jordansmithnz

A few observations I’ve made.

1. Many criticisms of AI’s usefulness focus on the present/past. They may well be right about the current state, but the trajectory things are improving at (unless we’ve hit a brick wall) means they’ll probably be wrong in a few years.

2. Some of the most vocal anti AI statements I’ve heard have come from people the most impacted by its disruption. Does the concept it cheapens your prior work, or perhaps threatens to replace you, not lead to a huge amount of bias?

Like any technology, AI has good and bad aspects. There should be criticisms of it, we need those. But focusing on where it’s headed, and being aware of bias, is going to produce the most important discussions.

I think the Air makes a lot more sense through the lens of a foldable iPhone.

Even for Apple, there are a significant amount of challenges in building a best-in-class foldable. Supply chain, manufacturing, hardware design, software. Apple is well known for planning ahead; breaking down problems by tackling some in an Air model first seems in line with how they operate.

The price difference really drives this home. It’s only $100 difference between a Pro and an Air. By the time you buy the perhaps-essential battery pack it’s the same price.

I don’t expect this model to continue more than a year or two, it’s a niche option only there to set the stage for a foldable that will take its place.

Having used it very briefly, I think it’s a reasonable direction. Before you all jump to tell me why I’m wrong:

1. It makes depth and layering extremely clear.

2. It prioritizes focusing on the content.

These are good principles and I think they’ll last the distance. There are plenty of refinements needed, especially for accessibility. I suspect over the next few years we’ll see the direction toned back a little while still retaining the best parts.

The article feels shallow. It’s real but my experience is that the reasons can be more complex.

- some friends are more selfish than you realized and that only becomes apparent when they put their preferences above short term needs you have

- some parents are exhausted and stop putting in the work needed to maintain friendships

- some friends don’t want to see their social circle become parent-filled, whether that’s because they’d feel left behind or because it doesn’t match their sense of self

- becoming a parent will lead to some sort of change in worldview or who you are, and that’s not always compatible with the friends you had

- as a parent you might just want to talk to people that ‘get it’

People grow apart sometimes and that’s part of life. Other times of course it’s about harder discussions and working through things.

If you actually want to write software without bugs:

Assume that your code will have bugs no matter how good you are. Correct for that by making careful architecture decisions and extensively test the product yourself.

There’s no silver bullet. If you put in enough time and make some good decisions, you can earn a reputation for writing relatively few bugs.

While this did happen and obviously isn’t great, there’s a more skeptical side too.

The ‘trapped’ man is the CEO of an AI consulting firm. He posted the video to linked in, didn’t press the abort button, and had a relatively successful customer support experience (5 minutes delayed and not charged for the trip). Apparently he is using a PR firm to handle questions.

Make of that what you will. Waymo can clearly do better, although for what it’s worth — my worst uber experiences have been much worse than this (legitimately unsafe driving decisions).

While interesting this is just… wrong. Imagine a world where:

- I tell people I’m 50 years old but I’m really just 49 1/2

- My phone says it’s Jan 7th but it’s really afternoon on Jan 6th

- My coworker says they’re a sr engineer because they’ve been told that they’ll definitely be promoted soon

Rounding shouldn’t be applied everywhere. Some things in life are supposed to use a floor function; common sense applies and most folks intuitively know that 1:00pm means ‘between 1:00 and 1:01pm’.

No one wants dark/cloud kitchens, and I don’t think anyone wants dark software either.

It’s extremely hard to do many things well. If a restaurant specializes in pizza, they’re going to get good at doing that — their employees will know the best way to cook them, their recipes will slowly evolve over time, etc. If a restaurant rarely cooks a pizza, none of that experience and refinement is there.

Not to mention, DoorDash doesn’t have any obvious health ratings visible for restaurants in NYC. I’ll happily order from somewhere I know, but not some unknown restaurant. And what’s to stop a poorly rated dark kitchen from closing shop and reopening the next day under new branding?

The whole model feels gross. It’s centered around profit and questionable tactics, rather than making a genuinely good product that people come back for.

Think about it from the parent’s perspective: the safety of your toddler while you’re at a crowded amusement park is of high value.

Losing a young child must be terrifying, even if they’re found shortly after. I think the value proposition justifies the price, at least for a reasonable amount of parents.

When I was 18 years old, a security guard kicked me and a friend out of a grocery store, much to our confusion.

After talking to them and requesting the store manager, it turns out they had a photo of a shoplifter that looked very similar to me. Eventually we were let back in the store and it was all OK.

