dpark

I didn’t say the code is the same. I said it’s incorrect to say that “ns” has nothing to do with NeXTSTEP.

That’s kind of a weird take. It’s perfectly reasonable that Apple has not attempted to yank all the “NS” references out, but they are absolutely a holdover from NeXTSTEP. That NeXTSTEP no longer exists does not change that.

> I imagine ethics is glaringly missed

You imagine wrong. Everyone I know with a software-engineering-type degree took a mandatory ethics course.

“Authentic” does not imply good. There were millions of poor interfaces coded up before AI.

I’ve seen several of these “slop design” critiques lately. They don’t seem to be coming from people with strong design skills. (Presumably qualified designers have better things to do than critique AI designs. Also they probably know how to get what they want out of the AI instead of accepting what it creates.)

Wow. That is rough. Way too much of that font, especially the initial rendering above the fold.

I am well outside my area of expertise, having underinvested in electrical engineering fundamentals. I trust that you are generally correct but I can’t reconcile that with the fact that Porsche specifically calls out that the system detects living creatures and halts charging. Clearly Porsche believes this is a necessary feature. So does the SAE standard (SAE J2954) apparently.

So while I buy the distinction between magnetic coupling and propagating EM waves, it seems that there is some risk.

I did not mean that the inductive pad was blasting microwaves but that the transfer is via electromagnetic waves.

Regardless, your MRI comparison is very apt. MRIs use similar amounts of energy for scanning and do sometimes cause burns. But no one seems to be getting cooked.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9849420/

Maybe? I’m definitely not an expert in inductive charging. I would think a cat laying between the charging pad and the receiver would be getting a big hit of radio waves. Maybe not.

> How can one know if the engineers' proposed "BIG systemic change" is appropriate and complete, without knowing the details of the problem it is addressing?

That’s the trust thing. Maybe the SVP trusts the people in his organization are capable of making the appropriate change without his supervision and what he’s doing is coaching them on how to do an incident postmortem properly.

Of course as you called out, the SVP might already have all the necessary details to do more than that. But simply pushing people in the right direction is a big piece of leadership’s job, at least when they have people they trust.

“Trust” is usually bounded. I trust my elementary aged son to get dressed for school without supervision. That doesn’t mean I trust him to start a campfire without supervision. A chef might trust that their new employee is a hard worker and well intentioned. That doesn’t mean they also trust them to create and serve original dishes.

Here you are recasting “I trust that, despite the bad outcome, everyone’s actions here were reasonable” as “I trust that you are going to solve this fully without my guidance”. The fact that the word “trust” appears in both of these statements does not make them equivalent. Trusting that people are capable and well intentioned does not mean trusting that they will accomplish the same thing without you.

> and let’s be honest, most code in the wild is pretty bad

Most code in general is bad by some metric, and likely many metrics. Let’s not pretend that closed-source, in-house code is better.

> There is no fitness function you can define for maintainable code, at least not one that we can discern, otherwise it would’ve been baked into our linters.

This is emotionally appealing because it tells me that my judgement is irreplaceable. But it’s also essentially an appeal to magic. A metric than cannot be defined is either not real or is a matter of taste. And maintainability cannot be a question of taste because it makes concrete claims about the software, not just human perception of it.

All this is to say that we have yet to establish that “vibe-coded projects devolve over time into an unmaintainable mess” is a fact, or that it’s more true of vibe coded projects than hand coded projects. We are still learning how to build the right guard rails on vibe coded software because previously we relied a lot on humans reasoning over the code and saying “this looks about right” which frankly is not a strong engineering practice to start with.

You take a picture of your wife with your phone. You show it to a coworker. They tell you that your wife looks like a reptile wearing a rubber face mask.

Your reaction is?

a. “Yeah, the slight over processing definitely turned my wife into a lizard person.”

b. “Fuck you.”

> Your odds of hitting it randomly are tiny, and it will probably the damage the port with enough repetitions of ramming it into the floor.

Why would it be random? The scenario here is self driving cars. Suddenly we are talking about random jostling instead of actually targeting.

> Change your reference point to the plane carrying the fuel and they get an awful lot closer. The planes are moving a lot relative to the ground, they're moving very little relative to each other. I'm not sure if you've watched them doing it, but relative to each other it's actually a very slow process.

What is your point here? I’m totally lost. You seem to be trying to hand-wave away the difficulty of refueling mid flight. The specific difficulty there is the fact that it’s happening at high velocity, not the difficulty of plugging a hose into a port. (Traditional mid air refueling is manually directed anyway.)

You are probably fully capable of fueling your car at a self serve gas station. Try doing the same at highway speed. Just reach out the window of the vehicle you are in and fill up your friend’s car from a gas can. Should be easy since the cars are “moving very little relative to each other”, right?

