5,508 karma · joined December 11, 2023
I’m only using it as a travel machine now, trying to hold on from upgrading it until I can get an Air with OLED display - hopefully coming in <24 months…
see the colored bits essay for an ur-example of this
If you do want to get into the "where big":
Shamanic/ritual/religious/social practices that wholly involve hallucinatory experiences (both with and without the aid of hallucinogenic substances) are well attested and documented throughout human development.
So the existence is there; if you want to argue that actually it was a Bad Thing for human collectives, from Siberia to the Amazon, from 50k years ago to the present day, to engage in these practices and that they'd have been much better off Not Doing It, I guess the burden of that proof is on you?
Case in point, the latest Samsung foldable that just happens to be the exact same unseen before form factor as the upcoming Apple foldable, released the month before, even though Android has been “innovating in the foldable space” for like 10 years now.
Because until now no one working on those foldable phones had the guts to say “wait let’s not just the take the existing phone screen aspect ratio and make it foldable, this new screen technology should make us rethink the overall form factor” - it took Apple to make that step.
Unless you want to be the guy in the 19th century making fun of Boole algebra for having no practical use. You might be right, but not for long.
This was true already before AI code generation, but AI code generation means the definition of “fast” has shifted like crazy. An experienced engineer can now build in an hour what would have taken them a week.
But it (right now) does nothing for the confidence about being correct - you still have to put in the extra time to ensure the software is correct to your desired degree of confidence.
Unfortunately for people who like their software to be correct (stable, performant, bug free, etc), it seems like way too many software developers right now are happy to take the gains of the former but ignore the tradeoffs of the latter.
(at the same time software quality for mainstream consumer goods like the kind of thing OP complains about in their post has been down the drain for a long time now, and it seems likely many of the examples they give are pre-AI)
You’re not going to overdose from using your phone too much, or die from withdrawal if you suddenly stop using your phone, so that seems like a stretch.
There is a mountain of human care and creativity to draw from; and nothing wrong with adding to the mountain.
But why bother with the statistical simulacra of the mountain (or raise your children on it).
I’d like to not upgrade until they offer OLED on the Air (I use it solely as a travel machine), but I might be waiting for a while…
And yes, having the ability to deny any app network access on iOS would be great.
Data centers as infrastructure are very different from DSL rollout though. Much, much more expensive to maintain, with a much much shorter timespan.
If the bubble pops and data centers get shut down because there’s no one to pay the bills, there won’t be much left 5-10 years later in terms of infrastructure.
Yes, this is a major factor for the regression in overall UI quality and consistency on Apple platforms. SwiftUI aims to make all those fancy animations transitions a single line view modifier rather than 30 lines of manually specified CoreAnimation easing curves and manual animation blocks, but it results in a lot of things just feeling janky, because one-size-fits-all rule and precise polish are fundamentally at odds.
A lot of people in the industry have vested interests in this not being discussed openly so you don't hear too much about it, but the implications are huge.
[0] where I assume you mean rules = "laws of physics", because if we were to choose the more conventional definition of rule = "an accepted principle or instruction that states the way things are or should be done", then your own definition doesn't apply to cells or other biological entities
Otherwise you’re just arguing that Sims are totally alive because Sims can make baby Sims.
The ball is in your camp to provide solid reasons to believe why they should be grouped together, when one is a deeply complex interrelated dynamic system (in fact, arguably the most complex system we know of) evolved bottom up over billions of years that we only very partially understand and cannot fully explain or document, and the other something entirely planned, designed, and produced by humans in which every component is finite and accounted for.
The argument boils down to “well the vibes kind of match to my taste, and it’s the best analogy I have in my analogy toolkit”, which is just not serious reasoning.
Yes? Literally no machine ever built by humans is capable of (or even hinting at beginnings of capability for) replication or novel synthesis like cells are, let alone autonomously, it’s quite unconceivable that anyone would take this to be a reasonable assumption in the first place.
If you have spent any time in those gigantic corporations, you know that there is effectively no one there who can actually speak sense and effect change.
No one can say "our laptops are too crappy and too expensive, let's fix it" and actually make it happen.
The people in the marketing department who wrote "Apple's MacBook Neo is a capable machine, and its arrival confirms that there's real appetite for premium quality at accessible prices" probably don't give much of a shit about Dell and its products, other than the fact that they get a paycheck from the company every 2 weeks; many of them probably have MacBooks at home, and many of them won't even be at Dell 18 months from now as they chase the next step in their career.
It's kind of shocking to many people too that even the C-suite execs don't have the power to change much there either. Remember that email from Bill Gates where he suddenly realized that the Windows install experience was shit and asked his underlings to fix it? Of course, nothing got better, and Windows is still a giant turd many years later.
What is a real miracle is that a company the size of Apple has managed to still give a shit after all these years and insane growth. There's plenty of missteps in Cupertino for sure, but compared to the competition it's night and day. Who knows how much longer it'll last.
- programmers spend time in meetings discussing requirements
- programmers spend time thinking how to improve performance and reliability
- programmers spend time tracking down issues in existing code
- programmers write binary/assembler code
Now:
- programmers spend time in meetings discussing requirements
- programmers spend time thinking how to improve performance and reliability
- programmers spend time tracking down issues in existing code
- programmers write C++/Rust code
Pray tell, where do you see the “programming has been successfully automated” part?
1) Incumbent is slow, clunky, unpleasant to deal with due to years of accumulated constraints to deal with
2) Newcomer can differentiate themselves by being nimble and pleasant to work with, taking market share
3) Over time newcomer has to deal with increasing amount of scrutiny, fraud, overhead, CYA type practices, etc
4) Newcomer is now incumbent, goto 1)