I can’t speak to OS development but industrial coding there’s a lot of experimenting and throw away. You generally don’t write a lot of code for the platform you’re building on (PLCs, automation components). It’s well tested and if it doesn’t hit industry standards (eg. timing, braking) you iterate or start over. At least that was my experience.
When it comes to general software development for customers in the everyday world (phones, computers, web). I often write once for proof, iterate as product requirements becomes clearer/refined, rewrite if necessary (code smell, initial pattern was inefficient for the final outcome).
On a large project, often I’ll touch something I wrote a year ago and realize I’ve evolved the pattern or learned something new in the language/system and I’ll do a little refactor while I’m in there. Even if it’s just code organization for readability.
Before AI there was a general consensus that creative areas (eg. Cities) were becoming a homogenized experience. A Starbuckization if you will. I can’t help but wonder what gets lost when using tools like this.
It's unclear to me whether it will result in more homogeneity, as a result of prompts being a coarse medium that results in the AI choosing what it's seen to fill in the rest, or less homogeneity, as a result of more people with non-mainstream tastes being able to create music aligned with their niche that otherwise wouldn't exist due time/money restrictions. I think the latter seems a bit more likely, but time will tell.
There's not really any need to speculate when this has already played out in other mediums - would you say that the proliferation of LLMs has led to an explosion of novel and interesting works of fiction, or just an explosion of cookie-cutter slop ebooks?
I would say too soon to tell. There has been an uptick in ebook slop, but I'm not sure if it's impacted the homogeneity of literature, because I don't think anyone is reading ai ebooks. It's not enough for it to exist to impact culture, it has to be being consumed.
Music is a uniquely interesting case, since music has a much lower barrier of entry to consume.
My thought to who you replied to exactly. Am I going to invest several days to read an AI slop novel? No. But I will take several minutes to read a blog post and likely have read many that were AI generated or assisted.
If no one is creating new music/styles for the models to steal, you will only get remixes of what already exists. AI is an entropy machine, it sucks all of the energy/momentum out of everything it touches.
Since you get exactly the kind of music you want, I think it leads to extremely small bubbles, which is pretty much the opposite of homogeneity.
For example, I had never heard epic power metal about birds, but with Suno I got exactly what I wanted. Sure, the sound quality (I only used v3.5) could be better and the songs could be longer, but I don’t care, I now have epic songs about my Bourke’s parakeet. However, I’m not pretentious enough to think those songs are interesting to anyone other than my wife and me, hence the smallness of the bubble.
Generating ‘content’ tailored to you and not meant for someone else’s taste.
Human artists need to make money and those who create music for a tiny bubble probably can’t make enough.
So as an artist what do you do? Do you have to create music with mass market appeal from the beginning?
Or do you need to bank on luck that your music for ‘small bubbles’ gets discovered?
Or you have to have clever marketing strategies to get your music in front of more ears to hopefully gain more fans. And create merch, tour etc.
I wonder how all this AI music is going to impact indie artists. Spotify and the likes is just ripping them off and on top of that their music is / has been stolen from these AI data gobblers.
I don’t see how at this stage it can replace human expression though (singing, playing violin, piano, etc) which is very nuanced.
Same with acting… nuanced expressions that matter. I’m not sure AI can replicate the acting skills of Denise Gough (Dedra from Andor) for example… and many others.
But it would be awesome to generate more story lines or episodes from your favourite TV shows, for example shows from over 20 years ago.
Imagine being able to create more episodes of Star Trek TNG or DS9, maintaining the feel of that era without letting someone like Kurtzmann ruin and tell you how new Star Trek should be.
But how do you ensure actors, writers and other creatives from that show will be compensated directly?
Or maybe this will only be possible in a Star Trek like world, where profit uber alles is not the focus anymore.
Different strokes for different folks. You don't need to please everyone, but it helps if you can move 15 million units with three developers. I don't play Candy Crush but yet somehow this little cash cow keeps getting updated and I'm not one of the 2.7 billion downloads!
