I liked Liquid Glass when I first saw it. I don't especially like the whole flat look everyone has had going the past few years so I was really looking forward to a refresh.
I downloaded the beta and the more I use it the less I like it. The icons are blurry, washed out and look terrible overall. I have a difficult time using the buttons on the lock screen to activate the flashlight and camera. Most of the time, I push them and the lock screen customization screen comes up instead of the flashlight turning on. I don't know if they changed the geometry of the buttons or what, but I can't reliably use them anymore. There are other instances of low contrast text, weird blurry artifacts and janky animations.
I hope these are all things that get worked out during the beta period. Overall, the whole thing looks unimpressive so far. I keep telling myself that OSX had the same kind of jank during the first beta and it will all work out. I want to roll back to iOS 18, but I can't do that without using iTunes, which isn't possible because I only have Linux machines.
I use virtual box to run Windows under, precisely to have iTunes to sync my mp3 library to my phone. No streaming here my dudes, you’ll rip (pun intended) my mp3 collection from my cold dead hands.
God I gave up trying to use the camera from the lock screen because if you fail, it's slower than just unlocking it and using it from the main screen, which is itself pretty unreliably and slow. I wish there was a way to quickly and reliably take photos without constantly fighting the stupidly fragile UI. Back in the day, you could just press the shutter button on your camera and it would take a photo instantly, but somehow we've regressed and nobody cares. It eliminates a whole range of spontaneous photos.
Apple cares. The iPhone 16 introduces a hardware camera button. You can use to launch to Camera while the phone is locked. You can use it as a shutter button. And other stuff.
Except that it doesn't actually take a photo - it (slowly) launches the camera app, which you can then use to take a photo. You can long press to begin filming a video, but at least by default it won't actually take a photo to press the shutter. Poster above is correct, it's slow enough that I frequently miss spontaneous pictures on my iPhone 16 Pro - as much because of the terrible recessed design of the shutter button as the software delay.
As I read your reply, I couldn’t help but think of the number of spontaneous photos I’ve been able to capture over the last decade because a camera is now built into my phone and available wherever I am. I still carry my camera a lot of the time, and for those who keep missing photos that depend on an instant shutter perhaps that would be a good move— but it’s hard to see how the effort to integrate a camera into phones is acting as a limit instead of expanding one
Oh it's certainly great having a camera in your phone. But it feels artificially crippled by all this fiddly software and tapping and swiping and reacting to the many screens you have to navigate through to get there. Great to hear newer phones have a hardware camera button, even if it does just open the app, that's still a big step forward.
I think you described it much more succinctly than most people do. It's been my exact experience as well. The LLM can develop much faster than I can build a mental model. It's very easy to get to a point where you don't know what's going on, a bunch of bugs have been introduced and you can't easily fix them or refactor because you're essentially the new guy on your own project. I find myself adjusting by committing code very frequently and periodically asking the LLM to explain it to me. I often ask the LLM to confirm things are working the way it says they are and it tends to find its own bugs that way.
I use an LLM primarily for smaller, focused data analysis tasks so it's possible to move fast and still stay reasonably on top of things if I'm even a little bit careful. I think it would be really easy to trash a large code base in a hurry without some discipline and skill in using LLM. I'm finding that developing prompts, managing context, controlling pace, staying organized and being able to effectively review the LLM's work are required skills for LLM-assisted coding. Nobody teaches this stuff yet so you have to learn it the hard way.
Now that I have a taste, I wouldn't give it up. There's so much tedious stuff I just don't want to have to do myself that I can offload to the LLM. After more than 20 years doing this, I don't have the same level of patience anymore. There are also situations where I know conceptually what I want to accomplish but may not know exactly how to implement it and I love the LLM for that. I can definitely accomplish more in less time than I ever did before.
One of my favorite ways to use AI is to get me started on things. I tend to drag my feet when starting something new, but LLMs can whip up something quick. Then I look at what it did and usually hate it. Maybe it structured the code in way that doesn't mesh with the way I think or it completely failed to use some new/esoteric library I rely on.
That hate fuels me to just do the work myself. It's like the same trick as those engagement-bait math problems that pop up on social media with the wrong answer.
The same. It’s mostly an example generator, where you know what to do, but can’t take the time to build a model of the language/framework/library. Then you look at the code and retain only the procedure and the symbols used.
