iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 05/10/2026

Truly the most important feature of the latest VSCode update. I guess I can be happy they’re basically showing that VSCode is “done”, and all they can think of now is ensuring blind people also get annoyed by silly visual fanfares?

Accessibility
Hear when confetti appears
The new Confetti accessibility signal provides the same celebratory feedback when you cannot see the animation. The joyful sound plays when chat thumbs-up confetti appears and when you successfully mark a session as done in the Agents window.

A clip shows the user clicking the checkmark icon, causing confetti to appear out of it.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 19/09/2026

Every time some process goes crazy and leaks 10GB+ memory, Activity Monitor gives up and says idk man, I sold your memory to Sam Altman

Activity Monitor’s memory graph shows medium memory pressure (orange). Total physical memory, memory used, cached files, etc are 0 bytes. Swap usage is 15.68GB.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 30/08/2026

Who needs accessibility or editor improvements anyway? 🤷‍♀️

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 03/08/2026

Also, people are noticing that StatCounter for some reason has decided “OS X” and “macOS” are separate. OS X has 2.65x more users than macOS. Why? Who knows, considering this is a very common case that should be handled by them. They’re supposed to be the […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

StatCounter GlobalStats of Desktop Operating System Market Share in United States Of America - July 2026

Windows: 55.95%
OS X: 21.81%
Linux: 11.92%
macOS: 8.24%
Chrome OS: 2.08%
OpenBSD: 0%

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 03/08/2026

I guess something I’ve wanted on macOS for a very long time now finally exists, but it’s entirely written by AI. I keep wanting to build an Activity Monitor replacement with the level of information Process Explorer provides on Windows, but haven’t found the […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

An app called Sysinternals Process Explorer, running on macOS. The main window looks like as straight a port from the Windows app as possible, including a Windows-style toolbar and status bar.
A property sheet window is open for one of the processes, where the title bar amusingly uses a thousands separator on the pid (39,396). It only vaguely looks like the Windows app. It has a strange custom tab bar.
The System Information window is the least like the Windows app, and shows a decent summary view of general system info, storage usage, and graphs for CPU, RAM, swap, disk I/O, network, and GPU usage.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2026

Some fun (?) facts I learned from this event. The architecture of our ActiveX control was heavily inspired by Microsoft’s official Windows Update ActiveX control. They weren’t using their own feature, IObjectSafety, that solves the problem of choosing whether […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

Internet Explorer 6 SP1 displaying a local file named test.html. The page is titled “Legacy Update 1.13.2 IObjectSafety Demo” and demonstrates that an Information Bar appears because the current page is not safe for scripting.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 03/07/2026

In response to recent industry changes, we’re making the entire 576 KB Legacy Update program available as freeware on a floppy disk. Just send $1 to: Homer Simpson, Jr. Vice President Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net 742 Evergreen Tce Springfield, USA Offer void in Nebraska.

Windows XP floppy disk icon overlaid on a stack of colored floppies on a desk.

Image credits:
Windows XP High Resolution Icon Pack by marchmountain https://www.deviantart.com/marchmountain/art/916042853
“Pile of Old Disks” by Jason Coleman https://www.flickr.com/photos/jason_coleman/3614327264/

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 15/06/2026

Bonus: I couldn’t trim the video properly because… turns out…

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 15/06/2026

So you can enable a wacky debugging mode for Liquid Glass on macOS Golden Gate: `defaults write com.apple.SwiftUI flexiGlassTuningEnabled -bool yes` #apple #macos

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 09/06/2026

Golden Gate happens to be a codename Apple already used internally for macOS Big Sur. For a brief moment, when the name was announced in the keynote but before the Apple website went live, The Apple Wiki was the top search result for macOS Golden Gate […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

Screenshot of Google Search Console, filtered to show queries in the past 24 hours containing “golden”. Between 3 and 4 AM Sydney time (10 - 11 AM PST), searches spike from zero to 2,673 impressions and 117 clicks. The average position of the result goes down from 1st to 2.7th, and has jumped around from there.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 31/05/2026

I can at least appreciate that they don’t gaslight with “We value your privacy” immediately before launching into “We and our 142 partners store…”. Do we really need to make it 80% of the screen height though?

