5 ms·
I feel like the weather app makes a lot of sense from a corporate politics point of view. A 1mb weather app would have a significantly less impressive pie char
by Verdex 6d ago
I feel like the weather app makes a lot of sense from a corporate politics point of view.
A 1mb weather app would have a significantly less impressive pie chart associated with it come "here are our improvements" presentation.
Also if times get tough and you're told to reduce headcount by 10%, who do you want to get rid of. Sally who knows the USB driver end to end or Todd who wrote the bloated 1gb weather app. (Don't feel bad for Todd, he knew what he was getting himself into.)
- Escapado 6d agoDid Todd just know or did his PO tell him to add telemetry tool number 24 while he was protesting and begged to be allowed to migrate to a newer rendering library but got shot down promptly because "KPI line must go up"? :)
- miroljub 6d ago[flagged]
- ldobre 6d agoAlso, showing the weather is a great excuse to ask permissions for the user location.
- swozey 6d agoI've been doing forest service stuff for a year with almost no signal and often no gps without antenna and it's incredible what asks for location permission to run. My amazon bought LEDs (15+, 3-5 diff types) all check location before I can connect them. I wind up waiting 30 seconds sometimes more to turn lights on. My generator and inverter have to phone home so that lags constantly. Also I've been shadowbanned from a bunch of social media sites and had problems with payment systems, etc because Starlink confuses companies tracking user locations to geoips etc. Won't even get into the apps that look downloaded and usable until you open them with no signal and they don't work before phoning home. I've been meaning to go through ALL my apps and delete everything I don't use, I haven't installed a new app in years. Then you have MacOS now that has the most "wtf" level permission prompts that make you think everything is phoning home or trying to access stuff on your network when it's just connecting bluetooth devices or something daily. I don't know how many games I've installed that now show up as having full screen or keyboard control permissions just to use input devices. I work on this stuff and can deduce what it's doing, especially after googling it, but "Stupidgame needs control of your system" is wild to someone who doesn't, I'm sure. I've been wondering if it's almost nefarious that they want to get people used to allowing these seemingly system wide controls to be given to.. everything, by hiding the security-ok things behind a giant red flag warning. Sorry went on a tangent. I miss specific permissions notifications I can trust. edit: Oh, my "fix" for most of this is fakegps and mocking my android systemwide gps location to whatever, if you go through this.
- nicman23 6d agoi prefer the macos mindset if not the actual OS
- swozey 6d agoI just looked and I think what I'm talking about, where they folded more specific permission callouts under a broad term "Full disk access" "local devices" etc used to be more granular before they updated that UI to match the iphone. If I got a jumpscare permission prompt on macos, I used to actually be concerned. Now they're all jumpscares for basic stuff. But I could be misremembering. I haven't liked any of the recent macos releases. I will begrudgingly install Golden Gate to hopefully fix my m1 max 64gb slowing ot a crawl with Tahoe.
- throwaway894345 6d agoUnrelatedly, I'm still trying to figure out why Apple requires me to unlock my phone to look at the weather. Is there some concern that someone could pick up my phone and learn what city it is in?
- freeplay 6d agoYou want to be able to launch apps without unlocking your phone? Slippery slope.
- throwaway894345 6d agoIf the app doesn't have any sensitive information, then yes. We already do this with home screen widgets today, so clearly there's no real barrier.
- zamalek 6d agoApps can have vulnerabilities (intentional or not). It's a contrived example, but maybe some weather app has a custom icon feature, which means you can then browse photos by opening it on the lock screen and going to that setting.
- throwaway894345 5d agoWidgets can't have vulnerabilities?
- zamalek 5d agoThey can, but scope and features increase surface area: their limited functionality intrinsically limits that.
- kevin_thibedeau 6d agoCamera app does it.
- afpx 6d agoThe mac tahoe weather system daemon is also sus
- zahlman 6d agoWhat does that have to do with its RAM consumption, though?
- xyst 6d agoIn this day and age, both Sally and Todd are expendable. Both have been silently training their replacement by feeding the data models. Replaced by LLM and an offshore contractor. CaPiTaLiSm, right?
- villish 6d agoThe list of professions made obsolete is very long. Why should programming be protected if AI in the future can make software better, safer, and cheaper?
- jm4 6d agoNot to mention, they have 1 GB of headroom in their back pocket if/when they need to make Windows more efficient. Quick rewrite of that app or just scrap it and they've saved months of optimization.
- throwaway27448 6d agoI think it's less about pie charts and more that weather apps can be very eyecandy-heavy. This sort of marketing works well for both consumers and board members.
- zahlman 6d ago1GB is space for almost half an hour of 5000kbps ("YouTube Premium") video. Just what kind of eye candy are we talking about here?
- monocasa 6d agoIt's also only 45 frames uncompressed at 4k. It's remarkably easy to hit that if your base assets are mostly raster rather than vector for a dynamic scene. Obviously, they should try harder, and this is an explanation rather than an excuse, but the graphics assets are mostly why.
- zahlman 6d agoWhy would you need that kind of resolution for a weather app? What are you even going to depict with all those pixels?
- monocasa 5d agoBecause people are looking at it on 4k screens.
- zahlman 5d agoI mean, I usually check the weather by putting "weather" into a search engine. And this will show me little SVG icons that take up a tiny fraction of my low-resolution screen and probably involve like less than a kilobyte of path description. And I think this looks perfectly fine and I can hardly even fathom why anyone would want it to be fancier than that. I think that even animating them would make the display actively worse.
- throwaway85825 6d agoBased on windows bloat Sally got fired because she was an old timer and cost to much so all the Sally's are gone and they're all Todd's now and windows is an unstable bloated mess.
- missingcolours 6d agoThe corporate dilemma between "I hired some less competent engineers and they're dragging the team down" and "I hired only highly capable engineers and now I have to give 10% of them bad reviews in stack ranking and later let them go"
- torginus 6d agoI don't think this is a real dilemma - people hell bent on avoiding work can get by without shipping a single line of code for years.
- nikanj 6d agoSally, obviously. Todd is much more likely to have a perfect haircut and immaculate fluency in corpotalk