I do the same thing, except if I hate something, I just ask the LLM to fix it. I can usually get to a starting point I'm pretty happy with, then I take over.
After that, I may ask an LLM to write particular functions, giving it data types and signatures to guide it.
I’m enjoying it - I wouldn’t be doing it otherwise. Perhaps you misunderstood me - I’m using it to automate things that are easy enough to do but time-consuming and generally uninteresting. It’s a useful assistant.
You could make the same comment about managers - does management sound like a fulfilling career to literally anyone (to some, it doesn’t!) Or about working on a team, where colleagues do work that you depend on.
It’s also very similar to the situation with compilers and interpreters for high level languages. An assembly language or machine language programmer might ask “does writing in a high level language sound like a fulfilling career to literally anyone?”
This all makes me suspect that your comment is coming from a place where you’ve already reached a conclusion and are now looking for excuses to justify it. Typical change resistance, essentially.
> you're essentially the new guy on your own project
Holy shit that's the best description of this phenomenon I've heard so far. The most stark version of this I've experienced is working on a side project with someone who isn't a software engineer who vibe coded a bunch of features without my input. The code looked like 6-8 different people had worked on it with no one driving architecture and I had to untangle how it all got put together.
The sweet spot for me is using it in places where I know the exact pattern I want to use to solve a problem and I can describe it in very small discrete steps. That will often take something that would have taken me an hour or two to hand code something tedious down to 5-10 minutes. I agree that there's no going back, even if all progress stopped now that's too huge of a gain to ignore it as a tool.
Really good thoughts here. You do become like the "new guy" on the project. It's becoming a black box. I think that should be some sort of signal to people...but my dear is people not caring or being complacent with this or not taking the time to review, read and learn. That's where the danger is.
I have found that you can't let the LLM do the thinking part. It's really fast at writing, but only writes acceptable code, if the thinking has been done for it.
In some cases, this approach might even be slower than writing the code.
I have retreated into only accepting small snippets from it. Asking it to write print functions, that sort of thing, or a specific loop that I hand-review. For the same reason.
“
I'm finding that developing prompts, managing context, controlling pace, staying organized and being able to effectively review the LLM's work are required skills for LLM-assisted coding
“
Did you not need all these skills / approaches / frameworks for yourself / coding with a team?
This is , I think, the key difference in those (such as myself) who find LLMs to massively increase velocity / quality / quantity of output and those who don’t.
I was already highly effective at being a leader / communicator / delegating / working in teams ranging from small , intimate , we shared a mental model / context up to some of the largest teams on the planet.
If someone wasn’t already a highly effective IC/manager/leader pre LLM, an LLM will simply accelerate how fast they crash into the dirt.
It takes substantial work to be a highly effective contributor / knowledge worker at any level. Put effort into that , and LLMs become absolutely indispensable, especially as a solo founder.
I went down that rabbit hole with Cursor and it's pretty good. Then I tried tools like Cline with Sonnet 4 and Claude Code. The Anthropic models have huge context and it shows. I'm no expert, but it feels like you reach a point where the model is good enough and then the gains are coming from the context size. When I'm doing something complex, I'm filling up the 200k context window and getting solutions that I just can't get from Cursor or ChatGPT.
I had a data wrangling task where I determine the value of a column in a dataframe based on values in several other columns. I implemented some rules to do the matching and it worked for most of the records, but there are some data quality issues. I asked Claude Code to implement a hybrid approach with rules and ML. We discussed some features and weighting. Then, it reviewed my whole project, built the model and integrated it into what I already had. The finished process uses my rules to classify records, trains the model on those and then uses the model to classify the rest of them.
Someone had been doing this work manually before and the automated version produces a 99.3% match. AI spent a few minutes implementing this at a cost of a couple dollars and the program runs in about a minute compared to like 4 hours for the manual process it's replacing.
Personally, I think it's much better than Github Copilot. The autocomplete is phenomenal and ctrl+k to quickly generate code is convenient. Agentic coding is good until you try something like Cline or Claude Code and realize how limited it is. I don't use Cursor's agentic mode anymore. I may go back to Github Copilot for autocomplete and Cline/Claude for everything else.
It depends on your idea of decent speeds and what you would use it for. I just tried it on a laptop with an AMD HX 370 running on battery in power save mode and it's not especially impressive, although it runs much better in balanced or performance mode. I gave it the prompt "write a fizzbuzz program in rust" and it took almost a minute and a half. I expect it to be pretty terrible on an SBC. Your best bet is to try it out on the oldest hardware you have and figure out if you can tolerate worse performance.
