Thanks, but the world's changed and there's no going back. Hope you can change with it.

Sorry that sucks to hear, but the real talent lies in systems thinking. How to make things look good. How to make it usable for humans. How to make something exciting and remove the blocker that was programming effort. Everything else is still a hard problem. And those are all people problems. Just because computers can now spit out computer code doesn't mean all the problems are solved.

Case in point: As I comment on this article. The US govt has asked Claude to stop the export of the latest Fabel and Mythos models. And Anthropic decided it was just easier to disable those models for all users.

These things aren't simple decisions. And we're just barely getting started with AI coding. Can't wait for what 1 year from now looks like :)

Coding did have a certain amount of fun to it. When it was small. And needed to just do 1-2 things. Severely constrained in it's scope and impact. But, those were the QBasic days when I just made a cute app. That thinking has not scaled for applications of any size for decades now.

I want to make great stuff for people and AI removes all the hurdles. Interviewing for asinine things like reversing a binary tree on the white board and then being nitpicked on getting the loop index wrong and then being ghosted is what the tech culture has devolved into. And its 100% caused by programmers who have grown too big of an ego and failed to develop socially.

All of that is game over. It's done. In just under a year, the whole landscape has changed permanently. There are those that like help and create, and there are those that like to gatekeep simply because it makes them feel better. Nobody likes the latter.

1. Internet 2. Smartphone 3. AI coding

All 3 were "WOW" moments for me.

I think the world changed. And it's changed for the good. AI is a tool, and we should not be afraid of this tool for the coding world. I am only speaking about coding, I'm not speaking about other uses of AI, just so that we're clear on the scope of what I mean by good change.

For the first time, I see people who had all these ideas finally bring them to reality and watch it blossom. They wanted to build something to share with their communities, but the walls were too high. Too much gatekeeping. Too much of thinking that programming was a task for the elite few and not for the masses. Along the way, we all forgot that we build tools for people. And having an additional tool help us make better tools for people is a win. Just below this comment, I see people talking about dementia, "lots more generated code, almost all of it garbage", "future where garbage software".

I think the only delusional ones are the idea that humans were better at coding. Have you never had to work on an older project? One that you did not have to start fresh on? Or did you come into either one and go "wow, this is perfect! everything is so beautiful!" Do you seriously consider your fresh project (that didn't use AI) to be the best most perfect beautiful code ever?

The fact is that nobody cares. People want to use good things and have fun with their lives. They're not worried about whether you wrote a method that parses some strings beautifully or did it with a one-liner. That never mattered, and I think a lot of you can't let go of that world view change and instead lash out at people who simply embrace that programming was simply a tool, not some elite special skill. And we're going back to those beliefs. It's done. It's over. Get over it.

1. LLMs can help create other better LLMs

2. If Anthropic is able to reach this ability, others can too

3. Intense work is being done by every chip manufacturer for local inference. Engineers want this. We’re headed toward this

4. These companies ultimately know that their moat isn’t permanent. Maybe not today, maybe not in 6 months. But it’s not forever

5. This stuff has so much research and eyes that policies like this rub people the wrong way. And it rubs them badly enough that it creates the friction necessary to make better alternatives

Amazon didn’t “copy” logistics from Apple. But both of them use similar underlying processes and optimizations. They both excel at it, and neither is eating the other’s profits. The same goes for smaller companies. Or the logistics providers like UPS.

iPadOS also did not receive any product specific updates because I think Apple understands that device well: it’s also a consumption device with a bit more productivity capability. They know they can ship a full macOS on iPad, as witnessed by the lower performance A18 chip in the Neo running the full OS, but what’s the point? Using a desktop UI with a touch interface is terrible. So you’d need a mouse and keyboard. By the time you get that accessory, you’ve already exceeded the cost of a Neo or MacBook Air. There’s also no size, weight or space difference between a fully accessorized iPad and MacBook Neo, Air or 14” Pro.

I think Apple will be fine regardless of whether this new Siri AI stuff actually works well or not. I think deep down they don’t really care because they don’t have to. All of their devices are perfect clients that can interact perfectly fine with cloud inference. And their devices are such a joy to use. That’s what Apple is good at.

