438: The Oppenheimer Problem

After a little async Ruby chat and developer morality struggle, Chris explains how macOS Monterey has lapped Linux with a critical workstation feature.

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• Google's 'Be Evil' business transformation is complete — Looking through the lawsuit, the scope and shamelessness of Google's greed would appear to be stark. Project Bernanke, for example, is claimed to take data from publishers' ad servers to boost Google's own services. Project NERA, to create a "not owned but operated" walled garden for users if they used any Google service. "Project Jedi" was allegedly meant to freeze out independent ad exchanges by using insider knowledge, and in "Jedi Blue", Google is alleged to have conspired with Facebook to parcel out the goodies between themselves.
• fasterthanlime 🌌 on Twitter — "Ok so, I just read through all 173 pages of the unredacted Google antitrust filing and I have to say that either Google is screwed or society is screwed, we'll find out which."
• Async Ruby — Async Ruby adds new concurrency features to the language; you can think of it as "threads with none of the downsides". It's been in the making for a couple of years, and with Ruby 3.0, it's finally ready for prime time.
• Explaining Ruby Fibers — A fiber is simply an independent execution context that can be paused and resumed programmatically. We can think of fibers as story lines in a book or a movie: there are multiple happenings involving different persons at different places all occurring at the same time, but we can only follow a single story line at a time: the one we’re currently reading or watching.
• How macOS is more reliable, and doesn’t need reinstalling — This layout segregates the contents of the system into files which don’t change, except in a macOS update, and everything else which does.
• Low Power Mode — The downside of any Low Power Mode feature will be reduced performance. This is generally easy to quantify via benchmarks, and the Mac's low power mode is not an exception
• Erase all content and settings — Open System Preferences and check the menu bar to launch the Erase Assistant. In short, it retains the system data volume (originally introduced in Catalina) and formats the paired data volume, destroying your encryption keys in the process so that no data can be recovered from the drive.
• Window management — Clicking and holding the green stoplight button when an app is in full-screen mode presents some additional options, too. In Big Sur, this menu will only offer to exit full-screen mode, but in Monterey you can send a Split View window into its own separate full-screen view, or you can replace one half of a Split View window with another app. And there’s also a setting that makes the menu bar stay at the top of the screen even when you’re using full-screen mode, instead of hiding-and-showing as it does by default.
• Some Older Macs Reportedly Bricked After Installing macOS Monterey — At least ten separate posts (1, 2, 3 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) on Apple Support Communities contain users complaining that as they were attempting to update their Mac to ‌macOS Monterey‌, the Mac went completely black and they're unable to turn it on.