I mean... I have a 34" widescreen, and yet, I spend most of my time on my laptop screen. So having multiple workspaces is pretty helpful for focus. I think your theory is a sound one. Once they realized their main business is a single screen with ONE APP focused at a time (yes I know, iPad can do more, Duo will also do more), they stopped caring about anything else.
10.5 Leopard was my peak. 10.6 Snow Leopard improved on its stability but had a touch of visible regretion (in my opinion). After that, I haven't really been happy with any release. Obviously some things have improved but... 10.5 was branded Unix, the UI was beautiful. It felt solid.
It sure does feel that way. But I've often maintained that Apple took a look at how people were using features like this on other operating systems and said, "NO! We're gonna 'think different'!" And no one liked their way of "thinking different". But they keep doubling down, believing that once we see the genius, we'll all come around.
I haven't yet come around. Unix had it figured out back in CDE days. i3 was my happy place... now it's Niri. As long as I can get to my workspace with a key combo THAT I DEFINE, I'm probably okay.
Oh man, I LOVED newsgroups back when they were being used for their intended purpose! I got a lot of help on the Delphi programming group back in the day. Every day was a new adventure of posts - and even some valuable flame-wars. I'm sure some of that still exists but most folks moved to PHP bulletin boards, and then on to other platforms like Discord/Telegram.
The launch is exactly what convinced me to get one. My brother-in-law had a Model S that he took me on a ride in. From a dead stop, he floored it and I was sold. The Model 3 has a pretty decent ride too (the Highland refresh).
Yeah, I'm actually pretty mechanically inclined but for some reason, I just don't want to bring any tools near this thing.... it feels like an appliance!
I have prompted a LOT of Go in the past few months. While LLMs do indeed know Go very well, the amount of over-abstraction I'm seeing is awful. It's not at all indicative of code that I'd write myself. The whole point of Go is to have a language that is immediately approachable by juniors. And I've tried to keep my code in that lane. The reason I won't prompt Rust at all, is that I know it'll output working code... that I likely will not understand. (that's not the LLM's fault)
I've had not a single "quality issue" with my Model 3 other than the cabin air filter. The car interior stinks worse than any other car I've owned, if it isn't replaced on time! I too have heard a ton of bad things on Reddit. Then I went on the subreddits where people actually owned them. Those folks really seemed to like their cars. I can't say I LOVE the car... removing turn signals, wiper controls and ability to physically shift into reverse seem like brain-dead moves. Otherwise though? It's a lovely care to drive.
Yup, same story for me. Father-in-law owned a consulting business on the side. (CS Professor was his day job) His apps were CA Clipper, DB3, VB4-6, FoxPro, Turbo Pascal, Delphi. I worked for him for years in college. Doctors offices, dentist offices and an oil company. What a time to be in the programming gig! I migrated Novell servers and moved customers from Btrieve to PervasiveSQL. We got into open source pretty early (1998 - which one might argue wasn't THAT early). Some of our "next-gen" stuff used Perl:DBI, Python + MySQL, PHP3. I got such a crash course in cool tech.
The one thing I learned early on. MS-JET is NOT something you want to share from a server! Dbase dbf on the other hand, seemed to work fine.
For me, BSD and Portage was my intro to "you're gonna need to learn how to compile stuff". But Gentoo Stage 1 was my real intro into how to bootstrap Linux. I had been using it for about 6 years at that point. (RedHat/Mandrake/TurboLinux/Caldera/Slackware/Debian-based stuff) Starting at nothing but a partitioned disk felt crazy. But I learned so much that not much in the Linux realm scares me these days. It made installing Arch back in 2011 a walk in the park.
I mean, I can't remember the last time they DIDN'T say that. Variable aperture is kinda cool I guess. 256Gigs of storage basically means everyone's going to have to upgrade their iCloud storage monthly spend just to back this thing up. I've stopped sending my camera roll to iCloud just to save on space.
That doesn't cause the amount that's already been spent to simply disappear. To recoup, they're going to need to sell a LOT of subscriptions. In about 3 years, we'll need to upgrade the GPUs that we use - if we're still chasing frontier models. That cost remains to be seen. There's a ton of unknowns here.
I'm not sure I'd call that "meaningful" in the sense of "trillions of dollars and datacenters built all over the place" meaningful. Yes, I can now tell Claude to build a feature and it often does an okay job. I can ship faster. I can't tell you that it's worth spending the true cost of AI for that however. What'll be nice is 5 years of data showing that companies are raking in more money because they shipped more features. We haven't seen that yet.
