Sometimes you just need to shove a round peg into a square hole. Sometimes that genuinely is the best option (or perhaps more accurately: the least bad option). I find my hand is often forced by APIs I don’t control (most often Apple’s APIs). e.g. data source or delegate callbacks that are synchronous and require… Read more
Famously, Google used to have a practice dubbed “20% time”: about one day a week, engineers were {expected ⊻ encouraged ⊻ permitted ⊻ tolerated ⊻ known} to work on something other than their nominal work; something they themselves chose. Circa 2011, not long after I joined Google, I pitched a 20% project idea to my… Read more
There’s a couple of bugs in Stellaris, that have been present for year(s), where the AI inexplicably builds absurd numbers of construction and/or science ships, then has them sit idle forever. This AI behaviour would be merely eccentric if it didn’t cause major performance issues with the game. For the case of too many science… Read more
I’m very glad Apple’s Messages team somehow snuck this one little button past the corporate bureaucracy (Apple infamously likes to pretend their software is infallible and therefore doesn’t need things like useful error messages or rectification tools). It’s of course not great that iMessages don’t reliably sync between Apple devices to begin with, but at… Read more
Consider these two examples involving Flickr, that occurred within just one day of each other. Nice gal Amanda I submitted the following feedback, not really expecting much of it. In fact, I fully expected some useless, boilerplate response that completely ignored the point and directed me to the upload requirements page (despite it being the… Read more
NSCopyObject is a very old Foundation function – pre-dating Mac OS X entirely; from the NeXT era – that was originally basically just memcpy, but now it’s complicated. A lot more complicated… Read more
Rob Napier‘s short anecdote intrigued me, and I was curious if anything has changed in the fourteen months since. After all, that’s supposed to be eons in “AI” terms, right? Spoiler: not much has changed. Kagi does a bit better, but Bing is still the best, Google still sucks, and ChatGPT (when considering Bing Copilot… Read more