iamcalledrob

Networking, as we all know, is a rats nest of complexity and edge cases. I think software started getting worse when a high speed internet connection became a given.

90s software ran mostly offline. It was simpler and more deterministic. I think that's why it felt more reliable. Your UI couldn't depend on laggy server round-trips. Things either worked or they didn't.

The young'uns all cut their teeth on the web, where every project tends to reinvent the wheel (poorly).

It's funny (depressing) to me that there is now "web app" design language and a "native app" design language, and most new desktop apps are following the web because they are built in html and CSS.

I wholeheartedly agree with this perspective.

As with most creative pursuits, the best things happen when there's a clear point of view.

Unfortunately, the best things aren't always the most commercially successful, because products are only a small part of what makes a company successful. I think we're seeing this play out in the software market.

JIRA might be objectively awful, but it still manages to print money!

Same -- fastmail is excellent and great value.

An example of a company that does exactly what I pay them to do and respects me as a customer.

Remember: it's not your machine, it's Apple's. You just get the privilege of using it.

That's actually the opposite of my problem. Even in landscape, windows end up way too tall to be useful.

In a traditional floating setup I would have multiple smaller overlapping windows wherever I want them.

Whereas with a tiled/scrolling layout, windows can end up way too big to be useful. It's fine on a laptop though.

I initially used Niri on a laptop and thought it seemed great. Then plugged in my large monitor and realised it was awful there!

> "what would happen if we only designed for large monitors?" What would it unlock if there were desktop designs that ignored laptops and only focused on widescreen monitors?

There's something to this thinking. Large workstation monitors are very much their own thing.

A real example l I've found: Niri (scrolling window manager) is really nice on a laptop but awful on my 6K display. The windows are way too tall, and the induced motion of large windows on a big screen is too much.

Something I learnt from doing research in this space is that spatial memory is quite powerful, and a hierarchical filesystem taps into that.

Whereas tagging doesn't align as naturally with the human brain in the same way.

> I bet people generated solutions end up significantly different from AI generated solutions. People learn more about the problem as they work it through and they don’t always end up with the thing they were imagining when they started.

Exactly!

And to be clear, you can learn a ton from LLMs. An expert teacher with infinite patience -- what an amazing thing. But there's a different kind of learning that only happens with practice, and that's what you don't get when a computer does the thinking.

Your brain is hardwired to find shortcuts. Once you have an LLM at your disposal, it'll be real hard to abstain from using it to do the hard bit.

Personally, I think a lot of the enjoyment comes from learning to overcome challenges. Jumping in to an unfamiliar problem space, sucking at it, then grinding until it all clicks.

Generative AI takes away the grind, which takes away the learning. How do I master a new language if I'm expected to code via an LLM from day 1?

It's also well understood that the act of writing is when thinking actually happens. You have new ideas, opinions form, and so on. I think it's the same with writing code. But when you're not writing code any more, you don't go through this process.

I wonder if an LLM-authored project would even end up solving the same problems that a human-authored project would? If a human didn't write the code, then a human didn't have the chance to think in the same way. They didn't spend time trying to think of a good variable name, which made them realise the whole premise was wrong...

> Leaving things alone is an underrated engineering skill.

Truer words have never been spoken.

It's funny, as a 20+ year macOS user, I've really struggled with file managers that are not Finder.

I don't think it's that Finder is brilliant -- it just encourages a unique set of power user workflows that aren't replicated elsewhere.

For example, Open/Save panels that act as drop targets, and navigate to the dropped file's parent folder. I use this all the time, and it drives me nuts when I can't do this on Linux (Nautilus) and Windows. Enter to rename, too. These habits are very hard to break!

WhatsApp is still based on XMPP unless things have changed a lot recently.

I think this is very true. I've seen it. It's the same in the design field too.

And it's because the tech industry has matured. Best practices are clearer, and there is proportionally less work happening "at the forefront", so to speak.

Most tech work is, at its core, stuff like building CRUD wrappers around a database. But we know a lot more about how to do those things now than we did 25 years ago. Our tech stacks are mature. There are extraordinarily well established patterns, and so much prior art.

This means that business folks have a stronger intuition of what's possible than before -- and that makes top-down direction much more likely. The innovation is commonly in the business strategy, not the tech itself.

(I'm not saying there aren't hard problems to solve, or there isn't exciting greenfield stuff happening -- there absolutely is, especially with LLMs -- it's just that the majority of tech work today exists to unblock a business goal)

Requiring Apple's own apps to use the same permission prompts as 3rd party apps does something very important: it incentivises Apple to improve the permissions experience for all developers.

Currently, the permissions APIs and user experience are designed horribly, and there's a disincentive for Apple to fix it.

Random example: if you write into the photo library, you don't have permission to read back what you wrote. You can't even deep link to that media in the photos app*

*Unless you are Apple.