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Cookie consent popups are only a scourge because publishers would rather further irritate their users than stop selling your data to their 936 “trusted partners”.
Even in perfectly normal, common situations it fails horribly. The bottom stretch of the road I live on is about 2.5 cars wide, but one side is reserved for parking (it’s terraced housing so no off-street parking). That leaves 1.5 cars of width, so if you’re driving on the side with parked cars you give way and pass on the other side when there is nothing oncoming.
Before I turned it off, my car would regularly beep frantically and try to steer me into the parked cars. Thankfully it’s a 2022 model so now I’ve turned it off, it stays off.
AI is such a core part of the experience
For who? Regular people are quite famously not clamouring for more AI features in software. A Siri that is not so stupendously dumb would be nice, but I doubt it would even be a consideration for the vast majority of people choosing a phone.
I would call the designing of the building art, yes. But I wouldn’t call it construction.
I would also call designing a system to be fed into an LLM designing. But I wouldn’t call it programming.
If people are more into the design and system architecture side of development, I of course have no problem with that.
What I do find baffling, as per my original comment, is all the people saying basically “programming is way more fun now I don’t have to do it”. Did you even actually like programming to begin with then?
I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you.
But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone to paint what you describe. That’s not doing, it’s commissioning.
On what planet is concentrating an increasingly high amount of the output of this whole industry on a small handful of megacorps “democratising” anything?
Software development was already one of the most democratised professions on earth. With any old dirt cheap used computer, an internet connection, and enough drive and curiosity you could self-train yourself into a role that could quickly become a high paying job. While they certainly helped, you never needed any formal education or expensive qualifications to excel in this field. How is this better?
By feel. Not everyone uses all the buttons all the time, but stuff you use a lot is easily operated without taking eyes off the road. It pairs well with the other upside of physical controls, the manufacturer can’t move them out from under you with a software update.
Formatted? I guess not really, because it’s trivially easy to reformat it. But how it’s structured, the data structures and algorithms it uses, the way it models the problem space, the way it handles failures? That all matters, because ultimately the computer still has to run the code.
It may be more extreme than what you are suggesting here, but there are definitely people out there who think that code quality no longer matters. I find that viewpoint maddening. I was already of the opinion that the average quality of software is appalling, even before we start talking about generated code. Probably 99% of all CPU cycles today are wasted relative to how fast software could be.
Of course there are trade-offs: we can’t and shouldn’t all be shipping only hand-optimised machine code. But the degree to which we waste these incredible resources is slightly nauseating.
Just because something doesn’t have to be better, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to make it so.
It’s funny, I never connected my G5 to the network or accepted any of the optional T&Cs, so there’s now numerous places in the UI that say “accept terms to see personalised content”.
Uhhh no? I’m good thanks
you won't get stuck because of a word you don't understand or a concept you've never heard of
I very much disagree here. To make any sort of progress in AoC, in my experience, you need at least:
- awareness of graphs and how to traverse them
- some knowledge of a pathfinding algorithm
- an understanding of memoisation and how it can be applied to make deeply recursive computations feasible
Those types of puzzle come up a lot, and it’s not anything close to what I’d expect someone with “just a little programming knowledge” to have.
Someone with just a little programming knowledge is probably good with branches and loops, some rudimentary OOP, and maybe knows when to use a list vs a map. They’re not gonna know much about other data structures or algorithms.
They could learn them on the go of course, but then that’s why I don’t think basic coding knowledge is enough.
You don't need a computer science background to participate - just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far.
Every time I see this I wonder how many amateur/hobbyist programmers it sets up for disappointment. Unless your definition of “pretty far” is “a small number of the part ones”, it’s simply not true.
The difference is you still need to express creativity in your use of GarageBand and iMovie. There is nothing creative about typing "give me a picture of x doing y" into a form field.
Also, "democratizing"? Please. We're just entrenching more power into the small handful of companies who have been able to raise and set fire to unfathomable amounts of capital. Many of these tools may be free or cheap to use today, but there is nothing for the commons here.
Do we pour billions into educating users not to click "yes" to every prompt they see?
Yes, obviously yes. In the same way we teach people to operate cars safely and expect them to carry and utilise that knowledge. Does it work perfectly? Of course not, but at least we entertain the idea that if you crash your car into a wall because you’re not paying attention it might actually be your fault.
Computers are a critical aspect of work and life. While I’m a big proponent of making technology less of a requirement in day to day life—you shouldn’t need to own a smartphone and download an app to pay for parking or charge your car—but in cases where it is reasonable to expect someone to use a computer, it’s also reasonable to expect a baseline competency from the operator. To support that, we clearly need better computer education at all ages.
By all means, design with the user’s interests at front of mind and make doing the right thing easiest, but at some point you have to meet in the middle. We can’t reorient entire industry practices because some people refuse to read the words in front of them.
Apple software, especially lately, can be really bad for it too. Single core perf is slightly better on my iPad than my MacBook Pro and yet everything feels an order of magnitude slower. If I am impatiently tapping the space I know a button will appear waiting for an animation to finish, some aspect of software design has gone horribly awry.
One of these days I’m going to get around to writing a little bash script or something that will let me take a plain-ish text file and upload it into Jira via the API.
I should be able to create a Jira ticket in however long it takes me to type the acceptance criteria plus a second or two. Instead I’ve got slow loading pages, I’ve got spinners, I’ve got dropdowns populating asynchronously that steal focus from what I’m typing, I’ve got whatever I was typing then triggering god knows what shortcuts causing untold chaos.
