🍎 ⤑ Mac: oh Mac, o Mac, oh Ma-a-acc..
Ohh my, oh my Macintosh.. 😔
Taught my impressionable young self so many an information-technological thing,
and kept it from learning so many such a thing, too. For by default there
was no, say, MS BASIC or TURBO PASCAL, so young self found itself baffled in
incomprehension its parents were unable, and uninterested, to clear up, when
some STEMmy magazine
promised programming magic on this monoscreen.
This incomprehensible abyss manifested itself at other occasions, of course.
Like when visiting friends or family, with games on
MS-DOS, all so sadly inexplicably,
otherworldly, Microsofty incompatible. 😞
Anyway, such. a. cool. thing this Mac. But then where did we it go wrong?
And wrong, and wrong again.
“Quo vadis”.. So.. 🤔 Ad quem? ..ivisti. Quo.. abiisti? 😶 Romance language verb tenses be gone – time waits for no one.
To my kiddy self, the Macintosh Classic II pictured above was magic, even with its monochrome screen. Quite a footnote not here, 'cause color kiddy self enchanted by a 🥹 colour screen not long after. The pinnacle of something that was, and was yet to come, yet turned out never to come? Never came to be! And then, Steve Jobs? And then‽ 🌈 OS X. But then iPod, and iPhone – the Apple never the same ol' Macintosh again. Intel, ARM, System Settings, and ultimately UI thingies or wallpapers the highlight of the point upgrade. 🤷
🤖 DAS ENSHITTIFIKAZIONSZEITALTER! by then long underway. And yet another
blogpost extremely TBC, too bad, for shame.
so let's continue, this 6/9/25 15:42
Not just coincidentally an
oh-so-topically relevant
Reddit link to process, but an entire folder of screenshots of Madness,
carefully casually collected, then zipped and
scp'd to the Linux
mothership, since I'm pretty confident it contains several screenshots
adequately highlighting the Second Downfall of the Apple from several angles.
Will take a lot of f* time to sift through. 😞 For now it looks like this.. 🙌
total 113M -rw-r--r-- 1 frits frits 1.6K Sep 6 16:24 contents.lr -rw-r--r-- 1 frits frits 98K Aug 6 10:16 mac.II.jpg -rw-r--r-- 1 frits frits 112M Sep 6 15:37 MKSCRTFFS.zip -rw-r--r-- 1 frits frits 1.4M Sep 6 15:38 Screenshot 2025-09-06 at 15.38.02.png
..but right now this dungeon of a soul needs cleaning. 😒
For a December 11th addendum, Reddit extremely consistently warned, then
convinced me
not to upgrade
my macOS to Tahoe.
Surely Apple says it makes the Mac “more capable, productive, and intelligent
than ever”. Ask yourself how many years ago things must actually have become the
literal “most” whatever they needed to be “more than ever”, because ever since,
they can only have gotten ever more worse.. “Sic transit”, as it were!
ʬ
🇺🇸 & 🇧🇪 ⤑ well have I ever!
Ohh my, oh man. 😏 This guy done did. Did what? Not quite eat the rich, but certainly kill one, in a movie-like fashion, in broad daylight on the streets of Manhattan. Shot one Brian Thompson, C.E.O. of an American health insurance corporation – by definition making (lots and lots of) money from (thousands of) others' misery. 🤷
And for now he got he seems to be swimmingly getting away with it, too! 🙂
Not even his name known yet.
Awkwardly mixed feelings abound, because what injustice, exactly, has been delivered, with bullets inscribed with meaning? (†) Seems to be a pertinent question for everyone, save, perhaps, Mr. Thompson's loved ones. :l
(†) Meaning conveyed by words – oh how many.. or rather, few? 🤔 words suffice to be so much more meaningful and consequential than many a human life.. I can't keep coming up with the orange Trump turd as a gruesome example of a sad surplus human that we really ought to have gotten rid of at an earlier occasion. Sent off floating on a slab of ice into the Arctic when he was still but already an entitled baby.. Or something less comically poetic. Can I. 😒
So then will this Brian Robert Thompson be missed? Is the world worse off without (people like) him in it? Does this grief carry equal weight compared to your loss, or mine? Morals and ethics stirred – good people, questionable deeds.. In that regard it reminds me of recent local news of an entirely different kind: a highly esteemed public figure defies rules and disdains lives by driving drunk. 🍺 Do as I say, not as I do. “Oh the humanity”? Zonder zonde, de eerste steen? Waezige zaak!
