Aaron Thompson

Dad. Nuclear power fan. Somehow still a resident of San Francisco.
Now at @anduriltech, previously at @spatialxr, @apple

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

Fine dining is funny cause it’s like “I’m bored. Cook me 8 little dinners and 3 desserts.”

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

@jessegenet Wow, that’s really nice typography and layout! How is the app rendering that layout and sending it to the display?

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

@aaroncbailey Trained on the whole corpus of human text, learned the fear from its creator

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

Google has a legitimately good font in Roboto. And yet, the default font for Google Docs remains Arial.

I suppose typographic sadness is not a measurable KPI.

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

@johnloeber After experiencing the same thing at a gym in Madrid, I have a theory as to why we all hate the music, despite objective popularity of the poppy-female-vocalized-EDM genre.

They’re using the spin class cooldown playlist for the weight lifting area.

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

@anandx Been em dashing for decades—it’s how I assert my pedantry

(Kidding aside, crafting your text thoughtfully does show that you care)

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

OpenClaw bringing this concept roaring back

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

@johnloeber Given the cases where SF continues to pay non-profits in violation of various laws and terms, would we also then have to sue the gov’t to enforce its own laws?

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

@jeffreyhuber Main thing missing is movies that are simply wonderful. But won’t be too long before directors using AI make that happen again.

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

OOP helped us think through separation of concerns. FRP eliminated whole categories of bugs. Code-only + live preview accelerated iteration speed.

But what’s next? AI does not care. We need people to care about advancing the state of the art, and AI only to accelerate that.

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

I’m worried AI coding will entrench existing frameworks/paradigms instead of advancing them. Functional reactive coding was a great leap for human productivity, but terrible for efficiency. Nobody asking what’s the next paradigm forward. Imagine if AI arrived during OOP’s heyday!

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

And sure, you can prompt to optimize your React usage, and the authors can do the same for React itself. But AI doesn’t feel how bad your latency is, or care how unacceptable it is to drop frames on our pocket supercomputers. The current state of “good enough” is absolutely not.

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

The best way for Apple to get its mojo back* is to have in-person WWDC again. Hearing bugs reports and feature requests straight from the customer’s mouth does a world of good, and Apple has long felt dehumanized.

*After shipping a competent LLM-based Siri replacement, of course

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

Hey chefs, are you okay? You keep adding raw red onions to things.

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

@johnloeber 1. Open Preview
2. Add un-redacted SSN over redacted, with white background

The form reviewers will not know the difference, and you’re doing the opposite of anything fraudulent

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

Turns out, the best productivity hack is having 2 children. Nothing levels up your focus like this.

Just 1 is a piece of cake, but 2 drops you into negative personal downtime, and an exponential increase of people management complexity and interruptions. Stretched in every way.

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

The fun part about Halloween in San Francisco is playing the game of “is that a costume or do they just dress like that?”

In either case, I’m here for it

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

We need an Anduril for healthcare

“In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one tactical aircraft.”
=>
“In the year 2054, your entire paycheck will go to health insurance premiums”

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

Software efficiency has fallen proportionally with the number of pony tails in engineering

[Aaron Thompson @aaptho]

macOS 26 has absolutely tanked perf on my Intel MacBook Pro. Just moving a window drops frames. Safari hangs for 9 sec at every wake. It’s no better with the discrete GPU or reduce transparency.

Apple should have EOLed this machine from feature updates rather than releasing here