161–170 of 177 posts
I wish the makers of live video apps would add an AI feature to auto blur unknown faces, car plates and mask unknown voices. This would make it possible to legally live stream in countries with strict privacy laws like Switzerland or Germany.
Can you please give some examples of live video apps you are referring to?
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He's undoubtedly a world class indie developer, but we were discussing his abilities as a programmer, in the sense of writing good code. True, it's not necessarily important or valuable in life, but that is what we were talking about. Most of the people I worked with at my FAANG job were excellent programmers, surely better than Marco, but none of them would have any chance of even coming up with a decent idea for an…
Our definition of a “well written app” is different. An app to me is well written if it is meets a need well enough to be successful. I would be much more impressed by an Indy developer who has a successful sustainable business without being slimy than a “FAANG” software engineer that got in because he can reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard while juggling two bowling balls and riding a unicycle on a tightrope. I…
What does it matter which skill is more impressive? Obviously there are way fewer successful indie developers than top tier developers, and obviously life as a successful indie is way better. Yet, there is such a thing as writing high quality code, which is more or less orthogonal to being a successful indie. And that was what we are discussing.
It's a bit like being a fast runner and being a good football player. There's some connection, but it's not like the fastest runners are the best players, or the other way around. Different skills.
As to low level audio, I know what you're referring to, and it doesn't say that much really. My co-founder at my previous startup wrote a bunch of DSP code that worked, and was probably more complex than the pause removal, but he was still a pretty random developer. His code was sometimes surprisingly bad. Marco's strength is to not shy away from anything, even if it sounds scary or complex. DSP sounds complex, but it's not string theory.
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Can you do it in the default photo editing app? Don't have any iOS devices handy to check out, but on my current phone, the standard Google Photos app has text markup - including emojis. Just tested it out and I was easily able to put an emoji over a face and resize/rotate it with pinch/drag type motions. Anything like that in the default Apple app? Granted, there is nothing like the automation features in OP's app,…
Frustratingly, no. If you insert a photo into Messages and hit Markup, the first view gives you a bunch of pen/pencil/brush options, with fixed sizes per brush. There's a plus button that allows you to insert shapes and text…but you can't pinch-zoom to scale the text. You then have to tap around again to set the font size and color. It's a weird, neglected-feeling interface. They could borrow a lot from Instagram's s…
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He said on a podcast that he spent "6 months" developing it. I very much doubt that was 6 months of full-time work, but even if that was only 10 hours a week, and even if the "cost" was let's say $100 (probably much more) an hour, that's around $25k or 7 straight years of $300 a month (that never goes down for 7 years, aka impossible) to recoup his investment. That's an absolute low end, I think you could easily argu…
Just for reference, $25K spent in time and then being able to talk intelligently about modern iOS development on a podcast that generates $16K an episode seems like a good investment. And “time isn’t money”. It wasn’t like the time he spent developing it would have been spent working on something else.
And time is definitely money, or rather, money is time. If you already have an income stream that is more than enough for your chosen lifestyle, spending lots of time on something that might give you a tiny bit extra seems like a bad choice. Why not spend time with his family, travel, take up a hobby, or at least write an app that is just for fun. Or one that has some sort of chance of making it really really big. Obviously up to him, but still, hard to understand.
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Just for reference, $25K spent in time and then being able to talk intelligently about modern iOS development on a podcast that generates $16K an episode seems like a good investment. And “time isn’t money”. It wasn’t like the time he spent developing it would have been spent working on something else.
He spends maybe 1% of the time talking about his apps, that really isn’t the reason. And time is definitely money, or rather, money is time. If you already have an income stream that is more than enough for your chosen lifestyle, spending lots of time on something that might give you a tiny bit extra seems like a bad choice. Why not spend time with his family, travel, take up a hobby, or at least write an app that is…
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Our definition of a “well written app” is different. An app to me is well written if it is meets a need well enough to be successful. I would be much more impressed by an Indy developer who has a successful sustainable business without being slimy than a “FAANG” software engineer that got in because he can reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard while juggling two bowling balls and riding a unicycle on a tightrope. I…
The interview is the least demanding part, working as a software developer at an ambitious company has nothing to do with binary trees. What does it matter which skill is more impressive? Obviously there are way fewer successful indie developers than top tier developers, and obviously life as a successful indie is way better. Yet, there is such a thing as writing high quality code, which is more or less orthogonal to…
Many of them could never handle the complexity of writing an entire app and maintaining the backend running on 20+ Linode VMs without the support of a trillion dollar corporation.
You really overestimate the skill and complexity of most code written by “FAANG” engineers.
FWIW, I’ve been coding for a long time (the 74 is a hint) and I started at 12 writing assembly language and spent a decade writing C including maintaining a proprietary compiler/VM for Windows CE devices.
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As a parent of a preschooler I can confirm this is definitely a thing. We have decided to do what we can to avoid our child’s life being subject to data mining or the creation of shadow profiles by whatever company (past or present) thinks it can profit from it. We always cover his face with an emoji. So do most of the parents in our social circle.
To turn it round, do you spend time looking at other people's emoji-obscured photos? I don't, so I can't see the point of posting them because I don't imagine that anyone would look at them. But I could well be wrong.
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I kind of hate-listen to ATP at this point, as the only one who lives in the real world is Siracusa… …but this is actually not easy to do via the iOS markup editor. It defaults to a pencil tool that draws way too fine of a line to mask a face without a loooot of scribbling, and adding a shape is a lot of taps. And text, forget about it, that's a pain in the default iOS editor. (Instagram: way better at this.) This is…
Siracusa is great to listen to since he can make very complex subjects seem simple. His writing with Ars was similar. I listen to his other podcast and wish there was a way to mute his co-host so I only heard John. Despite the rambling, incoherent interruptions from said co-host, I still listen to the podcast because the value in listening to Siracusa outweighs the pain from MM.
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I have kids, and don't mind posting their photos. But if I did, why post at all? It just seems weird. "Here's my son, minus the face. Oh he's so cute!"
For some, its not about the kids its about showing themselves as a parent. For others, its about sharing with people that you know that you and your kids had a good time while providing some privacy protection for your kids. Micro-managing who can see what picture is hard, the people that know your kids get the full mental image from the picture.
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> yet we don't know how good a programmer he is You know he is good because… > Marco is very successful with Tumblr, Instapaper, and Overcast, I don’t need to “see his code” to know whether he is good. He is able to produce software that people pay money to acquire without the sliminess. Software is a means to an end. Not an end onto itself.
You're conflating smart business choices with good programming. His code could be well marketed shit that just barely works under the covers, but he sells it well (Narrator's voice: "It isn't shit...") Marco is an excellent indie developer because he selects markets he has a good understanding of, finds his niche, then simply outclasses his competition by being ahead on features. He also has a loyal following from hi…
There are some segments from a few episodes that show that Marco is demonstrably not a super great programmer. I suspect some of his server side code is horrible. But he doesn't matter because he is super strong at other stuff super focussed on solving his own problems at gets it done. You don't need to be super great at programming you just need to be tenacious.