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Episode 592: One Of Our Crazy Trials

 

Apple is sued by the United States. Do companies like Apple get a heads-up from suing parties like the Department of Justice, and how would we react if we were the targets of lawsuits like these, or the changes from the European Union’s Digital Markets Act? Daniel and Manton discuss the lawsuit. Then in the second half of the show, rumors about Apple licensing AI from a company like Google. What are the benefits to Apple of treating large-scale AI as a commodity service that they don’t need to focus on? Considering the various scales of technologies at which companies like Apple, OpenAI, and others work.

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The post Episode 592: One Of Our Crazy Trials appeared first on Core Intuition.

Core Intuition

23 Mar 2024 at 21:18
#

I’m using the web interface for WhatsApp for the first time this week. It’s a great reminder of how nice it would be if iMessage had a web interface, on icloud.com along with mail and other apps. Could even start by requiring a registered iPhone so it doesn’t become an Android free-for-all.

Manton Reece

23 Mar 2024 at 20:28

Growth is a mind cancer

 

I'm following with somewhat vague interest the various legal battles Apple is currently involved in. Reading their response to the EU's DMA makes me sad. Not for the company itself. I honestly could not care less about the company. Nor for the people who run that company. I'm sad because the pursuit of endless growth is such a mind cancer. It consumes and distracts everyone. If you're an artisan, creating amazing objects is your end goal. Ideally, you want those objects to last forever. And if they don't, you want to do such an amazing job that once something is broken beyond repair, people will come to you again and ask you to make something new, rather than buying from someone else.

Apple makes amazing products. I bought the laptop I'm typing this 9 years ago. It still works fine. Sure, it's slow compared to my new machine but I can use it to do calls and write blog posts. And that's great. I love it. I was happy to give Apple my money back in 2015. But you know who's not happy? Apple. Apple is not happy that I bought a laptop in 2015 that was so good that it is still working fine 9 years later. And it's also not happy that I bought a phone more than 4 years ago that still does all the things I need it to do. Because they need to make money. More money. There's no end state here. "More" has no end state. At some point, a company like Apple will inevitably run out of people willing to buy their stuff. Because it's unreasonable to expect people to upgrade phones, laptops, screens, watches, tablets, virtual-ski-goggles every damn year. And so what do they do? They move into services. Music, movies, games, fitness, storage. You name it. But those also can't grow forever. Because guess what? There are other companies out there doing the same.

But they can't stop. They're a public company. If they're not growing enough it means they're failing. Forget that they make amazing products that can last decades with no issues. Forget that they're an almost 3-fucking-trillions dollar company. If they're not growing enough, stock goes down and that's no good. Because remember, there's no finish line here. They can't just be happy with their size. They can't be happy with the idea of employing thousands of smart people and creating amazing products. No, they have to keep growing. And sooner or later, this mind cancer becomes malignant.

Don't get me wrong, this is not just an Apple issue. It's an issue with any big company. It's an issue with everyone who can't accept that they reached their end state.

Cory Doctorow famously coined the enshittification term to describe the sad trend of online services going to shit over time. I don't think that's just an online services issue. It's a societal issue related to the pursuit of endless growth. And if you think about it, it's a deeply human issue. It's what happens when you can't say stop. No matter what you're doing, it can be something positive or negative, if you can't say stop, bad things will happen. Try to go for a run, and don't stop. Ever. Or try to drink water, and don't stop. Ever.

But it's our fault. Our as a society. We celebrate when Apple becomes the first trillion-dollar company but we don't celebrate when someone says "You know what? I think I have enough".


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Manu's Feed

23 Mar 2024 at 18:25

Blogroll Spin #3

 

Blogroll Spin #3

Spinning the Blogroll again with a new set of blogs. This was an easier set as I had several dozen tabs open with recent articles and knew I wanted to add every single one of them. It was just a matter of organizing them and deciding which to use for this round.

