Notices by Nick Lockwood (nicklockwood@mastodon.social)

Did I achieve any of the things I planned to do today? No

But did I organize my thoughts and lay the foundations for the work that needs to be done? Also no

OK, but did I at least take the opportunity to relax and recharge my batteries ready for a the week ahead? Alas,

I spent the weekend with my mom and her boomer friends, one of whom has a Tesla. They were all making fun of him for it - my mom called it a "Swasticar" 😅

Apple Lawyers: "are we sure it's OK to train our LLM on this code? The license says 'attribution required'…"

Apple Engineers: "no problem:"

It has been 0️⃣ days since I got bitten by a bug caused by forgetting to set an optional var in a Swift struct due to the synthesized init defaulting it to nil.

Reminder: you can avoid this by declaring it as:

struct Foo {
var bar: Optional<Baz>
}

Instead of:

struct Foo {
var bar: Baz?
}

@inthehands (although I guess MU/TH/UR is actually more analogous to our current AI tech - capable only of simple automation and answering questions without having any opinions or goals of its own)

@inthehands what are your thoughts on Ash from Alien? Seems he's similar to Hal - selfless but also utterly alien (pun intended) in his thinking, with no sense of morality or loyalty to anything but his directives

Man, Musk looks rougher every time he makes an appearance. It's as if the sickness in his character is physically manifesting in his features like a Batman villain

@inthehands these are great, thank you!

In a fit of madness I've agreed to give an internal talk about advanced Swift at my company. Has anybody got any favorite Swift tricks they'd like to share?

My web development journey:

1999: self-taught, hand-coded HTML 3 tables and exported slices from Photoshop (CSS? What's that?)

2007: fully XHTML-compliant hand-coded accessible, semantic HTML, CSS, progressive enhancement with jQuery

2008: *iOS happens*

2015: I'll just use an off-the-shelf Wordpress template

2020: a github pages site will be fine, right?

2024: fuck it, here's a link to a gist

A lot of folks replying to this with "you can't copyright gameplay" and of course that is correct, in legal terms. But with IP (as with so much in our society) it doesn't actually matter what the law says, it only matters how much money you have.

A free software author cannot defend themselves against a billion dollar corporation in court unless they are willing to risk ending up homeless on the street.

From: @jasonkoebler
https://mastodon.social/@jasonkoebler/112056599668035942

Apple in 1984: what's the best possible user experience?

Apple in 2014: what's the user experience that will maximise our profits?

Apple in 2024: what's the worst possible user experience that doesn't technically violate EU law?

@griotspeak Biden won't see your posts, but your friends will.

I get it. I understand about the ratchet system. I understand that it's a choice between a slow slide to the right and a faster slider to the right.

But the lesser of two evils is still less evil. Buying a little more time to find a solution is better than doing nothing. Driving friends and followers to apathetic despair so they stay home on election day only makes a better future harder to achieve.

It's debatable whether using Copilot or ChatGPT actually makes programmers more productive, but I think there's a dynamic where people are so keen to prove it does (for ideological/tech enthusiast reasons) they will subconsciously work harder in order to demonstrate their greater productivity when using the tool.

This isn't sustainable in the long term but it may be enough to drive widespread LLM adoption in industry (in exchange for reduced headcount).

@thanius @steveriggins oh, huh. Apparently the Xerox Alto had them - I stand corrected 😅 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_menu

@thanius @steveriggins you say this like Windows had a context menu at the time and Apple decided not to copy it (Windows didn't exist at the time to be copied).

@inthehands how much of this is actually *students* feeling uncomfortable vs their parents?

God, overengineering is absolutely endemic in our industry. I see it everywhere. Hundreds of lines of code where a dozen would do, overwhelming any performance gains we make from better hardware or tooling. All done in the name of cargo cult "best practices" and supposed maintainability or testability benefits that are never actually validated.

@inthehands @sindarina I also prefer Safari, but power users' requirements are not homogenous and they may need particular bleeding edge features, plugins, etc.

@dansup clearly you need to increase the TTL on your brain cache