They crossed it definitively, and still unbelievably, to me, when they started showing ads as the first result in App Store search. For a long time searching "ChatGPT" in the AppStore would surface a rip-off clone w/ a lookalike icon as the first result. How many thousands of users inadvertently downloaded the clone, paid for it, and were, basically, victims of a scam, facilitated by Apple? (Now the first result for ChatGPT, Claude, Grok is at least the correct first party ad, though this almost seems like extortion on the part of Apple.)
(Software quality has also fallen off a cliff, though that's more a loss of instutional competence, I think, than active anti-user behavior motivated by avarice.)
X has everything, and you can pick what you follow (there's a "For You" tab, but also a strictly chronological following tab). I like it for variety of political views (e.g. super-lefty @caitoz, super-righty @L0m3z), following interesting LLM stuff (@elder_plinius is a great follow), lots of devs (e.g. carmack...), art accounts (@yumenohajime, @neurocolor), nutrition/health stuff, so much good stuff!
Swift is an early example of Apple losing its way. Such a stark contrast to Objective-c -- which was a simple, fast compiling language that hit way above its weight for expressivity and runtime speed. A great language for its day. Swift is "a C++ hacker's first attempt at language design".
I would be fine with a Objective-C 3.0, but the big question would be how to fix the underlying C flaws, which was one of Swift's original goals.
I do agree that the language design has gone overboard in the last couple of years, expecially in the various approaches to parallelism.
However they are not alone, just look at any programming language sponsored by companies, you need features to justify team sizes and naturally old features don't go away.
Taste & trade-offs aside, you've gotta make it compile reasonably fast! I do get that Objective-C is not the pinacle of language development, but you shouldn't give your main language the rough edges of a research project.
(And while the past shouldn't necessarily be a shackle on the future, it is striking that such a radically different set of trade-offs was picked for Swift vs Obj-C.)
I think both Go and C# are pretty nice languages, to give you an idea of where I'm coming from. And Rust is very interesting -- as a user you see software that gets written in it exceed the previous state-of-the-art (e.g., ripgrep).
I don't see that w/ Swift. It seems like the opposite. E.g., the terrible Settings rewrite that rolled out a couple releases ago...
Confession, though, while I did a lot of ojbc back in the day, I've never done more than kick the tires on Swift, so I'm not critiquing from a position of deep knowledge -- more like talking shit from the sidelines. But I do think I'm right. ;-)
C# is starting to get a C++ like feeling, I no longer can keep track of all features that get added every year, especially when not able to work in vLatest in consulting gigs.
Just compare C# 14 with C# 1, laundry list of features, and BCL changes.
Go, has plenty of warts caused by ignoring the history of programming languages.
Rust async/await story isn't that great, as it is kind of half done.
We could also add others to the list, each year get a few more constructs, runtime changes, standard library changes, whatever is the package manager of the year, and so on.
All have issues, then again we can go back to the famous Bjarne Stroustoup quote
"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses".
Light-weight wrapper over C, so as fast as C when you want it to be. Message passing isn't as fast as, say, vtables, but is still quite snappy and flexible for loosely binding objects together. No generics avoids code bloat.
In practice obj-c apps were snappy, e.g., good perf on extremely limited hardware of original iPhone. SwiftUI (I assume) of MacOS settings app much slower than the old version it replaced -- too much heavy programmer framework magic resulting in slower final code? That's my diagnosis/guess from afar (I might be wrong ofc), a pitfall that objc did not tend to lead developers into.
There is a website forvo.com which has a bunch of community-generated pronunciations of words in a ton of languages. I used to use it a lot when I was playing around w/ learning languages.
Forget privacy, imagine what someone like @elder_plinius could get up to if you invited them over to dinner. All of the "AI Safety" issues get a lot more real once the AI's have bodies.
Nah, I don't think so -- it really was a big deal to have a bug back then, and software quality used to be a lot higher. We could go back and run some VMs to try to objectively quantify this (and it would be interesting to do so), but I'm personally confident my memory isn't being tinted by nostalgia.
The main reason is the ability to do constant updates now -- it changes the competitive calculus. Ship fast and fix bugs constantly wins out vs. going slower and having fewer bugs (both in the market & w/in a company "who ships faster?").
When you were shipping software on physical media having a critical bug was a very big deal. Not so anymore.
Basic windowing barely works on it. On macOS is can click anywhere on a window to bring it into focus and make it active.
System Settings is 50/50 if it works. I might still be able to interact with a control as it’ll click through, but the top bar is still lightly greyed out indicating it is still not in focus.
It was the first big sign that trouble was brewing. macOS is being destroyed from within.
