Did you even read the blog post? It's almost a direct quote
> We’re exploring preloading File Explorer in the background to help improve File Explorer launch performance. This shouldn’t be visible to you, outside of File Explorer hopefully launching faster when you need to use it.
These two sentences don't actually join together well logically:
> A recent access review had revealed that many systems were under the control of a single individual, which we determined presented a risk to the security and operational sustainability of those systems. We had intended to resolve this over time.
and:
> ... the departure of key maintainers and contribution data showing that some maintainers had long periods of inactivity (Least Privileged Access), changed the timeline.
As the 2nd doesn't really change anything about the 1st. If that "single individual" has been acting maliciously or similar then it might, but they don't present evidence of that being the case. So there's nothing about the 2nd statement which has anything to support changing any kind of timeline.
From a usability perspective, the difference is that Vista and 7 drew rounded borders around the window contents, while 11 doesn’t have any borders and instead cuts out pixels from the window contents to make the window rounded. The real problem isn’t the windows being rounded, it’s that they’re hiding parts of the window contents for purely stylistic reasons.
The potential for issues there depends on the radius of the curve, which is fairly mild in W11’s case. macOS has had similarly rounded corners since version 10.7 (2011) and has never caused any problems.
The extreme corner radii found in newer designs like M3 Expressive and Liquid Glass on the other hand are flirting with danger with the extent to which they cut into window content.
I've had issues with stuff on status bars getting cut off for programs written before status bars fell out of fashion. This is less of a problem on Mac because backwards compatibility isn't much of a concern there, so nobody expects to be able to run a program written more than a few years ago.
There’s a StarBucks near me that takes about 3-4 minutes per car at the drive thru. Frequently there would be 3-6 cars in line. Yes, people literally wait 15-20 minutes in line before they can even order, much less get their order.
Sure, maybe they’re just inefficient and shouldn’t be rewarded. However the people there are indeed working feverishly (and paid poorly).
Going inside and ordering isn’t any faster.
I’d put this in the “famously bad experience” category.
I've always been puzzled that Starbucks drive through is a thing, and even has long queues. It's coffee, do people really drive there just to get a cup? I understand if it's along the highway but otherwise. You pay the premium of the brand without getting to see or enjoy the facilities. Just my feeling as european, maybe just a cultural thing.
Some people stop every day on the way in to work rather than make coffee at home in the morning. They’re often ordering some caffeine concoction rather than drip coffee. I have known people with $100+ per month Starbucks habits.
Yeah it’s this, Starbucks isn’t a coffee place; it’s a caffeinated drink place. Their brewed coffee (outside of their higher end tasting room stores) is deliberately undrinkable to push you to their espresso drinks or their sugary concoctions.
The US has very few coffee chains and StarBucks dominates. Not like the European cities that seem to have a bakery on every block!
A lot of people say StarBucks coffee is bad, but it’s far better than the burnt motor oil sold at fast food places, gas stations, and donut shops. The upscale coffee competitors are even more expensive and never have a drive-thru.
Worse, donuts shops and gas stations never have real milk creamer — only the extremely artificial powdered stuff (not made from milk). Or they’ll sell a bad cappuccino for $5.
(re: drive-thru) You're going to be waiting aorund in a really long queue for Starbucks regardless.
Might as well wait in line in a comfy/cosy car where a barista will hand you your drink, than walk inside into a hot, loud, crowded environment and stand around awkwardly in a tiny corner, listening for a mangled version of your name to be yelled.
Starbucks in 2025 isn't Starbucks of 2010. There is no 'premium brand facilities' anymore, just premium pricing.
Standing in line at McDonalds, to pick up an online order, made me think that maybe the drive thru isn't that great of an idea during rush hours. The staff needs to handle orders in a very specific sequence, to get the cars moving, meaning that they'll need to priorities drive thru orders. Wolt/DoorDash impose the same problem to an extend. I've notice that orders from in restaurant customers is frequently seems to be de-prioritized to get the drive thru line moving or to get the deliveries out.
It provides an awful experience for other customers, and the drive thru is still going to be slowed down, if someone has a weird or large order, because they frequently can't move that customer to the side, so now everyone has to wait.
I think the big problem DoorDash and the like have, is they obfuscate the capacity connection between real restaurants.
