That is easy. Those top apps in mobile stores are constructed in part with compilers which are under great pressure from developers to generate good code as quickly as possible. There is often bloat at the level of the development environment or some critical library, but core developer tools are a big part of the software space and are made and sold with very different criteria from the most popular apps vended from walled gardens.

There is a huge space of possible software solutions. A very large amount of software that has real value involves using basic methodologies to build interfaces to databases and enable some known business logic. Writing this kind of software is very different compared to making highly general developer tools that need to have finely honed abstractions. LLMs are especially good at whipping up basic apps, but can actually interfere with the process of coming up with and implementing new concepts that operate differently from existing tools. In this respect I find that working with LLMs is very similar to working with graduate students who have energy, drive, and patience, but are also prone to making bad decisions and doing work that ends up being thrown away.

Macbooks are standard fare for tech workers. Having reached the top of the mountain it should not be a surprise that there are heavy winds. Instead of behaving like custodians of the cathedral we get fast movement with breakage and an emphasis on pursuit of bold aesthetic novelty. If there is any bizarre trend here it is Apple burning billions to give people features they do not want while letting core functionality weaken and fail.

stable as in house always wins?

stable as in "close the stable doors after the horse has bolted"

When sites show me a bunch of ads and slow my machine with tracking then I just close the window. They don't want me to read their articles anyway. When a company shows you who they are ...

Studying the effects of recreational drugs is similar to studying diet in terms of the level of complication. The headline "No evidence" is a good example of the discourse about this subject. There absolutely is such evidence, but this new analysis comes to different, potentially more robust, conclusions from the same data. As long as results are presented in this way a meaningful shared comprehension of the situation is likely to remain out of reach.

That is bad use of statistics. San Francisco forms the core of an urban conurbation of over eight million people.

Sure, but SFPD covers only the County of San Francisco which had a population of 827,526 in 2024.

It's certainly not a perfect comparison by any means - but that's more to do with the very different urban/rural splits, forms and structures of inequality, histories of segregation and political violence etc.

If you can suggest another American police department which would make for a better comparison, I'd be interested in seeing the stats... but I strongly suspect that they'd show a very similar contrast.

Good news, F-35 performance has surpassed expectations significantly! Bad news, F-35 production and deployment cost have surpassed expectations massively!

Why bother with ad blockers? These organizations don't want you reading their articles, so take the hint.

This is turning out to be a huge issue for me as my frequent use of em-dashes makes my remarks trigger people effectively disrupting attempts to communicate. Maybe my communication needs to change or maybe these objections are yet another red flag to watch for.

Just use -.

Why be wrong on purpose to placate people who are wrong out of ignorance?