While big tech has been letting me down, technologists themselves—especially the old guard—have been doing anything but.

1. The Let Down

In what should have been a welcome upgrade, iOS 26 and MacOS Tahoe over-prioritized style at substance’s great expense. For the first time in over a score I reverted. Hard.

It’s not just the watered-down skeumorphism that nobody asked for: Apple’s “liquid glass” overhaul leaks memory, reduces battery life, and wastes screen real estate on distracting and immutable visual effects. As someone who spends his career and life interacting with Cupertino-designed screens—whether this is a good use of a life isn’t the point right now—the degradation is noticeable, undesirable, and painful.

While it’s not all bad, it does encapsulate the term enshittification quite well. Big tech companies have been slowly boiling the frog.

It might be time to jump.

2. The Anything But

I am far from alone in my frustrations, and between the confluence of functional codegen and accelerating enshittification there is renewed interest and investment in alternatives.

And, with the industry moving away from desktop apps and towards webapps—and soon, AI-centric user interfaces—the verenable operating system needs a rethink. Mobile and desktop both.

Over the past six months, I’ve noticed more engineers and engineering leaders daily-driving Linux over MacOS and Windows. I expect this trend continues as open source operating environments rapidly approach parity with their commercial counterparts… who aren’t doing themselves any favors.

Last time Linux was my daily driver I was an undergraduate pursuing a computer science degree. Like the major itself, one had to enjoy a sustained slow-drip of seemingly disconnected informational nuggets that one day (maybe) pay huge dividends in aggregate deployable knowledge. Similarly, unless you were highly-motivated to go open source, Linux offered limited advantage over commercial offerings in exchange for the pain.

Last month I installed Linux on a 5 year old, $300 refurbished Lenovo X1 Nano. It weighs 1.99 lbs and runs quicker and boots faster and looks better than my 10×-more-costly MacBook Pro M4 Max on MacOS Tahoe.

Thanks to the efforts of those dedicated software engineers, we’re approaching the point where learning the nuances of a do-it-yourself operating environment is less frustrating than working around the limitations of commercial offerings. To boot—pun!—LLMs now make the complex configuration files that allow users to get exactly what they want out of their experience accessible and easy without risk of a quarterly earnings goals moving their cheese.

Good work, team. Thank you, and keep it up.

(Mobile phones are soon to be fair game, too.)

The Usuals

• Upcoming Travel
• Vocational Notes
• Avocational Notes
• Content Consumption (Abbreviated)
  • Television/Movies
  • Books
  • Games
• Sundry Notes

Upcoming Travel

Between the government shutdown, air traffic controllers calling in sick, and some other stuff going on… it’ll likely be a bit before we get on a plane. Expect we’ll spend a few weeks on Block Island sometime over the winter.

Vocational Notes

• Current foci include:
  1. Environmental Impact and Sustainability
  2. AI-enabled Workflows
  3. Anti-social Networking and Mass Customization
  4. Fractional work continues with ~8hours/week capacity available.
• The idea list continues to grow. While the speed with which I can codegen increases, the time-to-execute budget remains constant. Actively soliciting collaborators.
• Looking to support another non-profit following Literacy Trust’s wind-down.

Avocational Notes

• Lifting 3-4 times per week. It has been a cardio summer. Lifting resumes this week this winter (whoops).
• Have had limited Go-Karting time this fall but it is still the best. If anyone is into motorsports and lives in Manhattan, do reach out…
• Still having a blast with LLM-powered codegen and TUIs—textual user interfaces. (I’m so over GUIs.)

Content Consumption (Abbreviated)

Television/Movies

• Taskmaster - Your time starts now.
• Formula 1 - And no, I haven’t seen the F1 movie. Thankfully, actual racing is more fun to watch.

Books

• Babel: An Arcane History - R.F. Kuang. Finished this recently and highly recommend.

Games

• VimGolf - Related to my efforts to regain fluency in the command line (and vi which clearly won the command line text editor war).
• Chess
  • Elo ~1100 (Daily). Write me if you want my chess.com username.
  • I’m steadily getting better worse.
• LinkedIn Mini Games recently added a leaderboard and it is humbling how good some people are. (Queens is the best game, IMHO.)

Sundry Notes

One. Apple recently bought the US broadcast rights to Formula 1. I am concerned.

Two. My work increasingly involves telling a fleet of agentic LLMs (like OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code) what to do. These agents (at least the better ones) do their work best in the command line. Thus, the command line is where I spend most of my time managing features and quality while writing almost none of the code myself.

When building software my role is 99% tastemaker, 1% typist. The bulk of the engineering lift happens in an a compute cluster somewhere domestically and, notably, no longer on my local machine. That work I orchestrate in yet another computer that can outlast my laptop’s battery life and/or network connection (and/or attention). Consequently, not only am I on the command line, I’m connected to a remote machine in a terminal-friendly text editor like vim more often than I am a GUI like vscode. Yes, it’s exactly like that movie Inception.

Presently, my main workflow is to ssh from wherever I am (home, office, or on my mobile phone) into a $600 base-model Apple M4 Mac Mini that sits in my office. Once on the Mac, I run tmux to an attached virtual (containered) Debian Linux server, and let the commercial LLMs inside of those virtual computers go wild. As the models improve and local inference becomes more economical, I bet I can do this all on my own wholly-owned silicon… which means managing yet another layer down.

Given that these LLMs work best on, well, language (n.b., stuff that’s written down), it behooves one to get faster at editing and manipulating code and getting my Operating System to work with me instead of against me.

So I’m now relearning vim and having a blast.

Hat tip to nownownow.com.