This article was very eye-opening for me. I think I understand the author's pain and I could certainly feel it while reading the article. The fact that it was "the people" that made the difference kind of surprised me, and then I realized it was because I have seldom had the experiences he's had and that this might have a major impact on the way I (and others) view the technology.
For me, building software has often been a solitary process in which I was far more obsessed with it than those around me. I'm not in a tech-heavy area and I don't have a ton of well-informed people to talk to about programming, software engineering, or AI. I have had experiences like the author in which I needed to learn a new technology or a new language but ended up doing so on my own at home, not with the assistance of a much more knowledgeable developer with significantly more experience.
To me LLMs have left us in a situation where the following things are true and moving forward lies somewhere in figuring out how to reconcile / resolve these things:
- You can use LLMs and learn things or not learn things; this is a result of the approach, desire, and willpower of the user.
- There is a level of skill associated with using LLMs much like nearly everything else in existence. The user's skill level impacts their perception of the technology and also affects the way those around them view the technology. Unskilled users will generate more negative sentiment.
- Some people love to do the things the machine is good at and do not want the machine to do them, while others hate to do the things the machine is good at and want the machine to do them. I realized at some point this year that I don't love programming anywhere near as much as I love building and designing systems and solving problems.
- Software development is many things wrapped up in one and talking about it as a single thing makes it more confusing. Some people like to think through the logic of the application and have an LLM write the code while others want the LLM to think up the solution, implement it, and test it. These are two very different people with likely different goals and different desires.
- When someone else looks at Claude or ChatGPT they might see something completely different than what you see.
My current opinion is that AI is just a thing that is going to further amplify our existing tendencies (on a person-to-person basis). I've personally found it to be extremely beneficial in research, learning, and the category of "things that take time because of the stuff you have to mechanically go through and not because of the brainpower involved". I have been able to spend so much more time on things that I feel require more human thinking and on stuff I generally enjoy more. It has been wonderful and I feel like I've been on a rocket ship of personal growth.
I've seen many other people who have essentially become meatspace analogues for AI applications. It's sad to watch this happen while listening to many of the same people complain about how AI will take their jobs, without realizing that they've _given_ AI their jobs by ensuring that they add nothing to the process. I don't really understand yet why people don't see that they are doing this to themselves.
> At the end of it, they were sketching a completely different architecture without my "PMing". Because they finally understood who was actually using our product.
I cannot help but read this whole experience as: “We forced an engineer to take sales calls and we found out that the issue was that our PMs are doing a terrible job communicating between customer and engineering, and our DevOps engineer is more capable/actionable at turning customer needs into working solutions.”
Some of these items were such elegant distillations of my thoughts and feelings that it made me laugh when I read them. To the author: thank you so much for sharing this wisdom.
The only thing that I've found difficult to reconcile is the push and pull between those that think they're fighting the "you are 90% done" fight and those who think they're fighting the "think about pathological data" fight. Essentially, I've personally found the clash between speed and preparedness/safety to be a difficult one to solve.
IIRC that's not how any of it went down. The authorities wanted access to the device itself and were asking for a "good guys only" backdoor into the device to obtain anything that might not have been in the iCloud backup; Apple refused to do this and that is where the controversy / news story came from.
Apple was very open about the fact that law enforcement would have access to the iCloud backup, which is even mentioned in the article you provided. And there was no "backdoor explicitly preserved" for the FBI, the iCloud backup was just not e2ee. This was also (somewhat) common knowledge at the time and what was often suggested was to do backups through iTunes because there was still an option available to encrypt the backup.
1. Why do some people seem to be so fanatical about their love for Macs?
2. Why do some people seem to be so vocally fanatical online about their love for Macs?
As far as #1 goes, I think it's just about finding something that you have to use every day that you are much happier with. I have found small pieces of software that have made me jump for joy simply because they resolved a small problem; it's not hard to understand why someone would become so fanatical about switching to a a completely new piece of hardware and OS that they feel works so much better than what they were previously using.
I used to have long and aggressive arguments with my college roommate about why Windows was superior to OS X and said that I would never even consider owning an Apple product. I've been using a Mac now for work and personal use for a little over a decade and I dread every time I need to use my Windows machine for certain work tasks.
I think this is perfectly understandable and I don't think there's anything wrong with people going through the process of finding something that changes the way they do something major in their lives.
#2, however, tends to be more unpleasant when it becomes vitriolic/persistent. I think this is just a symptom of the happiness that exists from feeling like you've found the greener grass (and wanting to share that with others) mixed with an inability to understand the negative aspects of aggressively stating to complete strangers that the preferences of others are objectively wrong. I think this is inevitable considering the Mac is still considered the "alternate" option for some reason, and it's paired (inevitably) with those that feel that the fanaticism for the alternate option is unwarranted.
I think the tech sector has always attracted both skeptics and idealists/innovators, and that's bound to create an environment where you'll have groups that feel like it's their duty to inform others of what they feel is the better way and groups of people that feel like it's their duty to temper unwarranted fanaticism.
For me it’s just because I don’t want another piece of software on my machine that adds essentially no value on its own running in the background that I also have to manage to ensure that it’s not running in the background when I don’t want it to.
