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'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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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()
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!
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.
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).
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?
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.
# 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
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.
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.
I think it's fine to have an llm write a first or second draft of something, then go through and reword most of it to be in your own voice.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
Presenting synthesized words as original thought isn't using a tool, it's laziness at best.
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.
- 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
[0] https://lunar.fyi/#xdr
[1] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/YellowDot/issues/18
[2] https://developer.apple.com/forums//thread/814798
[3] https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/819331
[4] https://lowtechguys.com/clop
macOS has made some arguably poor design choices, but it makes it hard to take someone seriously when they state the whole OS is terrible.
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?
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.
Then again I never understood the trend to remember fondly windows 98 and those kind of interfaces, maybe it's generational.
It straight up broke some interfaces too
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2026/1/4.html
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.
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()
I tested on Chrome but I assume this is true for Safari as well?
It’d be nice if someone on the Safari team added this though to match Chrome and Firefox!
Best option is probably to set dev.our-root-domain.com in /etc/hosts
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_rebinding
It makes you wonder why they were messing around in these areas at all at this point.
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).
I have setup a VM running DNS on my laptop before ...
If you want valid certs you can generate them with mkcert and add them to your system trust store.
Next question: what reason would Apple have to make a change that would interfere with developers using their operating system?
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?
Thank you for the heads up.
Wait, it does that (from 15 to 26) without user interaction?
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?
Here’s a GitHub comment showing someone on MacOS 26 with a `.test` domain, which you claim is broken: https://github.com/apple/container/issues/856#issuecomment-3... —- maybe you are configuring it incorrectly.
All Feedbacks that you file are private to your own Apple Account.
New-UnboundInterface.sh - linux/rhel-like specific
00-localinterface.conf 91-allow-docker-containers.confWhy use Apple's browser when they don't actually care about your privacy?
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.
The whole macOS thing is amateur