Micro.blog recently rolled out a "recommended" blogroll feature. So now in addition to the blogroll collection on Raindrop.io, which I keep up-to-date with all the latest spins, I've added my complete Blogroll on microblog. This feature provides an OPML file for the entire blogroll.

  1. Ana Rodrigues

    Ana's blog is adorably styled like a scrapbook, complete with background graph paper, taped pieces of paper, hand-drawn doodles, and cut-and-paste adornments. I'm enjoying the bookmarks as much as the blog posts.

    You don't have to be a "content creator" to have a website.

  2. Baldur Bjarnason

    I started following Baldur on Micro.blog and quickly found an endless supply of posts and links to everything about the web today.

    The one about the web developer job market

  3. Ben Myers

    One the important accessibility blogs that I follow.

    Subtitles, Closed Captions, and Open Captions: What's the Difference?

  4. David Bushell

    I've read a few great posts by David recently, a worthy new addition to my RSS reader.

    CSS Button Styles You Might Not Know

  5. Eric Bailey

    A second entry in the important accessibility blogs for this spin.

    Thoughts on embedding alternative text metadata into images

  6. Katherine Yang

    Katherine's poetic style and treatment is a delight. I've been following the development of this site with interest.

    Coem (the attentive thing)

  7. Keith J Grant

    Keith's more recent blog redesign reminds me a lot of something I put together for a non-profit it college. I love the bold use of imagery, the circular patterns, and the classy font choices.

    Scoped CSS is Back

  8. Nikita Prokopov

    I have just started reading this blog after reading the post shared below and was so pleasantly amused by the dark mode I had to include it in this spin.

    JavaScript Bloat in 2024

  9. Paul Robert Lloyd

    Another blog I started following on Micro.blog, full of Indieweb goodies and personal musings.

    Small dents in the IndieWeb


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Apple Annie's Weblog

23 Mar 2024 at 18:02
#
 I've had my blogroll for a couple of weeks now, and I've got it on-screen a lot, as I'm developing another user interface that has the blogroll in it.

This blogroll is much like the one I had in the 00s, but it's in motion, and it's a source of news and ideas. It's also doing the thing that Twitter used to do, it lets me have a way to see what specific people are interested in. I expect more of that as new people get this kind of blogroll. Right now I'm pretty much the only one. The next step is getting the blogroll running in WordPress. And then getting it running on Om's blog and Doc's blog, both of whom have real experience with the art of blogrolling. From that, I expect to have a better idea of what the editorial UI should look like for people creating and managing these blogrolls. We'll iterate until it's pretty easy to set up and manage one. Also to be clear, I want it to run in other platforms, this is not exclusive to WordPress. It's just the place where the people are right now, the ones I really want to work with. But I wouldn't mind it running in Substack for example, if there are any writers there who find this compelling. That would require cooperation from the company though, their platform as far as I know, does not support other-party plugins.
Scripting News

23 Mar 2024 at 16:00

Radio noise

 

In The World of Silence, Max Picard describes silence as an active presence, a kind of independent and infinite substrate upon which all speech emerges from and then descends into. He believes silence to be a sacred and necessary component of living, and is quite distraught at the perceived lack of it in his day. Since he was writing in the middle of the last century, he’s particularly perturbed by the radio and it’s ever-present noise:

Through the continuity of radio-noise, therefore, man is inspired with a false sense of security. He is led to imagine that the radio represents something continuous and that he is himself continuous. A man goes to work: radio accompanies him, it surrounds him at his work. He goes to sleep, and radio-noise is the last thing in his consciousness before he sleeps. He wakes up, and radio-noise is there again, as if it were something quite independent of man altogether, something more real than man himself, and the guarantee of his own continuity. It is always around him, always available, and the one thing that seems always ready to care for him, to provide for him.

Picard, The World of Silence, page 206

It is perhaps not terribly remarkable that you could rephrase this to refer not to “radio-noise” but to the both visual and auditory noise of smartphones and it would be just as relevant. But as ever it feels useful to me to be reminded that many of our present-day troubles have roots in the past; not because it suggests we will never be rid of them but rather because it means we have the wealth of our ancestor’s experience to draw from.

