Sort of a love/hate relationship, though. Anyone who is a seasoned Apple dev, has been incandescent with rage at Apple, at more than a few points in the relationship.
But the thing I can't forget, is the absolute torrent of derision and abuse from Apple-haters, telling me what a loser I was, for sticking with them.
Funnily enough, I've not felt like hating anyone back. Never worked for me.
I never understood the tribalism. For nearly a decade now I have used Windows, Linux, and Macs essentially daily. I have an Ubuntu desktop in my shop, a variety of Debian servers in the cloud, a Windows desktop in my office, a Mac Mini in my bedroom, a MacBook in my bag, and a handful of iPhones/iPads everywhere else. They’re useful for different applications and workflows, and it’s not that difficult to adapt to where they all feel natural. I recognize I’m the weird one though, and I rather enjoy learning new interfaces (I switch my default web browser every few years for “fun” and as a maintenance strategy (kind of like an especially opinionated factory reset).
15 years ago I was thinking about switching my career to a different industry altogether, just didn't know what it would be. One thing I knew was that I was so tired of building web sites and backends. Boring, repetitive, uninspiring.
Then a friend asked me to write a simple iPhone app. I had no idea what development for Apple platforms would be like...
Fast forward to 2026, I'm 57 now, still in tech, building apps for Apple platforms, still enjoying it very much.
The durability of their products still surprises me. I still own and use iPhone 11 (still it is my first iPhone when I switched from Android). Still getting latest iOS updates and functioning very well and may last for 2 more years. What other phone could do this?
I’ve had the exact opposite journey. Native apps, disillusioned and frustrated with the backwards tooling, moved on to more open platforms (web apps and backends)
I’m curious what you find “backwards” about native tooling. I know the sentiment is common, and there must be some truth to it. But my partner works in web infra and frequently laments her inability to trace a single request through her company’s monolith while trying to reconstruct a failure from logs, and I am baffled that there’s no equivalent to attaching a debugger and stepping through execution.
How does Codex mac app compare with Cursor? If anyone who tried both can explain here?
My experience with Cursor is generally good and I like that it gives me UX of using VS Code and also allows selection of multiple models to choose if one model is stuck on the prompt and does not work.
Coding agents with full automation like this require a different workflow that is almost purely conversational compared to Cursor/Windsurf/VS Code. It requires more trust in the model (but you can always keep Cursor open off to the side and verify its edits). But, once you get into the right rhythm with it, it can be _really_ powerful.
Folks who have some extra time this Christmas, do check out the tv show Pluribus on Apple TV. It’s not your typical action packed sci-fi show but is very slow burning, philosophical kind of show which I found very smart.
Turns out my best 2 tv shows of last couple of years are on Apple TV: Severance and Pluribus
Jumping on to agree with Severance and make a few more.
Silicon Valley - for me the funniest (and painful to watch, sometimes) to show. Schitt’s Creek - heart warming, wonderfully written, very funny bite size episodes perfect for cosy Christmas times.
People use LLMs as their therapist because they’re either unwilling to see or unable to afford a human one. Based on anecdotal Reddit comments, some people have even mentioned that an LLM was more “compassionate” than a human therapist.
Due to economics, being able to see a human therapist in person for more than 15 minutes at a time has now become a luxury.
Imo this is dangerous, given the memory features that both Claude and ChatGPT have. Of course, most medical data is already online but at least there are medical privacy laws for some countries.
The thing with reading vs speaking to my emails is, it's much quicker and mentally less exhausting for me to just read and quickly reply or move them to folder in just a few seconds than having this kind of long conversation while driving and putting pedestrians and other drivers and myself at risk.
But let's be real, people need something to do while driving. They're not robots who can sit there tirelessly doing nothing but driving. Listen to music or podcasts or phone a friend. Something. If that something is talk with an AI about their emails, that seems better than having them look at their phone and trying to type into it while driving.
You say that, but I can imagine a good maths textbook and a bad one, both technically correct and well written prose, but one is better at taking the student on a journey and understanding where people fall off and common misunderstandings without odiously re-explaining everything
Recently I uploaded screenshot of movie show timing at a specific theatre and asked ChatGPT to find the optimal time for me to watch the movie based on my schedule.
It did confidently find the perfect time and even accounted for the factors such as movies in theatre start 20 mins late due to trailers and ads being shown before movie starts. The only problem: it grabbed the times from the screenshot totally incorrectly which messed up all its output and I tried and tried to get it to extract the time accurately but it didn’t and ultimately after getting frustrated I lost the trust in its ability. This keeps happening again and again with LLMs.
And this is actually a great use of Agents because they can go and use the movie theater's website to more reliably figure out when movies start. I don't think they're going to feed screenshots in to the LLM.
Honestly might be more indicative of how far behind vision is than anything.
Despite the fact that CV was the first real deep learning breakthrough VLMs have been really disappointing. I'm guessing it's in part due to basic interleaved web text+image next token prediction being a weak signal to develop good image reasoning.
Is there anyone trying to solve OCR, I often think of that annas-archive blog about how we basically just have to keep shadow libraries alive long enough until the conversion from pdf to plaintext is solved.
I hope one of these days one of these incredibly rich LLM companies accidentally solves this or something, would be infinitely more beneficial to mankind than the awful LLM products they are trying to make
Reading this makes me so sad and reminded me of a book I read years ago: Hiroshima by John Hersey - about the first-person narrative account of survivors who witnessed the impact of atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima that morning.
If you have the opportunity to visit, I recommend Nagasaki over Hiroshima and especially these two places in Nagasaki:
Shiroyama Elementary School
Nagai Takashi Memorial Museum Nagasaki
These felt much more personal than anything I saw in Hiroshima and there were zero (other) tourists to interrupt the experience (very much unlike the museum in Hiroshima).
What an insensitive, assumptive, stupid remark. You can't possibly know that the person you replied to behaves as you claim. It's 2025, the firebombing of Tokyo is widely recognized now, maybe not by most normies but certainly by any historical adjacent nerd.
No- but the main issue is that all reasonable ones I can conceive lead inevitably to the Singularity technologically, and pretty quickly since we seem determined to throw as much silicon as possible at the problem. Hopefully the final step is intractable.
Same for me. Severance is probably the best show of last decade. The last time I had such an engrossing experience was while reading 1984.
My other two are:
- Shogun (The depiction of 1600s Japan is so real)
- Resident Alien (Funny and heartwarming to see an Alien getting accustomed to life on Earth dealing with complex human relationships with their flaws)
PS: I am sad to exclude Parks and Recreation which ran from 2009-2015 so probably considered outside of last decade.
Interesting. I thought the premise had potential, but found the writing unbearable. There were major plot holes in the universe they created withing the first 10 minutes. It just didn't make sense. The dialogues and acting was bad on top of that. Didn't even finish the first episode. That being said, the series has OK ratings and was renewed several times, so it might be me not giving it a fair chance.
You should give it a try and watch the S1 entirely. Based on your comment, it seems like you are watching it with a different lense. It is not a drama or thriller where you'd look for holes. It is about perspective of someone who is new to this world trying to blend in.
I found Shogun the show to be relatively disappointing, after having read the book before. The book has a lot of nuanced explanations of people's motivations and philosophical/intelligent dialogue that the show just skips over, since they wanted to cover a huge tome in just one season.
This series deserved to be 2X longer to cover those imho.