I suspect a lot of management have been sold on scrum because they see it as a way to micromanage employees rather than manage change.

It’s definitely a trade off but both options have a lot of real world concerns. If safeguards on the wireless pad fail you could easily cook an animal or start a fire. The bottom of the car now needs to be metal free to allow this to work. Distance matters which means if it charges your Porsche it might not be able to charge a Rivian and certainly not with the same efficiency.

I also frankly do not believe the 90% efficiency claim because it seems so much higher than any other wireless charging I’ve heard of.

This seems like one of those things that seems cool but is not generally practical. As a convenience for wealthy Porsche EV owners, sure. As a general purpose charging solution? I doubt it.

“Start your own company” in this industry seems to generally mean “spend your time begging VCs for money”.

> Most scrum shops would not permit this level of backstory anymore … not much supervision

If someone needs close supervision to ensure they don’t get stuck like this and spiral, they probably aren’t ready to be a senior engineer.

> What's insulting about overprocessed photos?

This is a heavy walk-back from reptile wearing a rubber mask. It should not be hard to understand why that statement can be seen as insulting.

> You can clearly see that the arbitrary part of the face of the girl in front is literally blurred

Not really. It’s a bit smoothed but the smoothest parts of her face are also where the skin is stretched tightest from smiling. It is actually smoother in those areas. I don’t see a ton of difference in the foreground between the skin texture in the different photos.

Background is different but as you said, that’s blood from a stone. The data just isn’t there.

The point wasn’t that my robot vacuum is handling large current but that “moving device connects to power” is a solved problem. A car capable of driving itself onto this pad could as easily drive itself to a spot to plug in. Extendo-arm from the car could easily slot into an outlet in the floor. Or vice versa. Or a wall or pole.

Planes refueling mid flight is hardly an apt metaphor given the charging station isn’t moving at all and the car can move as slowly as needed.

> what's with the downvotes?

Presumably because others disagree. I also do not see it here. Zooming in there are clear pores and skin texture. Is it somewhat smoothed? Yeah, it has that feel. Does it look like a cheap rubber mask? No. And that phrasing is frankly very insulting to the pictured subjects.

I don’t know. I’ve stopped using my wireless phone charger because it’s spotty. Sometimes it charges. Sometimes it doesn’t (or barely charges). Sometimes it wakes me up at night because it’s glitching in between charging and noncharging states and my phone feels the need to beep and wake me up.

I’ve seen similar issues with multiple watch chargers. “Oh, it didn’t charge overnight again.”

I’m not as sold on wireless charging as I once was.

> the video on the linked post

The 3D rendered video of a car driving over the pad doesn’t really show anything unlocked. There are a lot of possible ways to build automated charging stations. This is not necessary tech for that scenario.

I have a robot vacuum that manages to do automated direct contact charging just fine. I don’t understand why wireless would be any easier. It seems more complex and less safe than a direct wired connection.

I also have a lot of trouble believing in the scenario of a neighborhood that has an automated charging station for EVs but no grid. That seems like very misplaced priorities.

“I can tell because I judge that my judgement is correct.”

> claimed a real Monet painting was an AI generated imitation

This is like the transvestigator creeps who think they can tell with 100% accuracy who is trans but they are regularly fooled by pictures of cis women when seeded with the notion that they might be trans.

Some AI is obvious. Some much less so, and a lot of non-AI content is being caught up in the amateur dragnets.

I don’t have visibility into what happened with the Windows Phone team, but Android from what I understand saw immediately that they needed to follow Apple’s lead and pivoted (originally they were building something closer to a BlackBerry). The Windows Phone team either didn’t believe they need to pivot initially or they just took too long to do so.

Windows Phone is a case study of missed opportunity.

Windows Phone 7 didn’t ship until 2 years after Android. 2 more years later Windows Phone 8 was released and it was a legitimate option but just too late.

Pre-7 was just not an operating system that anyone except the geekiest of geeks wanted to use.

My dude the question is not what danger a ring poses but why tungsten poses a higher risk. The flesh on your finger is much softer than a normal wedding band. Again, Jimmy Fallon is an excellent example of this. He fell in his kitchen and his very traditional platinum band took the flesh off his finger when it caught on the counter.

The additive part on the iPhone was:

1. A screen that covers the whole device.

2. A device that doesn’t suck for touch.

The loss of the physical keyboard was indeed actually a loss, but was offset by meaningful improvements.

My problem with most of these proposed devices is that they are purely subtractive. I can run ChatGPT or Claude or whatever on my phone right now. Where is the part where a new type of device delivers some new experience or capability?