Apple Reference Image is actually a great idea and positive for the world. Good job.

This is interesting. I have aphantasia and have no trouble recognizing people's faces or telling if two pictures are of the same person if you show both of them to me at the same time. But if there's any memory or visual imagination involved I'm absolutely useless. (E.g. you ask me to describe what someone who isn't there at the time looks like, or what would you look like with different hair or wearing a different color.)

It's obvious to me that I have some deep structure that tells me when I see him "this is Bob" (and brain science supports this), but I'd really struggle to tell you what Bob looks like.

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Aphantasia is linked to specific face recognition deficits, but matching skills remain intact

https://www.psypost.org/aphantasia-is-linked-to-specific-face-recognition-deficits-but-matching-skills-remain-intact/

☝️ This is also the explanation for why the feature I'm most excited about in Xcode 27 is the new New Project flow with so many fewer steps.

Swift Playgrounds are great for random code thoughts, but I often really want a full debugger when I'm doing it.

Making it that much quicker to do some random experiment will really positively impact my life. 😀

I have worked with people who work out the design before ever writing any code and then the code is mostly mechanical. I can imagine AI coding could work well for that sort of person.

I have always tended towards working bottom-up. I write a method or data structure or whatever that seems like it'll probably be useful. Move chunks of code around to change ownership or order of operations or data flow.

The writing and editing of the code is the thing that clarifies my thinking and understanding, and trying to do it in English and even worse, in some sort of linear conversational format is completely antithetical to the way my brain works.

Even when I'm "managing" (my coworkers don't need much management) answering questions or looking at PRs, I want to pull it into an editor and build it and try things. Just reading and talking to them about it gives me next to no insight whatsoever.

This is me saying the _form_ of the thing repulses me, completely ignoring usefulness or ethics.

I know the snark is fun, but also...

Remember:

Don't punish the behavior you want to see.

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@bsdphk/116419755925180688

My beginning Comp Sci classes were taught in Ada (UW early 90s), which seemed like a bizarre choice of the faculty at the time. I immediately jumped ship into C and C++ and never really looked back. But it's absolutely true that a bunch of the actual engineering in software engineering was all there back then and modern languages have just been slowly moving back in that direction.

Out walking the dogs, and I come upon, in the middle of the sidewalk, a giant industrial roll of toilet paper and an apparently full bag of Taco Bell food.

“Huh. There’s gotta be a story there.” I say to myself as I pull the dogs away from stealing the bag.

The thing I remember most about this was the pole IDs. No labels on the poles themselves, certainly no GPS or anything like that. No, they were identified by starting at a substation and following the line, counting poles, and indicating wherever the line split. So e.g. you'd have a transformer on pole Eastsound-W7L2R1 (go west from Eastsound substation for 7 poles, go left at the branch for 2 more, then the next one on the right). Imagine the linesmen going to do some maintenance driving along counting.

RE: https://vmst.io/@jalefkowit/116070241112523559

My very first summer job was on dBase. 10% database design, 90% data entry to convert the maintenance info on power poles and transformers from paper to electronic for the local power utility. (Where my dad was head engineer - obvious nepotism FTW!)

It's our anniversary today! 30 years is an insane amount of time to be married. Inside, I don't even really feel like I'm any older than 30, even, so how could I have been married that long?

But I guess I can't imagine any more even what it was like not being with and loving @hollie every single day.

The unfortunate but inevitable way that @hollie will leave this Earth.

The Seattle pet licensing dataset allows for filtering and aggregating, which is lovely!

Top ten dog names in Seattle: Luna, Charlie, Lucy, Daisy, Ruby, Bella, Penny, Milo, Rosie, Poppy. Unique names include Zipper Goose Foot and Xena Wiener Princess.

Top ten cat names (surprisingly similar): Luna, Lucy, Bella, Oliver, Charlie, Leo, Lily, Loki, Milo, Shadow. Unique names include Waffles Pancake Toast Moose and Sir Robin Cashmoney Pouncealot.

Say you have a large 'before' array, and an 'after' array where the elements have identity but aren't otherwise sorted or anything and need to determine where insertions happened (presumably a much smaller number of them, no reorders, no deletions). Is there a name for this collection operation? Is there a better way than this binary-search-inspired O(log(N) * M) N=original, M=insertions approach?

My earlier screwups in this game, unexpectedly redeemed! (I was black.) Never going to see a win like this again:

Happy Apple Developer Certificate expired, invalidating all provisioning profiles, and now I need to remember how to update our build system, to all who celebrate!

Wisdom: Actually born immortal and is invincible unless beheaded. She awaits the Gathering to fight for the Prize.

There can be only one.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c86w9n4jlvwo.amp

Last night as I lay in bed waiting to fall asleep, it came to me. The solution to sharing a bed with a blanket thief. CYLINDRICAL BEDDING. Your sheets and blankets are just over twice as wide, and zip at the left/right edge to form a cylinder. This goes around the bed so that half the blanket goes under the bed frame, looping around to the other side.

VOILA, any part of the blanket pulled away from you becomes available as slack on the other side. GENIUS.

I'm very happy with how the dynamic guide code for this worked out. Rewrote it from Obj-C into Swift and then generalized from being horizontal/vertical to being able to handle arbitrary pairs of non-perpendicular axes.

And primarily because now there's one set of code (some axis) instead of two (horizontal or vertical), it's now quite a bit smaller as well.

All high school level trigonometry, but a LOT of it.

https://mastodon.social/@kcase/113278489509629965

Warning! Very low-level behavior change in Xcode16's CoreGraphics SDK:

let r1 = CGRectZero
let r2 = CGRect(x: 10, y: 10, width: 10, height: 10)
CGRectUnion(r1, r2) // returns {x:0, y: 0, w: 20, h: 20}

E.g. it is actually unioning these rectangles instead of special-casing the zero rect. @bnut helpfully points out that the docs specify the _null_ rect, not the zero rect as being special-cased here (different!), but in previous SDKs the zero rect (apparently incorrectly!) acted the same way.

My son has worn hearing aids since birth, basically. (His first when he was a few months old.) He has moderate-to-severe hearing loss, so AirPods won't directly help him, but it's incredible how some of the features like 'conversation boost' (directional boosting to just speech frequencies in front of you) were things that ten years ago were brand new features on pairs of hearing aids that cost $5000-$6000. And now people can get the same thing for $249.

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-authorizes-first-over-counter-hearing-aid-software