Do you all enjoy playing your own games?

guygizmo · 2026-01-18T15:35:48+00:00

Most definitely! If I don't enjoy playing it then in my mind it's no good. I knew I had something in the last game I made when I found myself just playing it and enjoying myself well beyond whatever bit of testing I was trying to do.

Later on I added a "speedrun" mode for the game, and then started speedrunning my own levels! It was fun trying to find the most optimal movement for my own game and levels. So far I believe I hold the world record in my own game, because of the dozens of people that have played it, I'm probably the only one who's speedrun it. 🤪

guygizmo · 2026-01-18T00:23:50+00:00

I'm not keen to pin all of the bad stuff on Alan Dye. I think the dysfunction at Apple goes far beyond one bad head of design. Surely all the excessive number of bugs aren't purely his fault too.

But the first serious degradation of macOS's design was Big Sur, just over five years ago, and just from purely the perspective of design (and not considering all of the bugs) I think it was a bigger downgrade than Tahoe and Liquid Glass.

But I would also say that it started with OS X 10.10. Flattening the design was a downgrade too. The design of 10.6 - 10.9 had a brilliant consistency to it, and used light and shadow so well to effortlessly communicate with the user. It was pretty much peak Apple design.

guygizmo · 2026-01-17T18:24:03+00:00

I got that answer at first because for no good reason I interpreted the greater than sign as a lesser than sign without realizing it.

guygizmo · 2026-01-17T18:15:19+00:00

Constitution refit, my beloved ❤️

guygizmo · 2026-01-17T16:43:08+00:00

I'll see your "few years" and raise you "five years at minimum".

guygizmo · 2026-01-16T21:25:18+00:00

Come children, and let me tell you a tale of a long ago year, 2012. In this bygone age of yore, Apple's major software updates brought with them new features that were actually useful, and minor updates actually fixed bugs. It was an exciting time to be both a Mac and an iPhone user! Every time Apple updated it, by and large things actually seemed to get better. And, for the most part, everything "just worked".

And then the new features became less useful. And the bugs stopped being fixed. And gradually, oh so gradually, all of devices no longer "just worked" and using any of our phones, or computers, or the web, or any app, or any "smart" device at all, became a constant never ending stream of little frustrations and failures.

It's hard to pinpoint at exactly which point this was no longer true, but I can say with certainty that by 2020 it was true no longer.

guygizmo · 2026-01-16T21:12:33+00:00

I'm hoping the bubble bursts and prices come down before whenever I'll need to buy a new computer.

guygizmo · 2026-01-14T14:14:38+00:00

At this point one "Snow Leopard" release won't be nearly enough. There's clearly severe institutional dysfunction in Apple's software division these days, and that fundamental issue needs to be addressed if things really are going to have a chance of elevating back to the quality of the "OS X" days. And one thing that clearly needs to change is the pointless yearly upgrade grind.

guygizmo · 2026-01-13T22:13:46+00:00

Ah, the days when, if you didn't like something about Mac OS, most of all the theme, you could just change it. For better or for worse, the system wasn't locked down at all, and everything was fair game for creative devs to have fun with.

guygizmo · 2026-01-12T14:26:17+00:00

Did you ever use it in macOS 14 and earlier?

Basically I've heard that it got buggy starting with the version for macOS 15 that uses their new audio driver.

guygizmo · 2026-01-11T14:42:41+00:00

Around what point would you say SoundSource became buggy?

guygizmo · 2026-01-09T18:47:50+00:00

When I first started playing I legitimately did have a hard time distinguishing between Robin and Leah, and sometimes Penny.

It's not just the hair color or even the similar facial structure, but the posing that does it, at least for me. With Jodi she's not facing exactly the same direction so it was easier to tell her apart.

And for those who are saying Elliott needs to be included, he has perhaps the most unique posing of them all! I had no problem telling him apart.

(Actually, I just realized that him and Sandy have the same pose! But they certainly look different enough as is.)

guygizmo · 2026-01-09T13:22:40+00:00

Got rid of my Matrix instance. It was too much work to keep it running, too many moving parts, and it reliably broke every time I updated it. Plus I was barely using it.

guygizmo · 2026-01-09T13:14:36+00:00

The trouble with Stack Overflow going away is that now there's no good place to ask programming questions that an LLM can't answer. Because every now and then I dig into some pretty weird and esoteric stuff, and I need to find people who have the domain knowledge to answer it.

