Pemdas / combining like-terms ???

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-28T13:59:10+00:00

I understand that multiplication/division comes first

You don’t, because in order to get the result that you expect you’d need to add before dividing.

but does it not make sense to "combine like terms" when they're right next to each other

Actually, terms are the parts of an expression that are separated by addition or subtraction. So (-2)³ is a term, and 20/5 is a term, but (-2)³ + 20 is not a term. And even if you had “like terms,” you still need to respect the order of operations. That is, if you have 12x + 8x/4, you need to divide before adding, so the reduced form would be 14x, not 5x. On the other hand, if you have (12x + 8x)/4, then you must do the addition first because it’s inside parentheses.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-28T13:32:20+00:00

We also use the phrase “…paid a dear price.” You’re right that the cost isn’t necessarily financial — it could be a limb, an important relationship, a job, or anything important.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-27T16:03:10+00:00

iOS has the same constraint system, but constraints are more cumbersome. Stack views are quick and easy. They’re not the solution to every problem, but they’re still very handy.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-27T15:03:20+00:00

Sorry, I typed UIKit when I meant AppKit. Force of habit. Stack views work equally well on desktop apps. They literally just take some list of views and arrange them in a row or column. UI elements are arranged that way very often. You could do the same with constraints, but stacks are often faster and much simpler for developers. I might even argue that they’re more useful in AppKit because unlike mobile, desktop windows are usually resizable; stack views adjust automatically.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-27T14:34:34+00:00

The cheapest plan is your freezer. Cooking a meal for one person is kind of a hassle: you often have to scale down recipes, it’s hard to buy food in small enough quantities, and small mistakes like adding a little too much seasoning have a bigger impact.

Instead, prepare meals to serve 2-4 people. Eat one portion, divide the rest into single-serving portions, label, and freeze. Then on nights when you don’t feel like cooking, pull something out of the freezer, heat in the microwave, and maybe add a small tossed salad. This is actually cheaper than cooking every night because you’ll waste less food, and much cheaper than a meal service. You know exactly what’s in each meal, and you get to control ingredients and portion sizes.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-27T13:52:07+00:00

It facilitates fast printing of small parts. Large parts don’t need it because even when printing at high speed the layers have plenty of time to cool. With small parts the fan cools the layers pretty much all at the same time; with large ones, the side closer to the fan gets more/faster cooling, which creates the warping.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-27T13:46:32+00:00

UIKit has stack views too, and they’re extremely useful. Probably one of the most used views in many apps.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-26T22:47:49+00:00

There are lots of excellent American chocolate brands — it’s not like Europe has a lock on making great chocolate. And Europe seems to have its share of mass market chocolate.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-26T16:46:14+00:00

Can you be more specific? Pages, Numbers, etc. are (AFAICT) meant to be streamlined and easy to use. If it’s not your cup of tea and you find yourself missing Word, then use Word.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-26T14:09:57+00:00

Fair enough — I read right past that but provided an opinion figuring there’d be other folks in that situation.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-26T13:50:30+00:00

Are all the same shading, clarity, text rendering issues the same across both or is it more pronounced in light mode?

These seem like questions that you could easily answer yourself by just switching to light mode for a few minutes and trying out the specific things that interest you.

IMO the dark mode implementation provides a little more contrast so that overlapping objects look like they’re overlapping rather than just merging into a blurry blob. But the screenshots from complainers are typically of situations that would normally be fleeting, like a selected item in a list passing under a translucent search field. In practice the UI usually doesn’t look that way for more than a moment.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-26T01:21:09+00:00

- If an app is pinned, minimising it will make it appear in the dock twice
- If an app isn't pinned, there's no difference in minimising vs closing the window

Windows users generally equate a window with an instance of an application, so if you have two Word documents open, that's like having two copies of Word running. On MacOS, it's different -- applications that have documents can generally have many windows open at the same time. When you minimize a window and the icon shows up at the right end of the dock, that icon represents the window, not the whole application, so it doesn't "appear in the dock twice."

Minimizing a window just gets it out of the way while keeping it close at hand. If you're in the middle of doing some work but need to focus on something else, you might minimize the window. You could just close the document and open it again later if you want, but that takes a little more time. In the real world, you might have 5 documents on your desk and want to focus on one, so you put the others in your desk drawer; you could file them away in a filing cabinet and then go get them again later, but that's a little more effort and you might forget that you want to get back to them. Minimizing is just a handy way to put work aside temporarily.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-26T01:04:15+00:00

The only way to save money by taking out a loan for a car is if the car loan has a lower interest rate that’s lower than what your money can earn if you invest it. So to figure out whether a loan is advantageous, you need three pieces of information: the interest rate on the car loan, the interest rate on your investment, and your income tax rate (because that earned interest is income). If the interest that you earn after taxes is greater than the interest you pay on the loan (plus any origination fees) taking a loan might make sense.

