Threads for true_detective
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Lack of Export/API
There were competing businesses writing about this at the time, and at that time were kicked off the app store: https://freedom.to/blog/screentime-is-just-the-beginning-an-api-for-digital-wellbeing/ (via my 2018 tweet: https://twitter.com/vivekgani/status/1044757170078670848 > via https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1044689879224004608)
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Thanks for sharing. I wasn’t aware of Freedom, and it does look like an interesting service. I didn’t see what kind of usage stats they offer. I see that they don’t send data back and operate on device, I’m also interested in know how they block apps on iOS. Outside parental controls, I don’t think that’s possible.
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I was exploring how to write my own at one point, and speculate some apps (like Freedom) switched between a vpn profile setup (which could do everything locally and route certain domain names/ips to localhost - on iOS NSAppTransportSecurity’s NSAllowsLocalNetworking might facilitate this) and an actual remote VPN if really needed - hence why many have a monthly payment business model.
So you could block not the ‘app’ itself, but block the network connections - useful at least for social media & news apps.
Another approach may be dns proxying, done by https://nextdns.io/ for example.
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Thanks, that’s really helpful.
I’ve a Raspberry Pi running locally to block ads, I think it would be a fun weekend project to setup a VPN to my home network.
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I feel like this particular feature was one of those “bullet point on the box” features designed to placate moralizing parents who wanted to get devices for their kids but not let their kids use the devices “too much.” The majority of its users are thus captives who don’t want the feature and don’t care about it. It’s mostly there to convince distracted parents that they’re doing “enough” for their kids. So of course it’s no good. There’s no incentive for Apple to improve it.
I definitely agree with the thrust of the article though. Apple is always adding features that we don’t want or use, and then eventually they disappear in the night. Remember widgets? They’ve done this kind of thing forever. They’re humans too, despite how they present themselves.
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Thank you, I had not thought from that angle at all. That’s probably it. They do feature it near the top in Settings app though, it’s among top 10 in settings app list on iPhone and iOS.
Remember widgets? I feel that Widgets have at least gotten a lot more love and there are several rumors around widget improvements in iOS 16.
Nit picking aside, I agree that this is a habit they have gotten into lately and as someone who likes their devices, I find that a bit concerning. A lot of new features feel like they’re 90% done but then they leave them just out there. Storage screen in settings is a good example. It has been around forever and I still often see complaints about a mysterious “other” block growing to 100s of GBs once in a while. Heck, they even brought that to macOS without letting us see further what “other”
Though recent OS releases from them have been less buggy IMHO, I can only hope that they’ll tighten the quality around OS features next.
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I mostly agree, except widgets are a tar pit that both Apple and Microsoft and others periodically fall into. Remember Active Desktop with IE4 and Windows 98? (Which in turn was meant to challenge PushCast, IIRC.) Every few years since then someone decides that using HTML to make widgets is a good idea, but it’s never performant enough and they always drop it a few years later.
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I would be interested to know if there are open-source / self-hosted alternatives for these kinds of things. I did a quick search and found:
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Thanks for sharing these.
I hadn’t looked into open source alternatives, activity watch does look interesting. These projects would also benefit if Apple ever opens up their APIs because iOS and iPadOS are still not supported by such services.
Edit: missed the question! I haven’t searched open source alternatives. I used Rescue Time for the longest time and then stopped tracking time since it’s built in via Screen Time on iOS and macOS. I’d rather not have an extra program running doing the same thing when the OS is doing it for me.
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This is a nice and whimsical way to show an error to users. I like Amazon’s dogs on error pages too. Are there any other good examples?
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Why are the versions inverted? I read the post too and it says:
Below is a comparison of GoAWK’s performance when compiled using each released version of Go from 1.2 (the earliest version I could download) to 1.18 (which is in beta now)
Am I missing anything?
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Thanks for taking time to explain it, I see it now.
My sleepy brain kept parsing these as decimals instead of version numbers, so I couldn’t comprehend how
1.2<1.18.
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Here are a bunch of utilities I use daily and recommend:
- One Switch, paid - useful for quickly connecting AirPods/bluetooth headphones, toggling multiple settings on/off. I find keep awake useful when I need to monitor something without having to touch keyboard/mouse.
- Pastebot, paid - a nice clipboard manager. There are open source alternatives available but I like the interface and extensibility.
- Lunar, free - open source utility with nice UI to automatically manage your external monitor brightness. Warning - I have read on several places that lot of cheaper monitors have limited read/write cycles in their internal flash and this may cause them to be bricked after 100000 or so cycles. Can’t find the link though.
- 1Password, paid - Great password manager.
- BetterSnapTool, paid - adds useful window controls. Also checkout out BetterTouchTool to customize mouse/keyboard but I use Bartender and BetterTouchTool doesn’t play nicely with that.
- iStat Menus, paid - advanced system monitor.
- Safari, free - Unless you us some Firefox/Chrome specific extension, Safari is a great, if under featured browser. It has the best battery life among browsers on Mac and has great system specific features like play/pause controls on keyboard, picture in picture (may need extension to enable the button on all sites but Touch Bar will usually show a PiP button).
