Posted by zdw 7 days ago
I use to try it in any tool tools I was playing around with (I use to try lots of software just to see what they do) and often found something here.
These stopped being a thing at some point and I eventually stopped looking for these.
I doubt there will be anyone digging through the EFI or whatever of a MacBook Air in 30 years. If there’s even something there to be found.
But that's the thing right there. We won't know until someone does the search.
So you can see that "The Team" is indeed a single string, starting with the length of 8 (encoded as 0x08), followed by the string "Break at Event Match - Native" with length of 29 (encoded as 0x1D)
0: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25068903/what-are-pascal...
These people are Computing Archeologists - I don't know if that is a formal category but that is how I think of them. They go deeper into software and hardware of the past and bring back such gems before those are lost forever to the tides of e-waste.
For some reason I really enjoy "computer archeology" about Super Mario 3 and 64. There is even a total decompile of 64.
But I suppose also there's less fun allowed, the article mentions this easter egg was removed in 1997 when Jobs returned.
- modern screens are higher resolution, and so require much larger image resources.
- modern OSes contain all translations in them. In the 90s it was common to have language-specific versions that only contain that language and maybe English.
In the specific case of macOS, it also contains double the code it needs because it runs on both x86 and ARM.
I just did a "ncdu -x --exclude Volumes --exclude Users /" on my 15.5 (side rant: why the hell is the exclusion necessary to prevent ncdu going into an infinite recursion loop? -x should keep it on the same filesystem, no crossing mountpoints)... and well.
800 MB in printer drivers (/Library/Printers), 425 MB in audio loops (/Library/Audio/Apple Loops), probably 500 MB in various AI models in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks (/MediaAnalysis.framework, /CoreSceneUnderstanding.framework, /CVNLP.framework, /TextRecognition.framework, /CoreHandwriting.framework), around 2 GB of other AI models in /System/Library/AssetsV2 (/com_apple_MobileAsset_LinguisticData, /com_apple_MobileAsset_UAF_Siri_Understanding, /com_apple_MobileAsset_Trial_Siri_SiriTextToSpeech), 800 MB in /System/Library/LinguisticData, a whopping 550 MB in fonts in /System/Library/Fonts (of which Apple Color Emoji.ttc alone consumes 180 MB of data?!).
So it's at least 2.5 GB of AI models alone. Crazy. I mean, props to Apple for offering local models that work without internet, that's far from a given these days (sad enough). But the lowest-spec MBA clocks in at 256 GB disk space... having to waste 1% on AI alone and more on all the other stuff? That's ridiculous.
I don’t think 2.5 GB is a lot nowadays. Xcode is over 12 GB, iMovie over 4 GB, MS Word 2 over GB
> having to waste 1% on AI alone
Is that ‘having to’? I thought those models only get downloaded after you give permission to do so.
Same for some other stuff, I think. /Library/Printers is 12 MB on my system, for example and /Library/Audio 584 kB.
Word is ridiculous, agreed. Xcode isn't mandatory (although I'd LOVE to have it ship without tons of mandatory SDKs, emulators and god knows what else makes up the 12 GB) and I'm not sure if iMovie is.
> Is that ‘having to’? I thought those models only get downloaded after you give permission to do so.
I can't remember having ever given macOS the permission to install Siri and the likes.
> /Library/Printers is 12 MB on my system, for example and /Library/Audio 584 kB.
Indeed, tried on another machine, no printer drivers there. Probably the culprit is HP, their drivers suck balls. /Library/Audio however, that's just the same size on my M2 MBA as it is on my 2019 MBP.
On Windows, you typically have to install language packs to get more languages.
Also, how many image resources does Windows-the-OS have, and how large are they? There are some, but the largest I can think of right off are the device icons in the hardware & printers screen. And most of those get installed later since they are part of the driver.
You'd be surprised.
Probably a good call. Whenever I see an Easter Egg in software, part of me thinks “cool! That’s fun and harmless!” And the other part of me, the professional part who is responsible for releasing working software on time and minimizing risks, gasps and thinks “what if it wasn’t harmless? What if it triggered a subtle bug that had to be patched and put an entire device’s shipping timeline at risk!” What are you going to write in that postmortem that justifies adding unnecessary code (risk) to the product, just so you could be cool and fun?
I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but there are great, appropriate places for fun and whimsy, like personal hobby projects, not your company’s multimillion dollar product.
...now do the Black Monolith.