“Epic’s App Store developer account restored in Europe once again – Six Colors”
Turns out you can’t just tell a multinational organisation to fuck off if it controls the banking and taxation system for a big chunk of your global market
“The quiet, pervasive devaluation of frontend - Josh Collinsworth blog”
“Ian Betteridge - On Apple terminating Epic’s E.U. Developer Account”
I have too many thoughts on this but the short version is that while it’s a great overview of the sorts of problems software startups run into, IMO the reasons cited didn’t actually caused its failure
The big one is it launched too early with too little user research and testing
“I wonder if I have room for more in this post, what’s the character count at?”
(The character count is obscured by the keyboard switcher button) 😑
As much as I find micro.blog useful, it’s clear that it doesn’t have much of a culture for testing its software
Just realised that this year it’ll be 27 years since I first began to post short essays to a personal site (what we later called blogging). I’ve gone on hiatuses and switched sites several times but otherwise it’s been 27 years of online writing.
That feeling when you have a look at Linkedin and see a former boss write about how LLMs mean the end of coding and programming as a job. That now the only thing needed to get working software is to describe clearly what you want, something they were always manifestly incapable of doing
😑
Updating my iPad has repaced the frustrating obvious autocomplete errors with an equal amount of less obvious—so more frustrating—autocomplete errors.
Like, in the previous sentence I had to go back and fix three distinct autocomplete errors after the fact
And two in the sentence prior to this one
“The Money Is In All The Wrong Places | Defector”
The reality is that the people with the most money have devised, at every turn, new and more bulletproof ways for them to make and keep more money, and for the people who make things to make less.
“The Public Is Rapidly Turning Against AI, Polling Shows”
That an extremely biased poll (76% of the public trusts tech cos? Riiight) couldn’t juice up the numbers on “AI” should tell you something.
The main reason Web Components aren’t going to save you from the JS treadmill, however, is that the JS treadmill is first and foremost a cultural product.
“I know this project has 100% unit testing coverage and I’m using schema validation for runtime type checks, but it would be nice to have all that nice IDE stuff in VS Code, right? Typescript won’t suck up hours of work for no added benefit, right?”, he thought to himself, foolishly.
“Many services are doing this. | Apple Annie’s Microblog”
This is so annoying. Even when you aren’t in a single-person household, many, if not most, of the devices are going to be single-user.
“WebKit Features in Safari 17.4 | WebKit”
One of the tragedies of Apple’s overall hostility towards the EU and EU consumers is that it distracts us from the fact that the Safari team has been doing a great job.
“The work of creation in the age of AI | Andrew Perfors”
AI is the junk food of meaning-making in the same way that social media is the junk food of human connection and junk food is, well, junk food.
“Is GenAI’s Impact on Productivity Overblown?”
One of the cases where the answer to the heading is an unqualified “yes”
I was making many of these points last year, to deaf ears. Glad to see people with more authority and a bigger platform try to make a dent in the bubble
Updated my iPad and now the micro.blog share extension stopped working, doesn’t even manage to pop up a window when you try to share something.
Seriously, this service 😑 So many bugs.
But, of course, what is considered to be good taste is inherently about in-groups and out-groups
As Picasso said ‘Good taste and frugality are the enemies of creativity’.
Revolutions can’t be tasteful.
“Independent investigation into Söngvakeppnin demanded - RÚV.is”
I bet that *chan-style assholes in a forum somewhere decided to manipulate the results and the Icelandic techs were characteristically naive about potential attack vectors and completely missed it happening
“An Anti-Defense of Science Fiction – Ancillary Review of Books”
However, it’s much more common that invention is the mother of necessity—making something new and then convincing everyone they need it, regardless of actual utility, ethics, or larger consequences.
On a lighter note. This neighbour came for a visit yesterday. Did an inspection of the flat. Checked out my great-grandfather’s chair. Then did a big stretch on the landing before heading out. #cat
“No more forever projects — Diana Kimball Berlin”
This is an aspect of creating book-like objects that I happen to really enjoy.