Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
It’s been super hot and humid in Virginia this week so I’ve been staying inside as much as I possibly can.
I did manage to get to Grit yesterday and work on Stream. I need to write up the changes I’ve made in the last two BETA releases.
That’s all for now. I hope you enjoy the links.
Felix Rieseberg, quite obviously, is the answer to the question why Claude is an Electron app. It’s like wondering why all the screws in a building were hammered into the walls, and then finding out that the guy who oversaw construction founded and co-owns the world’s biggest hammer manufacturer. Windows uses Philips head screws, Linux uses hex screws, and MacOS requires Torx (of course) — but a hammer works the same way with all screws. That’s Electron. That’s Rieseberg’s baby.
John’s scathing take is also quite funny. Folks tend to gravitate towards tools they’re familiar with. I’m still fond of C++ and even though I don’t use it today I’d be happy moving back to it. Swift has been a real boon to developer productivity and stable code but SwiftUI has been a bit of a slog for some. Developers have been frustrated by lack of features supported by SwiftUI equivalent features of AppKit. Basically what I think I’m trying to get at and failing is it’s easy to write a crummy app using AppKit or SwiftUI just as easily as it is to write a crummy Electron app.
If folks coding in Electron paid better attention to the platform conventions and wrote apps to fit within them, would you be able to tell the difference between an Electron app and an AppKit app? I can’t answer that because I’ve never seen an Electron app that has tried to be a good platform citizen, be it Windows, Linux, or Mac.
I take that back, 1Password’s Windows, Linux, and Mac Electron apps are quite good and I’d love to know what real dyed in the wool Mac users like John think of it? I’d love a true objective look at 1Password and a recording of its failures as a Mac-assed-Mac-app.
Embracing the platform is the ultimate goal. I know y’all are probably sick of hearing about Stream for Mac but I want it to be a Mac-assed-Mac-app. Even if it’s short on features the big boys have it needs to be a proper Mac app. It’s all native. I’m writing it in Swift using AppKit and there’s the tiniest bit of SwiftUI and Objective-C sprinkled about, but does it feel like a Mac app? That’s all that matters to me in the end.
I would love to see someone write a small Mac-assed-Mac-app in three variants; AppKit, SwiftUI, and Electron. The design needs to match across the board. Without observing the apps binary using something like nm could a user of the app tell the difference? I suspect some may be able to pick up on some differences but I’d also bet most would fail to tell the difference.
Anyway, there’s my hot take. 🔥
Yeah so um… have you noticed that all modern software is teetering on the enshitty cliff? Everything in my dock is an Electron-ified enshittybomb one update from disaster. There used to be alternatives. Now those suck too.
Emphasis is mine. In David’s case he’s just fed up with crummy apps. Electron or not. Crummy apps are harshing his mellow.
Visual Studio Code is an app that seems to be beloved by the development community. I’d say it’s because most poor developers haven’t used anything better. In a past life I lived in Microsoft’s Visual Studio and loved the experience. Now, I’m afraid, it’s probably a bloated mess, but that’s just a guess based on the very little time I’ve spent with it. Xcode is a perfectly good IDE in my opinion. It’s fast and has the features I need to do my job. I’m sure I’ve complained along the way but overall it’s been a productive experience for me.
I’ve switched to Nova for my React Native work at work. It’s an example I can hold up as an excellent Mac app. It is fully native and is a Mac-assed-Mac-app. It’s the little things that I love. Something as small as Cmd+Shift+o displaying the Quick Open dialog brings me joy. Visual Studio Code’s equivalent is a different set of keys I can’t remember off the top of my head.
There’s part two of my hot take on Electron. 🤣
For the last couple of years, I have made the point that pretty much every meaningful update to iPadOS feels like a collection of features designed to make it behave more like a Mac.
Perhaps it’s time to let the iPad be its own thing? It’s proven itself useful to a certain set of folks for writing and I suspect many others like it for consuming books and movies. That’s a fine use for it.
Burno Ferreira • Tom’s Hardware
In yet another case of the AI-driven blues, 404 Media reports that Henrico County, VA, Manager John Vithoulkas sent an email to all county employees — including those in schools and social services — asking them to conserve energy by turning off unused lights and computers, using blinds to lessen heat buildup, and curbing or stopping the usage of heavy loads like space heaters.
That plea comes as the state’s main power provider repeatedly hikes rates, and those repeated increases are linked to the rapidly increasing demands of data center buildouts. According to the report, Henrico County already has 37 data centers within its borders, and more are coming to the area.
Virginia is the home to many data centers. By that I mean more than anywhere else in the country and there are more coming, but not without pushback.
