Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Nothing much to say.
Please, enjoy the links.
Jack Dorsey’s Block, the financial tech company that runs Square and the Cash app, is cutting its workforce by “nearly half” and axing more than 4,000 jobs. The company will shrink from more than 10,000 people to less than 6,000, Dorsey says in a post on X. And the reason why? AI.
Emphasis is mine. I’d imagine we’ll see this become a trend as companies learn how to use LLM’s.
I had an Engineering Lead say to me “I had a designer build a full application that worked. They didn’t know how to code.”
My heart sunk. I’m on an AI first team, but it’s four software developers.
As a side note, I cut Claude loose on a one page specification for an application. That spec shared the URL for fetching data and the data structure the app should operate on.
The Swift / SwiftUI code it output was really good. It left me a bit speechless to be honest.
It had a couple errors that needed correcting but they were tiny in the overall scheme and I understood every hunk of code it output. It took somewhere between five and 10 minutes to complete the code.
By contrast it took me an hour to write the code that defined the data types, fetch the data, and display it. And my version was just the basics. It was not a complete solution.
The more advanced requirements would’ve taken me most of the day to complete, if at all.
The folks who survive going forward will embrace these tools as a part of their daily practice.
A friend of mine from California, who works in the Bay Area, said 70% of their engineering teams were let go. 😔
Oh, one more thing. If you read his posting on X 🤮 you’d notice he wrote the entire thing without a single capitalized word. What’s up with that? Y’all too wealthy to even care about capital letters? 😳
In 2008, why the lucky stiff released Shoes—a toolkit for writing tiny graphical programs in Ruby. The pitch was simple: GUI programming didn’t have to be painful.
I remember reading _why’s work years back, very superficially. I had no idea he’d created a framework for creating UI. That’s incredible!
I liked _why’s approach. He was using native code on each platform. The new attempt is relying on the browser. I don’t like that. Native frameworks are so much better than relying on a browser to create your UI.
Scharon Harding • Ars Technica
Netflix backed out of its deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD’s) streaming and movie studios businesses on Thursday night. After increasing its bid for all of WBD by $1 per share on Tuesday, Paramount Skydance is poised to become the new owner of WBD, including Game of Thrones, DC Comics, and other IP, as well as the HBO Max streaming service and cable channels CNN and TBS.
Netflix is ultimately the big winner here. They get to save billions of dollars for content creation and lure Paramount into a huge amount of debt.
The big bummer of the deal is having a right wing nutter buying it. What will the do to CNN? Will it become another Fox News or CBS? Probably.
What happens to HBO? Do they gut it and stop making the best content in the streaming business?
Who could fill the gap left by HBO and CNN if they’re run into the ground? It could become a huge opening for Netflix, Apple TV+, and others to fill.
It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment—the “vibe in the room”—regarding the past year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire decade.)
It seems like the punditry is mostly unhappy with Apple about two things; Liquid Glass and Apple’s lack of backbone to stand up against the Trump mob syndication.
I don’t have a real problem with Liquid Glass. Sure, it has some problems, but I think Apple will eventually straighten it out or change it outright.
As for how spineless Tim Cook has been with Trump, well, I agree with that. Sure, sure, shareholder value… blah, blah, blah.
What about American greatness and bravery? What about democracy? What about decency?
You’re afraid of a dictator but not the loss of our democratic way of life. Shameful.
RAM, flash memory, and HDDs are unaffordable because of a bunch of greedy idiots that do not love the computer.
Thank you AI companies for making computers even more expensive. I can’t imagine what Apple is going to do to their prices. 😳
I can see it now: “The new 14in. MacBook Pro is available today with a starting price of $5,999.00 for 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.”
A 32GB system with 1TB of storage would be like $15,000.00. 🤣
I certainly hope not.
Ruby 4 doesn’t arrive with a flashy headline feature. Instead, it delivers a dense package of under-the-hood engineering improvements: reduced allocations, refinements in the VM, better JIT behavior, and internal API polish. The result is not dramatic in isolation, but cumulative in effect — applications feel smoother, more predictable, and more efficient under load. It’s the kind of progress that shows up in production dashboards rather than conference demos.
It’s really nice to see a team work so hard on the little things under the hood. Looking for performance and memory wins is always appreciated by developers using your tools.
It’s also really interesting to see Rust integrated into Ruby Core.
How’s this for a hot take to start the weekend: I think Apple is going to discontinue iPadOS. I know, I know, it’s a big swing, but put the pitchforks away and hear me out. iPadOS, as it exists now, is being stretched too thin. The idea of having one operating system, with the same features, that spans from a small, 8" tablet up through a 13" laptop-style slab that also connects to a 32" monitor is fundamentally problematic.
🔥 Hot take indeed! 😃
Alan Parker’s 1987 film “Angel Heart” is simultaneously gorgeous and salacious. Michael Seresin’s steady, professorial photography is some of the best you’ll ever see in a horror movie, and the film is further classed up by the presence of Robert De Niro as a mysterious benefactor named Lou Cyphre.
DeNiro’s Lucifer is definitely one of the best ever. Especially at the end when his eyes glow red. It really creeped me out. 😈
It’s one of those films I’d like to own.
My visceral reaction to these tools has been a combination of disgust and boredom. Here are the things I have told myself about why this technology can or should be ignored:
Like I said earlier. If you want to survive the LLM revolution you’d better embrace it with open arms.
