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OMG my app just got rejected because I didn't have the right screenshots to their liking... an app specifically made to remember stuff like this LOL the irony!

For those wondering why this is a big deal it means that every developers attempting to run a development version of an iPhone, iPad or MacOS app cannot run their apps right now.

This is worse than Github being down and Apple Developers who pay 99$ a year for the privilege of writing software on this ecosystem aren't event getting a status page update: https://developer.apple.com/system-status/


I had signed up for an Apple Developer account for "sign in with apple". I had auto-renew on. For the last month or so I was getting increasingly urgent emails about "Your Apple Developer Program membership expires in X days.". I logged into the website and there was a text block talking about a "renew" button that didn't exist on the page. According to reddit this is because mine is set to auto-renew so it's fine (why the text though, then?). A few days ago the subscription expired without auto-renewing. And I realized, maybe I don't need "sign in with apple".

They couldn't be trying harder to sink this ship.


All of Apple's software is rotting, from OSX to iOS to the developer tools. Massive bugs like the keyboard no longer working properly [1] are left unresolved for years. Whichever executive or engineering leader used to keep the quality bar high must have left or stopped paying attention. There also seems to be little culture of quality and ownership at the IC level.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo


> And I realized, maybe I don't need "sign in with apple".

Developers don't have to have most things they put in the apps they ship. Customers, on the other hand...

As of a decade ago (2016) Apple already had 782 million total (including free) iCloud users, with 73% or 570 million of them authenticated to iCloud.

By 2023, Apple has 973 million paying subscribers to its services.


This is more about Apple predatory tactics within their walled garden than actual improvement of their services. Not paying Apple for additional storage means you can't even be sure your phone backup in iCloud is complete.

Can confirm. Spent over an hour trying to figure out why I couldn't build to devices just to get frustrated, browse to HN, and here we are.

I'm looking for a job shoveling pig shit as we speak.

What genuinely pisses me off is that this isn't noted on their status page, nor is it indicated at all when you, I dunno, revoke and generate certs repeatedly trying to solve a problem you didn't fucking cause.


> I'm looking for a job shoveling pig shit as we speak.

https://www.goatops.com


It's definitely not worse than GitHub being down...

Depends on your priorities. Many developers don't pay for github access, and no one pays github 15-30% of gross sales.

And a lot more people use github for something at all and don't use Apple for anything at all.

The entire Apple universe is smaller than the world or even just the github part of the world, and the Apple developer universe is a tiny fraction of even just the Apple universe.


> The entire Apple universe is smaller than the world or even just the github part of the world

As of 2023, GitHub had 100M active users total.

As of a decade ago (2016) Apple already had 782 million total iCloud users, with 73% or 570 million of them authenticated to iCloud.

By 2023, Apple has 973 million paying subscribers.


You can still work locally if GH is down. You can even send patches by (gasp!) email for review if you want to do something ASAP.

Apple's servers being down makes it impossible to test your code on your _own_ devices.


> Apple's servers being down makes it impossible to test your code on your _own_ devices.

Which makes it sound an awful lot like they aren't actually your devices


Can’t you still test on simulator

You can, but it's a simulator and it often doesn't behave like real devices. Doubly so if you want to do something media-heavy.

The only thing worse is trying to get a denied Google Play review to change… considering you can’t even provide a comment to the reviewer objecting to your update

Can we see this for Apple please?


Apple can always choose to make less money. That said:

An estimated 98% of App Store developers qualify for Apple's 15% Small Business Program rate.¹ This doesn't help behemoths like Epic, of course.

App Store developers can also now direct customers to alternative payment methods on the web through in-app links.

¹ https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/18/21572302/apple-app-store...


I’m under the same impression. I don’t think LLMs are the path to AGI. The “intelligence” we see is mostly illusory. It’s statistical repetition of the mediocre minds who wrote content online.

The intelligence we think we recognize is simply an electronic parrot finding the right words in its model to make itself useful.


I fear that AI will be intelligent enough to negate human general intelligence before it is itself generally intelligent.


It's so attention needy, and it's transforming our culture


They already transform our language. Largely.


That's pre-training. Post training with RL can make models arbitrarily good at specific capabilities, and it's usually done via pooled human experts, so it's definitely not statistically mediocre.

The issue is that we're not modelling the problem, but a proxy for the problem. RL doesn't generalize very well as is, when you apply it to a loose proxy measure you get the abysmal data efficiency we see with LLMs. We might be able to brute-force "AGI" but we'd certainly do better with something more direct that generalizes better.


Maybe i'm misunderstanding your point, but human's have pretty abysmal data efficiency, too. We have to use tools for everything... ledgers, spreadsheets, data-bases, etc. It'll be the same for an AGI, there won't be any reason for it to remember every little detail, just be able to use the appropriate tool, as needed.


I don't see how you can come to that conclusion if you've actually used e.g. Opus 4.6 on a hard problem. Either you're not using it, or you're not using it right. And I don't mean simple web dev stuff. In a few hours Claude built me a fairly accurate physics simulation for a game I've been working on. It searched for research papers, grabbed constants for the different materials, implemented the tests and the physics and... it worked. It would have taken me weeks. Yes, I guided it here and there, especially by telling it about various weird physics behavior that I observed, but I didn't write one line of code.


