ncphillips (u/ncphillips)

ncphillips commented on Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub forums.ankiweb.net/t/anki... · Posted by u/trms

Timpy · 8 days ago

I discovered Anki 12 years ago while living in Japan. I was trying my hardest and absolutely failing to remember any of the Japanese I was studying. Maybe I was due for a learning-style renaissance for myself and Anki was just the catalyst, but it really made a positive impact on my life. More than just memorizing kanji on AnkiDroid during my commute, I just started to believe I could learn anything. I was starting to take my coding hobby more seriously at the time and hacking on Anki was a big part of that too. Thanks for all the hard work Damien and David Allison. I'm so grateful for the software you've worked on.

ncphillips · 8 days ago

I've just started using Anki and I'm almost grieving. If I had had this 15 years ago I probably would have done so much better in school. I've always struggled with memorizing, but Anki has made this much easier for me. I started learning Japanese 4 months ago and I'm baffled by how much I've retained in that period. Now I'm playing with using it to learn the rules for the OneRing TTPRG.

ncphillips commented on AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is fastcompany.com/91435192/... · Posted by u/felineflock

torginus · 3 months ago

In my experience, if you're working on a green-field project, you're working long hours, making very little visible progress, you have to write a lot of code, make important decisions.

All the while management is breathing down your neck and asking 'why isn't it ready yet'.

Once the thing is shipped, then all the important people come out of the woodwork, who were surely there all along, 'supporting' you from behind the scenes, there are photo ops and important people shaking hands. If they feel particularly charitable, then you might get a seat at the table. There's talk of spinning up a team around the product, and people fall over each other to get to lead it.

But the thing is, most likely they don't need your expertise any more, not really, once everything works, you don't really have a negotiating position as a dev. They get some cheap juniors to fix the bugs and add the missing feature niggles - hiring 3 juniors might not even be cheaper, the point is management does not have to depend on you, they can play their human resource games.

'But only I can fix that complex race condition, that popped up half a year after development' - well if it was good enough with the bug for people not to notice it for half a year, it's going to be good enough for another half, until the new devs can fix it.

This applies to ambitious feature requests as well - if the code's good enough that the contract was signed, the business requirement was met, they can just kick the can down the road until they can fix it.

ncphillips · 3 months ago

> In my experience, if you're working on a green-field project, you're working long hours, making very little visible progress, you have to write a lot of code, make important decisions.

Funny, this is the complete opposite of my experience. Greenfield projects I've been a part of have had a ton of highly visible progress with _frequent_ updates to stakeholders basically from day 1. Same goes for complex additional features.

ncphillips commented on iPad Pro with M5 chip apple.com/newsroom/2025/1... · Posted by u/chasingbrains

SkyPuncher · 4 months ago

I follow largely the same path. I basically find that mine ends up used for only two things:

1. Reading technical papers where I use the pen to make notes

2. Sketching household projects (a few of the apps are very nice for this).

Outside of that, I simply want a real, physical keyboard most of the time.

ncphillips · 4 months ago

I love my Kindle, but I have never been able to use my iPad for reading.

I got HumbleBundle with a bunch of Pathfinder 2e PDFs cheap but I'm still tempted to buy the physical copies.

ncphillips commented on iPad Pro with M5 chip apple.com/newsroom/2025/1... · Posted by u/chasingbrains

criddell · 4 months ago

If you aren't into drawing, what about music? You can download GarageBand for free and it's pretty great once you figure it out.

Or if you aren't a music person, are you into making movies? Final Cut Pro does have a subscription, but it's only $5 / month and the subscription is easy to start and stop. If your needs are simple, the free iMovie is pretty good.

Or maybe video isn't your thing. Are you a writer or poet? There are a lot of great choices for writing apps and the battery life of the iPad means you can work away from your desk all day.

Or if you like writing software, Swift Playground is fun. I found this to be a great resource:

https://github.com/uraimo/Awesome-Swift-Playgrounds

If you are into photography, Affinity Photo is fun. It doesn't have the AI features that Photoshop has, but for amateurs, it can get you pretty far. Plug in an external drive to your iPad and you can use it with a huge photo library.

ncphillips · 4 months ago

All of this is cool...but you can do them all on a laptop and you'll probably have a better time.

And those cheap/free things are only available after dropping $1000 on a new iPad

ncphillips commented on Next.js is infuriating blog.meca.sh/3lxoty3shjc2... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

solatic · 5 months ago

Half these issues stem from a relative misunderstanding of exactly where the code is running. Next.js has layers upon layers upon layers due to the interplay between the browser, middleware, edge vs. node, SSR... It's an enormous amount of complexity and it really only fits under the following set of circumstances:

  * You sell a B2C product to a potentially global audience, so edge semantics actually help with latency issues
  * You're willing to pay Vercel a high premium for them to host
  * You have no need for background task processing (Vercel directs you to marketplace/partner services), so your architecture never pushes you to host on another provider.

Otherwise, just tread the well-trod path and stick to either a react-vite SPA or something like Rails doing ordinary SSR.

ncphillips · 5 months ago

> Half these issues stem from a relative misunderstanding of exactly where the code is running.