Admittedly, I was one of the people who wasn’t impressed with the deal Obama made in 2016. I didn’t like that it allowed Iran to keep enriching uranium or that we paid them.
In recent years, that deal has been looking better every day. We are undoubtedly worse off today than we would be had Trump left the deal in place. This is a bad situation.
It was just not a good deal. It was more like kicking the can down the road and funding the regime. That's not good for Iranians and not good for anyone else.
Human problems are always in conflict, in cycle. How was that a bad deal? Never let perfect be the enemy of good
It also just as well could have been us making another deal to extend the time, but just because Obama's deal was "not good enough" this the outcome we want?
The Iran deal was far from perfect, especially taking into account the ancillary payments to Iran. I find it hard to believe that the oil-rich country of Iran is interested in nuclear energy for purely altruistic means.
It wasn’t a good deal. It was also probably the best deal that could have been achieved at any point in the past 20 years. More importantly, it would have kept things on an even keel and kept us talking to each other for as long as we both honored the deal. It was an opportunity to see if we could build a little bit of trust and make another deal later. Yes, it kicked the can down the road. It also represented a willingness on the part of both countries to try to avoid a conflict even though we both had reasons to want one.
It’s possible it would have been a complete failure. We will never know. What we do know for sure is that we have had fewer options for dealing with the situation since we pulled out of the deal and now we are at war.
Our country’s handling of Iran has been nothing short of a spectacular blunder. Two administrations have tried to negotiate out of the hole Trump got us into when he tore up the deal. The buffoon actually thought he would cancel the deal and make a better one. Now, after 20+ years of criticizing the Iraq war and campaigning three times on not starting new wars, he is the trigger man getting us into a new one when we are least prepared for it.
I guess we'll see what the fallout from this attack is, but if there isn't anything major (and that's where my money is) then it would seem that just dropping bunker busters on their nuclear facilities and then going home was actually the best solution all along.
That is pure fantasy. You don’t launch an unprovoked attack and simply go home without any consequences. What we and Israel have done to Iran in recent weeks is akin to 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. Furthermore, if we were legitimately without any other options it is because of our own failure to honor the deal we made in 2018.
You can be assured that there will be a response. What it will be and for how long I don’t know. What I do know is that diplomacy is completely off the table. It’s possible we are dealing with the consequences of this for decades.
The problem in Iran is the government or shall we say the dictatorship. I'm not sure how the US could have/should have handled Iran since the revolution. You're naive if you think the current Iranian regime has any interest in aligning itself to western views via deals. It wants to cement its control, broaden its sphere of influence:
Deals are tactical. They're not about shifting world views.
I'm not sure the US and Iran are really "at war right now". This is very different than Iraq. But I do agree intervention has risks. The problem is that no intervention also has risks. Take for example Obama's lack of appetite to intervene in Syria. Contrast to Turkey and Israel that effectively intervened recently in Syria and force a regime change that at least so far is more or less holding out.
Something like is going on between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Iran (borderline). The Iraq war. The Afghanistan war. A prolonged period of hostilities.
Something you would look back at and call "The US Iran War". I don't think the previous acts of violence, or the current one, between these two meets the mark yet. And it's not clear if this one will. Iran can't really do much right now and it's not clear whether the US will go a lot further here.
E.g. we probably aren't going to look back at the hostilities with Yemen and call them the "US-Yemen war" or the "US Houthis war" like we look at Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq.
Or as Putin would put it, it's a special military operation (yeah yeah, that one is a war).
My common interpretation of a war is that it involves the continuous exchange of violence on both sides over some time. An isolated bombing operation isn't what I think of as a war. Israel and Iran are at war for sure. The US and Iran, we'll see. It's possible Iran will calculate that it is not in their benefit to wage an open war on the US.
There's is already a history of violence between Iran and the USA. Was that a war? When Iranian funded militias attacked American bases is that war?
>You're naive if you think the current Iranian regime has any interest in aligning itself to western views via deals.
You are going to have take a step back and convince me why I should care about US hegemonic interests in the region. Iran is it's own nation - I don't see why we should be "dealing" with them in the first place. If you really care about the profit margins of Aramco and ExxonMobil (the whole reason were in this mess in first place) you should lead with that so that others know why you care about what a sovereign country does.