Picard is more pessimistic:

There is no longer any space in which it is possible to be silent, for space has all been occupied now in advance.

Picard, The World of Silence, page 199

Here is where Picard and I diverge. Picard worries that we have banished silence from the world, that it may not be possible to restore it. This emerges, I think, in part from his Catholicism, and from a cosmology that centers “man”-kind. (He has scant attention for women.) But from where I stand, the universe is a great and vast silence, far older and more immense than anything humans have given thought to let alone spoken of. However much noise we insist on making on this one small and fragile world, we can never overcome that silence. It will always and forever remain—even when (especially when) we have not the wisdom to hear it.

A Working Library

23 Mar 2024 at 15:30

One endless meeting

 We made a list on my team at Retool the other day of all the things we’ve done, everything we’ve shipped since the team started back in November. And it’s a lot! Plus, I realized that we’d shipped more in the last four months than I had in the prior three years. So what gives?

Was it the folks I was working with? Was it 10× engineers? Am I a 10× designer? (Lol no.) Or perhaps it was the environment? The snacks at the office? The app that we’re building? Were we all just running as fast as humanly possible and shipping a bunch of garbage? (Well, no. I think we’re all proud of what we’ve built so far, so that can’t be it.)

I think there’s a few reasons why we’ve been productive:

1. The team is small

Like, tiny. So tiny that most folks would scoff at us. Two people making things and shipping 1% improvements to the app every week? How can that be effective? But small teams are often way better than larger teams because there’s less bureaucracy, fewer meetings, and more time for actual work. There’s no tickets. Why do you need tickets? Is this thing important? Great, do it now. If it’s not, kick it to later. You can only do one thing at any given time and most big teams try to juggle ten thousand projects and that’s really what slows em down. So focus is more important than anything else.

2. The hard part is building stuff, not making decisions

Decision making is what slows down most teams. The endless slide decks, the pitch to leadership, the lack of trust in what they’re building. They’ll go round and round in big circles trying to convince everyone in the entire company that this is the right thing to do. (I have done this before! Never again!) Or they’ll spend weeks debating about whether we should be doing ticket 1 first or ticket 2 and 99% of the time that doesn’t matter in the slightest.

This is the most obvious thing to say in the world, but: the hard work should never be the bureaucracy, it should be designing things and solving technical problems. If the hard work ain’t the hard work, ya gotta bounce. Don’t kill yourself trying to tell people that.

3. Feedback every day

On the design front, I try to break up my week into work days and feedback days. On work days, I’m grinding out iterations of a design or polishing the final one. On feedback days, I’m just talking to people, getting their opinions and notes on how things should work, what the real problem is. When I joined Retool and started doing this I realized that one thing that had held me back from making design decisions in the past is that I would hide my work, not share it with others. I would wait for the big unveiling and only get feedback once every couple of weeks and that...is a terrible way to design things.

If I just show everyone the mess all the time then they’ll guide me in the right direction. They’ll show me the way.

4. One endless meeting

This one is harder because I believe in it and also I strongly don’t. But working in the office again, where an engineer can just turn to me and say “hey, what should I do here” and we can riff on things together, it just saves us so much time. Plus it helps me think more deeply about the design when I get their eyes on something quickly. I’ve worked remote for years and some people are super effective about learning when to communicate in slack, when to setup a meeting to chat through things, but man. Just turning to someone and pointing and saying “that’s not right” is better for me, I think? I hate the commute but the work is easier.

Someone on the team called this “one endless meeting” and I think that’s right. We should always be talking, always be iterating and not working in isolation. But I think this has more to do with the communication style of individuals than some big important lesson to take away here.

Anyway, this is all simple stuff. But sometimes the most simple thing is the least obvious thing when everyone is telling you otherwise.

Robin Rendle

23 Mar 2024 at 15:29
#

Anyone using a Pushcut server to extend Apple Shortcuts? What kinds of real world things are you using it for?

Chuck Grimmett

23 Mar 2024 at 15:17
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