One group of people pretends to have written something and another group of people pretends to have read something. Much productivity is gained.

Zizek had a great point about this.

At least both get paid in not-pretend money.

For the time being. Their manager is under constant pressure to lay them off and replace them with “ai”.

I think that's fair. Funny to have a language that makes it prohibitively difficult to use most of the core computer science constructs (lists, graphs etc.).

No Swift was developed as a strategic moat around Apple's devices. They cannot be dependent on any other party for the main language that runs on their hardware. Controlling your own destiny full stack means having your own language.

Apple already had that "strategic moat" with Objective-C. It was already a language you could effectively only use on Apple platforms (the runtime and the standard library only run on Darwin) and for which Apple controlled the compiler (they have their own fork of Clang).

I suspect that it was developed, in order to make native development more accessible. SwiftUI is also doing that.

They want native, partly as a “moat,” but also as a driver for hardware and services sales. They don’t want folks shrugging and saying “It doesn’t matter what you buy; they’re all the same.”

I hear exactly that, with regard to many hybrid apps.

Swift is Apple's toy language and they cannot and will not allow it to be anything more than that.

Great work on the 20% of making a working chat app. Now somebody has to do the remaining 80% and then the other remaining 80%.

Thanks. It was just a fun exercise and I had fun writing about it.

It’s against money laundering. Onerous regulations being interpreted highly defensively create these kind outcomes.

Neither the people creating the legislations nor the people at Apple responsible for these flows care very much about collateral damage.

I think it's a combination of money laundering and phone scams where people are told they owe money to the IRS or something and are tricked into buying a bunch of gift cards.

That said, if buying and redeeming gift cards are such an indicator of fraud that people are legitimately afraid of getting their accounts permanently locked, why doesn't Apple just stop selling them?

Apple keeps money from the gift card after banning you. Just business, nothing personal.

Digital feudalism

All these platforms are kind of a non-starter at scale. The thing that would really stand out is something that has the user friendly workflow definition but then for production running, bakes it into a container that's orchestrated on k8s natively.

We figured out a decade ago or so that Slack was entirely unsustainable for any kind of community type usage. Glad to see that more people are coming to that realization.

I suspect that the same applies to discord.

NPM is a Github company and when there was a relatively serious attack in Github Actions a while back there was also pretty much zero response from them.

Github is SOC2 compliant, but that of course means nothing really.

The amount of times I've used `git bisect` productively can be counted on one hand.