> Iran is it's own nation - I don't see why we should be "dealing" with them in the first place
Iran spends rather large amounts of money funding various groups that are adverse to US interests and operate well outside Iran’s borders. Pretending that Iran is its own country and can thus be ignored is not an effective policy.
>spends rather large amounts of money funding various groups that are adverse to US interests and operate well outside Iran’s borders.
1. This describes many countries that we haven't invaded that I'm not sure you are being serious.
2. You will need to be specific. Which US interests? The interests of Californians or of Saudi Aramaco?
3. America is propoganda giant number one, and China has seemed to come up just fine despite America spending hundreds of billions trying to convince the world the communists in China are eating dirt.
I'm not convinced that this is a good use time or money for the American tax payer. I'm fully convinced American hegomonic decline is fully self-inflected and the trillions wasted in Afghanistan did more to hurt American than any backwards goat farmer in the middle east could ever accomplish.
I honestly don't care about the oil companies. I'll lead with that.
I'm not an American but my argument would be that a free and stable world is better for the US.
A regime like Iran's that has killed Americans, is openly calling the US "The Great Satan", is supporting militias in places like Iraq that attack Americans. That funds, supports and trains organizations the US considers terrorist organizations. Is abusing its own citizenry and actively seeks to export its values to other countries. Is supplying weapons to Russia for attacking Ukraine. This sort of regime can't just do whatever it wants under the label of "its own nation" since what its doing impacts others.
The US is the big superpower of the "west" and the "free world". For the most part it is its deterrence against Russia and China that is standing in the way of those doing whatever they want (e.g. China taking Taiwan by force). I don't think the world would be a better place if the US just stands back.
All that said, intervention, and use of force, needs to be sensible/reasonable/calculated. It's not easy to say where this is going. But it's also not easy to say where it would have gone otherwise. I can also understand Americans not having an appetite for any of this after Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan. But to contrast that I think failure to intervene in the Arab Spring led to pretty bad consequences, prolonged civil wars, a refugee crisis, etc. So perhaps some intervention and support would have helped. Also the US withdrawal and lack of support to democracy in Russia were probably factors in the reversal of that country back to where it is today.
Anyways, that's my very long opinion on this topic. But I can totally understand Americans not wanting any part of this. But don't think that you can just hide, things that happen in the world impact you.
>I'm not an American but my argument would be that a free and stable world is better for the US.
You aren't arguing for a free and stable world. You are arguing for a total hegemonic power for US interests - and thats my point. You are taking the position of "this is what is good for US companies and interests" and working backwards from there.
It's remarkable you use the "were stopping China from doing whatever they want", but you don't stop and think that there are other people who have legitimate concerns in stopping the US from doing what they want. Replace China with the US and Taiwan with Palestine. Aren't we doing to Palestine what you claim we should stop China from doing to Taiwan? At the very least it comes across hypocritical to claim you are in it for a "free and stable world" when that actually means "the US should get to invade whoever it wants".
Furthermore, the same things you say about Iran, you could argue about North Korea. North Korea has killed Americans, they have an entire month dedicated to hating America (it starts next month!) and openly funds corporate espionage attacks that drains billions from Americans. Despite that do you honestly believe, that the world would be safer if we started dropping GBU-43s on North Korean children? Honestly answer me that.
Despite what you can say about North Korean regime - don't you believe a North Korea, with Nukes mind you, is far more preferable than the alternative? Where America is dropping bombs on North Korean every 5 years? Which do you think is actually better?
Why does North Korea - who again, has done all the same, and more, than Iran get a pass from the military industrial complex? Isn't North Korea clearly the bigger threat when it comes to peace as defined by the parameters you laid out? Once you interrogate this line of thinking it makes 0 sense - and anyone who thinks candidly realizes the contradiction: ironically, once our so called "enemies" have nukes, children stop being vaporized by bombs.
Many companies have a policy that requires active support for all software and for good reason. Failing to install security updates or using software which no longer receives security updates might be the easiest way to shoot yourself in the foot. If you have ever worked in information security you know that the vast majority of attacks companies face day to day are malware exploiting patched vulnerabilities and social engineering attacks. If you don't have good patch management or end user training, you don't have good security regardless of anything else you do.
This sounds crazy to me. Why should websites ever have access to the local network? That presents an entirely new threat model for which we don’t have a solution. Is there even a use case for this for which there isn’t already a better solution?
