The App Store has done a great job of training users to think that anything downloaded from it is somehow safe. In reality, Apple’s static code analysis and human review processes are flawed and people need to exercise way more caution than they do.
After having given Openclaw a try as my "personal assistant" for a day when traveling, I 100% want this to be one possible way I can interact with my computer going forward.
Of course it's failed hilariously in many instances, is currently not private (I want local inference before giving it access to anything material, or it'll indeed be a privacy nightmare), and crashes all the time, but the fact that a (not yet) walking, talking CVE can do a better job at this than one of the most wealthy corporations in the world after several years of trying should give them some serious pause.
The “failing hilariously” bit is critical for this road-tripping use case.
It’s only going to take one bad suggestion that leaves someone in a dangerous situation to lose faith in simply handing over a whole day’s itinerary to an LLM. Honestly that can go so bad very easily.
We are decades into the GPS navigation era and I still don’t trust the route my vehicle suggests. I have been burned so many times that we literally still compare routes from different providers for a new trip.
> I have been burned so many times that we literally still compare routes from different providers for a new trip.
I heard this often but what has been the issue in practice? The worst that happened to me is Google Maps suggesting I cross a bridge that was washed away by the last typhoon, but that's hardly Google's fault.
Only in very remote places has Google Maps failed me, at least for driving directions (for trails it's another story...)
> It’s only going to take one bad suggestion that leaves someone in a dangerous situation
I feel like if one bad suggestion can leave somebody in a dangerous situation, many other things must have failed before, such as informing oneself of the general condition of roads in a given place and the current season, having a fallback plan in case digital navigation fails or a road is unexpectedly closed etc.
> failed hilariously in many instances, is currently not private, and crashes all the time, a (not yet) walking, talking CVE
Is actually doing a better job than not doing any of that at all? This isn’t a life or death situation where something is better than nothing out of desperation. Sometimes if you can’t do it right it’s better to not do it at all. Better to wait for the full meal instead of having a “slop snack”.
I can do a terrible job at transplanting brains in robotic bodies. Terrible. Which is more than any company can do so yay?
Some things are worse than nothing in terms of quality or liability.
Yes, it's significantly better than nobody doing any of this for me, and the important thing for the purpose of this prediction is that the error rate still seems to be going down exponentially with time.
> This isn’t a life or death situation where something is better than nothing out of desperation.
That's exactly where it would make sense to try a new thing then, no?
> I can do a terrible job at transplanting brains in robotic bodies.
Sounds like a much more high stakes activity than telling me factoids around my travel itinerary, so I agree that we shouldn't have you run the neurosurgery department yet, yes.
I can see a lot of negatives in relation to removing the human readable aspect of software development. Thorough testing would be virtually impossible because we’d be relying on fuzzing to iron out potential edge cases or bugs.
In this situation, AI companies are incentivised to host the services their tooling generates. If we don't get source code, it is much easier for them to justify not sharing it. Plus, who is to say the machine code even works on consumer hardware anyway? It leads to a future where users specify inputs while companies generate programs and handle execution. Everything becomes a black box. No thank you.
All these questions are true for agriculture, yet you say "yes thank you, and please continue" for that industry I am sure, which seeks to improve product through random walk and unknown mechanisms. Maybe take a step back and examine your own biases.
> All these questions are true for agriculture, yet you say "yes thank you, and please continue" for that industry I am sure, which seeks to improve product through random walk and unknown mechanisms.
Tell me you know nothing about modern agriculture without telling me that
Figma has become absolutely shocking in the past few years. The performance is so bad these days. It doesn’t help that almost every designer doesn’t care to split things into more than one document. I’ve seen Figma documents with hundreds of screens.
> It doesn’t help that almost every designer doesn’t care to split things into more than one document
That’s how these tools encourage you to use them. If the tool crumbles under its own usage modalities, that’s because it’s poorly designed, not the user’s fault.
You don't need to split into multiple files to make large documents manageable, multiple pages works just fine (pages you're not using aren't loaded). But even still, I have absolutely massive pages with ~100 screens on them that work just fine on this base-tier M2 MBA.
Honestly given the complexity of the screens involved I feel Figma's performance is pretty reasonable. (Now, library publish and update - that's still unreasonably slow IMO)
In Australia, if you work in multiple places and at multiple companies, it’s still trivial to file your own taxes. You log in to the government portal, where the collected amounts of tax from each income source, including bank interest, is listed. It can get more complicated if you have your own business but for the majority of people it’s easy and doesn’t require a third party.
Australia has a progressive tax structure, right? If you have multiple income sources how does each source know the proper withholdings? How do they know what deductions you'll be eligible for or are wanting to take?
If it works anything like what we've got in Norway, they take a rough percentage, and once every year when the taxes are filed, the IRS equivalent charges or repays the missing amount.
