Interesting. I always thought about it in the sense of a "clay tablet" that could only "display" on a single surface, as opposed to a notepad that allowed you to freely flip through pages.
Blaming any one person doesn't seem very useful without extraordinary insight into the development process. It could be this approach was dictated, and it's not like the rest of the product team didn't have say, and it allows scapegoating them even if both the above are true.
Being on the E team is literally about being the one person to blame when things aren’t right.
When you’re an exec in charge of a whole area, the buck stops with you and, to quote Steve Jobs - the reasons stop mattering.
As a user I don’t care about having “extraordinary insight into the development process”. All I know is you’re vice president of interface design and the interfaces are getting worse over time.
Well that's all well and fine when you're trying to scapegoat someone in the corporate hierarchy, but it doesn't make very much sense to respect if you're trying to make sense of it in general.
Isn't that the point of a hierarchy, though? The important decisions come from the top.
When I worked for someone else (now self-employed), some bugs were my fault. But with features and other intentional changes, the bosses had to sign off on them, and in some cases there were vigorous internal debates, but the bosses had the final say and could overrule objections.
It is not scapegoating. It is actually helding people responsible for the huge compensation they are getting. If something is successful it is these people who gets the big bonus.
In a vague sense, yes, but in a specific sense, no.
The stockholders do not make design decisions but only elect the board of directors. The board of directors do not make design decisions but only elect the CEO. The former CEO Steve Jobs did make design decisions, but the current CEO Tim Cook appears not to make design decisions, delegating that to subordinates. Alan Dye is Vice President of Human Interface Design at Apple. He does make design decisions; indeed that's in his job title. Dye previously reported to Jeff Williams, COO, but Williams just retired, so it's unclear who Dye reports to now. In any case, Dye is likely the person at Apple who has the final say on design decisions.
it bothers me when this kind of thing needs spelling out in such detail. the initial claim of scapegoating showed an incredibly childish world view and then when it was pointed out what this role was, they doubled down. do people really hold that kind of world view, or do they enjoy being contrarian?
Even when everyone is to blame, one person is to blame. That's why prime ministers resign when they can't hold together a government. That's why leaders step down.
There are tens of thousands of interface designers who would be able to make a better interface than what is Tahoe and iOS 26. One of them should have the job.
So if you hired a plumber to install a new faucet or whatever, and he totally fucks up (eg. floods your entire kitchen), you're saying we shouldn't blame him, we should blame... you, for hiring him in the first place?
>not the people who could have said no?
Going to the plumber example, you're saying that you should be hovering over him to catch any mistakes? Isn't the whole point of hiring a professional is that you don't have to worry about stuff like this? If you're able-bodied and are going to have to supervise the whole thing, why bother hiring someone?
> Who cares what the intent was? The people who put it in the ground are dead, and so are their children, and their children. The only living people who care are the ones digging it up.
There are many conceptions of humanity that hold the dead in equal (or indeed greater) esteem than the living. Just because you consider the dead to have vanished does not mean others agree.
> orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done.
I can't be the only person to find thinking about cognition like this to be a little odd. It's like the biological myth of progress. It's true we can reason about the world in ways many animals can't, but we're also biased to view reason (and recursive language, which is its engine) as "more advanced" as that's primarily what distinguishes us from other animals (and even then certainly to a lesser extent than we are able to know!), and obviously we are extremely attenuated to how humans (our own babies!) mature. Meanwhile ants in many ways have more organized society than we do. Why is this not considered a form of advanced cognition? I think we need more humility as a species.
Next time I’m at the zoo, I’ll run this by the zebras to see what they think.
:) I’m being sarcastic but it seems self evident to me that human cognition is a unique treasure on this planet and—while it’s true that ants and octopus and other creatures do some amazing things—-they’re not even close to us. We can agree to disagree but I’m just psyched about the psyche.
While I agree with you, I think, having cognition is not black and white. There are animals with great cognition skills especially among predators. Our brains are essentially anticipation machines capable of predicting the future — a trait uniquely advantageous when hunting other animals. We just happen to have specialized on this trait to the extreme (and otherwise lack good sensory organs or impressive innate weapons).
Whenever this topic comes up I have to think about this octopus who escaped an aquarium. [1]
I think it’s pretty fair to say humans have advanced cognition. There is no myth here, other animals barely use tools, change the world around them, create and pass on information, etc
The myth is in reducing complex behavior to a single dimension and calling it "advanced" rather than, well, more human-like. I'm skeptical of the utility of this "advanced" conception. There's no objective reason to view tools, language, etc as particularly interesting. Subjectively of course it's understandable why we're interested in what makes us human.
Good grief. This is what 20 years of language policing has wrought. People who are nervous (hiding behind ‘skeptical’) about words like ‘advanced’ when, by any number of dimensions, human cognition is uncontroversially superior, more advanced, more fluid, more deep, more adaptive, more various (pick one, nervous people) to that of spiders or cows.
