I miss more on iOS because if that. The eight things I cared about are mixed in with the 94 that I don’t.

Exactly. Everyone complains about ad tech and enshittification until you point them to the conveniently located button that lets them pay for the service…

It’s just Maslow’s Hierarchy. The person who doesn’t have a job should be egocentric, at least in this narrow area of focus. If your position is that people should prioritize abstract societal benefits over their own security and well-being, I’m not sure what to tell you other than to prepare for a life of people disappointing you.

Many of the people who currently experience the privilege will be pissed off and view it as unfair. But in reality they’re getting a taste of what other minorities already experience.

There are two competing lenses we can view this kind of thing through, and both are valid. First, there’s the macro lens in which groups like women are significantly underrepresented, and most reasonable people believe that to be a problem we’ve created that we need to solve. It’s not that women are bad at this job. It’s that women have been pushed not to participate for reasons we think are bad. Through that lens, an obvious solution is to bias things in favor of women for some period of time to get to a steady state where the system won’t automatically fall back into gender-bias as soon as we take our thumb off the scale. That’s a reasonable theory, and pursuing it does a lot of good.

But there’s a second lens in which individual people with names are trying to participate in the labor market. The fact that men have had a built-in advantage does not imply that any man looking for a job would only be able to get one by leveraging an unfair advantage. If we think talent and hard work are equally distributed through the population, then temporarily biasing things away from men is, to the man currently trying to find a job, exactly as discriminatory as anything that prior generations have faced. The fact that there’s a societal good being pursued doesn’t make that harm go away either. It is unfair, and we should recognize that. We may decide we have to do it anyway, but I’m not a fan of the idea that “let’s mistreat them like other people were mistreated” is inherently a good thing.

I feel like this would result in so many broken phones that most companies would not want to enter this market. Wouldn’t be surprised if you could find something on Alibaba or Amazon, but I doubt it’s much of a market.

Devil’s advocate though. With things like 4GLs, it was still all on the human to come up with the detailed spec. Best case scenario was that you work very hard, write a lot of things down, generate the code, see that it didn’t work and then ???. That “???” at the end was you as the programmer sitting alone in a room trying to figure out what a non-responsive black box might wanted you to have said instead.

It’s qualitatively different if you can just talk to the black box as though it were a programmer. It’s less of a black box at that point. It understands your language, and it understands the code. So you can start with the spec, but when something inevitably doesn’t work, the “???” step doesn’t just come back to you figuring out with no help what you did wrong. You can ask it questions and make suggestions. You can run experiments. Today’s LLMs hit the wall pretty quick there, and maybe they always will. There’s certainly the viewpoint that “all they do is model text and they can’t really learn anything”.

I think that’s fundamentally wrong. I’m a pretty solid programmer. I have a PhD in Computer Science, and I’ve worked as a software engineer and an architect throughout a pretty long career. And everything I’ve ever learned has basically been through language. Through reading, writing, speaking, and listening to English and a few other languages. I think that to say that I can learn what I’ve learned, but it’s fundamentally impossible for a robot to learn it is to resort to mysticism. At some point, we will have AIs that can do what I do today. I think that’s inevitable.

it’s a complete mess, glad they’re not making programming languages…

Make a note to never look at Applescript.

And yet another one that discussed at length how you obviously can’t magically expect AI to put the right things out. So we went to the topic of code reviews and I tried to tell them: Give a real developer 1000+ line pull requests (like the AI might spit out) and there is a chance of a snowball in hell you’ll get bug free code despite reviews.

Arguably this is comparing apples and oranges here. I agree with you that code reviews aren’t going to be useful for evaluating a big code dump with no context. But I’d also say that a significant amount of software in the world is either written with no code review process or a process that just has a human spitting out the big code dump with no context.

The AI hype is definitely hype, but there’s enough truth there to justify some of the hand-wringing. The guy who told you he only has to throw away the 20% of the code that’s useless is still getting 100% of his work done with maybe 40% of the effort (i.e., very little effort to generate the first AI cut, 20% to figure out the stupid stuff, 20% to fix it). That’s a big enough impact to have significant ripples.

Might not matter. It seems like the way it’s going to go in the short term is that paranoia and economic populism are going to kill the whole thing anyway. We’re just going to effectively make it illegal to train on data. I think that’s both a mistake and a gross misrepresentation of things like copyright, but it seems like the way we’re headed.

But you still need to show up at a gate with a guy in front of it who will either let you in or not let you in. And that guy is a trusted centralized authority. Just have him issue you the pass and be done with it.

An NFT only certifies that you have an NFT. Nothing certifies that the NFT can be used for any physical purpose. The nature of the physical world is that there’s only one seat 1F at the concert you want to go to. I can sell as many NFTs as I want that all claim to represent the fact that you can sit in seat 1F, and you each have a cryptographically signed proof that that’s exactly what I sold you. You still can’t all sit in one chair, and there’s going to be someone in charge of the venue who decides what happens. And once you have someone in charge of the venue who can decide what happens, just let that person sell the tickets. You all have to trust him anyway.

But for authenticating an event pass? That’s what NFTs were actually designed for. So it’s a little weird seeing one of the first large-scale uses of NFTs for their correct purpose getting hated on by everybody.

But this is an event pass for a league…as in, an organized and well-known central agency managing the event. You don’t need a blockchain for this, because you don’t need any decentralization. Just buy the shit from the trusted party who manages that transactional history in a database developed with 60 year old technology with none of the weirdness and problems of blockchains. If you don’t trust the event organizer, then a provable certificate that your pass is legit is worthless, because the event organizer can just decline to accept your pass anyway.

