Papercuts like this are why I moved away from macOS.
I will say, I don't love the use of LLMs to write these bug reports. It's probably fine if reviewed, but at least review for things like "worked on macOS 25", which obviously didn't exist. If that wasn't caught, how sure are you that the rest of the report is accurate? We all want the bugs fixed, but people are going to start throwing out the obviously LLM written reports rather than have to validate each claim, since the author probably didn't.
Its my strong belief that using AI in any capacity which does not upfront state "the following content was generated by artificial intelligence" is never acceptable. In most situations, allowing an AI to wield your name gives off the scent of "My time is more valuable than yours, so I've automated writing to you." It is quite disgraceful. If your use-case would be materially harmed by an upfront disclosure of AI generated content, then you need to take a good, hard think on what that means for what you're doing (then again, maybe you're not interested in thinking anymore and that's how you got to this point in your life).
It’s good-faith arbitrage. Until everyone automatically suspects everything to be LLM generated and there is zero trust, anyone doing this is eroding the good faith that lets them get away with it in the first place.
I am genuinely curious if you are trolling, or putting that forward as a genuine argument?
Trivially, it's the difference between medium, and message/content.
On one axis, whether message is spoken, written via pen or typewriter or word processor, sent electronically, faxed,mailed, etc - it is fundamentally a communication from one human being to another, even if medium / mechanics differ.
The other axis is actual content - genuine human interaction, intent, message and connection, vs a result of a prompt.
> Same thing as using a word processor and printer rather than handwriting a note. Inexcusable.
There is no confusion, when in receipt of something written using a word processor, that it was so written, and people are free to respond accordingly (though, of course, most of us don't care). There is no such certainty with products generated by AI, so it is appropriate responsibly to disclose it.
I'm used to papercuts on every OS, but at least with a Linux box I can roll it back. Usually it's as easy as picking the previous boot menu entry (with NixOS, the whole system rolls back that way). I find macOS acceptable enough for my laptop, but I'm doing most of my real work in Linux containers anyway.
> Papercuts like this are why I moved away from macOS.
It's been this way for decades. Microsoft was known for preserving backwards compatibility, while Apple was known for being willing to break stuff.
The differences aren't that extreme in reality: Microsoft breaks stuff more than it used to, while Apple has become comparatively more conservative than once upon a time.
Yes, for the time being the final report should probably come from us (but endless opportunity along the way to clarify thinking and understand industry standard terms).
Using LLMs for any kind of writing is unethical, with the narrow exception of translation. If you didn't take the time to compose your words thoughtfully then you aren't owed the time to read them.
at this point I really think its better to read broken english than have to read some clanker slop. it immediately makes me want to just ignore whatever text i'm reading, its just a waste of time
I do wonder, we had pretty good (by some measure of good) machine translations before LLMs. Even better, the artifacts in the old models were easily recognized as machine translation errors, and what was better, the mistranslation artifacts broke spectacularly, sometimes you could even see the source in the translation and your brain could guess the intended meaning through the error.
With LLMs this is less clear, you don’t get the old school artifacts, instead you get hallucinations, and very subtle errors that completely alter the meaning while leaving the sentence intact enough that your reader might not know this is a machine translation error.
and not just artifacts/hallucinations, the worst thing about is the fact that its basically "perfect" English, perfect formatting, which makes it just look like grey slop, since it all sounds the same and its hard to distinguish between the slop articles/comments/PRs/whatever.
and it will also "clean up" the text to the point where important nuances and tangents get removed/transformed into some perfect literature where it loses its meaning and/or significance
The LLM presents a perverse incentive here - It is used for perceived efficiency gains, most of which would be consumed by the act of rewriting and redrafting. The alienness of the thoughts in the document is also non-condusive to this; Reading a long document about something you think you know but did not write is exhausting and mentally painful - This is why code review has such relatively poor results.
Quite frankly, while having an LLM draft and rewriting it would be okay, I do not believe it is reasonable to expect that to ever happen. It will be either like high school paper plagarism (Just change around some of the sentences and rephrase it bro), or it will simply not even get that much. It is unreasonable with what we know about human psychology to expect that "Human-Rewrites of LLM drafts", at the level that the human contributes something, are maintainable and scalable; Most people psychologically can't put in that effort.
>The LLM presents a perverse incentive here - It is used for perceived efficiency gains, most of which would be consumed by the act of rewriting and redrafting.
It might give efficiency gains for the writer, but the reader has to read the slop and try to guess at what it was intending to communicate and weed out "hallucinations". That's a big loss of efficiency for the reader.
