Politics
Since the new US administration took office, I’ve noticed a significant drop in activity on Mastodon. A few people switched to activist mode and mostly post political content. Others try to pretend everything is normal and keep posting about computers, but those posts don’t get as many reactions as before. Then, there are those who just went silent, including me.
I just don’t know what to say. It feels wrong to comment on another country’s politics. But if I post something like, “Hey, check out my latest app,” I think people will feel it’s out of touch with the current political climate.
Apple
The morale of app developers seems very low. It wasn’t high before, but now it’s worse. The App Store continues to suck, and then we have the whole Apple vs EU situation, the Core Technology Fee, Tim Cook’s $1M donation, and Apple resuming advertising on X. These are just a few of the major events.
Recently, I had another app idea. At first, I was excited to create it. But then I thought, why am I making Apple’s platform better? It’s not like they need my apps. In fact, I think Apple doesn’t need anything from indie developers anymore. We like to think that the Vision Pro failed due to a lack of indie apps, but it’s really about the lack of mainstream apps (and the high price). It would probably sell like hotcakes if it were priced at $1000 and users could watch Netflix and YouTube on it.
AI
It seems like AI is here to stay. The general public has accepted it, much like they accepted Facebook years ago. Most people don’t care about how the models are trained, even fewer care about the environmental impact, and even fewer know what hallucination is. To them, using ChatGPT as a source of information is perfectly normal.
During Chinese New Year, I visited a friend who is an AI enthusiast. He asked me why people still want to watch human chess when Deep Blue already defeated Kasparov in 1996. I told him, you can make a machine that perfectly shoots basketballs across the court, but fans would still want to watch humans play. But what do I know. 🤷🏻♂️
Life
I haven’t traveled for many years due to some family medical issues, and I feel guilty about my wife having to endure it with me. So this year, I’m planning a trip with her. But then I learned that Lonely Planet got sold to a crappy company, and now their guidebooks are crap. Yet another nice thing in my life gone. I feel like as I get older, more and more nice things in my life will disappear.
Maybe this is why older people are grumpy.