I hope you're not saying the only possible alternatives are the opposite extremes of Candy Crush or Hollow Knight, though :) I'd feel vaguely insulted.
I did finish Cave Story after all (but maybe today I wouldn't, I no longer have the time or patience).
So many things wrong with this. Reminds me of the Objective-c vs Swift arguments from back in the day. The author mentions the initial release, as someone who held out migrating production apps to Swift until v3 I think we all know early adoption is going to be bumpy.
But as of iOS 15+ SwiftUI is very production ready. I’ve migrated two production applications from UIKit to SwiftUI. These have active users and are available on the App Store.
Bloated? The last migration resulted in 79k new lines of code written and 181k deletions after rewriting 80% of the application.
Photos album works out of the box. If you mean camera then there are some issues depending on your use case. Beauty of SwiftUI is we can wrap UIKit views and interop allowing it to play nicely with other frameworks.
If you’re supporting applications that target the last few iOS versions it’s time to learn the new paradigm. Do yourself a favor but most of all anyone who might inherit your codebase.
I primarily do iOS and iPadOS, but it’s far easier to bridge the gap between all the platforms than the experience I had in the past with UIKit/AppKit. My last MacOS app sadly does not do infinite scrolling.
Off the top of my head, I’d consider the approach. Is it a ScrollView? A LazyVStack? What do your view redraws look like?
Anyone working with Swift Strings back in Swift 1+2 was in for some shockingly bad performance. We adopt, we adapt, and the framework matures.
LazyVStack and ScrollView don't scale (no cell reuse / no unloading). The only option is List which has different behaviors and performance characteristics on macOS including issues with eager rendering
To be fair a LazyVStack handles cell reuse and unloading automatically which is why offscreen content that was previously viewed further back on the list will only maintain the root level state (children in the view hierarchy may and will lose state in order to save memory and energy). How that data is loaded and how you key off Identifiable is also important.
Apple’s own documentation discusses this in detail and for large data sets recommends the Lazy approach. If you’re using List you’re in for some issues.
I’m on a phone which means digging through Apple docs or WWDC-ascii isn’t fun. But for my recent Insta-like infinite feed on iOS this was very helpful:
Also... Funny that I'm getting downvoted for correctly pointing out that LazyVStack doesn't reuse or unload views. It's so obvious that they should, that no one can believe they don't.
There are additional links and details about LazyVStack highlighted in the content. I thought the top level article focused on Lists would be more helpful for you.
I followed those links and it agrees with my initial post that LazyVStack does not reuse or unload, and confirms that the only choice for large data sets is List (focused on iOS)
I know all cars can’t be perfect but as a 2010 Prius owner (I probably shouldn’t complain given it’s 15 years old) it has had several well documented issues that never prompted a recall.
I was hit with a bad oil gasket that causes the engine to burn oil. It’s so much work to replace their solution is to replace the entire engine. My solution is to keep putting oil in it. I was told by the dealer this is common over 70k miles.
The steering controls (heat, volume, cruise) stopped working pretty early on. It was well over $1k to fix, mostly labor. Apparently the connection they use is prone to failure.
Leaves me wondering if my next car will be a Toyota. Maybe if they adopted Apple CarPlay.
That being said, batteries are still good and I’ve been pretty impressed how low the maintenance has been.
Another 2010 owner here. I'm at 280,000km, and other than burning some oil everything still works fine. Usually by this age cars here are pretty rusty, but so far my Prius has held up well. There's a few spots of surface rust in places, but nothing serious.
We had to replace the inverter a few years ago (apparently there was a software update to prevent this failure, but we didn't have it), but even when that broke the car was still driveable, just the ICE engine was running all the time.
The biggest issue I've had is with brakes. Three times now the rear pads have got rusty and I've had to replace both the pads and rotors. My theory is that as they are hardly used, they don't get hot enough to dry out any moisture. Last year I rebuild the rear calipers, so let's see if that fairs any better.
