Dennis Forbes - Microblog

Vegan Whey

Dennis Forbes — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:47:00 GMT

To get it out of the whey (lol), I'm not a vegan. Nor a vegetarian. Though I respect the conviction and choices of people who choose those paths.

I drink milk. I use protein powder that was extracted from milk, as whey happens to be the perfect protein. It is complete, fast-absorbing and highly bioavailable. It's the gold standard of protein sources.

Most people don't get enough protein, particularly high quality proteins like leucine. Carbs and fats are our fuel sources, while protein is the essential building blocks.

Meats are extremely resource intensive and have some attached moral issues, and you can't supplement some meats in your drinks or processed foods. I mean, I guess you could, but that probably wouldn't taste very good. It would probably be weird if your high protein sliced bread has chunks of chicken in it.

Milk is similarly resource intensive, requiring a whole process that most people would rather not think about.

Occasionally I take a look to see if there has been any progress in synthetic or engineered whey. Turns out there actually has been progress.

Some groups (for instance Verley) have used the genes responsible for whey production in cows and encoded them in fungi (e.g. aspergillus oryzae). They let the fungus loose in a vat, feeding it a supply of sugars, and the fungi ferments that into whey proteins. When extracted and purified it is indistinguishable from milk-sourced whey proteins.

Fascinating stuff. I doubt it is economically competitive, but once perfected and scaled up who knows. One day we might have Fungi Farms keeping society healthy and nourished. I guess we already have mushroom farms, of course, but expanding on that.

Found this all very interesting.

Spring Is In The Air

Dennis Forbes — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 09:52:00 GMT

import BlogLink from '@components/BlogLink.astro';

There is something magical and motivating about March. After the sparse sunlight and extreme cold of the winter, feeling the sun's warmth during the lengthening days is liberating. We're in that transitional period where it's -12C this morning, but it will be 17C in just a couple of days, veering back and forth as the seasons battle.

I love winter, and all the seasons we enjoy here in Ontario. But there is a point where the cold and glum has overstayed its welcome, and by the end of February we're done with it.

Time to do some big things.

Apple Neural Engine

I wrote previously about the Apple Neural Engine. Came across a fun entry this morning where a skillful practitioner delves into the hardware. I am a little skeptical of their INT8 conclusion -- the industry standard of FP16 x 2 = INT8 only holds where one FP16 op translates into two INT8 operations, and it would be nonsensical if you just wasted half of each operation -- but for a reverse-engineered effort it is fantastic.

Building FlashAttention-2

Dennis Forbes — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 06:29:00 GMT

FlashAttention-2 is a Python package that can significantly improve the performance of attention mechanisms in transformer-based models when running on nvidia hardware[^ports]. A 7-10x speedup. It does it by some clever memory optimizations, leading to more of the attention operations running within SRAM instead of constantly having to communicate back to GPU RAM (e.g. HBM).

Installing it is often a beast. While there are prebuilt wheels (those are from the official source, but there are community wheel builds as well, offering a more comprehensive collection), builds need to be targeted to a specific combination of flash-attn version, GPU hardware generation (e.g. Blackwell), CUDA version, Torch version, and platform (e.g. x86-64, ARM64, etc.). The community builds has some 384 different variations, and even then it often isn't sufficient.

So most of the time you end up building the wheel on your hardware. This is the point where a lot of people have issues and abandon the effort and just go flash-attn-less.

It's a resource intensive build. The ninja build system will use all available cores, each build thread consuming enormous resources, which you might restrain by setting MAX_JOBS to some low number, maybe even 1. Still you're going to find the build consuming enormous amounts of memory, grinding into paging hell, because while ninja only uses one thread, it calls out to NVCC which then has its own horizontal scaling tendencies, spawning out many copies of CICC (CUDA Internal C/C++ Compiler). CICC makes heavy use of nvidia's CUTLASS templating engine, and every instance is going to consume 5 to 8GB, even when doing marginal processing.

You reign CICC's insanity in with NVCC_THREADS, which will restrain NVCC from going wild with its own process spawning tendencies.

# 1. Restrict the build system to 1 file at a time
export MAX_JOBS=1

# 2. Restrict the CUDA compiler to 1 frontend process at a time
export NVCC_THREADS=1

# 3. Target Blackwell (change for your target arch)
export TORCH_CUDA_ARCH_LIST="12.0"

# 4. Build without isolation
pip install flash-attn --no-build-isolation --force-reinstall

With both thread-scale optionals set to 1 a build will take hours and hours, but it isn't going to churn through your flash storage endurance endlessly paging and will actually succeed. Higher numbers are viable on decently equipped systems.

Just an FYI. I've encountered this on just about every new install and finally thought I'd comment on it. It's the NVCC_THREADS that seldom gets mentioned, when it is by far the most effective way of reigning in outrageous memory needs to install a package.

[^ports]: there are ports for AMD, Intel, and Apple Silicon variants, but the main use is against nvidia

Ode to the Winter Olympics

Dennis Forbes — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 08:54:00 GMT

Another Winter Olympics has come and gone. It had some moments.

I'm not a huge Olympics watcher -- not even for the big nationalistic showdowns -- and honestly many of the events are positively ridiculous.

Like, how many people on the planet are doing luge or bobsled? There should be some minimum accessibility/participation floors for sports to be included, and events that require enormous facilities yet only have a tiny handful of involved athletes worldwide probably shouldn't make the cut.

Kudos to Norway and the Netherlands on just completely dominating again. These countries absolutely owned cross-country skiing and speed skating, respectively, and should be proud of such a stunning overachievement. And to be fair, cross-country skiing and speed skating are both fairly accessible, or at least the base competencies are.

And congrats to the US on winning gold in both gender divisions of hockey. Great performances, and the US dominated opponents in seeding rounds so thoroughly they looked unbeatable. Did not think those games would make it to overtime.

Though the aftermath of that win, particularly the men's hockey team, has been...well, unfortunate. From the most unathletic FBI director ever trying to steal some of that glory on the taxpayer's dime, in just a grotesquely inappropriate "me too!" bit of selfishness, to Trump pushing AI fantasies about how he'd win the gold himself and beat up Canadian players, all while dismissing the women's hockey team's accomplishment...good god. Just world-level sore-winner cringe.

Unbelievably pathetic, third-world despot type behaviour. North Korea-level stuff. Teams turned into political pawns to try to scrabble for some win among a year of chaos and losing.

Congrats on the win. It's too bad a political movement tarnished it for their own gain. These vile goblins try to drag everyone down with them, and anyone foolish enough to help normalize their deplorable, childish behaviour has to be considered a willing participant.

Push-up Challenge: Conquered ✅

Dennis Forbes — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 13:49:00 GMT

import BlogLink from '@components/BlogLink.astro';

Early this month I mentioned that I was taking on the CMHA push-up challenge. Proud to say that I just hit 2000 moments ago. Three days early! Every one of those two thousand push-ups has been full range and of excellent form, as I'm a stickler for stuff like that.

Is this impressive? No. Am I proud that I stuck with it? Yup. Actually incorporated more of a daily target for a variety of similar exercises and will maintain this as an ongoing thing.

Conditioning is a fascinating thing. Three days in my chest and triceps absolutely killed, and carried from day to day, and eking out 10 reps was unpleasant. I had to go to the well frequently through the day to try not to fall behind. Now on day twenty, there is zero residual pain or fatigue day to day, and banging out 25 reps on demand is easy.

To try to spin this as broadly wise, we all have an enormous number of ways of staying fit without needing expensive equipment, memberships, and so on. The basics are all that most people need. For almost all of my adult life I've carried one or more gym memberships, taking advantage of it sparingly. I've probably accomplished more just doing a random challenge this month.

