For the past month I’ve been working on a creative / VFX / 3D tool that connects Apple devices into an all-in one node editor: https://subjectivedesigner.com/
With it, you can build interactive experiences, connect device sensors, compose shaders with AI models, orchestrate real-time data flows, and create projects that span across the entire Apple ecosystem.
I’m posting about it regularly on social media and you can see some of it here: https://x.com/sxpstudio
(Though it’s still early and most content is on socials thus far).
It’s done fully in SwiftUI + metal and also a good occasion to ramp up on agentic-powered software engineering. So far it’s been a lot of fun and working really great for me. And to be clear I’m absolutely not talking about vibe coding :-)
In an ideal world, people would be implementing UI/UX accessibility in the first place, and a lot of those problems would be solved in the first place.
But one can also hope that having the motivation to get agents running on those things could actually bring a lot of accessibility features to newer apps.
The last time I can remember a collaboration between Valve and Apple was for the SteamVR support on macOS back in 2016. Sadly it fell apart a year(-ish) after that.
But… one can dream!
At this point, it’s clear these sort of measures will go through, if not now but in some foreseeable future. What would be our best bet moving forward? Moving to signal/telegram?
Signal is centralized. So this company operating in EU, under EU laws, will have to do the scanning too.
How they implement it however and when and if at all remains to be seen.
All maybe they will not and EU will block signal.
Maybe they will allow you install apk and Google will block installing from apks directly, basically forcing companies to do the scanning.
And if everybody will do the scanning, maybe they will be sending all of this data to the giant EU server then that will look for 'problematic citizens' like in minority report.
Who knows, but it seems like running your own private chat for your own and your family and friends will be the only way to have some privacy in a few years.
Words are just words as far as I know but the prospect of leaving the EU for Signal would really send a strong message to all those who still believe that the EU is better in terms of privacy than the US.
As far as I am concerned this is the nail in the coffin for the EU privacy advocates/ evangelists.
They have the same jurisdiction problem as Signal. So does Delta Chat, Matrix which were mentioned in another response here.
From a practical side, if the client and server are open source then the project is survivable even if the supporting organization is wiped out. For now users don't demand it nor do they understand it. At minimum, the clients must be open source and buildable, all encryption must happen on the user's device and there should be some control over the end server connections. It is also critical that there are near foolproof workarounds for tunneling the traffic in severely locked down countries like China. This is one of the big problems with requiring a phone number, for example. If users in China can't use a communications tool then it's bullshit.
Some projects like Delta Chat are criticized for one reason while the critics take at face value unverifiable claims from other projects. Delta Chat checks a lot of boxes along with user control and deployment of servers.
SimpleX is a good concept but I'm not sure how it can scale -- which is a detail that shouldn't be ignored. How Signal expects to continue with no visible revenue source is another good question.
XMPP should not be written off either. If I had to bet on a protocol having users a decade from now, that's the one. AI coding agents are going to rapidly iterate on improving the front end stuff. With all of the privacy busting age verification coming from the US, I'd be willing to bet the replacement for Discord will be something XMPP based.
On one side the EU funded open source projects to try to break away from the US tech giants, while passing laws to kneecap their own tiny open source alternatives (Cyber Resilience Act etc.) If the US & the EU wants to exist in the next century they need to be going the opposite direction. It was bad enough that western tech companies built China's great firewall and assisted authoritarian regimes elsewhere.
Most end users don't understand that keeping communications secure is not a given, it is really expensive and difficult. Adding wacky, difficult, very expensive or impossible to follow requirements is the fingerprint of EU bureaucracy and not just unwelcome but very dangerous.
For the EU Elon haters -- with the growth of Starlink, Elon Musk or whoever controls SpaceX is going to have a deep view of global internet communications in the years ahead. That will include an ability to block, filter, and allow things either they or those who control Starlink choose. Any regulation which weakens or cripples the security of internet communications is ceding power to that entity, whoever it may be.
Yes I believe one way to see what is happening is in fact our own mistake.
We thought we could prevent those law of being signed but it was very naive.
The only way you fight this is by moving forward and faster than them. Because their eternal weakness is that they are slow and somehow stupid.
But tech oriented people got pretty lazy in the last 2 decades:
- We let ISPs be the only gatekeeper of the Internet
- We let big tech dominate the mobile OS space
- We embrassed the Cloud and SaaS (not your computer)
These 3 things made us sitting duck to any authoritarian government and now we pretend to be surprised we are getting shot.
Some decentralized platform with federation abilities. Delta Chat seems promising, but does not support forward secrecy. It is quite interestingly based on plain old email!
Maybe it’s just me but I wonder why western countries don’t implement noise limits for vehicles with sirens in residential areas (fire trucks, police, ambulance etc.).
