I have friends who moved to Germany, so although I haven't been or experienced immigrating there myself, it's been in the conversation amongst my circles.
What I hear about it is that it can feel closed and lonely. Germans are not necesarily mean, but they won't fully assimilate you into their circles easily, especially if you're not European. I also hear dating can be tough if you're not German or European. It's an important factor for choosing to stay somewhere permanently if you move there in your early 20s, like my friend did.
I think illustration isn't something too much in the mindshare of open source, so overall support for it isn't great. IMO this has contributed to it. The industry standard tools are all closed, with closed formats, so it just sounds like much more of a hassle vs contributing code/text.
I mean this throughout the whole process. The only standard illustration file format I can think of is SVG, but it's largely a format to export to, not one industry-standard software uses as it's main persistence format.
So for starters, contributors tend to need access to speciality software they probably don't have installed to view and edit the source of truth. This also means you're handling at least two files in your VCS, the closed format acting effectively as a blob, no diffs, etc. and an export file (usually more, for different scales) to actually interface with the rest of the ecosystem; this is the file everyone can open, inspect and compare, the one your build consumes, etc.
This already would be a good amount of friction for someone familiar with the tools, but designers are not necessarily familiar with git, the PR process, etc. Add to it that icons are more subjective than code, which overall should follow certain rules and either works or doesn't, and it overall seems not worth it for a casual contributor.
I like electronic music production and mixing, and at some point embarked on the quests of writing a DAW (for which I wrote my own state library too) and a dj application. The DJ application I started this year, the daw has been going on for 5 years now.
I think it's helped me at work. Even though I don't have a job with anything related to music or audio, getting in the weeds of building a complex app like this has a way of teaching you all sorts of things. But even if it weren't, it's fun! When work is stressing, for some reason I find coding something completely unrelated, fun and fully my own de-stressing too.
I find you working 30 years on this game engine/application platform very cool and admirable! I hope this or some other project of mine accompanies me for that long.
> Maybe the CEO was always like this, but he went from being a likable, and liked person, to a fucking maniac.
I might not know him, but I don't think he changed. I think the circumstances changed and they happened to lead to another expression of who he is.
IMO the "AI psicosis" is just the latest expression of the hyper-capitalist ideology that has taken over Silicon Valley (and the USA).
Engineering at these companies was special, because there was good money to be made from software at practically nil materials and distribution costs. It was all labour; very specific labour. Instead of a million-dollar idea taking months and lots of $$$ to prototype, mass-produce, and distribute, the right people could type for a week, press a button, and reach millions of people pretty much instantly.
Of course capitalism is going to be kind on this type of labour. But as it becomes clear this labour can be replaced with cheaper automation, we just switch to see the other side of the coin; one employees in other industries have seen for a long time. As an employee, you're a human resource, a cost-center, and without proper labour protections, you get treated as such.
Mark Zuckerberg has also always been like this. Not with the engineers back when they were more special, but with the content moderators for example, who have long been considered "replaceable". plenty has been written about how terrible it is to work in content moderation at Meta, the quotas, the little thought given to doing a good job, to mental health, etc. As engineers keep getting less special, they'll keep seeing the face of Zuckerberg that exploits resources, decreases cost, and demands higher margins.
> I am flabbergasted that I am a lowly peon in the machine, and yet unless I'm missing something, I seem to be a lot smarter than most of the people I see running these companies.
This has also long been the case, especially in other industries. I can assure you an average barista at Starbucks knows more about making good coffee and keeping customers happy than the CEO.
Credit where credit is due, the CEO probably does know more about playing the politics, pleasing investors and how to ruthlessly optimize organizations.
When I was at Facebook they decided to re-write Messenger in C. There were people who thought it was a waste of time. There were people who thought it was a great idea. It was a lot of work, took a while, and I wouldn't be suprised if by now it's been re-written to something else.
It's not that hard to make up work, and there's people whose whole job is pretty much just that.
This is not a laptop announcement. This is an attempt at a software announcement disguised as a laptop announcement.
All that's shared about the actual laptop are renders. The website and the video spend much more time and pixels advertising hypothetical software features. The worst part is it's not a hardware announcement, but it's also not even a software announcement since the software is also just conceptual renders and nothing material. It's a website to advertise non-existent software features, running a non-existent google-branded laptop, for the purpose of what exactly?
