gyomu

In 5-10 years an Apple Watch will run a Fable level model locally. I don’t think we (hackers) should worry too much about token cost inflation. The current wave of providers, that’s another story.

Can you share studies that show they’re “identical”?

You’re not going to overdose from using your phone too much, or die from withdrawal if you suddenly stop using your phone, so that seems like a stretch.

32x memory isn't that big of a jump if you go from storing a bunch of low res, low color count textures to a bunch of high res, high color count ones. I don't know if that's what's going on here but given the advertised "DirectX 8 → DXVK → Vulkan → MoltenVK → Metal" rendering pipeline I could easily see some leaky abstractions there that end up consuming a bit more memory than originally.

No, because the premise resides in the fact that human care and creativity is what makes the value.

There is a mountain of human care and creativity to draw from; and nothing wrong with adding to the mountain.

But why bother with the statistical simulacra of the mountain (or raise your children on it).

I have a 8GB M1 that still worked great, until macOS 26 severely degraded its performance. Thankfully the macOS 27 beta somewhat improved things (although Xcode is more of a slog than it used to be).

I’d like to not upgrade until they offer OLED on the Air (I use it solely as a travel machine), but I might be waiting for a while…

I derive lots of value from Little Snitch on my Mac, so this approach is more effective than not having anything.

And yes, having the ability to deny any app network access on iOS would be great.

Better yet, a tool like Little Snitch should be built into the OS. Give me a detailed log of every network requests, to which domains, with what data.

society at large will benefit from the infrastructure

Data centers as infrastructure are very different from DSL rollout though. Much, much more expensive to maintain, with a much much shorter timespan.

If the bubble pops and data centers get shut down because there’s no one to pay the bills, there won’t be much left 5-10 years later in terms of infrastructure.

I think every one of those animations are system-supplied ones. Some are likely SwiftUI ones

Yes, this is a major factor for the regression in overall UI quality and consistency on Apple platforms. SwiftUI aims to make all those fancy animations transitions a single line view modifier rather than 30 lines of manually specified CoreAnimation easing curves and manual animation blocks, but it results in a lot of things just feeling janky, because one-size-fits-all rule and precise polish are fundamentally at odds.

Rewrite in Swift

A bit fallacious because if you've been supporting the proper size classes API and not hardcoding assumptions about windows/orientation/etc. (as Apple has been telling you to do every WWDC for like 10 years now), there's basically 0 work to do.

Yes, those tools are extremely good at reverse engineering. With a bit of know how, it is now trivial to reverse engineer any protocol or crack any software, often in a matter of hours or less.

A lot of people in the industry have vested interests in this not being discussed openly so you don't hear too much about it, but the implications are huge.

If your definition of machine is "purely physical object behaving according to rules"[0], then one could argue that everything in the universe is a machine, which is not a very useful definition.

[0] where I assume you mean rules = "laws of physics", because if we were to choose the more conventional definition of rule = "an accepted principle or instruction that states the way things are or should be done", then your own definition doesn't apply to cells or other biological entities

We are talking about physical replication, please let me know when a computer worm can turn my laptop into 2 laptops

Otherwise you’re just arguing that Sims are totally alive because Sims can make baby Sims.

Yes again, ribosomes have nothing in common with machines, that are built and designed by humans.

The ball is in your camp to provide solid reasons to believe why they should be grouped together, when one is a deeply complex interrelated dynamic system (in fact, arguably the most complex system we know of) evolved bottom up over billions of years that we only very partially understand and cannot fully explain or document, and the other something entirely planned, designed, and produced by humans in which every component is finite and accounted for.

The argument boils down to “well the vibes kind of match to my taste, and it’s the best analogy I have in my analogy toolkit”, which is just not serious reasoning.

Do you disagree with the assumption that cells are machines?

Yes? Literally no machine ever built by humans is capable of (or even hinting at beginnings of capability for) replication or novel synthesis like cells are, let alone autonomously, it’s quite unconceivable that anyone would take this to be a reasonable assumption in the first place.

Who could have known that people wanted quality AND affordability?

If you have spent any time in those gigantic corporations, you know that there is effectively no one there who can actually speak sense and effect change.

No one can say "our laptops are too crappy and too expensive, let's fix it" and actually make it happen.

The people in the marketing department who wrote "Apple's MacBook Neo is a capable machine, and its arrival confirms that there's real appetite for premium quality at accessible prices" probably don't give much of a shit about Dell and its products, other than the fact that they get a paycheck from the company every 2 weeks; many of them probably have MacBooks at home, and many of them won't even be at Dell 18 months from now as they chase the next step in their career.

It's kind of shocking to many people too that even the C-suite execs don't have the power to change much there either. Remember that email from Bill Gates where he suddenly realized that the Windows install experience was shit and asked his underlings to fix it? Of course, nothing got better, and Windows is still a giant turd many years later.

What is a real miracle is that a company the size of Apple has managed to still give a shit after all these years and insane growth. There's plenty of missteps in Cupertino for sure, but compared to the competition it's night and day. Who knows how much longer it'll last.

