as a charging pad.

Picture quality is great and does the job well for me. Text looks great, which is what I was gunning for, and the viewing angles are exactly what you would expect from an IPS panel. Looking forward to putting it more through its paces this week.

Just installed Monterey on my MBP and am giving the new Safari two-factor authentication magic a whirl. So far, mixed results for autofill from websites, but it’s early. Where it does work, it’s phenomenal.

This post by Dan Moren from Six Colors helps you migrate Authy two-factor codes to Safari. it is a little tedious, and depending on how your Authy is set up, it may require a little trial and error, but it works – a massive timesaver especially since I don’t plan on additional migrations to Monterey or iOS 15 for a while yet.