ghoulishly (u/ghoulishly)

ghoulishly commented on “This is not the computer for you” samhenri.gold/blog/202603... · Posted by u/MBCook

Really? In that case I retract the statement and will ponder what AI has done to my ability to assess this kind of writing!

ghoulishly · 2 days ago

Author here, it’s all me. I ran it through Claude before publishing to spot check me on grammar/typos and it caught a few syntax things, but this is just my writing style.

Here’s a satire piece I wrote in the summer of 2021. Tonally very different but you can pick up on my voice between it and my essay yesterday: https://samhenri.gold/blog/20210803-localhost/

ghoulishly commented on “This is not the computer for you” samhenri.gold/blog/202603... · Posted by u/MBCook

holliplex · 2 days ago

It's an interesting slip, given the premise of the article, that this hypothetical child is assumed to be a boy.

ghoulishly · 2 days ago

I actually gave a de-gendered draft of the essay to some friends a few days ago and heard that it landed with a thud — the essay is largely written about myself, in the third person, retrospectively, so removing the pronoun made the autobiographical thread harder to follow. I switched it to "he" to make that clearer.

I think if I used "she" it would've made the "That kid was me" transition harder — it would either involve some gymnastics to make it make sense or it would introduce a reading I didn't intend.

ghoulishly commented on “This is not the computer for you” samhenri.gold/blog/202603... · Posted by u/MBCook

m000 · 2 days ago

A key point that TFA misses (probably for the sake of story-telling) is that, unlike the 2006 iMac the author fondly remembers of, MacBook Neo is not a hand-me-down computer.

It is not the proverbial gift horse. You are paying fresh $ for it. So, it is only reasonable to have some baseline expectations on redeeming value from it.

Also, an important point of the MacBook Neo criticism is that because of its cut-down features, a Neo may never graduate to a "hand-me-down computer", but instead head straight to the e-waste pile.

ghoulishly · 2 days ago

ARM macs are too new for us to know how the reuse/hand-me-down/legacy support world will shake out for them. There’ll be signs when the first M1 machines get axed but for now, I have no clue.

ghoulishly commented on “This is not the computer for you” samhenri.gold/blog/202603... · Posted by u/MBCook

haritha-j · 2 days ago

I don't think this is about the macbook neo. I don't think the comments need to devolve into a mac vs. linux argument. It's simply an ode to that kid pushing hardware to the limits, and learning so much along the way.

What I feel a bit sad about is, I was that kid. Growing up in a 3rd world country, running games that i didn't own on hardware that ought not run it, debugging why those games don't work, rooting my phone and installing custom OSs just for the heck of it. Man I had so much time to tinker.

Now I have amazing gaming hardware but I barely touch games. When I do, its on steam. I've swapped out the endless tinkerability of android with the vanilla 'it just works'-ness of the iphone. That curiosity took me far, but I seem to have lost it along the way.

ghoulishly · 2 days ago

(Author of the post here) The post was inspired by the Neo and provoked by a certain YouTuber’s review of it, but yeah it’s about the Neo in the same way that The Old Man and the Sea is about fishing.

I wrote about the Mac in general since that’s what I know, but I imagine if I grew up in the Windows world and liked Windows more, I would have a similar experience with my dad’s old ThinkPad or something.

ghoulishly commented on “This is not the computer for you” samhenri.gold/blog/202603... · Posted by u/MBCook

saagarjha · 2 days ago

When Chromebooks originally came out, that was not an option. And almost all school-issued computers will not let you do this.

ghoulishly · 2 days ago

Author of the post here. You nailed it here; I used Chromebook as the example in my post since the one I used in high school was locked down to basically a kiosk. Couldn’t even open dev tools, much less root it. Such a wild departure from the eMacs I used in my elementary school’s library where I could set bonkers `defaults write` commands and customize every aspect of my account.

If I got a Chromebook as a personal machine as a kid, I probably would’ve rooted it and see what I could do, but growing up, the beauty of the Mac (in that Snow Leopard era) was progressive disclosure. I could start on the happy path and have a perfectly stable machine, then customize the behaviors through the terminal, see what it does, mess with the system files, see what breaks, revert it, then go back to using iMovie like normal.

In my (admittedly limited) time using a rooted Chromebook, it’s much more like a switch flip. You go from mandatory water wings directly into getting pushed into the ocean and Google shouting “Good luck!!”

ghoulishly commented on MacBook Neo apple.com/newsroom/2026/0... · Posted by u/dm

jsheard · 11 days ago

I wonder if this means a Mac Nano with an A-series chip is on the table now. Essentially a beefed up Apple TV that runs macOS.

ghoulishly · 9 days ago

I’m curious what the use case for that would be. Where would someone opt for that over a Mac mini? They’re already pretty cheap ($500 on sale)

ghoulishly commented on The fix to the iPhone Antennagate in 2010 was 20 bytes hachyderm.io/@samhenrigol... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

ghoulishly · 5 months ago

Author of this thread here, thanks for sharing! This was the first time I publicly went into assembly code so I was a little nervous about screwing up a detail but glad it’s getting a warm reception.

ghoulishly commented on The MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge twitter.com/samhenrigold/... · Posted by u/leephillips

astrange · 6 months ago

"Can't change it" means "haven't tried to change it". People's legal names change, so you have to be able to update a record of your legal name.

ghoulishly · 6 months ago

They told me they would need a notarized letter signed by both me and my mom. I figured at that point I’m just gonna die with this account name.

ghoulishly commented on The MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge twitter.com/samhenrigold/... · Posted by u/leephillips

cush · 6 months ago

Looks like something is off with the value. That “exact angle” makes zero sense

ghoulishly · 6 months ago

Hey, developer of this experiment here. I screwed up the calculation on the demo video, but it’s patched in the latest version on the repo.

I thought it was centidegrees but it turns out the sensor was reporting the raw degrees.