01HNNWZ0MV43FF

I'm going to lump together proprietary and for-profit software a little because I rarely see exceptions:

Proprietary / for-profit software is made that way, yes. There's no other way you can do it, given the incentive landscape. You take the huge base of FOSS code and spend as little effort as possible to build a thin little layer of moss on top. You respect the customers as little as possible to keep them around. You fix bugs as little as possible. You use other proprietary services that spy on your customers, like Sentry and Firebase, because privacy costs money.

Free / libre software has to compete on its merits. If a project isn't useful it doesn't grow. But not growing is okay. Some projects accrete over years, like a pile of stones forming a cairn. They don't need to squeeze money out of people to live because they aren't alive. They don't have to "eat".

I'm mixed on the Unix philosophy. It makes a lot of sense when you're building CLI tools that a hacker is going to plug together, because then your program is really a function in a programming environment that spans one or more entire computers. Tools like ripgrep, jq, curl, they're all great, I love them. A good function does one thing and does it well.

But just as often, I'm okay with huge software that does a lot. Web browser engines are evolving into universal GUI / IO frameworks and I'm trying to make peace with that. Systemd does a ton of stuff, but hell, so does the Linux kernel. I don't see an inherent problem with having an init system that acts like a monolith kernel for userspace. Microkernels are nifty but in the end we all ship our org charts. Maybe there's no need for microkernels if the real divide is between kernel programming and userspace programming. For the same reason, I haven't found any personal use for wasm, because wasm makes the most sense when you're connecting two pieces of code written by different teams at different times, like a GIMP plugin. I don't need wasm to plug my own code into my own code.

And for GUIs it's just been a fucking nightmare. 57 years since the Mother Of All Demos and it's still 10x easier to write `fn main()` and build a CLI program that runs on _every_ OS, rather than a GUI program that maybe runs on one OS, like it runs on Ubuntu 24.04 but not Ubuntu 22.04. What a fucking mess. GUIs don't compose, so every GUI project I've tried feels like I'm inventing the universe from scratch. It's fun but it's a stupid fucking waste of time.

Honestly browser engine frameworks like Electron and Tauri _are_ the Unix philosophy compromise. Making a GUI framework requires tens of thousands of lines of high-effort code made by experts. If a browser's one thing is "Be a GUI framework" then it allows your GUI app to just serve HTML and now it's a CLI app that runs anywhere without fucking with GTK 3 vs GTK 4 bullshit.

Sorry for the long rant. This stuff is all percolating in my head. I started with Visual Basic 6 and I still haven't seen GUIs improve since then. Phones have been a fucking step backwards, too. Everyone uses a phone but just like a mouse-and-keyboard player dominating gamepad players in a shooter game, I get a lot more done at a real desktop with a real pointing device.

I've seen this sentiment on the left. I think the author just phrased it a little oddly.

Sometimes called "pink capitalism" or "rainbow capitalism", where a company will show the rainbow pride flag for Pride Month, but not put any more substantial effort towards diversity, plurality, LGBTQ rights, etc.

I expect nothing from companies, and it's nice to see that virtue signal. If they're signalling, it means they think we haven't been exterminated yet. But I don't expect good works from anything for-profit. It's just business.

Edit: The author using the phrase "surveillance capitalism" is generally a left wing thing. I don't hear right-wingers rallying against capitalism (let's not even get into the weeds of defining "capitalism" the word) even when they happen to oppose surveillance

Today I Learned: https://github.com/witnessmenow/ESP32-Cheap-Yellow-Display

I heard the convincing argument that AI CSAM is bad because it means you can pass off real CSAM as "Oh maybe it's AI though". They don't want to let GenAI give cover for something bad.

So maybe the strong argument against NCII is the same - It doesn't matter how you got an image of someone, if it's non-consensual then it's wrong.

Hopefully cartoons can still be the exception since they're obviously not photographic in style. Political cartoons and satire would never be mistaken for photos.

Network effect is killer. "better" would include having more than 3 billion people already on it.

Maybe the EU or China will crack down on it. A single company shouldn't decide who gets to talk to half the world. If that company is American they will not tolerate it for long.

Personally DeltaChat is my new favorite Thing but it falls afoul of Zooko's Triangle - A WhatsApp number or POTS number is short because it's centrally controlled and you have to pay for each one. DeltaChat has public keys, so I have 20 of them, and nobody can control who gets one, but they're incredibly long... the QR codes are nightmares.

Buddy I'd join the right wingers if they weren't wrong about abortion, freedom of religion, gay rights, trans rights, economics, racism, public safety, environmentalism, cars...

> How should people make money? No idea, as in the "prosperous future", everything is replaced by AI.

If we taxed land ownership a la Georgism and then taxed negative externalities like pollution, we could give everyone UBI and probably kick back and take it easy for a bit.

