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mrbombastic

1,061 karma · joined October 20, 2012

Interests: Mobile Development, Open Source, Remote Work, Hiking, Digital Nomad

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Mobile Developer in Brooklyn. Primarily native iOS but comfortable working on and learning different parts of the stack. Contact me for remote work opportunities or opportunities near Brooklyn.

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mrbombastic··on Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
people have been saying "it's been a minute" to mean a long time since at least the 90s in NY
mrbombastic··on Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
this is so cool :) thinking about some remixes already with maritime traffic and tides
mrbombastic··on Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
Seems a lot like the meme of the new designers pushing a redesign to justify their existence.

To be less dismissive it seems an industry wide problem that big splashy projects get rewarded while the silent “Snow Leopard” mind numbingly obvious just up your quality and fix bugs and UX issues work goes unnoticed.

mrbombastic··on Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route
I don’t see a single comment I would describe as celebrating this
mrbombastic··on An overview of how our family is prepared
Fun to watch, not fun to live is what i believe the parent is referring to.
mrbombastic··on An overview of how our family is prepared
“The other is to make sure you have a good insurance company” such a thing exists?
mrbombastic··on Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down
moderate corporate democrats are repeatedly getting trounced in elections and the DSA crew are starting to win so citation definitely needed
mrbombastic··on Felony Bench
your perspective on today’s America is there is _too much_ accountability for big companies?
mrbombastic··on Going Dark, and the era of law enforcement hacking
"The Corner" is also a great read by him.
mrbombastic··on AI is removing the middle class of software engineering
this is a more reasonable argument IMO, but i would still disagree that that means only the top level pros stay for a few reasons (although it might happen / is already happening in the short term):

- if it is true that AI enhances our abilities it just means the goal posts move of what was expected for each level

- the complexity ceiling will rise for the level a superstar or a company is capable of maintaining, meaning there will still be stratified complexities for the mid levels of old to handle, it might just be higher than before

- counter intuitively but time and again increased software creation more often than not increases demand for more software rather than decreases

if the world decides it has no more problems to solve with software, then we are in trouble. i don't think that is happening anytime soon.

mrbombastic··on AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
Because the companies everyone claims are now obsolete are making a lot of money still doing the supposedly obsolete things?
mrbombastic··on AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
because this comment is responding to: "I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software"

photoshop, paypal, and many more companies etc. have software of vast complexity that cannot be reproduced or maintained today solely with llms, ipso facto you still need software developers or some similar role to build and maintain the complexity of _yesterday_

some guy shipping an iOS app to zero users doesn't change that. although i think it is good we can have more bespoke software.