In the real world, if you drive up to a McDonalds, and there's a line around the building for drive-thru, you can make a decision. (Is it worth the long wait, or not?). In the real world, if you go to a sit-down restaurant, and they're full, they simply turn you away (often with a buzzer or a text callback or whatever, for the 'next available table') and you can make a decision. (is it worth the long wait, or not?).
DoorDash and the like, knows about (but intentionally hides) whether a restaurant can actually handle your incoming order -- they never admit if a restaurant is busy or falling behind, because then a human might use that information to decide not purchase.
So, DoorDash implies to humans that restaurants are open and ready, orders stack up indefinitely far beyond what a real-world restaurant normally would take, and real-world restaurants have to magically 1.5x to 3x their capacity out of thin air.
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It's not a systems-based issue -- no combination of "moving orders" or "separating orders" or "more apps / AI" could solve it. It's a fundamental capacity issue -- restaurants (especially drive-thru places) don't staff enough people to handle making more than a certain number of orders at a time, and shuffling that capacity from window to counter to drive-thru is just obfuscating that fact.
I observed the same thing around the time online ordering became more popular. It used to be that at a lunch spot, cashiers or phone operators could restrict the order flow a bit to keep the kitchen from getting overwhelmed with orders. DoorDash et al. have no interest in that, they only want to take as many orders as possible, as quickly as possible; they have an incentive to obfuscate the real wait time from customers.
Waiting in line to order your lunch is skin in the game. Even the sight of a long line is enough to help load balance lunch orders between restaurants. I do wonder though that if restaurants could feed back to DoorDash and limit the order flow with online-only "surge pricing", if that would help in the same way to forestall kitchen overwhelm.
I don't know how true this is, but I recall hearing many years ago that McDonalds operating model is to anticipate orders during heavy periods as opposed to making on items only on demand.
If this is true, then they don't have to worry about the order in which they process orders.
McDonald's around here have designated wait spaces with numbers. I've had them direct me out of line and an employee then brings the bag out to me when it is ready. So they do seem to have solved that problem.
Mine does that as well, but it's like a five minute walk or two minutes on a bike, and I'd feel silly walking through the drive thru.
It's not my impression that online ordering for pick-up is massively popular here. We do it, because out side rush hours we can order, walk straight over and our food will be done a few minutes after we get there.
if youve ever been inside to listen to these kinds of orders these people WILL find a way to still take 3-4 minutes to order from an AI. if an AI can get those numbers down i want copies of those transcripts so i can learn how to do this myself
In theory, you could move both the ordering and payment processing into an app, so there's only a pickup window. That'd let the no-attention-span ditherers take their 15 minutes to order without holding anyone else up. Obvious downsides - electric bill at the AI DC, barrier to new/occasional customers (app required), and the C-suite probably loves holding customers mentally "hostage" in the drive-through line.
People are "famously bad" at correctly valuing their time. I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone spend $x of their time making a business case to purchase something that costs $y, where x > y.
Thats only if you can get $x for every minute of your time. On paper, it'd be cheaper for me to hire someone to empty and fill my dishwasher, but in reality the time I spend doing the dishes isn't time I would be spending earning money.
Honestly sometimes sitting in my car away from everyone for an extra 20 minutes without actually having to interact with anyone is exactly what I am looking for. No other demands on my attention. While waiting for my over priced sugar coffee concoction I can just relax for a bit.
Some similar experiences here, and not just at Starbucks. Counting heads, I've too-often noticed that the busy-looking employees outnumber the customers, and still the service is dead slow.
Maybe that's part of the experience they're selling? - "you're a VIP, just look at the legion of minions rushing to serve you!" - but I find it a distasteful waste of time, and avoid going back.
I got trapped in a Burger King drive thru for half an hour. Car parked in front of me, cars stuck behind me, concrete barrier on the right keeping me from pulling away.
No clue what they were holding on, no apology once they got to the window, nothing. Emailing RBI got an empty response back on top of refusing to provide a refund for the order or any kind of customer recovery.
Most Wendy's without a kiosk have the cashier's chronically ignoring customers at the counter as online orders queue up from the receipt printer. I'm on a personal boycott for this shit tier service.
I find it hilarious how painful starbucks has made the process of ordering coffee. I only drink drip coffee and think we deserve a distinct queue. This phenomenon has, a little distressingly, spread to places like dunkin donuts. People love to drink their sugary milk with a splash of coffee, I guess. I don't begrudge them this but I do question paying $7 a day for what must be a significantly-increased chance of getting diabetes. Curiously, these same people often turn their nose up at equally-sugary soda. You'd think people would just learn to make this at home with a moka pot and a milk skimmer that costs less than what they paid for a single drink...
