macOS Catalina 10.15 Beta

There was an article in Wired maybe 15 years ago about how people’s google queries (randomly selected) are displayed in real time on giant screens all around the Google offices so engineers were constantly reminded what kinds of queries they were dealing with. While the reporter was there, the query “how do i deal with a friend talking about suicide” appeared in the wall and the interviewee said “wait second, i want to make sure they got good results”.

The worst thing about this phenomenon isn’t invasion of privacy (the article in fact points out the data is “pseudonymised”) but the horribleness of the work (which is hinted at). At least Apple isn’t a social media platform using minimum wage workers in horrible places to decide whether posts are offensive.
 
Meanwhile I read that Apple stopped this process. No human watching anymore. Point to them.

Facebook, youtube et al. have tons of horrible content that gets uploaded and is controlled through those minimum wagers on the Philipines. They not only don't get much money, there is no psychological help even if this work is traumatizing as hell. After a few months they have to quit, they're burned out, damaged for life. They don't get any further compensation or whatever. They are treated like garbage (they are not the only ones but that would be another story). There are so many reasons why one should avoid (most of) social media (and don't think they have a better opinion of their users).

I'm still not happy with Apple. Their way to avoid taxes, the horrible conditions for the workers for example in China etc., etc. It's all about money. But, sad as it is, with the exception of fair trade phones, they are the lesser evil. I have to agree there with podperson (if I wouldn't need computers ...).
 
My own experiences with Catalina are quiet mixed so far. Although I support the deprecation of 32bit apps I was surprised how many of my apps were still 32bit. So Catalina might become e a pretty pricey OS update for me since I now have to buy various Upgrades. Since many will have similar problems I pretty sure that Mojave will become the next Snow Leopard. An OS with extreme popularity.

That the iPhone and iPads are now managed via the Finder was more than overdue. I never understand why they integrated that functionality in iTunes.

What really hurts is the removal of the dashboard. I used it heavily and there is no adequate replacement for it. I don't get it why they removed it.

That notarising an app is now mandatory came a little bit surprisingly. But as long as apps can have full file system access in the hardened environment I don't want to complain too much. Still way better than sandboxing.

Notarising an app itself isn't too difficult. But shipping an app in an DMG file is quite annoying since also the dmg file has to be notarised. So far an .dmg file can only be notarised via command line. So it adds an extra layer of manual work for every release.

Bye
Martin
 
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