The Corrupt Social Media Reviewer

Dennis Forbes — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 08:45:00 GMT

A few days ago I noted that I use a lot of Apple devices because of their hardware excellence. CPUs, top-quality screens and speakers and batteries, even storage systems are just class leaders. And performance on Apple devices is seemingly effortless, where my entire history with competitors is that it was basically just a boast, especially in mobile form where if you actually use the capabilities you'll have blasting fans and a 30-minute battery life.

I'm looking forward to competitors legitimately catching up and giving us options. So when I saw a huge wave of hype-pieces for Intel's new Panther Lake class of processor, it caught my attention. Pieces with titles like "Intel's M1 Moment is Finally Here".

What almost none of these reviewers disclosed, however, is that Intel did a whole press junket where they flew all of these guys out to Intel's Arizona fab for a whole dog and pony show, wined and dined them, and basically ensured that they would write fawning pieces. Whatever claims any of these people make about how this doesn't coerce them is delusional nonsense. It instantly puts a shroud over any sense of credibility.

This junket thing is a very old strategy that is massively corrupting, and it is done specifically because it's an easy way to buy off foolish people who will declare how it totally doesn't influence them at all and their words are all their own and...

Anyway, it's an interesting processor. Still uncompetitive single-core speeds, but it makes it up in cores while still being surprisingly power efficient, and it features a very decent GPU.

Some of the makers of laptops with this chip have stepped back from the dodgy "stick a bunch of stickers all over the laptop" garbage they've traditionally done as they target the Apple market. Most reviews comment on this (remember the junket, where they were fed narratives), vendors amazingly realizing that sticking of a bunch of ridiculous looking stickers all over a device is not wanted. Probably still going to stuff a bunch of crapware in the OS, though.

I will check it out. Give me a durable, robust laptop featuring this processor at a price that reflects that it still isn't Apple Silicon tier and it'll do numbers.

Push-up Challenge Update

Dennis Forbes — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 15:07:00 GMT

Over halfway into the push-up challenge and it's going well. I currently have a few days of rest banked, several hundred reps ahead of schedule.

Honestly thought I'd drop out three or four days in, when the wall of fatigue and pain hit. The residual muscle recovery and pain seemed like it would get worse by day, and I'd fall further behind. Instead, it just disappeared, and many push-up sets became effortless.

And let me be incredibly clear that none of this is boasting. 90 push-ups a day is not a great achievement. I like fun "better yourself" challenges and this one caught my eye as a fun exercise. But the conditioning happened far quicker and much more absolutely than I expected.

Moving To Linux

Dennis Forbes — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 14:48:00 GMT

After writing that short-form piece about Windows yesterday, where I observed that nothing really ties me to Windows, I realized I should take action.

So I moved my Windows/CUDA machine to Linux last evening.

There was a period of wasted time when somehow nvidia drivers got installed from two sources and broke the package manager while it panicked about overlapped files.

Got that sorted and got everything setup. A super-modern stack where I can use the latest FlashAttention and Triton without a concern.

I always keep machines replaceable, such that every project is always up to current on repos, every document is in some sort of cryptographically protected cloud source, and so on -- machines and drives can fail at any moment, and I always operate as if they will -- so it wasn't some big thing. Barely an inconvenience.

And it just works. This piece is being authored in WebStorm on linuxmint. All of my primary apps and toolings are all here. I'm hardly early to using Linux on the Desktop, and have made attempts at mainlining this before, but never has everything I use had first-class support. A number of Steam games even have ports (Valve has been hugely influential in making that happen), and where they don't Proton can often emulate Windows sufficiently. Gaming on this machine isn't a big need for me, and I usually just use Geforce Now for that.

The one thing I was concerned about was VNC versus RDP. VNC is trash, and is just a horrendous experience to have to endure, while RDP is almost like being at the machine if your connection is decent. Figured I'd just deal with it and largely lean on SSH terminal connections.

Then I discovered NoMachine. Delightful. The remote experience is significantly superior to RDP (and infinitely better than VNC), and a client was available for my Mac. It has some serious limitations unless you subscribe to their increasingly expensive tiers -- for instance limited to the foreground desktop, and thus a single connection, and limited to the resolution of the host machine -- but it's such a step up from the horror that is VNC.

Time To Dump Windows?

Dennis Forbes — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:01:00 GMT

I primarily use Apple Macs -- while Tahoe was a regression and Apple is an extremely greedy company, the hardware is superb and the chips remain simply the best all around -- but a lot of my work entails CUDA-related activities. For that I RDP and ssh to a Windows desktop and a respective WSL2 session on a very beefy Windows machine.

Deployment-wise 100% of what I deploy to are Linux boxes on the business and commercial side, like pretty much all the industry.

I realized today that nothing ties me to Windows, and that it benefits me in no ways. Almost all of my work on that platform has to happen in WSL2 because of FlashAttention / Triton. The former is partly supported in Windows, but it's a mess. It's just way better to just eschew it and use Linux.

So for years I've used WSL (then WSL2) to achieve this when doing CUDA work.

Along the way there was always some Windows-specific tie-in thing that coupled me with that platform. Some app or communications platform that was best on Windows. Today I reevaluated and this just isn't the case anymore.

I basically use a fat Windows layer to host a Linux machine. Irony.

Recently saw someone declare it the year Linux takes over the desktop, to yield the cynical reply "We've been hearing that for years". And it's true, it has been prophesized for well over a decade. But at the same time, change happens gradually, then suddenly. I imagine a lot of people would find that absolutely nothing ties them to Windows anymore, even gamers with things like Steam Proton often find their needs met.

Interesting times. There was a time when Windows was the centre of my professional and personal life. Even obtained my MCSE, MCSD, along with a number of other Microsoft certs. I subscribed to MSDN (and even wrote for their magazine), Technet, and every beta program I could get my hands on. I watched for every move of that company as invariably the industry shifted in whatever direction they moved.

Now? Eh. Microsoft just doesn't matter to my life. I subscribe to zero Microsoft products. My Xboxes sit unplugged. Azure is the one cloud provider that I have zero deployments on, versus lots on OCI, GCE, AWS, and so on. My once beloved Hotmail account is basically a spam collection vehicle.

EDIT: Realized after writing this that I do use one Microsoft product: Github. It is completely fungible to me, however, and the slightest nuisance and I would just move elsewhere.

None of this is like some angry spiel about Microsoft, and I think they brought a lot to tech world over the years and given that they're a $3T company they're doing okay. It was just a shocking realization when I noticed that it just doesn't have relevance to me anymore.

Obviously other people's experiences differ.

And honestly if Apple didn't have excellent hardware I would be probably making a switch there as well.

The Great Way To Lunch

Dennis Forbes — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:56:00 GMT

A Great Lunch is easy for those who have no preferences.

That last entry on the lines from the poem Xinxin Ming (which can be found in many varying translations, but with a common meaning), oddly made me think about group eating, specifically the choices leading up to the same.

I can enjoy just about every cuisine or category. I have preferences and favourites, though these shift over years and even by time of year or time of day, but I can greatly enjoy a meal from almost any of the options that anyone might throw in the ring.

Ever deal with people who have made polarized opinions their way of trying to make their choices override others? They do this by "hating" anything but their preferred choice at the moment. Everyone else's opinions gets invalidated because one person declares that all other suggestions are invalid because they fall in the hated category.

"Burgers? Hate em. Steaks? Hate em. Pizza, hot pot, sushi? Hate em."

This all or nothing thing has corrupted society generally. It's the people who think every movie is either 10 or 1, when a vanishingly small number should qualify for such a ranking. Every political party or figure is all good or all bad. Every Uber driver is five stars or one star.