Duolingo is terrible†, but proper gamification combined w/ LLMs for real conversations could be an incredible learning tool. (I might build this if no one else does.)
†It can be useful for going from absolute 0 to epsilon, just to kind of get familiar with the language, but if you're using it more than like 2 weeks, you're seriously wasting your time (vs. reading material in the target language, watching TV in target language, trying to talk w/ people in target language). Anki, too, can be a trap that feels like learning but isn't, really, in my experience.
There's a newer app I use called Natulang, developed by a Ukranian software dev to solve this problem for themself, which is entirely speaking focused w/ AI support and aims to get a person to a B2 level over 360 lessons w/ about 15 minutes each. I'd round up to 30 minutes each for actual time commitment due to the extra SRS sessions tacked on.
I'm 50 lessons in Spanish now and I definitely believe the claim. Recently was on a date w/ someone who knew about as much English as I know Spanish and only grabbed Google translate about a half dozen times.
It doesn't have much in the way of gamification... to me the fact that it seems very evidently effective is enough motivation to do a daily lesson.
Actual LLM powered free-form conversationalist assistants are better once someone has a solid base understanding, probably at least a 2000 word vocab. What you'd really want is a LLM powered instructor that develops and adjusts a lesson plan based on progress.
Playing briefly, looks pretty good! -- though I wonder if there's a way to move away from using a source language (or maybe it does this in later lessons?). You really want to try to get your head 100% inside the target language as quickly as possible, and not be translating back and forth.
You can do this with the "free dialog" option from the beginning. The only issue with this is you do have to reference the actual lesson material to that point, so it's more of a review piece.
That said, my impression is getting to functional in a language quickly requires referencing a source language that is fully understandable by the user to build vocab and comprehension - ie. explaining a new concept in the target language using the target language for a B1 student is going to be inefficient and not expressive enough. Otherwise you're fortifying what you already know vs. actually building more knowledge. Things like comprehensible input are great but seemingly more indirect and less efficient.
If you have an option to get from zero to B2 fairly quickly, you are functional enough in the target language to use a myriad of options to fluency, including doing nothing other than conversing with others.
You can get quite far with consistent long term approach with stuff like Duolingo. The problem is, its just one or very few... vectors or dimensions in which you progress, specifically aligned with how the material is done. I have a friend, he is doing DL for French for maybe 2 years, every day. He can talk some stuff pretty well, freezes on some other situations. Passive understanding works quite well for him too.
Real use of language has many dimensions, changing also ie the ways you think in that language for example.
Nothing beats real use where you have to express yourself and not skip to other languages as a shortcut, no way around this.
I've tried learning apps with LLMs and part of the issue is that you can't have much of a conversation early on. A conversation of "how many cats do you have?" "I have two cats" "what color are your cats", etc., isn't much different than the non-AI lessons. At the point where it would be really useful, the other options you mentioned are much better choices.
I think having a world (3d maybe, or maybe just 2d) you could talk about in a really simple way might be useful here. Imagine something like "el gato quiere la pelota roja" and you have to carry the red ball to the cat to pass to the next lesson, and there's a cat, and a dog, and capibara and various shapes; something like that...
There's probably the opportunity to have simple stories and personalities come into play too, early on, to add interest. Think about e.g. the Frog and Toad books for children learning to read.
I teach languages and teaching people how to functionally craft things with a language works much better in the medium to long term. By the time you get some basics down, you can actually have a conversation beyond "comment ca va, comment t'appelle tu?" because you know how to use the language, not just parrot phrases.
> but proper gamification combined w/ LLMs for real conversations could be an incredible learning tool.
I don't necessarily disagree but I do believe it will require some really smart design ideas. I am pessimistic that a big name company will come up with them
YouTube is incredible, YouTube is poorly run. If I were making the laws, I'd do something similar to mandatory licensing of songs for radio: mandate that YouTube, as a sort de-facto content monopilist, provide third-party access to its database (upload, discovery, view counts, recommendations, etc). Devil is in the details, but well-done it would strictly improve the world.
Independent competitive companies are great, but things tend to devolve into de-facto mini-governments once things stabilize, and from there I think the (real) government using its power to force a little more competition could really improve things.
Setting aside safety for a moment, consider just hygiene: BART is shockingly dirty. Which suggests mismanagement, above and beyond just a lack of detterence of criminality.
As for safety -- firing squads are probably not in the cards, but would jailing the violent be too much to hope for?
(Software quality has also fallen off a cliff, though that's more a loss of instutional competence, I think, than active anti-user behavior motivated by avarice.)
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