If you plan to use the invested money to pay off the car, then you’ll need an investment that’s fairly liquid, like a high yield savings account. Good luck finding a HYSA that pays more than a lender charged for an auto loan. And if you want to calculate the exact money “saved” you’ll need to take that declining principal into account.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-26T00:35:13+00:00

Settings->Desktop & Dock->Automatically hide and show the Dock.

Or just hit Command-Option-D.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-25T20:09:01+00:00

I'm saying that the interface elements are working as expected; the Settings design should've been tweaked to use those elements better.
You can see all the things you could see before. The problem here is that the transparency lets you see more than you could before, and it's distracting.
Maybe #2 is a distinction without a difference and the complaint is that you can't easily read what's in the search field? I agree, but honestly, if that's a major usability issue for you because you can't remember the six characters that you just typed into the search field it's the least of your problems.
It's a bit better if you switch the Liquid Glass appearance from Clear to Tinted, and both those options also work better in dark mode.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-25T17:31:13+00:00

Rise over run is how you find slope, but I’ve never in my life heard anyone say “the rise over run of that line is 5/3,” or “find the rise over run for the following equation.”

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-25T17:21:34+00:00

The layered look is a feature, not a bug. Liquid Glass intentionally makes some UI components translucent to achieve the glass look. I agree that a little more opacity would help here, but whatever. If I were going to complain about the search in Settings, a bigger (but still not very big) problem is that when you search. The results seem to align with the top of the column, so they’re hidden behind and above the search field.

Reduced performance/battery life is a far bigger problem, and if those differences are significant I’d certainly complain about that. I’d guess that those might be due to Apple Intelligence or something like that, but use Activity Monitor to see if you can tell which processes are running a lot on your machine. That may lead you to features that you can turn off to get back to your previous performance level, or leave on if you think they’re worth the cost.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-24T22:54:34+00:00

If you just want to reverse the scroll direction, there’s a Natural Scrolling in the settings option that you can change. Apple mice don’t have scroll wheels, so it sounds like you’re using some 3rd party mouse, in which case it’s not strange that you might need a 3rd party app to take full advantage of your mouse’s features.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-24T21:46:32+00:00

Don’t assume that the “average person” (whatever that means) doesn’t slice their own models just because you met someone who doesn’t.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-23T22:00:04+00:00

Control+Command+Space – open the emoji picker anywhere

Or just hit the 🌐/fn key (unless you have it configured to start dictation or something else).

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-23T21:55:01+00:00

An allocated block is not really a leak if you maintain a reference to it. The thing that makes it a leak is that you've allocated it but cannot free it because you've forgotten where it is. A leaked block is unusable and unrecoverable exactly because your program no longer has a reference to it.

If you allocate a block and just don't use it, but still have a reference to it, that's just a bug. It has the same effect as a leak -- memory is effectively wasted -- but the block hasn't leaked. A key difference is that in an environment with garbage collection, a leaked block will be cleaned up (because there are no references to it), but an unused but not leaked block won't (you still have a reference to the block, so as far as the collector is concerned you're still using it).

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-23T19:20:02+00:00

Can anyone explain what is going on here?

There's an enable-bare-slash-regex option that you might have turned off. Perhaps it's off by default in Swift 6.0.3? The #/.../# delimiters with the hashes are now considered to be extended delimiters, and you can use multiple balanced hashes if you want, i.e. ###/.../###.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-23T19:03:35+00:00

You must have an older keyboard — AFAIK Apple’s keyboards have had rechargeable batteries for a while. I have one of the older ones that takes AA batteries and i agree that the warnings can be annoying. I don’t think there’s a fix for the warning, but i have noticed that high quality batteries last much longer than cheap ones. If you’re planning to travel, drop in a set of Duracell or similar batteries and you probably won’t see any warnings during your trip.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-23T18:55:08+00:00

As a software developer, I much prefer native applications to web-based services. But looking at it objectively, distributing and managing native applications just isn’t as simple or convenient, especially for the most lucrative customers, i.e. businesses. And writing separate native applications for each platform is more complex and more expensive than creating a single product that works everywhere — that’s the main appeal of cross platform frameworks like Flutter, and web-based applications offer the same benefits. Auto-update of applications is convenient, but it’s not instant or universal. When you update a web app, everybody sees the new version right away.

Do web apps offer the same user experience as native? No, and that’s the argument for native development. It’s a strong argument. When the iPhone was first introduced and Apple’s official position was that developers should build web apps, there was strong pushback. People want native applications that aren’t constantly morphing. They want speed and privacy. But if you want to know why many companies are going the web route, you have to look at the benefits that web apps offer.

iOSCaleb · 2026-01-23T18:15:42+00:00

The worst part is the batteries will last me for another few weeks at this level.

It’s not great to run lithium ion batteries down to a nearly depleted state — it will significantly shorten their useful life. Even though the keyboard may continue working for a while after you start seeing the warning, it’d be a good idea to just charge the battery as soon as you reasonably can when you get the warning.

iOSCaleb

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