FWIW they have adopted carplay. I have a 2019 prius prime, which was I think the last year before they swapped over. My neighbor has a 2024 model, and it has resolved my two main complaints about my car, in that it has carplay and they have three seats in the back now instead of two.
Sadly this rings true. Of all the apps and games we've ported to Android the cost has never been worth it. The games were pirated more than purchased and across both apps and games our support tickets went way up.
It's the Tesco app we're talking about, so none of that even applies.
Saying that half the population somehow doesn't matter for one of the country's largest supermarket chains is completely mental on every level and is not a serious viewpoint.
It's also just harder to support because of the sheer fragmentation.
I give my engineers different Android phones as their primary development devices and yet the weird Android issues that keep cropping up are near constant.
This is difficult, because the mess that is mobile(?) (Android?) development could be better in general, but that also sounds like your software just is poorly designed...
When it's a "works for me" on one platform but falls over with different hardware, that usually points to some serious issues (e.g. threading, contention, false assumptions) in your code/app.
Not to say that there probably aren't buggy areas in Android itself, however with an appropriate test budget you could determine which are likely hardware (different phones) vs OS (common across devices, with simple repro apps) vs your software (you have bugzorz).
In our case, the weird Android issues we encountered a lot lately has been due to the Jetpack Compose’s bugs. It’s amazing how buggy that framework is.
Had this back in the 90s for a month or two. It was amazing. A bit finicky. Our neighbors split out cable outside and it stopped working. Apparently needed a dedicated line.
iPad Pros have a very capable (and expensive) keyboard which doubles as a great stand. BLE keyboards and mice can be paired with an iPad. Wired keyboards also work.
I often see my dad use his iPad in keyboard/mouse mode. At this point I question the point of the iPad. It seems like the user is seeking to interact with it like a laptop, yet the OS is far more compromised than macOS. Window management isn’t as flexible, all apps need to come from the App Store, things that power users would generally want (like Terminal) aren’t there for the native OS, Files is less capable than Finder, and the entire OS is build around apps rather than files, which makes working on a file across multiple applications more difficult.
I think my tech life would be more simple if I could use an iPad as my computer, but I can’t see a path there. I’d have to give up too much.
I program for a career and I’m not going to argue that iPad is going to be my go to device, until there’s a ‘killer’ app. But that’s my day job. When I want to play around with a hobby (writing, music, game dev using Godot???) I turn to an iPad because it’s NOT a computer. Maybe in the same way a lot of music hobbyists buy gear to make music even though using a computer DAW is far easier - we want to ‘unplug’.
Same here. I used to have Linux on my iPod and Xbox, MythTV running on a server and Fujitsu netbook. Now between the hockey rinks and soccer fields, I take out my iPad Pro for HN, light photo editing and Netflix if I’m lucky enough to find an hour of down time. There’s enough Linux, QNX, Windows, FreeRTOS, Azure, etc etc all day at work now.
I use the iPad for several reasons.
- I can remove the keyboard when I don't want it.
- When I want it I can use keyboard, trackpad, mouse and a Pencil, something a Mac does not have.
There are power users out in the world that never use a terminal because that's not their line of work. I use the Affinity suite of apps, most notable Affinity Publisher for layout and design work. I regularly design annual reports, newsletters, any number of print materials ranging from brochures, posters, banners, bookmarks, etc. All of it. And I do it all with the iPad and whatever input I want/need at the moment. No problem.
Additionally I use the iPad along with Textastic to code websites the old fashioned way, basic html and css. I started experimenting using the iPad for those particular jobs in 2010. When I sold my MacBook Pro in 2017 I switched to the iPad for all of my new website set-ups as well as website updates for existing sites. Textastic is great for that and I've had no problem.
Last, I do spreadsheet work for a client who runs a retreat center. I process thousands of records per year, managing contacts, retreat signups, mailings, etc all from the iPad and with no problem.
When I want a break or at the end of the day I set the keyboard to the side but within reach.