So, it’s not an entirely new problem? Although with facial recognition I guess there is less recourse; a manager is not as likely to believe they got it wrong if their computer tells them otherwise.

Some cases yes, but in plenty of cases, this wouldn’t be great.

- Browsing HN, and your scroll gesture happens to start where a link is? Before you know it, you’ve navigated away.

- Long pressing to delete an app, and the app opens in the meantime? Awkward UX.

In the majority of cases, press gestures are competing with other gestures like scrolling. Waiting until you’ve released is often the first moment that it’s 100% clear which gesture you intended. If both gestures get invoked, it will probably lead to much worse problems.

I’m sure there are cases where act on press makes sense, but I don’t think it’s as dramatic as the tweet makes out.

Does this tool actually generate vectors? Or is it really just an AI image generator with an image to SVG converter added on.

Based on the complexity of the logos it generates, I suspect it might be the latter.

‘Nobody’ is a large assumption. For developers with a consistently small download base, they can switch with little concern.

The consensus here seems to be that Apple don’t want anyone to switch. I’m not sure I fully buy into this, because most developers don’t have the size problem, so switching could be beneficial for them.

Thanks -- this is a relief. I hope it lasts though, I could see Apple deprecating this option in a few years, once most apps have adopted the newer terms.

I have a free utility app for school kids with an install base in the multiple millions. I don’t make much off it, but many users find it helpful. It’s most popular in the EU.

So… if I’m understanding right, I need to take the app down, or start charging an up front fee to school children? Nice one Apple. I hope I’m allowed to add a pop up explaining to users why the app will now incur a mandatory charge.

The best way I can interpret this: it only applies to new downloads each year. In that case, it’s still concerning —- what happens if there is a surge of downloads? I’m on the hook for $50k overnight?

And if updates are included in this number like some comments here suggest, users aren’t going to get any bug fixes.

Wow. HN, please tell me I’m interpreting this wrong.

I’ve been dealing with long COVID since March last year. There’s some interesting learnings I’ve had along the way:

- I was almost perfectly healthy and in my early 30’s. Long COVID isn’t that rare and can happen to anyone, even with a mild case of COVID.

- After first getting COVID, I didn’t rest much. There’s research showing this increases chances of getting long COVID. If you test positive… rest and fully recover. Don’t make the same mistake I did.

- Quite a few people I’ve met seem to have the opinion it’s all neurological. The linked study has plenty of proof it’s not, but people seem to like putting things they don’t understand in a nice bucket.

- If you’re reasonably healthy, don’t take it for granted. Health won’t always last.

Thankfully, I’m doing much better the last few months. I think I’ll be 90% back to normal within a year. Not everyone is so lucky though, so it’s encouraging to see so much research being put forward.

I don’t want to discount your experience here, but it seems unlikely to me that what happened followed ordinary medical prioritization.

It’s tricky to relay over a short internet comment the full experience and context - for example, hearing the phone calls the couple made to family/hospital, the full conversation the nurse had with us about priority, or the missing detail that my wife had pre-eclampsia. I guess we don’t know with 100% certainty, but having been in the situation, I’d say there is a 98+% chance that the status/wealth of the couple directly influenced how soon they were given a bed.

(Sorry to add facts after the original comment; I wanted to avoid writing something too lengthy but I can see how these details may have been necessary).

Now that I recall more clearly, I got this part wrong… they had requested an early induction (not a scheduled c-section). Unsure if that changes things, but they weren’t going straight to an operating room.

I’ve seen a similar thing happen at another well known NY hospital. My wife was waiting to give birth with all beds taken up. A couple walks in, very unhappy that there is a wait, and we exchanged some conversation with them. It was quite apparent they were from wealthy families. She had requested to be induced, after being a couple of days past her due date (extremely normal for a first pregnancy).

A nurse told us privately that we’re first on the list for a room as my wife was most in need of care; there was one becoming available in an hour or two. However, the other couple started complaining and calling family members. They were ushered off to a different waiting room. We waited 15 hours for a bed, and in the meantime heard someone give birth in the hallway.

A few days later we bumped into the same couple on the way out of the hospital. They’d been given a bed 12 hours before we eventually got one despite being there voluntarily.

I recently bought an rPi 4. After trying in vain to find any in stock at a reasonable price, I figured out you can buy units that are preconfigured for another purpose and re-flash them (eg https://www.pishop.us/product/raspberry-pi-w-optisigns-pre-c... - in stock right now).