I don't think that's fine, I think that's an example of why using LLMs to write is unethical and creates no value.
The purpose of written language is to express your thoughts or ideas to others. If you're synthesizing text and then refining it you're not engaging in that practice.
As someone who has dealt with projects with AI-generated documentation... I can't really say I agree. Good documentation is terse, efficiently communicating the essential details. AI output is soooooooo damn verbose. What should've been a paragraph becomes a giant markdown file. I like reading human-written documentation, but AI-slop documentation is so tedious I just bounce right off.
Plus, when someone wrote the documentation, I can ask the author about details and they'll probably know since they had enough domain expertise and knowledge of the code to explain anything that might be missing. I can't trust you to know anything about the code you had an AI generate and then had an AI write documentation for.
Then there's the accuracy issue. Any documentation can always be inaccurate and it can obviously get outdated with time, but at least with human-authored documentation, I can be confident that the content at some point matched a person's best understanding of the topic. With AI, no understanding is involved; it's just probabilistically generated text, we've all hopefully seen LLMs generate plausible-sounding but completely wrong text enough to somewhat doubt their output.
This immediately invalidates a software or technical project for me. The value of documentation isn't the output alone, but the act of documenting it by a person or people that understand it.
I have done a lot of technical writing in my career, and documenting things is exactly where you run into the worst design problems before they go live.
> If you didn't take the time to compose your words thoughtfully then you aren't owed the time to read them.
Apply this argument to code, to art, to law, to medicine.
It fails spectacularly.
Blaming the tool for the failure of the person is how you get outrageous arguments that photography cant be art, that use of photoshop makes it not art...
Do you blame the hammer or the nail gun when the house falls down, or is it the fault of the person who built it?
If you dont know what you're doing, it isnt the tools fault.
I disagree with the downvotes, but let me put it differently: if you don’t understand, have reviewed and be ready to own all of LLM output (the thoughtful part), then you aren’t owned the time to read them. If you didn’t try to reign in the verbose slop that’s the default for LLMs, I don’t want to read it.
Maybe the poster is running a local LLM.. you’d think that a SOTA model would have surmised that an overnight MacOS upgrade can only be a minor version.
Agreed, which is why I didn't bother reading this comment before downvoting it. If you think that you were owed some other behavior from me despite not paying me for it, feel free to elaborate; for example, you could acknowledge that there exists an implicit social contract when it comes to basic human communication.
Also elitist attitudes towards people for whom English isn’t a native language, elitist attitudes towards people with dyslexia and other conditions that make writing difficult, and elitist attitudes towards people with lower education levels.
One problem I see with the broader use of LLMs these days is the death of literacy.
For example, you chose to read my response and attack the vocabulary as if that was the point I was trying to make. This is a misunderstanding. I am purposefully reusing the word choice of the comment I'm replying to.
I was trying to very concisely point out that if an LLM is generating your writing it is not your words or your thoughts that you're trying to communicate.
macOS 26 has to be the most breaking version so far, its problems and intended breaking changes making my app dev life so hard this year. Just to name a few:
- Reference Presets no longer allow setting arbitrary SDR nits, making it impossible to natively unlock 1600nits of brightness on MacBook Pros or 2000nits on Studio Display XDR which breaks my Lunar app [0] (this seems to be intended, no idea what hurt Apple that they had to block this under SIP)
- The orange microphone dot indicator and its very colored friends can no longer have their brightness changed for dimming them, which made my YellowDot app useless [1] (I guess this is for privacy, I still think this could have a setting guarded under TouchID like Accessibility Permissions works)
- Floating non-titled windows don't accept mouse events (thankfully this got fixed) [2]
- Gamma table changes don't work on MacBook Neo and M5 Pro/Max which breaks Sub-zero Dimming and dimming external monitors that don't support DDC (thankfully, Apple is looking into it) [3]
- The resizing area thing on very rounded windows which drives everyone nuts, I had to add custom resize handlers to some of my windows
- The `com.apple.SwiftUI.Drag-` temporary file paths that get generated for any file that gets dragged from a drag&drop handler which makes it impossible to get to the original file when dragging images from Clop [4] or file shelf apps like Yoink, Dropover etc.
- NSImage returning different pixel count for .size than what the image actually has, breaking workflows that depended on that to determine the image DPI
As a hobbyist music producer with an interface always connected, that microphone indicator is so annoying and unnecessary. I can't believe it can't just be disabled outright. I like macOS but it's too opinionated and some of those opinions SUCK.
> The orange microphone dot indicator and its very colored friends can no longer have their brightness changed for dimming them, which made my YellowDot app useless [1] (I guess this is for privacy
It absolutely is for privacy, to stop malware or trojan programs from obscuring their accessing the camera or microphone.
