Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I went out on Monday and picked up a 2008 Chevy Silverado 4x4 pickup. Why? Well, we bought a camping trailer last spring and we discovered pulling it with Kim’s Honda Pilot felt unstable and underpowered. Basically it felt like we were on the edge of something going wrong at any time. It was just unsettling.
I’ve been without a vehicle since COVID and since I’ve always had a truck and we wanted one for the trailer it was an easy decision. Plus, as far as trucks go, it was inexpensive.
Would I love to have a new Chevy or Ford EV Truck? You bet! Am I willing to spend $60,000 plus to have one? Sorry, can’t do it.
Anywho, I like it! 🛻
This is wild. Both because they declined – again, for the first time in a decade – but more so because they have to know the signal it sends in declining.1 At best, it looks like they’re trying to avoid answering any non-staged questions about how things are going. At worst, it looks like they’re freezing Gruber out for a few recent critical posts about the company – notably, his “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” post about the Apple Intelligence shitshow back in March.
When I read John’s post about this years The Talk Show at WWDC I figured Apple was showing their displeasure with John’s earlier piece.
Like most big companies Apple has run into their fair share of problems, criticism, and lawsuits.
The law is finally catching up with some of Apple’s policies around their 15-30% fee for sales in the App Store, which is the only way to sell an iOS App.
They lost a case in California that says they have to allow third-party payment systems. App developers have Epic to thank for that. I’m not switching my in app purchase strategy. I’ll continue to use Apple’s system, at least for now.
Brown University Computer Science
This book is designed to help C++ programmers learn Rust. It provides translations of common C++ patterns into idiomatic Rust. Each pattern is described through concrete code examples along with high-level discussion of engineering trade-offs.
Really nice resource if, like me, you have a C++ programming background! From everything I’ve heard, Rust is a great language. I kind of wish someone would do a low-level equivalent for C++ devs moving to Swift.
Has anyone proven that Swift is just as performant as C++ on Mac, Linux, or Windows?
I know Microsoft is using Rust for some Windows APIs now. I don’t recall if it was GDI or User, but Windows does have some Rust code in it now.
As policy makers in the UK weigh how to regulate the AI industry, Nick Clegg, former UK deputy prime minister and former Meta executive, claimed a push for artist consent would “basically kill” the AI industry.
Maybe the AI industry needs to be killed or at least thrown in technical and political jail until a rational, equitable, system can be devised to pay authors and artists for their work.
How about the AI folks give us access to all their hard work? Their code, their algorithms, their LLMs, and all of their compute for free? All for the betterment of mankind. I bet they’d balk at that. 😃
Holly Cain • NASCAR Wire Service
A day filled with high hopes and trophy expectations after weeks of hard work at track and a year to contemplate the quest ended abruptly Sunday after NASCAR star Kyle Larson crashed just before the midpoint of Sunday’s Indianapolis 500 — a race ultimately won in a sprint to the finish by three-time and reigning IndyCar champion, Chip Ganassi Racing’s Alex Palou.
I feel really bad for Kyle Larson. He is without a doubt, in my mind, the greatest driver in the world today. He’s able to adapt to anything and everything, but that doesn’t mean he’s perfect. Last year he finished the race, in 16th I believe, this year he made a mistake and crashed out, taking two other cars with him.
It does happen, even to Kyle Larson. He’s a high risk high reward driver. He’s always on the edge of disaster.
After leaving Indy he got to the Coke 600, lead a number of laps, and spun out. No crash but he lost the lead and was mired in the back of the pack for the remainder of the day.
As a Kyle Larson fan I feel terrible for the guy.
Harvard Lets You Take 133 Free Online Courses: Explore Courses on Justice, American Government, Literature, Religion, CompSci & More
I’d like to take advantage of these courses! I’ve wanted a History degree for years and years. Maybe I can get some great American History courses through this program? The CompSci courses would be nice too! 😃
Daniel Rosenwasser • Microsoft TypeScript Blog
Today, we are excited to announce broad availability of TypeScript Native Previews. As of today, you will be able to use npm to get a preview of the native TypeScript compiler. Additionally, you’ll be able to use a preview version of our editor functionality for VS Code through the Visual Studio Marketplace.
