A couple of months ago, I switched entirely to an iPad Pro for about two weeks. I did not use my MacBook Pro at all, and forced myself to do everything on the iPad. After that experience, I planned to write some kind of review, but it turned out that my conclusions were pretty simple:

iPad Pro running iOS 13 can technically do almost everything a MacBook Pro can, but it is incredibly frustrating to use. Accomplishing anything other than trivial tasks takes 2-5x longer with 10x more cognitive overhead than on a Mac. iPadOS is simply an annoying operating system to use.

The iPad is amazing for content consumption and certain types of gaming, but no matter how much Apple pundits might try to say the iPad is a device well-suited for “creation,” it just isn’t – unless you are an artist using Apple Pencil.

And so, as the iPad turns ten years old this week, I agree with John Gruber’s...

From Apple’s announcement of the 16-Inch MacBook Pro a couple of weeks ago:

“Our pro customers tell us they want their next MacBook Pro to have a larger display, blazing-fast performance, the biggest battery possible, the best notebook keyboard ever, awesome speakers and massive amounts of storage, and the 16-inch MacBook Pro delivers all of that and more,” said Tom Boger, Apple’s senior director of Mac and iPad Product Marketing.

It’s almost unthinkable, but it appears that Apple compiled a laundry list of customer complaints about the 15-Inch MacBook Pro and then simply addressed them, matter-of-factly. Bigger screen? Sure. Unreliable keyboard? Reverted. Not enough RAM? Fixed. There is no story behind the 16-Inch MacBook Pro. It has no soul. It is just a larger, heavier 15-Inch MacBook Pro that lazily fixes some serious flaws that have been left extremely conspicuously unaddressed...

‪Apple TV is a hardware device.

‪Apple TV is an app on Apple TV that curates content you can buy from Apple and also content you can stream through other installed apps (but not all apps, and there is no way to tell which ones).

Apple TV is an app on iOS/iPadOS devices that operates similarly to Apple TV on Apple TV. Apple TV on iOS/iPadOS syncs playback and watch history with Apple TV on Apple TV, but only if the iOS/iPadOS device has the same apps installed as the Apple TV – and not all apps are available on all platforms. Apple TV is also an app on macOS, but it does not show content that can only be streamed from external apps on an Apple TV or iOS/iPadOS device.

Apple TV is an app or built-in feature of other devices, like smart TVs and streaming set-top boxes, but when Apple TV is running on a third party device, it does not show content from other installed apps on that...

Earlier this summer, the New York Times published an opinion piece titled The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism, by Aaron Bastani:

To say the present era is one of crisis borders on cliché. We inhabit a world of low growth, low productivity and low wages, of climate breakdown and the collapse of democratic politics. A world where billions, mostly in the global south, live in poverty. A world defined by inequality.

But the most pressing crisis of all, arguably, is an absence of collective imagination. It is as if humanity has been afflicted by a psychological complex, in which we believe the present world is stronger than our capacity to remake it – as if it were not our ancestors who created what stands before us now. As if the very essence of humanity, if there is such a thing, is not to constantly build new worlds.

If we can move beyond such a failure, we...

Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.

Anthony Bourdain

Published from Medellín, Colombia.

Amazon’s AWS is an inexpensive and limitlessly scalable platform that can be ideal for hosting fast, secure, and reliable static websites. I host several sites using the method described below, and it costs me pennies per month. The only problem is that getting things set up–especially with HTTPS support–isn’t exactly straightforward.

Summary

• We’ll create and configure two S3 buckets. One will serve static content via S3. The other will be used simply to redirect www.yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com.
• We’ll create an SSL certificate using AWS Certificate Manager.
• We’ll set up two CloudFront distributions which will use the S3 buckets as origins. (The website itself will be served through CloudFront’s edge locations, but the files will be stored on S3.)
• We’ll set up DNS alias records which point to CloudFront, using Route 53.

Configure S3

1. Create two buckets in S3. It doesn’t...

While I was reading through some of my older essays the other day, I came across a piece called Privacy vs. User Experience, published in 2014. In the article, I argued that Apple’s then-nascent philosophical stance on the supremacy of user privacy was going to slow down its product development while competitors fully embraced deep data mining techniques to build better user experiences.

It is, I believe, one of the dumbest, most wrong things I have ever published.

The essay’s structure isn’t actually that bad. It has a strong thesis. The whole thing seems relatively innocuous, whether or not you agree with the premise. What makes Privacy vs. User Experience so dangerous as an essay is that the thesis is undeniably correct in the abstract and yet completely wrong in practice. There is no valid counterargument to the abstract idea. It is a fact that if a company has better data and...

The New York Times obituary for President Andrew Johnson, published on August 1, 1875:

The history this man leaves is a rare one. His career was remarkable, even in this country; it would have been quite impossible in any other. It presents the spectacle of a man who never went to school a day in his life rising from a humble beginning as a tailor’s apprentice through a long succession of posts of civil responsibility to the highest office in the land, and evincing his continued hold upon the popular heart by a subsequent election to the Senate in the teeth of a bitter personal and political opposition….

Whatever else may be said of him, his integrity and courage have been seldom questioned though often proved. He was by nature and temperament squarely disposed toward justice and the right, and was a determined warrior for his convictions. He erred from limitation of grasp and...

Most people are taught that biological evolution is a linear, slow, and gradual process which leads to change only after incalculably long periods of time. This is mostly inaccurate. While gradual evolution does occur, it is relatively rare. As it turns out, the way evolution really tends to work is through a phenomenon called punctuated equilibrium¹ .

The basic idea is this: most of the time, organisms and ecosystems remain in stasis–that is, a state of harmony and balance–with very limited evolutionary change. However, every once in a while, something dramatic will happen to the environment, throwing things out of alignment–say, a new predator will arrive, or maybe there will be a natural disaster that changes selective pressures. As organisms adjust to the change, rapid evolutionary adaptation occurs. It is often swift and brutal. Eventually, a state of equilibrium is reached once...