> Reference Presets no longer allow setting arbitrary SDR nits, making it impossible to natively unlock 1600nits of brightness on MacBook Pros or 2000nits on Studio Display XDR which breaks my Lunar app [0] (this seems to be intended, no idea what hurt Apple that they had to block this under SIP)
OLED displays are widely expected this year. Not wanting to have to deal with "my battery life is an hour and a half instead of 10, what's going on!? Replace my battery!" nonsense is probably the remainder.
Afaik ".internal" isn't reserved/defined anywhere, it's just a convention some people/devices use, and doesn't have anything to do with the root cause here (a custom resolve.conf or whatever it is called in macos changing after an update), no?
It's not quite the same, but I've moved to using *.localhost for all my local web dev work. All modern browsers will resolve *.localhost to 127.0.0.1 internally. No need to setup any DNS resolvers or edit your hosts file.
But that only really helps you when you're dealing with websites in a browser, and when you want the address to resolve back to your local machine. So it wont help you with other programs like python/wget/etc or any calls you make to getaddrinfo()
The best part is that *.*.localhost is also supported, so you can finally just replace *.com for your prod domains with *.localhost.
ArchiveBox now uses this feature by default in the latest version to finally offer unique per-snapshot domain isolation, so we can safely replay archived JS without risking compromise of your whole archive.
Such an awesome feature, the barrier to do this used to be prohibitively high but now it "just works".
Yeah I've been doing this as well. I know it's a minor nit, but I wish that TLD was shorter. I've used *.local in the past but that has bitten me too many times.
Just tried it on my Mac and sadly it doesn’t seem like it. I’m still on Sequoia, so possibly it does it on Tahoe, but probably unlikely. That’s a shame.
It’d be nice if someone on the Safari team added this though to match Chrome and Firefox!
Haven't had an issue yet, with a team scattered across US, Canada and UK. I'm sure it's possible - but so far we've been using this for about 3 years with no hiccups.
Still wishing for the day apple is split into the hardware and the software company. I want their silicon, but I will never use their (arguably terrible) operating system. If I can't run my own kernel and kernel modules then it's a device that I don't own. Firmware is alright in some cases, but my laptop next to me is running core boot just to prove a point.
Maybe Apple Hardware would write Linux drivers to sell their hardware for servers. Intel contributes to Linux kernel. AMD contributes to Linux kernel. Nvidia contributes to Linux kernel. A lot of hardware manufacturers support Linux to some extent. It's no longer reverse-engineered wild west.
Not on new silicon and asahi linux is still pretty damn far from being able to use it seriously. I do appreciate the effort, but I am just saying that it would be a lot better if you know, apple sold the hardware so vendors could build laptops with apple silicon.
It could be just me, but every time I tried to do something I sat thinking that I am not the target audience for this thing. I don't like the UI, I hate not being able to talk to the hardware the way I can on linux (uart took me way too long to get working), I am angry that I am not able to run kvm, I hate not being able to replace the desktop and fix bugs myself. That's what makes it terrible for me.
MacOS IMHO is no longer a viable OS for people like us(who know what this website even is). MacOS26 along with Windows11 are enshittifying and in some ways it's glorious to see. I do feel bad for non-IT people though, Linux is daunting to them...I get it.
That's desktop market share. I'm sure the comment you're replying to means overall usage including mobile and server, where Linux is far and away the leader.
It’s pretty bad. IPC doesn’t work reliably any more. The window manager is unusable. Spotlight misses results and also pegs the cpu, killing battery.
Finder is bad enough on its own, but the 1:N mapping from logical directories to filesystem directories (like photos, home, applications, etc) makes it essentially unusable without spotlight.
Notifications are flaky as hell (missing phone calls and messages from contacts, but displaying explicitly blocked spam sms).
Copy paste between devices has never worked right.
Which part of the OS is not terrible in your experience?
Edit: also, compatibility with video games (even ones released for macos) is abysmal. It’s much worse than Linux’s ability to run the Windows version of MacOS native releases!
I run a setup like that on my (outdated) Yosemite machine to provide multiple private TLDs for local deployment/development needs.
I set that up in like 2014? Even back then it was known already that the quick /etc/resolver way was the deprecated way to do things. So I guess they finally killed that feature off?
The proper (more awkward) way is to use scutil directly (which then stores the settings in some binary plist somewhere, I assume).
Maybe try this and see if it still works afterwards?
scutil is only half the story, because some macOS lookups still go through mDNSResponder in ways that ignore or override that config, which leaves you debugging random misses and binary plist junk. At this point, unbound or dnsmasq is simpler.
