Notices by Kyle Hughes (kyle@mister.computer)

@darnell can’t win em all, just most

Every time I get in my car I say, “Siri, shuffle my inbox playlist.” I have organized all new-to-me music into an inbox playlist for a decade. Now, Siri says, “Sorry, but Mail can’t do that yet.”

I use Siri for two things. Now one of them doesn’t work, and it wasn’t sacrificed for anything in particular.

Apple’s stewardship of Siri is indistinguishable from corporate sabotage and/or intentional sandbagging of public perception. My parents’ friends don’t know what Face ID is or Apple Silicon but they know that Siri sucks shit.

It is so obvious that Google will eventually pursue the Amazon Basics model with YouTube where they use their position as the platform to have an omnipotent view of the entire streaming video market and then use Veo to commodify every trend that has value.
https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-youtube-channel-uploaded-nothing-but-videos-of-women-being-shot/

A permanent underclass with a crippling short-form AI-generated video addiction driven by reinforcement learning with human feedback. That is The Matrix that we deserve and it is what we will get.

There is a Fastmail scam going around right now. They must be crawling DNS records and looking for anyone with Fastmail MX records.

The subject line is, “Action Required To Keep Your Fastmail Services Running,” and the body of the email is an image. Clicking on the image will redirect you through a URL meant to look like a Coursera assessment on AWS S3. You will be taken directly to a payment flow.

I love to program computers.

A citizen cannot be deported, only kidnapped. Do not say deported.

On August 19, 2024, I generated the first image with ChatGPT. I just told the new model, “make this photorealistic.”

The ChatGPT image generation upgrade hints at a different headwind for software development regarding AI: less of a need for bespoke software.

Presently, LLMs can't write all of the code for Blender or Photoshop, but ChatGPT can produce higher fidelity photorealistic and 3D images than, probably, everyone but a few thousand people in the world. So, is it more impactful that it can't write the software it tries to replace, or that it rapidly replaces the need for that software?

@ristkof try XCTUnwrap 😅

@darnell@one.darnell.one @darnell@darnell.moe JaGOATby 🫶🏻

@darnell Oh jeez, hope you're doing well. Do not tell influencers that you spent your limited electricity watching their videos, their heads are already too big.

@darnell Do you regularly watch Theo or his peers? That feels like a generation removed for me, although I'm only a little older than Theo.

I feel a bit bad when I post about Apple because I know so many people there and I know how frustrating it can be to read outside people opining about your Big Tech company. But I make my living leveraging a different relationship with Apple and it’s valuable for me to mull that over in public with likeminded folks. I’m always communicating in good faith*, never assign blame or pass value judgements, and never acknolwegde individual contributors. I think I thread the needle as well as I can.

Adopting these new Apple technologies has made me lower my quality bar year-over-year and I feel resentful. That’s not productive, that’s my problem to deal with. But our collective problem, if one cares, is that keeping up with Apple & working at the top of our craft used to be synonymous and feels increasingly less so.

SwiftUI -> Swift Concurrency -> SwiftData kind of buried my perennial WWDC enthusiasm under an avalanche of reality. After the last four years, my hands are full of technologies that I eagerly anticipated but are tiring or impossible to hold right. This is the first year I don’t feel guilty for not being excited and that’s progress for me.

I have more confidence in Apple than anyone else that they can get these new technologies right in the long-term. But SwiftUI debuted in 2019 and my career – at best – has 6 more 5-year spans in it. It is crucial to reflect on the ROI from the attention I have paid to this space for the last 5 years and the outcome is not good. These technologies have not allowed me to be build better, safer, and more performant software: they have encouraged me to sacrifice those tenets for time to market.

My partner is looking for a senior-level backend engineering role in Seattle or remote. Holler if you hear of something.

- 10 years of experience
- AWS @ Amazon for majority
- Platform & product roles
- Mentor to many
- Ideal tech lead

She is in multiple underrepresented demographics in tech.

#GetFediHired #FediHire #TechIsHiring

I come from Japan to tell you: big pants are coming. They’re already here but you don’t know it yet. In two years you’re going to be gawking at hip 20-something’s wearing JNCO jeans and baggy shirts with parted hair and you’ll be boosting jokes about the early 2000s. I’m trying to warn you now so you don’t sound old then but we both know you won’t listen. We are both cursed in different ways. See you soon.