I’ve been saying for a while now that the actual test should be that you miss a couple. If you can look at a this 4 nanometer picture of what is either a bird, a sofa, or the titanic, and correctly tell me if it has part of one pedal from a bicycle in it, you’re a robot.

I’m not sure “Twitter is not a backup service for your personal hard drive” is a point that needed to be made.

I don’t mean the spam filtering on received email. I mean the black hole lists and all the stuff that major email providers do to email you send. It’s possible to run your own SMTP servers, and it sounds like you do, but that’s extraordinarily difficult. The major email providers are much more likely to do things like just block all email from your domain if they don’t recognize whatever IP address your server is sitting on as being one of the big known players, that sort of thing.

Worth noting it’s probably more like $70 a year if it matters. A domain will cost $15 and up, and you’ll need to pay an email provider on top of that, and most run around $50 a year.

Basically, you buy a domain name through some registrar. I use hover.com and Cloudflare.com. Hover is more user-friendly, but really registrars are pretty much commoditized, so kind of whatever. The registrar will provide some function like “manage DNS" or “manage your domain” that lets you add and remove DNS records. You’ll use that to tell other people on the internet how to send you email.

But at this point you don’t actually have an email account anywhere. You need to buy one from a company like Proton Mail, Fastmail, Google, etc. that allow you to bring your own domain. Let’s say you pick Fastmail. They tell you what to type into those “manage DNS” boxes at your registrar.

Once you follow those instructions, you’re done. The only time you ever have to mess with it again is if you decide to change email providers. If you decide to move from Fastmail to Proton, you sign up for a Proton account, delete those MX and TXT records that Fastmail told you to create, and add the new ones Proton tells you to create.

You definitely should not run your own email servers, but he’s just saying to buy a domain and pay for a GSuite account (or Fastmail, Proton, whatever) to actually operate email on that domain. All those companies handle all the modern anti-spam functions for you.

Sure, but I stand by the fact that the problem is that the changes are random and crazy, not that he didn’t bullshit his way through an apology we all know he didn’t mean.

Look at it this way, if Bud Light had responded to the big protest by just putting out a statement that said nothing but “we stand by our decision”, most of us would have considered that to be pretty great.

Basically I guess I think a bad decision accompanied by a slimy attempt to tell me how it’s actually good or that it was really hard for you is worse than just making a bad decision and saying, “this is what I’m doing”.

The apology letter is a bug, not a feature. I want more companies to just openly and unapologetically say, “this is what we’re doing, and not everyone is going to like it, but it’s what we believe is the right thing, and we’re doing it.” No one needs more bullshit in their lives. I don’t mind that he isn’t giving me a bullshit apology. I mind that he’s a lunatic and his ideas are stupid.

I don’t know anything about any of these people one way or the other, but if you believe her account and just think the timing is opportunistic, then do you not also believe the part of her account that’s in, you know, the bigger more noticeable font at the top that says, “To stop the speculation and DMs I’m receiving…”.

As in, “I quit two years ago and didn’t say anything about it, but now this is all over the news and a million people keep asking and/or assuming things, so I guess I should address it”.

That all depends on Apple’s ability to run it effectively, and they have basically no demonstrated ability to do that.

App Review is an absolute joke. Listen to last week’s Accidental Tech Podcast. One of the hosts is developing an IMDB competitor app, and he’s been rejected three times as of that episode. One rejection was for playing copyrighted video without permission – in an app that doesn’t have any code that can play a video. One was for not having a link to his T&Cs in a field in the app store that can’t render links. And the third was for displaying copyrighted media in his screenshots (maybe? no one really knows), and that media was the cover art for movie and TV shows. None of those even pass the sniff test. We all know that you’re allowed to show the cover art for a movie in an app that has information about movies. We all know that’s Fair Use, but beyond that, a third grader knows that literally everything in the world that presents information about movies does it. At the exact same time that all this is happening, Apple happily published some scammer’s app called “Threads” and let it collect 300,000 people’s information who thought they were downloading the actual Threads app from Meta.

It’s always been this way. I personally wrote the original iPhone app for a large US retailer in 2008 – the first year the App Store existed. App Review’s only purpose then was to detect your use of private APIs, usually because that would let you build things Apple didn’t want you to build. That’s the only purpose it serves today, 15 years later. Everything else is random noise that just punishes you unpredictably for no reason. I had an update of that app rejected once for using our own company logo as the icon. They don’t catch obvious scams. They never have. The people doing these reviews know nothing or are given so little time that the way to game their metrics is to just randomly reject sometimes without analysis. Unless they change something, it’ll just be a thing that scammers fill out however they want with no consequence to them at all, and a random 5% of legitimate developers will waste a few weeks arguing over when it’s applied to them with no logical basis in reality.

I think there are probably some ways to cross over a bit, but really, LLMs aren’t necessarily aimed at the kind of things we want a virtual assistant to do today. Siri falls down mostly on its ability to correctly do things quickly and reliably. Generating 5000 words of convincingly human sounding explanations isn’t what I want from a thing I quickly trigger on my phone. What I want is very short or no reply accompanying the action I wanted to take. Call this person. Start navigation to an address. Turn on the lights. Play the version of a song I like from this specific live album. Some of those things are things Siri really sucks at today, and none of them are likely to get a lot better with an LLM in place. Maybe playing music benefits from a more robust understanding of the language of my query, but the rest of it are things where the suckage is more that Siri takes 8 seconds for the server to respond or just inexplicably decides that today it doesn’t know how to turn on a light.

At this point it feels like a great LLM would let Siri fail to respond to a much more varied set of ways for me to ask my question in English, but that’s not really the target we’re shooting for here.