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I mean… Apple went out of their way to build a GUI OS picker that supports custom names and icons into their boot loader.

So they don’t actively help (or event make it easy by providing clear docs), but they do still do enough to enable really motivated people


Using the iOS 26 keyboard on an iPhone SE 2/3 is a truly miserable experience now. Upgrading from 18 was a terrible mistake

POS Apple just made me upgrade my iPhone Mini to 26 so that I could pair my new Apple Watch, because I just broke the old one.

I wasn't sure I wanted another Apple Watch, but it was the easiest thing to buy, and I don't have to figure out how to transfer all the data and set it up somewhere else.

But I definitely regret going the "easy" way; iOS 26 is truly awful, what the fuck.

I'm going to figure out what fitness/sport watch I really want to use next because I doubt I'll be sticking to iPhone with what they have on offer these days...


Luckily, hearing all the complains early adopters of 26 had, I disabled auto updates on my SE. Since you can't go back to previous iOS version, leaving it on is a bit risky in general.

This is cool work. However, the author claims the following:

> This knowledge could be useful for security research and building developer tools that does not rely on Xcode or Apple’s proprietary tools.

Yes it could be. But if you developed it for such altruistic purposes, why tease the code?

> I’m considering open-sourcing these tools, but no promises yet!

Maybe OOP is thinking of selling their reverse engineering tools? Seems like that’s still a proprietary tool, I’m just paying someone else for it


I'm not sure it's about money. This maybe be increasingly hard to imagine in this age of AI-slop, but some devs actually don't want to publish code that is a terribly embarrassing mess, and prefer to clean it up first.


There is nothing bad with messy code unless you work with a team. Showing that you coded messy code doesn't make you a bad coder.


I know, but not everybody knows or agrees with this. The idea that when someone doesn't put their code online it must be because they want money seems way off the mark to me, and that's the only point I was making.


Lots of fun references here - the Minecraft world border, and green goo looking “strange matter” from Kurzgesagt


LiDAR is the technology used to do spatial capture. The output is just point clouds of surfaces. So they’re generating surface point clouds from video


Was thinking I had missed an entire edition of Pathfinder for a moment upon reading the title


Your comment made me one day younger.


They made C memory safe? This is a big thing to gloss over in a single paragraph. Does anyone have extra details on this?

> On devices with iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 or later, Apple modified the C compiler toolchain used to build the iBoot bootloader to improve its security. The modified toolchain implements code designed to prevent memory- and type-safety issues that are typically encountered in C programs. For example, it helps prevent most vulnerabilities in the following classes:

> • Buffer overflows, by ensuring that all pointers carry bounds information that’s verified when accessing memory

> • Heap exploitation, by separating heap data from its metadata and accurately detecting error conditions such as double free errors

> • Type confusion, by ensuring that all pointers carry runtime type information that’s verified during pointer cast operations

> • Type confusion caused by use after free errors, by segregating all dynamic memory allocations by static type


>They made C memory safe?

They made a dialect of C with bounds safety, see:

https://clang.llvm.org/docs/BoundsSafety.html#overview


Many years ago. It’s called Firebloom. I think it’s similar in theory and lineage to Fil-C.

https://saaramar.github.io/iBoot_firebloom/


Sort of. From my understanding they’ve been heavily using clang with fbounds checks to insert checks into functions. I think there was work done to try to insert them into existing code as well. They memory tagging in new processors help avoid overflow exploitation. Maybe someone can jump in and add more details


Yes, that is however a dialect, and one of the goals to Swift Embedded roadmap is to replace it.


So they were not joking when they say they want Swift to replace from Assembly to Javascript.

I dont think this will end well.


It has been on Swift and Apple's official documentation since the early days.

People keep forgetting that Objective-C also had a full stack role on NeXTSTEP.

And the same full stack approach was also a thing on Xerox PARC systems, which mostly failed due to mismanagement.

Usually ends well for closed source platform vendors when developers aren't allowed to come up with alternatives like on FOSS operating systems.

At least, as long as the platform stays market relevant.


>People keep forgetting that Objective-C also had a full stack role on NeXTSTEP.

In terms of Apps and Low Level Stack Objective-C doesn't seems wrong in my book. The problem is Swift begin as a much larger language and evolve into a gigantic pile of a little of everything.


Doesn't seem to hinder C++, which modern C compilers are written with nowadays.

Despite all its complexity, LLVM and GCC aren't getting rewritten any time soon, or the OSes that rather use C++ subsets instead of being stuck with C.


Why? There's no particular reason why a language can't span low-level to high-level. C# is a good example of that: normally you deal with garbage collected objects and references, but if you need to drop down to explicit stack allocations, raw pointers, unions etc, you can - though of course the resulting code looks very different from idiomatic high-level code.


I find it interesting how in the essay Sanderson implies he doesn’t take issue with AI as a tool. You can use it to search in a more advanced way, or to summarise meeting minutes.

He in essence claims there is some intangible attribute of a work that defines it as art or not depending on both the person who made it and the process they went through.

It does seem like a slightly romantic notion, since for any given item you can’t know if it’s art or not just by looking at it, which seems a bit odd. But then again, I suppose there’s a reason people pay for guided tours at museums so they can learn about the history and background of a work.

Side note: the title is editorialised; it should be “The Hidden Cost of AI Art: Brandon Sanderson's Keynote”


>It does seem like a slightly romantic notion,

I'm not sure it is. I think his whole stance here is that you should create art for yourself, not because there is some intrinsic use to whatever you create, but because the artist has an insatiable need to create __something__. Creating art is therefor as much an act of personal growth as it is a past time. To rob yourself of that growth in his eyes, is to discard such growth.


I’ve used this site every time I’m doing http networking stuff for the past few years. It’s so easy to just go to http.cat/303 to check a status code you don’t know, or to scroll down the homepage to find the number you need for a specific response.

The cats make it much more fun than a regular docs page, whilst still being a useful quick reference. I wonder if other bits of reference information could be made more interesting in this way.


The IEEE-reference feels like a cute nod to HN


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