Every writing group has that person the keeps restarting their project, or abandoning a project when it gets hard, to start another one with another 'great' idea.
The upshot is, they don't want to do the hard part - continuity editing, developmental editing, hell, just finishing the dang thing. Even the boring chapters you didn't really have any idea what was going to go on there.
Writing, as an occupation, is a whole lotta schmoozing, attending conferences, volunteering, promoting. Maybe 1 month of writing a year, for 11 months of the hard stuff.
I have a buddy who says he always wanted to start a bar. I said, You like budgeting? Taxes? Hiring? Firing? Stocking? Remodeling? Promoting?
Nah; turns out, he just likes to hang out in bars.
The only reason you start a business is, because you like to run a business.
The only reason you become a writer is, because you like the business of writing.
Once they move product testing to the Engineering group charged with releasing the product, it was inevitable that Release would take priority over Exhaustive Test. Even if bugs surfaced during their sketchy testing, the group would be pressed to release anyway, to meet schedule.
This is obvious to anyone. The management at Microsoft was naive or ignorant to make this process change, take your pick.
It is baffling how sluggish windows explorer has become, same with the start menu...
Even worse that there are no end-user settings to turn down what makes both suck... you have to run hacks, tweak registry keys in order to have it working ~normally~
Windows users: Linux is too complicated, you have to configure too much stuff and eww command line
Also Windows users: I downloaded this massive collection of registry tweaks and PowerShell scripts that I have to run as admin after every update to undo whatever fresh fuckery Microsoft just forced on me. And there's no guarantee that it won't all be undone with the next update.
I'm being facetious to make a point, but it's always amused me how much effort you have to expend just to keep a moderately sane experience.
Software should adapt to the user, not the other way around.
filepilot is a very snappy and feature-rich alternative to the native file explorer.
I wish there was a runner alternative. I love tofi on linux where a tiny bit of config makes it show up with dynamic yet deterministic results in a couple frames (at 60Hz).
I truly don’t understand how the world’s most valuable corporations with huge reserves of cash employing tons of developers can exist and NOT make a stable and reliable bug-free product after 30 years. It’s just more bloat and bugs all the time. I think open source projects by contrast get better over time, because they’re not constrained by whatever corporate agenda is that obviously doesn’t prioritize combatting enshittification over chasing fads and enriching shareholders.
Apple has had the same crap, Webkit/Safari is now the sick man of browsers, the entire development stack for Apple is a steaming pile of ad-hoc kludges (from Objective C to Swift to iOS APIs) and they even forgot to renew the certificate to their own app store, breaking all their apps. Twice!
Even today, the new OS they shipped is focused on creating a usability nightmare with liquid glass making everything hard to read and forcing users to use “Accessibility > Reduce Transparency” to try and combad rather than, say, focusing on fixing long-standing bugs and making their browser better. I mean hey, iOS has been around for almost 20 years and their search is still so broken that “Coo” shows a result but then continuing to type “Cool” hides all results including those with the word Cool, for some mysterious reason every search keeps hitting their servers before it can reveal what’s on the local device. The “Spotlight” MacOS indexing sucks more than “Sherlock” did 30 years ago, it never seems to find the files, always appears to only begin indexing only when you search (default setting), the search results interface sucks with everything including previews etc. despite a single guy at Apple literally creating Previews for every major file format! But somehow they can’t be bothered to make it easy to use, but you can hold Option or Shift and then open each found file in a full program to see what it contain. Technically takes literally at most $200K to get this right and rock-solid out of $50 BILLION DOLLARS. One would think they’d care about “user experience”. The old Apple did.
And Siri is nearly as dumb as it was 10 years ago, and ALSO needs to send data to their servers just to, say, find out what time it is on your own device. “I’m sorry Dave, but I can’t do that — I can’t reach my servers right now.” Sigh. This isn’t buildin rockets to Mars, people. You have BILLIONS OF DOLLARS SITTING AROUND and you don’t know what to do with them. This is a failure of basic product management. These corporations KNOW that their users aren’t leaving. They are an oligopoly in devices and browsers. That’s what they use to keep the plebs in line.
