I was literally just talking about this the other day—every app on my Mac that gives me trouble is from Apple (Music, Podcasts, Keynote). And don’t even get me started on the declining UX quality in iOS. It feels like the cracks are really starting to show now. I know Apple’s developer quality has been on a downward trend for a while, but at this point, it’s impossible to ignore.
Readit NewsShinchy commented on Apple's Software Quality Crisis eliseomartelli.it/blog/20... · Posted by u/ajdude
Shinchy commented on Why blog if nobody reads it? andysblog.uk/why-blog-if-... · Posted by u/alexgiann
For me blogging acts as a function to learn about something. If I want to understand a particular subject (albeit a small one), I’ll write about it. Do some research on the matter, think over what I am trying to answer, and at the end I always feel more knowledgeable about that particular subject point. Another factor is that it improves my writing, which in turns helps expression which too is very valuable. Sure not many people read it, but honestly putting on some music and just tapping away on something interesting is quite therapeutic.
Shinchy commented on Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants" simonwillison.net/2025/Fe... · Posted by u/twapi
I strongly agree with this comment. Anecdotal evidence time!
I'm an experienced dev (20 years of C++ and plenty of other stuff), and I frequently work with younger students in a mentor role, e.g. I've done Google Summer of Code three times as a mentor, and am also in KDE's own mentorship program.
In 2023/24, when ChatGPT was looming large, I took on a student who was of course attempting to use AI to learn and who was enjoying many of the obvious benefits - availability, tailoring information to his inquiry, etc. So we cut a deal: We'd use the same ChatGPT account and I could keep an eye on his interactions with the system, so I could help him when the AI went off the rails and was steering him into the wrong direction.
He initially made fast progress on the project I was helping him with, and was able to put more working code in place than others in the same phase. But then he hit a plateau really hard soon after, because he was running into bugs and issues he couldn't get solutions from the AI for and he just wasn't able to connect the dots himself.
He'd almost get there, but would sometimes forget to remove random single lines doing the wrong thing, etc. His mental map of the code was poor, because he hadn't written it himself in that oldschool "every line a hard-fought battle" style that really makes you understand why and how something works and how it connects to problems you're solving.
As a result he'd get frustrated and had bouts of absenteeism next, because there wasn't any string of rewards and little victories there but just listless poking in the mud.
To his credit, he eventually realized leaning on ChatGPT was holding him back mentally and he tried to take things slower and go back to API docs and slowly building up his codebase by himself.
'"every line a hard-fought battle" style that really makes you understand why and how something works'
I totally agree with this and I really like that way of wording it.
Shinchy commented on UK's hardware talent is being wasted josef.cn/blog/uk-talent... · Posted by u/sebg
As a Brit, when I was raising the seed round for my startup, UK and European VCs would consistently try to haggle you down on price while the American VC's were exclusively focussed on trying to figure out whether this could be a billion dollar business or not (in the end we raised a $5m seed led by Spark, and have done extremely well and raised more since).
The UK lost Deep Mind - which could have been OpenAI!! -- to Google. I think part of the issue is cultural - the level of ambition in the UK is just small compared to the US. Individual founders like Demis or Tom Blomfield may have it but recruiting enough talent with the ambition levels of early Palantir or OpenAI employees is so hard because there are so few. Instead, a lot of extremely smart people in the UK would rather get the 'safe' job at Google, or McKinsey than the 'this will never work but can you imagine how cool it would be if it did' job at a startup.
There are probably political reasons as well. Unfortunately the UK has not been well governed for 20 years or so, and hence economic outcomes as a whole have been abysmal.
I agree and it's a real shame, we used to spearhead some of the most initiative companies in technology (Acorn, Arm, Sinclair, Sage, Deepmind). Now it's just a shadow, while places like Silicon Valley or Stockholm have jetted ahead the UK just sort of stagnated - it's kind of embarrassing.
Shinchy commented on Show HN: Tetris in a PDF th0mas.nl/downloads/pdftr... · Posted by u/ThomasRinsma
That's truly amazing! I knew you could do a lot with PDF but that not to this extent.
Which country? I am in Finland and have had the same number for over 20 years. It is publicly listed. I receive maybe 1-2 marketing calls a month and less than one SMS scam per year. I am somewhat restrcitive filling in my contact details when I don't expect any real business. I only use deposable email addresses, but that should be completely unrelated.
The last "Microsoft" support call was years ago.
Here is the UK it is very common, I must get 4-5 a week and I am also very cautious about who I give my number to.
Shinchy commented on Open source AI is the path forward about.fb.com/news/2024/07... · Posted by u/atgctg
The big problem with this is that content is harder and harder to find. Try to find a non-AI generated reply to a viral post on Twitter, you're looking at having to scroll down 5-6 1080p screens to finally get to some actual stuff people wrote.
The content you're enjoying today still exists, but it's a needle in a haystack of AI spam
This is the exact thing I keep telling people. It's all well and good saying human made content will still be around, but it will be covered in a tidal wave of cheaply generated AI hogwash.
Shinchy commented on Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013) computerhistory.org/blog/... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
In the aughts I worked at Adobe and spent time trying to archive the source code for Photoshop, Illustrator, PostScript, and other apps. Thomas Knoll's original Mac floppy disk backups were available, so I brought in my Mac Plus, with a serial cable to transfer the files to a laptop via Kermit. The first version was 0.54, dated 6 July 1988. The files on the floppies were in various ancient compressed archive formats, but most were readable. I created an archive on a special Perforce server of all the code that I found. Sadly, the earliest Illustrator backups were on a single external disk drive that had gone bad.
Wow, oddly enough that kind of sounds quite fun.
I'm not sure what others are saying, I re-watched Ghost in the Shell again recently and I had forgotten just how brilliant it is. There is something pure about it that you just don't find in modern anime, something that really resonated.
Shinchy commented on The Myth of the Second Chance ft.pressreader.com/articl... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
It's important to recognize that life is path-dependent. But as a counter-point, worrying too much about each decision as a potential mistake can lead to the kind of fear-based paralysis described by Sylvia Plath in the Bell Jar:
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
That's a great analogy, I'm now going to have to read this book.