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  My son is looking for a software job. He graduated this year with a BS in CompSci. He's been writing software since he was tiny — the degree just made it official. He got great grades, has strong hobby experience, and stellar references. He's great with high level code, the new AI hotness, but great with old school C too. And he's an all around nice guy. I'm reaching out to you folks to see if anyone is looking for a young guy to fill out your team. Please repost to spread th...

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  rescued this post from a meta platform

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  question to Obj-C fans: does the Xcode debugger show you object values? for me, po correctly runs debugDescription on all NSObject subclasses. but in the left debugger area that shows values from the stack context: nope. C value-types. that's it. i can "Edit Summary Format…" in the context menu. i can do: {(NSString *)[$VAR debugDescription]}:s it works for that one single type — better than nothing, but why is this no longer the default? or am i holding it wrong?

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  so… being solo for so long, i have questions about best-practice git usage. when you're working — let's say on a specific reported bug… - do you make a new branch for just this bug? or do you put a bunch of fixes in each branch? - do you keep multiple branches in different directories? or do you use git to hop between branches in one dir? - when you merge/pull the fix, do you delete the branch afterwards? or do you keep that branch going and re-merge again later?

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  notarization failing today because of new Paid App terms. i don't have any paid apps but still have to agree to get notarization working. took me 90min to sign in. dev ID was "Locked for Security Reasons" — it always is. unlock fails in Chrome, "The action could not be completed". in safari the captcha doesn't show. but unlock works on my phone. the it says, "Reset your password?" but it didn't. it just unlocked the account — the text in the alert wa...

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  finally watched One Battle After Another. it did not disappoint. PTA somehow manages leave me in a state of confused emotions. sean pen was outstanding. though leo’s character seemed awfully similar to the one he played in Killers of the Flower Moon.

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  what’s your most interesting hot take about where AI might change tech in the next few years???

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  basically what i want is Xcode’s xcuserdata. it’s not part of the project data per se — which is why most folks put it in their git ignore file — but it saves the state of that project the last time it was opened — even if you don’t explicitly change the project itself or change/save any source files.

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  i always find it a bit strange when building something akin to a component of an Apple app, but it isn’t really represented well by Foundation or Appkit. it feels like if Xcode finds it useful, then that would be useful to other Mac devs too — so a good component for Cocoa in general.

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  thanks everyone for helping with document/project/workspace settings. there doesn't really seem to be any sort of facility to do this within the Cocoa frameworks. using NSDocument prevents out-of-band writing to the documents NSFileWrapper. not using NSDocument means building your own file coordination and all the other complex stuff NSDocument does. saving to the app support folder or to NSUserDefaults makes unique keys the difficult problem. IOW: there are no easy or de facto solution...

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  @bwebster@mastodon.social @troz@mastodon.social i thought state restoration was just to get the app back to where it was when it was last running. that’s not quite what i’m after. i can open an Xcode project. select a specific item. then close the project. when i come back to that project a year later (even if i’ve viewed 100 projects in between. and xcode will open my old project just as it was when i last looked at it. it’s not app state. it’s not project file data. it’s project/workspac...

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  saw Project Hail Mary. it was pretty great. enjoyed it.

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  @pileofgarbage@mastodon.social @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social crimes against Human-ID

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  i’d like to save some “workspace” type settings: settings that are tied to the document rather than to the app itself. things like the selected tab, the sidebar widths, etc.these need to persist even if the user doesn’t save the document — so they’re definitely settings, not document data. anyone else doing this? i was hoping there was some hidden corner of NSUserDefaults that handled this, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

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  canadian citizenship updates my records request for my grandmother came up empty. but i got an email from her tonight (yes, she’s still alive and kicking and sending email at 96). i have more details about her adoption and many name changes. apparently her birth name is Esther and she once had a second middle name — all news to me. combined with a nickname, which became her legal name in the US, a last name when adopted, and a married name, she’s been quite a few people. onwards…

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  in other personal news… i was pointed to a foundation that hand weaves wigs for kids with cancer. they are always in need of hair donations. they accept gray, but need hair that's never been colored or heat-damaged. and they need a full 12" from your whole head. not many qualify. i have plenty to spare. mine's about 18" long. and it (annoyingly!) grows 6" a year. so i'll have a very temporary crew cut. help me out here. i need to work up som...

