gyomu

The Internet changed the nature of tourism quite a bit as well. You have to remember most people used to use services like travel agents or tours to organize things for them. Anyone who went off the beaten path and was interested in experiencing another place by sleeping on a stranger’s couch was probably someone interesting.

Now everyone is used to using the internet to organize their travel and get the best deals on anything they can - and so websites like couchsurfing become a free booking.com alternative for people who have no interest in the human experience side of it.

The complex emergent narratives people love in Dwarf Fortress or Caves of Qud aren’t branching stories though?

If the argument is “let’s build games that tell character stories as complex as Last of Us with the world building techniques of Dwarf Fortress”, it might be worth considering why 1) it wouldn’t be feasible and/or 2) it wouldn’t lead to a game that’s as fun/compelling as a more narratively linear counterpart.

The narrative in Last of Us is compelling because it’s tight and focused and authored by the authors to be told in a very specific way.

The “emergent narrative out of raw world simulation” argument sounds like filming thousands of hours of security camera footage and expecting Citizen Kane to come out of it.

I mean again, I would be pretty receptive to a “this game had the right idea, we should push it further” argument, but the “I’m a visionary game designer who hasn’t shipped a game that embodies my vision AND the thousands of other game designers are clueless, but everyone will see how clever I was in 3 centuries” argument rings pretty hollow.

For what it’s worth, Chris Crawford’s tool (http://storytron.com/) is a branching story editor, and one that seems much less powerful than what is used in the industry (eg articy).

People come up with complex shared narratives in multiplayer sandbox games like Minecraft/Roblox/Kenshi/etc. all the time.

In the single player realm, there are games like Dwarf Fortress, Caves of Qud, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, etc.

Point is, the landscape of what "narrative" means in video games today is broad and deep. If none of those are even remotely like what Crawford thinks is "right" - and he's not able to design a game that meets his standards himself - I'd argue his definition of "right" might just not be workable in the first place.

There's a kind of people who want video games to have all of the possibility, depth, and meaning of real life. A game where you could do anything, be anyone, but still have consequences matter and be far reaching (like "Roy: A Life Well Lived" in Rick & Morty). Well, that exists, it's called real life, but you're not going to recreate it on a computer screen.

I was not familiar with Chris Crawford other than vaguely being aware of the name. Reading this post and others on the website (like https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035048/http://www.erasma...), it’s hard to not get the overall picture of “person says everyone else is doing it wrong, without having done it right themselves”.

What I mean by that is that there are game designers like Jonathan Blow who have their own theories on what is a great game and are extremely critical of the industry not following those theories, and then have released games that succeed at demonstrating those theories. In Jonathan Blow’s case, you can disagree with the man, but you can’t disagree with the fact that The Witness is a wildly original, successful game (1M+ copies sold) that has a cult following.

That does not seem to be the case for Crawford’s work. Lots of theories, lots of indictment for the industry doing it wrong, but no actual demonstration of what “doing it right” would mean.

Saying that no one gets it and civilization won’t be ready for many centuries (as the article I linked above does) feels like kind of a cheap rhetorical cop out.

For what it’s worth, I disagree with his indictment of the video game landscape as being narratively poor. Lots of video games with great interactive narratives out there, and there are many players who have been deeply moved by such games (of course, which games that might be varies from person to person).

I think a good antidote when one finds themselves in those thinking patterns is to listen to what others have to say, and not dismiss them as not getting it because they don’t follow your particular (unproven) theories.

This is an interesting one.

On one hand it’s hard to disagree with the statement “it should be clear what your product does in a single glance”. In fact there’s a whole meta that’s been developed around this, with well established common wisdom on how to structure your landing page to quickly frame value to prospective users, call them to action, etc.

On the other hand it’s kind of fun to stumble upon something and feel like you missed the beginning of the conversation, and to figure things out piece by piece based on context.

I was also confused when loading this website but it led me to trying the app and it was kind of fun.

Sometimes the most optimized, clearest path isn’t necessarily the preferable one.

> Now Apple has become just another cooperate entity but with design team holding sufficient political power.

You’d be surprised to hear how much the political power of the design team within Apple has eroded over the last decade.

Here’s a little game of insider Apple baseball:

1) why do you think the chief of design isn’t on this page? https://www.apple.com/leadership/

2) from the SVPs on that same page, who do you think the chief of design reports to?

> But modern society depends on using Apps on Smartphone

It doesn’t have to be that way. Why is my bank’s website close to utterly unusable in a mobile browser (crazy timeouts, popups everywhere, etc) but their app is super smooth? You can argue about the root cause of the issue, but it’s fundamentally not a technology problem.

Yeah maybe. Talk is cheap, show me the code.

