Now that Dye is gone, I still hold out hope that Apple will change direction and start fixing their UI. But that fact that it got this bad in the first place implies things are seriously broken at a senior leadership level.
Or just consider the “asshole dinner guest” trope that appears in so many TV shows and movies. They will always be talking too loudly and gesticulating/pointing with their cutlery.
There are plenty of web devs who care about performance and engineering quality. But caring about such things when you work on something like a news site is impossible: These sites make their money through user tracking, and it's literally your job to stuff in as many 3rd-party trackers as management tells you to. Any dev who says no on the basis that it'll slow the site down will get fired as quickly as a chef who get a shift job in McDonalds and tries to argue for better cuisine.
The WP reportedly lost $100m in 2024. So one the one hand, you might understand Bezos wanting things to change. On the other hand, Blue Origin reportedly loses multiple billions of $ per year, and has done for decades, which Bezos pumps in without insisting on massive cuts or layoffs.
> The WP reportedly lost $100m in 2024. So one the one hand, you might understand Bezos wanting things to change.
You don't even "might understand" this, because you're intelligent enough to grasp that its profitability as a newspaper was never a factor in Bezos' desire to purchase the WP.
There is quite a bit of difference between not making a profit and consistently losing around $100m a year with apparently no path to at least revenue neutrality.
So it loses pocket change for a multi billionaire?
Edit: The consideration being that perhaps billionaire toys need not be profitable per se, but are purchased for different reasons. Twitter is another example here.
That's assuming the pro-billionaire propaganda it produces doesn't make him many hundreds of millions more.
In that light an arbitrary but vaguely plausible reason to fire anyone who insists on doing actual journalism and not billionaire propaganda is a useful tool.
There's an obvious difference between the two in that Blue Origin is the gateway to multibillion dollar prospective markets that current have virtually no incumbents (other than one very big obvious one). Whereas the WP does not have any prospective future growth trajectory whatsoever b/c it's competing with the endless turd spigot that is social media.
The WP is his propaganda tool contributing to maintaining this billionaire-friendly environment. Trump gave the bourgeoisie trillions in tax cuts last year, and Bezos is a major receiver of this present himself. It's hard to quantify, but these captured media together are much more valuable to oligarchs than any other ventures of theirs, certainly more than their space toys. Hence why Ellison would spend $100B of his personal wealth to add CNN to his catalogue, or why Musk spent so much on X and doesn't seem to care too much about making it profitable.
One of the big lessons of the last decade is that media can have billionaires as their primary market. The Free Press got huge because of infusions of cash from the rich. Media that flatters the opinions of billionaires and projects their propaganda into the world can be enormously valuable even if it isn't making traditional cash. It is a return to a patronage model.
Garry Tan has even said this expressly. That the rich should simply own their own parallel media so they can project their will against the will of the people.
Here's a controversial opinion -- it's actually always been this way.
Hearst used his newspapers to manipulate the American public into war against the Spanish Empire.
Government lies (babies in incubators, yellow cake...) were used to push two Iraq wars on the American public by the media.
The abnormal thing is that we had maybe 10-15 years where the press put up at least a pretense of acting impartial as power shifted from pineapple and arms companies to tech monopolies.
I think the bigger change is that wealth is continuing to concentrate. The more wealth accrues under a few hands the more these people are able to exploit disproportionate control over the information environment.
Rich businessmen have expensive hobbies, and those can look a lot like real businesses. Jeff could also buy a couple oceanographic research vessels tomorrow, spend a few years looking for sunken Spanish treasure ships, then get bored and sell the whole "business" in a liquidation auction.
Yes, Jeff and his companies keep making idealistic, pro-social statements. Unfortunately, such statements are little more than socially mandated lies. Which millions of people really want to believe - so be cautious about calling them out.
BO definitely does layoffs, and is run just as awfully as Amazon (look who the CEO of BO is as of 2024). Doesn’t matter if you’re in an office or on the manufacturing floor, the hours and demands are terrible there. Everyone I know that has worked there echoed the same problems that Amazon had.
