@tolmasky@mastodon.social
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tolmasky

@tolmasky@mastodon.social

Founder @runkitdev and TC-39 Delegate. Previously: Original iPhone team on MobileSafari, Creator of Objective-J and Cappuccino.

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tolmasky, to random
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So Swift is about 9 and a half years old now. Does it feel like a mature programming language? Like a language with “10 years under its belt?” How does SwiftUI feel? Let's do a little comparison. Objective-C was created in 1984, and by 1993, when it was the same age as Swift is now, you can see what had been built on top of it in this NeXTSTEP 3 video below. Major parts of NeXTSTEP, Project Builder, Interface Builder, etc., some of which had earlier versions in 1988(!).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrTQOMRt4yw

tolmasky,
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That’s a 25 MHz machine btw. So I never want to hear about how Swift is so much better for performance because it doesn’t use objc_msgSend.

tolmasky,
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@nicklockwood The comparison is totally fair to a good faith reading. In 9 years, AppKit, tools, and apps were built on the “Cocoa family of technologies” — parallel to implementing those very same technologies! It’s as apples to apples as you can get. What have we accomplished on Swift? A UI framework people still find frustrating, system apps people hate (like System Settings). From language to framework to end user apps, the ObjC story is incredible and the Swift story is depressing.

tolmasky,
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@nicklockwood There are two possible positions: Swift is important to the state of our tooling in the last 9 years, or it isn't. If it's the former, then it is self evident that it must have contributed to the state we all seem to agree is bad, if it isn't, then why did we bother? Swift was a huge change, much of which could have been done incrementally (in a "true" Obj-C without the C). (cont.)

tolmasky,
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@chucker Nullability wasn't preventing anything meaningful (I'd argue async/await was), but more importantly, Objective-C was plenty popular. No one wasn't making an iOS app because of it. It's like JS, you had no choice, but more importantly this ignores the thing everyone ignores: the vast vast majority of apps don't use either (both by downloads and by revenue), because they're games. This is pretending that most apps are UIKit (they're not), and hyper-optimizing for this small percentage.

tolmasky, to random
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Are there any good open source search engines? Brave Search isn't open source, right?

tolmasky, to random
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And yet Siri on it remains just as useful.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/2/23900158/apple-watch-edition-gold-2015-obsolete-unsupported-beyonce

tolmasky, to random
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If Google was evil and smart (instead of just evil), they would show tech people, who probably have never once clicked on an ad result ever anyways, the same quality of results that we used to get back in the day. That way we'd still be recommending Google and thinking to ourselves "what is everyone complaining about?” instead of actively trying to figure out what's going on.

https://twitter.com/pdrmnvd/status/1707395736458207430?s=61&t=UPVm_rAGsAxo-a_Da9s3vw

tolmasky, to random
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Is Apple trying to secretly get rid of Messages apps? I can’t think of any other reason to make this horrible new Messages UI. It’s bad for everything, but it’s really bad for apps.

tolmasky, to random
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CSS variables really live up to the spirit of the rest of the standard: tempting enough to trick you into using them, only to immediately fall far short of what you need, leaving you hoping that maybe in 5 years your super common use case will be supported. In this case, I have a variable that holds a number (that I use as a number in a width calc() expression) that I have the audacity to also want to use as a string in a content property. Impossible. Gee, I wonder why people use transpilers.

tolmasky, to random
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Do you think Apple is keeping actually interesting colors as an ace up their sleeve to deploy in case a generation ever seriously underperforms? Like a Bright Banana Yellow or Blue Dalmatian iPhone Pro Ultra Max Extreme S?

tolmasky, to random
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So it looks like Typescript is now entering Stage 3 of the “JavaScript-Adjacent Cycle”, characterized by thought leaders shifting the ”contrarian” opinion that, actually, <insert popular thing> is bad and not even that much better than <clearly more verbose vanilla JS implementation>. This is inevitably followed by larger scale backlash, with said technology eventually receding into the background to make way for the next “big thing”. CoffeeScript, backbone, React, JSX, the cycle continues.