> Last week, I did something I’ve put off for 10 years. Built a full production-grade desktop app in 1 week. Fully reviewed. Clean code. Launched builds on Launchpad. UI/UX and performance? Better than most market leaders. ONE. WEEK.

I really wonder why people who write these things never actually show these apps they vibe coded in a week that are “better than most market leaders”.

> We’ve hit the point where asking “Which programming language should I learn?” is almost irrelevant. The real skill now is system design, architecture, DevOps, cloud — the stuff that separated juniors from seniors. That’s what’ll matter.

My UML professor said very similar things 25 years ago. You’d just draw a UML diagram, and boom! All the code would be generated. The only thing I remember from this class is how terrible she was at coding.

It's not just the hardware constraints - it's also the training constraints, and the legibility constraints.

Training constraints: you need lots, and lots of data to build complex neural network systems. There are plenty of situations where the data just isn't available to you (whether for legal reasons, technical reasons, or just because it doesn't exist).

Legibility constraints: it is extremely hard to precisely debug and fix those systems. Let's say you build a software system to fill out tax forms - one the "traditional" way, and one that's a neural network. Now your system exhibits a bug where line 58(b) gets sometimes improperly filled out for software engineers who are married, have children, and also declared a source of overseas income. In a traditionally implemented system, you can step through the code and pinpoint why those specific conditions lead to a bug. In a neural network system, not so much.

So totally agreed with you that those are extra tools in the toolbelt - but their applicability is much, much more constrained than that of traditional code.

In short, they excel at situations where we are trying to model an extremely complex system - one that is impossible to nail down as a list of formal requirements - and where we have lots of data available. Signal processing (like self driving, OCR, etc) and human language-related problems are great examples of such problems where traditional programming approaches have failed to yield the kind of results we wanted (ie, beyond human performance) in 70+ years of research and where the modern, neural network approach finally got us the kind of results we wanted.

But if you can define the problem you're trying to solve as formal requirements, then those tools are probably ill-suited.

Is there anything similar in the public iOS API?

“Conversational delivery”

> They're not all-perfect gods. In reality, most successful people are one trick ponies. They caught lightning in a bottle once early on that boosted their careers but that doesn't mean they're still relevant and correct with their decision making today.

I don't think that characterization is quite right either. I'm a big fan of Brian Eno's "scenius" phrasing:

> A few years ago I came up with a new word. I was fed up with the old art-history idea of genius - the notion that gifted individuals turn up out of nowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. I became (and still am) more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. I call this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’.

Extremely successful people benefit from the scenius within which they get to operate. But as that context changes and evolves over time, they fail to recreate their earlier wild successes - not because they lost any of their skills (although that can also happen), but because the skills aren't sufficient, and the deep, layered conditions that enabled those wild successes just aren't there anymore.

Alan Dye is the interface design lead at Apple, he's been there since 2006.

One of the lead designers on Liquid Glass is Chan Karunamuni, who's been at Apple since the early 2010s. If you search for more of the names of the design presenters at this WWDC, you'll find a lot of people with similarly long tenure.

So the theory that it's all Gen Z designers with no experience or talent seems pretty weak.

Yes, but that’s more about manners and being part of a community than language skills. You can speak shit Japanese and still be involved with your local community and be accepted and appreciated, for sure.

Maybe the least interesting question to ask. Instead: Which ones are more lucrative to work on? Which ones are more fun to work on?

Heh that’s overstated. As a non Asian foreigner*, you get a lot of leeway for making mistakes when speaking Japanese, as it is somehow ingrained in the subconscious here that Japanese is very special and very complicated and a foreigner trying to speak it is already doing something near impossible.

If your Japanese is near flawless except for the honorific register that would strike people as weird, but then what did you do to end up speaking flawless Japanese without ever properly internalizing honorific Japanese?

*(If you are an Asian foreigner, you are subject to many other layers of prejudice unrelated to your language ability)

> I’m driving a tractor while you are pulling an ox cart.

Or you’re assembling prefab plywood homes while they’re building marble mansions. It’s easy to pick metaphors that fit your preferred narrative :)

So you went from being able to handle at most 10 or so of these tasks you often get per week, to >500/week. Did you reap any workplace benefits from this insane boost in productivity?

That phrasing is misleading.

You can absolutely publish apps that target versions of iOS prior to iOS 18; eg all my apps are iOS 15+, I published one as recently as last week.

You can build an app with the iOS 18 SDK that target previous versions just fine (as long as your calls to APIs posterior to the version you’re targeting, if any, are wrapped in the proper macros) and submit them to the App Store.

So yes, you have to build your apps with the latest SDK to publish them - but that doesn’t restrict the target OS version in any way (ie I can build apps that target iOS 9 with the iOS 18 SDK).

