Clay Ellis

Memento mori. Amor fati. iOS Engineer @Apple

[Clay Ellis @clay_ellis]

@sketch Keyword: automatically 😅 Thanks for the reply, though. Cheers!

[Clay Ellis @clay_ellis]

@sketch is there a setting in the web app somewhere to automatically open links in the Mac app?

[Clay Ellis @clay_ellis]

I just want something to click the "Edit in 💎" button for me, "Allow", then close the tab. Does that exist (that you know of?)

[Clay Ellis @clay_ellis]

@jfmarkham @iStudiez Good to know 😅

[Clay Ellis @clay_ellis]

I was just talking with my little brother who's starting college and he asked what apps I recommend. @iStudiez was at the top of my list, but it looks like you guys have gone dark since I last used it. What happened?

[Clay Ellis @clay_ellis]

@iStudiez Wow! Honestly didn't think I'd get a reply. Good to know things are still in the works.

[Sebastiaan de With @sdw]

bike infrastructure in the Netherlands: we built a bike garage that look like an Apple Store!

bike infrastructure in California: enjoy the new suicide center lane on this highway overpass

[Clay Ellis @clay_ellis]

@ios_dev_alb I deleted derived data today

[Clay Ellis @clay_ellis]

@hrolnd You finally solved it. How can I buy you a drink? I owe you, good sir

[Clay Ellis @clay_ellis]

Here's a little shortcut to fix your bluetooth audio when the #iOS simulator turns your audio to 💩

https://t.co/FBMOGAPHwy

[Clay Ellis @clay_ellis]

This is an incredibly beautiful micro-interaction! Love it!

[Kasper Lahti @kasper_lahti]

Tried out transitioning a more menu into swipe actions in SwiftUI

[Clay Ellis @clay_ellis]

@briandstone @j_grieshaber One man’s treasure is everyone else’s trash 😅

[Clay Ellis @clay_ellis]

@JPEGuin Just “Formula”

[Clay Ellis @clay_ellis]

@chancegraham I thought @iAWriter had some features like that? I could be wrong though

[Peter Nixey @peternixey]

I'm in the top 2% of users on StackOverflow. My content there has been viewed by over 1.7M people. And it's unlikely I'll ever write anything there again.

Which may be a much bigger problem than it seems. Because it may be the canary in the mine of our collective knowledge.

A canary that signals a change in the airflow of knowledge: from human-human via machine, to human-machine only. Don’t pass human, don’t collect 200 virtual internet points along the way.

StackOverflow is *the* repository for programming Q&A. It has 100M users & saves man-years of time & wig-factories-worth of grey hair every single day.

It is driven by people like me who ask questions that other developers answer. Or vice-versa. Over 10 years I've asked 217 questions & answered 77. Those questions have been read by millions of developers & had tens of millions of views.

But since GPT4 it looks less & less likely any of that will happen; at least for me. Which will be bad for StackOverflow. But if I'm representative of other knowledge-workers then it presents a larger & more alarming problem for us as humans.

What happens when we stop pooling our knowledge with each other & instead pour it straight into The Machine? Where will our libraries be? How can we avoid total dependency on The Machine? What content do we even feed the next version of The Machine to train on?

When it comes time to train GPTx it risks drinking from a dry riverbed. Because programmers won't be asking many questions on StackOverflow. GPT4 will have answered them in private. So while GPT4 was trained on all of the questions asked before 2021 what will GPT6 train on?

This raises a more profound question. If this pattern replicates elsewhere & the direction of our collective knowledge alters from outward to humanity to inward into the machine then we are dependent on it in a way that supercedes all of our prior machine-dependencies.

Whether or not it "wants" to take over, the change in the nature of where information goes will mean that it takes over by default.

Like a fast-growing Covid variant, AI will become the dominant source of knowledge simply by virtue of growth. If we take the example of StackOverflow, that pool of human knowledge that used to belong to us - may be reduced down to a mere weighting inside the transformer.

Or, perhaps even more alarmingly, if we trust that the current GPT doesn't learn from its inputs, it may be lost altogether. Because if it doesn't remember what we talk about & we don't share it then where does the knowledge even go?

We already have an irreversible dependency on machines to store our knowledge. But at least we control it. We can extract it, duplicate it, go & store it in a vault in the Arctic (as Github has done).

So what happens next? I don't know, I only have questions.

None of which you'll find on StackOverflow.

(I write on AI from a technical and product perspective. If you find that interesting then please do follow me for more)

[Clay Ellis @clay_ellis]

@aureliawelde @BrotherMike17 Yikes

[Clay Ellis @clay_ellis]

@jamesrp13 I'm sorry, what-lython??

[Cory House @housecor]

Some teams struggle because there’s too much friction in making improvements.

If a dev has to create a ticket, sell management, size the task, and get it prioritized, they’re likely to just say "not worth it."

Solution: Welcome proactive improvements. Make them easy.

[Clay Ellis @clay_ellis]

The church's approach to critical thinking in a tweet

[Clay Ellis @clay_ellis]

@ronyfadel https://t.co/woXHJXAtpF