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cageface

19,336 karma · joined March 1, 2009

info@plastaq.com
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cageface··on I've been loving Claude Code on the web
This matches my experience. Codex is just more capable. But Sonnet is also quite good and much faster.

So lately I'll start with Sonnet for everything but the most complex tasks and then switch to Codex when needed.

cageface··on Gemini 3.0 spotted in the wild through A/B testing
For writing code at least this has been exactly my experience. GPT5 is the best but slow. Sonnet 4.5 is a few notches below but significantly faster and good enough for a lot of things. I have yet to get a single useful result from Gemini.
cageface··on F-Droid and Google’s developer registration decree
This has not been my experience with Flutter at all. It's made building a non trivial cross platform app so much easier and for the few things I've needed to drop down to native it's been very easy.
cageface··on Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time
He very often brings other knowledge to bear in conversations that clearly wasn't just prep work for the specific topic. He's not strong on science but he has a firm grounding in literature, philosophy and history that isn't common these days.
cageface··on Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time
It won't be easy to find somebody with his breadth of knowledge to replace him.
cageface··on Apple vs the Law
I finally gave up and pulled all my iOS apps from the store after receiving yet another app update rejection from a reviewer that clearly hadn't spent 5 minutes trying to understand what the app is for. I'm tired of begging for having access to my users restored every time something like this happens and I'm through feeling that powerless.

From now on I'm an Android user and only building PWAs.

cageface··on Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS
You could give my app a shot too:

https://www.plastaq.com/minimoon

cageface··on Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS
You could also try my app:

https://www.plastaq.com/minimoon

cageface··on Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff
Maybe this could explain why mental illness & creativity seem to be so closely related? Just as one example, James Joyce's daughter was schizophrenic.
cageface··on Generative AI's failure to induce robust models of the world
but this depends on the antecedent claim that much if not all of reason is strictly representational and strictly linguistic.

Most of these newer models are multi-modal, so tokens aren't necessary linguistic.

cageface··on Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
My experience too. Here in Bangkok I never bother to even open it anymore.
cageface··on Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
Even if you like the general direction of SwiftUI it's way less mature on the mac and being tied to the OS version means you have to deal with all the churn it's had in the last three years to ship with it on the mac. Very few devs are going to bother with this.
cageface··on Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
This might be true in the US but it's close to worthless in a lot of the rest of the world.
cageface··on I Built My Own Audio Player
You could give my app a shot too:

https://www.plastaq.com/minimoon

cageface··on Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri
Only in the US. Apple Maps is still far behind Google Maps in most of the rest of the world.
cageface··on Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options
I think the term you're looking for is virtue signaling.
cageface··on Apple's Software Quality Crisis
Yeah that view builder syntax is a perfect example of optimizing for the wrong thing. It makes for nice short examples but in real apps your compile times explode trying to untangle these crazy generics and the compiler very often just throws up its hands and tells you to figure it out. This means you just start commenting out bits of code until you find by trial and error what it doesn't like.

That this is shipping in the native UI framework for a trillion dollar tech company is astonishing.

cageface··on Apple's Software Quality Crisis
You can really see this when trying to build apps with Swift & SwiftUI. The language and the framework seem to be optimized for nice terse WWDC demos but both fall apart pretty quickly when you start to do any heavy UI lifting with them. And I think that's starting to bleed into their own native UI now too. The lousy macOS settings app is a good example.

Unfortunately there don't seem to be any good alternatives to Apple. Windows is even worse.

cageface··on Visualize Ownership and Lifetimes in Rust
If I have a complex structure MyStruct that I make recursively readonly it doesn't show up in the IDE as DeepReadOnly<MyStruct> or something like that. It shows up as a huge tree of nested readonly declarations, so the original type is highly obscured.
cageface··on Visualize Ownership and Lifetimes in Rust
Right this is what I tried to do but unfortunately trying to mark everything immutable in Typescript leads to some very unergonomic type signatures. Hopefully this can improve in the future.
cageface··on Visualize Ownership and Lifetimes in Rust
I recently came to this realization in a large typescript codebase. It's really important to understand who owns data and who has the right to modify it. Having tools to manage this and make it explicit built into the language is so helpful for code correctness and is especially beneficial for maintaining code you didn't write yourself.
cageface··on DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player
It's both desktop and mobile. If you're browsing on mobile it will show you screenshots of the mobile app.

The sync app is separate, free app just used for serving files to the mobile app for syncing though.

cageface··on Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
Most of my classmates would have been very interested in an academic career if they thought their chances were even one in ten and this was in a top tier program. And they were all totally willing to relocate too.
cageface··on Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
When I was in graduate school the chances of getting a tenured position weren't anywhere close to 1 in 3. Where are you getting that number?
cageface··on DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player
You could add mine to that list: https://www.plastaq.com/minimoon
cageface··on We are destroying software
I guess I just see so many of these "the whole industry except for me is doing it wrong" kinds of posts but almost never see anybody really back it up with anything concrete that I've grown extremely skeptical.
cageface··on We are destroying software
I think I'd need a lot more than one claim with no evidence that this is true but I appreciate the thoughtful response all the same.

Outside of really edge case stuff like real time low level systems software optimizing performance is not that hard and I've worked with many engineers over my long career that can do it. They just rarely have the incentive. In a few particular areas where it's critical and users are willing to pay software can still command a premium price. Ableton Live is a good example.

cageface··on We are destroying software
If you really think what you're doing can be easily generalized then you're leaving a lot of money on the table by not doing it.
cageface··on We are destroying software
This is the inevitable result of decades of feature creep in software that tries to be too general and meet every enterprise edge case.
cageface··on We are destroying software
You can get all the software quality you want if you're willing to pay for it.

Users have now been taught that $10 is a lot to pay for an app and the result is a lot of buggy, slow software.

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