Bit off-topic. I mostly use Linux and I'm of the opinion that it's miles better than Windows, but I don't fully understand why people say MacOS looks bad?
Ignoring the current Tahoe mess, MacOS felt relatively polished. I'm purely talking about UX here, as the OS is evidently buggy. The most popular Gnome themes are a re-impl of MacOS, so I can't be the only one.
Yeah Tahoe has been mostly fine. I have all the liquid glass stuff turned off (via reduced transparency). The grab handles for window corner is annoying, but it doesn't mean the rest of the OS is not good.
There's bugs in the OS, like pretty much every OS, but I rarely interact with them should they manifest.
I don't know. I generally like the UX. The way full screen windows work is a bit unique but I ended up liking it once getting used to it and the related shortcuts. I don't like the lack of window tiling, though.
That said, I still prefer Linux. I think my biggest papercut there has been suspend/power management being broken in some way or another on both laptop and desktop for the last 8 years.
> Then again I never understood the trend to remember fondly windows 98 and those kind of interfaces, maybe it's generational.
I may have a generational bias (I am almost 49), but I think the fondness is due to lack of UI surprise. A button was a button, a menu was a menu with clear shortcuts, etc. There were no mystery scrollbars that required specific interactions to appear or expand. Don't get me wrong, I'm a happy-ish MacOS user and love screen size, clear fonts, etc that we get in the modern world, but I think we've all had moments of frustration when we had to go on a scavenger hunt in an app and cursed those who didn't leave well enough alone.
There's very valid reasons to have issues with Tahoe's changes. The dock being liquid glass is fine. But curving the windows to look like iPad apps, and not even adjusting the grab target appropriately for resizing the window is bad. Getting rid of the title bar so it's not clear where you can grab a window is bad. Apple Music hiding the volume slider behind another click is bad.
I'm glad that it's working well for you, but from the moment some users with M-series SoCs report laggy animations, something somewhere has to be wrong.
It's incredibly bloated. I don't want AI engine in my OS. I don't want Spotlight in my OS. I don't want my OS to load CPU for 10 minutes after boot for who knows what. I don't want my OS to ship with Chess app and lots of other irrelevant software. I don't want my OS to ship with Music app and bother me with subscription offers. I don't want my OS to ship with iCloud app.
They also do strange choices regarding shipped software. For example they ship ancient bash 3, apparently because they hate GPLv3 or something like that. I like GPLv3 and this choice makes macos user-hostile.
I never knew about this feature but it's so cool and I wish I knew it earlier. Sadly it seems features like these are being left to rot in MacOS because it's not what the average normie uses.
A couple iOS versions ago, Apple broke self-signed certificates... crippling mobile development by preventing the use of HTTPS to communicate with a local server.
It makes you wonder why they were messing around in these areas at all at this point.
*.example-private point is to have multiple machines using private addresses such as web.example-private in A 192.168.0.100 and db1.example-private in A 192.168.0.101.
If you just want to resolve 127.0.0.1 then you just resolve hostname "localhost" or use 127.0.0.1 directly.
Personally i don't bother configuring custom private dns zones, instead i use reserved MDNS *.local that autoconfigure everything using machine name (hostname) and DHCP address: somehostname.local in A <dhcp assigned ip>.
> The only reliable workaround is to add entries manually to /etc/hosts, which bypasses mDNSResponder entirely. This is impractical for dynamic use cases (e.g. Docker container DNS, where host entries change frequently) and requires sudo for every change.
I suppose I'm lazy - I've always used /etc/hosts, but then again, I've never had use cases like those mentioned in the linked gist.
I am not familiar with dnsmasq at all (is this machine-local?), but absolutely love my PiHole hardware — you can even create rules which intercept hard-coded-IP DNS request and/or httpsDNS. You can also hard-code/intercept .TLD to local service IPs.
Programs like LittleSnitch never really seem like "enough" for me, because the computer has to boot before DNS filtering comes online. It also has the design error (IMHO) of pre-resolving IP addresses before clicking Accept/Deny(all).
A great blockrule for your personal firewalls would be to ban (at top level) icloud.com, apple.com, &c; system updates can then be performed manually using guides like <http://www.mrmacintosh.com>. Of course: this breaks everything (in exactly the way I prefer to compute).
It is not too difficult to allow your PiHole to serve you globally (but does requiring opening some ports in your firewall == additional security risk).
There is a simple checkbox within the DNS's web interface to `Allow WAN Requests`. You'd then only run into issues of accessing your local IP addresses if those hosts aren't configured correctly within your network rulesets.