The Verge website with a teal cookie banner visible from the bottom of the page. Or as they call it, a “Privacy Notice”. It starts with “We and our 142 partners store and access personal data, like browsing data or unique identifiers, on your device” and goes on for long enough to make the page almost fully invisible.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 08/05/2026

Did people really not notice Chrome has been downloading a 4 GB+ model for the past 10 months? #ai

Discord message sent by me on 2025-07-31:

[censored] Chrome seems to be silently downloading a 4.4GB model recently…

Screenshot of Get Info for OptGuideOnDeviceModel, 4.39 GB in ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome, created 2025-07-10

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 01/05/2026

What are you on about? I’m just trying to write a damn document, go away #microsoft

“What’s New in Word” dialog

Updating Content for Document Segments from Various Grounding Sources While Preserving Formatting

Update the information in a section of my document based on an external document so that I don't have to copy and paste that data manually.

On top of this dialog is the App Store “Enjoying Microsoft Word?” rating prompt.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 25/04/2026

529.2k blocked requests in the past 24 hours, and I made a few more rules against inauthentic traffic patterns so that’s only going up. The number goes up every time I check it. Just hurts to think of all the electricity being wasted on scraping half a million Cloudflare captcha pages.

Cloudflare security actions graph spanning the past 24 hours before this post:
Total: 529.2k
Interactive challenge: 334.92k
Managed challenge: 164.29k
Block: 29.87k
Interactive challenge solved (human visitors): 70
Managed challenge solved (human visitors): 58

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 16/04/2026

I know RAM is worth a lot right now but did you really need to desolder it off my SoC?

Activity Monitor shows 0 bytes for every value in the breakdown of memory usage, other than swap, which is 7.00 GB.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 11/04/2026

Still can’t believe that to delete an accidental screenshot, you don’t press the ❎, you press the ✅

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 08/04/2026

Found a CLI tool that uses the same model (I hope). With some scripting that means I can actually make use of my hardware: github.com/sveinbjornt/hear

12 instances of localspeechrecognition are using all my spare CPU cycles

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 03/04/2026

Making my contribution to Apple’s 50th anniversary: One of the things that got me so interested in the inner workings of iOS is the Debug podcast. Guy English and Rene Ritchie interviewed former engineers about everything from shipping System 7, to OS X, Intel […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

The album art, a spray can with DEBUG spread across it, on teal background

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 30/03/2026

It never made sense to me that the Mac Pro “had” to change away from this general design. A well-designed computer can be respected as art, but its primary purpose is still to be a computer. An all-in-one box that can be thrown in the car between gigs. Just plug […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

Mac Pro (Early 2009) with the front and side visible. The side panel has been removed to reveal the internals, which are mostly still hidden behind aluminium panels.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 17/03/2026

Features nobody asked for: You can now subscribe to Legacy Update news as an Internet Explorer Web Slice. Just click the green button in the toolbar (it’s green to show that Internet Explorer is really excited a website is actually using this feature), or the […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 13/03/2026

Trying Sublime Text again for the first time since 2013. I fully blame @codecat for making me nostalgic about it. She already talked me into buying Sublime Merge 🙃 Still as fast as ever, slowly trying to replicate my setup from back then, but it will take some […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

Sublime Text with the Avalonia project open, which is mixed C#, C++, and COM. Two tabs are open side-by-side, and the UI is an OS X Aqua-style theme.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 12/03/2026

Mozilla extended support for Firefox 115 ESR on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 and macOS 10.12 – 10.14 until August. It was due to end support last month, and they may consider extending it again. Firefox ESRs are old versions that continue getting security updates, and […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

Firefox 115.33.0esr showing itself as up-to-date on Windows 7

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 10/03/2026

The trick to block the Claude user on GitHub as a warning beacon is the gift that keeps on giving. I’m not even that annoyed if people write code with AI, but letting the agent make commits for you feels like an admission that you haven’t reviewed its code. A […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

The top nav bars of the mermaid-js/mermaid repo. It has an orange banner: “A user you’ve blocked has previously contributed to this repository” and then lists @claude under it.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 09/03/2026

Today, UAC has suddenly started being happy with the exact same binaries (this was happening for the delta patch and full installer, and @codecat repro’d with Sublime Text too). What happened to change this? Sublime HQ’s certificate is OV (organisation […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

UAC dialog in a happy mode where it recognises Sublime Merge Update Installer is signed by Sublime HQ Pty Ltd

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 07/03/2026

Actually, I don’t know what’s going on here. Both the previous and current version are signed, and it’s a valid cert from DigiCert, not some self-signed weird thing. Soooo… can I trust this or not?