Ever since humanity crawled from the muck it’s had some dude yapping about how uniquely cool and special humans are because it feels good to do and to listen to. As we’ve learned more, we’ve realized that the underlying principles of our thinking apparatus are more similar to those of animals than we thought and we’ve continually found more high-level capacities, like surprisingly complex language, in various animal species. In my opinion, it’s valid to want to talk then about a non-dichotomous view of species’ cognition and, personally, I like it because it’s a whole lot less boring.
You're communicating ideas across unknown thousands of miles with a stranger in near realtime and are able to comprehend each other, for one.
No cat or dog has managed that feat yet.
No cat or dog has managed to reproduce fire to the degree that evolution has changed their gut to adapt to the increase in available calories.
The big brain comes with down sides, but one thing it does have is utility.
Germ theory of disease has made it so a scratch isn't fatal anymore. Why, after all, do cats play with their prey? To tire it out so there's less chance of injury when they go in for the kill.
We just figure out how to farm it instead and mold it to our needs.
What do you or anyone else actually get from such obvious absurdity, I wonder?
If it helps - and I have doubts - does (say) a working knowledge of Galois theory require more advanced mathematical cognition than arithmetic?
Would it be immoral to introduce such ghastly, hierarchical language? Etc.
I see you ignored the obvious rejoinder downthread, which stated that the utility of classifying behaviours or capacities is to help you predict outcomes.
How much more help do you need here? It’s not very complicated, but you prefer to showboat.
Speaking in material terms allows clearer communication of meaningful concepts than floating signifiers. "Advanced" is just a meaningless concept.
> I see you ignored the obvious rejoinder downthread, which stated that the utility of classifying behaviours or capacities is to help you predict outcomes.
Let's say you're about to embark on a cross-oceanic sailing voyage. For safety reasons, you think it's best to bring another living being with you who can help if things go south or you are incapacitated.
Are you going to bring another human, or a goat? Can a goat navigate while you sleep? Can it apply first aid to you? Can it respond on the VHF radio if you get hailed? Can it operate the bilge pump?
> I don't disagree with any of this, but what is the utility of viewing this ability as "more advanced"?
Because that's the most accurate description of what it is. The more accurately you describe something, the more effectively you communicate, an aspect of more advanced cognition.
Tool use allowed humans to colonize the planet and outcompete all rivals. We became a super predator species. We even gained the ability to look beyond our home. We look for evidence of other such advanced tool users in space.
Humans have fingers and thumbs and sophisticated wiring of throat, lips, and tongue.
Wire up a gorilla with the equivalent hands and vocalization capacity, negate the wild hormonal fluctuations, and give that gorilla a more or less human upbringing, and they're going to be limited in cognition by the number of cortical neurons - less than half that of humans, but more than sufficient to learn to talk.
The amazing thing isn't necessarily that brains get built-in environmental shortcuts and preprogrammed adaptations, but that nearly everything involved in higher level cognition is plastic. Mammalian brains, at the neocortical level, can more or less get arbitrarily programmed and conditioned, so intelligence comes down to a relative level of overall capacity (number, performance of neurons) and platform (what tools are you working with.)
Give a whale, dolphin, or orca some neuralink adapters for arms and dexterous hands, and a fully operational virtual human vocal apparatus, and they'd be able to match humans across a wide range of cognitive capabilities.
By co-opting neural capacity for some arbitrary human capabilities equivalent, you might cripple something crucial to that animal's survival or well-being, the ethics are messy and uncertain, but in principle, it comes down to brains.
What makes us interesting as humans is that we got the jackpot set of traits that drove our species into the meta-niche. Our ancestors traits for adaptability generalized, and we started optimizing the generalization, so things like advanced vocalization and fancy fingerwork followed suit.
> Give a whale, dolphin, or orca some neuralink adapters for arms and dexterous hands, and a fully operational virtual human vocal apparatus, and they'd be able to match humans across a wide range of cognitive capabilities.
While I don't disbelieve this out of hand, I can think of different things that might easily make this untrue. On what evidence is this assertion based? Is it just "our brains are essentially similar and much of it is not hard wired therefore they should perform the same" or is there deeper science and/or testing behind this?
There's a lot of data that seems to fit. I'd say the science heavily leans this way - things like the dog/cat talking button studies, AI vocalization research in primates, whales, and birds, a whole ton of biological research across mammals, and most data start to paint a picture of mammalian brain structure being more important than particular quirks of human brain biology.
There are some theories of function out there, like that of Numenta, which seems consistent across mammal brains, and is at least partially explanatory of cognitive function at a cellular level. There's also value to be found in LLMs and AI research in understanding networks and recursion and what different properties of structures that perform different functions have to conform to.
