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lol yikes. Some of the other illustrations quoted seemed OK esp if you already have a layman's understanding of the major concepts... but this just seems.... bad.

I've begun to wonder what our obligation is as the last generation of humans to educate ourselves and grow up without AI.

Or as I like to say “the best way to launch is to cut features”.

As an engineering leader you’ve got to advocate for it against product/design all the time.


The better way is to never have those features in your pipeline already.

truly, but you seldom have full control over the input of that pipeline

App rejiggering is not an exact science, and is often poorly done.

Even if apps transition well between aspect ratio / screen size breakpoints, there is a cognitive load to maintain 2+ UI configurations.

Preserving aspect ratios eliminates these issues. It'll make every app better.


^^This.

Despite all the responsive design tools and declarative layouts to ensure a great layout even on an oddball resolution... the fact is that in practice it's nontrivial, and remember that the companies that make most of the apps you use have finite design and QA budgets. They need to actually use the resolution in question in order to really do a good job of designing for it, and giving them double the work, for a $2000 and up phone which probably won't be super highly adopted, is a recipe for getting apps that end up with layouts that aren't optimized properly on one (or both) of the screen sizes.


My point is largely that the nontrivial work you've described is the norm today. What's being asked for tomorrow is not new. Most apps are already set. Not just because of work Apple does to make it easier for apps to "port" out of the box, but because the multiple sizes that apps are already prepared to handle across iPhones, iPads, and resizeable iPad apps (and to the extent that devs are having React Native handle this, then across Android too).

So it's a lot of work, yes, but it's work that's already been done and that engineering teams already assume in their processes. The future is the same because this has been the status quo for a few years. Whether the Duo has a 2:1 ratio or something slightly different, the apps are at about the same readiness for it.


I'm not calling you a liar or anything, I get that yeah, no apps really survive today that are laid out statically for each resolution.

I'm just saying that they don't release a new version of Uber, Instagram, etc. without checking to see what that flexible and responsive layout looks like on the most popular devices and, where important UI ends up suboptimal on one of them, it'll be tweaked before release. And I'm saying that nobody really wants more of these 'significant formfactors' to check.


Uber Eats is a good example of a website that handles different screen sizes poorly.


This is already something every app needs to deal with on iPad, where users can arbitrarily resize apps and windows. And apps that support landscape layout on phones have always needed to support their UI being rendered in different aspect ratios.

At WWDC this year, Apple introduced a tool[0] to let developers arbitrarily resize their simulated iOS device screens.

Flexibility and adaptivity are more front-and-center for iOS devs than ever.

[0]https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/configuring-...


I agree it will feel super nice to go from the front screen to the dual screen and have nothing "move". And similarly it will feel "mildly infuriating" if it doesn't do that.

I also think that I (personally) don't need a front screen and would love to have whatever cost savings or improvements would come if there weren't one. This last sentence is of course a me thing, but I mention it because I think that if people start on the front screen and then open the Duo, they may just want the full screen app or something else entirely. I'm not sure the use case of being in your banking app device folded, deciding midway through flow to open it, and wanting to be in the same UI is really what I want. The part I question is what's going on that step 2 came about—I think it's either you want to go into more depth on it or you're just opening the device the way you would had you not been in your banking app.

The case where I open it to find the app using half the screen and then I have to press something or drag something to make it full screen is not that great (and isn't great today with current iPad window resizing). The best case I can think of for wanting the app in the same size format when I open it is for is something like multitasking, I guess we'll see how that looks or feels and how you get the second app open (or whether it's very common use case anyway).

In general, I've long felt the folding tech is for tablet use cases not for phone use cases. I think Apple's foray (finally) into it more or less validates that. Even though there will be a meaningful number of people buying it to replace their phone, I think this is largely because their phone use is already tablet use case-y (for entertainment especially). I assume many people will also buy it as a(n expensive) tablet replacement in addition to their phone, which is perhaps related to the timing of iPhone Handoff (same SIM on two phones) too.


I actually like this one lol.


same I just like monads lol. cat + pipe feels purer and has lower mental load for me, which dominates the efficiency of spawning an extra process for, typically, a few microseconds.


Exactly. It allows for a consistent pattern:

cmd1 | cmd2 | cmd3 | ... | cmdn


I took it as a... joke...