Before:

- programmers spend time in meetings discussing requirements

- programmers spend time thinking how to improve performance and reliability

- programmers spend time tracking down issues in existing code

- programmers write binary/assembler code

Now:

- programmers spend time in meetings discussing requirements

- programmers spend time thinking how to improve performance and reliability

- programmers spend time tracking down issues in existing code

- programmers write C++/Rust code

Pray tell, where do you see the “programming has been successfully automated” part?

That’s just the nature of these industries.

1) Incumbent is slow, clunky, unpleasant to deal with due to years of accumulated constraints to deal with

2) Newcomer can differentiate themselves by being nimble and pleasant to work with, taking market share

3) Over time newcomer has to deal with increasing amount of scrutiny, fraud, overhead, CYA type practices, etc

4) Newcomer is now incumbent, goto 1)

The voiceover in this video is in a weird uncanny valley where I don't think it's purely AI generated, but it doesn't sound 100% human either. Some sort of AI processing filter maybe? I'm not familiar with what tools are common those days.

Eg at 00:30, for a few seconds there's a marked difference in how the speech sounds - like the filter is turned off or something.

I think the video also mixes things up a bit. For example it compares the skeuomorphism of "Find my Friends" with that of a car maintenance training program - but the latter isn't an example of a skeuomorph ("a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues (attributes) from structures that were necessary in the original"), it merely adopts a realistic graphic design style to mirror the operation it's depicting.

Yes, you get to the heart of the problem - we turned what started of as a document viewer into a general purpose application platform.

Features paramount in a document viewer (broadly, "respect the user's local document viewing preferences") aren't desirable in a general purpose application platform.

A large number of companies/web developers don't think of themselves as offering the user a document to view on their own terms, but rather an "experience" that they want full control over (which means, most of the time: show ads and record user behavior).

If you're offering me a game, fair enough. But if you're showing me my hotel reservation or electric bill, I want a document, not an ""experience"".

way less aggressive with the AI proofreading

It’s funny how anytime an article gets called out for being AI slop on HN, the author’s reaction is something like that: “oh yeah sorry I used AI but just for proofreading I swear, I should’ve done just a tiny bit less”.

No one seems to get the message that relying on AI at all is what makes writing shit. Good writers have confidence in what they produce. The fact that you’re willing to incorporate any AI suggestion at all means you’ve already lost the battle.

In many cases a talented/smart person will bring little to zero value to a country with ossified institutions, but huge value to one with the right systems in place to build value.

We are in the early stages of AI. Anthropic is Altavista and OpenAI is AskJeeves or something. 10-20 years from now the scene will be unrecognizable and all of this will be inconsequential but at the same time it is the fondation on which tomorrow is built.

They’re still fun, but you have to be really good at understanding what your idea of fun is, listening to that voice, and not falling prey to what other people/companies with an agenda are trying to push on you as fun (when it’s just crap designed to fill their pockets).

99% of everything is crap, but if you want to find that 1% that makes you so happy you found it, you have to deal with trudging through that 99%.

Also it helps to try and socialize with people who have similar values and notions of fun as you so they can point you to the things they find fun. You won’t agree a lot of the time, but it’s still interesting directions to have on your radar.

it’s just that a lot of his skills are not transferable because you have to cultivate the kind of taste he spent his whole life acquiring

Steve had great taste and keen insights as a PM, but what pushed him to GOAT status was his intuition for people and his capacity to rally them to his cause. Whether pre-Apple, at early Apple, NeXT, Pixar, or modern Apple, he was consistently able to identify world tier performers and get them to join the vision and do great stuff.

Witness that some of those people are still making Apple what it is 15 years after his death. That’s an insane skill that you very rarely see, whereas as a designer I see people with great taste not that infrequently.

The potential for creepiness and abuse in the example use cases given is too damn high. At Apple scale, a single case of an insane stalker misusing this technology is image destroying - see some of the PR debacles they’ve been facing lately with AirTags.

These sort of things are exactly what hand-rolled setups à la OpenClaude are great for- the potential for insane privacy disaster is still there, but in that case you have no one to blame but yourself.

Large tech companies aren’t going to take that heat for features that aren’t really monetizable.

Our culture only deserves what we feel strongly enough to enshrine and enforce as law.

Americans like to clown on the EU, but consumer protections and privacy laws don’t magically pop up on their own, and businesses don’t all magically act in the consumers’ best interests unless they are legally made to.

The saddest part to me was realizing that pretty much no one gives a shit.

I knew that they were plenty of careless people with no taste for truth or quality in the world, but I didn’t realize there were so many of them.

Especially so amongst my friends and family members and coworkers. Here’s someone who’s now sending AI generated messages for daily communication. Here’s someone who’s now using AI generated slop art to promote their work. Here’s someone who turns to ChatGPT for any random question they have. No regard for beauty or truth or personal expression or the quality of expert work, only hooked to the “get this done” machine.

The Mac Mini and Studio are due for an update in the coming months, a part of this is also probably that they’d rather save memory to build up their next gen model inventory rather than current gen ones?