I've used https://pairdrop.net/ before to share files between devices on the same LAN. It obviously wouldn't have to be a website, but it's pretty convenient since all my devices I wanted to share files on already have a browser.
Same use case, but I remember getting approval prompts ( though come to think of it, those were not mandated, but application specific prompts to ensure you consciously choose to share/receive items ). To your point, there are valid use cases for it, but some tightening would likely be beneficial.
Not a local network, but localhost example: due to the lousy private certificate capability APIs in web browsers, this is commonly used for signing with electronic IDs for countries issuing smartcard certificates for their citizens (common in Europe). Basically, a web page would contact a web server hosted on localhost which was integrated with PKCS library locally, providing a signing and encryption API.
One of the solutions in the market was open source up to a point (Nowina NexU), but it seems it's gone from GitHub
For local network, you can imagine similar use cases — keep something inside the local network (eg. an API to an input device; imagine it being a scanner), but enable server-side function (eg. OCR) from their web page. With ZeroConf and DHCP domain name extensions, it can be a pretty seamless option for developers to consider.
>Why should websites ever have access to the local network?
It's just the default. So far, browsers haven't really given different IP ranges different security.
evil.com is allowed to make requests to bank.com . Similarly, evil.com is allowed to make requests to foo.com even if foo.com DNS resolves to 127.0.0.1 .
> It's just the default. So far, browsers haven't really given different IP ranges different security.
I remember having "zone" settings in Internet Explorer 20 years ago, and ISTR it did IP ranges as well as domains. Don't think it did anything about cross-zone security though.
> Is there even a use case for this for which there isn’t already a better solution?
I deal with a third-party hosted webapp that enables extra when a webserver hosted on localhost is present. The local webserver exposes an API allowing the application to interact more closely with the host OS (think locally-attached devices and servers on the local network). If the locally-installed webserver isn't present the hosted app hides the extra functionality.
Limiting browser access to the localhost subnet (127.0.0.1/8) would be fine to me, as a sysadmin, so long as I have the option to enable it for applications where it's desired.
>That presents an entirely new threat model for which we don’t have a solution.
What attack do you think doesn't have a solution? CSRF attacks? The solution is CSRF tokens, or checking the Origin header, same as how non-local-network sites protect against CSRF. DNS rebinding attacks? The solution is checking the Host header.
Vivaldi seems to be doing ok and they only focus on a free browser. Brave seems to be doing well too, even if some of what they're doing is controversial. I admire them for at least taking a shot.
I don't necessarily fault Mozilla for trying to diversify revenue. The problem is when they neglect the browser to work on silly projects like Pocket, VPN's, mail relay, etc. and not even do a good job on those either. All of them were bolted on via acquisition or partnership, felt like an afterthought, and didn't provide anything that wasn't already easily accessible.
The organization doesn't execute well at any level and hasn't for a long time. They only exist because of Google and the remaining holdout users who feel obligated to use a sub-par, non-Chromium browser. I'm finally off that bandwagon. For the first time in over 20 years, I don't even have Mozilla's browser installed on my system.
The more I think of who I wish would buy them out based on some of the things they've done for side funding. I think someone like CloudFlare (not Google, Microsoft or Apple) would fit the bill for me. Mozilla birthed Rust, they very likely still have Rust talent onboard. CloudFlare relies on Rust for critical software.
I kind of miss the world the Mozilla was going all in on Rust for Firefox, I think the language could benefit greatly from it, especially in terms of out of the box libraries. One of my hopes was that Rust would eventually build out a standard GUI stack that's cross-platform that would be used by Firefox, but could be used by everyone. Same could be said of all the different pieces that make up Firefox, including the JS engine, could have been its own discrete Rust crate.
I downloaded the beta and the more I use it the less I like it. The icons are blurry, washed out and look terrible overall. I have a difficult time using the buttons on the lock screen to activate the flashlight and camera. Most of the time, I push them and the lock screen customization screen comes up instead of the flashlight turning on. I don't know if they changed the geometry of the buttons or what, but I can't reliably use them anymore. There are other instances of low contrast text, weird blurry artifacts and janky animations.
I hope these are all things that get worked out during the beta period. Overall, the whole thing looks unimpressive so far. I keep telling myself that OSX had the same kind of jank during the first beta and it will all work out. I want to roll back to iOS 18, but I can't do that without using iTunes, which isn't possible because I only have Linux machines.
reply