Pilot whales and blue whales and some other species have upwards of 45B cortical neurons, and if higher cognitive function is conserved across species, then they'd have the potential to be significantly more intelligent than humans - all else being equal.
A useful thought experiment is to compare different species to feral humans. Absent culture, the training, education, knowledge, and framework for understanding reality, without language, natural and wild living is pretty grim and intense. There's a whole lot we take for granted underpinning our abilities to reach the heights of technology and abstract use of language and thought.
It could be humans and primates have some sort of magic sauce - a particular quirk of networking or neurochemistry that augments relative capabilities, as opposed to embodiment or other factors. People have sought the magic sauce for decades, however, and that doesn't seem to be a viable explanation.
Animal intelligence is often underestimated, (e.g. there's a famous test that shows that chimpanzee working memory is better than ours) but our use of language is qualitatively different from other animals. Some animals have rudimentary communication, but no other animal is capable (as far as we know) of recursive, infinitely variable language structure like us.
That remaining 1% are then actually the most advanced species, since they can continue their billion year existence through a blip of a couple thousand years when the environment became a bit more radioactive. We're so fragile that we're effectively biologically unstable, they're so advanced that they don't even need to know what happened.
It's not our capacity that matters but our actual behavior. Sure, we could cause even greater mass extinction. But will we choose preservation over suicide? That matters in evaluating our role in the hierarchy of life
So you rail against "advanced" as a meaningless concept and then start talking about the "hierarchy of life". How does one rank life on this hierarchy?
Homan cognition is more advanced than in any other animal. I think it is clear enough. Humans are not the only animals that evolved higher intelligence, but we have a combination of attributes that made it really effective: we are larger animals (with room for a big brain) with a social structure and a relatively long lifespan (good for passing knowledge).
Ants beat us when it comes to society, but in a sense, we may also consider multicellular organisms as a society of single cells. Still impressive, and there is a good chance for ants to outlive us as a species, but we are still orders of magnitude more intelligent than ants, including collective intelligence.
By intelligence, I mean things like adaptability and problem solving, both collective and individual. It is evident in our ability to exploit resources no animals could, or our ability to live in places that would normally be unsurvivable to us. It doesn't mean we are the pinnacle of evolution, we have some pretty good competitors (including ants) but we are certainly the most advanced in one very imporant area.
not exactly, fitbit acquired pebble in 2016, and google acquired fitbit in 2021. so while google did end up with the IP in the end, they did the Right Thing this year and open-sourced PebbleOS.
i don't normally praise google, but i am glad their open-sourcing of pebbleOS here enabled this new revival of Pebble devices.
Taiwan is not distinct from China. Both the ROC and the PRC view Taiwan as part of China (ironically, at the cost of the mass slaughter of taiwanese to in service of the chinese).
Nobody is giving them more deference than the other. In a perfect world, the ROC would be the one and only surviving entity from this mess and the PRC would be a relic of history.
That isn’t what the facts on the ground are though. The ROC no more has sovereign jurisdiction over the mainland than the PRC does over Taiwan. Which is to say that at this point they are functionally separate sovereign nations independent of each other, regardless of the claims by either the PRC or the ROC. Or put another way, the way I did the first fucking time: Taiwan is an independent nation.
> Taiwan intends to violently and militarily resist if it comes to that
I sincerely wonder if the people who live there agree. I sure as hell wouldn't put up much fight if china tried to invade my country; just the opposite. If anything I wonder if voluntary unification is on the table in today's climate
> I sincerely wonder if the people who live there agree ... I wonder if voluntary unification is on the table
One of the benefits of a free democratic society is that you can ask; and people vote according to their preferences. A recent study suggests ~13% of the public support unification with China: https://www.tpof.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/20250214-TPO... . Taiwan's politics are dominated by the KMT and DPP parties, both of which oppose unification.
> I sure as hell wouldn't put up much fight if china tried to invade my country
> I live in the US. I think it's pretty obvious the PRC is more competent in every way than our own government is.
Yes, and you wouldn't be able to express your political opinion (like you do here on HN or anywhere else) if you were living in China. People living in the US tend to overlook that minute detail.
I'm willing to concede that the CCP may be more competent than the US government, but the Taiwanese government (despite their antics in parliament) ranks alongside Singapore and Norway in my top three most competent governments in the world. That's purely my own subjective opinion of course but I see no reason for the Taiwanese people to be embarrassed.
If you live in the US, supporting a Chinese invasion is definitely unusual.
> the PRC is more competent in every way
I guess it depends what you mean by competent. Dictatorships can be frightfully competent at certain things, but that doesn't make them a good place to be. We're talking about a country that is genociding its own Uyghur ethnic group, represses Tibetan culture, disappears its own elite athletes, and has a horrific LGBTI record. The US is far from perfect, but has nothing on China in terms of nastiness.