----
I am a user, not an expert; by trade, I am a blue collar electrician. I know very little about internet topology except how to use simple open-source hardware. Perhaps what you said makes sense (e.g. that you cannot use outside your network, some service(s)).
Yeah that can work, though at that point I start to consider just exposing my "internal" DNS to the world at large - who cares if secret_service.mydomain.net can be seen by everyone to resolve to 192.168.88.4?
I had to abandon Apple MacOS container because it has so many issues with networking and DNS. I'm looking forward to try it again if they can get it fixed.
Has anyone found a working workaround yet? I use dnsmasq for .local dev routing and held off updating after seeing this but curious if there is a viable path forward short of waiting for Apple to patch it.
I don't understand your question since my question was honestly posed.
What might lead Apple to make a change that would reduce the audience of their devices. I don't develop on macOS but I know developers who do. Did they just make a mistake and they're gonna fix it?
I doubt it was an intentional change. A lot of bugs result from, "hmm, didn't think about that use case. Ooops." There's just the question of how long it'll be before they ship a fix. It seems like there ought to be an automated test for something like this, but Apple seems to be shedding QA as fast as Microsoft is.
(And apologies if it seemed that I was insinuating ill intent on your part.)
There's a game I play (Old School Runescape) that does network ticks every .6s. Mac does some sort of aggressive optimization on the network hardware/software, so network this infrequent doesn't keep the layers "hot", and you end up getting delayed ticks regularly, meaning you learn what should be happening in the game .2-.5s late. This optimization for (I assume) battery life makes the software not work as intended.
Playing anything that streams, like video, or triggering TCP connections (e.g. curl) at a more frequent clip while the game is running fixes the problem.
No way other than hacks that I've found to fix it, and I have no idea how you could report this to the right team at Apple to get it actually fixed.
Very interesting. I play RS3 and made a helper tool[0] for tracking ticks. I noticed increased jitter on my MBair (~50-150ms) compared to Windows, but I chalked it up to the air being on a wifi connection. I wonder if your explanation's the real reason.
# should be placed in /etc/unbound/conf.d
# bind to a specified IP address, allow access
server:
interface: 10.53.0.1
interface: fd53:fd53:fd53::1
access-control: 10.53.0.1/32 allow
access-control: fd53:fd53:fd53::1/128 allow
91-allow-docker-containers.conf
# allow queries from the Docker "bridge"
server:
access-control: 172.18.0.1/16 allow
Again? This happened like 6 or 7 years ago. I had so many issues with macOS in the few years I was forced to use a MacBook that I refused to use it. Not surprised to see this stuff still happening.
No, it does not. It’ll bug the shit out of you to upgrade, but it won’t automatically do a major version upgrade. By default it will automatically do minor version upgrades (that can be turned off).
That’s what makes the LLM bug report make no sense in light of OP’s report here. Bug says it’s a regression from 25.x (which doesn’t exist), so maybe they mean 15.x? But OP says they “woke up” and it was upgraded and broken, but macOS doesn’t major version upgrades w/o user action. So which is it?
Apple container CLI configures internal domains (`container system dns`) by adding an internal resolver and it worked for me when I specified an actual domain previously handled by external DNS and it showed up as a custom resolver.
Thanks for sharing your report, it's frustrating to see things like this break in minor patch updates. Small tip for GitHub Gist: set the file format to markdown (give it a .md extension) so that the markdown will be rendered and won't require horizontal scrolling :)
The report says it broke when updating from macOS 15 to 26, so not a minor patch update. I'm a bit surprised no one noticed this earlier though, since 26 has been out since September and in beta since June.
It also seemingly broke removing Safari cookies on a per website basis, something I often used to stop Google's scummy tracking across all their services if you just want to sign into YouTube.
Ah great another reason to add to the many reasons not to use this OS. Semi serious question, is Apple looking to dump its existing customer base for a new, perhaps consumer not pro-sumer one?
Wait... someone is under the impression that Apple was ever good to its customers?
I thought we all just dealt with the overpriced hardware, the prisons, the control, that they are a US company that gives away data to the government(PRISM), has weak security(Pegasus), lies about hardware issues(butterfly keyboard and holding your phone wrong), deceptive marketing...
All so we can compile iOS apps.
If you arent compiling iOS apps... Do you not know about Fedora? Ofc Windows sucks, but we have Fedora.
If you have ScreenTime turned on. Port :8080 is occupied and your ubuntu apt-get in a docker build gets hash mismatch because they obviously modified packets. Let alone I am having another issue of unable to delete a private key in Keychain Access.