I can imagine two reasons this website exists today. It exists because someone at Google has seen the possibility of getting a promotion by relaunching Chromebooks, and it was launched today hoping people will hold off a few months on buying the MacBook Neo, to weigh their options once this launches.
I've always thought letting the free market decide everything is not an optimal strategy. Protecting sovereignty of key industries like this is a good example.
What IMO is a bad strategy is the aversion to nationalization that exists in the USA. They buy billions worth of shares in key companies to inject capital during times of crisis, to later divest and refuse to be a player in industry.
China's model is much more complex. There's state-owned companies, companies where the state is a major stake-holder, and private companies too. It seems to afford them more tools to push and steer industries as they see important.
The USA is no stranger to this at smaller scales; airports are state run (at the municipal or state level). This rids them of the burden of profit, and allows them to be strategically use for the broader benefit when it makes sense.
Some are profitable; state-run doesn't necessarily mean unprofitable. But some can written off as infrastructure investments that don't make money but make other industries in the region competitive. At some point this makes sense if you want to keep pushing forward; let's stop worrying too much about making money on X, because if X is a widely-available commodity, we can instead make money on Y and Z.
I see it in Mexico too. Mexico's private healthcare is affordable and good because it has huge state-run healthcare system to compete with. State-provided healthcare isn't the best or fastest healthcare you can get, but it is free. This certainly puts competitive pressure on private healthcare companies, and in a way gives the Mexican government the best regulatory tool: the market itself. The Mexican government isn't trying to destroy private health, but via the state health enterprise it gains tools to steer and push the health industry in ways it may deem important.
Looking at the state of EVs and the car industry, I think it's clear whatever the Chinese government did to incentivize EV innovation was more effective than the federal incentives the USA government provided. At one point the USA government had a 60% stake in General Motors [1]; meaning it was nationalized, before being privatized again by 2013.
I just wonder what the USA could've done with that machinery; could they have offered a cheap EV, even if it's low quality, to push adoption, competitive pressure and get supply chains going? Could they have further commoditized certain parts to lower costs? Could they have strategically opened factories in certain locations to lower the risk and investment cost of future companies, and this way get the ball rolling on creating new auto-industry regions? We will never know, but we do know the USA's auto industry is now on the defense playing catch-up to China, and there seems to be little the USA government can do except placing tariffs and offering subsidies.
Because they need it to work, so that everything built on it works too.
Building developers sell you the apartment, not the elevator room, the electrical room, mechanical room, etc. They will make all sorts of controversial decisions with the apartments; odd layouts, ugly flooring, weird pricing, tacky finishes, etc. The "core product" is the money-maker, that's where the egos clash, priorities change, and where they try to charge as much as possible while they cut costs as much they can.
No one is buying the electrical room though. It just has to work. Yes, you'll make it as cheaply as possible; no flooring, no paint on the walls, no interior designer meetings to argue what's the right tone beige for the walls. But it'll do what it needs to do. It'll keep the lights on. Otherwise you can't sell any of the apartments.
Same thing with Facebook; there's active incentive to introduce all sorts of dark patterns over their app, to ignore certain bugs, to unnecessarily change things, etc. But none of those incentives are present with React. The incentive is to keep React reliable and performant, and to keep the team lean. I'm sure it's similar with Bun in Anthropic.
And to be clear, Anthropic definitely spends most of it's engineering effort making sure their core product "functions properly". This "functions properly" is just different for us as clients vs them as a corporation. There is high overlap, since they need to keep us clients happy. But a well-functioning product at a company is one that leads to money. I'm sure very capable engineers pushing the okrs they care about.
Bun is not a "product" at Anthropic though, it's a tool for its developers to build products. IMO as long as it remains that way, the incentives for its developers will remain fairly aligned with the incentives of people who use it outside the company.
A good example is React. Facebook's interest is that React be performant (website performance is correlated with time spent on said website), reliable (also correlated to time spent), quick to build on (features ship faster) and popular (helps new recruits hit the ground running). That's fairly well aligned with what developers outside of Facebook want too.
Sure, since Facebook's server is written in Hack it means we'll never get a truly full-stack React, and instead we'll need third parties for the back-end (Next.js, Tanstack Start, etc). But Facebook building react also means it will always be someone's job to make sure this Framework works well in codebases with millions of modules.
This is all independent of any shitty practices with their other software. And this has been for decades at this point.
I think this can be true at the IC level and in situations where the organization's success depends on the product being good, but that's not always the case. Big companies with market control can go years, or perhaps even indefinitely make bad product decisions and still print money. Product development comes to revolve less around merit and more about appearances.