I agree with your general complaints about the decline of Apple’s software quality, but what’s your problem with Safari? I’ve never found another macOS browser I like half as much.
On MacOS it is way better than the crippled hacked-together thing that is on iOS. Google was right to move from WebKit to Blink for Chrome. It is far more stable and impressive.
Hm. The one-button mouse? That was part of the design impact - for user experience, it wasn't much of a win.
Likewise the faulty power cords and noisy power supplies (no choke on the power cable, because it looks ugly!)
How about the soldered-down components and device cases with special screws to keep users from ever opening them? That was not 'for the user', that was more 'walled garden'.
In fact, I'm not sure where this myth of 'quality and user experience' came from. It was all about selling, baby.
These critiques are so tiresome. Like he forced people to buy macs or something. You're not the audience. For the average consumer the fact they don't even have to think about unscrewing something is a major part of the appeal. The walled garden is a plus for them not a negative.
And then ending with the sanctimonious line about selling. Like you eat off of selling nothing. Go screw in whatever you like just understand your critique comes across as little more than entitled griping against a majority. You're the people he fought against the entire time, people obsessed with their own personal agenda/minutia with no understanding of the overarching mission or who the customer is. This video comes to mind https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o
Design without an audience in mind is not design. Don't dismiss the work simply because you're not the audience.
I get it. Lots of people fall for design over usefulness. Not very technical, so a mac is enough.
but lets never fool ourselves into thinking they are more useful, more efficient or flexible. That's tiresome, and it's repeated endlessly as well.
People buy all sorts of things that are not very good. Audience is an excuse; salesmanship is not about selling what the customer needs.
I'm no newb, just ranting about macs. I've been around, even before the mac existed. Written code for them, for nearly every platform around. I'm not sanctimonious; I'm educated. The Mac OS was a pile of bad code. The current Mac OS, dev tools, documentation, deployment environment is among the worst.
Somebody has to be the brave experimenter that tries the new thing. I'm just glad it was these folk. Since they make no tangible product and contribute nothing to society, they were perhaps the optimal choice to undergo these first catastrophic failed attempts at AI business.
While someone does have to be the first to experiment I think you've implied a bit of a false dichotomy here. Experimentation can be good for sure, but it also doesn't have to involve such extremes. Sucks for the people left who now have to make up for the fact that someone's experiment didn't work out so well.
I think that as an employee it’s good to have a clear failure case study to point to from a large and credible organisation that this idea your boss has to fire everyone and just LLM everything isn’t going to work the way you expect it to.
The more examples of this going badly we can get together the better.
I think it was mostly a branding exercise, Salesforce wanted to signal to its customers that they are on top of this whole AI thing and there is no need to go to some unknown AI startup to "AIfy" their business. So they wanted to capitalize on FOMO / fear of being disrupted while using a bad labor market to improve profitability. They succeeded in this and made news around the world, but maybe not so many new customers.
Makes no sense - why would Salesforce's customers care if the company is using AI or not, other than when it impacts them (the customer) such as worse customer service.
This just seems a poor decision made by C-suite folk who were neither AI-savvy enough to understand the limits of the tech, nor smart enough to run a meaningful trial to evaluate it. A failure of wishful thinking over rational evaluation.
If you consider the extent to which our economy has become financialized, then you see these decisions have little to do with providing a product for customers but rather a stock for investors.
they contribute very little except of course that without jobs their products have created 14.8647% of US population would starve to death. HN seems like a perfect place where people upvote stupid shit like some of the most successful companies in the history of mankind contributing nothing to society. bravo!! :)
A bold statement. Who knew so many US citizen owed their food to an internet company! And not even Google or Amazon. Seems a reach, by maybe two or three decimal places.
When an aperture is aligned to the winter solstice, it is also aligned to avoid light the rest of the year. An early attempt at air conditioning? Keep the heat out.
The article talks extensively about how these monuments were used for timekeeping. Marking the seasons allowed people to predict animal migrations and plan agricultural activities.