Where it starts to be a pain for new apps built in 2025 is if you want to target pre iOS 13, as you’ll have to use the older AppDelegate mechanism, but still totally doable. (That’s getting deprecated with the next release, but deprecated APIs still build just fine).

> the updated tools tend to drop support for older SDKs and devices. You have to kind of go out of your way to keep your app targeting them. You can see how this plays out by getting a second hand iPhone 7 today and go to the AppStore looking for apps. It will be very difficult to find an app that will run on it. This phone is not that old, but the ecosystem abandons you pretty quickly.

Well, you're mixing 2 things here: Apple's tooling support for older versions of iOS, and what developers choose to do.

Today, you can create a new app in Xcode, choose "iOS 15" as the minimum deployment version for your project, and you'll have an app that runs on devices going back to the iPhone 6S/first generation iPhone SE.

Even supporting back to iOS versions prior to that is fairly straightforward (you'll just have to edit a plist by hand rather than use the UI picker if creating a new project) - I have some older iOS 9 projects that still compile without any issues (just tested for the sake of this comment).

But to your issue of most apps not working on an iPhone 7 - that's because many developers will choose to only support iOS 16/17 or later (and the iPhone 7, a 9 year old device, stops at iOS 15). That's their choice though, not a failing of Apple's tooling.

"I worked at Apple for 12 years, making tools to empower creative people [...]"

I think this was the hook that got many of us to admire Apple as a company (and more broadly, to get excited about computing as a discipline/industry). For a long time, that was arguably (one of) their primary mission.

I suspect to what extent it could still be considered to be the case today would be subject to much debate.

It's really hard to extract computing from the capitalistic, consumerist cradle within which it was born.

Every other human creative practice and media (poetry, theater, writing, music, painting, etc) have existed in a wide variety of cultures, societies, and economic contexts.

But computing has never existed outside of the immensely expensive and complex factories & supply chains required to produce computing components; and corporations producing software and selling it to other corporations, or to the large consumer class with disposable income that industrialization created.

In that sense the momentum of computing has always been in favor of the corporations manufacturing the computers dictating what can be done with them. We've been lucky to have had a few blips like the free software movement here and there (and the outsized effect they've had on the industry speaks to how much value there is to be found there), but the hard reality that's hard to fight is that if you control the chip factories, you control what can be done with the chips - Apple being the strongest example of this.

We're in dire need of movements pushing back against that. To name one, I'm a big fan of the uxn approach, which is to write software for a lightweight virtual machine that can run on the cheap, abundant, less/non locked down chips of yesteryear that will probably still be available and understandable a century from now.

Not necessarily a bad plan per se, but don’t forget to take into account the fact that this jobs/rental crisis might be due to deep systemic+geopolitical issues that are only going to get worse and that we might not be going back to the abundance of the 2010s anytime soon.

Finding yourself in an even worse job market 5 years from now is a very real possibility.

Yes, this is a solid succinct summary.

I’d also extend the last point:

> talent is deeply concerned that they will be reduced and replaced, going from high paying careers to fast food salaries

The delta in that money going to the investor/tech exec instead. Yet another wealth transfer from the middle class to the 0.01%.

The author also wrote

“Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed.”

This tells you all you need to know about the kind of work the author values.

Next time you wonder why so much software is buggy, slow, half considered slop, you’ll know exactly who it was made by.

Would you be so kind as to link to some of these sophisticated products? Would love to check them out.

There are two kinds of engineers.

Those who can’t stop raving about how much of a superpower LLMs are for coding, how it’s made them 100x more productive, and is unlocking things they could’ve never done before.

And those who, like you, find it to be an extremely finicky process that requires extreme amount of coddling to get average results at best.

The only thing I don’t understand is why people from the former group aren’t all utterly dominating the market and obliterating their competitors with their revolutionary products and blazing fast iteration speed.

These people are 1) unbelievably rich, and 2) their name is everywhere (the latter being easy to achieve if you have the first).

For most people, that’s enough to inspire… something.

The most disappointing thing about Jony as a designer is how nouveau-riche he is.

Since he left Apple, he’s been designing for Ferrari, King Charles, $2500 jackets, etc.

It feels quite at odds with Jobs’ original visions of products that were beautifully designed, but still remained generally affordable for students, teachers, small business owners, and Mr/Mrs Everybody in general.

Of all his tendencies that Jobs supposedly kept in check, I think that’s the most underdiscussed one. I guess the writing was on the wall with the $10k gold Apple Watch.

The word "capsule" (カプセル, kapuseru) is pretty established in Japan. There are capsule toy machines (also often called "gashapon" or "gacha" but those are respectively Bandai/Tomy trademarks). As another commenter pointed out there are capsule hotels; the working name for Pokémon was originally "Capsule Monsters".