Yes, this is a major factor for the regression in overall UI quality and consistency on Apple platforms. SwiftUI aims to make all those fancy animations transitions a single line view modifier rather than 30 lines of manually specified CoreAnimation easing curves and manual animation blocks, but it results in a lot of things just feeling janky, because one-size-fits-all rule and precise polish are fundamentally at odds.

A lot of people in the industry have vested interests in this not being discussed openly so you don't hear too much about it, but the implications are huge.

[0] where I assume you mean rules = "laws of physics", because if we were to choose the more conventional definition of rule = "an accepted principle or instruction that states the way things are or should be done", then your own definition doesn't apply to cells or other biological entities

Otherwise you’re just arguing that Sims are totally alive because Sims can make baby Sims.

The ball is in your camp to provide solid reasons to believe why they should be grouped together, when one is a deeply complex interrelated dynamic system (in fact, arguably the most complex system we know of) evolved bottom up over billions of years that we only very partially understand and cannot fully explain or document, and the other something entirely planned, designed, and produced by humans in which every component is finite and accounted for.

The argument boils down to “well the vibes kind of match to my taste, and it’s the best analogy I have in my analogy toolkit”, which is just not serious reasoning.

Yes? Literally no machine ever built by humans is capable of (or even hinting at beginnings of capability for) replication or novel synthesis like cells are, let alone autonomously, it’s quite unconceivable that anyone would take this to be a reasonable assumption in the first place.

If you have spent any time in those gigantic corporations, you know that there is effectively no one there who can actually speak sense and effect change.

No one can say "our laptops are too crappy and too expensive, let's fix it" and actually make it happen.

The people in the marketing department who wrote "Apple's MacBook Neo is a capable machine, and its arrival confirms that there's real appetite for premium quality at accessible prices" probably don't give much of a shit about Dell and its products, other than the fact that they get a paycheck from the company every 2 weeks; many of them probably have MacBooks at home, and many of them won't even be at Dell 18 months from now as they chase the next step in their career.

It's kind of shocking to many people too that even the C-suite execs don't have the power to change much there either. Remember that email from Bill Gates where he suddenly realized that the Windows install experience was shit and asked his underlings to fix it? Of course, nothing got better, and Windows is still a giant turd many years later.

What is a real miracle is that a company the size of Apple has managed to still give a shit after all these years and insane growth. There's plenty of missteps in Cupertino for sure, but compared to the competition it's night and day. Who knows how much longer it'll last.

- programmers spend time in meetings discussing requirements

- programmers spend time thinking how to improve performance and reliability

- programmers spend time tracking down issues in existing code

- programmers write binary/assembler code

Now:

- programmers spend time in meetings discussing requirements

- programmers spend time thinking how to improve performance and reliability

- programmers spend time tracking down issues in existing code

- programmers write C++/Rust code

Pray tell, where do you see the “programming has been successfully automated” part?

1) Incumbent is slow, clunky, unpleasant to deal with due to years of accumulated constraints to deal with

2) Newcomer can differentiate themselves by being nimble and pleasant to work with, taking market share

3) Over time newcomer has to deal with increasing amount of scrutiny, fraud, overhead, CYA type practices, etc

4) Newcomer is now incumbent, goto 1)

Eg at 00:30, for a few seconds there's a marked difference in how the speech sounds - like the filter is turned off or something.

I think the video also mixes things up a bit. For example it compares the skeuomorphism of "Find my Friends" with that of a car maintenance training program - but the latter isn't an example of a skeuomorph ("a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues (attributes) from structures that were necessary in the original"), it merely adopts a realistic graphic design style to mirror the operation it's depicting.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256415

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Features paramount in a document viewer (broadly, "respect the user's local document viewing preferences") aren't desirable in a general purpose application platform.

A large number of companies/web developers don't think of themselves as offering the user a document to view on their own terms, but rather an "experience" that they want full control over (which means, most of the time: show ads and record user behavior).

If you're offering me a game, fair enough. But if you're showing me my hotel reservation or electric bill, I want a document, not an ""experience"".

It’s funny how anytime an article gets called out for being AI slop on HN, the author’s reaction is something like that: “oh yeah sorry I used AI but just for proofreading I swear, I should’ve done just a tiny bit less”.

No one seems to get the message that relying on AI at all is what makes writing shit. Good writers have confidence in what they produce. The fact that you’re willing to incorporate any AI suggestion at all means you’ve already lost the battle.

99% of everything is crap, but if you want to find that 1% that makes you so happy you found it, you have to deal with trudging through that 99%.

Also it helps to try and socialize with people who have similar values and notions of fun as you so they can point you to the things they find fun. You won’t agree a lot of the time, but it’s still interesting directions to have on your radar.

Steve had great taste and keen insights as a PM, but what pushed him to GOAT status was his intuition for people and his capacity to rally them to his cause. Whether pre-Apple, at early Apple, NeXT, Pixar, or modern Apple, he was consistently able to identify world tier performers and get them to join the vision and do great stuff.

Witness that some of those people are still making Apple what it is 15 years after his death. That’s an insane skill that you very rarely see, whereas as a designer I see people with great taste not that infrequently.

These sort of things are exactly what hand-rolled setups à la OpenClaude are great for- the potential for insane privacy disaster is still there, but in that case you have no one to blame but yourself.

Large tech companies aren’t going to take that heat for features that aren’t really monetizable.