Duolingo Delight
"A few years ago, we started a team called ✨ Delight ✨. Delight was not tasked with improving our metrics; its purpose was to make the app more delightful. This can be anything from: 💥Animating the explosions that appear when you answer a hard question. 🐝Satisfying haptic feedback throughout your lesson ✨Adding subtle sparkles across the app We didn’t expect these changes to have a positive effect on our numbers. But we tested them anyway. To our surprise, the animations do in fact keep people in the app longer and cause them to return to the app more often! ✨Delight facilitates learning✨, in ways we did not anticipate."
iOS UI Lawsuit
"It is claimed that Apple restricts the APIs available so that only Apple Pay can implement "tap to pay" on iOS. In addition to lock-in, note that Apple also collects fees from banks for using Apple Pay, so they get direct financial benefit in addition to the more nebulous benefit of enhancing the Apple platform."
Apple most certainly does restrict the APIs available for Apple Pay. These APIs are request only and hidden behind a private access entitlement. I had to develop against these APIs.
Apple does have a rake on Apple Pay for providing the service which I don’t have a particular problem with, and I’m not sure if there’s compatibility between on-chip security and an open “anyone can use” API.
Patching over “tap to pay” could certainly be used as an on-ramp for alternatives to the Visa/Mastercard/AMEX such as bank to bank or even crypto.
Of course Apple’s response is: “it would hinder our ability to create the kind of technology people expect from Apple — where hardware, software, and services intersect. “
Europe investigates Alphabet, Apple, and Meta
The Commission is concerned that Apple's measures, including the design of the web browser choice screen, may be preventing users from truly exercising their choice of services within the Apple ecosystem, in contravention of Article 6(3) of the DMA…
In case of an infringement, the Commission can impose fines up to 10% of the company's total worldwide turnover. Such fines can go up to 20% in case of repeated infringement.
I wonder how specific the contract of the multi billion dollar "Google as the default search engine" on iOS deal is. How specific would the contractual obligations of the interface design be?
I imagine the contract isn’t “hey yeah, $X billion a year if you make us the defaults” - I imagine Google would attach some wireframes or even screenshots to indicate what they wanted? What does Apple do now? Head over from Cupertino to Mountain View and have a pow-wow- “Hey Google, the Europeans have the audacity to say those design aren’t fair - sorry we’re going to have to make Bing, DuckDuckGo, and maybe even Perplexity a bit more on-display. Also we know that with AI, you're a bit under pressure to with your Search business, the price has doubled”.
Lattner on Mojo
You're right that Mojo is a completely general purpose programming language. Community members are already building gui libraries and serving stuff etc.
It might not be the best thing, but here's the rationale for why we do this: it's basically that Mojo is still early, and being "good" at something requires more than a language - you also need a library ecosystem and committed community around there. We don't think it is time to declare that Mojo is a great solution for GUI development (for example) until these things happen.
In contrast, Modular is pushing hard to build out the AI part of the ecosystem and already has MAX engine and even more things coming, so we're pretty confident that Mojo will be great in the AI domain.
As the community builds out, we can expand positioning where it makes sense. We just don't want to overclaim.
-Chris
Ethereum scaling
Gary Bernhart
Me at 25: Tests should be 5ish lines! One assert per test!
— Gary Bernhardt (@garybernhardt) March 28, 2024
Me at 40: This test is 56 lines long with 11 asserts. If I broke it up, it would be 11 separate tests, ~5x as much code, multiple helper functions and `beforeEach`s to avoid duplication, and more difficult to read.
React Native Growth
React Native has an impressive growth
— Seb ⚛️ ThisWeekInReact.com (@sebastienlorber) March 29, 2024
Particularly after 2022
Wonder what has changed, maybe Expo Dev Client?
Maybe stats are also impacted by shorter release cycles, EAS CI... ? pic.twitter.com/2hfouchimU
AGI Trades
Need to follow more Daniel Gross content, he’s ahead by a few moves.
So many bangers:
- Some modest fraction of Upwork tasks can now be done with a handful of electrons. Suppose everyone has an agent like this they can hire. Suppose everyone has 1,000 agents like this they can hire…
- $250b of India’s GDP exports are essentially GPT-4 tokens… what happens now?
- What happens to Internet bandwidth? Should we buy copper?
- …the thing can just write all software, is SF the new Detroit?
- How does AI change wealth inequality? Is all beachfront property mispriced?
Also enjoyed a Nat Friedman bullets:
- Going fast makes you focus on what's important; there's no time for bullshit
- We are often not even asking the right questions
- The goal is not to avoid mistakes; the goal is to achieve uncorrelated levels of excellence in some dimension
What are human values, and how do we align AI to them?
“What are human values, and how do we align to them?”
— Joe Edelman (@edelwax) March 29, 2024
Very excited to release our new paper on values alignment, co-authored with @ryan_t_lowe and funded by @openai.
📝: https://t.co/iioFKmrDZA pic.twitter.com/NSJa8dbcrM
Hassibis
“The next step is for these systems to do things for you, solve things for you, book holidays, restaurants, whatever. You can give them goals, and so on,” he says. “We're experts in doing that.”
XZ backdoor
Anti-cheating on your computers
Searching for outliers
Simon Riggs: The Next 20 Years of Postgres
RIP