- Things, paid - To Do, Project manager. Nice UI and lot of useful features.
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This HN comment is the first time that I have heard about the EEPROMs write limit. Note that I took the comment at face value because of the author and I haven’t researched it further.
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I have to second your Safari recommendation. Even better with an ad-blocker like Better—the architecture of content blocker plugins in Safari means that they generally don’t negatively affect page load performance at all.
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I use Better with Safari and it’s my daily driver for personal use. Of course web dev tools leave a bit to be desired and not all extensions are there. Hopefully extension issue will be resolved with upcoming changes to adopt web extensions API.
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Yes, I remember that from WWDC. But Apple still wants extensions in App Store, and that may limit devs since that costs $99 a year.
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I can definitely recommend that you get Dash, it lets you download documentation for a lot of languages and frameworks and browse and search them offline. Probably one of the reason I like working on macOS so much.
Otherwise:
- Textual 7 for a nice IRC app,
- Texpad for all your LaTeX needs (supports live LaTeX preview!) and
- MacTeX for everything else.
- Sublime Text is pretty popular for some folks.
- OpenEmu for all your emulator needs (supports playstation controllers too).
- GitUp if you like a graphical interface for git.
- Shimo if you want a nice GUI interface that supports a lot of VPN protocols.
- Little Snitch for all your firewall needs.
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I second Dash recommendation. It’s a really nice app and I use it daily.
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I’ve been trying to get rid of my real name from reddit/gaming accounts. Reddit won’t let me migrate my subreddit subscriptions over easily.
I am planning to write a small script that can do this using Reddit API.
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I have three projects in the cooker at the moment:
- A complete ground up rebuilding of a static site generator I started working on in 2015; otherwise known as aggressive refactoring
- A loose port of Isso to Go; this is to help me learn Go and what better way than to port tens of thousands of LOC from one language you don’t know to another?
- A simple podcast publishing platform that can be self hosted while also offering federated publishing of feed
My day to day at work involves PHP, Node and a substantial amount of front end JS in the form of Vue and Angular; I am a backend developer at heart so I need these personal project just to keep my sanity.
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I can relate to you. I did quite a bit of PHP and AngularJS work at my last job. Now I’m just starting up on a job where I’ll be doing a lot of Python and React. While react is alright, I still prefer backend and Python is much more fun for me.
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The past 5 years of my career I’d categorize as “trying to avoid web dev at all costs.” It is possible, just depends on your shop.
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I’m about to wrap up my postgrad, so my focus is on skills that will be good in job hunting and increasing my visibility as open source contributor. Right now, my list is:
- Increasing my ML skills by participating in at least 2 competitions on Kaggle
- Get good with programming interviews by practicing on Hacker Rank and LeetCode
- (Re)Start contributing to OSS projects. I am thinking of getting started with gensim, scikit-learn and Rust Docs, open to any other interesting projects as well.
- Finish reading Calculus Made East
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I’ve been a long term WordPress user but Gutenberg looks like an overkill and with this announcement, I’m excited.
Imagine Medium’s editor and Slack’s integrations had a beautiful illegitimate lovechild. That’s the vibe we set out to accomplish.
I don’t know about general sentiment but Medium is a great writing experience and adding Slack like slash commands will only enhance the experience. I have moved my blog a couple of times to Ghost but this may finally be the push I needed.
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I’m Oleg, occasionally I write about Go, would like to add more posts about unpopular algorithms and personal projects.
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Do you mind giving a couple of examples of unpopular algorithms? That just caught my eye and I think learning something new never hurts.
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Glad to here :)
I was thinking about Johnson’s algorithm, few primes algos(few my own prime sieves), union-find with additional data, well…plenty of them :D
Well, maybe not all are unpopular, but not that common at least.
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Hi, I’m Ishan and I write anywhere from 2-6 posts a year on my blog https://ishan.co/blog
I also write about games at times but mostly, it’s useful tips related to issues I face. Mostly centered around PHP, Machine Learning (not yet started), macOS and iOS.
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While I got the context that this is about GNOME, I’m not really sure what the author is talking about. Are their guidelines very complicated that make icons look terrible? How does that affect blender or other apps in screenshots? And how does detail become harmful there?
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I learned AWS on the job.
I am learning on the job at the moment, and this youtube channel is the best resource I’ve found.
He’s got a nice style and a knack for cutting through irrelevant details to expose the essence of the services. You can try this excellent:
18 minute overview of the core AWS services
to see if you like it.
I’ve also done (or partially done) a few on LinkedIn learning and somewhere else I forgot, and they weren’t as good as this free resource.
very strange list of “most important” IMO. But what is most important to one will not be most important to another.
+1. I did a 3 day course offered by AWS. It was helpful to learn the foundational blocks like access management, ARNs and course taught us how to build a web service.
For any new services, I’ve found their docs helpful and there are usually tutorial style documents that teach you how to do a specific thing with the service.
I did this as well but I recommend not having to learn how to deploy, configure, and maintain Hadoop clusters at the same time as in my case.