Like....shouldn't the average Uber driver be 2.5 stars? Isn't that how the system should work? Isn't it a massive failure of the system if drivers are kicked from the platform for falling below 4.6? What is even the point of the rest of the range? It's illusory nonsense that can be found across most customer feedback system.

If you want to know the truth, surrender your opinions

Dennis Forbes — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 11:48:00 GMT

The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.

If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.”

Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.

-- Jianzhi Sengcan in Xinxin Ming

Is VLC Dying?

Dennis Forbes — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:57:00 GMT

VLC on the Apple TV has a couple of serious issues.

If you access a uPNP network device, it will work the very first time. After that you will have to restart your Apple TV for VLC to again see the device. Decide to watch something on the network? Time to hit system / restart for VLC to have awareness that the network exists.

No other app on the system has this problem. Other network media players see the devices fine.
If you are playing 10-bit HDR content, and your Apple is in HDR mode like Dolby Vision, VLC will completely screw up the tone maps and yield a disastrous posterized mess. You have to switch your Apple TV to SDR mode to get anything tolerable with such HDR files, as the SDR will all least force it within a range where the posterized nonsense is tolerable.

Again, neither of these happen with other players. Infuse, for instance, can support HDR fine and has no problem playing files on the network, no device restart necessary.

On the HDR issue, a while back I figured I'd just solve it myself, to find that building that project for Apple devices is an absolute disaster. Cocoapods have always been an absolute garbage dependency manager -- hello circular dependency conflict hell -- and despite an incredibly vanilla stack it was just impossible to get a build functioning.

I then asked a member of the VLC team to be told "oh yeah, VLC 4 fixes the HDR issue!". VLC 4? Where is that? The most recent version on iOS or AppleTV is 3.0.x. Apparently 4.x has been coming real soon now for half a decade.

There are a number of similar VLC issues on macOS. For instance to view in folders on a network device you have to navigate "into" it, where VLC will start playing the first item at that level. You then stop, and now can see the folders and files at that level, so rinse and repeat.

It's a free product, and is a killer on Linux or Windows. But if the support for Apple devices has such basic bugs, just drop them as targets. These devs owe me and other Apple users nothing, and I am grateful that they considered the platforms, but on the flip side, don't waste people's time with a subpar product.

And Cocoapods is thankfully going to put to a merciful end this year. If I never again see a project that uses that trash troublemaker, I will sing a little song of delight.

America's Billionaire Problem

Dennis Forbes — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:49:00 GMT

Trump posted a lie-filled spiel of nonsense about a new bridge connecting the countries 🇨🇦🇺🇸 yesterday. Yet another demonstration why the 25th needs to be enacted, where again literally everything the foolish demented diddler said was ignorant, factless trash.

Just lying endlessly, as is his nature. What a clown show idiocracy right now. A worldwide embarrassment as such a great country has become a pathetic farce, headed by a cabal of the worst possible people. The crime-spree is so in the open that I hope Americans realize that these people believe they can never be held accountable.

The moment it was posted everyone immediately suspected it was the scumbag Moroun family from Michigan pulling the strings of the Big Diddler, likely paying a big bribe if the diddler beclowns the US and slows competition. The rent-seeking Moroun family have been profiteering off the Ambassador Bridge for decades, and have done everything they can to block alternatives.

A family privately owning an international crossing is crazy, but that's how the situation was.

They bought off every politician they could to keep the status quo -- that is just the norm in the profoundly corrupt US of A, and it was a corrupt cesspool long before Trump came along and turned every dial to 11 -- earning insane profits off of their poorly managed, derelict bridge. Until eventually a governor (Rick Snyder) bucked their influence and let a bridge be built. But only if Canada paid for 100% of it.

Well, it turns out that those people were right. The scumbag Moroun family got the ear of Epstein pal and perennial greaseball Howard "Wig-Salesman" Nutlick and mere hours later Trump was pushing out his nonsense. As an aside, is like everyone in that administration a paedophile and criminal, beyond just being vile, reprehensible people? Is it a requirement to be close to Trump? The political movement dedicated to finding the sex traffickers literally voted them into power.

What an absolute disgrace. Canada needs to shut down the Ambassador Bridge. Having these foolish clowns lying endlessly about this country...it's done.

This is not short-term damage these foolish self-dealing incompetent grifters are doing. It is going to be a legacy that endures long after this garbage is dead. The US plutocracy/kleptocracy is going to come out of this criminal administration with zero friends (well, maybe El Salvador, Argentina, and the hilarious rag-tag group of pathetic despots that make up the "Board of Peace"), a spiralling economy with no one to fund the largess, and a more and more certain civil war. All while this admin is trying to foment separatism in Alberta...far more likely, clowns, is that Canada absorbs some of the better parts of the US after what is coming.

It has been pretty quiet news, but the US sanctioning ICC judges (on behalf of Israel, as the US will endlessly self-immolate in the service of that foreign nation. However one feels about Israel's standing on world affairs, it is bewildering how the US has been reduced to a pitiful Israeli client state, where members of congress will literally say Israel first, or actually wear Israeli military gear in the House. Utterly bizarre behaviour, and the US is quite clearly Israel's El Salvador, where desperate simps try to pony good words from the boss), forcing all America-based companies to cease business with those people, basically put a death clock on US businesses from operating internationally: Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, and even the tech companies...their days are numbered outside the US. This is a completely grotesque and untenable situation.

Everyone is rapidly pursuing replacements. Everyone should be decoupling from that rogue cabal that repeatedly elects absolute garbage to positions of power. The US has long abused sanctions for political ends and everyone just looked the other way, but sanctioning judges and prosecutors in an international criminal court, to which every civilized country belongs (the US and Israel do not, for obvious war criming reasons, and that doesn't change my set-criteria at all), unveils the whole mirage as the farce it has always been.

Good job, chimps. You got your momentary big tough guy wins, while flushing the future of America down the toilet.

As an aside, every middle power needs to start fining any foreign company operating in country that observes sanctions that aren't locally recognized. If an American company is making profits in Canada, and they refuse to do business with a Canadian woman because she judged against Netanyahu in the ICC, they should face massive daily fines. If they don't like it, see ya. Just as they should do in France, Germany, Japan, and basically all the West.

They can all retreat to their gilded land and lick their wounds and write angry tweets CCing JD Vance and other members of the criminal cabal decrying how mean everyone is. It was clearly a massive mistake to ever let corporations from that corrupt state gain a foothold. Any country considering leveraging Palantir, Oracle, Salesforce, Flock, or any other American firm for infrastructure or security business...if you aren't the US of A, you are insane to even consider such a ridiculous notion. They are all agents of a hostile, rogue nation.

Or they can spin off fully separate divisions having zero accountability, legally or financially, to the original. Whatever they need to do. If Google, Microsoft, nvidia, or any other company is enforcing grotesque war-criminal-serving sanctions in a sovereign nation besides the US and Israel, they should be sent packing. The short term harm will be tough, but long term it will be great for everyone.

Everyone can just cluck and imagine that the fetid bag of shit will just die soon enough and it will blow over and things will go back to normal -- this is literally how many Americans are treating it, like some funny troll that, you know, only has four years to cause chaos -- but it won't. This trash exists top to bottom in American politics, and it is not a trustworthy partner in any matter. How a country could elect such a depraved criminal is...good god. It's a symptom of a problem much deeper than one malignant narcissist diddler creep.

As an aside, I would be remiss to point out how hilarious it is to see the Big Diddler constantly railing about Canada making a relatively small trade deal with China. China has dick-slapped this foolish simpleton in the face repeatedly, and have come out of Trump's pathetic threats stronger than ever, but Trump has announced a dozen or so "deals" with China so far, often just making up details for his smooth-brained base to celebrate. Chairman Trump is desperate for any iota of attention he can get from Xi, even if China basically shrugged and moved on, knowing America is an empire doing a historic speed-run decline.

