Archive for April 23, 2026

Thursday, April 23, 2026

What’s That “Structured” in Structured Concurrency?

Max Seelemann:

There are only three ways to create a concurrently running operation from the standard library, Task being the first. The other two are async let and TaskGroups — which happen to be the structured ones.

[…]

In my words, it’s a direct, inescapable dependency relationship. You can always start a task and forget about it – not structured. But when you do an async let, you need to await the result before the function ends (or discard it, see below). Likewise, task groups can only be created through with(Throwing)TaskGroup, which forces the caller to await their completion.

Previously:

Stolen Device Protection May Protect You From Accessing Your Own Device

Glenn Fleishman:

Note that this remains an iPhone-only feature, even though an iPad could be exploited the same way. I have to infer either that Apple has had almost no reports of exploitation via iPad passcode theft, or that they are balancing the needs of the average iPad user who is out and about with that device against the complexity of managing Stolen Device Protection.

[…]

Once enabled, you see two options: Away from Familiar Locations and Always. Familiar Locations ostensibly leans on Significant Locations, but I’ll warn you that I have, on multiple occasions, been in my home, a place I spent a significant majority of my time, and was told by Stolen Device Protection that I wasn’t in a familiar location.

Eric deRuiter:

Stolen Device Protection will require that you erase and restore your phone to be able to regain full access to it should FaceID fail to recognize you (surgery, injury, shaving a beard, broken eye glasses, etc…)

Previously:

NetNewsWire 7.0.4

Brent Simmons:

The big new changes are to iCloud syncing: there’s a new setting to not sync the content of unread articles, since that’s the biggest part of your iCloud database and what takes the longest to sync.

NetNewsWire:

We’ve added a new weekly background iCloud storage cleanup.

This happens automatically, but there’s also a status window with a Clean Up button to initiate it manually.

Your next syncs after cleaning up may take an extra long time! This is because iCloud syncs deletions, and doing a cleanup means doing a lot of deletions.

[…]

From here on sync times should be faster and iCloud storage needs should be lower.

I’ve been syncing using Feedbin, and version 7.0.2 added an important fix for that, with more to come in 7.1.

Brent Simmons:

To be clear: we didn’t do anything in NetNewsWire to support AI, LLMs, or MCP, but, since the app is scriptable, you can do all kinds of useful things with it.

Here’s the netnewswire-mcp repo on GitHub.

Greg Pierce:

I’ve been feeling like MCP is a lot like x-callback-url. Kind of a janky, pragmatic solution to a problem that optimized for opportunities and constraints available at a particular moment.

Maybe not built to last, but super useful.

Previously:

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