It always felt to me unnecessarily loud.
I don't now where you live, but there seam to be drastic differences between countries. These vehicle do have an in-city and out-city loudness. Also here they tend to have the siren off most of the time and only turn them on immediately before an intersection.
Funnily enough, I got into trouble in Korea (Jeju to be specific) because of this. I had just stopped at a red light (huge intersection), and I saw a police car get behind me, they had their lights on and put on the sirens.
In my home country (France), lights mean emergency, sound means "MOVE ITS URGENT" (and they generally ONLY use sirens when it is REALLY urgent). So when they started the siren, I put my warning lights on and moved slowly through the red light and to the outside of the road (I did not continue moving).
The guy ripped me a new one in Korean, but then I explained that I thought it was urgent because we were all stopped and they put the sound on so I moved out of the way in the safest way I could and even stopped. He calmed down eventually.
Apparently, it's normal in Korea for police cars to 1) always have the lights on and 2) just randomly blast the sirens going about their day.
I live in Paris, France and it’s so loud (but people here don’t really respect emergency vehicle so it could be part of why it’s so loud). In contrast, I spent a month in Tokyo Japan; and even though I was near a police station, it was nowhere near the sound level of what we have here. Curious what other countries you have in mind?
They’ve made them louder and louder over the years. That’s because cars have improved soundproofing to keep out the road noise of the tires against asphalt. But that also means it’s harder for drivers to hear sirens. Plus sound systems have gotten louder (in some cases almost drowning out sirens for people outside the vehicle as well as inside!)
TLDR: arms race against audibility for drivers, with residents’ sanity as the casualties.
Your points make sense, I didn’t think about it that way. I wish there was a standard to override nearby vehicles with radio / audio to signal the presence of the emergency ones, but probably not happening anytime soon…
Maybe another future win for self driving cars that can be more aware of those things and smooth out traffic
Starting September 1st, I’m freeing up time for select freelance work & collaboration on Apple Vision Pro and other XR platforms.
From helping build the visionOS platform back in 2016 to publishing several immersive apps, I bring hands-on expertise across the stack — from concept to launch.
Available for:
- Early concept & rapid prototyping
- 3D interaction design, environments and visual effects
- End-to-end native app development (No Unity)
- Strategic, product & technical review
Though I usually work solo, I'm also part of a broader collective of people consisting of XR devs & 3D artists that can help scale for more ambitious projects.
Back when Meta was still called Facebook, I was in a spot where I had a few offers (including Meta) and the reason why I picked it was the following:
- cool project that is somewhat not related to shady stuff (Oculus)
- cool people I knew there
- I got down-leveled, so money was just a small % bump to my previous salary
I ended up quitting after less than a year due to said toxic culture and a bunch of other reasons.
Meta employees had (has?) this little stat on your profile page that gives you a title based on how long you were there. Staying 4 years gave you the title of "Mercenary". I think it speaks by itself :-)
Honestly speaking, some people actually thrive in the Meta culture and end up making bank with repeated promotions, but they are also clearly able to abstract the ethical side of things to focus on maximizing impact at all cost.
Last year I quickly built then released an experimental mixed reality horror game for Apple VisionPro: https://pulsargeist.com. It was a lot of fun and people actually liked the early prototypes of it. The game ended up completely tanking on VisionPro. Most people are on Meta Quest anyway so I'm now trying to re-implement the whole thing with Godot for Quest.
It's been a lot of fun but Meta HorizonOS (or whatever) is such a poorer dev experience... Anyway I'm now trying to rebuild the live environment mesh reconstruction feature that doesn't exist while encountering first limitations with Godot... Hopefully it will be ready in a couple months!
If this whole thing got you curious you can watch a technical talk I made about this game at the Letsvision conference in Shanghai, CN. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYFH2hiRNqk
...and if social media doesn't somehow destroy your soul, you can follow me here: https://x.com/sxpstudio
When Trump dumped his support for NATO in Europe, everyone was looking at France to shield them and deter attacks. I was wondering if other EU countries were reasonably close to building a bomb and I found this question.
For the past month I’ve been working on a creative / VFX / 3D tool that connects Apple devices into an all-in one node editor: https://subjectivedesigner.com/
With it, you can build interactive experiences, connect device sensors, compose shaders with AI models, orchestrate real-time data flows, and create projects that span across the entire Apple ecosystem. I’m posting about it regularly on social media and you can see some of it here: https://x.com/sxpstudio (Though it’s still early and most content is on socials thus far).
It’s done fully in SwiftUI + metal and also a good occasion to ramp up on agentic-powered software engineering. So far it’s been a lot of fun and working really great for me. And to be clear I’m absolutely not talking about vibe coding :-)
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