FractalHQ

How’d you do this? I’ve got an alarm entry at every 10th minute of every hour from manually doing this over the years

As much as I hate monopolies, I hate having to write apps for 5 platforms at once even more. If my app works on Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, Android, and Edge, and I have to jump through hoops and litter the code with if (isSafari) workarounds to get it working on iPhone, the last thing I want to do with the remainder of my time is start from scratch to fix all of the bugs or missing apis so Firefox can run it for 1% of users.

I understand the risk of a chrome monopoly, but boy do I feel a the conflict of interest when these conversations come up…

Firefox is such a pain to me as a web dev who does a lot of WebGL and Web Audio API work. Even CSS and SMIL animations can get funky. It’s not nearly as bad as Safari but it’s harder to swallow due to how small the user base is relative to the amount of time it sucks out of my life.

To me it seems like hollow virtue signaling to the FTC. It’s so bad. I’ve been pollyfilling and bug hunting a web app to fix and work around bugs / limitations / missing APIs in Safari for weeks and the result is an inferior experience.

I can _only_ learn top-down. Facts without context are much less interesting and much more difficult to internalize. The incentive to understand, inspired by said context, is a prerequisite to mustering the motivation needed to to truly learn with sustained focus without losing interest. My ADHD brain will stop cooperating otherwise, and I’ll find myself daydreaming against my will!

Muggle

Safari renderer is so bad though, every single complex smil animation I’ve ever built just broke into pieces on Safari.

Svelte is already so lean and provides so many QOL improvements to the whole JS/HTML/CSS experience itself that I haven’t found time to try out HTMX, but I’m keen to learn it. I imagine it would be great to stash in the armory for a rainy day. Unfortunately, my use cases almost always require way more firepower than your average website… so I’m not sure when that rainy day might come, but I dig the spirit and simplicity around HTMX.

I’m pretty sure the apps do a lot more now than they did on windows XT. I wouldn’t build with Electron over something like Tauri+Svelte but I also don’t mind waiting 1 second for hundreds of great extensions and lsps to load once for a 4 hour session.

I couldn’t agree more. Mdsvex was life changing when I discovered it: https://mdsvex.com

Can you not please? I enjoy coding and I don’t want to have to change careers again. Can you just automate something else like Congress or the people running the Taco Bell drive through?

Svelte Stores and connect api are a simpler and more powerful solution to this than any library I’ve ever used. I’m curious what you would recommend.

He’s usually right though. And when he is not, he’s one of the fastest to admit it.

I use my laptop everyday and leave it connected to power. Battery power is nice but rarely used.

Use Brave browser, they have their own search engine called Brave Search.

Use Tauri as an Electron alternative.

Brave! It’s privacy first chrome. Arc is also advertised as such, but isn’t open source so you have you take their word for it or reverse engineer it.

Sounds a lot like my experience with severe ADHD.

I almost kept scrolling before I saw “and Svelte”. Vercel hiring Rich Harris has been one of the biggest contributors to my quality of life in years.. Excited to try this out with Svelte 4 next week!!

They rebranded it into “console ninja”, with a more generous (and actually (extremely) useful) free tier for the extension. I can highly recommend it!

How in earth did they manage to make so many combinations..?

Nice now fix 3D transforms, SVG animations and clip-path or give me 200 hours of my life back. Safari rendering engine is a bug infested nightmare.

Yea but any web dev can learn Svelte in a weekend which is a huge advantage.

I’ve been making a living as a freelance Svelte dev for years now and never struggle to find work, but your point stands — job market share matters.

Hopefully (for devs, execs, and users sake) Svelte adoption will continue to rise!

Svelte is still the best by just about every metric that matters. The consensus seems to be clear that once you get a real taste of the Svelte DX, everything else is a downgrade.

It’s highly limited compared to the tiling in Vivaldi. You can only tile 2 tabs at a time. Arc also doesn’t seem to have horizontal tabs so you lose 10-20% of your screen space to the vertical tabs bar which gets annoying. I do like Arc but there are some basic things missing that make it hard to use.

I struggled with math in school. Once I started programming later in life, I found myself doing complex math intuitively, and eventually got into lower level 3D graphics with even more complex math.

If you were to turn some of my 3D scene management or fragment shader code into raw math, I would be pretty lost. But the ability to give variables intuitive names and structure things freely makes all the difference for me.

For the few years I’ve been on HN, I’ve always seen a lot of this. What makes you believe it’s becoming more common?

I find GPT-4 to be very useful almost daily. I can often spot hallucinations quickly, and they are otherwise easy enough to verify. If I can get a single new perspective or piece of relevant information from an interaction with it, then that is very valuable.

It would be significantly more useful if it were more grounded in reality though… I agree with you there.

I just wish Nintendo would sell the rights to Zelda, one of the most iconic franchises in gaming history, to a modern game company that won’t cripple it by forcing studios to cram it onto god damn potato. It’s fun, sure… but it’s so much worse than it could be.

I agree, and with over 15 years of experience with Live and a fruitful music career thanks to it, I have a deep respect for it. It’s hard to use anything else because of how many small, seemingly insignificant workflow features it has which add up quick in a session.

_But_ - man is it far behind the modern DAWS like Studio One and Bitwig in the low-level fundamentals like plug-in isolation, multithreading, and flexibility in terms of your ability to offload frozen tracks from RAM. This puts a bottleneck on the max size of a session before it becomes unstable and unusable. Even with 32GB RAM and a top-shelf CPU, my ability to finish a song grinds to a halt around the 100 track range. My songs can have 150 tracks with 1-20 plugins and 1-30 automation lanes per track by the time they are finished, and the number of hours I’ve lost from crashing or just waiting for it to respond could easily add up to months at this point.

And small things like the inability to know if a plug-in is the VST2 or VST3 version have been driving me nuts for over a decade.

My music is absurdly abnormal in terms of complexity though, and the vast majority of people will never encounter these problems. I worry, however, that the glacial pace of development likely due to the prehistoric tech stack at Ableton will prevent it from ever closing the growing gap made by the increasingly valuable feature sets of modern DAWs have been able to push out quickly and consistently.

Either way, Ableton Live is a great demonstration of the incredibly fine nuance involved in a good UX. They got a lot of little things right, and that alone has been the largest contributor to their success in the industry.