majormajor

soooo wouldn't that be exactly the "deskilling" being discussed here, and isn't that deskilling concerning for money-handling firms?

having seen both (a) mission-critical human-built systems become nightmares for maintainability and extensibility and (b) bleeding-edge ai coding agents confidently and quickly fix a wrong problem in the face of an issue (or fix it in a slightly wrong way), I remain skeptical that this great de-skilling will all be perfectly fine.

of course, if you aren't looking at the code you won't fucking know until someone yells...

It's been a long time, but I'm pretty sure Appearance Manager and the corresponding unreleased-but-leaked Hi-Tech theme was 8.5-or-so-and-up-only, which means I must reject 7.6 on aesthetic grounds ;)

Thanks, that does make sense. Though as a many-windower alt-tab is just often tooooooo big for my tastes to even try to rely on.

The 40-year-deep-history Mac answer to workflows like that with a small working set with frequent cross-app-one-to-other-switching IMO is mouse-based navigation + spatial partially-overlapping windows, but this seems to be an extremely foreign concept to Windows/*nix users that grew up on full-screen-maximize or tiling. So I don't think is particularly likely to be adopted by anyone who doesn't already have it burned into their brains at this point. :) There's a lot of these old Mac bones still baked into the OS (e.g. if you have a folder on your desktop, and double click it, and move it, then close it, it'll open to the location you moved it to next time. And that memory is separate from that for another folder on your desktop. Though some of the follow-on behaviors have changed (opening folders in already-open windows used to behave similarly, opening new windows by default).

The 20-year-history version is my own personal lord and savior: Exposé hot corners.

Spaces and no-mouse navigation are still in many ways comparative afterthoughts to mouse-based/spatial workflows. Though as someone with 30+ year of Mac muscle memories in my head, the switching-windows-vs-switching-app concept and awareness of "where" I am relative to it is pretty embedded.

>AI does very well following rules.

How many of these "we sandboxed it and said not to do Y, but then it went and did it!" stories would you consider necessary to disprove that?

It may be good at following rules 99.99% of the time but if someone launches a million times more parallel agents than they would hire humans, it might still be much worse in practice...

"We've been told we must find an effective drug candidate here, and to follow this process for evaluating the quality of the candidate, but actually we could subtly change the analysis like this to make this candidate look favorable enough..."

(And then compare that to deterministic algorithms...)

> They can put it onto robots / automatic labs, so this step is easily solvable. Humans in a modern lab are largely unnecessary. Just look at China.

You can automate the setup and mechanical process. You could increase the physical capacity for parallel tests. You could increase the rate of acquiring raw materials.

But how much you cut down the time depends on how much of the trial-and-error feedback loop depends on feedback and iteration vs cast a wider initial net.

(One of the interesting things to me about the dominant software development agent pattern across all of Claude, Codex, and Cursor is that the approach is still extremely local and iterative, human-mimicking, rather than big-brain-one-shotting a novel or perfectly-fit-for-purpose software design. The performance of the agents on the initial "jump to conclusions" step does not appear superhuman in the same way that the speed-of-iteration is clearly superhuman.)

The separation of Cmd-tab and Cmd-backtick is one of my favorite things in Appleland... what about it is broken to you compared to alt-tab?

Expose added in Panther was the last window management feature that changed my day to day usage of PCs.

Expose + Cmd-tab/Cmd-backtick being separated == a gap that Linux/Windows have somehow never managed to close in 20+ years now.

I don't disagree.

I think there's some nuance here though between "fully anti-AI" and "be careful with that power saw."

That example I mentioned didn't make it to production. It got noticed and fixed more properly by the person who submitted the first prompt before it even went to PR.

But a lot of times things in that same vein can be solved sufficiently with a "dumb" prompt like that, so a one-line prompt to get a PR drafted in the background for the dumb stuff can be a pretty good time saver.

The art is not skimping on your attention to the bigger or more important stuff so much that all the time you save on first getting code written is lost by cleaning up stuff like that...

> And moreover, what differentiates software now will no longer be the care put into it but marketing and trends. The highly commercialized nature of software means that there's not much point now in doing anything except getting there first and exiting with a decent nest egg.

That happened at least 20 years ago. How many recent "this product did so great because of the care of software engineering, and now the creator is comfortable for the rest of their life without risk of it being copied" success stories are there compared to "this product chased some trends VCs were nuts about with a slapdash MVP and the founders took out 8 figures from their later fundraising rounds, but then the business sputtered out"?

