Been listening to No Agenda since episode 1. Cranky Geeks and Silicon Spin before that. And the occasional appearance on Computer Chronicles long ago. I always loved your passion for technology and your take on the world. You will surely be missed.
Unfortunately, the 14 layers of management are also responsible for deciding how the 14 layers will get cut. It's likely that all or most all of the middle management will survive but the ICs doing the real work will be the ones that take the hit.
I saw the same thing happen at Amazon. They claimed to be reducing layers of management in 2024/25, yet all that happened was a shuffling of the boxes on the org chart a bit and cuts to the ICs. Managers that had too many reports were forced to give some up for managers with too few, but most managers stayed in place.
Sometimes you need capacity and you have to choose where the capacity is not where you would like it to be. Unfortunately, the days of cloud bursting, and thinking of the cloud as an unlimited resource where you can spin up and spin down machines at will is vanishing. Power availability and supply chain lead times combined with unprecedented demand are the reason for this. That's why you see all the hyperscalers recently reporting on their "backlog" in their earnings reports.
The needless processes / bloat still burn electricity though. I'd have to guess that given the millions of installed macOS machines it's a non-trivial amount of wasted electricity. Long gone are the days of ruthlessly optimizing software for the limited hardware.
Apple has done more than anyone to make its hardware more energy-efficient and its software too. It even warns you about which apps are using the most power.
macOS is far from perfect, but when the background services are working properly, I don't see any evidence that they're any significant driver of energy usage.
On the other hand, when they're buggy and suddenly start consuming 100% CPU all the time for no reason...
Indeed, these processes are not all sitting there doing nothing.
Two processes in particular have been this exact sort of problem for me: mds_stores and mediaanalysisd. On three separate Macs (all Apple Silicon), I've observed the case heating up whenever the computer is plugged in but not actively being used. Assuming Activity Monitor is more or less accurate, the culprit seems to be those two, who always have massive amounts of accumulated CPU time, but never seem to actually be using CPU when watched. I suspect, given what they supposedly do, that they're also needlessly exhausting SSD write cycles, but that's harder to analyze/prove. Naturally, they are also in the untouchable area of the file system. Completely disabling Spotlight, which you can do without disabling SIP, seems to always fix this problem, albeit at the cost of seriously decreased usability. I've also had mixed results with just limiting the categories of Spotlight indexing in System Settings.
Yeah, that's not supposed to be happening. Yet it does. For me it's fseventsd that goes crazy sometimes. These processes are all meant to be lightweight, but they're just buggy and end up in bizarre loops. Once my Mac crashed because it was endlessly downloading the same Aerial screen saver videos in a temp directory until it ran out of space.
Such sad news. As a kid growing up in RI I used to love watching Computer Chronicles on our local PBS station each weekend. Stuart and Gary were the best. RIP to a legend
That's a great point. Sometimes we look for architecture or technology solutions for a problem that could be easily solved at the sales level by negotiating a PPA (Private Pricing Addendum) with AWS.
I can quickly see something like this turning in an AI arms race between insurance and the provider with each auto-approving/denying/disputing the other. All the while locking out smaller players because they can't afford the 3rd party disputotron.
I already have a solution to the downcoding practices of these health insurance carriers.
I recently created an application called EMpowerAI that uses AI to analyze clinical notes and assign appropriate billing codes based on medical complexity or documented time. It also can enhance the Assessment/Plan to justify higher billing codes if the note content supports it.
As a Cardiac Electrophysiologist, I optimized the application for cardiology and EP, though it is scalable to other specialties. I am looking for beta testers and would appreciate any feedback. Here is a link to the app:
You would have to leverage the law (if you have one) that involves the state resolving the dispute because otherwise the automated disputes would probably be dropped on the floor. The insurance company has the leverage because they're actually in possession of the money and the contract that gives them stupidly high discretion on how much to pay out.
Doing nothing but flipping the burden, doctors get paid whatever they invoice and insurance have to claw it back would make a lot of this stonewalling bullshit go away. But with an openly corrupt government paid by insurance it'll never happen.
Been listening to No Agenda since episode 1. Cranky Geeks and Silicon Spin before that. And the occasional appearance on Computer Chronicles long ago. I always loved your passion for technology and your take on the world. You will surely be missed.
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