Now the confusing part is the new Microsoft hardware project. Is Solara a laptop? Tablet? 2-in-1? Phone? They already have a great hardware run with Surface, so I wonder if this new project is a more powerful local inference push?

And quite honestly. It shows in the CS grad population too. A lot of us are condescending toward anything that doesn't make sense to us. But, I digress.

The best engineers I've worked with are all non traditional backgrounds, non degree or degree holders from non elite schools. They think differently, they tinker, they are incredibly nice and patient, and do it for the love of connecting humans to technology.

Look up the names mentioned in the article. Garcia, Ranade, Nelson. All of them are involved with highly theoretical mathematics and scientific computing. Just because you're good at 1 thing does not mean you are qualified to teach. And none of these professors are trained or taught or graded or performance managed on how they teach. For most of them, its just required that they spend 10% of their time in the classroom lecturing.

Let's be honest about another thing. 99% of EECS graduates, even from elite schools, are wrangling objects and their relationships to a graph. Simply put, we're all just a bunch of glorified JSON massage therapists. It just so happens that we get paid well for it, and we hold that over people. The same happens in the classroom.

I think in order to facilitate a healthy, educational environment for young adults, we as adults must encourage, motivate and make that environment fun and practical. We force feed binary trees and the compiler AST's, but we need to make it fun. It's like the commonly accepted saying: Schools kill creativity :(.

Proprietary technologies, poor or no documentation, silent deprecations and removals of APIs, slow trickle feed of yearly WWDC releases that enable just a bit more functionality, introducing newer more entrenched ways to do stuff but still never allowing the basics that every other developer platform has made possible on day 1.

A broken UI system that is confusing and quickly becomes undebuggable once you do anything complex. Replaces Autolayout but over a decade of apps have to transition over. Combine framework? Is it dead? Is it alive? Networking APIs that require the use of a 3rd party library because the native APIs don’t even handle the basics easily. Core data a complete mess of a local storage system, still not thread safe. Xcode. The only IDE forced on you by Apple while possibly being the worst rated app on the store. Every update is a nearly 1 hour process of unxipping (yes, .xip) that needs verification and if you skip it, you could potentially have bad actors code inject into your application from within a bad copy of Xcode unbeknownst to you. And it crashes all the time. Swift? Ha. Unused everywhere else but Apple platforms. Swift on server is dead. IBM pulled out over 5 years ago and no one wants to use Swift anywhere but Apple because it’s required.

The list goes on. Yet, Apple developers love to be abused by corporate. Ever talk to DTS or their 1-1 WWDC sessions? It’s some of the most condescending, out of touch experience. “You have to use our API this way, and there’s this trick of setting it to this but then change to that and it’ll work. Undocumented but now you know!”

Just leave the platform and make it work cross platform. That’s the only way Apple will ever learn that people don’t want to put up with their nonsense.

Would be a beautiful thing to see. Not sure how storage would work though since you cannot take payment (that would make it centralized), and storage would have to be distributed, but by who?

There's still zero evidence that WFH reduces productivity or that RTO increases productivity.

The internal air handler unit looks exactly the same as any other manufacturer. It's still ugly, and it still sticks out and doesn't integrate as nicely as ducted HVAC systems. Wouldn't homes just benefit more from replacing their existing furnace+AC systems with a heat pump if it's necessary, rather than installing mini splits in each zone and running refrigerant pipes all over the outside of the housing structure.

Also how is this related to depression, you said “this is the same problem” after you mentioned depression.

More than likely, their CRM software automatically tied their user-facing account with their support ticket email. Especially if the only unique identifier is based on email address. It's not hard to remove the name and location from the CRM, but because it would become a manual process they just don't want to have to deal with it.

FWIW, this theory could be put to test by signing up an account with username.extrachars@gmail.com and then sending a support email from username.extrachars+1@gmail.com, not sure if they would reject the support ticket as "emails not matched".

irq: Agreed. It's just a roundabout way of saying they want everyone physically at work. Given that they're based in SF, and the real estate/rent is high and the need for a small group to boost downtown revenue, of course the investors will push for that since it benefits that group. Not having a clear remote only position for a 100% software company post pandemic is just not going to work for me, and there's no evidence that physically being together has any productivity gains.