Chairman Trump is desperately offering up all the latest tech and China is saying "Nah, bruh." How pathetic.

Canada makes a small deal and suddenly we're cancelling the Stanley Cup? Someone take grandpa's phone away, he's sundowning. It will be great for the world when that vile creep dies, but Americans are fooling themselves if they think that's the end of it.

In other news, right on target for the 2000 push-up challenge. It was looking grim over the first couple of days as muscle fatigue and pain made it seem unsustainable, but the conditioning started happening much quicker than I expected.

Hacker News Makes It To Depression

Dennis Forbes — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 07:14:00 GMT

Hacker News is a community of many disparate voices and opinions, at every level of skill and coming from many perspectives, demographics and corners of the globe. In this entry I'm talking about the average HN user, which I will label Joe HackerNews. The aggregation that decides what comments and submissions rise to the top, and ensure that others are pummelled to transparent or flagged away.

Use the site enough and you can clearly see trends and group-think come and go. It has been interesting watching the evolution of AI discussions on the site.

There are the oft cited five stages of grief that people move through when confronted with a shock or loss. It's a controversial simplification device, and like a Barnum effect we make reality fit the stages when often it's much more nuanced and non-linear.

Whatever. This is a football 🏈🦉 Sunday before-first-coffee post, so I'm running with it. Lots of pushups left to do.

Denial: "AI will never understand the code I work with, or the complex domain I work in. That's only a tool for shitty web apps and juniors that don't know what they're doing!"

Anger: "AI stole all of our comments, blog posts and github repos. Do you think we can sue and shut them down?"

Bargaining: "Okay I installed CoPilot and read a tutorial on how backpropagation works. Pretty much up to date. I'm AI augmented and ready for the next century. Should I vibe code the next $10B SaaS unicorn?"

Depression: "It's over. The field is ruined. Our educations and experience are worthless. The end is nigh." ⬅️ WE ARE HERE

Acceptance: To be seen how this unfolds.

The denial phase was intolerable, people desperately trying to convince everyone that they are a unique snowflake and work in an advanced unique domain with unique needs, where there's no way the thinking machine has relevance for them. You still see this sort of person occasionally -- "only bad developers get value out of AI, but not me because I'm a great developer" -- and generally it's just delusion with a side of denial.

Just as weird are the "AI has peaked" sorts. At every stage they've announced that this is it, AI can't get any better and now we just wait until the big ponzi-scheme that is the AI market collapses and the ruse will be over. And then it keeps getting better again, and again, and again, even with unknown outsiders on a tight budget popping in with crazy models that make last year's SOTA look like garbage.

Anger was a conflicted one where the same people who celebrate that information should be free, everything should be open source, every API public, and so on, lamented that algorithmic use was made of that. It's especially weird when developers complain about other developers looking to automate their jobs away, because this is literally what most software development is: In some way we're making a machine do something a human could do. Our entire profession is allowing people to do more with less.

Even if you just make a library and post it on github...aren't you taking away the jobs of every business that would have had to employ developers to make that functionality from scratch, you monster?

Bargaining saw about a thousand "Introduction to tokens" submissions being voted to the top, followed by waves of basic neural network explanations. And to be clear, I'm not being patronizing in noting this, but you could see the collective move to the "if you can't beat 'em, join em" stage, perhaps not realizing how outrageously high the entry stakes are now.

Joe HackerNews is now at depression. Posts like this one lamenting the loss of the craft are topping the front page. The comments across almost all AI discussions are veering to positively grim, and have a very "end game" feel to them.

This isn't the first time the community felt such a threat. Around the turn of the century every board was sure that all software jobs were going to India. The release of GUI builders like Visual Basic were going to put software devs out of work, making building apps into simple work, and even apps like Microsoft Access had forms and flows and could run as an application built by a layman.

Before that CASE tools were going to automate it into some middle-management drag and drop.

I very much have skin in this game. Aside from my own professional operations, one of my sons is in the middle of computer science program, just starting some coop placements. Another is still in high school and makes good money developing for the Roblox community. A daughter does creative works, including 3D modelling for games, and obviously she can feel the pressure on her field. My other son is still selecting his career, considering the medical field, and even there, like almost everywhere, AI is ominous.

It is something I think about constantly, and it can feel overwhelming and like there is no clear path to prepare for the future.

I have notes that I'll use for a much longer piece on AI that I'll get to at some point, and this microblog piece was not meant to be particularly illuminating or useful. Just some lazy morning thoughts.

If there is one take away that I would offer up: You can't argue reality away. Posting comments saying AI is trash, slop, can't write good code, etc, doesn't change the path that we are on the tiniest iota. You can't argue a different reality into existence, and it's just wasted words trying to do so, even if you find a community that will start chanting in unison to manifest their hopes.

AI is already surprisingly good, and it's rapidly getting better.

That Push-up Challenge Not As Easy As Imagined

Dennis Forbes — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 16:40:00 GMT

On just day two of the 2000 push-up challenge, and it's looking more daunting than I originally imagined.

Push-ups are in isolation easy. I've done countless over my life, though never in large numbers over a short period.

Getting 110 finished on day 1 was easy, trying to get a little ahead of the daily 87 or so to hit the target. It made it seem like this would be the easiest thing in the world.

The part I forgot about is the muscle recovery / fatigue / pain on the next day. I'm clearly out of shape, making this doubly worthwhile of a goal, but also doubly difficult.

Still got ahead of the quota today, thankful I made today easier by doing extra yesterday, but interested to see how this plays out. Will I condition up quickly enough that I can start taking gap/recovery days and make it up on the fill days? Will the pain and fatigue gain quicker still?

I track this in my Obsidian daily notes. I added a numeric property to the template for the trial period, and on each new daily now it pulls the accumulated pushup_total from the day before forward, adding it with the push-ups done the day before. A convenient way to track it with my normal tracking without yet another spreadsheet.

2,000 Push-Up Challenge

Dennis Forbes — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 16:55:00 GMT

The Canadian Mental Health Association is running a challenge from February 5th to the 27th, participants challenged to complete 2000 total push-ups over the period. It is a fund-raising effort to support CMHA, but also to raise awareness of the 2000 lives lost each day to suicide.

Lots of people will get fitter in the process.

I've taken on this challenge, and we'll see. Around 90 push-ups a day is easy enough, right?

These sorts of challenges, finding a reason to do these little self-improvements and to give something to think about at the same time, are always worth consideration.

A Microblog Disclaimer

Dennis Forbes — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 07:04:00 GMT

I added this "microblog" section for quick thoughts I have before I start my day, or when I take a random break from the tasks at hand. The things I write in here will have been created in five or so minutes, ten minutes at the high end, and are meant as "passing thoughts" kinds of things.

I'm not going to great lengths to verify every statement comprehensively encapsulates all perspectives on the subject-matter. Nor do I optimize wordings or grammatical structures. If I happen across an entry at a later point I often see things I could improve and do a quick edit, but apologies if these entries may seem lazy at times.

This is my release-valve, per se, to stop me from feeling the itch to engage with social media. It's my way of adding my noise to the global cacophony, however drown out and meaningless it ultimately is.

And I mean, really this section isn't a µBlog, but instead is the purest form of blog. Yet I have ambitions that the main listing of the entries in the macro-blog part of this site are more considered, thoughtful pieces, rather than a reaction to some passing comment someone made elsewhere. So I quarantine those smaller thoughts here.

I hope you have a fantastic day ahead.

Defending the Apple Neural Engine (ANE)

Dennis Forbes — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 08:25:00 GMT

import BlogLink from '@components/BlogLink.astro';

In a discussion about Apple Research's open-source MLX machine learning framework on Hacker News yesterday, a comment proclaims-

ANE is probably the biggest scam "feature" Apple has ever sold.

