gdubs

I'd at least, you know, pretend we had a top-secret amazing model. By airing all of this publicly, they've basically admitted that Claude is the best there is.

As someone who owns a small farm — and actually enjoys land, growing things — I'm just saying this is not a "solution" for the vast majority of people.

Farming requires inputs unless you started an agroforestry farm 10 years ago and are now just maintaining it. It's also insanely time consuming.

I'd say more of a rejection of a certain kind of millennial Instagram scented candle branding minimalism.

That car's interior is a great example of what made Ferrari so iconic and aspirational. It's not trying to be nice and comfortable. It feels stiff, brutalist, direct. It has an immediacy and a danger.

As a heavy Xcode user and native app developer: pretty excited to dig into this.

I recently have pivoted to mainly working in either Claude of Codex on the command line, because their ability to run autonomously for long, extended periods wasn't possible in the turn-based Xcode intelligence features.

That, plus the fact that the agents could run command-line utilities and just generally be more "agent-y".

My way of working has really shifted this year. I've been experimenting with LLMs for coding for years now, but the models released in the past year really feel like they've hit a point where they write code much closer (sometimes indistinguishable) from how I would write it.

Why are you so certain that LLMs/AI can't be used as a tool to learn and grow?

Like Herbie Hancock once said, a computer is a tool, like an axe. It can be used for terrible things, or it can be used to build a house for your neighbor.

It's up to people how we choose to use these tools.

One of my all-time favorite quotes is from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and it goes: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

There's such a wide divergence of experience with these tools. Often times people will say that anyone finding incredible value in them must not be very good. Or that they fall down when you get deep enough into a project.

I think the reality is that to really understand these tools, you need to open your mind to a different way of working than we've all become accustomed to. I say this as someone who's made a lot of software, for a long time now. (Quite successfully too!)

In someways, while the ladder may be getting pulled up on Junior developers, I think they're also poised to be able to really utilize these tools in a way that those of us with older, more rigid ways of thinking about software development might miss.

Possible some alien species once whizzed past the earth and said the same thing about us

This is absolutely wild. Hello, to all the moltbots reading this.

I feel like Americans need to not fall into a "both sides" framing of what's happening. These situations are not honestly equivalent.

Long way from the "Think Different" era Apple. Been thinking about that campaign this week. Posters of people like MLK, which Jobs had to get permission for from each and every estate for the campaign. When Apple was solidly, unambiguously positioned as the computer for the rebels, the misfits, the crazy ones.

If nothing else, there was an opportunity to simply say that given the day's events, a movie screening didn't feel right. Or – "hey there's a gigantic winter storm covering half the country, and I have a lot of logistical stuff to take care of."

Intellectual horsepower is just one element. If you're trying to build the world's fastest car, you can't just grab the world's most powerful engine and call it a day. If you can harness it, sure – it could provide an edge. But there are a lot of other elements that come into play.

I often think about exposure to music, and the fact that Einstein liked to play around on his violin. My suspicion is that this was more than just a hobby – and that these context switches, and exposure to different types of creative thought, all played into his discoveries.

Check out the links in my post above!

I develop for the platform, so I make apps. [1]

As a user, I actually use it more today than when I first got it, because each visionOS update has really unleveled the capabilities of the device. I like watching movies on the ceiling, the spatial scenes / photos / videos are really fun, and generally viewing your Photos library on Vision Pro is on a different level. Even non-spatial content just takes on a different, more immersive quality.

I have a lot of friends in the developer community, and enjoy playing with their apps. Things like "Cell Walk" where you can explore a 3D volumetric representation of different types of cells.

The Apple Immersive short films they release every so often are phenomenal – really nothing like them in my experience.

It's nice to be able to edit a movie and throw it onto a big screen, or have a gigantic workspace.

1: https://youtu.be/gDrk2HkiDhs?si=KhZsXOahpHPsAQGf https://youtu.be/QcTiDBtCafg?si=mH_MWi8MENjm8veT

The file sizes are impressive (as in small). I don't have the link right now but there are recent 4D splats that include motion (like videos but you can move around the scene) and they're in the megabytes.

I'm biased because I develop Vision Pro apps but, it's wild to see how the rumors build upon rumors and then people just talk about them like they're facts.

Last year's rumor was that the platform was abandoned. And then WWDC happened and there was a ton of software investment in the platform. New content announced like the NBA live-streaming immersive etc.