That's how it works. You indicate if you want the company to take the tax free threshold (you only want to do this for one job if you have multiple), and then you can also elect to tell your employer(s) an estimated taxable income and they'll use that. Otherwise they just assume your income from that job is your taxable income.
At the end of the year you file online and put in your deductions, which hopefully cover any other taxable income (capital gains, dividends, interest, etc.) if you didn't give your employer a higher figure. Then you pay if you're owing or get a refund if not.
I don't understand how these could be issues. They aren't in my country.
You're still responsible.
Tell each company how much to withhold.
If they take too much, you get it back when you file taxes.
If they don't take enough, you pay a penalty for having too large of a bill when you file.
The issues you mention exist regardless of how many employers you have, because you can have income that does not come from an employer (e.g. stock dividends).
This sounds the same as the US then. If you have more than one income source or you're planning on taking something other than the standard deduction you need to tell your income sources to change withholdings. If they take too much, you get it back when you file taxes.
What's the big difference? You don't need a tax preparer to do your taxes in the US, and if all you have is a normal W-2 income and a bit of bank interest its a pretty simple couple of forms to file.
It's hard to tell if there's much of a difference or not since I don't really know the US system (and I'm, in all likelihood, from yet another country different than GP).
The simplest cases, however, don't really require filing forms at all. The withholding process sounds similar, and when the time for filing taxes comes, you get a pre-filled return sheet with withheld taxes and your pre-calculated actual tax based on the information the tax office has.
Employers directly report income to the tax office, so that information is already included. Banks also automatically withhold taxes on the interest they pay and report it to the tax office. I think banks and broker companies usually report sales of stocks etc. made through them as well.
The same pre-filled return sheet includes national and local income taxes that have been automatically calculated based on your place of residence. (I assume this is more complex in the US due to different state legislations; here the tax legislation is the same everywhere even though local tax rates vary.)
If you don't want to add deductions (in addition to standard ones) and you don't have any corrections to make, you don't need to file any forms. The only things you need to do are to pay the difference if you owe something or to report your account number for a refund if they don't have it already. Otherwise filing in a simple case is a no-op.
If you do want to file for deductions or make corrections, you can do that with an online form.
And of course you still do want to check that the pre-calculated information is correct and whether there are any non-automatic deductions for which you're eligible.
More complex cases are, well, more complex. If you've got income from renting an apartment, for example, you do need to report that information yourself. But it's still a relatively simple online form.
Real estate tax is handled separately from income tax. You get sent a bill with a pre-calculated sum based on property registered in your name. If you have no corrections to make, you just pay the bill.
In contrast, I think even small businesses commonly hire accountants since for them the process is probably more complex with all the deductibles etc.
If the simple cases are similarly simple in the US and making corrections is a relatively straightforward form away, I wonder why there always seems to be such a big fuss in the US about filing taxes. Because of state/local differences in tax code? Just overall complex legislation? Or maybe it's just more common to have income from a variety of sources so more people need to deal with the more complex cases? Is the filing process paper-only and the only way to do simple online filing with automatic calculation to go through commercial tax-filing software?
In the UK you get a code based on last year’s earnings, which the company uses to set a flat rate of withholding on each paycheck. If there’s any discrepancy that usually just feeds into next year’s code.
In Australia, you probably need to tell the companies about the other income sources, and they will attempt to withhold at the appropriate rate. Then at the end of financial year, you go to your pre-filled online tax return which has all the figures reported by each company you work for already present and sums up whether there’s a refund or payment due. This is also where you enter any deductions.
I don’t mind the visual appearance of iOS 26. My main gripe is that this update introduces some pointless additional taps for common interactions.
Here’s some of the UX regressions:
- Apple Music: the “next track” button is only visible if the tab bar is expanded. So now we have to scroll or tap, wait for an animation and then click next.
- Web views search web for selected text: previously we could highlight, swipe the action menu and then tap the button. Now we have to highlight, tap the small arrow, wait for the horizontal list to animate into a vertical list, tap the button. They removed the ability to swipe the action menu.
- Tab bars: since 2007, you could change tabs with one tap. Now it’s one or two taps, depending on whether it’s collapsed or expanded.
Personally, I like the vertical list in the web view for highlighted text. The action menu was so annoying. The items were always in a different order and I always had to highlight, tap, tap, tap… on small targets to get to what I wanted.
Agreed! Accidentally dismissing the old menu and needing to scroll again drove me up the wall. My phone has over 3 million pixels and I did not gain anything by having a small, horizontally scrolling menu specific to highlighted text.
react-router is such a disaster. It’s got to be one of the most irritating but ubiquitous packages. I’m going to migrate to Tanstack Router on a project that uses react-router v6 currently, rather than bother with the v7 migration.
I don’t think it’s actually faster than Jest in every circumstance. The main selling point, IMO, is that Vitest uses Vite’s configuration and tooling to transform before running tests. This avoids having to do things like mapping module resolution behaviour to match your bundler. Not having to bother with ts-jest or babel-jest is also a plus.