This is a recurring observation, with many inferring that because Apple's very own MLX doesn't use ANE, therefore, the logic goes, ANE is useless. An "if they don't eat their own dogfood" sort of deal.

As some background, Apple added the ANE subsystem in 2017 with the iPhone X. It is silicon dedicated to running quantized, forward-pass neural networks for inference. Apple's intention with the circuitry was to enable enhanced OS capabilities, and the immediate use of the chip was to power Face ID. That first silicon offered up some 0.6 TOPS (trillion operations per second), and was built with power efficiency as a driving requirement.

The next year Apple released a variant with 5 TOPS, an 8x speed improvement. Then 6, 11, 16, 17, and then 35 TOPS (though that last jump is likely just switching the measure from FP16 to INT8). In all cases the ANE is limited to specific types of models that fit within its limitations. It was never intended to power NN training tasks, massive models, and so on.

It was some NN-dedicated hardware to enable low power but high (enough) performance assistance for OS features and functions. Other chipmakers started adding similar neural engines into their chips to address the same need: Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, Huawei, Samsung ... everyone got in on NPUs for the same reasons. You aren't going to run ChatGPT on it, but it stills hold loads of utility for the platform.

And the system heavily uses the ANE now. Every bit of text and subject-matter is extracted from images, both in your freshly-taken photos and even just browsing the web, courtesy of the ANE (many don't even realize this, and it's a barely heralded feature. You can search your photo library for a random snippet of text, even heavily distorted text. You can highlight and copy text off of your photos and even on images found on random websites in Safari when using Apple Silicon, at virtually zero power cost. ANE). After you've triggered Siri with Hey Siri, voice processing and TTS is handled by the ANE. Some of the rather useless genAI stuff is powered by the ANE. Computational photography, and even just things like subject detection for choosing what to focus on, is powered by the ANE hardware.

All of this happens with a marginal impact on battery life and without impeding the CPU or GPU cores in performing other tasks.

It's pretty clear that Apple intended the ANE as hardware for the OS to use, and third party apps just weren't a consideration or priority, nor did they make it a part of their messaging. In 2018 they did enable CoreML to leverage the ANE for some limited cases, and even then the OS throttles the capacity you can use to ensure that the OS is never left waiting when it demands it.

So why doesn't MLX use ANE at all? The authors specifically stated why. The only public way of using the ANE subsystem is by creating and running models through CoreML, which is entirely orthogonal to the purpose and mandate of MLX. Obviously Apple Research could just reach into the innards and use it if they wanted, but MLX is an open-source project so that simply isn't viable.

Apple added some tensor cores to the GPU in their most recent chips (M5 and A19 Pro), calling them "neural accelerators". These are fantastic for training and complex models (including BF16), at the cost of magnitudes more power usage. It also gives Apple a path to start massively scaling up their general-purpose AI bona fides, adding more and more NA cores per GPU core, and GPU cores per device -- copy/paste scaling -- especially on the desktop path where they can achieve enormous levels of performance where power isn't as much of a concern and active cooling is available.

Apple is unlikely to move existing OS NNs to these new tensor cores. Their purposes and driving philosophies are very different, and they serve different roles and purposes.

Nor is there any indication that Apple is abandoning CoreML (another parallel claim made in MLX-related discussions). Apple Research put out MLX to rightfully try to get some of the attention of the Pytorch et al. community, and it has been wildly successful, but it doesn't supplant or replace CoreML.

If you have a consumer app for Apple devices, and you run NNs for inference to enable features, odds are high that your best bet is CoreML (which will use the GPU, GPU NA, ANE, and CPU as appropriate and available).

People seem prone to all-or-nothing stuff like this, thinking it's all losers and winners and everything is binary. It's reminiscent of Google unveiling Fuchsia, where every tech board like HN had the prognosticator of all prognosticators declaring that the day of Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and so on was over. It's a Fuchsia world now, baby.

Years later and Fuchsia powers a Nest device, and largely seems to be a dead project. So...maybe not?

Conflating The Message and the Messenger

Dennis Forbes — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:08:00 GMT

I've casually listened to Peter Attia's podcast The Drive for years. I'm not the sort of podcast listener that has a queue that I vigilantly keep on top of, but instead it's more of a periodic picking and choosing when I'm in the mood. Sometimes when I take a walk I open the podcast app and see if there are episodes that sound like a good listen from the ones I subscribe to: The Drive, 99% Invisible, Decoder with Nilay Patel, This American Life, Freakonomics, NPR's Fresh Air, CBC's Ideas, Sam Harris' Making Sense, among a number of others. If nothing looks good I listen to great music playlists like the algorithmic 𝔇𝔢𝔞𝔡 𝔏𝔢𝔞𝔳𝔢𝔰 𝔇𝔢𝔞𝔡 𝔖𝔬𝔲𝔩𝔰.

Peter Attia is a fantastic science communicator, with a unique approach. In the current blowback to his appearance in the Epstein files, one critic talked about how she enjoyed an episode he hosted with a female researcher she respects, but then complained that he spent much of the episode "mansplaining". Which is a pretty silly complaint because Peter's entire method of repeating, recapping, and guiding the conversation forward is something he does with every guest. It's what makes his podcast good, and he really seems to do a ton of homework preparing for each episode. The information/time ratio is much denser than comparable podcasts for this reason.

Attia isn't just a Joe Rogan grunting along and saying stupid stuff occasionally.

Regardless, his emails to Epstein were vile. Thankfully I've never taken advice from Attia on how to be a good person, husband, father, or so on, and I imagine few others have either. His involvement with Epstein doesn't indict his science communications. I don't suddenly think statins are bad because Attia believes in them, and now that he's unveiled as a bad guy therefore anything he has ever said is bad. That would be bizarre and unproductive, but it's precisely what is happening across the space. People are literally doing an "Aha! I told you he was wrong about everything because look he wrote some gross emails to that terrible guy Epstein".

It just demonstrates that people are more interested in going all in on cult of personality things and it becomes some weird personality thing where it's 100% onboard or 100% against. There can't be "this guy is a creep and I disagree with him on many things, but this is actually interesting and informative".

Separate the art and the artist, the science from the science communicator.

I still think Kevin Spacey was fantastic in almost everything he was ever in, and his personal issues are a matter for the courts and the people involved, not the court of public opinion. Spacey was great in Glengarry Glen Ross, for instance, which I still think is a tremendous story and screenplay even if David Mamet became a weird, unhinged Trumper.

I'm a fan of loads of Tom Cruise movies, and simply do not care what cult or whatever he is engaged with, who he dates, what his sexuality is, or anything else not directly and immediately relevant to his acting in a movie. He acts real good like, so good enough for me.

None of these people are my heroes. I don't idolize any of them. When they fail personally it just doesn't change any prior response I've had to their work because it was never based upon my adoration of these people generally.

Weird anti-bike hostility

Dennis Forbes — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 11:48:00 GMT

I drive lots of places. I've had my licence for decades, have countless kilometres under my belt, and see cars as liberating. I'm an "Ontario speeder" which means I generally drive around 20 over, yet have zero infractions over all my years driving. Zero accidents either, aside from a minor thing where I went a bit off-road a bit and hit a mailbox: A bee or wasp somehow crawled into my summer shoes and like most I have an irrational overreaction to such things. Only yielded a scratch on a passenger door and a country mailbox that needed to be put back in place on its stand.

Oh, I also once scratched the bumper of someone in the parking at Awenda Provincial Park as I pulled a 26-foot travel trailer and the combined turning radius wasn't quite what I calculated.