I've worked in big tech and had the sort of conversations with my managers where they say: "The work you're doing in X is great. I use it and it really needs work. But it's not a priority, or even 'impactful'. Your work on X is effectively equivalent to doing no work".
Sometimes it isn't even about getting a promotion, sometimes the implication is you should be worried about keeping your job. You can still do X which everyone knows is great and someone should do, but "on your spare time, as an extra" because Y is what your performance review will really revolve around.
The sad part is I can tell they mean it, and do agree someone needs to work on X, but it isn't their decision to make, because they have to show face and explain to their manager why an engineer earning XXX,XXX didn't meaningfully work on Y. Ultimately someone up the chain who you've never talked to is the person who decided X is unimportant; they don't want to kill it they just don't use it, or have a strategic reason to not care about it.
In the politics of upper management perhaps it was something an adversary used to vouch for, and now you have to prove the org can do without it. Or perhaps it's the ace in your pocket, and you wan't it to be lack-luster so when the big boss above you starts talking about retirement, you can show amazing wins in the area and be first in line for succession. Companies are not democracies. For better or for worse big companies are not democracies, they are feuds, so if the kingdom isn't in danger its future comes to depend a lot not on what's the best decision, but how a decision fits the game of thrones.
Apple is hurt by being so centralized Cupertino IMO. A company that big in city that small and frankly, boring, isn't going to have the best hiring pool.
I know plenty of very talented people who simply won't apply to Apple. They don't want to live in Cupertino or have to commute 2+ hours each day to go to work.
Steve Jobs was a middle-class guy trying to find his place in the world; the kind to travel India to to meet Neem Karoli Baba, shaved head, barefoot, wearing kurtas [1]. 50 years later, who grows up in Cupertino? It's no longer "middle-class". I'm sure Cupertino produces some excellent talent that did great at some top university, but I'm also sure it's not the kind that rocks the boat, or the kind that will push a "dumb decision" out of principle at work and get fired, like Jobs did back in 1985.
When I think Cupertino, the city, I don't think vibrancy of the built environment, diversity of professions, or wealth of ideas. I think comfort, complacency and quiet. The type of place that repels the kind of people who want to fight in the trenches, and slowly milds the fight out of those who do move there.
I can only assume Apple, like a lot of the Bay at this point, survives from imported talent. The kind that is hungry enough to move across the country, or across the globe, to achieve something. But if you're in demand, why would you want to work in Cupertino and not San Francisco? Or better yet New York, Shenzhen, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris, etc. Money only motivates people so much, and people who are in it for the money don't stand up for or against things in the same way.
I grew up with this animation so I didn't consider it annoying until I bought a new Macbook a couple years ago.
I noticed sometimes I would press keyboard shortcuts before my system's focus had switched. Just little stumbles here and there, some inoffensive, some annoying, but who knows maybe I didn't catch enough sleep.
Over time it happened often enough that I decided to google it, and it turns out my muscle memory wasn't failing me; the animation speed did change ever so slightly and was slower in new Macs with 120Hz displays [1][2] (newer MacBooks, 2021+). If you switch your screen to 60Hz it goes back to the faster animation.
Why is this animation slower now, and why does it depend on screen refresh rate? I have some technical theories but can't think of an organizational reason it happened and hasn't been fixed 5 years later at a 3.82 trillion market cap company. If you Google it there's plenty of discussions online about this. It's noticeable and annoying to people who have used the feature often enough.
I think the biggest issue with classes is subclassing, it looks like a good feature to have, but ends up being a problem.
If one avoids subclassing, I think classes can be quite useful as a tool to organize code and to "name" structures. In terms of performance, they offer some good optimizations (hidden class, optimized instantiation), not to mention using the memory profiler when all your objects are just instances of "Object" can be a huge pain.
First and most importantly is the fact they have a lot of very valuable data they wouldn't want to siphon to a competitor. This data is a key strategic asset in the space where they do business.
Secondly though, I think it has to do with the fact Meta is big enough to worry about vertical integration and full control of their business.
The whole reason they've been trying to make AR/VR happen for over a decade now is the assumption of a worst case and best case scenario. The worst case is Apple and Google wants them gone. This isn't as far fetched as it seems, Google has historically been Meta's biggest competitor and even tried to release its own social network back when Meta was threatening them. If either pulls Meta apps from their respective stores, it'd be an immense blow to Meta; their whole trillion-dollar business depends on competitor's platforms.
