akersten

Misquote or not, the article is bang on and I think a better interpretation of that sequence of words anyway.

Thanks for highlighting the "one element cross fades into a totally different one" example. That particular type of animation really makes an app feel ungrounded and unreliable to me, it gives a sense that the UI elements aren't really tied closely to the data and are just barely existing. And somehow I see it all the time across tons of apps.

The improved versions where the elements actually transform into each other, sharing the same visual real estate, is so much better.

> All I’m really getting from this is that I should avoid animations

Wouldn't be the worst takeaway from the article. You should avoid animation for animation's sake in general. Imagine if we animated letters flying up from your phone's keyboard into the text field as you type them for example.

Yeah the difference is that the blur frames are deliberate and purposeful for the overall effect. The animations showcased here are accidental jank that reveal a clobbered together unpolished app.

The author's example of a conventional commit is not correct anyway IMO, which is maybe why they think the "fix" part is redundant:

> fix: prevent foo from bar'ing

The whole idea of conventional commit is:

> fix: [problem]

so the correct conventional commit would be:

> fix: foo bar'ing

which is succinct and perfectly fine.

> Agreed, this can't be worse than what it's replacing.

The mistake is assuming this replaces anything instead of becoming just one more piece of the tracking puzzle.

Even if it did "replace" cookies or whatever, it's strictly worse than "before" because it's giving advertising a front seat in the browser. My browser should be doing precisely nothing to help you attribute your ad impressions or whatever. But now Mozilla et al have to waste their time maintaining and augmenting this opaque piece of mathematical faff.

It's actually extremely useful and an apt comparison. I don't think the allowed shapes of formed metal should be regulated either.

If you do something bad with your tool (knife or LLM), though, that's the problem. And we have laws for that already.

Yeah, it's clear to see that they'd want to get in front of something like that happening again. My point though is that the pull quote I highlighted is a flimsy reassurance because "it all happens on the device" does not at all prevent "Apple knowing about it," yet the sentence is constructed in a way that (tricks?) people into thinking it would.

Sure, what I meant is "without actually taking a stance on what the article is about and opinions on Apple's feature aside, I dislike the particular placation presented within"

> Because the photos and videos are analyzed on your child's device, Apple doesn't receive an indication that nudity was detected and doesn't get access to the photos or videos as a result.

Apropos of nothing, I really don't love the construction of this reassurance. This is not actually a reasoned-through guarantee, it's just two things that happen to be true at the same time. But the latter could change at any point, on-device processing does not preclude the device notifying Apple about what it saw.

It must be a tricky problem to balance. On the one hand, you as Google want people to create 30 seconds of video per month with your cool Omni, Flow, Gemini, etc. tools.

On the other hand, as soon as people share those things on the logical platform for sharing videos, they'll be branded with the scarlet letter.

I wonder what Google is thinking - that people won't mind? That it won't matter? That Omni is just marketing and they don't actually want people to use it?

> they incentivize people with power to manipulate the real world in horribly destructive ways to win a bet.

How does the same line of argument not also suggest that stock markets be prohibited?

And the most critical thing about JPG is that the decoding is deterministic. Who's to say this fancy new PICO thing doesn't produce different pixels in a year when the algorithm improves, or the local model changes, etc.

Imo, generative AI and its derivatives should be completely shunned as image/video encoders. They are simply an inappropriate tool for the job. And I say that as an AIpilled token addict.

It would be like saying hey check out my amazing new text compression algorithm, 97x better than LZMA, then you look at the encoded file and it says "generate a romance story between two characters named Romeo and Juliet"

IPOing soon at $11B btw

Personally, having to buy the barely-changed newest yearly edition of half a dozen $300 textbooks per semester of undergrad totally radicalized my view on copyright.

You are very convinced of your position and I don't think I'll un-convince you, but you have to realize that people with opinions different from yours are not "brain damaged so that's why I must be getting downvoted, and the more I'm downvoted the more correct I must be."

I'll leave a variant of your argument here for you to mull over, and consider whether the bathroom-breaker here is just as morally bankrupt as the online ad-blocker:

> There is no way to reconcile [over the air TV] where the suckers who cannot figure out [how to leave the room during ad breaks] carry the overhead costs for those who do. It costs money to create the content you consume, it costs money to serve the content you consume. [Broadcast television] is not some magical exemption from standard financial practice going back millennia. The cost is your burden, take it or leave it. But don't take it then do mental gymnastics about why it's not actually something you value while walking away with free,

> The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly a maintenance dead end.

In the Tailwind thread the other day I was explicitly told that the intended experience of many frameworks is "write-only code" so maybe this is just the way of the future that we have to learn to embrace. Don't worry how it's all hooked up, if it works it works and if it stops working tell the AI to fix it.

