Comment by simonw
14 hours ago
The vibes of starting a thread with "You've never met a more conceited asshole", followed by attacking my credibility with "you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about" and "I am supremely disappointed in your comments here" purely because I asked "what's the grift?".
It was mainly the "I am supremely disappointed in your comments here" thing that put me off, I didn't see how that was a reasonable response to what I had commented in this thread.
> "You've never met a more conceited asshole"
Again, you'd be hard-pressed to find an Apple engineer who has spent any in-person time with John who doesn't have a similar take.
> "you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about"
There is nothing in this thread, aside from your supposed "friend", that makes me believe you've had any direct contact with Apple employees who know anything about John's relationship with Apple. So, in this specific instance, I have no reason to believe you know what you are talking about.
Lastly, I'm not the one who pointed out any grift. My point was that John's relationship to Apple is complicated.
You are communicating with someone who helped build two of the most popular development tools of all time, and yet you continue to act like you are above us, poor HN commenters. I've offered to discuss things with you privately (which is the right thing to do, since I have no intention of hurting Apple), and you've ignored it. Anyone who has access to information and yet refuses to engage is not a journalist.
Would you still like me to email you? I don't have time for a conversation today (mainly because I'm not a journalist and have software I need to ship) but I can contact you if you think it would be productive.
I am more than happy to have a conversation. I am more than happy to share my experiences with John. I am more than happy to talk about some of the things we did at Apple (and MS) to "help" certain stories reach the right people. We definitely handled John differently than people like David Pogue or Jason Snell.
I'm also happy to show you a demo of my app (built without AI assistance) that Claude has repeatedly failed to replicate because it requires architectural knowledge that SOTA models still aren't able to turn into a comprehensive solution. That is very different from building a web browser from scratch.
If none of that interests you, then no, there is no need to reach out.