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  (1 of 3-ish) i know i whine about using AI agents for coding too much. i find it frustrating most of the time — and posting about it is kind of cathartic. for many tasks it seems like i'm just dumping my time and money into a hole. so, i'm trying to make a change here: instead of more whining, here's something i've found it does insanely well…

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  (2 of 3-ish) i've found (with Codex 5.3 and 5.4) that discussing architectural tradeoffs is immensely helpful. in the past couple weeks i've been trying to wedge my proxy-objects implementation into the gap between my live objects and the rest of the lazily loaded project file chunks. but it's fragile. breath on it and some corner case breaks down. finding those bugs is a nightmare. but Codex not only understood my problematic code — but understood the larger problem...

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  (3 of 4) i didn't ask it to implement the change, but asked it to suggest alternative architectures. in under a minute it was done alazying and made a very subtle change: add some specific info to my page manifests. that was enough to avoid proxying every archived object. i had even considered this architecture — i already build similar manifests — so it's not a large change. i just hadn't really considered the broader implication and how much of the complexity it obvi...

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  @Migueldeicaza@mastodon.social omg

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  @ottaross@mastodon.social oh, i remember hearing about Nanaimo bars — but i can't say i've ever had one. i'll have to see if i can find one next time i'm in the pacific northwest. sounds wonderful. no-bake chilled custard and granache seem like they'd just become a buttercream puddle here in Texas.

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  (4 of 4) codex explained why the change made sense — and exactly how it would simplify the implimentation. it offered to write the code for me — but i stopped it there. it think i'll do the first pass myself.

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  …and less than 24 hours later, some minor successes. i have a "border crossing card" from 1948. it's when she left canada and entered the US as a permanent resident. it has all her original names, including her former family name, and the adopted family name. i don't think this is her official name-change. i think that's the adoption papers. but it at least confirms i have the names correct.

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  @mrudokas@mastodon.social @manton for 30 years i’ve been lucky that this creative thing i enjoy would also pay the bills. but i think that situation was always an anomaly. AI is inevitable correction. like musicians and artists, i now have to separate my hobbies from my career. it’s an uncomfortable adjustment, but i’m trying to be grateful for the 30 years i enjoyed that anomaly, rather than bitter that i’ve reached the end.

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  @stefanpauwels@mastodon.social @ctietze@mastodon.social @czottmann@norden.social my AI experience: not useless. 👍 good at writing basic unit tests. 👍 good at AppKit (mostly) even in old Obj-C code. 👍 great with web-tech like flutter. worth Claude's $1200/yr price? not yet. i consider working with AI a longer-term investment. i'm optimistic it will become more useful in the not too distant future.

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  @stefanpauwels@mastodon.social @ctietze@mastodon.social @czottmann@norden.social also: you might find my posts over the past week interesting. i gave Copilot, Codex, and Claude a head-to-head test: the same prompt, same setup/style prompts, and the same project in a clean repot. (Codex used GPT 5.4) - short prompt - easy to understand - simply code. < 100 lines. - but requires understanding of several overlapping AppKit protocols. spoiler: none of the above. they all failed to build the fe...

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  @MLE_online@social.afront.org i’m 0.0062. but for someone probably a couple decades older im calling it a win

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  in spite of pretty crappy results from my AI trials the past few weeks, i continue to have panic attack levels of AI FOMO. it's just…  it's a lot. you know?

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  @czottmann@norden.social last year, after seeing a talk on Claude, i went all in with agents (cursor and claude mostly). today, almost a year later, i doubt i've realized gains that outweigh the vast amount of time i've sunk into it. i'm not saying AI is useless. i just don't have enough uses for what agents can do today. for me it's an investment for when code quality improves. that time is fast approaching IMHO.

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  @ctietze@mastodon.social @czottmann@norden.social at least for the moment, i've decided to set AI agents aside for a bit. i've sunk too much time into agents recently and it really hurt my productivity for february a lot. i just have some serious AI FOMO. i feel confident that the next 12 months are going to bring some big changes. i mostly just want to make sure i'm ready for it.