Comment by Verdex
20 hours ago
I feel like the weather app makes a lot of sense from a corporate politics point of view.
A 1mb weather app would have a significantly less impressive pie chart associated with it come "here are our improvements" presentation.
Also if times get tough and you're told to reduce headcount by 10%, who do you want to get rid of. Sally who knows the USB driver end to end or Todd who wrote the bloated 1gb weather app. (Don't feel bad for Todd, he knew what he was getting himself into.)
Also, showing the weather is a great excuse to ask permissions for the user location.
What does that have to do with its RAM consumption, though?
What if the user changes location?
Sounds like unbounded, dynamic allocation to me!
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The mac tahoe weather system daemon is also sus
I've been doing forest service stuff for a year with almost no signal and often no gps without antenna and it's incredible what asks for location permission to run. My amazon bought LEDs (15+, 3-5 diff types) all check location before I can connect them. I wind up waiting 30 seconds sometimes more to turn lights on. My generator and inverter have to phone home so that lags constantly.
Also I've been shadowbanned from a bunch of social media sites and had problems with payment systems, etc because Starlink confuses companies tracking user locations to geoips etc.
Won't even get into the apps that look downloaded and usable until you open them with no signal and they don't work before phoning home.
I've been meaning to go through ALL my apps and delete everything I don't use, I haven't installed a new app in years.
Then you have MacOS now that has the most "wtf" level permission prompts that make you think everything is phoning home or trying to access stuff on your network when it's just connecting bluetooth devices or something daily. I don't know how many games I've installed that now show up as having full screen or keyboard control permissions just to use input devices. I work on this stuff and can deduce what it's doing, especially after googling it, but "Stupidgame needs control of your system" is wild to someone who doesn't, I'm sure.
I've been wondering if it's almost nefarious that they want to get people used to allowing these seemingly system wide controls to be given to.. everything, by hiding the security-ok things behind a giant red flag warning.
Sorry went on a tangent. I miss specific permissions notifications I can trust.
edit: Oh, my "fix" for most of this is fakegps and mocking my android systemwide gps location to whatever, if you go through this.
Android's permission system conflates the Bluetooth scanning permission with the "Fine location" permission, because in theory any app that can enumerate nearby Bluetooth devices (including things like nearby Bluetooth Low Energy beacons commonly found in stores and malls) could use that information to locate your phone within a few hundred feet.
It seems like there's a newer build option to explicitly disable the "Fine location" permission prompt while still being able to scan for Bluetooth devices, but such beacons are somehow filtered from the list if it's enabled, and it's only available for builds targeting newer Android versions.
I'm sure at least some of those macOS permissions prompts are spurious, but for the most part I think they're genuine red flags of poor software quality if not actual security/privacy threats. When a video game prompts for full disk access, it's probably because it wants to spray config and save files all over my home directory instead of putting them in a platform-appropriate location. When it triggers a permissions prompt about Bluetooth, it's probably using the wrong API to get input from a game controller or the wrong API for identifying what kind of input devices are present. If it triggers the "wants to control your system" prompt, it's probably trying to keep responding to input even when it's no longer the foreground application.
Sometimes the right API might not actually exist, but most of the time it's just lazy developers half-assing a port with no care for making the application behave appropriately for the platform. The prevalence of "Please don't turn off your computer while the game is saving" warnings is pretty clear proof that game devs in particular don't make any platform-specific adjustments they aren't forced to. (Game consoles usually require those warnings, but they're stupidly out of touch on a computer.)
i prefer the macos mindset if not the actual OS
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Ah, most of the people just click yes, yes, allow, allow, yesIamsure, next. Especially when the system is training them to do exatly this by these meaningless warnings you described.
The forest job sounds nice :)
Unrelatedly, I'm still trying to figure out why Apple requires me to unlock my phone to look at the weather. Is there some concern that someone could pick up my phone and learn what city it is in?
You can use the weather widget on the lock screen, and as long as you have lock screen content when locked enabled, you can see the current area's weather just fine. Or do you want the whole app experience?
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You want to be able to launch apps without unlocking your phone? Slippery slope.
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Did Todd just know or did his PO tell him to add telemetry tool number 24 while he was protesting and begged to be allowed to migrate to a newer rendering library but got shot down promptly because "KPI line must go up"? :)
Todd was a script kiddie and never really knew what he was doing. He changed careers after the layoff and is now an owner of an electrical contracting business.
The longer I work in corporate, the wiser Todd seems
Based on windows bloat Sally got fired because she was an old timer and cost to much so all the Sally's are gone and they're all Todd's now and windows is an unstable bloated mess.
The corporate dilemma between "I hired some less competent engineers and they're dragging the team down" and "I hired only highly capable engineers and now I have to give 10% of them bad reviews in stack ranking and later let them go"
I don't think this is a real dilemma - people hell bent on avoiding work can get by without shipping a single line of code for years.
Not to mention, they have 1 GB of headroom in their back pocket if/when they need to make Windows more efficient. Quick rewrite of that app or just scrap it and they've saved months of optimization.
I think it's less about pie charts and more that weather apps can be very eyecandy-heavy. This sort of marketing works well for both consumers and board members.
1GB is space for almost half an hour of 5000kbps ("YouTube Premium") video. Just what kind of eye candy are we talking about here?
It's also only 45 frames uncompressed at 4k. It's remarkably easy to hit that if your base assets are mostly raster rather than vector for a dynamic scene.
Obviously, they should try harder, and this is an explanation rather than an excuse, but the graphics assets are mostly why.
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I have deep faith you can find the imagination with in you to understand
Sally, obviously. Todd is much more likely to have a perfect haircut and immaculate fluency in corpotalk
In this day and age, both Sally and Todd are expendable. Both have been silently training their replacement by feeding the data models.
Replaced by LLM and an offshore contractor. CaPiTaLiSm, right?
The list of professions made obsolete is very long. Why should programming be protected if AI in the future can make software better, safer, and cheaper?
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