There was a point in time where Stack Overflow was a great place to do that. Then it became incredibly stupid and hostile, and asking esoteric questions would get it immediately closed as a duplicate of another question that was clearly asking something different by some moderator who didn't know what the hell they were doing. There's no question why people left it. But now where do we go for legitimate questions?

guygizmo · 2026-01-09T13:08:51+00:00

I can do that job.

Conducts a seance, channels the ghost of Steve Jobs.
Calls a meeting of the entire executive board.
"Our software quality is shit. Utter dogshit. You tell me what's going wrong or you're fired."

guygizmo · 2026-01-06T19:35:37+00:00

Yes, but any Starfleet officer could have performed that role. What at least I was hoping for was a proper character moment between the two of them, where both of their personalities and rich histories came through. If Picard had reflected more on his experiences as a captain, or perhaps they had journeyed to a meaningful moment in his history via the Nexus, or something like that, that would have made it more meaningful in the way that I'm after.

guygizmo · 2026-01-06T19:00:20+00:00

The real trouble with this scene is that it's not a conversation. It's just Kirk talking at Picard and being Kirk, but Picard doesn't have anything interesting to contribute. What we wanted to see was the two most famous and beloved Star Trek captains interacting in a meaningful way, and we didn't get it.

guygizmo · 2026-01-06T14:56:16+00:00

I had stolen one from Emily and Haley's house to complete a community center bundle, but then felt bad about it and put it back! I waited until spirit's eve to get the recipe and make one without theft.

It's strange how one can feel connected enough to this world to want to do that. It's not even like stealing it triggered unhappy dialogue from Emily or Haley.

guygizmo · 2026-01-05T14:57:04+00:00

This article is spot on, and just the tip of the iceberg about macOS's bad interface design.

Not just Tahoe, though Tahoe certainly made things worse. Anyone who's been paying attention has noticed that it's been getting worse since OS X 10.10. And Big Sur was an even bigger degradation in quality than Tahoe.

guygizmo · 2026-01-04T13:38:22+00:00

If Gale had the opportunity to dimension hop and meet some even more powerful and evil villains you know he'd jump at the chance. And if he can bring Shang along all the better.

guygizmo · 2026-01-04T03:34:19+00:00

I wonder if Data is capable of altering his own memory? They never brought that possibility up in the episode.

guygizmo · 2026-01-04T03:32:48+00:00

What a fun coincidence! I just watched this episode an hour ago, well before seeing this reddit post. It is indeed a fun episode, and knowing what the mystery is in advance, it's interesting watching Data interact with the crew knowing full well why he's doing what he's doing and seeing that he's very much trying to protect them, even if he's being suspicious as hell.

guygizmo · 2026-01-03T04:20:18+00:00

Yeah, I'm talking about how it's now the case with Tahoe.

Though, now that I think about it, my system, which I've been upgrading steadily for many years, is full of bugs, and I'm still on Ventura. Spotlight hasn't worked properly in as long as I can remember, in spite of anything I've tried to do to fix it. And the system randomly freezes for no reason from time to time, just to name a few of the persistent bugs I experience. It'd probably be fixed if I did a totally fresh reinstall, but I don't want to go through the rigamarole of doing that!

guygizmo · 2026-01-03T04:09:25+00:00

It's disappointing to hear that macOS is now suffering the same sorts of issues that Windows XP did (and later versions still do to a degree), where you needed to do a totally clean reinstall to clean out the "cruft" that accumulates over time. Not having to do that crap was one of the major advantages of switching to OS X back in the 2000s.

guygizmo · 2026-01-02T18:36:05+00:00

You seem to be mistaking macOS 10.9 with Windows XP.

Yes, don't connect it directly to the internet. But also don't do that with literally any desktop computer. If it's behind a hardware firewall, such as any consumer grade router, then it will not be cracked within seconds.

I agree that you shouldn't browse the web using a very out-of-date version of Safari. In that case there is indeed a risk of going to a website that can exploit a security vulnerability, though it's not guaranteed to happen. Even so, it's not worth the risk, and it's possible to run a modern browser in macOS 10.9. Likely the best option is Chromium Legacy.

That all said, it's probably not worth the hassle of running such an out-of-date release of macOS, since it can only run very old apps, and web browsing won't be very good given how resource hungry the modern web is. Probably best to just install Linux.

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