I wrote, I am not telling anyone how to judge this. So where do you get the idea that I think others must feel the same way that I do?

You like it? Go ahead and like it. Knock yourself out. In fact, when Tesla ships a car that can kick flip over a Semi, you can look me up and yell, "Hah!"

For that matter, even if they never ship it, you can bump into me anywhere in the world and say, "I liked the flying car demo." I won't argue with you liking it, but don't expect me to change my mind.

Others have pointed out that Apple have shipped vapourware. Yes they have! And I'm old enough to remember how much buzz the Knowledge Navigator generated in 1987:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umJsITGzXd0

It was exciting. It pointed in new directions. People were nerd-sniped. But in retrospect...

Apple wouldn't ship Newton until 1993, more than five years later. Nothing of importance from the Knowledge Navigator video made it into Newton that didn't already exist. iPhone was 2007, a full twenty years later. And we are only now getting close to the core concepts of Knowledge Navigator with LLM-based agents that can animate a human avatar in real-time.

Knowledge Navigator was billed as a concept video. Apple did not promise you could buy it in two years or two decades. But apart from some temporary hype... It accomplished nothing of importance for Apple or its customers. The 90s were so hard for Apple that they were nearly acquired by Sun Microsystems.

Shipping a demo didn't move any needle other than "engagement."

The problem with the demo is that it was vapourware. Period, full stop. It is not the car they are selling to us, and they haven't even begun making them. I am personally not a fan of pure concept products that exist only to polish the company’s crown.

Steve Jobs said that "Real artists ship," because the act of shipping is the act of making the incredibly difficult and important decisions that manage the enormous number of constraints that go into the actual product.

If people like concept cars that don't have to actually work or meet a specific price point, fine. It is entertainment, nothing wrong with that. But I am not and will not be impressed until, like Apple, the thing they show on stage is so far along that you can be expected to buy one within weeks, not years.

I am not telling anyone how to judge this. But by my very old-school standards, vapourware sucks.

Great guy to work with. I think he runs a craft brewery now.

I never said otherwise. I think we're talking past each other, so I'm out.

If you don’t feel that toggling the binary 16-bit words into RAM demonstrates that binary is what actually runs on the hardware, and that assembly is source code for a binary, well ok. I find it persuasive.

Give it six months and there'll be have Optimus robots toggling switches to load terrabytes of binary programs directly into memory. Nobody wrote it, nobody will read it, but it will run everything.

"Impersonal lack of human touch for we, but not for thee."

I look at them with a mixture of pity and contempt. They are examples of "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King" work: i conjecture that this type of "shallow customization" is going to be most persuasive with recipients who have very little exposure to slop and/or the kinds of things human recruiters used to say when visually scanning some stale copy of a résumé while on the phone with the prospect.

Or, their so-called "smart" TV is acting as a proxy without their informed consent.

Possibly not wrong. One scenario that happens over and over again is that we lose a deal because we didn't have feature A. So we build feature A, and we still don't win deals with it. One way this happens is when the competitor has a focus on one part of the market, and we have a focus on another.

Example: We go after SMB, the competitor owns "The Enterprise." Just building A will never break us into the Enterprise part of the market. We have to build an entire strategy around seizing part of the Enterprise market from our competitor. That strategy may or may not include A, but it is definitely more involved than "Build A and customers will come."

if we aren't going to build an entire strategy around "The Enterprise," not only can building A fail to win the business, it may cost us some of our existing SMB business. Every feature our core market doesn't want or need is additional complexity and feature surface area for our customers to absorb. They stop thinking of our product as "tailored for their needs" as it begins to bloat with features they don't need.

And worst of all, the investment in feature A means some other feature—B—that our existing customers have asked for gets punted down-calendar because we're suddenly tearing up our road map and building A because the VP Sales threw a temper tantrum about being unable to close deals without A. This is another way that chasing feature A means sacrificing value for our existing customers who are asking for feature B.

The story was based on a real-life incident in 1959:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoverer_2

The initial version of this post opened with “You can use the wiki or a docs folder for your GitHub project, both are valid choices” but as I wrote more, I realised that there is a single reason to use a wiki, and many more reasons not to use the wiki. So many in fact, that I consider using the wiki on GitHub is an anti-pattern.

A very straightforward example of McCulloch's quote that "Writing is thinking."

We will have reached HFK-ception when the bots are fighting to be the first to submit "How I used AI to build a High-Frequency Karma Farming Bot on Hacker News."

Everyone who got out of that decade alive and with at most minimal brain damage thinks that we're too obsessed with safety today.

;-)

The iPhone Duo and iPhone 18 Pros were released this week. The "ordinary" iPhone 18 apparently won't ship until Spring of 2027. That's the same strategy!

I dunno, but there's no way Bezos doesn't look at his drivers and delivery partners and think, "Your livelihood will soon be my margin."

Wilhoit Conservatism: In-groups protected by contract law but not bound by it, alongside out-groups bound by contract law, but not protected by it.