That's not even touching the biggest problem of dictatorship, which is what happens when Dear Leader takes a fall. I doubt Xi has much more than a decade of leadership in him, and I worry for the Chinese populace when he goes.
> The US is far from perfect, but has nothing on China in terms of nastiness.
I think you have this reversed, friend. Our culture is based on violence and death. Theirs is based on stability and prosperity.
> That's not even touching the biggest problem of dictatorship, which is what happens when Dear Leader takes a fall. I doubt Xi has much more than a decade of leadership in him, and I worry for the Chinese populace when he goes.
I pray he liberates us before he passes. I agree it's not likely but.... one must maintain hope in this world
Ever? No. Whether or not it's moral to support the state under which you live depends entirely on the circumstances. In the best case the state is mostly an expression of the will of the nation, and if your country is invaded you support the state.
But even if the state is parasitical, in the case of an invasion it's usually moral to support it.
Ok, so why do people not violently rise up against the us government? They clearly have never represented our values, and they use the pretense of sovereignty to act as if their behavior reflects our interest.
> It is not nationalism to want a sovereign nation that you have influence over, that's democracy.
So what's our excuse? Do we not have a democracy, or are we simply a contemptible people?
Unification, in this case, means surrendering all rights to privacy, all rights to free expression, everything.
The fact that you wouldn't fight being occupied and forced to be a slave doesn't speak highly of you, but I must admit it's an honest statement, and it's true that a lot of people might feel the same way. A majority of people everywhere are cowards, collaborators and sycophants. But they're along for the ride.
> rights to privacy, all rights to free expression, everything.
Surely rights to more substantial things like healthcare make this quite an easy decision. Freedom to criticize a government doesn't matter if you can't force the government to actually give a shit about anything
Does Taiwan not have healthcare? Verbatim from Wikipedia:
> According to the Numbeo Health Care Index in 2025, Taiwan has the best healthcare system in the world, scoring 86.5 out of 100,[6] a slight increase from 86 the previous year.[7] This marked the seventh consecutive year that Taiwan has ranked first in the Numbeo Health Care Index.[8]
Just my sense as an outsider, but a lot of interest in voluntary reunification got chilled after seeing China's actions in Hong Kong. A lot of it stems from lack of trust for the CCP to honor it's idea of a one county two systems form of governence.
I don't know how much the Taiwanese would be willing to fight and die in a military invasion though.
In terms of survival strategies, letting someone else rule over you was sort of the OG Christian thing before they got control of the Roman Empire. It's kind of the default in most places. Declaring independence and actually succeeding at it and governing yourself is remarkably rare. The question isn't what you think is wise, or what you would do (because no one knows until they're in that situation). It's whether you feel you have anything worth preserving when you are conquered. Some people don't, evidently. Other people do.
You simply cannot compare the experience of being conquered in a pre-modern society to being conquered by the PRC.
Premodern States simply couldn't afford the level of oppression and exploitation that is possible today. They usually just replaced the upper layers of the old hierarchy, put some small garrisons in a few places and left most local elites in charge, often with their local armies. If there was an organized rebellion, there would usually be a a few skirmishes and then a re-negotiation of the terms.
Today even Morocco could afford to turn Western Sahara into a territory with total surveillance, checkpoints everywhere and an impenetrable wall in the desert while slowly ethnically cleansing the native population.
That's not a binary choice. Find yourself under the wrong governance and you'll find your loved ones disappear pretty quickly, even if you do toe the line. The people who treat populist politics as a sport are the people who don't have personal experience of that, or convince themselves they're insulated from the repercussions.
Until a few years ago, gccgo was well maintained and trailed the main Go compiler by 1 or 2 releases, depending on how the release schedules aligned. Having a second compiler was considered an important feature. Currently, the latest supported Go version is 1.18, but without Generics support. I don't know if it's a coincidence, but porting Generics to gccgo may have been a hurdle that broke the cadence.
The best thing about gccgo is that it is not burdened with the weirdness of golang's calling convention, so the FFI overhead is basically the same as calling an extern function from C/C++. Take a look at [0] and see how bad golang's cgo calling latency compare to C. gccgo is not listed there but from my own testing it's the same as C/C++.
Isn't that horribly out of date? More recent benchmarks elsewhere performed after some Go improvements show Go's C FFI having drastically lower overheard, by at least an order of magnitude, IIUC.
Seems doubtful, given that generics and the gccgo compiler were both spearheaded by Ian Lance Taylor, it seems more likely to me that him leaving google would be a more likely suspect, but I don't track go.
Without knowing what your interests/motivations and backgrounds are, it is hard to make good recommendations, but if you didn't know about rosettacode or github I figured I should start with that
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