Another point worth mentioning that I think often goes overlooked by those that don't use the iPad is the variety of interesting set-ups that can be created with it. Because it's not attached permanently to a keyboard it can be easily attached to a multi-arm stand and swiveled to different angles and heights. Just one example. I've enjoyed experimenting with all sorts of different useful arrangements.
The iPad obviously isn't for everyone or every task. But it's kinda bonkers how many people who don't have a use for it themselves just assume that no one else could possibly put it to use.
For those who have a use for the touch screen, like drawing, I get it.
I was thinking more about people who solely use the iPad docked with the keyboard and trackpad.
I’ve had 6 or 7 iPads. They all end up sitting around with a dead battery after a while, because all I ever want is a keyboard and mouse, and at that point, the laptop is easier to deal with.
If you're looking at this from the perspective of a power user, then sure. For everyone else, the iPad makes a robust computing device that simply does not have a lot of complexity that we power users have just learned to accept. Try explaining the concept of "files" or "terminals" to a random person on the street.
Considering files have been at the center of how operating systems work since the beginning, and computers have been used in school and businesses for 30 years now, I find it disappointing that people are still confused by files.
When people were confused by the keyboard, Jobs said that death would take care of that. When it came to files, he saw that as a problem that needed to be solved in the system, but I think it is more confusing on the iPad than macOS.
People have had to use files, moving them to floppy disks, burning them to CDs, copying them to flash drives, and now dealing with them with services like Dropbox. I would think files and folders in a home directory would be something people understand now. I think the modern smartphone and tablets made a lot of people regress, and the youngest simply aren’t learning it. The less it’s used directly, the abstract the idea becomes, and that makes systems harder to use, because at the need of the day it’s still files and folder. Avoiding that has so far created confusing layers of abstraction that haven’t worked so well.
> When it came to files, he saw that as a problem that needed to be solved in the system, but I think it is more confusing on the iPad than macOS
I completely agree, and I think this is probably iOS' single biggest design mistake. In trying to hide away difficulties non-power users face managing a filesystem, they've managed to make things both more confusing for novice users and just plain annoying for power users.
I think the issue is that most computer users do understand at least a little about filesystems. They might lose things or accidentally delete or overwrite things, but I think many many people are reasonably okay with the concept "my things are in files, my files are in a folder".
But the app-centric model iOS uses becomes unnecessarily difficult when you need to do anything with a file that extends beyond viewing it in the software that created it. Emailing or copying a file is an incredibly common thing to need to do, yet some of the most technophobic people I know can manage it just fine on a PC because the process is the same for any and every file. The hardest part for them is usually just remembering where they put it.
That one problem is solved by an app-centric file model, but introduces a much bigger problem in that the mechanism to share or copy a file is different for every app! It might be under an "export" option, or it might be under a little abstract picture of a square with an upwards pointing arrow—because of course, everyone universally understands that square-with-upwards-arrow is how you email this to Steve in accounts...
(Yes the share icon is fairly standard across iOS apps, but it could be and is located all over the place, and I'm not convinced it's intuitive that step one of "emailing a document" is "open Word").
When was the last time you used an iPad and the Files app? It seems like your view is somewhat outdated. It's true that in the early years the Files app was very basic. But there were some significant improvements introduced around iPadOS 15. As of iPadOS 17 it is a far more robust app that is much closer to the Mac's Finder in terms of visual design and features.
I regularly manage thousands of files in nested folders of website projects as well as Affinity Publisher documents in nested project folders, each with hundreds of linked asset files. And this also includes regular use of local network drives, external drives and sftp accounts for websites.
And many apps are now much more flexible in terms of opening and saving files in locations other than the default. It's not identical to the Mac Finder and there are occasional oddities but in my experience it is very capable. But it's nothing like what it was 10 years ago.
It's easy to say that files should be easy to understand by now but for a lot of people who aren't necessarily computer natives, there is a non-trivial learning curve as to what a "file" conceptually is: something that's on a storage device, that's in a specific part of some abstract folder tree, that is required to have a name, that has a type that may or may not in the name (file extensions), that has a format that some programs understand and others don't, that has an associated program or programs that know how to open it, that can be copied and that copies are in no way connected to the original that may be found in different locations to the original, etc.