But I also love biking. I love walking. I love transit. I love being in areas that facilitate and encourage all of the above, where I never need to think about parking or other car-related nonsense. We go on vacations to better-planned cities where everyone is walking and biking and it's just wonderful, and then we come home to our "designed for cars" cities and just accept this as normal or the best we can do? It isn't.

Here in Ontario, a leans-on-populism premier recently did a big dictum where he forced his way on a lower level of government and ordered them to remove some already built and paid for bike lanes. This was idiotic, and is the sort of self-destructive nonsense that make us look backwards and clownish, and thankfully the courts have thus far blocked it. A number of propagandist figures posted videos to support the premier's overreach, lamenting the "low number of cyclists" using the bike lanes, not noticing that in their own cherry-picked video there were more cyclists seen than personal vehicle occupants.

Brian Lilley, for instance, who pretends he's a reporter but shares a bed with Ford's media relations manager, and is the sort of guy that just puts out completely worthless, thoughtless partisan noise.

The weird thing, and the only way this car-centric nonsense continues, is the significant percentage of the public that makes being anti-bike their personality. It's like the obnoxious people who want to start incredibly boring spiels about how much they hate pineapple on pizza. If there is a discussion or media story about bikes, these sorts (likely heart-attack in waiting sedentary lazy-bones) always crowd the discussion, making the cliché bot-like noise. It's bizarre.

Cities should not be designed around single-occupant vehicles. Indeed, those uses should be massively discouraged, tolled, impeded, and so on. The outcome would be better for literally everyone, even if so many can't see how self-sabotaging the pro-car prioritization we currently endure is.

Every single-occupant vehicle is a massive failure in basic civic sense and city planning.

Obsidian scripting

Dennis Forbes — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 13:41:00 GMT

Obsidian is Electron based, and thus it is an eminently scriptable platform. This is evident in the broad range of core plugins that come with the platform, along with a massive community of plugins from third-parties.

I trust the core plugins. I do not trust community plugins. While there's a superficial vetting on first inclusion, the potential for supply chain attacks or malicious intentions is enormous.

Thankfully adding your own scripted functionality for novel needs is trivial, and the major LLMs are fully versed in creating simple plugins for the system. For my daily notes I start with a template and on file creation a simple, easily audited script, mostly built with Gemini, grabs the current and forecast weather for the day through a web API, and then grabs my current chess.com ELO, and drops it into placeholders in the template. And yes I used Gemini because I have approximately zero interest in becoming an Obsidian scripting expert. But the result is a tiny plug-in script, kicked off on file creation, that I can audit in seconds, versus massive and overwrought community plugins that I can't reasonably verify in any rational amount of time.

The chess ELO thing is an odd, temporary inclusion as I realized my chess game had stagnated and I'd become mentally lazy about the game, so it's just a personal motivation to make it a metric I pay more attention to and stop making the silly mistakes and blunders.

launchd scripts and perms

Dennis Forbes — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 07:26:00 GMT

I'm a heavy user of Obsidian MD. I use the app across macOS, iOS and Windows, but instead of using the inbuilt sync service I store my vaults on a cloud drive. I use multiple vaults (Research, Daily Notes, General / Family, and then one for each major project) all subs in a shared root directory.

Why not the Obsidian sync service? Because one of my reasons for choosing this product is decoupling from a specific platform and treating it as a file-system structure of markdown files that some editors lubricate the use of. Using the built-in facilities for sync is orthogonal to that goal. Everyone should still support Obsidian with a Catalyst license.

I manage history by storing a git repo of all the Vaults and pushing it to a remote repo, accomplished periodically via launchd on the Mac. But given that I store the git work tree on an external drive this causes just endless pain as the security system interjects itself and normal simple perms do not suffice. Macs really encourage you to use the undersized, overpriced internal drive, and make using external drives a nuisance. Add that eliciting the removable device perm request seems to be a roll of the dice, and other times it just auto-denies.

Running the zsh script from launchd fails because it doesn't have the environment or perms my user account does, and I refuse to just grant zsh universal perms for this one-off need.

Solution: Create a simple Automator app that just calls the script. Run the Automator app, e.g.

/usr/bin/open -W "/Users/.../UpdateObsidianGit.app" `

Grant it the removable device perms. Now schedule that app to run periodically via launchd. Problem solved. Automator is a pretty neat tool, and I had never touched it before but will leverage it heavily henceforth.

Oh and for the git remote I push encrypted files courtesy of git-crypt. Filenames and metadata is still visible, but contents are not if the remote were compromised. Originally used git-remote-gcrypt but having one or two mega files that have to be fully pushed on every tiny incremental change wasn't quite what I was looking for. For more secure projects and vaults I store them in Cryptomator volumes on the cloud drive. Cryptomator also uses granular change management, similar to git, so changing a file or two in a large project doesn't yield a massive transfer.

macos storage bloat

Dennis Forbes — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 07:21:00 GMT

I evaluate the storage usage on my primary Mac Mini occasionally, always to be surprised by some storage bomb that is consuming far more than expected. Today's lucky winner is Windows App -- this is the RDC client I use to connect to my primary Windows CUDA machine -- which was consuming almost 200GB in the user Caches folder, accumulated junk going back about a year.

How does a simple VNC app amass such a volume of junk files? Very good question. Each time I do this exercise I find some culprit that subscribes to the add forever but never manage or delete philosophy of file management. And note that the Caches folder isn't some system service where things are truncated as needed, but instead it's up to the apps using this facility to delete their junk as they go, which lots of apps never do. Add that on modern flash storage you shouldn't treat it like RAM where "empty space is wasted space". For a variety of reasons you should strive to have 20%+ of an SSD unused, yielding the benefits of pSLC/dynamic caching. Lower usage/TRIMming makes wear-levelling more capable as well.

This entry reminded me why I've always leveraged external storage on my Macs.

Neilson 26g Protein Chocolate Milk

Dennis Forbes — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 16:30:00 GMT

A number of local stores were retailing a Neilson protein chocolate milk product over the past month or so. Featuring 26g of very high quality whey protein per 325ml bottle and minimal sugar (only natural milk sugars), this product is an absolute banger, and while a lot of people don't like the light sweetening -- only a small amount of stevia -- with an added sucralose sweetener it is an amazing way to start the day.

$9.99 CAD for a 12 pack, which is an astonishing value. I bought some at $19.99 a few weeks earlier and was a big fan at that price too. You can't make a protein drink yourself this cheap with the dodgiest protein powder.

If you're listening, Neilson, please continue with this product. Not sure if you just had an excess of powdered milk that you needed to get rid of or something, but this is a great product in a space that is dominated by American brands like Fairlife.

A place for micro-thoughts

Dennis Forbes — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 10:00:00 GMT

Added some microblogging facilities for those micro-thoughts I often have during the day, links I might want to share, etc. Yeah, I'm not going to use Twitter, Threads is barely any better (and at this point Meta is basically an arm of the US government), and meh...if I was the only person to ever look back on this I'll still consider it worthwhile.

Fragile Devices: Precious electronics in a hostile world

Dennis Forbes — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

When Our Devices Crash Into The Real World

Apple Devices Last...Sometimes

I'm a big fan of Apple hardware. They make excellent smartphones, laptops and desktop computers, whether all-in-ones like the iMac or small form factor like the Mac Mini. The performance is generally excellent and the energy efficiency is top tier. And while some Apple software has regressions -- Tahoe should probably have gone through more of a QA cycle, for instance -- generally I think Apple has excellent software quality as well.

It's a great combo.

Their offerings are generally secure and reliable. Their pricing is entirely competitive.

Treated carefully these things generally last forever. I've never had an Apple device fail on me, and instead they only go out of service due to extreme obsolescence[^XR], or because of misfortune yielding a physically destroyed device.

