EnragedParrot

It doesn't, but I've used Apple stuff for going on 25 years now and it is doubtful I will care to move to something different any time soon, so it works for me.

Always the tradeoff with Apple is choice and flexibility versus a seamless and pleasant user experience.

Apple makes this experience as seamless as I think it possibly can be. (As long as you use Safari...). All my passwords synced across all devices all the time, instantly available with faceID or or my fingerprint. Apply pay makes checking out of most online retailers as fast as using my fingerprint or double-clicking the side button on my phone. Passkeys generally starting to replace passwords on many major sites, making the process even faster.

Same for me, I honestly think people are just trying to find things to complain about. I've shopped in the Apple store many times and it's been quick and easy, no hassling by the employees.

I totally agree and everyone should be able to work in their preferred way. I'm very wary of any efforts to entice more people back into offices, though, as it's absolutely not being driven by a desire to offer more flexibility.

I'll be dragged kicking and screaming back into an office, and would only ever consider an in-person role as a stopgap measure while I job hunt.

People have different preferences, but I will never, ever, ever again in my life voluntarily commute hours every day in standstill traffic to a bland, lifeless corporate hellhole of an office to have disinterested polite banter with random people I have nothing in common with to do a job that is entirely based around sitting at my computer. Not when I can work comfortably in the peaceful surroundings of my own home office, decorated and set up exactly how a I want, or even at a local coffee shop (or halfway across the country while visiting family for a month), eat lunch with my wife, walk our dog mid-day, and spend my mornings and evenings peacefully getting household stuff done and relaxing.

The improvement to my quality of life that remote work has produced is so monumental that it's hard to even envision how I coped most days before.

This strikes me as a, "poor carpenter blames his tools" situation. Obviously if a business does a bad job considering the needs of their engineers then the needs of their engineers won't be met, but that doesn't mean that the modern development environment is the problem.

I don't think there is laziness in falling behind the technology curve - the things that worked ten years ago still work today and if you're shipping code then what you're doing is working. But new technologies aren't overly complex and they generally make a developer's life easier, not harder, but they all come with a learning curve. And the landscape evolves quickly, so in order to leverage them you have to stay on top of it.

Lack of dev familiarity.

A well-tooled development environment takes minutes to set up.

This sounds like a symptom of you falling behind the technology curve more than a problem with the technology curve. Most people are achieving vastly more with newer tech than ever could have been done in the early 2000s. You've gotta be looking through some densely rose colored glasses if you think that that the web in the 2000s was just as powerful as the web of today.

I hear the argument being made, it just doesn't make any sense. We are using React to do things vanilla JS could do eyears ago. That doesn't mean React doesn't make doing those things easier. I like Svelte as well, but it likely wouldn't exist today without lessons learned from other frameworks like React.

I think you nailed it. In reality from a business standpoint, Reddit should have taken Selig's offer and bought out Apollo and built the main app around it and injected ads, maybe offered an overpriced subscription to minimize ads for premium users. I think nobody would have complained a bit.

There's also the fact that those complex solutions aren't engineered by a solo developer but by teams, typically even multiple teams each working on a compartmentalized piece of the whole thing.

But now you have to subtract from the "plenty of people" those who are angered and disillusioned over Reddit's treatment of existing community mods and power users. You're whittling down the population of people who actually care about the subreddits they moderate and contribute to. So yeah, you could get them moderated, but the site would mostly go to garbage.

Reddit's triumph from the user perspective is that all of the content is driven by users, and those users are primarily made up of a small and passionate minority. The downfall of this fact from the business side is that Reddit as a company needs to appease those people because without their contributions, nobody would want to use the site.

That's a valid point, but on the flip side, Reddit's content is user driven, and 99% of users never post or contribute anything, they're just on the site to consume content posted by that 1% of power users. Those power users are really the "extremely online" people who are angry about this. If you don't have moderators running subreddits and power users posting quality content, reddit doesn't have a product.

iPhones didn't solve any "problems", but they unquestionably ushered in a new era in smartphone user interfaces. The public wasn't clamoring for a touchscreen phone, Apple just made one up and told everyone it was the best thing ever. And it was. The touchscreen is, for nearly 99% of uses, just better. In the same vein, you'd have to be pretty bereft of imagination to not see how AR/VR promises an incredibly useful and exciting approach to interfaces.

Instead of staring down at a tiny device or simply wracking your brain in desperation any time you need information about something in the world around you (driving/walking direction, business hours, the history of a sculpture in an art gallery, the name of an acquaintance approaching you down the sidewalk, etc.), imagine that the information is just... there. In the environment with you. That is incredibly useful, and is an incredible way to interact with information. Imagine cooking along to a recipe laid out on the countertop in front of you, with generative AI guiding you through different techniques (or even helping you change a tire on a busy roadside).

Instead of needing bunches of different tiny screens for bunches of different use cases (I wake up and sit at my medium work screen, sometimes scroll my tiny screen, go home and sit on the couch and watch my large screen, maybe over the weekend I'll catch a movie on the extra large screen), you just need a single device that produces exactly the screen and environment you want. That's the promise of VR. I could be on a cramped flight watching a movie on an Imax screen or writing code with 3 separate monitors in front of me.

We could go on and on and on just imagining excited scenarios where AR/VR would provide an incredible way to interact with tech. It all just hinges on how well it can be done. Apple has now laid out the requirements needed for a truly satisfying UX with these devices, so the next step will be to see if the industry can make devices small enough, powerful enough, with enough battery life, etc. to make these viable for the average consumer. If that happens, I predict that in 10 years flat-screen based (TVs, smartphones, desktop PCs, laptops) devices will all but disappear.