mrbombastic··on AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
color me skeptical that the CEO or anyone non-technical is ever going to prompt their way out of a major incident when all the AI chickens come home to roost.
mrbombastic··on Show HN: Write.md – A free, open-source, themeable Markdown editor for macOS
small bit of feedback, "Rice it until it feels like yours." is pretty jargon heavy for a landing page, i don't think all that many people outside linux/tech use that term, why not "customize"?
mrbombastic··on Ruff v0.16.0 – Significant new updates – 413 default rules up from 59
A chef in a michelin restaurant, unless he/she is the sole employee (very rare) is likely in charge of a team of line cooks and while they may get some time and place to experiment you better believe it will not be when preparing the chefs carefully curated menu and recipes for paying customers who have been on a reservation waitlist for months. Bob decided to cook the broccoli with a blowtorch and substituted some ingredients in table 9s dinner. There is a fire in the kitchen and the NYT food critic is going into anaphylactic shock but Bob at least feels like an artist so we will let it slide.
mrbombastic··on Ruff v0.16.0 – Significant new updates – 413 default rules up from 59
the claim we are arguing here is not that “linters never make mistakes” it is that “linters are generally beneficial and avoid mostly useless debates we previously spent an inordinate amount of time on” Most linters have an escape hatch for exactly this which is usually a one line disable comment
mrbombastic··on Ruff v0.16.0 – Significant new updates – 413 default rules up from 59
I also never have these conversations at work…because every repo uses a linter and the engineers are mature enough to recognize most of these debates as bikeshedding. Every once in a while someone will suggest turning on or enabling a new custom rule with some justification and there is a brief discussion and it is enabled or not. Outside of work in a consulting gig I didn’t have a linter in the codebase and the owner brought on a new engineer, he wrote if else statements all on one line no matter how long they were and removed spaces everywhere because he thought shorter code was better. He balked hard at any feedback about code style and I was told I couldn’t enforce code style or install a linter. I think you will surprised how much you care if someone with a truly weird style starts putting it in your codebase, I always told myself I didn’t before this. After more dumb waste of time clashes like that I quit the project. Now even personal projects get a linter :).
mrbombastic··on Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode
everything has tradeoffs, on the one hand you are right you have one less dependency, on the other hand the maintenance of said dependency is now on you. many times app store connect has changed some api and fixing our release process was a matter of updating fastlane because the community had already dealt with it, that's on you if you have a bespoke delivery solution.
mrbombastic··on Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode
This is cool but also makes me worried about the tendency with llms for all of us to make bespoke solutions rather than building a better community tool or extending an existing tool to solve the problem. fastlane exists to solve exactly this problem in the mobile space.
mrbombastic··on Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera
Was driving in Lapland with a car like this, snow and ice everywhere on the road except in 2 narrow strips of pavement previous drivers had driven over, naturally it was not always in the exact area of lane that lane assist wanted me and I felt it was actively trying to kill me. Was able to disable but turned back on every time you stopped and started engine and I am forgetful.
mrbombastic··on Vite+ Beta
You are signing up for another hellscape of unmaintainable slop. Enable package cooldowns and only whitelist internal packages and you are better off than 90%
mrbombastic··on Mark Zuckerberg directed Meta to create a prediction markets app
not to mention rage posting dozens of time a day doesn't scream contentedness
mrbombastic··on Anthropic employees accuse Trump administration of targeting them
Presumably if they want ai regulation they want evenly applied regulation across the industry, not just for them.
mrbombastic··on How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
Jira is fine and devs just grow to hate issue trackers because they hate that part of the job. Watch for another one to come and go when people get sick of linear.
mrbombastic··on Robinhood now lets your AI agents trade stocks
I was a fan of Robinhood's mission of democratizing finance and prioritizing UX for casual traders. They seem to jump on every hype train though, crypto, prediction markets, now agentic trading, whether it is ethical or not or good for their customers or not, and it seems like the distance between "democratizing finance" and "finding new suckers" is closing. Disappointing but not surprising.
mrbombastic··on What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications
Not sure i understand. Sure it doesn’t require it but Apple doesn’t trust you to handle it because you’ll probably drain the battery or spam the user or whatever, that is Apple MO, putting themselves in the middle so they can control the experience.

The single persistent connection is just to receive pushes, there is still some daemon controlled by apple in charged of dispatching to correct app.

mrbombastic··on What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications
yeah this is what author hints at with "Push as a battery problem". Apps are limited by default in what they can do in the background due to this, so most apps are in a suspended state not making network calls when you are not using them. To avoid the app having to keep running this stuff is delegated to OS which tells the app, "hey I have a push for you wake up and handle it!" You can send pushes locally but because of the background limitation it is not practical for unpredictable events like messages coming in.
mrbombastic··on Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation
hey now, they should be grateful they get enough tokens for their appointments with ClaudeMD for their statistically below par data labeling performance, we could reduce the allowance if we keep hearing that kind of talk. We have been very generous with portions at the automatic canteen as well, that energy could be better allocated to the maintenance bots in the server farm.
mrbombastic··on I don't think AI will make your processes go faster
just this week i pushed back on some requirements in a very detailed product spec I was implementing to speed up time to ship. The pm had no idea what I was talking about because the requirements were invented by an LLM. This is not a bad PM, discipline doesn't scale.
mrbombastic··on Native all the way, until you need text
a bit of a roundabout way to answer this, but i think most native devs are okay with a self contained app element using webkit, that is what it is there for and generally stuff like rendering html, markdown, a one off static page, it is just a view from UI perspective. When things get more interactive, have a navigation hierarchy, animations etc are when things start to diverge from native feel and performance and you have gone too far.
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