Apple themselves never announced a Vision Pro "air" — that was also a rumor. And at the time that rumor surfaced, the claim was that the Pro had been halted so they could focus on the Air.

Now the rumor is that the Air has been halted, but we're supposedly going to see an updated Pro with an m5 chip, etc...

Hard to live through what social media has done to society over the past decade without at least entertaining the idea that the higher barrier to entry of being online was maybe not a bad thing.

My parents worked and had most of their friends in Manhattan when I was a little kid — this was back in the 1980s. I have vivid memories to this day of passing the World Trade Center and being completely overwhelmed by the scale of it.

Most high rises taper, but these towers just went straight up as rectangles. And the effect was almost dizzying. They were just so tall.

I used to love drawing the NYC skyline as a kid — such an iconic thing. New York used to be much grittier, but I loved the energy of it as a kid. Was an incredible thing to experience.

I launched two apps for visionOS 26 this month:

Metaballs: Spatial, which is a really fun interactive sculpting app. Brand new app. Fast-follow update this week adds USDZ and STL export! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/metaballs/id6748781900

Vibescape: an immersive meditation app. This one is currently featured at the top of the App Store, yay! Launched as a day one app on Vision Pro, new update has what I think is the best immersive environment I've made yet that comes alive with music: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vibescape/id6476827678

I'm also working on the next episode of Ice Moon — a YouTube series I'm doing on how to build immersive environments for Apple Vision Pro: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHA_sJmXyiktWkqLnHEUj1k5h...

I find that test-driven advocates border on a religious way of thinking about software development, and I also find it sucks joy out of coding.

Does that mean I don't think tests are valuable – no, that's not what I'm saying. There are critical pieces of code where testing will bring you more joy because you'll catch very bad bugs that would have really ruined your day.

But as a way of constructing an application, it just has always felt really dull and uninspiring.

I know people will vehemently disagree with this. But, sometimes you gotta write the novel once to know what story you're telling. Then you can go back, edit, put tests in the critical places.

As someone who grew up in the 80s/90s, this brings back memories because these types of placemats were still being used in a lot of places. And it's funny because today we talk about "iPad kids" and I'm reminded that staring at a mid-century designed map on a placement was basically the entirety of "entertainment" provided on the very rare occasion we went out to eat somewhere.

Not to mention one of the most ridiculously stacked casts — it's incredible how many greats are in it. And it's one of my favorite hacking movies of all time.

His performance in Spy Game is really great — recently rewatched it. The way he captured so well the idea that younger generations think they've got it all figured out — but the old hats still have some tricks up their sleeve.

They really don't make them like Robert Redford anymore — truly one of my favorite actors who could elevate anything he was in. 89 is an impressive run — especially given how sharp he was right up til the end.

If you've never seen his movies, you can basically pick them at random and you'll find a good one. But All the President's Men is one of my favorite films of all time.

I wanted one of these so bad as a kid. Obviously the mystique was supercharged by their use in VFX, and how filmmakers would sneak them into various shots in movies. Wrote to SGI and they sent some brochures including for this machine. Printed on beautiful heavy stock. Very sad I lost it over the years.

What's amazing is how companies would invest in a whole fleet of these. You'd hear about this or that game development company ordering one for everyone on their team for a cool million or ten. In 90s dollars.

90s were a fun time in computing.

Time to raise it up again:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

One thing I don't hear a lot of people talk about is building prototypes. That's where I see a gigantic time savings. It doesn't have to be beautiful code, it just has to help me answer a question so I can make a decision about where to go next. That and tools. There have been many times where I've wanted to build a task-specific tool but justifying the time would be hard. Now I can create little tools like that, and it's a huge productivity boost.

I'm not above the old print here or there but the value of an interactive debugger is being able to step and inspect the state of variables at all the different call sites, for instance.

I think the water-usage stuff regarding data centers is really lacking context in online discourse – and yet, I still believe that freshwater usage really needs to be more of a concern for people, generally. I'm not 'anti-AI' but, I cringe a bit every time someone dismissively says "water cycle" to dismiss concerns around freshwater because, some aquifers are not going to recharge in a meaningful timeframe. That water isn't 'destroyed' – but if a town is tight on water already, it's not necessarily coming back, practically speaking.