I'm friendly and cordial with my coworkers, I don't need to be friends with them. The only thing that is missing for me is the pressure to pretend to want to spend social time with random people I only have contact with because our job responsibilities overlap. I always know there's another person on the other end of the Teams call, there's just less of a facade. All I want from my job is to log in, do my work well, and log off at the end of the day. I don't have holes in my social life that I need an employer to fill.

What compelling use cases did the average consumer see for carrying around a computer in their pocket before Apple released the iPhone? There were a bunch of devices on the market all kinda doing what iPhone did, but Apple made it make sense for the average consumer.

I get the impression this model is intended to introduce the product line to the market and give developers something to build on while Apple fine-tunes the hardware. The thing is way overpriced for the average consumer but the tech inside it is wild. I expect we'll see more consumer-friendly models in 2024-2025.

The UI is absolutely awful. As just one example, if I want to view the karma count on a recent comment, in the official app I have to tap my user profile icon in the corner, tap "my profile" (didn't I just tap my profile icon?!), then tap "comments". So now to go back where I was I have to back swipe three times. If I'm in a comment thread and I tap on a user's name, a profile card slides up from the bottom of the screen. If I then want to view that users comment history, I have to tap on their username from the slide up card, and that brings me to the full user profile card, and then I have to tap on the comments tab for that user. To go back to the comment thread, I have to press the back arrow to leave their profile, then press the (x) button on the slide-up profile card - so I back swipe and then down-swipe/tap a button.

It's an absolutely insane and frustrating UX. Things slide in from different directions and there are multiple UI elements with similar (but not identical) functionality. That's on top of crap like not being able to download gifs and videos right to my device and the built in video player being broken. There are so many other major social media apps that do things so much better it just boggles my mind at how bad reddit's is. TikTok is so smooth and easy to use, even Facebook is better.

In Apollo on the other hand, I view my comments by tapping the "profile" button at the bottom of the screen. In a comment thread, to view a user's history, tap their name and their history pops up. It's smooth and intuitive and fast and simple. I always "go back" views by sliding from the left - the interactions never change depending on context so I always know exactly how to navigate intuitively.

> The more likely scenario is that Russia would rather detonate a nuke in Ukraine than lose the war, regardless of what NATO's response would be.

Based on literally nothing but your own fantasies.

It's a terrible policy. Not all conflicts are identical to Iraq. What will be the most damaging for Europe is if Russia is permitted to violently invade and annex neighboring sovereign nations. It's insane that you would think otherwise.

>Western policy risks building up a big Asian military alliance. It should be obvious to China that what is currently happening to Russia is also slated to happen to them. India will be nervous too unless they are hopelessly naive. China and the US were friends once too, back in ... the 2010s...

So your position is, "we should stand aside and turn a blind eye to Russia's violent and unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation because China might worry that we won't allow them to violently invade other countries?"

I tend to use both. Copilot is vastly better for helping scaffold out code and saves me time as a fancy autocomplete, while I use ChatGPT as a "living" rubber duck debugger. But I find that ChatGPT isn't good at debugging anything that isn't a common issue that you can find answers for by Googling (it's usually faster and more tailored to my specific situation, though). That's why I think it's mostly beneficial in that way to junior devs. More experienced devs are going to find that they can't get good answers to their issues and they just aren't running into the stuff ChatGPT is good at resolving because they already know how to avoid it in the first place.

ChatGPT is a godsend for junior developers, it isn't very great at providing coherent answers to more complex or codebase specific questions. Maybe that will change with time but right now it's mostly useful as a learning aid.

I think there's certainly a risk of information overload, but I'd say that's a risk of our modern lives in general, whether we have AR glasses or not. Well-designed AR would, in my opinion, be vastly less intrusive than having to stare into a handheld device for hours a day. I would trust Apple to make a well-designed UI for the thing if and when they manage to release them. 3rd party apps not so much (although certainly there will be a handful of great ones). That's more on users making informed choices about the apps they download than a downside of AR, though.

You're already wading through ads and product placement. They're just physical signs.

It's absolutely a game-changer. Imagine having driving or walking directions laid out on the street in front of you. Imagine using AI to help you identify things like engine parts in your car, plants, birds, other people (never forget a name again). Looking at a package and scanning the barcode to get price comparisons. Recipe directions on the counter in front of you, even labeling the next ingredient and how much of it to measure. Walk into a museum and see highlighted details of every painting or information about a particular element in a sculpture. First aid details right in front of you, keeping both hands free to offer assistance in a roadside accident. Live AR-driven instructions for changing a tire or locating an oilpan plug.

Currently any time you need information you have to pull yourself away from your present moment to dive into your phone. AR will make it so the information you need is just integrated into the world around you.

I'm not sure that the regulation being proposed by Altman is good, but you're vastly misstating the actual purported threat posed by AI. Altman and the senators quoted in the article aren't expressing fear that AI is becoming sentient, they are expressing the completely valid concern that AI sounds an awful lot like not-AI nowadays and will absolutely be used for nefarious purposes like spreading misinformation and committing identity crimes. The pace of development is happening way too rapidly for any meaningful conversations around these dangers to be had. Within a few years we'll have AI-generated videos that are indistinguishable from real ones, for instance, and it will be impossible for the average person to discern if they're watching something real or not.

The "What's New" tab only opens when I don't open Code into a project directory, usually it opens right into the last file I was working on. The extensions notifications I suppose could be an annoyance, but I seldomly encounter new file types, so it's a non-issue for me and I suspect most users.