Links, Sept 19th, 2025

§Writing Mac and iOS Apps Shouldn’t Be So Difficult

Brent Simmons on something I’ve been thinking about since I had learned that Adobe Lightroom’s interface is scriptable with Lua, and something I’ve been thinking about again as I spend more time with tools like Bitwig Grid and KiCAD:

It’s easy to see why things are the way they are right now, and you can point to a string of good decisions. No doubt.

But we can think outside of what we have now and ask: what would make app writing easier? What would make it a better experience? How could we get more done for our users with fewer bugs and faster turnaround?

Brent also suggests this speaks to the popularity of Electron:

If you were a new developer right now, would you pick Xcode’s build-and-run, edit, build-and-run, edit — plus the growing complexity of Swift — over something like Electron and JavaScript?

§Stop using Brave Browser. Seriously.

If someone recommends Brave to you, you should ignore them, because they are wrong. Brave Browser is a mess of a software project, and the company building it is even worse.

§The rise of Whatever

But I think the core of what pisses me off is that selling this magic machine requires selling the idea that doing things is worthless. Because if doing something has some value, then it must be somehow better than pushing a button and receiving Whatever for essentially no cost. If you’re some assclown like Sam Altman, whose graph-go-up depends on convincing you to replace all your employees with ChatGPT, you have to destroy that idea. It is the greatest threat to your business model. You have to destroy the idea that things are worth doing.

A long but great read about the latest tech scam and where it fits into the history of tech scams – from “I’ll get rich if I can get everyone else to buy cyberbucks” to the new idea that nothing is worth doing.

§Against the protection of stocking frames.

Ethan Marcotte, who I will call “one of the leading voices about humane web design”, on just how ludicrous this whole “AI” thing has gotten:

That is absurd behavior. Imagine screening prospective hires by asking their opinions about your company’s hosting provider, or evaluating employees for how they feel about Microsoft Teams.

§Not doing

I am once again asking you to read Mandy Brown, this time writing about resistance and consequences:

This is gaslighting at an industrial scale. At some point, the only response that will save your sanity is a hell no.