The Melania documentary is an important artifact that historians will be talking about for decades, although not in the way those involved anticipated.
Wikipedia says it "had the highest opening for a non-concert documentary since the $10.7 million opening for Chimpanzee (2012)".
It did well by documentary standards, poorly compared to its budget, and the stories about empty theaters are mostly in areas with very weak Trump support. Those stories spread mainly because they makes us feel good.
So it's a cost center. Exactly like the public relations tool that WP is. Until due to cuts public loses interest in it, at which point it ceases to be an effective tool and keeps being only a cost center.
It's noblesse oblige, or rather an example of the end of noblesse oblige, that the super rich don't even have to pretend to do things for others any more. Which, I would suggest, is a short-sighted and ultimately hubristicaly stupid change...
Annex 1 of the study lists the test results for individual brands/models. There are several, including Airpods, that get an all-green evaluation score.
I suspect AGENTS.md files will prove to be a short-lived relic of an era when we had to treat coding agents like junior devs, who often need explicit instructions and guardrails about testing, architecture, repo structure, etc. But when agents have the equivalent (or better) judgement ability as a senior engineer, they can make their own calls about these aspects, and trying to "program" their behaviour via an AGENTS.md file becomes as unhelpful as one engineer trying to micro-manage another's approach to solving a problem.
It's a best practice to document things about the code base, so that other devs (even senior devs) don't start to do things differently. This will probably not change
What I think is short lived is this insistence in separating LLM instructions from general documentation for both humans and AI. LLMs can read human docs, and concerns about context window size will probably disappear
But maybe future docs will be LLM-first, but people won't read them directly. They will ask a LLM questions about it
I think AGENTS.md will still have a place regardless. There are conventions, design philosophies, and project-specific constraints that can't be inferred from code alone, no matter how good the judgment
Eh, even for a senior engineer, dropping into a new codebase is greatly helped by an orientation from someone who works on the code. What's where, common gotchas, which tests really matter, and so on. The agents file serves a similar role.
Except that most READMEs are seemingly written more for end-users than for developers; and even CONTRIBUTING files often mostly just document the social contribution process + guidelines rather than providing any guidance targeted toward those who would contribute. There’s a lot of “top-level architectural assumptions” detail in particular that is left on the floor, documented nowhere. Which “works” when you expect human devs to “stare really hard and ask questions” until they figure out what’s being done differently in this codebase; but doesn’t work at all when an LLM with zero permanent learning capability gets involved.
There's a big difference between being in a field versus working in a field, from dawn to dusk, every day, regardless of the weather or sickness, in order to produce just enough food to feed you and your family, knowing that a single failed harvest (due to conditions like weather and pests that you have no control over) will leave you starving, watching helplessly as your children, spouse, friends and neighbours slowly weaken and die, knowing that even if you survive, you will face the same thing again the next year, and the next, for the rest of your lives, which will likely be short, due to the constant, exhausting labour, frequent bouts of malnutrition, and nonexistent medical care.
I expect its synergy with Tailwind. Shadcn/ui uses Tailwind for styling components, and AIs love Tailwind, so it makes sense they'd adopt a component library that uses it.
And it's definitely a real effect. The npm weekly download stats for shadcn/ui have exploded since December: https://www.npmjs.com/package/shadcn
Firstly, an auto paint shop is not the same as an auto manufacturing plant.
Secondly, it says you can't permit a new auto paint shop in CA, but it specifically mentions the Bay Area AQMD as the reason. But, as its name implies, the Bay Area AQMD only regulates within the San Francisco Bay Area. It is only one of 35 air districts in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_air_distric...
So, it is impossible to permit a new auto paint shop in all of these districts, or just the bay area? Because those are very different. It also labels starting a new paint shop as "impossible", but then says it's "nearly impossible". So is it actually impossible, or just nearly impossible?
Now that Dye is gone, I still hold out hope that Apple will change direction and start fixing their UI. But that fact that it got this bad in the first place implies things are seriously broken at a senior leadership level.
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