Between this and the inexplicably high cost of hot black coffee, i've just given up ordering from "coffee shops" and buy it from wendys and mcdonalds instead. The coffee is both cheaper and delivered faster and it could taste a lot worse.
My guess: if the prices reflected the marginal costs of the product inputs, amortised machine wear and ingredient storage and handling and the labour to make, black coffee would be so much cheaper that it would attract too many people away from higher-priced, higher-margin options.
Prices are based on analysis of the effect on demand rather then as a representation of the cost of the item to produce relative to other products.
McDonald's for example has cheap black coffee, because it's an incentive to get you to buy some overpriced food at the same time. Whereas a coffee place is primarily just selling the drinks.
Maybe they’re less busy there but everywhere I went in California it was faster to park and walk inside if there was anyone in line ahead of you, which was almost always the case. The problem is that you’re limited by the slowest order ahead of you but the same place usually has multiple registers inside and the people who are waiting for pickup don’t block you from ordering. (Head of line blocking in real life)
This used to be worse when everyone was paying cash and you’d be stuck behind someone counting out quarters or dropping their change.
When I worked at McDonald's in high school, the drive thru times were tracked (for manager shift bonuses) and the in store orders were not. Drive thru was always prioritized over in store if there was a possible wait on anything.
The only time management gave any priority to in store would be the case where a bus load of kids would show up before or after a school trip. That was just to get them out as quickly as possible before they can make a mess.
Starbucks allows you to order from home, and drive to the store. The ones I go to usually have my Americano waiting for me when I get there.
Starbucks also seems to allow store managers to shut down app orders if the store is too busy.
McDonald’s—-I’m a connoisseur—-allows you to order through their app, but they clearly don’t start orders until the customer speaks their order code to one of the outdoor kiosks. The only parallelism is between the customer waiting for the order and them making the order.
I like McDonald’s vanilla lattes but I hate McDonald’s Americanos.
It’s worse now because fast food isn’t fast, and you end up committed with online ordering. You need to online order or pay a big premium, then you discover the drive through line is a trip to narnia only when you arrive.
Or because their kid or dog is in the car. Or because they have difficulty walking. Or because they just want to decompress and scroll their phone or listen to the news for 10 minutes. Or they hate crowds. Or they are immune compromised and don't want to be mingling with a bunch of people around a counter. Or they have social anxiety. Or they have a cold and just don't feel like getting out of their car. Or they are expecting a call from the baby sitter. Or they are having a fight with their spouse which they don't want to export into the public.
IMO, drive throughs are great, I hate crowds and queues (yes, the car line is a queue, you know what I mean), and it is much kinder to my bad discs in my back (transitions from sitting/standing is just murder, steady state is much better). It would take a egregious queue to get me to go in in most cases. But sure, I'm lazy or just reaaally bad at math. edit: I also find it hard to hear in high volume rooms with lots of reflections (like an in-n-out), and yes, the drive through can have it's own sonic issues, but it is generally smoother for me.
Sorry, but I get tired when people take the most uncharitable read, especially when they blanket apply it to everyone.
I think your parent made a perfectly good point. Going into the store is a whole lot less pleasant than staying in my car and waiting a couple extra minutes in an environment I enjoy.
If I’m in a hurry then yes maybe I can shave a few minutes by going in, but if I’m getting fast food I probably don’t feel like interacting with people, and listening to crappy piped music while standing in an artificially lit corporate chain restaurant waiting for my order.
Interesting. I've found going inside to be much slower because the cashiers are so busy with the drive thru. I guess this probably varies from brand to brand, if not store to store.
Definitely "Dunkin" (as it's called now) can fuck right off. (And don't let this old man get started on store employees that allow a caller on the phone to take higher priority than a customer standing in front of them.)
> caller on the phone to take higher priority than a customer standing in front of them
Oh. That triggers one horrific memory.
I was buying some bread at a nice local bakery. I wanted a few items. While three or four of us were in line, someone called in. The in-store employee pulled the last loaf of one variety off the shelf to reserve it for them.
When I complained, the manager told me that that was the correct move and they supported the decision. I suggested that polling the people who were actually in the store - actual, not just potential customers - before giving away the last loaf is probably wiser.
So the ai here isn’t what’s improving anything, it’s the companies forcing themselves to upgrade.
