Author of A Window on Intelligence. Software engineer. Founder @veritula. Ex Apple. Translator of The Beginning of Infinity. I build tools for thinkers.
Chicago
Joined August 2012
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New homepage 🥳
dennishackethal.com
ALT Dennis Hackethal’s new homepage at dennishackethal.com
The future of software is malleability. Every OS should be malleable in the name of error correction.
Just imagine it: a free, local, Opus 5.5-level LLM on every device. Including your phone.
Like, imagine Siri was actually smart. So smart it could rewrite the software on your phone in real time.
That bug you found in the Music app? ‘Hey Siri, fix that.’
Don’t like the color of a button? ‘Hey Siri, change it to blue, and move it to the top of the screen.’
In exchange, Apple could somehow collect the best changes and release them as part of the next OS upgrade.
No more waiting for software updates to fix bugs. Everybody wins.
Dennis Hackethal retweeted
So, basically, 500 million Europeans expect 300 million Americans to protect them from 120 million Russians who can’t even defeat 40 million Ukrainians while those 500 million Europeans don’t even realize they are being conquered by 2 billion Muslims who claim they are being persecuted by 8 million Israelis. Is that about right?
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Dennis Hackethal retweeted
We’ve raised $1.3M from YC & Afore Capital so you never have to type or speak again.
Typing is slow. Talking into your computer is awkward. Subvocal fixes both
Our glasses give you the speed of speech without you making a sound or touching a keyboard.
It tracks your internal speech muscles with non-contact sensing and decodes silent, almost invisible mouthing into text at more than 200 words/min.
Pre-orders are now live at:
subvocal.co/preorder?utm_sou…
One of the best things you can do right now is use AI for productivity gains BEFORE the moochers come for them
(Translation: German politicians considering AI tax)
Dennis Hackethal retweeted
100%
Very well said.
Apple was and is supposed to be the king of saying NO.
Saying no is one of the most important things in good product design.
And they increasingly seem to become yes-people.
I’ll explain it
When you buy Apple, you're buying CRITERIA: the best experience for each task.
I don't want 50 options. I want the best one, already chosen.
A buffet gives you 50 dishes and no idea which ones are good. Pick wrong, and the bad meal is your fault
A Michelin-star restaurant is the opposite: a fixed, opinionated menu where every dish is great
Apple is supposed to be the Michelin restaurant
This MacBook Pro is a buffet: “use whatever input you like, best for the task or not.”
That's why we're upset
Because we can't blindly trust Apple's CRITERIA anymore
And that trust is the #1 reason Apple got to the top!
Dennis Hackethal retweeted
This is what Bill had to say:
“Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox, and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”
Xerox showed Steve Jobs the future of the computer for the right to buy $1 million of Apple stock. Ten years later it sued Apple for $150 million over what he saw.
In 1979, when Jobs was 24, Xerox's lab in Palo Alto showed him three things. He was so blinded by the first that he missed the other two, he said later.
The first was a screen of windows and icons run by a mouse. The others were networked computers and a new way of writing software.
In return for the visit, Apple let Xerox buy in before its 1980 IPO. Xerox put its own version, the Star, on sale in 1981. Apple's Macintosh followed in 1984.
In December 1989 Xerox sued, saying Apple had collected more than $100 million from the interface. In March 1990 a federal judge threw out most of the case. Copyright claims have a 3-year deadline, and the Mac had been out for almost 6.
In 1996, 17 years after the tour, Jobs said on camera for PBS that Xerox "could have owned the entire computer industry today."
Xerox Star, 1981: $16,595.
Apple Macintosh, 1984: $2,495.
Be honest. Did Jobs take the idea, or did Xerox give it away?
Work in progress but tell me this doesn’t look sexy. 🤯
Should I keep going? 🚀
What would you wanna see in Apple Music if it were rebuilt in 2026? 🎵
Dennis Hackethal retweeted
‼️ The git, curl and python3 in macOS still trust compromised eMudhra certificates, 11 days after Apple was told.
Anyone can recover their keys, so an attacker on your network could pose as GitHub and feed you code.
Researchers say macOS 27.2 even wiped fixes applied by hand.
Dennis Hackethal retweeted
Yeah, if you say, "hey AI, make me a game" then it's going to be unoriginal. If you have a very specific game in mind and you describe it to the AI in great detail, then test and iterate and test and iterate and test and...
Then you're doing game design, and simply using a tool.
I had Claude make me an Apple Music clone and it looks way better than the original.
Better lyrics view, better album view, better everything.
Should I drop some screenshots? 👀
Can’t believe I put up with Spotlight for so long.
This speed makes a HUGE difference.
Any action you repeat dozens or even hundreds of times a day has to be SNAPPY.
Spotlight would keep changing the result just before I pressed enter, causing me to open the wrong app.
Or it would just not load the result I needed.
No more of this nonsense. So far, Blink always gets it right.
I was tired of slow, bloated Spotlight.
Then it hit me: I didn’t have to wait for Apple to fix it. I could just have Claude whip up an alternative.
Meet Blink: results in under 17ms vs. up to 1,083ms for Spotlight. Free and open source.
github.com/dchacke/blink
Dennis Hackethal retweeted
I was tired of slow, bloated Spotlight.
Then it hit me: I didn’t have to wait for Apple to fix it. I could just have Claude whip up an alternative.
Meet Blink: results in under 17ms vs. up to 1,083ms for Spotlight. Free and open source.
github.com/dchacke/blink
“Should we all be allowed to go 200?”
Yes but not by government. Roads should be private. So it would be up to the owners and customers
I was tired of slow, bloated Spotlight.
Then it hit me: I didn’t have to wait for Apple to fix it. I could just have Claude whip up an alternative.
Meet Blink: results in under 17ms vs. up to 1,083ms for Spotlight. Free and open source.
github.com/dchacke/blink