Othia

Tech stuff… I knew you'd understand.

261012

Developers vs. Apple's Brand Promise

Lately I've been hearing developers complain about Apple locking down their platforms.

They don’t understand just how maniacally Apple protects its brand promise.

Apple’s Brand Promise

1. the best technology possible for a given price
2. the best design possible for a given price
3. safe to use, both financially and in terms of privacy
4. easy to use — no learning curve
5. a pleasure to use
6. empowering to the user

And perhaps less obviously:

• independence from state influence
• ideologically neutral

Developers and Advanced Users

Some people would argue that the brand promise should include elements like:

• the user has absolute control over their tools
• the user owns the tool, not Apple

But these values are in direct conflict with “safe and easy to use”.

They can make people… maybe not feel bad, but feel less happy about their device.

The Power Tool Analogy

An analogy that gets used a lot in this context is “If I buy a power drill, I need to be able to use it to drill holes.”

And the suggested solution is always: have a switch for advanced users. Make it hard for regular people to turn off the safety protection, but enable advanced users to do it with their eyes open.

And Apple does this, to a certain extent.

The Mixer Analogy

If you buy a mixer for the kitchen, you (of course) want to be able to use it for what it was made to do.

My mixer won’t run if the lid isn’t securely attached. It won’t run if the pitcher isn’t on the base.

What if there was a cover on one side that said “Advanced”? And inside, there were switches for eliminating these safegards?

You know you’ll never want to actually do it, but wouldn’t it just be a bit strange to live with the cover? You might not feel as good about using your mixer.

You might feel basic. A bit like a loser — “I’m just a regular cook, I’m not advanced”.

The Brand Promise: the Missing Element

There is an element that I left out of Apple’s brand promise:

• Apple won't make you feel stupid

What developers often don’t get is that to protect their brand promise, Apple will never add advanced features that are even visible to their more mainstream users.

Adding visible “advanced” features feels like a middle finger to the rest of the users — so to the extent that Apple adds developer-friendly elements to their ecosystem, it is done seamlessly and invisibly to mainstream users.

tags: #apple #development #branding

251219

Don't Fear the Socialist AI

from Seb Krier

If you believe that capitalism is better than socialism because a centrally-run government lacks access to the knowledge to successfully manage the economy, you needn't be afraid that a single AI will take over the world.

A super intelligent AI would still have the same problem as a socialist government — the knowledge necessary to be effective doesn't exist in a single place.

So, such an AI would not be capable of suddenly running everything in its own fashion.

251218

AI and the March of Nines

In the Dwarkesh Patel podcast, Andrej Karpathy says that AI development is a "march of nines".

If it takes 1 year to get to 90%, it will take 1 year to get to 99% and another full year to get to 99.9%.

I had not heard of this but it's useful in a lot of contexts, even just a simple programming task.

Developing Pwika, my SVG-based website builder, went like this and it always mystified me.

So it might be helpful, when begining a project, to declare how many nines will be targeted.

• if it's a 90% project, it'll take a year
• if it's a 99% project, it'll take two years

It might be helpful for thinking about how fast AI will arrive more generally.

My impression is that we're at about 60% — if I ask ChatGPT to help me with something, it frequently fails.

So we're still not even at 90%. Perhaps it will take five more years to get to 90% — so let's say 15 years for 90%

Then we can expect another 15 years to go from 90% to 99%. A very slow takeoff.

Think about self-driving cars — I was driving near my house the other day, and there was construction.

I arrived at a T intersection:

• there was a cement truck parked to the left and another vehicle parked to the right, blocking my view of the cross street I was entering
• there was blinding horizontal light from the sunrise
• there was a dark-skinned black man in the sunlight wearing complex clothing
• he was holding a panel that was green on one side and red on the other
• he was indicating, in very haphazard way, when it was safe for me to pull into the other street
• we made eye contact and he made a subtle gesture indicating that I should pull out

This kind of situation, at least superficially, requires understanding what you're seeing, and I have to imagine that a car that can automatically navigate it is still far in the future.