Modern app bloat in one analogy:

Business logic size: ~20 bytes Total app size: ~47 MB = 47,000,000 bytes

Bloat factor: 47,000,000 / 20 = 2,350,000

Let’s scale this up and say the business logic is 1 pound.

Then the whole app would weigh: 1 lb × 2,350,000 = 2,350,000 pounds

What weighs ~2.35 million pounds?

   - A fully loaded Boeing 747-8: ~987,000 lbs  
   - Another fully loaded 747-8: ~987,000 lbs  
   - A blue whale: ~330,000 lbs  

The business logic is like shipping a 1 lb object (a book, a flash drive, whatever) by loading it into two fully loaded 747s and strapping a blue whale on top.

Just to run 20 bytes of logic.

To be fair, the author didn't make this to impress people with byte optimizations, they probably just wanted to publish an app quickly that is useful, and was familiar enough with Electron or JS to do so.

It’s not the easiest way just the most evangelized. A Qt app even would be a few lines of code, but we’ve done a good job scaring people that learning other languages is bad because we can’t ship features fast enough with non-evangelized frameworks.

I so strongly wish more developers gave even a single shit about this. The current state of desktop app development is truly an embarrassment.

I keep thinking that this could be solved by just building Electron into the OS as a shared framework so we don't have to have a separate copy for every app, but the more I dig into it, the more I realize I'm just reinventing the web browser.

Wow, they optimized the minimal Electron app down to 47 MB?

And notice the other abstraction too.

This is not 'an app to change MAC address' but an app to 'overcome WiFi time limits'.

Cough, AI Training Models, Cough

There's great power in abstraction. Disagree?

Your point is that an operating system, and its shell, all running on a machine, and a collection of apps, are somehow smaller than a wrapper application.

I'm curious the amount of bytes the entire stack, minus the chrome which is the complaint I believe, how many bytes that is. I would say probably a gig.

Those who don't learn /usr/bin are destined to reinvent it, poorly.

Yes but you need a space station OS (Unix) to enjoy the terseness of 47-200 bytes of business logic.

ps: I love both space stations and Unix

Are they doing something additional with the 47MB - 200 bytes? Like selling you to the brokers?

Looks like ai-generated bloat. It even has deps for deb+rpm builds yet is mac only.

Honestly would not expect anything more from js devs who use macs/windows. I see this so often.

If you don't know Swift, but do know Electron, it's easier to do it in 30 lines of Javascript.

People who don't like the developers work can always write and publish their own application, of course.

Electron is an overkill way to not have to learn how to do stuff properly, if you ask me. And people love not to learn.

If you want a frontend for you app, you probably just use Electron and get it over with in a few minutes instead of digging through the docs for Qt or some other framework.

Is it worth it? Probably not, since this is a single-platform app to start with, but JS+HTML are easy to theme and customize, and Qt is... not quite as simple.

People forget to think about Swift let alone tools like Platypus.

It doesn't need to be - on macOS, it could even just as well have been a simple Xbar Plug-In! ( https://xbarapp.com/ ).

Talk is cheap. If it's so easy, I'm sure the author would welcome a PR :)

Is ActionScript still a thing on Macs? I feel like that tech was almost criminally overlooked while being the backbone for a lot of processing pipelines back in the day.

1) the dev only had a hammer and he nailed the screw in

2) the dev has 64gigs of ram and a newest CPU and doesn't care about performance issues for people on older computers... that's why you need gigs of ram just to read a weather report online.

Because that's all anyone knows, and PC development is dead.

>content-length: 47262814

Sigh...

So I tried this out on macOS 26 and the `airport` command is no longer there.

There is a `airportd.sb` file, which appears to be some permissions based thing in s-expression/LISP. Weird.

Edit: Spun up a macOS 15 VM and I got this:

WARNING: The airport command line tool is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. For diagnosing Wi-Fi related issues, use the Wireless Diagnostics app or wdutil command line tool.

I guess they weren't kidding.

It just resets the MAC address, making the router believe it's a new device, thus not subject to the "x minute" free WiFi.

Not for Mac. MacOS is an open garden: there is an app store; or you can install signed apps (requires Apple cooperation); or you can install unsigned applications. MacOS gives you a nudge to the app store (which has genuine advantages) and a much stronger nudge away from unsigned non-app-store apps, but it is still an open garden. iOS is closed garden, which makes some sense for the security guarantees it can give for financial applications.

Are you saying that on IOS 18 if you enable developer mode then each time you forgot the network it gets a new Mac? But without developer mode it does not get a new Mac each time you forget it? The Apple docs linked elsewhere in this thread suggest it only gets a new Mac once per 24 hours when you forget the network normally. I’m going on a long boat trip in the next week where this trick might work for me if so!

Auth is username/password over captive portal. You could pay for more bandwidth. The system was so pwned I ended up giving myself unlimited bandwidth.

  For devices running Android 11 or higher, users can enable non-persistent MAC randomization globally for all Wi-Fi networks (that have MAC randomization enabled) through the developer options screen. The option to enable non-persistent MAC randomization for all profiles is found at Settings > Developer Options > Wi-Fi non-persistent MAC randomization.

Could you describe how? Quick searching doesn't show it to be "straightforward" as far as I can find.

OTP via SMS: depends on the country. These days it's not very common in the UK. They often ask for an email address, but my experience is that most of the time they don't check it for validity.

you have both options in ios/macos, fixed random mac per ssid, and rotating

GrapheneOS has per-connection (as an alternative to per-network) randomization which is enabled by default

They must be unique in a LAN segment. And only the lower 3 bytes in a MAC are “unique” as the upper 3 are the vendor ID and relatively fixed.

In practice people put fewer than 256 devices on networks (class C), so they have less than 1/65536 possibility of complete failure. And far less because they have a mix of OUIs.

But yeah, if you put a few hundred or thousand security cameras or other device from a single vendor, all on the same network, conflicts are certainly possible.

MAC conflicts are also a bit nasty to troubleshoot, and less obvious than IP conflicts.

There are like 50 trillion possible addresses, unlikely to clash in one network :)

Pretty sure the electron app has the same limitation (popover notification says “join the network again for free wifi”, besides you wouldn’t be able to change the mac address if the network interface were actively in use)

Yes. It’s a bad (maybe even illegal?) thing to do. The victim device will start losing packets, and it’ll look to them like the network is just unreliable. Eventually they give up and disconnect, and you take full control.

I was trying to understand how this could be used for flights. I've seen either having to enter your last name and seat, or loyalty plan number to get in-flight wifi. Are there really airline wifis that give every mac address a free amount of time?

A lot of airlines now offer free "messaging" - usually just text on common messaging apps like WhatsApp. I've been meaning for years to write some kind of server that could give me useful functionality over chat messages.

There is a "local bit" in MAC addresses per RFC 7042, so MAC addresses that have their second character as E, A, 2 or 6 are "local" which effectively means "randomly selected by software". So my current macOS selected MAC address of 16:6a:d2:20:e6:eb is "local" due to the second digit in the address being 6

In reality it’s mostly VC/Big Tech news. Hacker ethos isn’t something we see much of around here.