It might be time to start tweeting again with everything happening in the tech world right now. I feel like it would be a good time to help folks both inside and outside make sense of AI and what is going on there as things move so quickly...
A big part of that case has been Apple's promise that the walled garden of a reviewed app store is to keep the store a safe place. However, I don't believe anyone in app review even opened these apps because literally the only thing the app does is open a web browser to an online casino...
I'm interested by these cropping up for two reasons. First because the "report a problem" link has been removed from app store pages, so now the only way to report an app like this is to install it on your device. Secondly because the Epic v Apple case was in the news as recently as today.
One for a fish-themed slot machine has an app store page listing itself as "Gill Guru" an ai-powered "fishing mentor." Another for an Egyptian-themed slot has an app page that pretends to be a historical reference app. And I'm sure this is an iceberg tip and there are plenty more.
Came across a weird scam on the Apple app store - apps that are advertising themselves openly as casino/gambling apps in ad networks, but then the app listing page has been camouflaged so that they can evade Apple's gambling and age restrictions (downloadable by kids as young as 4).
"Of course, the last thing they expected to sell for £1 was... themselves!" www.theguardian.com/business/202...
Apple is absolutely killing me with this decade-long slow motion crash unifying MacOS and iPadOS
Shout out though to the Apple events video team coming up with ever more esoteric ways to transition between the different presenters
This year’s WWDC is an absolute Sherlock festival
Must be nice to be an LLM - I wish every request to *me* started with some affirmation like "You are a top notch software engineer who cares about coding reliable, user-friendly experiences..."
“No matter where you stand on Israel and Gaza, these blatant attacks on free speech should terrify you. We are witnessing the most aggressive crackdowns on speech, both online and off, that we’ve seen in decades.”
Requiring reproduction repos linked in your Github issues is an anti-pattern. I get the reasoning, but I suspect that in practice 90% of the repos with this requirement are adding it just so that people don't report issues.
I'm just lucky I was born into it natively
(Silver lining, to all of this is, of course, that it means lots of "___ for React Native" small indie hacking business opportunities.)
The clearest example of this I saw was Storybook. At least they support RN at all, but you notice they have pages of first-party docs about how to integrate with NextJS while their RN docs are just a link to a Github repo. The instructions on how to show their UI is two links to dev.to blogposts.
Indeed, even outside styling, the lack of support you get compared to web dev tooling is the most notable thing. You can tell you're moving from extremely polished CLI tools and docs to ones that were done quicker and with less of an eye to QA and polish that supports folks learning the platform.
Good: Build and styling tools have come a long way in 5 years. Not perfect, but so very much easier to set up a new project now. Bad: the various component/theming packages are still lacking and either have a steep learning curve (Tamagui) or lack the polish & qa that the web tooling spoils me with.
Every time I play around with React Native, I'm reminded how far behind that dev ecosystem is compared with React on web. So many tools we take for granted on the web are still in their infancy on native - definitely feels like a big opportunity space for folks interested in DX tooling.
Well, that’s one way to confirm that TikTok did, indeed, believe my account was based in the USA… Darn it, now I have to train the algorithm from scratch all over again!
The age of generative AI is overhearing “my phone autocorrected merry Christmas to meerkat Christmas?” and being able to respond with a beautiful joke image in 30 seconds. I’m sure there’s some other useful stuff it does, but I’m here for the memes.
So Meerkat Christmas, to all who celebrate!
Oops! Startup YesMadam is now in damage control mode after (they claim) a viral marketing post meant to promote their new "employee destress" wellness programs went *too* viral and trashed the company's reputation. Don't try and stir up viral outrage at yourself!
TIL that Apple added a warranty narc daemon to Macs that logs if it ever detects that the Mac was exposed to liquids: 9to5mac.com/2023/11/03/m...
@jackosborne.com how did you get your domain as your Bluesky name? If there was a way to stop being “zackdotcomputer” and finally use the fact that I own “Zack.computer” I’m all ears…
“Cheers is just Always Sunny for boomers”
