Jon_Alper

@jon_alper@mastodon.online
247 Followers
229 Following
4.7K Posts
Technologist for a living, Photographer for joy and a past life as a Lighting Designer for television, concerts and special events.
LocationBoston
InterestsApple, Media, Social Justice
StyleGrumpy old man who's almost always TRYING to be at least a little funny.
That moment when somebody admits something in an oblique way that confirms hunches you'd had about their background that would explain everything and.. yep!

Study: When experienced open-source developers used current AI tools, work took 19% longer to complete. In spite of which, the developers *thought* they were working *faster.*

It’s just one study, and they don’t claim anything beyond what they observed. Their results are not predictive. Still....

(There must be a name for the psychological trick we play on ourselves to believe we’re being more productive even when we’re considerably less so.)

Hat tip: Dave Martin

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/

Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity

I repeat—anyone who has tried to make translucent UI is familiar with the story being played out right now. The core issue is that translucent UI is fundamentally flawed. You cannot make it too translucent without sacrifice. But every sacrifice you make makes it less cool. That’s why they started where they did. That’s why they are where they are now. It’s embarrassing to re-tread known issues like this. This could have been an exercise internally that no one ever saw.
https://pdx.social/@louie/114793581017754299
Louie Mantia, Jr. (@louie@pdx.social)

For anyone who’s ever tried to make translucent UI, it’s obvious that to make this “work,” you have only a few options. You can make the controls more opaque, but then you lose the desired impact of the glass being clear. You can blur the content, but that’s at the expense of the content being clear. You can dim the content, but it compromises on both the content and the glass effect. This is consistently the problem with translucent UI. And everyone knows that. https://pdx.social/@louie/114760076589198466

pdx.social
@dmoren But Dan, the new OS is all about keeping the OS out of the way and keeping your content first!

Oh no…now Meta is automatically sharing our private messages to its AI. As far as I can tell, you can only turn it off for each message thread, one at a time (and there seems to be no option to turn it off *at all* for group threads!). Yet another privacy disaster from Facebook.

I use Messenger btw for family and non-tech friends, so don’t (ahem) shoot the messenger.

@jackwellborn @BasicAppleGuy .mac is the cool kids domain! (if you don’t have your own)

When the question tells a story of ‘young whippersapper-hood’…

Mine was - being jealous of people who had AppleLink accounts while dialing into BBS’s.
https://mastodon.social/@BasicAppleGuy/114825133726079801

Who’s shocked?

Religious extremism leads to violence irrespective of the overt doctrines in their source material.

It intrinsically makes non-adherents an enemy because if adherents and non were on an equal footing with the deity, why would a given faith need to exist?

Where does piety end and extremism begin?

That’s the question nobody wants to confront because it comes with difficult answers.
https://newsie.social/@TheConversationUS/114825199638980988

The Conversation U.S. (@TheConversationUS@newsie.social)

The man who allegedly shot a Minnesota state representative studied at a Bible school linked to a movement that promotes the ‘'Seven Mountain Mandate’' — the belief that Christians should “take dominion” over government, media, education, and other key parts of society. https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-seven-mountains-mandate-and-how-is-it-linked-to-political-extremism-in-the-us-260034

Newsie

Divy Nayyar is the quintessential personification of tech-bro garbage.

Our cultural immune system continues to fail us.
https://mastodon.social/@AnnaAnthro/114822858753479224

@octothorpe I’m so tired of all ableist bicycle fascists ranting that we should ‘ban all the cars’ because of the proliferation of these ridiculous trucks when, as you allude to, we could just require CDL/commercial registration for trucks above a certain size/weight and do it on a state level. It doesn’t even need to be structured as a ‘sin tax’.