Here, too, our conscience makes awkward leaps and bounds, and our moral compass behaves erratically. We struggle to make sense of a confusing world of reprehensible and good people, bad vibes, and bad things and good deeds.
Luckily our very own VRT has a pressing matter pop up to curb our confusion! “Hoe werkt een botsabsorbeerder”?🤦♂️ Orr, eh – well SOME moral! is direly needed from this story. And sought, and found: “Ook verstandige mensen doen domme dingen”. "😅"
“Morbid glee” appeared to be the upshot of the Anglo-Saxon matter. The Flemish.. Not quite sure. “Sardonisch gelach in vuistjes” is an unpolished mouthful. “Povere boel” in any case. 😏
On 9/12 Luigi was finally apprehended. The story not quite finished, but already quite the.
🦄 ⤑ AI: highly artificial..
..and of questionable intelligence – the mere word here is absurd and inappropriate. There is literally nothing intelligent about AI, it generates. 🤷 Regurgitates what it's been fed.
Its generated regurgitations arguably are quite something – it can be asked for beautiful pictures, say, and the LLMs make for impressive haikus (†), possibly great programming advice, email drafts, gift ideas for your dad who loves fishing, you name it. Impressive antics and magic tricks 🎉 but often, without warning, oblivious and shamelessly it will “hallucinate”. Really, “hallucinate”? More improper antro.. anthropom.. – humanisation. It almost sounds pardonable! Poor overloaded ChatGPT, just couldn't handle it anymore, someone find it some benzo and a pillow. 😐
Sadly its quirkiness may be the manifestation of an inherent inclination toward shittiness. Making matters even/far worse, like the sad crypto craze, AI gobbles up obscene amounts of energy. Someplace I read one Midgard-generated image makes for a fully charged phone. 😞
So what good will it bring us, and at what price? Speaking of price, since silly
amounts of money are involved, we are made to embrace (potentially highly
disruptive) technology. Microsoft would even have it
dabbling in your computer. 😀
Fortunately “everything is designed to remain local and private on-device”,
what could will possibly go be wrong.
For an Autumn 2025 update/aside, apparently Microsoft itself warns Windows may “agently” install malware. 😐 I'd wrap this up on a slightly dramatic note, something about the bone-dry bucket of chuckles in dire need of a refill maybe, but of course what chuckling would remain appropriate when we're reminded how direly bone-dry real life has become in, say, Tehran. 🫥
So much resources that could have been devoted to matters more pressing.. Will AI bring us nuclear fusion? Help us fix any of our myriad troubles? My sad premonition is that vibe-coded slop and serving sleazy human urges will remain the highlight of its career. Homo ecophagus once again doubling down on frivolous destruction without much consideration, reckless with his future, reassured by hubris.
(†) Great haikus – except, of
course, when ChatGPT totally confidently miscounts syllables. 😶 Please note
that counting is something computers are good at by their very nature, it's in
the name; and that haikus by their very definition consist of a precise number
of syllables.
And then this supposedly intelligent piece of software unflappably offers you
a broken haiku! Eh.. 6 syllables? You tell it it's wrong – get 8 instead on
another line. Again you tell it it's wrong.. It will merrily acknowledge its
mistake, apologize for good measure – and, unruffled, continue! to produce
broken and proper haikus alike.
To be sure, it will also keep apologizing and promising not to make the
(rather grave 😶) mistake again, but won't stop making it! over and over again.
Rubbing faux- and proper haikus in your face.. Downright farcical; and what does
it imply for its output in general? How can you ever trust this thing..