Yes, it would be like trying to “stop” gunpowder in 1400 or atomic weapons in 1938. Pandora’s box is open.
5,510 karma · joined December 11, 2023
“An experienced programmer told me he's now using AI to generate a thousand lines of code an hour.“
https://x.com/paulg/status/2026739899936944495
Like if you had told pg to his face in (pre AI) office hours “I’m producing a thousand lines of code an hour”, I’m pretty sure he’d have laughed and pointed out how pointless that metric was?
I'm not sure why you're getting so defensive; I indeed don't speak Chinese, hence why I'm asking a question.
A claim like "Chinese as a language is less technical and specific than English and slows progress" seems pretty grand; and if Chinese people failed to launch satellites in orbit or do brain surgery you could point to that; but they don't seem to be held back by their language when it comes to making specific, technical achievements, so I'm curious to hear actual, concrete details or examples about what makes Chinese a "less technical and specific" language.
It sounds like your answer is "it simply just is, because it's a courtly language" - which is not a very satisfying answer, intellectually speaking.
It's funny how people feel the need to repeat that last mantra. Kind of similar to the "listening to audiobooks is reading" crowd.
Compare two high schoolers: one who vibe codes a game in English and generates the graphics with Nano Banana; vs one who actually learns how to program and draw to make the game.
Are they doing the same kind of activity? Getting the same kind of cognitive development out of it?
So how is the language "strictly less technical and specific"? Can you give specific and technical examples?
I don't think we're getting a f/1.78 lens on the telephoto anytime soon. The widest aperture the tele's ever had was a f/2 on the 12 Pro, and that was back when the tele was a 2x (52mm equivalent, so not even really tele...). Maybe f/2.4 or f/2.2 (what the ultra wide has)? That'd already be a significant improvement.
The next big upgrades on the ultrawide/tele for the 19/20 generations will likely be larger sensors - they're currently 1/2.55", compared to 1/1.28" for the wide lens. I don't think they can fit three 1/1.28" sensors in there, so plausibly 1/1.7"? But that might mean that effective aperture remains constant.
(and yet none of that will beat an equivalent focal length lens on your XT3)
The tradeoffs will fundamentally be the same. You're not getting a > 100mm^2 sensor (with the glass lens required to image on it) on the iPhone anytime soon (or anytime ever really, unless the form factor of the iPhone dramatically changes).
https://kotaku.com/pokemon-ken-sugimori-original-art-red-blu...
The problem is that software design as a discipline has changed fundamentally in terms of core values. “Old school” designers had a bit more of a human factors training and would think about things like discoverability, information hierarchy, error recovery, etc. And the software from that era tended to be stable for many years in terms of design, in no small part because it shipped in boxes.
Current day designers work almost exclusively from a visual bling/marketing angle - what’s going to look good in a 5 second sizzle reel? And because software can be updated 5 times a day if you want, design is much more subject to the whims of a random exec/PM wanting to push their feature/whatever AB test is popular that week rather than stable, proven foundations.
The web, rather than desktop, being the primarily delivery vehicle for software also changes what kind of design gets built.
And with more and more software being AI designed in the years to come, this won’t get much better I’m afraid.
“It was night and day. Six minutes instead of six years tells the story,” McFadyen says. “Instead of 12 frames per second, I can now shoot at 30 frames per second, so when a bird dives at 30 miles per hour, it makes it so much more likely you’ll capture it at the right moment.
McFadyen says that the focusing system is also “incredibly fast” on mirrorless cameras. “It can lock on the kingfisher’s tiny eye at these super-fast speeds,” he adds.”
https://petapixel.com/2025/11/27/photographer-recreates-king...
This is a bit of a marketing puff piece, but the core insights are correct - the kind of shots the photographer is talking about here were insanely hard to pull off on film, still very tricky to achieve with digital bodies in the 2010s - but modern tech makes them almost trivial.
The Liquid Glass guidance is so emblematic of this. What in the slop is "providing a more dynamic and expressive user experience that elevates the content" even supposed to mean when we're talking about an app that shows a scrollview with a tab bar and a few buttons?
Reading the early 2010s HIGs is such a breath of fresh air in comparison, where it's just a succession of clear statements like "Controls should look tappable. iOS controls, such as buttons, pickers, and sliders, have contours and gradients that invite touches".
Just two entirely different schools of thought. One based on research, evidence, clear actionable items; the other is just pure vibes. Something of value's been truly lost along the way.
And the environment, which now gets polluted with discarded short life boots, and all the waste byproducts required for their production/transportation
And the social fabric inevitably changes for one reflecting the priorities of a world of cheap disposable boots made far away
I can't come up with any other explanation for why there seems to be so many people claiming that AI is changing their life and workflow, as if they have a whole team of junior engineers at their disposal, and yet have really not that much to show for it.
They're so white collar-pilled that they're in utter bliss experiencing a simulation of the peak white collar experience, being a mid-level manager in meetings all day telling others what to do, with nothing tangible coming out of it.
> This has truly freed up my productivity, letting me pursue so many ideas I couldn’t move forward on before
If you're writing in a blog post that AI has changed your life and let you build so many amazing projects, you should link to the projects. Somehow 90% of these posts don't actually link to the amazing projects that their author is supposedly building with AI.
I wouldn't, because such a lawsuit would trivially get dismissed. There are no intellectual claims to be had on app architecture or the design of a property panel, otherwise the whole industry would be a bloodbath.
On top of that, their recent redesign comes with a number of boneheaded decisions that would make a Sketch alternative a gift from the heavens above...
> Surely it is an obvious next step to offer export to e.g. React, React Native, SwiftUI…?
These UI frameworks do not really operate in a "down to the pixel" way and so getting correspondance between a bitmap design and a representation in the UI framework is far from an "obvious next step" (if it were trivial to add such a feature, then of course the developers of these tools would add it).
Various concerns that aren't captured in the bitmap design - like how your screens transition from one to another, etc - can dramatically affect how the UI is implemented in a target framework. This is the job of UI engineers.
Well, used to be. Now it's vibe code all the way down.
No, a company can’t sue you (well they can try, but it has no legal standing) because you rip off their side panel design. Thank god the industry doesn’t work like this.
Well, the heavy lifting was supervised by the same people, but while receiving Apple paychecks :)