ajconway

15 ms·

61.
by ajconway 5y ago
Hype and (related) money is what open messaging needs at the moment. XMPP is fine, it’s stable, extensible and generally works, but average users have never heard of it.
62.
by ajconway 5y ago
This can be easily resolved by forcing developers who provide their own method of payment to also include the App Store's default in-app purchases. That's how it currently works with Sign in with Apple.
63.
by ajconway 5y ago
No, it's about delivering products faster or prettier. There are fields where squeezing every tiny bit of performance matters — media compression, 3D software (including game engines), data processing, hardware. Engineering is not art,
64.
by ajconway 5y ago
Does it mean that an attacker with the ability to monitor network connections can see who is talking to whom?
65.
by ajconway 5y ago
Well, that’s a different kind of issue. Should politics have anything to do with mandating which technologies have the right to exist? The Internet itself enables global surveillance by sufficiently funded actors, but it also makes this con
66.
by ajconway 5y ago
> What good are performance and battery life For the average consumer — everything. I'm kind of torn between the two opinions. I wish my iPhone would be able to run anything I want to run. I also recognize that nobody forced me to b
67.
by ajconway 5y ago
Here is their reasoning for a change of protocol: https://getsession.org/session-protocol-technical-informatio... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25690036 Summary: forward secrecy and de
68.
by ajconway 5y ago
As stated in https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/find-my/ Apple (or any other third parties) cannot access the actual location data in the Find My network directly. It is supposed to be only
69.
by ajconway 5y ago
Animations were slick (compared to other mobile platforms) because they were hardware accelerated.
70.
by ajconway 5y ago
If you look at the original review videos (or even the keynote), you may notice that the first iPhone lags quite a bit. Of course, it's not Objective-C that causes it, but rather the limited hardware of the time.
71.
by ajconway 5y ago
The possibility to perform manual or semi-automated (QR code) key verification is still useful. 1. Those who care about encryption are able to verify their keys. 2. The service can't implement mass-surveillance in secret if there are a
72.
by ajconway 5y ago
On the other hand, it is ~infinitely less CPU intensive than decoding HEIF and AVIF with no hardware acceleration, and they were supposed to be the future of the web.
73.
by ajconway 5y ago
Indeed, it throttles way sooner than one would expect. Despite that, it was faster than the previous gen models.
74.
by ajconway 5y ago
> Ok, but can you do similar things on Windows or Linux or xBSD on the M1 Unfortunately, no, I need a macOS environment. > If you sacrifice your computing freedom, you will be supporting the development of incompatible locked down bla
75.
by ajconway 5y ago
But it compiles and links my code twice as fast as my previous 16" MacBook Pro with an i9.
76.
by ajconway 5y ago
Bytes don't care about protocols, but anyone who cares about future and backwards compatibility should.
77.
by ajconway 5y ago
So, when you reach the "edge" you were going for, you arrive at the point when everything has already moved past your horizon (including Earth), there isn't a single hydrogen atom around, so you're stuck in the darkness
78.
by ajconway 5y ago
Probably the main issue is that every time a technology or regulation that starts like that (“you don’t need to worry if you’re not doing anything wrong”) is then inevitably expanded into repressive activities by governments around the worl
79.
by ajconway 5y ago
I was more focused on the "equivalent or superiour replacement" part. At this point in history, you can't avoid Apple's ecosystem if you want to use their ARM-based laptops/desktops unless it's a hobby of yours
80.
by ajconway 5y ago
M1 is nearly a year old now, and the replacement (M1X, M2?) is rumored to be released in a couple of months. So far no other SoC has been able to come close to even the current-gen M1 in terms of performance + efficiency, with a remarkable
81.
by ajconway 5y ago
As a software engineer, who hasn't felt like "I definitely know how to make everything better by rewriting the whole thing!"? UI/UX designers feel the same way. It's never the answer, but it's not the end of th
82.
by ajconway 5y ago
Blurring happens inside the UI server process. Here is a related technique in macOS: https://avaidyam.github.io/2018/02/17/CAPluginLayer_CABackdr... Basically, it's like an iframe — you declare what cont
83.
by ajconway 5y ago
They do! See https://devstreaming-cdn.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/233l9q8h... and the corresponding WWDC session on them minimizing the input-to-display time.
84.
by ajconway 5y ago
No, that would be OS-provided GUI components (or sometimes manual reimplementation), similar to how most win32 apps had the same right-click menu behavior.
85.
by ajconway 5y ago
This is not entirely accurate. iOS indeed uses a client-server UI model, kind of similar to X11. Along with submitting “widget” hierarchy updates, it also supports submitting “animations”. The downside is that the animation states are not t
86.
by ajconway 5y ago
The decentralization argument comes up fairly often in similar discussions. Assuming it was Matrix and not Signal, what advantage would there be in the current situation?
87.
by ajconway 5y ago
> In many cases, this software doesn't even do anything that is functionally different from 10 or 20 years ago, but it still consumes many more resources I would argue that in most cases the choice is not between fast, optimized and
88.
by ajconway 5y ago
There's not a single perfect format for everything, so why not?
89.
by ajconway 5y ago
Not many companies are in the business of being fair or moral, usually it's about making money. Lawmakers have the power to force companies into being more fair (for whatever definition of "fair"). On the comparison between A
90.
by ajconway 5y ago
So it’s just a legacy file format that (as reflected in the article) has likely evolved from an internal object representation in the early days of macOS X (maybe earlier?). Apple has been working on the tooling for the past several years.

More ›