But all of the chains around me have upgraded their drive throughs years ago and they’ve been great, outside of the recorded pre-sell they do. That’s caused me to just go inside and pick up my mobile orders.
I disagree. First, there’s a 40-year chasm between the 80s and “these days”. Next - anecdata? I have found horrible drive thru audio systems in the past decade, let alone in the last millennium.
I usually prefer to park the car, go and order to go inside.
This is a crazy claim. I still routinely get bad speakers or mics, 40 years after your claimed cutoff. Where do you live? I expect you must have really great drive throughs pretty much everywhere near you in order to make this bold of a refutation of the comment above.
Yeah, if it’s not sarcasm, it’s a very good indicator that their opinion should be ignored because no one in their right mind would say Teams is better.
If you restrict the input to ASCII, then it makes sense to talk about "string length" in this manner. But we're not talking about Unicode strings at all then.
If you do allow Unicode characters in whatever it is you're validating, then your approach is almost certainly wrong for some valid input.
Practically speaking, for maximum lengths, you generally want to limit code points or bytes, not characters. You don't want to allow some ZALGO monstrosity in a password that is 5 characters but 500 bytes.
For exact lengths, you often have a restricted character set (like for phone numbers) and can validate both characters and length with a regex. Or the length in bytes works for 0–9.
Unless you're involved in text layout, you actually usually don't wind up needing the exact length in characters of arbitrary UTF-8 text.
> I want to make sure that the password is between a given number of characters. Same with phone numbers, email addresses, etc.
> This seems to have always been known as the length of the string.
Sure. And by this definition, the string discussed in TFA (that consists of a facepalm emoji with a skin tone set) objectively has 5 characters in it, and therefore a length of 5. And it has always had 5 characters in it, since it was first possible to create such a string.
Similarly, "é" has one character in it, but "é" has two despite appearing visually identical. Furthermore, those two strings will not compare equal in any sane programming language without explicit normalization (unless HN's software has normalized them already). If you allow passwords or email addresses to contain things like this, then you have to reckon with that brute fact.
None of this is new. These things have fundamentally been true since the introduction of Unicode in 1991.
Beside of the fact that App-Developers don't have the option to "stay on iOS18 or switch to Android", that statement is equivalent to "Stop criticizing my country. If you don't like what it is doing, find yourself another country".
Developers (and users) are citizens of that ecosystem, serving other citizens and contributing to its economy. It is their right to judge and criticize directions being taken.
The owner of that ecosystem must endure and acknowledge this (especially when he continuously makes efforts to increase the difficulty to LEAVE that ecosystem), and other citizens should not take any offense from this at all.
> The owner of that ecosystem must endure and acknowledge this
Do they need to acknowledge it? Ecosystems aren't countries, they're markets, and citizenship doesn't exist here in the same sense – only participation in the ecosystem. Maybe there's some EU chicanery that makes it illegal for American companies to ship a UI that's displeasing to European tastes, but if we pretend that Apple is strictly an American company, would they need to acknowledge this at all if it didn't affect sales?
> I'm not sure we have the same understanding of "acknowledge". Apple can acknowledge criticism and still decide not to act on it.
We do, but what I'm suggesting is that Apple might exercise a third choice, which would be ignoring the criticism and pretending it doesn't exist if they don't think it will affect their sales.
That argument is moot, because it's not a third option. Apple won't release iOS 26.1 rolling back any of this. Their path is set, they will tweak forward only.
Towards developers they will apply "acknowledge and ignore" as the communication strategy, towards users they will continue to express the usual confidence to know best what he needs, because that's what their users like and that's the only thing they can do now anyway.
In a grander scheme of things, Apple needs to prepare a transition of their locked-in userbase to AR, because there is a risk that AR replaces the smartphone and their users move away from Apple then. So they have to transfer the stickyness of iOS to AR before that happens, to have a ecosystem headstart against all competitors.
The actual interest of users and developers are secondary, they need to smoothly transfer them to a new world without alienating them too much. The only way is forward.
Agreed, I think we're saying the same thing. Apple's already made up their mind on it and they're going to ship it no matter what at this point. To admit that it's not the best design for non-AR devices, whether rightly or wrongly (I personally don't mind it), would be to admit that their overall strategy is flawed.
> We’re exploring preloading File Explorer in the background to help improve File Explorer launch performance. This shouldn’t be visible to you, outside of File Explorer hopefully launching faster when you need to use it.
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