Folks are sick of these things and for some reason companies are being horrible citizens as they build them. What I mean by that is they’re not considering the human and environmental costs of their diesel powered, water chugging, AI data centers. It doesn’t help that our current administration doesn’t care about people of the environment, but I digress.
In the end new data centers need tighter restrictions and strong governance to not pollute our water and destroy natural resources and put people’s health at great risk. They need to solve the water problem in a non-toxic way and bring their own environmentally friendly power to the game.
I can hear it now “But, but, those things would be costly and take more time to build!” Yea, so, what’s your point? Suck it up buttercup and do the right thing for humanity and not shareholder value. I’m sick of the phrase shareholder value.
The full moon is here, and it’s bringing a Werwulf with it. Focus Features has released the first trailer for Robert Eggers’ highly anticipated creature feature, putting his signature grim spin on the classic monster movie as he travels back in time for his latest film.
I’ve watched the trailer and I’m all in. I’m not sure if this is a film I want to see in theaters or wait for it to hit streaming. Either way, I’m seeing it.
The device, known as the Clicks Communicator, was first introduced at January’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to cater to people who do a lot of work on their phones, like texting and emailing. It’s particularly meant to appeal to those who miss the BlackBerry’s physical keyboard, which some argue is better for these types of tasks.
My wife had a Blackberry at one time and she loved her little keyboard. I sent her a link to the Clicks and she likes it. The big question is this, would she like it after being an iPhone user for years and years now? I don’t think so. I think her love of the keyboard is nostalgic and she’d become sick of it after a short period of time and want her iPhone back.
Scientists, educators, farmers and the broader public now have a new website for climate information in the United States. The site, Climate.us, launched this week and fills a void left when a government-run climate information website was shut down last year by the Trump administration.
This is very cool! If the government is going to screw up and not do its job it’s nice to see a private entity step up and fill the gap.
Now, the conservatives that loved these cuts will say “See, small government works. Private entities filled the void!”
Don’t fall for it. There are certain things the government should do for the people and this is one of many I hope we get back when a reasonable administration returns to power.
Ford says it has hired back some human engineers after AI failed to match their skills and experience.
In a bid to reap the benefits of the tech, which developers claim can cut costs and boost productivity, the US carmaker adopted it across some parts of its operations including for quality checks.
But, according to Bloomberg, its executives said the firm has rehired more than 300 “veteran” quality inspectors in recent years to make up for the pitfalls of automated systems.
This is really nice to see. I don’t think it’s a failing of LLMs, rather a failing of management at Ford believing they could replace humans with computers. We’re not there, yet. We’re at step one of many of LLMs being able to do this stuff without a human counterpart.
What I’ve come to learn is an LLM isn’t a replacement for a human. It’s just another tool in the toolbelt. I’ve had great success using Claude as a coding companion. I point it at a well defined ticket that includes behaviors, expected acceptance criteria, documentation (often), and a visual design to guide it. In response it does a darned good job of building out the feature based on other inputs. Inputs like configuration files, existing code structure, code standards, and the general coding style of the developers involved in the project. Another thing I believe is critical to its success: pairing the LLM with an experienced human developer and keeping tasks small. Building in bite sized chunks, I believe, is a super power and super charges the LLM (along with all those skills and configuration files we’ve added.)
People talk about RSS like it’s a power user’s secret trick to making the internet more usable, but the real secret is that it’s not that hard to set up and use. Here’s what you need to do:
I like to tell folks RSS is just another way to view a website. It’s the stripped down form of HTML. The meat of the subject. It can contain HTML, images, and even video. It’s just an easier way to fetch a bunch of articles for reading and, if you’re lucky, a lot of the bigger news sites provide separate feeds for different types of news.
I love RSS and what its done for the web. It’s why I created Stream.
Dear compiler developers, I’m happy to announce that from now on “mandatory” parts of the compiler can be implemented in Swift (on the main branch).
This is really cool news. I have two questions: 1) When will the etire compiler be written in Swift? 2) Will they try using an LLM to port all of the C++ code to Swift?
I like to see an experimental port using an LLM.
Three decades on, software developers still live in the terminal, now more than ever as coding agents dethrone the integrated environments that held sway for so long.
With the advent of the GUI it made it easier to have multiple terminal windows open at once. On a typical day I have at least three open; one for git, one for yarn, and one for Claude. I’ll open others if I need them. The three I mention above are all in a single tabbed window in the order listed.
When working on Stream I have a separate terminal window open for doing stuff there.
I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil. The problem during the first era of the AI boom (circa 2023) was indeed that Meta was too slow to identify the metaverse flub. But that was no longer Meta’s problem entering the agentic coding era: The problem, rather, was that Meta had no coherent strategy.
Meta/Facebook are terrible companies, but boy are they great for shareholder value.