Now, if Claude starts synthesizing more drugs that can help those with diseases (like OpenAI has just done) we might be trending in the right direction. For now, all I see is squirrels water-skiing. And while that's great... it's not meaningful.
I mean, yes, that might get more folks working on a single project - which _might_ lead to shipping more quickly (might - more devs doesn't always equal speed). But I think what we'd end up with is Gnome; something that works fairly well, yet the committee won't allow simple things that the community wants. So we have the whole, "fine, I'll fork this project and add it myself" followed by, "why don't you spend your time HELPING the project instead of creating your own". It sounds a bit like a doom-loop.
I'm kinda on the opposite end of the spectrum. I love this world where 45 people try to race toward the same goal. Sometimes the best ideas win. Sometimes the fastest to the first goal wins. Sometimes everyone gives up. Sometimes we have competing standards we have to sift through. It's a mess, but it's a beautiful mess.
I have other reasons - mostly hiring competent engineers that deeply undertand the language. I can hire a competent SpringBoot engineer who can "fill out the form" and have a fast-enough API ready in a few days. Will it be beautiful and elegant? Probably not. Will it take traffic and get the data from the producer into a database reliably? Most likely.
From my time with Haskell, I learned to REALLY think about types. Like, REALLY. Having a type doc above every function that describes a curried path, is really cool. It made OCaml documentation (which I consider among the worst) make sense. (No shade at OCaml as a language. I LOVE it. But their docs aren't gonna win any awards)
You just made me realize how much I miss IRC. Pre-911, one could go for months and months without hearing a single thing about politics. And this is with lots of folks from Berkley in the chats!! (again, not saying Berkley politics are a "problem" - just that I prefer to talk about tech)
I really can't deal with BlueSky. I wanted to because I had a lot of good "starter packs" for NeoVim and OCaml development. Nerd stuff is the reason I visit these sites. The problem is, I start following people and it almost always turns into politics. I may even AGREE with the person's politics but I hate reading and talking about it. God forbid I ever disagree.
Funny thing though. I've heard the claims of "CSAM on Twitter" and now "CSAM on BlueSky". I've never had any of that ransomly show up. I do still have 2 or so random follows from clip-art female avatars with no tweets - per week. I've never quite figured out how that scam is supposed to work. I used to block 'em, now I ignore 'em.
With the exception of using divs for things that have a more appropriate element. Buttons for example - for the love of all that is holy - when I see an onclick handler and aria attributes on divs, I think, "couldn't you have restyled the button??"
This just mimics what I call BusinessBro™ speech. It also goes the other way, they use verbs as nouns. "I know this is a big ask". "The solve for that is that we can...." When it was just my product owner in tech meetings, I'd mock him relentlessly "There's already a word for that, it's 'request'" or "Are you sure you didn't mean 'SOLUTION'?? words are hard man". (This was all in good fun, I still love the guy to pieces).
CL was recommended to me here. I had only played with Scheme over the years (SICP and Little Schemer - which, I used to recommend to every engineer that answered to me). I quickly bought Practical Common Lisp in hardcover (used). The language has a LOT to love. But it's caused me to go back and revisit Scheme(s). I put down my CL book to look at The Scheme Programming language and Chez Scheme. Going through all of this without an LLM has restored some joy. But I can understand reluctance to use this unless I could assemble a team with a ton of knowledge. Prompting for Lisp sounds like fun. But not having the deep understanding means I'd be blindly accepting its suggestions. I can't say what Lisp would be better. Clojure maybe?
Yeah, it literally hearkens back to an era where "programs" were literally well-thought-out programs like you'd receive at a play - the cast list, the acts, the music, etc. COBOL on punchcards springs to mind here. Lots of organization. I don't hate it... but kinda like Java, it can be annoying to have to dot all the i's and cross all the t's to do such simple things.
I can tell you that Apple grows closer and closer to Microsoft-level annoying every year. The update situation is just stupid at this point. 10:30am and "hey, we'd like to take your computer offline for 45 minutes? Want to defer until this evening? Yeah? put your password in anyway.
iOS has gotten gross as well. You see that email notification on your lock screen? Wanna see what it says? Tap it. HAHA, that just expands the stack. Tap it again... that reveals a bit.... TAP IT AGAIN - ah, now we're unlocking and revealing it in the app....