Hemingway writes like that. Hemingway editor encourages that kind of style.


We are essentially saying that our kids should be allowed to smoke cigarettes and not doing anything about it.


If cigarettes didnt have health effects it would be great (they may even be good for their brains who knows)


Don't believe this has anything other than to do with the USA's recent attacks on NATO countries.


You clearly don’t know what Apple’s nano texture is nor have you read the article.

Nano texture is not a coating. It is different than the coatings offered by competitors because of this.


From what I read it's the same thing as the etched screen of the Steam Deck which is not a coating either. Again, Apple didn't invent anything.


> it's the same thing as the etched screen of the Steam Deck

Steam Deck nano-textured display: late 2023

Apple nano-textured display: late 2019

Might be the same but Apple have a 4 year headstart.

> Apple didn't invent anything

They do have the patent though - https://patents.google.com/patent/US11199929B2/en


If you compare both side by side, you'll also see that apple's textured screen is superior in terms of sharpness and color/vibrancy.

And no, it is not exactly the same tech.


could you share a picture of the comparison?


Having travelled the world I can say without a doubt that this person misses the point of travel.

It isn’t about winning a trivia night. It’s about connecting deeply on a level that a Wikipedia article just cannot offer.


Yeah. I mean, I think "connecting deeply" gets oversold too, but my experience of a place (whether it's "authentic" or the country's biggest tourist trap or even the next town over) really isn't best summarised by how many facts I can recollect about it.

I'm also amused by the suggestion that Japanese Bach fans understand German culture more deeply than Germans (does this mean Westerners with moderately large anime collections understand the many nuances of Japanese culture better than the Japanese?!). I mean, I don't actually think most travel does connect deeply with foreign culture, but few travellers are left with such a shallow first impression of other countries they legitimately believe they've obtained deeper insights into a country than the average person who lives there by attending a performance of some cultural artefact from that country's history.

Also, for many people, travel is fun. If you find travel not fun, or reading about a place more fun, then more power to you. Some people find sex and relationships messy and inconvenient too, and if they prefer collecting stories and pictures that's fine - just maybe inadvisable to blog about how much more they've learned from the internet...


One of my favorite things about a recent trip to Japan was just watching people go about their daily lives.

We stayed in a home and it was fascinating how differently the homes are designed and function.

There is no substitute for experiencing a place.


Agreed, I did a month long cultural homestay in northern Japan and got to deal with a bunch of mundane bits like laundry, grocery shopping, and trash day.


Indeed perhaps the most valuable lesson from travel is returning with the realization of just how poorly the generalizations and statistics describe the messy reality of a place. Everywhere has every sort of person


The trivia approach doesn't even work for most people - ask the wikipedia reader and the person who travelled to Turkey about it a year later and see who has actually retained some knowledge.


Connection is not education. It doesn't matter how deep your emotional connection is, it won't rise your education about it on itself. If you want, or need the education, you have to search for it, and you should do it from reliable sources, not just random locals telling who knows what.

The bigger problem here that many people are building opinions lacking education, and this often can lead to harmful descicions, especially in how the world is developing today.


you are not connecting deeply with anyone or anything in 10 days


For the life of me I don’t understand why people absolutely insist on using JavaScript to render HTML. Backend frameworks do HTmL just fine.

DOM manipulations can be simplified to just a few actions: remove, Add, change.

The other types of manipulations and interactive features can be sprinkles of JavaScript instead of hundreds of kilobytes of the stuff.

HTMX, Hotwire/Turbo, LiveView are just so much saner to me.


For me the debate never reaches the end because different kinds of developers build fundamentally different kinds of products.

If you are building a website, a forum, or a generally document based application with little to no interactivity (beyond say, “play media”) then absolutely make a server rendered html page and sprinkle it with a bit of JavaScript for accordions.

If what you are building is a complex editor (image, text), is highly interactive (with maps, and charts and whatever) and users will generally spend a lot of time navigating between almost same pages. Basically when there would be no expectation that this should work with JavaScript disabled… then just build a purely client rendered application in the framework of your choice.

To me the dispute comes when one bleeds to another. I also think that mixed modes are abominations unless you truly have actual performance gains (maybe if you have 1B+ customers), which I’d argue is true for almost no one.


> For the life of me I don’t understand why people absolutely insist on using JavaScript to render HTML. Backend frameworks do HTmL just fine.

There’s an entire universe of front-end developers who don’t even know JavaScript. React is the only thing they’ve ever touched and they’re completely helpless without it.


You can't write React without Javascript. Even the most basic React demos require you to write JS, if only to increment a counter.

Perhaps they don't really "know" the entire monstrosity of Javascript, but that's a tall order. JS is such a big language, with so many redundant features, that most developers will use only a fraction of it.


Morphing the web user agent into something akin to an X11 server made total sense to me when I started doing such in 2000. If we developers had demanded a true distributed windows system, then we would have been spared this bag of hurt.

I remember demoing the Andrew Window Manager to colleagues in 1989 and them feeling like they had glimpsed the future. Alas, that future never came.

https://mirrors.nycbug.org/pub/The_Unix_Archive/Unix_Usenet/...


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