I think some developers are kinda dense or something, and don't understand that shoving AI content in people's faces is simply rude.

In recent versions of iTerm2 for example, when using the plain old menubar and hovering over some items, panels appear showing awful sloppy AI images. WTF? https://files.catbox.moe/5ivkhw.png - That makes me question everything... Was the developer always tasteless? Or did they get a taste bypass?

Yes, they were always tasteless. One job of a platform SDK is to enable creating tasteful things that mesh nicely with the platform idioms, and make it hard to create tasteless things.

With AI, creating the tasteless thing became easy.

If you give people the ability to select a font, they will select Comic Sans.

Giving developers the ability to impose Comic Sans on the users is bad. Giving users the ability to make their own tasteless choices is good. It's my computer and I'll make it ugly if I want to. Windows 3.1 included the famous "Hot Dog Stand" theme. The loss of this freedom only encourages user-hostile practices.

Seeing this makes it hard to believe that I actually used iTerm2 for a few years back when I was still on macOS.

... in pink on yellow too, if you add a color picker.

WTH…? I use iTerm2 and wasn’t aware of this. What an incredibly bad call.

I think iTerm 2 jumped the shark when the author started implementing a homemade web browser into it.

That AI image is pretty baffling though. Setting aside the pointlessness of displaying an image in the context menu, it even looks like it was made with ancient stable diffusion from 2024 or something, modern image generators are "better" than that. I wonder when it was put in.

Oof, that image is rough. Image models just don’t know when to stop shoving shit into an image (instead of less is more, MORE IS MORE), which makes it even worse because that’s where AI image generators tend to break down aka the devil is in the details.

Then they proceed to summon a million infernal imps.

Oh god they have invented useless hero images for tooltips. The images being slop is just the cherry on top.

Haha what the fuck.

I've never considered updating iTerm. Apparently that lazieness was the right call?

Jesus. What the hell. What does that sudden AI image even offer? I guess it would make some sense in a "docs page" context (even though there it would too be slop), but as a tooltip of a menu option?

Gotta say though.. that is so unhinged, one has to respect the human ingenuity behind it. No LLM can come up with an idea so batshit insane. They're too mid for that.

Oh jeez, that's atrocious. I'm starting to reconsider some of the things I used to say about Corporate Memphis.

No, it is always right to criticize Corporate Memphis. Keep up the fight.

I dunno, tjpnz might be on to something. Would a nice smooth blue leg stepping towards the camera with super exaggerated perspective really be so bad right about now?

I imagine that's a deliberate decision of the overall project to try and get people to evaluate it on its merits, rather than associating it with something old and unfashionable.

I think this was once the case. Smalltalk was very "so last year" once Java Marketing overtook the world (I worked for Cincom, final resting place of VisualWorks Smalltalk, may it rest in peace).

At this point, I think it's flipped. The people that might be attracted to it would probably enjoy the retro hat tip. The various language wars have all been pointlessly adjudicated, and lost in time, first to the dominance/explosion of JavaScript only programmers, and now due to LLM generated code.

Learning Smalltalk, and practicing it heavily for 20 years was probably the single best thing I learned in programming during 35+ years. It helped me get very good at modelling things. I work in Swift/Kotlin/Elixir/C now days, and I've learned some great things from those systems as well. But how to build representations of real world data as well as structure concepts/relationships more virtual, hands down to Smalltalk (for me).

I learnt Smalltalk on Smalltalk/V for Windows 3.1, so I also watched that transition take place.

Not sure how it was seen from inside at Cincom, however having a couple of Smalltalk vendors quickly pivoting from Smalltalk into Java, to the point most IDEs and libraries that appeared where from Smalltalk origin, was what ended up killing all existing interest into keeping using Smalltalk products.

There was this language that Sun was pushing for free, with SDKs on cover CDs, alongside plenty of stuff coming from Smalltalk, why pay for expensive Smalltalk IDEs, seemed to be the opinion back then.

So we ended up with Java, .NET, Objective-C, as half way to the whole Smalltalk experience.

> It's the part that faces the user. It's what helps the user form their first impression of your product.

Same for the README on a GitHub project. Alas, plenty of those are now just voluminous AI spew.

I am comfortable on Reddit because I understand that it's made up of thousands of sub-communities that vary wildly in how interesting/friendly they are.

I don't understand the desire to ignore that aspect and pompously dismiss Reddit as a whole. It's like dismissing an entire country as worthless because you didn't like the vibe in a couple of the big cities.

It was playable even on an 8 year old iPhone XS. I cleared up the whole wikipedia page and the framerate never got bad enough to hamper the gameplay.

That's amazing. I would have no clue how to write that so that it works so well.

Edit: I guess the main enabler is that it gets out of the business of HTML really quickly, by importing a representation of the page into the game engine. The classic bookmarklet version linked below messes with actual page elements using CSS transformations etc.

You should submit it to this site too: https://macoswm.com/submit

Just the other day I thought it looked like the friggin official Python homepage is using Courier for the code example

Looks that way to me too, but I wouldn't look to Python for best practice.

In hindsight, the movement in the early Tomb Raider games was really awkward. It didn't feel very human... it felt like an endless loop of rotating a circular tray then putting your foot on the gas.

Learn from the old master... with a big stinkin' LLM interposed!

Partial AI use, yes, on the diagrams -- somewhat as an experiment to see whether it was any good. I thought it was better than nothing.

But the core text was hand-written, and the code faithfully represents the logic of the hand-crafted original from 30 years ago.

The overuse of words such as ”deliberate” give it away.

I actually use that word quite a lot in normal writing, and find that my general tone is quite bot-similar.

I am nevertheless unworried by this. ;-)

#replicant

Now we know The Source!