The team chose Go because they did a straight port of their TypeScript/JavaScript code to Go. The syntax was very similar so it was kind of a no brainer and Go is a memory safe compiled language.
It’s too bad they didn’t use Rust.
Soon it will become something else entirely. Because it’s my website and I’m perpetually becoming somebody else.
I wish I had the skill to make my own websites. The fact that Taylor can and does is impressive. And to top it all off I love her style!
Personally I’m always after a JavaScript free site as plain HTML. That’s what I get with Micro.blog.
I do have a bit of JavaScript in my blog, at the end to see how many visits posts get. It’s minimal.
A recent experiment by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University staffed a fake software company entirely with AI Agents — an AI model designed to perform tasks on its own, basically — and the results were laughably chaotic.
You can’t rely on AI to do things without monitoring it. Think of it as an intern, only not as smart - because it’s not intelligent, it’s a pachinko machine that often times makes really good guesses.
Use it, do not trust it, and for goodness sake verify everything it produces if you’re going to use it. It could be a real time saver, or wreck your work if you’re not careful.
I used our AI product this week and while it gave me good answers it didn’t provide me with a solution to my problem around publishing npm packages to GitHub. It gave me great information on how to setup part of my GitHub Actions script but I’ve never done it before and was hoping it would “just work.” It didn’t.
I hadn’t setup the Packages section in the repository to accept packages from my own repo. Live and learn.
BTW, that is not an indictment of AI failings. It provided me with great answers to my prompts. It really did. I just didn’t know what I didn’t know.
Reading GitHub’s documentation on the matter would’ve been very beneficial to me. Next time I’ll be better prepared for my sake and the AI’s.
Tripp Mickle, of the New York Times, wrote another one of those articles exploring the feasibility of iPhone manufacturing in the United States. There is basically nothing new here; the only reason it seems to have been published is because the U.S. president farted out yet another tariff idea, this time one targeted specifically at the iPhone at a rate of 25%.
I can’t see how Tim Cook and Apple can possibly manage their way out of TACO Man’s sights. He desperately wants Apple to make things here in the states. Apple has the money to do it, but they don’t want to do it.
They could help local Community Colleges and Universities spin up training programs to teach the skills necessary to build iPhones, IPads, and other products, but that would take years and years to do and take lots of cash to pull it off.
Apple wants to make money, not spend it. Remember, it’s all about shareholder value to these folks. It’s not about helping our fellow man find a great paying job.
Your job title says “software engineer”, but you seem to spend most of your time in meetings. You’d like to have time to code, but nobody else is onboarding the junior engineers, updating the roadmap, talking to the users, noticing the things that got dropped, asking questions on design documents, and making sure that everyone’s going roughly in the same direction. If you stop doing those things, the team won’t be as successful. But now someone’s suggesting that you might be happier in a less technical role. If this describes you, congratulations: you’re the glue. If it’s not, have you thought about who is filling this role on your team?
As a Staff Engineer I’m way more valuable to my team being the glue that brings us together. I act as mentor, coding buddy, and I see projects from 30,000 feet all the way down to minute details.
I’m not nearly as smart as 99% of the developers in the world. I’ve just been around the block a few times and I’ve built lots of different things on different OS’es using a mix of languages. I’ve done everything in the development life cycle so I know how to take something from concept to shipping and know how to do it with a team. That’s my strength. Sure, I can write code, but I really enjoy doing that glue stuff. It’s often random, sometimes spur of the moment — like fixing something in our iOS app yesterday so we could submit it to Apple.
I love the mix of people I work with daily. I have excellent management surrounding me who encourage me to serve my purpose on the team. Add the amazing Software and Test Engineers I work with daily and you have the perfect formula for happiness on the job.
Given all that I’d still love to retire and work on my apps full time. Not because I hate my day job but because I desperately want to build my apps! 🙂
Less than two years later, the company has announced that it’s discontinuing Arc in favor of a new app – Dia – which it is also pitching as the future of internet usage
I find this puzzling. I know so many people who absolutely love Arc! Why not keep it running to serve the people who love it? Keep a tiny crew on it, let it evolve slowly.
In the end VCs have to get paid I suppose. This is part of why we can’t have nice things or useful software. 🤣