Contrast that to how iOS just generally leaves applications to "own" their own data and present them however makes most sense, with only a few exceptions (the most notable being the Photos app, which sorts and displays photos by things that make sense for photos). The place where you'll find the thing you were working on is actually just in the app where you were working on it, which is, unsurprisingly, far easier to explain. Plenty of people get on perfectly fine without knowing or caring about "files" and are not really worse off for it.
I have a hard time accepting that some of those are what trips people. That a something called “file” is in one place (device or particular location) seems more readily understandable than an ethereal thing that’s (sometimes, to some degree, at some resolution) ubiquitous.
The format topic is also something that I see causing frustration, but it is not complicated to understand, as long as someone is familiar with the concept of incompatibility (screwdrivers, human languages, etc.)
In my opinion at this day and age is more an issue of “never needed to learn / cared to” than that of “it is difficult to learn”.
Okay, I'm going to take a hard disagree on this point. Apple's "abstraction" for viewing files is really not that deep. If you open the Photos app, you are looking at a bunch of files. Garageband showing it's saves, iMovie showing it's projects, iCloud showing it's folders, none of it is a particularly "simplified" view of things. At best, it's rehashing the MIME type filtering mechanism most mainstream OSes have used since the 90s. You really cannot argue that iOS is some different breed of computer when ultimately it's just creating a custom wrapper around things people readily understand.
I didn’t say that iOS is some different breed of computer, I said that it doesn’t present a lot of the complexity. Of course it’s all files underneath but the point is that they are usually presented in a way that doesn’t leave the user thinking of them as “files” as an abstract concept. People browsing through the Photos app aren’t really thinking about file names, whether it’s a JPEG or some other format, what folders they’re in etc. The “abstraction” doesn’t need to be deep to be effective.
That's a very nice combination if you have a relatively static setup for the keyboard and mouse, where you can drop the iPad in and out of it like a dock and take advantage of the modularity.
However—at least in my own experience—if you're carrying the keyboard/mouse/trackpad around with the iPad all the time, I found it robs the device of what makes it compelling to begin with (being ultraportable and handheld).
For a stint I was using an iPad Pro with the keyboard/trackpad case, and it made it a far worse tablet. The case almost doubled the total weight and thickness, which made using it much more like to a laptop, but it isn't nearly as capable as my MacBook (nor is it any cheaper).
More power to you if that setup works for you, but I came to the conclusion that I'd just assembled myself a second, worse laptop (which I think was OP's overall point).
See the second paragraph of the comment to which you replied:
If you're going to use the iPad with a keyboard, why not just use a laptop?
I suppose the use case here is iOS game developers who don't want to use their MacBooks, but iPad+keyboard doesn't seem like a fun way to write complex software to me.
I experienced this chronically. It was so pervasive that I would convince myself the next day that I was exhausted with only six hours of sleep. I started tracking my sleep with an Apple Watch and soon realized that, I may wake up, it’s usually for minutes and not nearly as often as I thought!
Broken or broken in your use case? I recently left corporate development for the start up life. As I recall we had to disable our VPN for the majority of development use cases, from package management (gradle), robotics comms, all the way down to running third party unsigned software (I received a stern email from security for downloading Apple’s OpenAPI package).
Our security chain was so deeply embedded in every part of the OS that I was constantly trying to figure out where the failures and slow downs were coming from.
that issue I linked to apple developer forums has 37k thumbs up so I guess the issue is widespread - when reading the conversation a lot of pissed people me included how they handled it.
When it comes to general software development for customers in the everyday world (phones, computers, web). I often write once for proof, iterate as product requirements becomes clearer/refined, rewrite if necessary (code smell, initial pattern was inefficient for the final outcome).
On a large project, often I’ll touch something I wrote a year ago and realize I’ve evolved the pattern or learned something new in the language/system and I’ll do a little refactor while I’m in there. Even if it’s just code organization for readability.