I think there's an angle with AI tools where business-minded people will have a better chance of doing interesting things now than in the recent past, because you could potentially tailor much more deeply to individual customers with reasonable economics than in the past. There are fields where there's room for a garden of solutions from different small-team vendors appropriate for different use cases instead of a one-size-fits-all SaaS winner-take-all type market in the past. We could kill the old line about SAP around needing to change your business to accommodate SAP instead of customize SAP to accommodate your existing workflow.

But if you aren't business-minded at all there are likely less places that will need to hire as many careful maintainers or novel-software-writers, which obviously is a huge kick in the teeth to a lot of people.

> Maybe it's a language-specific thing. Most of the time, in Java, LLMs take into consideration tradeoffs (especially if they are part of the initial prompt) and actively explains them. It generally won't make messy workarounds, without a lot of extra prompting forcing it to do so.

Claude in its current Opus 5.5 form has made some wild reaches in response to reasonable-seeming prompts. For instance: "this error is getting swallowed, make sure the real termination message exposes the root cause" -> discovering that the issue is actually in a third party library that isn't exposing the original error except so through logs, so doing some hackery to inject a log-capturer that gets the stdout, buffers it, and looks for the message in order to re-throw based on that...

And it can demonstrate that working, but it's added some fragile and/or unintended consequences like (a) string matching on a particular WARN log message of a particular version of the lib, and (b) buffering those logs such that there were now cases where they would never make it to the actual output stream before the program terminating.

It's certainly capable of being used smarter than that, but it's also really easy to end up with messy fragile stuff if you get lazy about reviewing the output.

I disagree with their criteria that they couple with it, but I could come up with some of my own that I'd like better.

"This has 900 lines but 850 of them are in codegen boilerplate that changed", for instance.

"This has 900 lines but they're mostly updating a bunch of test fixtures along common patterns."

"This is 800 lines because we bumped ten version dependencies and that bumped a lot of other things + they changed the package naming for some so we had to rewrite a bunch of imports."

"I added two panels to a Grafana dashboard." (ok slight exaggeration)

>How do you know Apple has not interviewed a broad and representative sample of real users and found that their #1 desire in a laptop is thinner and lighter than what is currently available?

>I would bet that is what real users have been asking for, for decades now. They aren't asking for swappable batteries or headphone jacks.

Well isn't it telling that Apple hasn't focused on thinner and lighter than what is currently available for 5 years now?

Their actions seem to indicate that they heard this desire loud and clear, and that this caused a single-minded focus that lost the plot on the overall functionality part of the role of design. And then they heard lound and clear from users that "thinner than what came before" was not the end-all-and-be-all. They also rolled back other victims of the "as thin and liught as possible" chase, such as SD cards and HDMI ports.

The claim here is that they could have anticipated that if they weren't driven overly by the aesthetic bragging-rights side of the design team vs the functional side. It's not hard to anticipate everyday reliability causing more blowback than relatively-rare battery-replacement capabilities. They probably had a very good idea of how many replacement batteries were sold, after all. (And for the record: headphone jacks are still there.)

That seems nonsensical. Consider a selection of even just 8 types of components or patterns that might be in a training set (or available to be found over Google and fed into a prompt by a harness, for that matter). There are 256 distinct ways to use 1-8 of them together.

And of course the number of libraries, known algorithms, etc, is much larger than 8. There's any number of ways to make something new by combining well-understood parts.

I don't think non-expert prompting is pushing the envelope on what can be built because I think the current generation of harnesses and models pushes to using well-understood patterns in well-understood ways but it's certainly moving the line for what has been built. And with more skilled prompting you can build pretty crazy stuff + extensive validation for it.

> A workaround is to always shoot everyone the same. If a journalist or interviewer grows a reputation, they can show everyone "on level ground" by keeping the pose, lighting, etc... constant.

I don't think this works.

And I think it might be actually easier to exploit. The fraudster knows what you're going to do in advance, and can target their own presentation to maximally take advantage.

If the way you show someone conveys X about them, especially when due to outside cultural cues - here's the millionaire framing, here's the convict one... - and you just use the same X for every subject, then you're just suggesting a particular framing over and over. You're avoiding a layer of "my active framing is telling a particular story" but only with a passive—but still deliberate—framing of "my framing is telling a particular story" that you hold constant across every story.

In some ways this is similar to what Holmes exploited originally! Lots of industry media was willing to uncritically frame and present her with their "visionary tech founder" styles, and she leaned even further in to that with the Jobs-isms.

Would not a truer "fair" framing would've been to dig into the claims and let the evidence determine the visual language, to avoid the visual language of "Steve Jobs!!" bias the reader/viewer into giving Holmes' claims more credence?