Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48626930
As a Linux guy, I recently did some macOS development and was incredibly annoyed by the "security" features, which seem designed to shift blame for security issues from Apple to users.
macOS is constantly throwing up security screens and warnings about completely normal programs the user knowingly installed and trusted.
If a developer pays for an Apple Developer account, signs their software, and a user knowingly downloads and installs it, that software should be allowed to run and do what the user wants.
If you say "yes", the program can do almost anything and you'll have no idea what it's actually doing. If you say "no", you often can't use it for its intended purpose.
They took the iOS model and applied it to their desktop OS and it's just lazy and broken.
It might be a lazy model, I imagine Apple could’ve done something better if they still gave a damn about desktop, but I’ll take this over nothing. It actively provides value to me.
I think there was a case of Teslas having these sorts of failures at one point due to them writing logs quite aggressively.
Another example was MacOS causing rapid wear due to virtual memory swaps if I recall on devices with smaller amounts of RAM.
The "I know what I'm doing" approach is the absence of the checkbox. Each of these decisions matters, and gives you insight into what the programs you're installing are trying to do today, independent of what they did when you last installed them (and maybe audited them) five years ago. Neither default behavior of "disallow all" (which would prevent correct operation of many programs) or "allow all" (which would likely violate your trust assumptions) is safe -- thought and human decision-making based on your own risk model and your own intended use of the installed software is needed.
Modern proper SSDs for computers do their best to spread out the writes (TRIM, and other features). They still wear out of course, nothing can beat physics. But if you buy a 2TB drive, there's a lot of room to spread out the write cycles that a normal user probably never has to worry about (no normal user is going to hit 500TBs of writes that breaks a modern 2TB SSD write balancing algorithm)
But it probably should be noted that embedded controller-free SSDs have significant write amplification issues. Embedded systems assumed you were trying to save money and/or compute... and also assumed you didn't do too many writes. So they really weren't designed for the write cycles that Teslas logging system did.
spenvo•14h ago
mirashii•13h ago
Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48626930