Sublime Merge build 2126 setup is signed by Sublime HQ Pty Ltd on 24 February 2026, using a valid cert from DigiCert

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 07/03/2026

Why is the latest Sublime Merge update on Windows not signed? The previous version is signed. I really don’t like that Windows takes unsigned code as such a whatever thing. I don’t want to guess whether your binary is unsigned because you forgot, or you don’t […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

Orange UAC dialog for Sublime Merge Update Installer.exe, Publisher: Unknown.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 23/02/2026

Just came across this GitHub post from a few weeks ago. Why are these features shipping only now? These controls have been overdue for well over 10 years. I appreciate that they’re making these changes, but the vibe is so off on this post. Even starting from […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 16/02/2026

Something really, really makes me think someone was trying to prove a point about the lack of value of image models (other than fraud) by releasing a diagram this broken. Like, this went through a pull request and someone approved it. But it’s really hard to say […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

The horrendously broken AI-generated diagram showing how Git branching and tagging are used. Time goes up but commits/merges go down, typos everywhere, lines that make no sense, etc. The usual from an image model basically.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 23/01/2026

Mozilla is running a survey named “What Is Your Dream for Mozilla?”. It seems pretty specifically designed to see who’s for and against AI in their audience. I answered with this, and you should tell them what you think too: mozillafoundation.tfaforms.net/201 #mozilla #firefox #ai

Survey question: What do you want to see from Mozilla in the future?

(Sorry, I would put the entire answer here, but it’s over the limit for alt text)

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 19/01/2026

I would call this heavily inspired, but even Microsoft eventually figured out stringing a bunch of qualifiers in a row is just awful product naming

Dialog showing the benefits of a Google feature named “Google Home Premium Standard”

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 15/01/2026

In 2009, Microsoft made it a focus of the Windows 7 user experience guidelines to reduce pointless notifications. They point out notifications like the classic “There are unused icons on your desktop” as being in the Windows XP Hall of Shame™. Seriously, it’s in […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

A Windows 11 toast notification:
Print Cleanup Notification
We noticed you have some unused printers. Would you like to remove them?
[ Yes ] [ Ask later ] [ No ]

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 07/01/2026

What is the Silverlight logo supposed to be, anyway?

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 05/01/2026

Someone took my spot as the top NSIS developer on WakaTime in 2025. Whoever you are, I’m sorry, this wasn’t a challenge. Nobody should be subjected to this much NSIS.

Two bars, “You” and “Everyone”, for NSIS.
“You” is 44 hours and 23 minutes.
“Everyone” (average of all users who logged time writing NSIS) is 51 minutes.
A tooltip says “The top coder in NSIS logged 100 hrs 5 mins”. I fear for their sanity.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 31/12/2025

But it’s ok. It was fact checked by Grok 👍 These subtly incorrect but very confident-sounding sentences are the exact reason AI can never be trusted. I spent 5 minutes making sure everything I said above is correct. AI doesn’t, and can’t, fact check itself like this.

SSE2 article was fact-checked by Grok last month (November 27, 2025 at 4:08 PM)

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 31/12/2025

I don’t think anyone here needs more proof Grokipedia is a terrible idea, but here you go: • SSE2 works on any OS that supports SSE1, so, Windows 2000 • SSE2 is a mandatory feature of AMD64, so it didn’t “emerge” with Vista • The Legacy Update page it references makes none of the claims made here

A section of the Grokipedia page on SSE2:

Operating System and Library Usage
SSE2 integration into operating systems began with early 2000s releases targeting x86 processors capable of the extension. Windows XP (NT 5.1), released in 2001, offered partial support for SSE2, enabling applications to utilize the instructions on compatible hardware without mandating them for core OS functionality. Full SSE2 reliance emerged in Windows Vista (2007), where 64-bit installations required processors with SSE2 support to ensure consistent performance across system components.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 30/12/2025

We’ve reached a point in dead internet where AI is responding to support forum threads from 14 years ago with `sfc /scannow`. Even if this is intended to summarise the thread, it’s entirely hallucinated things that weren’t discussed. Nobody mentioned […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

Screenshot of a support forum site that seems to have scraped a Usenet thread. The thread happened 14 years ago over the span of a week, with 5 users. (The user’s issue was that iTunes couldn’t find d3d8thk.dll.)