tolmasky, to random
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Oh no! The map needs a key! But we know someone who is good at map keys, but there's history between us… This could take literal episodes to figure out.

tolmasky,
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@janl I always have time to traverse a linked list of macguffins.

tolmasky, to random
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The US could have been as green as France in the below electricity CO2 emissions map… for the last 30 years (?) if not for our bizarre implicit environmental position that boils down to “use coal and gas until we can replace them with fusion and solar.” Meanwhile the entire continent is burning and we’re getting hurricanes in California. I wonder how things would be if we’d invested in nuclear and had actual running Gen IV reactors by now instead.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

tolmasky, to random
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If I am understanding this thread correctly, Apple might disable your AppleID if your credit card is stolen... even if the fraudulent charge doesn't even happen on your account. It's crazy that disabling an AppleID is a remedy for anything, let alone things not happening on your account. That means you’d lose all your emails on iCloud, BACKUPS on iCloud, data, your logins to every site you used sign-in-with-Apple, the list goes on. This is absolutely crazy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36974358

tolmasky, to random
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Has anyone every defined any other "OMs” aside from the "DOM”? As in, "something-else Object Model”? Any prior art there?

tolmasky, to random
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It's crazy that the platform I increasingly trust the least for my daughter is the iPad. 99% of kids apps are absolute garbage, either trying to trick kids into buying stuff directly, or showing brightly colored ads for scammy apps. And unlike the Mac, the prominence of IAP on iOS makes it feel encouraged. The Mac feels so much safer. Isn't Apple deeply ashamed of this? Or embarrassed? If not for stopping this basic level of disaster, then what are all these AppStore rules supposed to be for?

simon, to random
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Random thought concerning personal AI ethics: it's rude to publish something that would take someone longer to read than it took you to write it

tolmasky,
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@simon Nah, because they’ll just put it through their own AI to summarize it. That’s what AI actually solves: you give your AI an sloppy list of points you want to say, it wraps it up in a socially acceptable paragraph form, then that gets unwrapped back into an easily digestible list by an AI on the other end. “Paragraphs” just become a protocol format to prove you can afford an AI.

tolmasky, to random
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Mozilla should call for a vote on the removal of Google from the W3C over the implementation of Web Environment Integrity. "But Chrome has 65% market share, what good is the W3C without them?” If Google can take unilateral action to fundamentally change the basic principles of the web, then the W3C is already useless. This will give Google a clear choice: if they want to maintain the idea that the W3C matters, they should withdraw this implementation.

https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commit/6f47a22906b2899412e79a2727355efa9cc8f5bd

/cc @mozilla

tolmasky,
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If someone drafted a proposal to the W3C that only a pre-approved set of existing browsers should be allowed to render web pages, the correct response would not be to "take the stance that you oppose that proposal," it would be to seriously question whether the party should even participate in the group. Make no mistake, that is what is happening now.

tolmasky, to random
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This Safari query parameter removal thing is just going to become a cat-and-mouse game, right? Google can easily start using gclid2 or even switch to using something like “a,” that you'd be less willing to indiscriminately chop off the URL. Eventually, you could even imagine a dynamic query key scheme, where you can identify it with a credit-card-style hash function. For example, if f(KEY) = (char1 + char2 + .. .+ charN) % 64 = 39, then it knows that that query key is its tracking ID.

tolmasky,
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@thomasfuchs My point is that you only feel safe mutating query parameters if you know for sure that they are tracking query parameters. You wouldn't for example ever want to either remove, nor mutate, “q=". That would break search. If trackers just start using less identifiable query keys, then it becomes very difficult to do anything to them without also potentially breaking legitimate websites.

BasicAppleGuy, to random
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Famous Apple Xs

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tolmasky,
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@BasicAppleGuy That bottom right corner is more infamous than famous…

tolmasky, to random
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OK now someone do the equivalent of Threads but for Google search. You know, just make an exact copy of the way it worked perfectly fine 10 years ago, but have it seem new and amazing since the original decided to make itself unusable.

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