I’m not sure others have caught onto this yet given these are still in stock.

A few years back I lost 15kg, mostly driven by a few lifestyle changes:

- consistent meal times. Previously my meal window would be 2-3 hours wide, leading to increased amounts of hunger.

- less stress. Apparently this is different depending on the person, but stress can increase weight (I’m sure there are a ton of other health issues it causes too).

- avoid snacking too much. No hard and fast rule, just remind yourself you have a meal coming up.

It saddens me that human lives, war crimes and families losing loved ones is somehow equated to ‘my personal politics’.

I’ve spent the last few years turning my current apartment into a ‘smart’ HomeKit apartment. While there are some rough edges from time to time, there’s a lot to like about it overall. A few learnings from setting it up:

- the quality of HomeKit accessories you purchase matters a lot. Cheap unreviewed light switch? It will likely be unreliable and frustrating. It’s worth getting quality products.

- bad or unreliable Wi-Fi? Fix this first. Before upgrading to a newer mesh network, accessories were often unresponsive for me.

- Siri sucks. Despite this, HomePods are still a core piece of a HomeKit setup, and really make the home feel ‘smart’. Clear articulation and setting up scenes can help prevent Siri mishaps.

For me there’s no ‘one great thing’ that makes HomeKit worth it. The marginal benefit of having lights, shades, heating, and more accessible via voice/app all adds up.

Leaving the house? One button tap turns things off. Busy feeding the baby? Shades go down via voice command. Zoom meeting and the light in your background looks too bright? A few clicks, and it’s set to 50%. No one great thing, but lots of small nice-to-haves.

New Zealander here. My wife and I just made it through the MIQ system in time to see our families for Christmas (and introduce our son to his grandparents for the first time). A few interesting things:

- we had to enter the MIQ lottery five times before ‘winning’ a spot. The lottery system is the same used by some shoe drops and ticket reservations, and there is no weighting given to citizens that have enrolled in previous lotteries.

- when you make it through the lottery and select a date, it has to match the date you arrive in NZ exactly. If flights only go to NZ on certain dates, and those dates are all taken, then you’re out of luck. Many people make it through the lottery only to find that there are no dates left that work.

- you are not told what MIQ hotel room or city you will be in until you arrive in NZ. At that point you may be flown across the country (adding and extra 5+ hours to the end of an international trip), and placed in who-knows-what hotel. You are charged a set fee for the hotel.

- at every stage of your stay at MIQ, the people running the show have the ability to prolong your stay if they believe there is any COVID risk. The morning we were packing our bags to leave, the hotel called to say we needed to stay in our room while they waited on an urgent COVID test for a suspected positive case. Had the result actually been positive, most of the hotel (everyone from our flight) would have needed to stay additional days.

- ‘famous’ people go through MIQ too. We met someone on the flight that plays the lead role in a popular TV series. Like everyone else, they were flown across the country and placed in a hotel room.

- the hotel food is usually not great. We were fortunate enough to be in an Uber Eats delivery area, so we ordered out a few times.

In regards to the linked article: the real problem, at least to me, is that New Zealand citizens with an urgent need to come home (visa, sick relative, funeral, etc) are not always able to do so.

MIQ is an interesting experience, and at least at the start of COVID it made it possible for NZ preserve a pre-pandemic way of life. Now that we’re years into COVID and vaccines are readily available, it’s extremely frustrating for New Zealanders with family or loved ones overseas. Public opinion is steadily shifting towards ‘open up the country’, and the government has announced some tentative dates for doing this (although they were recently shifted back due to omicron).

While ObjC is far from dead, I’m not sure these metrics paint an accurate picture.

For a Swift-first app or binary, there are a few reasons that you might see ObjC as part of the binary:

- easier interop with ObjC

- Xcode code generation (CoreData, Intents, etc)

- legacy code (no real benefit to rewriting if it works fine with Swift)

I’d expect most Swift-first binaries to have even a small amount of ObjC for one of the reasons above. I’d also expect that binaries already containing ObjC would rarely drop it, even if new development is done in Swift.

As a HomeKit user, I was looking forward to iOS 15, thinking there might be some incremental improvements to Siri’s handling of HomeKit commands. It wasn’t bad before, but it had room for improvement.

Unfortunately iOS 15 significantly deteriorated Siri’s understanding of HomeKit in some situations. Here’s a few reproducible examples:

‘Hey Siri, shades down’: sets the shades to 99%, i.e. a 1% adjustment. I now need to say ‘closed’ rather than ‘down’ to close them.