2 weeks ago, “Dani AI” felt the need to summarise this thread, while injecting many things that were never discussed. The thread never talked about `sfc /scannow`, yet the AI is recommending it. It very vaguely suggests you should do something with “the CBS log” with zero explanation (the link is a support page showing how to run `sfc /scannow`), and links to Legacy Update, which didn’t exist yet. It’s also very sure Internet Explorer plugins (BHOs) are related to a missing Direct3D dll and need to be fixed.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 23/12/2025

Spiderman pointing meme but it’s Apple warning me that Apple is trying to paste from Apple

On a Safari new tab page:
“Safari” would like to paste from “Safari”
Do you want to allow this?
[Don’t Allow Paste]
[Allow Paste]

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 06/12/2025

What's the deal with specifically PCIe Wi-Fi cards having ginormous heatsinks? These chips barely get warm. Is it entirely to justify selling it for $45? If this were necessary, we would see them heatsinked in laptops, but nobody does that.

Amazon product image for a Ugreen Wi-Fi 7 PCIe card. It has "WiFi 7" in beautiful ginormous 3D WordArt™. It then has a misleading chart where it compares 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz, where 5 and 6 GHz are both 2882 Mbps, but 6 GHz is displayed larger. Bigger number better.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 29/10/2025

Suddenly had the urge to watch this 7 year old Cathode Ray Dude review of Kid Pix that I probably haven’t watched since back then. An absolute classic. No notes. Why did it print the date?! youtu.be/NK6-ZSaBzjc

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 27/10/2025

Things that are known to be certain in life: 1. Death 2. Taxes 3. The certificate icon in macOS remaining unchanged since OS X Tiger

A file named tls_ca.crt has a very pixelated and very old icon that kinda, vaguely, tries to look like a certificate. It’s gold and written in cursive and has the starburst thing I guess.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 24/10/2025

The previous screenshot was from DuckDuckGo (GPT-4o). Google does at least recognise that it’s disputed, but doesn’t say so clearly enough for my liking.

A Google AI Overview for the same search query, which opens with “According to market share data from StatCounter Global Stats, Windows 7's global market share was approximately 9.16% in September 2025. This is a significant increase from previous months, though some analysis suggests this surge is due to reporting errors, particularly in Asian markets.”

Only at the very end (below the “fold” where you need to click to expand) does it more clearly state the data is flawed: “Technical Note: As Windows 7 is an unsupported operating system, this unexpected rise in market share is likely an anomaly in the data rather than a genuine trend of users returning to the older OS.”

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 24/10/2025

Just a friendly reminder that, particularly when coming from search result summaries, AI only knows as much as it can glean from sources it deems to be authoritative. Often, those are news outlets that use clickbait and put writers under pressure to push out […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

A conversation with DuckDuckGo’s AI chat feature. The conversation starts with the search query “windows 7 september 2025”. Assist (DDG’s search summary feature) says that “In September 2025, Windows 7 experienced a surprising resurgence in market share, increasing by tenfold, particularly in Asia, as users began to shift away from Windows 10, which was nearing its end of life. This trend indicates that many users are opting to continue using the older operating system despite its lack of official support since 2020.”

I continue the conversation by challenging it on the validity of the data. It searches and then says “The claim is almost certainly invalid - StatCounter reported a large September 2025 jump for Windows 7, but multiple technical analyses and follow-ups flag it as a reporting anomaly […]”.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2025

So long, Windows Update website 🫡 This week, Microsoft took down the old Windows Update v6 web app entirely. It was a time capsule locked in the Microsoft.com design from 2005. It’s been broken since 2021. You can still see it preserved through Windows Update Restored.

The Windows Update v6 website open to its homepage on Windows XP, as preserved by the Windows Update Restored project.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2025

Steam powered? No no, *Windows* powered

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2025

Oh dear. Why can you do this? Who decided this is a good idea?

For some reason, you can change the transparency of the icon, widget, and folder accent color, with expected results of being beyond unreadable.

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Adam Demasi @kirb.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2025

This really ain’t it. macOS Tahoe RC. All of the tinted modes look pretty bad, but did they completely forget to check contrast on the iMac default colors?

Weather widget in the macOS 26 Tahoe notification center. The system-wide icon/widget style is set to Tinted Dark. The widget is a grey blurred background with dark purple text (default tint color on the purple iMac). The window underneath is white with black text.

The widget is close to unreadable, and the blurred text in the background increases the poor contrast.

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