Meta tried making inroads into the phone business but failed; it is a very crowded market after all. So they changed their strategy. Instead of playing catch-up, they'd invent "the next iPhone" and be the first to a brand new market. This is the best case scenario; they invent a new platform where they can be dominant from day 1 and stop depending on competitor's hardware, not only removing that risk factor for them, but also unlocking a new market they can control.
AI ties into all this because it appears to be key for this next platform to happen. You will communicate with these smart glasses via voice, hand gestures, or subtle movements that a model will have to interpret. The features that could make them stand out as more than just a screen on your face are all AI related; object detection, world understanding, context awareness, etc. If all this were done via a 3rd party Meta would effectively be back on square one: a competitor could easily yank away its model access, or sell it to a competitor. Meta would be again at the mercy of others.
Compared to other big-tech players, I think it's easy to see how Meta is in a riskier position. There's little Google or Microsoft can do to kill the iPhone. There's little Apple or Google can do to kill Amazon's online store. There's little Amazon or Apple can do to kill Microsoft's business deals. Google and Meta are primarily in the business of capturing people's data, attention, and selling ads, and both Google and Apple could do quite some damage to Meta. Beyond expanding it, it's important for them to invest in ways to protect their money-printing machine.
I've worked with text and in my experience all of these things (soft hyphens, emoji correction, non-latin languages, etc) are not exceptions you can easily incorporate later, but rather the rules that end up foundational parts of the codebase.
That is to say, I wouldn't be so quick to call a library that only handles latin characters comparable to one that handles all this breath of things, and I also wouldn't be so quick to blame the performance delta on the assumption of greenfield AI-generated code.
Do people really have a choice though? Many people don't choose what OS they use for work, and even when one can pick, the environment we exist in is one where being less productive is often hard to afford.
Another instance where companies can have more leverage than consumers is gaming. Console exclusives are a thing because they work; not giving consumers the option to play Pokemon on anything but the Nintendo Switch drives switch sales. Microsoft is better off working with other gaming companies to ensure Windows keeps being dominant, than building an OS to gamer's preferences.
I think time has proven many times that consumers aren't always good regulators for the market. The market is best regulated by organized entities.
IMO it's telling that the lineup here is bucketized by screen size and not model. Screen size, processor performance, storage, sensors, etc are ambiguous concepts that don't mean much in their own merit. People don't really think "my priority is 8.3 inches"; people think in terms of use cases and cost.
For laptops the buckets are portability and performance. These two will always be at odds, and people will gladly prioritize one over the other; these are the ingredients you need for creating a model lineup. Each model prioritizes something different:
- Affordability, MacBook Neo
- Portability, MacBook Air
- Performance, MacBook Pro
There's people who will be carry this machine everywhere and will gladly sacrifice performance for portability. There's people who will gladly use a laptop as essentially a desktop they can occasionally move if it means maximum power. You even see this in the wider market; there's a clear category of laptops praised by their portability (ultrabooks), and another group praised by their power (gaming laptops).
I don't think there's an equivalent for tablets, since people don't really seem to need them for that much (lol). Apple has been focusing a lot on portability, but the market of people who carry their tablet everywhere isn't really that big, most people use them at home [1]. Digital nomads, students, PMs hopping around meetings: they're on laptops. Same with performance; people who need performance are on laptops.
The killer use-cases for tablets seem to be drawing and media consumption, but not only is drawing not a huge market, these two aren't at odds. Both are better with a better, bigger screen. A single dimension for improvement doesn't give you the ingredients for creating a model lineup, it gives you the ingredients for a price ladder where more money just gets you a bigger, better screen.
I think the iPad's lineup could be simplified to just one model, but I understand Apple want's to have several for marketing and price-ladder delineation, like it does with the iPhone. In that case, I think like the iPhone, the iPad could do with less overlap:
- 8.3", $ (iPad mini, affordable)
- 11", $$ (iPad, standard)
- 13", $$$ (iPad Pro, better in pretty much every way)
And keep the iPad Air in the same space as the iPhone Air, a novelty luxurious product that isn't the fastest nor the most affordable, but showcases premium hardware and what the future could look like.
I think Apple doesn't do this because it hopes to discover what people want through the grid of different screen size, thinness, performance, etc permutations that currently exist, but oh well.
Socials: - github.com/mrkev - aykev.dev
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