Been on Tahoe now for a few weeks. The new rounded corners bug me a bit, but aside from that it's been rock stable. The trick with macOS is of course not to immediately upgrade. Give it a few weeks before you go to a new release.
I've been through all the releases since Jaguar in 2003. There's been some ups and downs, and a lot of complaints, but I'd say it still remains the most rock solid UNIX™ desktop OS out there.
That doesn't mean that they aren't still constantly making it worse.
Apple themselves note that most of the new features in the OS are "design" and "apple intelligence". I really don't care for these features, so I don't really care to upgrade. Even on the Tahoe page, they note many of the features as updates to individual apps themselves, so why can't they just release those as individual app updates?
I'd rather have a solid OS with a UI that isn't re-imagined every other year with more focus on usability improvements and bug fixes. And as you note, it is one of the most solid UNIX™ desktop OS'.
So when Apple puts out a major update that I think is going in the wrong direction, how else should I signal my distaste? I sent feedback. I posted on their customer forums (which are a terrible place for discussion btw). Now I just want to not update, but they use dark patterns to try to force it on me. So I'm going to be more annoying and vocal about it because I think they can and should do better.
By all means make good use of LLMs and other AI. What counts as good use? The world is figuring that out, it will take years, and HN is no exception (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). We just don't want it to interfere with the human conversation and connection that this site has always been for.
For example, it has always been a bad idea and against HN's rules when users post things that they didn't write themselves, or do bulk copy-pasting into the threads, or write bots to post things.
As I mentioned, the HN mods (who are also the HN devs) use AI extensively and will be doing so a lot more. The limits on that are not technical; they have to do with (1) how much work we still do manually—the classic "no time to do things that would make the things that take all our time take less of it"; and (2) the amount of psychic rewiring that's required—there's a limit to the RoA (rate of astonishment) that any human can absorb. (It's fascinating how technical people are suffering the most from that this time. Less technical people have longer experience being hit by disorienting changes, so for them the current moment is somewhat less skull-cracking.)
Getting this right doesn't mean replacing human-to-human interaction, it means we should have more time for that, and do a better job of supporting HN users generally, as well as YC founders who want to launch on HN, and so on. The goal is to enhance human relatedness, not diminish it.
Having your cake and eating it too? NIMBYism?
If anything it reeks of privilege. It says that it's okay to spread slop on the world at large, just so long as it doesn't soil the precious orange website.