For a system that is—at least how we use it at my job—a glorified todo list, it is infuriating. If I’m even remotely busy lately I just add “raise a ticket for x” to my actual todo list and do it some other time instead.
Is that “general” though? I’ve always taken AGI to mean general to any problem.
For all his faults, Jobs always sold the idea that he really thought the stuff he was showing was the coolest thing ever. There was at the very least an illusion of pride and excitement, even if it wasn't always genuine. He'd crack jokes, make off-hand remarks, and wasn't afraid to mention competitor's products.
Modern Apple presentations are just like being read some marketing materials. It's very disingenuous.
focus on content
This has been Alan Dye's modus operandi since he took the helm on software design and the problem is it does not scale to larger devices. On a phone and mostly on an iPad, where you're far more likely to be consuming content anyway, it's not the worst thing to shoot for.
On a Mac it's infuriating. I'm working on anywhere from a 14" to a 27" display, both have a wealth of pixels to work with: why are you hiding controls? You're not making anything simpler, I need those buttons to perform the tasks I'm trying to do. All you've done is make it less intuitive, less discoverable, and added extra clicks.
To be honest it has some problems even on the smaller devices too, mainly in the form of lack of visual affordances. So much functionality you would never discover unless you'd seen someone else do it or triggered it by accident (and even then might not realise what you've done—just yesterday I had to help my mother get out of private browsing in Safari because she'd swiped across to it and didn't know how to get back).
Seriously why does seemingly every presenter from Tim Cook right down to the engineers in the tech-specific sessions speak with the exact same uncanny delivery in these videos? It's incredibly off-putting and sends my brain immediately into "you are being marketed at" mode.
I am incredibly annoyed that they’ve hidden all the camera controls behind an overflow button. Hiding functions is not the same as simplicity any more than shoving all the dirty laundry under your bed is cleaning.
Then why not just write it? You mention not having to write Markdown in the post, but c’mon dude, you’re a software developer.
Presumably the fact you have a personal blog means you must enjoy some aspect of writing, so what’s the end game here?
I mean you do you I guess—it’s your blog and I’m nobody. But if I’m reading someone’s thoughts I want _their_ words, not something filtered through a machine.
Automate Content: Like this very post. I use Wispr Flow to talk with Claude, explain the topic and tell it to read my past blog posts to write in my style.
If you had any respect for your readers you’d put this as a disclaimer right at the top. I can’t be bothered to read anything you can’t be bothered to write.
Absurd take. Speed is not the issue! Optimising for speed of production is what got us into the utter quagmire that is modern software.
Lack of correctness, lack of understanding and ability to reason about behaviour, and poor design that builds up from commercial pressure to move quickly are the problems we need to be solving. We’re accelerating the rate at which we add levels to a building with utterly rotten foundations.
God damn it, I’m growing to loathe this industry.
Heidi was the default option on our work machines a few years ago and it’s one of the buggiest pieces of software I’ve ever used.
Does it still lock up the entire UI if a query takes longer than five seconds to return results? Does it still pop up exception dialogs every ten minutes when it’s been open for longer than a few hours?
you end up in the interface's declaration so you have to jump through additional hoops to get to it
Bit of a tangent, but this really annoys me when I work on TypeScript (which isn't all that often, so maybe there's some trick I'm missing)—clicking through to check out the definition of a library function very often just takes me to a .d.ts file full of type definitions, even if the library is written in TypeScript to begin with.
In an ideal world I probably shouldn't really need to care how a library function is implemented, but the world is far from ideal.
I can’t rule out that at rush hour in either country it makes a difference, because I haven’t experienced it.
But I’m with you, with an express travel card set in Apple Pay (so you can just plop your phone down on the reader without opening anything) there is a beat for it to read on the Underground barriers, but it’s basically the same length of time as it takes to do the step and a half from the reader to the gate. At a normal walking speed I don’t feel as though I need to interrupt my stride.
I want a 7-10” central display that spends 99% of its time showing CarPlay but also has a radio if I need it, the backup camera when I’m in reverse, and lets me change a couple of settings for convenience features like auto locking etc. Everything else can be dials, knobs, and buttons. My Mazda3 is perfect for this and I’m quite sad that I’m almost certainly not going to be able to find anything like it by the time I come to replace it.
"Android" but for cars.
Is this not just Android Automotive? A lot of Volvos use it, it’s a lower-level OS type thing that sits below Android Auto or CarPlay.
I bought a Mazda3 a few months ago and I love it. It is exactly what I want as a driver.
I even adore the scroll wheel and wish it could be in any car I own in future. Yeah it takes slightly longer to do certain actions in CarPlay, but I can do it so much more safely than I could in the Civic I had before. The infotainment boots basically instantly; as you mentioned CarPlay starts itself, and the patronising-but-mandated “don’t use this in motion” warning dismisses itself. In the Civic I would be half way down the road already by the time it booted, blindly prodding at the screen to try to dismiss that warning so I could pause the podcast that started playing itself because I plugged my phone in.
And, while my 2022 car predates the stupid auto-re-enabling ADAS requirement in Europe, the 2024+ models have single button deactivation. I dunno how, cause it’s supposed to require a minimum of two presses legally, but it sure makes me wanna stick with Mazda.
However that makes the upcoming 6E that much more disappointing. They’ve partnered with a Chinese manufacturer, I assume because they don’t have an EV platform of their own ready yet. Looks fantastic from the outside, but the inside is a sea of touch screens with barely a physical control in sight.