justin․searls․co

Everybody needs a hobby.

Maybe I’ll start posting more photos.

gj everyone

X marks the spot on this SEO.

Are Apple Vision personas… people?

This is some real snake-eating-its-own-tail shit by Apple Photos. What the hell am I supposed to click in order to not screw up its training of Aaron's face?

I hate code review less now

I've hated the culture of asynchronous code review for years, especially as the popularity of GitHub and its pull request workflow lent itself to slow, uninformed, low-empathy, bureaucratic workflows to address problems that would be better solved by higher-bandwidth collaboration between team members.

That said, as someone who's spent the last 9 months building an app by myself, I've really enjoyed having GPT 4o as my "pair". It's still too slow: I get bored and tab away to check Mail or Messages. But instead of waiting hours for feedback I'm waiting for literal seconds. There's also zero ego, politics, or posturing. And while it does hallucinate bullshit, there's far less of it than one can expect from bleary-eyed developers squinting at the GitHub web UI looking for a way to score points. And yes, I have to correct its corrections sometimes, but it almost always catches minor oversights that I (and my linter) would have missed.

TIRED: Spicy autocomplete in your IDE
WIRED: This shortcut that pipes git diff to the ChatGPT Mac app and asks it to critique the code like Justin Searls would

Give it a try. It's another reason that I, for one, welcome our LLM underlords.

Pro-tip: engrave your iPhone PIN on your AirPods case

I guarantee a non-zero number of people have put their iPhone PIN on their AirPods case.

Help me fill this out

Starting from scratch with my RSS subscriptions.

Only rules for each feed:

  1. Is interesting
  2. Is published by an individual

Anything you'd recommend? Let me have it: justin@searls.co

Hey, I know that speaker

Extremely proud of… how much my posture has apparently improved since I started speaking.

It was a real journey.

How to Reset People & Pets in iCloud Photos

If you're experiencing persistent issues caused by the People & Pets metadata in iCloud Photos, there is a hidden way to reset it across all devices associated with your account.

The most common reasons you might want to do this:

  • You accidentally merged multiple people and can't train your way out of detangling them
  • You accidentally removed people and can't get iCloud Photos to recognize them as people again
  • The People Collection in the iOS Photo Shuffle lock screen and the updated watchOS 11 Photos watch face configurators is missing someone important, and you hope that by resetting everything, your spouse or kid or whoever will start appearing (this is the issue I've had for a couple years now)

The reset function is not currently available from any settings screen, and is only triggered by selecting and removing all people and pets in a single remove operation. I only tested this on a Mac (under macOS 15.0 Sequoia), but it may also work on iPhone and iPad. Since it will trigger a full re-scan of your photo library, it made the most sense to trigger the reset on a Mac that has the full library downloaded locally.

Steps, in a nutshell:

  1. Select all the people (not the groups) in the "People & Pets" tab of the Photos app (you can do this by selecting one and pressing Command-A or by clicking the first and then shift-clicking the last)
  2. Press the delete key
  3. If absolutely every item is selected a special dialog will appear prompting you to "Reset People & Pets Album". Click it, if you dare
  4. Don't touch anything. Over the next several days while Photos is "finding people", anyone you name or any people you attempt to merge may (will?) disappear entirely

Subsequently, an indeterminate progress bar was displayed for five minutes or so in my case (I have about 160,000 photos and 50,000 videos). Following that, you should see the "Finding People…" status view appear on the People & Pets tab of each of your devices.

Hopefully this fixes whatever ails you! 💜

New User of the Month

Why should you come to my Rails World talk about building an app? Look no further than my latest credential. Hotwire user of THE WHOLE MONTH.*

*Apparently there are actually two of us.

TFW your product owner slash wife starts reading your commit messages

Well, would you look at that

Looks like I'm partly responsible for Rails 7.2's only…

😎

Breaking Change 🫳🎤

Spot the N+1

In general, it's great that you can call array and enumerable methods on relations in Active Record, but the way that's implemented (cleverly querying on the relation instead of considering if to_a and doing the operation in memory would be more performant) is maddening at times.

Something must be done about the skyrocketing cost of college

Life comes at you fast

Quintessential Oils

Sure, you've tried essential oils, but once you go quintessential you won't go back.

IYKYK

AAAAAwesome company name

I've got nothing but respect for this rando Amazon vendor's alpha-sort-hacking game.

Outed

I hate when the algorithm nails me.

Putting your phone away to focus? Fixed that for you

If you've ever felt distracted and thrown your phone in your bag so you can focus on your Mac, you're going to need a new strategy to achieve self control thanks to macOS Sequoia's new iPhone Mirroring feature.

The #1 app on iPad is a calculator

Saving this for posterity as it seems likely Apple is 90 minutes away from announcing a first-party Calculator app for iPad. Only took 14 years.

If you're the DOJ, this is definitely a sign that they're abusing their market position and stifling competition!

If you're anyone else, you're amazed that Apple let them use an icon so evocative of their own Calculator app on iPhone.