Can we post jokes?? Everyone knows Al Gore didn't sit around in an SV garage inventing the internet.


It's not so much a joke as a smear. Gore was attacked for claiming to be the inventor of the Internet, but he never said that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...


He said he created it lol


No he didn’t. Please don’t post lame comments like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we’re trying for something better here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


To me it counts as a trope and the guidelines ask as to avoid posting Internet tropes, for the very reason that they’re more likely to elicit a groan than a laugh.

We’d love to see good jokes on HN, but they’re a precious rarity. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289.)

I guess this one stings because I hate that HN is a place where our idea of a joke is mocking the work of a politician who really is credited by the pioneering technologists of the field to to have played a crucial role in enabling our industry to develop.


Yeah fair enough and tbh I didn't even know there was a no tropes guideline.


hah. I was an intern at Google in 2005 when he was hired and remember the wave of reverence that went through Mountain View. Salute to a legend!

It’s like two lifetimes in tech years. I remember that summer Google Earth was launched, we were a year removed from the Gmail launch, and I worked on shipping the first Summer of Code.


I worked on GFiber in the mid 2010s. We were having a debate about IPv6 support, which many people wanted to not do. I wrote a far-too-long essay on why it was important (at the time) and Vint picked it up to yell at the leadership team to get it prioritized. It was truly an "only at Google" experience to have someone who essentially invented the Internet reading your posts and acting on them.

(I guess a decade later, was IPv6 important? Still not sure about that one. But it seemed important at the time.)


Wow Google Fiber what a blast from the past.

I eventually went full time at Google NYC in the early 2010s - I remember the internal uproar when Reader was sunsetted =)


The Google Fiber name didn't change to GFiber until March 26th, 2026.


wow, that was the golden age of Google.


I don't want to name him as he's decently well known, but I'm pretty sure my mentor monitored Vint's interview to make sure no one accidentally rejected him for a coding error or something.


I suspect the only thing at risk of being smeared by a more complete retelling of that story is Google’s interview process.


They made him write code as part of an interview?


I don't know if he actually did.

Just know that my mentor was hand-holding the hiring process which basically prided itself on false negatives and still probably does.


Never underestimate the power of hubris.


Vint had an interview?!! Who had the gall to suggest he needs to come in and be evaluated?


I don't remember the exact details after 20 yrs but I think EVERYONE got a coding loop no exceptions at the time by default.

And they were still in the era where's they'd just keep interviewing you until they "got enough signal" so people would be back 3 and 4 times.


I don't know if he had to do technical interviews (I'd imagine not) but what he described was Eric Schmidt approaching him and asking him to leave MCI to work at Google. They asked him what his title should be and he (I think he) jokingly suggested Internet Pope. They eventually settled on Chief Internet Evangelist.


When Google hired Guido van Rossumm, they put him through the same trials they require of every employee who is thinking of contributing Python code. Then they yelled at him for making Python inefficient.


There's gotta be a story about him and python readability at Google.


They were really going after all the legends.

Google hired Guido van Rossum around the same time. I worked down the hall from Rob Pike, they had already hired Peter Weinberger (the w from `awk`), and I shared a 4-person office with Gren Stein, who was then director of the Apache Software Foundation.


ok but what color is the yak hair?


Same color as the bike shed, obviously


Not from Unitzikstan I see

White, of course; that way the statisticians can dye them any color they want. But for ultra high precision I do recommend the Boeing system. But be sure to use the older models, before private equity firms replaced all the metal parts with zipties. If you can't find a quality Boeing (plausible), consider 1.1 Blue Whales (tricky).

fnordpiglet was being deliberately humble with the decimals. It's accurate down to the semi firkin. Not to be confused with a quarter Tod.

Ignore the redundant bike shed comment, as that fits precisely 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar. Anyone with a bike should know that.


White is so outdated.

I wish we'd stop ignoring Councilman Blatt's proposal to triple-dye the yak hair Imperial Blue, to minimize the color variation and therefore the effects of mass loss due to black body radation.

We are, after all, trying to be accurate here.

Pickups of Imperial Blue Yak Hair (or PIBYHs) is the clear road to the future and it's dismaying to see any other response from a fellow Unitsman.


I'm interested in how you can present simultaneous rich visual information about what is happening the side delegation work.

i.e. how will full duplex & delegation enable/enhance desktop flows w/o corresponding leaps in UI.


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