Doug Schaefer 🇨🇦

Tools developer at Apple focused on the Swift Package ecosystem and growing Swift everywhere, proudly from Ottawa, Canada.

[Swift Language @SwiftLang]

Training an LLM with Swift, with optimization techniques to match or exceed C performance. 🏎️ Plus Wasm updates, recently active Swift Evolution proposals, and a talk about the Temporal Swift SDK, in the latest edition of What’s New in Swift https://t.co/1l51xIb5EW

[bashbunni @sudobunni]

devs went from not wanting to talk to anyone to talking to their computers all day. hmmmmm

[Doug Schaefer 🇨🇦 @dougschaefer]

The world needs more Fareed.

[Fareed Zakaria @FareedZakaria]

At university graduation ceremonies this spring, commencement speakers have been getting booed for championing AI, given how the technology might threaten their job prospects.

In a commencement speech at Bard College last week, I delivered a more hopeful message — that humans can do essential things that computers simply can’t. Here are some highlights from that speech:

[Doug Schaefer 🇨🇦 @dougschaefer]

One of my favourites to play on guitar. Very sad song but Johnny is perfect. And thank you Trent for giving us this.

[Ladytron Fan Account @Lady_FanAccount]

"Hurt" is not an original by Johnny Cash. The song was written by Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) in 1994 for the album The Downward Spiral. Rick Rubin had to insist several times on Cash recording his version, at first Johnny found the idea completely insane because the original version is industrial and noisy. At 71, already very ill, almost blind and with trembling hands, Cash completely transformed the band.

The iconic video, directed by Mark Romanek, was filmed at the House of Cash (his own museum). June Carter Cash appears looking at him fondly, the video was shot in February 2003, a few months before she died (May) and Johnny himself (September).

Trent Reznor was so moved that he declared, "This song is not mine anymore." It is considered one of the best covers of all time.

[Ryan Fleury @rfleury]

Modern “AI” is prediction using a statistical model based on a huge dataset of preexisting human work. This, by definition, considers ~mean quality output as successful output. That isn’t a bad thing, nor is it useless, but that’s what it is.

Software has sucked for a long time. A small number of people really cared to make it great. They are statistical outliers.

[Doug Schaefer 🇨🇦 @dougschaefer]

@TheBreakdownAB FWIW, Alberta voted on equalization payments that aren't a real thing. Totally in character.

[Doug Schaefer 🇨🇦 @dougschaefer]

@htmx_org Structs were a late add to the language. Very much bolted on at the time.

[Doug Schaefer 🇨🇦 @dougschaefer]

@Devin_Heroux It was nuts. What a crowd! Wife and I were glad we went. Way louder than when Homan won the trials here, lol. But pretty close!

[Doug Schaefer 🇨🇦 @dougschaefer]

@lauriewired @gzcl3000 I learned from Bjarne's book. Printed on paper. Mind you that was in the stone ages of the 1990's...

[William Shatner @WilliamShatner]

Happy Victoria Day! (Canada)

[Doug Schaefer 🇨🇦 @dougschaefer]

@taigakanak @lauriewired Or a better C++. Interesting either way.

[Doug Schaefer 🇨🇦 @dougschaefer]

@lauriewired It would be interesting to see how Swift does in this test.

[Doug Schaefer 🇨🇦 @dougschaefer]

@harrisonlowman Honda hates electric cars. They've put zero effort into competing in the market and sales show it. This is just a simple alignment with their business strategy. Blame Trudeau and Ford for falling for it.

[Doug Schaefer 🇨🇦 @dougschaefer]

@ThePrimeagen You don't install on Mac. You can drag the app anywhere you want. It's just nice of them to make it easier to copy it to your Applications folder where other apps are.

[Doug Schaefer 🇨🇦 @dougschaefer]

@EclipseJavaIDE Don't forget his stint with CDT. Well deserved. Congrats Jeff!

[Fabrizio @ipla03]

My first impressions running Swift on Android

- Now that is released as officially stable setting it up is reasonably simple, the hardest step is writing the cradle config to build the Swift code with the app, but they provide examples for various use cases and LLMs can easily get this working

- By default the built library is very big and takes a lot to compile, I think it’s because it bundles the whole std lib into the library even stuff you don’t use, I haven’t checked yet what can be done to improve this but a basics android app with swift code weights 150mb

- swift-java works pretty good and saves you from the pain of writing raw JNI code for most use cases

- Weird thing I have noticed is that print() doesn’t output to logcat on android, the best solution is to use SwiftLog with an Android backend

[Doug Schaefer 🇨🇦 @dougschaefer]

@DimitrisSoudas That's over thinking it. We just voted for the grown up.

[Doug Schaefer 🇨🇦 @dougschaefer]

Good architecture is that feeling of joy working in a code base. Hard enough for us to understand let alone the models.

[Doug Schaefer 🇨🇦 @dougschaefer]

@acoyne How did Germany afford the high speed rail for ICE?