I used to think Javascript everywhere was an advantage, and this is exactly why I now think it's a bad idea.

My company uses Inertia.js + Vue and it a significantly better experience. I still get all the power of modern frontend rendering but the overall architecture is so much simpler. The routing is 100% serverside and there's no need for a general API. (Note: Inertia works with React and Svelte too)

We tried Nuxt at first, but it was a shit show. You end up having _two_ servers instead of one: the actual backend server, and the server for your frontend. There was so much more complexity because we needed to figure out a bunch of craziness about where the code was actually being run.

Now it's dead simple. If it's PHP it's on the server. It's JS it's in the browser. Never needing to question that has been a huge boon for us.

ncphillips commented on Apple's Liquid Glass is prep work for AR interfaces, not just a design refresh omc345.substack.com/p/fro... · Posted by u/lightningcable

marxism · 8 months ago

I have to disagree with Carmack here.

The evidence suggests this isn't AR prep at all. I watched Apple's 20-minute design presentation, and their design team makes the same point repeatedly: Liquid Glass has very narrow guidelines and specific constraints.

Here's the actual design problem Apple solved. In content apps, you have a fundamental trade-off: you have a few controls that need to be instantly accessible, but you don't want them visually distracting from the content. Users are there to consume videos, photos, articles - not to stare at your buttons. But the controls still have to be there when needed.

Before Liquid Glass, your least intrusive option was backdrop blur or translucent pastel dimming overlays. Apple asked: can we make controls even less distracting? Liquid Glass lets you thread this needle even better. It's a pretty neat trick for solving this specific constraint.

So you'll feel like you're seeing Liquid Glass "everywhere" not because Apple applied it broadly, but because of selection bias. The narrow use case Apple designed this for just happens to be where you spend 80% of your phone time: videos, photos, reading messages. You're information processing, not authoring.

Apple's actual guidelines are clear: only a few controls visible at once, infrequent access pattern, only on top of rich content. The criticism assumes they're redesigning everything when they explicitly documented the opposite. People are reacting to marketing tone instead of reading what Apple's design team actually built.

[1] https://peoplesgrocers.com/en/writing/liquid-glass-explained

ncphillips · 8 months ago

I dunno, I find the blur more visually distracting than a hard stop.

I would rather borders and color contrast to create visual separation anyway. That approach takes up less space. White space takes makes your UI less dense, but blur is even worse.

Either way… how does that relate to my keyboard being transparent? I don’t need to see a completely illegible blur of the colors behind my keyboard.

I just turned on the “reduce transparency” setting and it’s much better.

ncphillips commented on Apple's Liquid Glass is prep work for AR interfaces, not just a design refresh omc345.substack.com/p/fro... · Posted by u/lightningcable

crooked-v · 8 months ago

Similarly, I am perfectly content with the visionOS UI, and yet I turned off the iOS 26 transparency after maybe five minutes of using the Music app.

ncphillips · 8 months ago

Wait, that’s an option? My god.

Just found the setting…thank you! It was actually driving me crazy. There’s still a bunch of really weird, unnecessary UX changes but this helps a lot.

ncphillips commented on Inertia.js – Build React, Vue, or Svelte apps with server-side routing inertiajs.com/... · Posted by u/rob

halfcat · a year ago

How difficult is it to troubleshoot Inertia when something breaks?

That was my only fear when I toyed with Inertia, Django, and Svelte for an afternoon. When I’d get an error it seemed obscure or not indicative of the underlying cause.

What’s everyone’s experience? Inertia seems like magic. And that’s what scares me a little.

ncphillips · a year ago

My team of 5-6 devs has been using Inertia for a year now. I really don't think that Inertia is magic. Some of us have 10 years experience, some 2 years. I don't think anyone on the team has had to troubleshoot Inertia. Nothing with Inertia has ever broken. Juniors have never gotten confused by how it works.

It is just a simple bit of glue between your Vue app and your backend. The docs are good, and it overall just feels solid/stable. Super excited to see the new changes that are coming too!

ncphillips commented on Inertia.js – Build React, Vue, or Svelte apps with server-side routing inertiajs.com/... · Posted by u/rob

begueradj · a year ago

My experience with using Inertia.js for Laravel has always been smooth and pleasant.

But I can't say the same with translations/localisation.

ncphillips · a year ago

Really? What's been the issues? We have our app fully translated and it's seemed fine.

ncphillips commented on Inertia.js – Build React, Vue, or Svelte apps with server-side routing inertiajs.com/... · Posted by u/rob

KaoruAoiShiho · a year ago

What's a Laravel equivalent in JS so we can stick with 1 language instead of using PHP?

ncphillips · a year ago

There isn't one. There's been a couple attempts but they just don't hit the mark like Rails or Laravel do.

Honestly, the upside of 1 language is not that high. Don't be afraid of PHP, it isn't the same language it was 15 years ago. I've been programming JS for 10 years but only been using PHP for a year, it's weird but it's got some nice parts too.