Notices by Nick Lockwood (nicklockwood@mastodon.social)

@thomasfuchs @Migueldeicaza Apple provides a standard ratings dialog API for this with very little control over the presentation.

A bespoke implementation can't provide similar functionality because the APIs are private; You can link the user out to the app store page, but you can't give them a way to set a star rating or write a review from within the app

@thomasfuchs @Migueldeicaza FYI one of my first and most popular open source projects was an app ratings library for iOS (before there was an official API)

It was also the one and only time I ever caught the attention of John Gruber, who was so enraged by apps showing review prompts (which was common long before my library) that he called me out on his podcast 🤣

@thomasfuchs @Migueldeicaza Some apps present a custom prompt as a primer before showing the real prompt, but I generally think this is a bit skeazy

They mostly do it either to get around the built in rate limiting of the real dialog (you can only present it three times then it silently fails), or to check sentiment beforehand so that only happy customers get shown the real dialog

@thomasfuchs @Migueldeicaza I've seen this sentiment expressed a few times, but statistically, people who will go to the trouble of leaving a bad review just to punish an app for asking are a very small minority compared with people who are happy to leave a positive review but will never think to do so unless asked

@inthehands @jargoggles @pluralistic

Rude

Eww 🤮 https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/

@mattiem the two statements are not contradictory - the former only implies that AI can't write an entire piece of software by itself, and the second only implies that it can be used as a tool to aid a human in the writing of software.

That said, I am no longer all that confident that AI can't write software by itself. In the last few years almost every statement of the form "AI can do X but can't do Y" has aged very poorly.

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?