It's kind of liberating I guess. I'm not sure if I've reached AI nirvana on accepting this yet, but I do think that moment is close.

Hmm. I think extrapolating from the reddit people who say "I tried vibe coding an entire app from scratch and all I said was fix this and make no mistakes and it didn't work" is a bad data source and will give you the wrong intuition. Of course it won't work when you hold it like that. But put just a tiny bit of knowledge and guidance into the prompt and AI will nail it.

I didn't think this 6 months ago but today after what I've seen these models debug and accomplish in established, messy production monoliths, I'm fully convinced even the worst vibe coders are only a year or two away from being able to actually create something from scratch and have it not blow up 50 files in.

So I guess I take the totally opposite stance, today's AI is the worst AI will ever be at coding, and I believe the vested interests behind AI do not plan on making it any worse at this task, so...

> It's totally, and completely, unambiguous. The internet just has collective brain damage

The point that continues to be missed is that instead of taking downvotes as validation that people simply failed to comprehend the argument you're making (they didn't), you should take them as a check to reevaluate whether your conclusion is as unambiguous as you believe.

Man, I wish folks calibrated their E(I am actually wrong|downvotes). Have you considered what that value could be in this case?

> [fighting against the system] is tacitly accepting the barcode.

I don't really see it. I think it's important to win on both fronts.

There's an underappreciated comment in the other thread about SynthID and OpenAI [0] that captures what (IMO) the hacker ethos on this should be. We care about privacy, we should not accept tools that barcode our every digital move. (note that the counter of "well, they don't do that yet" is not particularly convincing)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48200060

This was done in the past, Google saw it, and now either refuses to generate or doesn't emit the SynthID watermark for those images

> That's a lot of hyperbole, there's no cause/effect relationship I can think of here that could realistically produce your slippery slope.

Have you been watching the headlines over the last year? It's like there's a global push towards locked down and verified computing (age verification, TPMs everywhere, Captchas that only work on non-rooted phones, ...).

You can look out the window and see movement in this direction happening right now. Governments and corporations around the world can't get enough of this shit. Privacy matters, advocating for it is not a "slippery slope."

> this AI detection watermark [...] that to be clear can not track you in any way.

Is that clear? We have no idea what metadata they are or aren't embedding in SynthID.

> Google or anyone else could start adding those unique tracking watermarks you're concerned about any time they want,

The point is that this is bad and should be denounced!

My favorite feature of Plex is that it resets the subtitle track to `None` when the next episode in a series starts. I love manually switching on the same named subtitle track every 30 minutes! $749 is actually too cheap for such an amazing feature.

Long time ago TrueCrypt suddenly and abruptly shut down with a vague goodbye message saying "everyone please move on and use bitlocker instead"

Prevailing theory is they were pressured to put in a backdoor and couldn't disclose it, so they had to make a seemingly ridiculous statement (because who in their right mind would trust bitlocker) to call attention that "something is very wrong"

> Now your first instinct might be to "that’s unreadable", but keep in mind HOW you actually read and write this code. You’re not actually reading it to understand what it does like you do with iterative code. You see how the browser renders it, and you just adapt the code. Tailwind code is mostly write-only and maintained by viewing what the component looks like. This code doesn’t need to be reusable either, the whole component needs to be. The Tailwind code inside is unique.

I think this helped me finally understand the chasm between tailwind proponents and me. I just don't think I'll ever be part of the "keep painting each room a slightly different shade until it looks right" camp, when there's the "you can buy all the same color paint ahead of time, and even have some left over for the next five rooms you build" option right there.

Yeah, tailwind as write-only code definitely tracks. I guess some people like that. Not my bag though.

I think the new world cannot be born is larger than just AI. Even before llms we had a whole generation of people going through CS curriculum who call the Internet "wifi" and don't know what a file is. Even if LLMs disappeared tomorrow my faith that we'll ever have the same curious and brilliant minds in our field as yesteryear is fading. I hope I'm wrong.

> If the person who wrote this were to be imprisoned for the rest of their life [...] then things would be very different

Yes, they certainly would. You wouldn't have smartphones, for instance.

I can't tell if this is satirical or not. But there are so many takes like this recently (hold the website liable for user content, hold the corporate developer liable for zero days in a project they happened to touch) that would all result in the same outcome (no more product at all) that I can't help but wonder if there's some luddite psy-op trying desperately to bring us back to a pre-Internet era in any way they can...

Based on the recent comments I've seen around here, selecting whether "Social Media" or "Private Prisons" are worse for society is somehow, inexplicably, a tough decision.

Many of the options here are also confusing. "Pharmaceuticals" as one of the options among other generally-considered bad things? Pharmaceuticals have saved millions of lives. Am I supposed to assume we're talking about the opiate crisis specifically or something?