Of course this would require a global democratic mandate bigger than the world's ever seen, so I'm not waiting up on it.

I don't exist and that's okay

I thought Tar had an extension to add an index, but I can't find it in the Wikipedia article. Maybe I dreamt it.

Isn't there still a problem that desalination produces brine, which is a pollutant?

I hate that. If I live in the country, my car spies on me. If I live in the city everyone spies on me. One value I agree with the libertarians on is, I just want to be left alone.

Plug-in hybrids are a wonderful middle point on the Pareto frontier.

Wikipedia lists the 3rd-gen Prius Prime at roughly 3,500 pounds curb weight, and the Tesla Model Y at 4,100-4,600 pounds, I assume depending on the battery it's equipped with.

The Prius Prime has 40+ miles of all-electric range, and it can reach highway speeds with the gas engine off. So your day-to-day driving is all electric, then you still have an engine for harsh winter days, power outages, and you have 600 miles EPA range on gas for sudden road trips.

People are really sleeping on hybrids. Even a used non-plug-in Prius will get 50 city and 50 highway MPG. No gas sedan can do that.

I did unplug my GPU to save 30 watts, but... 2 watts is equivalent to driving a Prius Prime 0.155 miles per day on battery power. So there's that

Yeah. Actually, as I read it, I'm not sure if the robot is running WebRTC or not (In my comment I assumed it was)

But yeah it would be much more predictable for everyone if the robot didn't use WebRTC or the fancy logging library, and there was a WebRTC shim on the laptop to get the visuals into a browser.

The longer I think about that 10 ms control loop, the more I hope they aren't running any WebRTC thing on the same hardware cores as the control loop.

Oof lol.

Sometimes I yearn for the Haskell or Idris style of programming where a dependency can do nothing harmful or stupid without me passing in permission.

Then I think about having to pass in thread handles and file handles to logging libraries. I don't know. It would be a cool option. There is probably a hack for `tracing` that would let me manage the logging thread myself.

Software is so complex these days. The funny solution of doing static-allocated C with no threads and no logging isn't gonna work for me. You aren't going to have WebRTC in from-scratch C.

Maybe they need something that works without root and IP space allocation. I like WireGuard and use it myself but it is a bit of an installation compared to binding a port

I use Caddy the same way. My web apps aren't allowed to think about TLS, they sit behind Caddy and I'm secure as long as I keep it updated

Here's a favorite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleshort

Had to do that to my furnace with a paper clip one winter when a sensor went out and I couldn't replace it for a couple days

I'm glad people are aware of it. 7 years I heard about The Scissor on SSC and wasn't sure if people would ever believe it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/

I was at a coffee shop once that was playing metal while my writing group was meeting there and I just thought they had excellent taste (it was not near closing time)

Could be interesting for finding winners and losers of a potential land value tax

His SDF probably puts out a depth buffer, so with some effort (shadows might be hard?) you can just mix it with traditional polygons. The same way raytracing and polygons mix in AAA games.

He's using the SDFs to fill a space sort of like Unreal's Nanite virtual geometry. Nanite also doesn't support general animation. They only recently added support for foliage. So you'd use SDF / Nanite for your "infinite detail" / kit-bashing individual pebbles all the way to the horizon, and then draw polygon characters and props on top of that.

In fact I was surprised to see that Nanite flipped from triangle supremacy to using voxels in their new foliage tech. So maybe the two technologies will converge. The guy who did the initial research for Nanite (his talk also cites Dreams ofc) said that voxels weren't practical. But I guess they hit the limits of what they can do with pixel-sized triangles.

Interesting can't wait for the local version

I suppose I should journal more too. Or aggregate my hacker News comments

Gosh I hope my house isn't inspection coverage

If I had a billion dollars I would shrimply role-play as an actual angel

Now ban everyone from buying them :P Tax the land

You can't loan more than you have, but fractional reserve means you can loan most of your assets while only keeping some liquid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

Even in educational games you have to go through a waterfall :)

C is such a Blub language lol

Optional is `Option<T>`

Zero-copy is `&T`

Mutation is `&mut T`

Diehard C programmers have Stockholm Syndrome for the language because they like to show off how they can be productive in a bad language. If they took a few months to learn C++ / Rust / C# / any language that has solved this, they'd have to admit that they staked a lot of their ego on a language that constantly makes them jump through hoops. Because they love showing that they're good hoop-jumpers.

But any noobie who's a year into programming will say "Oh cool, in those languages I don't have null pointer exceptions" and never learn C. Good!

Today's experts are the novices of 40 years ago, and today's novices will be the experts in 40 years.

C and C++ don't require static analysis, and it's difficult to set up, and so most of us slide down the incentive gradient of using C / C++ without any helpers except CMake and gdb.

Rust requires it, so the noobies use it, so in 40 years the experts will accept it.