zaidf

An entire generation of non developers are being onboarded to products built for developers because of AI. Exampl: a very non technical friend has built a bunch of business automations with Claude and a few days ago he just dropped in the conversation that he is using Cloudflare. “For what?” I asked because usually Claude will recommend Cercel before Cloudflare. But in this case, it recommended Cloudflare because of the Tunnels feature. Now he is using it for a lot more than Tunnels. Mostly just lets Claude use it whenever it makes sense.

“To what end?” was the default reaction when Amazon launched S3 in mid 2000s :)

He was talking about Excel. Google Sheets with a tiny fraction of Excel features destroyed Excel except for a tiny minority of hardcore finance and Windows users.

Fair enough. But tides do shift. A lot of today’s terrible patterns (like flat design) were born in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The current generation of UI and UX folks—for simplicity, designers in their 20s—who are empowered to make both big and small decisions at Big Tech are largely riding that inherited wave. There’s still time for their taste to evolve as their confidence and seniority grow.

My hope is that the new generation of designers/UX people question and reject many of the UI/UX patterns made popular in the past 15 years and go back to the 90s for inspiration. Resources like the Apple Design Guidelines from 1992 linked in the OP is excellent!

Perhaps my biggest gripe is that many of these terrible UI/UX patterns are built in at such a low level, it is near impossible for developers to override them in the software they build. For example, I really dislike flat UI and particularly flat scrollbars. But it is near impossible to add scrollbars that look like these in any Windows or Mac app I build: https://flowingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/evolution...

Usability has become theatre across Apple products. The sad part is that since Microsoft just seems to copy Apple, over time Windows usability has also degraded severely. I am so frustrated by what Apple, Microsoft and Google have done.

The problem is that CSS continues to be a pain in the ass, even as it evolves. There is no other reason why something like tailwind should have the traction it has.

This is what C2PA is trying to do: https://c2pa.org/

40% (and growing) of Apple’s profits are from services. Margins on services are 3x of hardware.

Apple doesn’t make money directly when you doom scroll but a lot of App Store revenue is a by product of people simply using their device in unlocked state.

No. I don’t want Apple to make LLM Siri. I do wish they would become the company unlocking creativity instead of shackling it. I will give you one specific example: iOS has extreme limitations on what it allows app developers to display on the Lock Screen. The area each app gets is limited. What gets displayed and how is very limited. How often the data gets displayed is limited.

This might sound like nitpick. But I guarantee you that if they removed many of these limitations, it will reduce total screen time: because many things that make people unlock their phone can be done from the Lock Screen…if only Apple leadership would allow and incentivize their product and engineering teams. Instead, they want people to force unlocking of the screen to do actual productive tasks because the next thing people instinctively do is…doom scroll. And doom scrolling is profitable for Apple.

It is 2025. I have to unlock and open Google Maps to reliably tell when the next train will arrive. Why? I’ve tried many apps that attempt to fix this. They are all severely limited by the iOS restrictions. Why? What are they optimizing for?

The Camera Roll app is a clusterfuck.

Apple Maps is considering introducing ads.

iOS makes little attempt to tell you about trials: I download an app, I enable the trial, I conclude within minutes this app is not it. Now to cancel, I have to make 5+ taps. Often, I forget until I get the receipt from Apple. You’re telling me no PM at Apple has proposed mechanisms like a reminder or popup a day before my trial ends asking if I want to cancel or keep the subscription? Apple knows after all that I have barely used this app!

I can keep going. Like OP said, it is pretty obvious the focus is on milking the cow. This is unfortunate because Apple’s positioning was to do the right thing for the user who paid a premium for the device. They are increasingly and consistently doing things that makes the CFO happy at the expense of its user base.

It’s not JavaScript if you can’t make an html page locally and open it in your browser without things like an http server or need to transpile.

Dumb question: why do news websites have such a hard time keeping users logged in? Like I can go an entire year without getting logged out of gmail. But can't go more than a few days before getting logged out of news websites.

I have subscribed to news sites and still use something like archive.is because it is faster than my paid experience.

I've been stunned by how many smart people talk so casually about LLMs becoming better at math. Do they just forget that a calculator that is wrong 1% of the time is a de facto calculator that doesn't work and should not be used?

Good luck. I lost access to my Facebook account of 18 years a few years ago due to some 2fa bug (it tells me to enter a code from the fb app which doesn’t have that code.) Despite sending copies of my passport, license etc, the automated systems are of no help.

Closest thing I’ve used is the mighty: https://bemighty.com/products/mighty-audio-screenless-connec...

Downside is it doesn’t allow mp3s. I’ve been making my own meditation mp3s using AI tools and wish I could listen to them when I’m on my walk with mighty and no phone.

I think the real question is if someone other than Steve Jobs was running Apple, would they have gone the same way the companies you listed go as well?

John Sculley already answered this, no?

Hi, just responded to Jérôme's email. I originally sent a twitter DM and will continue over email now that we are connected.

(I work on the Images product at Cloudflare)

While I continue to dig in to the specifics of the billing and support issues described, I can confirm this bit from the blog post:

if you stored 2 million images and delivered 1 million images, your total cost for that month for the Images product should be ~$210, not $400+

I've reached out to the author to get some additional information which will help me investigate this further. Also happy to chat with anyone else with questions or issues (zaid at cloudflare)

From where I sit, $4.8 million in cash is plenty of runway for 100 people

LinkedIn shows ~350 employees with about half of them in the US. $4.8 million is far from plenty to pay 300+ employees...not counting lawyers.

Agree 100%. Lived in the Tenderloin for 6+ years before moving to a nicer part of SF.

Credit card companies are anti-porn.

False. Credit card companies are simply protecting their business. From what? The laws and court rulings that make them liable for damages from really terrible edge case scenarios.

Uzi Nissan was one of the more interesting people I met as a freelancer in college. He replied to a craigslist ad and we met for coffee. He had some crazy ideas (and conspiracies:) about all the things he wanted to hire a freelancer to do with nissan.com

I feel like others lose opportunities by not doing the same

IMO it is a slippery slope to see this as opportunity too strongly. Sure, doing the right thing may be net beneficial to the business in the long run...but the $RIGHT_THING should be done first and foremost because it's the right thing.

Could not agree more strongly!

What's a better alternative in your view?

Softlayer was solid at providing colo and dedicated servers. But they were never really architected with the cloud in mind. The pivot to cloud came later on. I always wonder why IBM didn't buy a provider like Linode.

The overarching skillset that really smart people use everyday to explain how x works or investigate a customer issue is...google

The PDF you linked cites lifetime earning data collected from the previous century. It might tell you about how things were 1950-2000. But says little about our current Internet-driven world.

In my early 20s, I deposited a 5 figure check from a client for a contract gig. The bank cleared it. Then it turned out the client had a record of writing fraudulent checks.

Common sense would dictate I was a victim of fraud. But my bank (Wells Fargo) decided to close my lone bank account of 5 years for "suspicious activity."

Ah. SF is at 87% with at least one dose and 80% with at least 2 doses.

I think 62% vs. 80% could be a big enough delta to explain the difference here versus your town.

What's the vaccination rate in your county?

I think when the dust settles, we'll conclude that Omicron for the vaccinated posed very similar risks as the flu. Keyword of course is for the vaccinated. SF is seeing the highest case counts at any point in the pandemic and yet there is no real change in hospitalizations/deaths.

Anecdotally, I've attended two mega indoor concerts in the past couple of months. It is almost impossible that I haven't been exposed to or contracted COVID.