I've decommissioned some iPhones, iMacs and an iPod due to obsolescence. We lost a couple of iPads and an iPhone due to physically being destroyed. Lost an Intel-era Macbook Pro because my son lightly dented in a corner of the screen, and courtesy of the tiny bezel made of soft aluminum, it destroyed the screen.

If Treated Extremely Carefully

Some Apple devices are built for aesthetics, however, with form clearly prioritized over function. At least in how they can survive the perils and risks of the real world.

iPhones look and feel amazing from the factory, but I don't even take one out of the box until I have a heavy duty case and screen protector ready to be installed within seconds of its consumer birth[^catching_the_bus].

"Just buy AppleCare+ and don't sweat it"

I have zero interest in spending my time at an Apple store, or without my device. Going without my device and then getting some refurbished device is not a valid solution for me. There is literally zero upside to getting a phone repaired or replaced in this fashion, and I'll avoid it wherever possible[^roadrage]. And to be clear, I usually do buy AppleCare+ regardless and for worst case scenarios, but I still don't want the hassle.

And clearly I'm not alone. Only maniacs use their iPhone without a case[^maniacs], and all of Apple's boasting about making slightly thinner or lighter devices just doesn't matter to most people who just want a better battery, performance, screen, camera, etc.

See the flop that the iPhone Air has been. Seriously, almost no one thinks smartphones need to be thinner, yet for some reason Apple particularly seems to really care about this. Every release goes on about tiny savings on thickness or weight that no one outside Apple cares about at all. It's institutional pathology at this point.

An uncased iPhone is an attractive, impressive device. But it isn't practical for most people. We all occasionally fumble our device, knock it off shelves and chairs, or put it in a pocket with scratchy companions.

The Counterpoint

This whole thought came about while moving my youngest son's Lenovo laptop[^lenovo]. It offered an example that it doesn't have to be this way.

The thing is built like a tank. He tosses it in his backpack with little concern. The shell is strong, and the screen is well protected by beefy, strong bezels. It's still a speedy, impressive device, but somehow it also can survive normal use without babying.

I contrast this with the MBPs I've had. All are outrageously fragile devices that I carefully extract from their massively-padded laptop cocoon and carefully place on the desk. MBPs often feature tiny bezels and beautifully curved aluminum shells, so you need to be extremely vigilant that are never hit around these perimeters.

I treat Macbooks more carefully than any other electronic in my life. It is a device I actually don't like using out and about. Whoa, does that table I put it down on have tiny bits of material that are going to scratch the bottom? Is someone going to bump the edge while moving by?

Give Us Rugged Apple Devices

I know this angers some people who really prioritize looks above all, but we need rugged Apple variants.

I want to use Apple Silicon (especially now that they added "tensor" functionality in the GPU) on the road. I want to use Apple's software. The outrageous, unacceptable fragility of the devices is the part that I find hard to rationalize, and always reach for alternatives.

Give us rugged options. No, I do not care that everyone knows I have the latest Macbook or iPhone. No I don't want people marvelling over bezels or soft-metal shells. I absolutely do not care if it weighs a bit more or is thicker or has larger bezels.

Give me some sort of beefy, robust options that I don't have to fret over and baby. Make it ugly if need be. Make the form fit the actual function. Let those of us who don't prioritize the aesthetics of a tool the option to have more durable, robust options out of the gate. There is a medium somewhere between "fragile, precious work of art" and "gaudy plastic covered with stickers", and I think it's a medium many customers would prefer.

[^roadrage]: While maybe it's just online bluster, often in discussions about driving -- whether in the real world or online -- people will boast about how people had better not "cut them off" or the like, because they don't care they'll smash right into them.

This attitude fascinates me. I've avoid a number of accidents through careful defensive driving because even if the other guy is fully at fault and my dashcams back me up, it's still an **enormous** hassle with only downside. I think of this when people use AppleCare+ as their fallback.

[^XR]: We're in the process of replacing a couple of XRs in the family. They still operate perfectly, performance is still satisfactory and the screens still look fantastic, but they're being replaced purely as these seven-year-old devices are no longer getting major OS updates. While they're still getting security updates, it won't be long before major apps start gatekeeping on iOS 26.

[^maniacs]: Seriously though, I am truly fascinated by people who use fragile smartphones without cases. I mean, often they have multiple cracks on their screen, a dented in enclosure, and so on, and I guess they're willing to live with that.

[^catching_the_bus]: This isn't always enough, however. A few years back one of my sons was late going out for the bus to school and had to run down the icy drive to get there in time. An unfortunate fall on an inconveniently situated rock yielded a situation that even Spigen armour couldn't help with. The iPhone was soundly destroyed.

[^lenovo]: He bought this laptop with his own earnings from his various initiatives in the virtual world. At times this teenage Roblox developer/business man in training is out-earning me, which is humbling.

macOS/iOS/iPadOS 26 get new backgrounds sounds

Dennis Forbes — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Relaxing Background Sounds, Built In

If you go under Accessibility / Audio on macOS, or Accessibility / Audio and Visual on iOS or iPadOS, the operating system has built-in background sounds. The 26 release expands the options, offering up the following gamut of choices-

Balanced Noise
Bright Noise
Dark Noise
Ocean
Rain
Stream
Night
Fire
Babble
Steam
Boat
Bus
Train
Rain On Roof
Quiet Night

More than half of these are new with the 26 release.

They aren't all winners, but in a pinch they're a great way to camouflage background noises. They're especially potent when used in conjunction with a ANR headset.

It is notable that the macOS implementation offers the ability to choose to download higher quality versions, but that function seems to be broken currently. In normal operations when you download the higher quality option the icon will change to a wastebasket for when you might want to delete the local copy, but that doesn't currently function. This might explain why some options loop too quickly and have clear repeating patterns. For instance "babble" is not great on macOS, where it's excellent on the mobile variants. That will get sorted at some point.

Note also that you can add these as shortcuts in the control center to make quick toggles and sound selection even easier.

Apple Watch VO2Max

Dennis Forbes — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

It's a good smart watch

I'm a big fan of the Apple Watch and its health metrics[^1]. It's a great platform for health and activity tracking, and is just generally a great device. The SE devices are a wonderful value if you're okay with the mediocre, yet workable, battery life.

That is actually my single real complaint about the devices: competing devices are offering sometimes weeks of usage with a similar feature set, yet Apple keeps boasting about making it lighter or with a slightly bigger screen, barely improving on the 18 hour battery life. It would be awesome if one could go away for the weekend or even the week without worrying about the special needs of charging your watch. And of course, for children it's one of those annoyance/benefit things where often they'll have a dead device.

Yes, you can charge it while showering and during other activities and make its limitation work with minimal fuss. It still would be better if you didn't have to.

And my suspicion is that Apple keeps such a marginal battery in the device to ensure that as the battery fades you upgrade purely to get back to a workable battery life. If the device started with a two week battery life, few would be motivated to upgrade when a couple of years in its down to a week of battery life. Seeing your 18 hours drop to 9 hours, on the other hand, is a very different story.

Regardless, one measure I've paid attention to is VO2Max^pdf, using it as a general measure of overall health. Using my Polar H10 and its VO2Max feature I get very different numbers (much better numbers, for what it's worth). However, I only use the H10 occasionally so it'd be nice if the Watch proved useful on this measure, at least in relation to seeing trends.

But don't read too much into the VO2Max Measures

I've become suspicious of the value of the VO2Max measure, however, at least in regards to movements in one direction or the other.

I've had activities where my heart rate has stayed relatively low and consistent, and yet my VO2Max inexplicably drops. Others where I'm a bit under the weather and my heart rate is higher than normal, yet my VO2Max improves. I've had walks where I'm carrying 40lbs of groceries[^groceries], expecting a big VO2Max penalty -- the watch has no idea of the burden I'm carrying, but suddenly my body is working harder for seemingly the same effort -- yet it rises still again.