It seems that you are the one who has forgotten the practical uses of these artifacts.
Tech really went downhill since Alphabet started using machine learning to help the oil industry find more deposits.
It created a feedback loop where datacenters increase both energy consumption and energy production. "AI" is just the current upshot. Energy use is exploding and its being fed by an exploding increase in oil production enabled by the very computer clusters that consume most of the excess production.
The global warming death spiral has begun. Brace for impact.
I see it this way: simpler code can be smaller, say half the size. It takes half the time to write (at the most), half the time to read, half the time to compile and execute. That already gives it an eight-fold advantage.
You better have a good reason for spending the time and money to do more that the simple solution. Engineering is all about money spent for results. Not cleverness, except indirectly.
The job, in the modern world, is to close tickets. The code quality is negotiable, because the entire automated software process doesn't measure code quality, just statistics.
That's why I refuse to take part in it. But I'm an old-world craftsman by now, and I understand nobody wants to pay for working, well-thought-out code any more. They don't want a Chesterfield; they want plywood and glue.
I woke up and had a thought the software engineering isn't a serious engineering field if they actually fully shipped llms and expect everyone to use them. What do you expect quality wise from a profession that says that this is okay?
Imagine if normal engineering did that. Engineers invent a "blobby" thing that glues things together. It has amazing properties that increase productivity but sometimes it just stops working for some reason and comes off. It's totally random and because of how blobby is produced there is no way to tell when it's going to work or not, contrary to the typical material. Anyway we're going to use blobby to build everything from schools, to bridges, to airplanes now.
You and me both, and for many of the same reasons.
I would point out that in your OPs comment, Luddites get the stereotypical dismissal as anti-tech, which is far far from the reality of demanding good conditions for workers.
For the modern s/w engineer, being granted the time and resources for adequate testing could be considered a "worker's rights" issue. In that context the Luddite allegation could be accurate.
Huh. That's exactly how you make garum - an unpleasant horror of mashed fish. Refer to Max Miller and his spectacularly successful effort to reproduce Garum in his back yard.
It's one thing if you make a youtube video starting from already knowing how to make modern fish sauces, and what they're supposed to taste like, and quite another level of horror if you don't. My recollection of the letter or paper or whatever it was was that the person who wrote it was not at all pleased with the result.
There are folks that will insist that we don't know at all what Roman garum really tasted like or everything involved in its preparation, and they're not exactly wrong since Colatura di Alici can only be traced back to the middle ages, but it's also oddly obtuse. I think it was probably like modern fish sauces but Roman garum could have been as different from Colatura and Asian fish sauce as those are from Worcestershire.
Max had no idea whatsoever what he was doing. He did all the steps, didn't stop at the 'jesus that's disgusting' phase. Saw it through to the end. Even the complaints from his neighbors, he put up with.
And got the most divine, golden syrupy sauce you can imagine, at the end. After all the gagging and stirring, straining and filtering and pressing.
I mean, showing the texture of the underlying stone is how the vast majority of statues from classical antiquity are displayed, and indeed how most pastiches are created.
(and half the objection to the paint jobs comes from the fact we've come to incorrectly associate decorative elements from the classical period with the colours of bare stone)
Associating them with garishly and almost certainly inaccurately (based on pretty much all the indirect evidence we have) painted sculptures doesn't seem like much of an improvement, though?
The upshot is, they don't want to do the hard part - continuity editing, developmental editing, hell, just finishing the dang thing. Even the boring chapters you didn't really have any idea what was going to go on there.
Writing, as an occupation, is a whole lotta schmoozing, attending conferences, volunteering, promoting. Maybe 1 month of writing a year, for 11 months of the hard stuff.
I have a buddy who says he always wanted to start a bar. I said, You like budgeting? Taxes? Hiring? Firing? Stocking? Remodeling? Promoting?
Nah; turns out, he just likes to hang out in bars.
The only reason you start a business is, because you like to run a business.
The only reason you become a writer is, because you like the business of writing.
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