‘Hey Siri, close the living room shades’: responds with the current shade status. I need to switch the ordering to get things working (Hey Siri, living room shades: closed)

Did someone delete a mapping file of common HomeKit voice commands to actions or something? At this point, I’d almost prefer no AI, and just a static command list. I guess I could create that with shortcuts, but with 20 or so accessories that’s a big chore to set up.

I’ve had the same experience too.

A side project is interesting, shows initiative, and if it comes down to you and another otherwise equal candidate - it may well be the deciding factor in a hiring decision.

On top of that, hiring aside: the skills and expertise I’ve gained from a side project have been invaluable, and even for this reason alone I’d say it has been well worth it.

A while back, I built a sync library for iOS storage <-> CloudKit (Apple’s iCloud storage system)! It features offline queuing, smart merge/deduplication, and uses NTP timestamps to make sure offline/online merges are handled reliably. It took quite a bit of time to get right, and is probably one of the projects that has helped me grow the most (technically) as an engineer.

- I built it because at the time, sync for iOS was a mess: Apple’s original CoreData iCloud sync was very buggy and often failed to sync. An open source alternative seemed nice but poorly maintained, and I wasn’t completely on board with the overall architecture of it. A paid library was great but also quite complex and I had no control over the direction, features, and longevity.

- Apple released their own alternative recently, although it’s only available on newer iOS versions. Additionally, I’m not in control of the CloudKit data schema, and I don’t have the ability to add more complex sync features if needed.

- underlying all of this: the need for control, reliability, and customizability.

So, I spent a few weeks writing my own system. It works well and despite a few hiccups that I’ve resolved, it currently provides reliable, seamless sync for an app with millions of downloads.

- My library is quite generic but I never open sourced it. It would be a nice contribution to the open source community, but I’m not sure I have time to consistently maintain it or review pull requests. I’ve considered it at times, but it’s just never been a priority.

- If sync ever goes wrong, I’m able to debug it and understand exactly what the problem is.

- I can add features any time I like. I plan to do so soon to support a few things that even Apple’s new solution might not encompass.

There are quite a few downsides to it too:

- I need to maintain it myself

- It probably has had less testing than something like Apple’s new solution

- I’ve occasionally shipped a small sync bug, primarily due to lack of ability to test at scale

Overall I think it was worth it, especially given that Apple’s new solution wasn’t available at the time. I learnt a lot; building a generic framework is a great way to grow technically.

If I had to make the same decision again today, I’d heavily consider Apple’s new solution instead, although I’d only choose it if I was confident that it is much more reliable than the prior option they provided.

Like other commenters here, I’ve also experienced app rejections that seem arbitrary and fail to look at the bigger picture.

I don’t have any proof of this, but I have a suspicion that app reviewers may need to meet some sort of rejection quota. It would certainly explain some of the frivolous rejections I’ve seen. Reviewers must be evaluated and held to account by some standards, so it doesn’t seem too far fetched to think that some sort of rejection ratio may be applied, or at least tracked somewhere.

If this is the case, it’s not necessarily an easy problem to solve. How you you enforce a consistent quality bar without using some reviewer KPI/metric that’s inherently flawed? This being said: rejecting apps for menial reasons does not seem like the right compromise to make.

From being on both sides of whiteboard and take home interviews over the last few years, I’m all for whiteboard interviews, for a few reasons:

- take home interviews incentivize the candidate to spend more time than they’re told. You can choose a three hour problem, but candidates that really want the job will probably spend more time. Less experienced candidates will spend more time on it too.

- I never found reviewing take home interviews to be a great indicator of skill level. It’s hard to know how long was really spent on it, and how much the candidate used resources etc to guide them. Are they a great candidate that cut corners, or a less experienced candidate that used stackoverflow + 10 extra hours to get to a final result.

- whiteboarding can go badly too. The caveat is that if it does, only so much of the candidate’s time is taken up; there’s a hard ceiling.

- from the perspective of conducting whiteboard interviews, the company loses out if the interviewer doesn’t do a good job. This is really on the company though - it’s worth investing in a good whiteboarding process. If there’s no investment here, it’s only the company that suffers (competent candidates will get hired by a company with a better process).

In terms of conducting a good whiteboard interview, my $0.02 is no trick questions, just solid problem solving with plenty of scope to show creativity and proficiency.