This matters to me because there is the implication that the calculations are seeing something deeper. So when my VO2Max drops, it makes me concerned. It makes me wonder if there is some underlying health condition that the Apple Watch picked up on early.

This led to me exporting the heart rate data from a set of activities to trying to find any correlation with the movements of the VO2Max measures. I found no correlation, and it seemed almost random. Like in broad strokes my overall fitness level justifies the broad band within which my VO2Max sits, but the number is rising and dropping by up to 20% seemingly based upon essentially nothing.

Over the spring and early summer I was doing a significant number of activities where the Watch was reporting it. Every day there would be at least two sessions.

My VO2Max kept improving, jumping almost 20% over a month or two. These were pretty low-effort sessions so I was a bit surprised that they seemed to have such an outsized health benefit.

As the heat of the summer settled in -- and Toronto summers are very, very hot and humid -- I stopped doing those activities and moved to alternate cardio exercises that weren't subject to Apple's VO2 estimates, yet were even more potent for actual cardio training. To be clear, I was absolutely doing activities that maintain if not improve VO2Max, but not under the watch of the Apple Watch.

So on the rare occasion where I did do an Apple Watch monitored VO2 effort, my score kept dropping and dropping. Every week it was a new low. Again I exported actual heart rate data for the relevant activities and it didn't support this drop, and seemed comparable to heart rate response from the spring when my VO2Max was hitting personal highs.

What gives?

The Man Behind The Curtain

The Apple paper linked above heralds the tight correlation between the Apple Watch's VO2Max measures and formal measurements using a lab test with a max effort, mask-monitored session. While individuals often differed between measurement devices significantly, it averaged out across the set.

I think that correlation might be overvalued a bit: It is one of those cases where just having rudimentary measures about a person -- their age, sex, weight, height, etc -- is enough to approximate a set of people to a close to 1.0 correlation: Exceptional people will fall above or below your guess, but it will average out. Getting a good correlation seems to be mostly a parlour trick, in the same way that you can guess someone's age of death using mortality tables and you'll also hit an ~1.0 correlation. Some will die much earlier, some much later, but that's the whole thing about mortality tables is that it will mean out.

Apple documentation on the VO2Max measure makes a big deal about doing relevant exercises frequently, purportedly to give it more data to analyze. After months of monitoring this, I am confident that frequency of activity as observed by Apple Watch is the most important input into their equation, regardless of the heartbeat response to an activity.

It starts by setting you to an average VO2Max for your particulars, then maybe adjusting based upon significant heart rate variations from estimates. As you do Apple Watch activities frequently, it will improve your score regardless of heart rate response. If you do activities less frequently, it will drop it.

Conclusion

Clearly Apple was concerned with wide variations in VO2Max scaring users or making the measure look unreliable, so they put in a longer term averaging that makes general trends almost worthless. If I am feeling sick and am carrying 40lbs of groceries, I would fully expect my VO2Max to drop significantly, yet instead I see it actually improve because for the two weeks prior I took daily walks. And so on. None of this is seen in its measures as it massages it out and seems to use it mostly to gamify doing activities, acting as a bit of a fake feedback loop.

That is unfortunate. It makes it, in my opinion, a poor measure of health and at best is a "how many VO2 max qualified activities have you done in the preceding period?".

[^1]: As detailed in the opinions page

[^groceries]: I love walking and getting groceries as an bonus of being in a suburb that is nearby many amenities. Occasionally I underestimate the weight of the groceries I'm carrying and it gets a bit ridiculous.

macOS 26 (Tahoe) - First Day Troubles

Dennis Forbes — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

import ResponsiveImage from "@components/ResponsiveImage.astro";

Installed the release of macOS 26 (Tahoe) yesterday.

Aesthetically I'm not a fan of what they've done on either the macOS or iOS/iPadOS sides of the 26 releases. I'm a pretty chill guy about that sort of thing generally and just try to roll with whatever they deem appropriate -- aesthetics like this have a lot of subjective qualities, and I don't imagine myself to be a great judge so I just assume they're the experts -- but wow, it is seriously ugly.

The ridiculous rounded corners that are dated to begin with, but different apps and even platform features see laughably varying radii. The awful translucency that makes many apps and controls visually confusing, ruining the visual clarity of the display. The control bar on the Music app, for instance, is just just a mess: Gray controls on a translucent background where album covers beneath force you to have to spend mental effort interpreting what you're seeing. Obnoxious animations that don't help with affordances at all.

Ugh.

I can roll with all that. It's ugly and with reduced usability, but...whatever. Adapt, Darwin, I Ching. Whatever Man, We Gotta Roll With It

Woke up to find my Mac unusable, having exhausted all of its memory overnight. For those who have ever encountered this, even after you've force quit the culprit consuming 90%+ of the memory, it's still almost impossible to make the machine usable short of a reboot. macOS deals with memory exhaustion very poorly.

The culprit was Messages[^culprit] (aka iMessage), sitting at 60GB+ and still trying to acquire more. I wonder how much of my SSD wear it rolled through paging garbage out endlessly through the night. Good times. At least I have Applecare+.

It wasn't some esoteric new service or JetBrains app eating all the memory, but instead one of the most banal core apps on the platform.

Best I can tell, my brother-in-law sent an overnight message in a fantasy football group sharing a funny video. My power napping Mac momentarily wakes for things like this and it seems that sent it spiralling.

So that's nice. I've disabled waking for network access and now sit with activity monitor open and Stats running in the menu bar. Sad.

Foreboding. Every indication is that Tahoe is going to be a disastrous release. Something is going wrong in Apple's software development process.

[^culprit]: At least this is what the system is attributing the memory to, though I've seen a number of reports of similar massive leaks against other basic apps.

Missing macOS Features

Dennis Forbes — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Like many people, I use a third-party mouse with extra buttons on macOS. I enjoy the gestures available on the Magic Mouse, but it isn't an ideal mouse for precision work. The extra buttons of the third-party mouse are a great productivity boost. For instance I've set the scroll wheel button press to bring up Mission Control[^1], and use this constantly.

Support for the back and forward buttons should be pervasive. We're about two decades past this being a known benefit. Some apps just automatically utilize these extra mouse buttons, for instance Microsoft Edge, but Safari explicitly does not. Safari stubbornly does not. It's obnoxious.

A similar daily annoyance is the lack of system volume controls for individual apps. Sure apps that emit audio often have their own volume control, but there are many cases where they simply don't and you want to reign them in at the system level without having to decrease your master volume. macOS has no such facility.

And finally Bluetooth and audio devices. When bluetooth connects it has a variety of protocol/profile options at vastly varying levels of quality. If it uses a profile that uses the microphone on a headset -- and sadly almost every headset has a microphone now, which is unfortunate given this problem -- it will use a terrible quality profile for output audio (HSP/HFP), prioritizing high quality recording of the microphone and dropping the audio to a low bitrate, mono mess. If a single app on your system asks for audio input, even optionally, bluetooth headsets will fall to this AM-radio quality level audio output.

All I want for Christmas is to be able to configure the headset to not use the microphone, and to never ever fall to HSP/HFP. There is no such facility. Buy airpods that have their own solution is the fix, I guess.

For each of these missing features, and for many similar little itches, there are third party apps to hack in the ability. I don't want to have to trust or use sometimes dodgy third party apps for simple things like this. For instance background-music can be used to individually control the volume of apps, but it's so overwrought and has such ugly edges it's not something I want running normally.

They're big oversights and it's absurd this continues to be a problem.

[^1]: Before some recent updates I would have to reconfigure this shortcut in Keyboard & Mouse Shortcuts on every restart, but recently it actually was fixed and retains it.