I’m resistant (and I think this is the case with others as well) to the idea that games must exist inside of their creator’s special portal; it’s a level of abstraction that I wish did not exist. Every modern desktop OS has some way of directly installing applications and many of them also provide their own stores (Mac App Store, Windows Store, etc.). The only thing “game store competition” is doing is creating a “now you have [x] standards” problem where the pitch of “all your games are located in one place” ends up becoming “all your games are in a bunch of places which you’ll be able to access after you’ve installed several different applications”.
This isn't my understand of what the parent commenter is trying to communicate. I think the point that they're trying to make is this:
A chef could originally decide that a dish is only complete if it is garnished with a terribly rare ingredient that costs an enormous amount of money; this would be analogous to a dev team lead deciding that a new feature will only be considered complete if it covers non-primary use cases or specific pieces of functionality that will add a substantial amount of time to the overall development estimate.
The parent comment is saying that defining that 100% is part of what will impact your possibility/rate of success or failure; the 100% is not predefined or intrinsic, it's a place in time / level of progress that you need to carefully define. If rarity and cost keep you from obtaining the "finishing" ingredient 80% of the time that you make the dish then you're setting yourself up for failure. If you define the feature as only being finished when it covers nearly every sub-feature you can think of then you're setting yourself up for failure.
There also seem to be analogies between quantity and quality. You can get 80% of the way through a feature and decide it's "good enough". The leftover 20% could either be bugs that needed to be fixed or additional features. I don't think leaving out some additional features would be considered skipping the "finishing" phase, but leaving serious unresolved bugs almost definitely would be. An undercooked dish is nearly useless, but one missing a garnish is not.
I enjoy watching Apple's keynotes with the presenters delivering extremely polished and scripted rundowns of each new product and feature; they come across as having tailored their emotions to fit the desired tone of the presentation. It's very different to me from the way that Panos comes across when he presents things.
I must be in the minority here, but I actually find it very refreshing to watch him speak in these sorts of events. I'm guessing that you are mostly talking about Panos when you mention that "presenters felt like they were on the verge of tears" since the other presenters seemed to me much more relaxed and "normal", for lack of a better term. From my own perspective he comes across as genuinely being excited about the work they're doing and doesn't seem to have a problem falling into his own rhythm while presenting.
Intellirogue's comment mentioning his facial expressions also made me realize that his presentation style might just be closer to what I see in myself; I find myself in situations quite frequently where I am genuinely excited about something and those around me think that I'm feigning excitement. Whether or not his delivery style is universally more palatable to people, I personally feel more connected to it and there is something about it that ends up coming across to me as more relatable and sincere.
I also think it might be a positive thing for us to leave open the possibility that some of these execs are as passionate about these things as anyone on HN would want them to be. I would love to have people at Microsoft and Apple and Google creating things that they feel are so incredible that they're on the verge of tears.
This proposal seems to me like it's centered around a false dichotomy:
- Acknowledge the presence of natural talent, put naturally talented kids into advanced levels of math, and create inequity.
- Denounce the belief in natural talent, keep all kids at one level of learning, and help resolve inequity issues.
It doesn't seem to leave any space for kids who are just more interested in math or more dedicated to their pursuit of mastering it, as well as kids who have little to no interest in math and are not as dedicated to their pursuit of mastering it. I can't see the potential gains of this proposal outweighing the results of stifling the ability of many kids to explore the areas of academia that they're interested in. Isn't that one of the most beneficial aspects of the learning experience?
I alternate between a Razer 15 and a MacBook Pro that I plug into a 3 display setup and this is one of the things that is very aggravating / comically short-sighted about macOS with multiple displays.
While I largely prefer using macOS, the way that Windows 10 handles desktops is much better in my opinion. I can't understand why macOS does not let you display your menu bar on all displays if you don't have "separate spaces" enabled. It seems so strange to me that throughout the entire development process no one thought it was kind of ridiculous that the user would not be able to access the menu bar of an application from the same screen the application is on.
That said, I basically cross my fingers now every time I win+tab in Windows 10 because about 10-15% of the time the entire UI locks and I just have to wait 1-2 minutes before I can use my machine again.
I'm interested in this as a convenient way to access some of my cloud storage providers, but I can't consider it responsible to use this until it supports OTP two-factor.
For me, building software has often been a solitary process in which I was far more obsessed with it than those around me. I'm not in a tech-heavy area and I don't have a ton of well-informed people to talk to about programming, software engineering, or AI. I have had experiences like the author in which I needed to learn a new technology or a new language but ended up doing so on my own at home, not with the assistance of a much more knowledgeable developer with significantly more experience.
To me LLMs have left us in a situation where the following things are true and moving forward lies somewhere in figuring out how to reconcile / resolve these things:
- You can use LLMs and learn things or not learn things; this is a result of the approach, desire, and willpower of the user.
- There is a level of skill associated with using LLMs much like nearly everything else in existence. The user's skill level impacts their perception of the technology and also affects the way those around them view the technology. Unskilled users will generate more negative sentiment.
- Some people love to do the things the machine is good at and do not want the machine to do them, while others hate to do the things the machine is good at and want the machine to do them. I realized at some point this year that I don't love programming anywhere near as much as I love building and designing systems and solving problems.
- Software development is many things wrapped up in one and talking about it as a single thing makes it more confusing. Some people like to think through the logic of the application and have an LLM write the code while others want the LLM to think up the solution, implement it, and test it. These are two very different people with likely different goals and different desires.
- When someone else looks at Claude or ChatGPT they might see something completely different than what you see.
I hope some of this resonates with others.