Shish2k

I do wonder how long until the average consumer starts considering “VC-backed” as a curse rather than a blessing. Is there merit in advertising my small-scale tech services as “Not vc-backed. Our business model is to serve you, not to sell you out to our investors”?

If everybody used a sufficiently smart editor, and used sufficiently smart codegen, and we removed all the existing breakage from our tools and infrastructure, yes. I wish I lived in that world.

TBH my money is on that never happening, but maybe we will skip to an even higher level, where the canonical format for source code is the AST rather than plain text - indentation, braces, line length, all the things that humans care about but the computer doesn’t become render settings.

They thought that Windows 11 coming with a built-in keyboard shortcut to open LinkedIn was such a great idea, they had to have the same thing in their keyboards? -_-;;

I think I grok bzip2 fairly well, but I can’t figure out what your descriptive commands would actually do :S

> It has strong typing, not just hints in comments

Even for arrays?

In my personal experience of being around back then, postgres and python were still considered "technically better", but such a massive pain in the ass to install (especially on cheap shared hosting where it was often actually impossible to install) that only the most masochistic people would even try. I myself wrote a fastcgi implementation in PHP which would allow a web server which only supported php to call python under the hood and forward the inputs and outputs :P

It is kind of depressing that 25 years later, no other language has even attempted to compete with PHP in the “easy to get started on bargain-basement-tier shared web hosts” space D:

> I want to write a sql query I can deploy against test and prod, so I need to be able to parameterize table names

… are your “test" and “prod" different tables in the same database? :S

The zero-cost abstractions is a bit of a tangent, but connected:

Using Electron, running an extremely-optimised search algorithm and displaying results takes 200ms

Using Rust, running a hopelessly naieve algorithm takes 1s; but a slightly-optimised-and-still-very-clean algorithm (which is built out of zero-cost abstractions) takes 4ms

> react doing this very thing and calling it JSX

In PHP, “HTML" is string concatenation; in React, “HTML" is an HTML-flavoured bit of syntax sugar over HTML-generating functions (and you are still welcome to call the functions yourself, if you want your HTML-generation code to avoid looking like HTML). Aside from looking kind-of similar if you squint, I’d say the differences and pros and cons are fairly significant (For example the IMO worst thing about the PHP approach, the ease of shooting yourself in the foot with XSS holes, is a non-issue in JSX).

As a vaguely-related anecdote, I wrote a super-hacky PHP script in highschool 20 years ago, it gained some popularity based on being open-source and easy-to-install (PHP’s #1 strength for sure) - and to this day I am still spending a significant chunk of development time refactoring based on ideas that eg Typescript and Rust have out of the box (eg using PHPStan to emulate a language with typed arrays)

(I keep wishing that I could rewrite it in a “better” language, but there is no other language that is even in the same ballpark when it comes to “any random user can upload this .php file to any random web host and expect it to work”)

> it's hard to understand why anyone outside of the respective orgs would adopt

Personally I don’t care about the backend at all - I’m loving sapling just as an alternative git frontend with considerably better UX :)

Any git host, though the integrations for eg “show pull-request code-review status” are configured for github by default

> I think the world has moved on from facebook

The HN bubble has moved on for sure, but going by DAU/MAU (which isn’t perfect but is better than “I think”), facebook is still the biggest and is still growing

> In my opinion your life is very empty, full of materialism and selfishness

That’s a heck of a baseless assumption IMO. I’m not the OP, but I am in a similar position to them - in my case I have a sufficient amount of material stuff to be basically comfortable without excess; then beyond that I have friends, volunteering at community events, and working on open source projects, none of which feel particularly materialistic or selfish?

“Please don’t do it like a 4x4 truck, do it proper, like a bicycle” — there is some overlap between those things, but for people who are actually making full use of the former, the latter is not a useful suggestion

I did this for a few months, but I only did it because I was suffering from Burnout (officially diagnosed) - now that I’ve had a chance to reset, I’m back to actively seeking productive things to do with my time and will accept any work that isn’t actively soul-crushing

Yes this - I’ve been using python for decades, and been mostly fine (dropping down to ~zero packaging & deployment issues since I started putting all my services into docker images). But AI stuff? Somehow that manages to be a massive pain in the ass every single time

“write code clear enough that an LLM can look at it and create an accurate summary of the high-level goals” gives me similar vibes to “explain like I’m 5”, which seems like it could be an interesting metric (and my gut tells me that things will go horribly wrong as soon as somebody turns this metric into a target :D)

A lawyer commenting on the game industry (which is largely copying the Silicon Valley business model) has an excellent explanation of these cycles, and why it is that the industry is simultaneously reporting record profits and mass layoffs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-653Z1val8s

tl;dw (in my own words): investors like it when you have extreme hiring during the good times, and they like it when you have extreme cutbacks during the bad times. Investors don’t like slow and steady growth.

Interestingly, Nintendo quite firmly rejects the Silicon Valley approach, sticking firmly with the slow & steady - and while the rest of the games industry was doing layoffs, Nintendo gave all their employees 10% raises.

I've sworn in front of a FAANG CTO who was I think 5 or 6 levels above me in the management chain at the time. Nobody batted an eyelid.

http://stestagg.github.io/dashcast/ allows you to display arbitrary URLs on your device. From my experience doing so is built on a pile of hacks (it’s not actually casting an arbitrary URL, it’s casting the registered-with-google dashcast App ID, and then the dashcast app loads an arbirary URL inside it), but the end result mostly works

Back when they were in the “acquire users” phase (when all of this innovation was happening) the UX was much better. Now they have acquired users and are in the “exctract value” stage it’s all going to hell ;(

> still alive and well

Last time I checked user numbers were both steadily in decline, and small in absolute terms (top 10 IRC networks combined have ~500k users - compare to eg discord with 150 million users. There are individual discord servers with larger user numbers than the entire world of IRC)

> survived takeover attempts

Didn’t the takeover succeed, and then all the users migrated to a different server? I guess if you’re saying “IRC as an abstract concept survived the takeover of an individual network” then sure that happened.

> got a shiny new protocol spec with modern features

Perhaps I’m reading this chart wrong, but checking the IRCv3 feature support page, features that I would consider “modern by 80’s standards, table stakes by 90’s standards” (eg account registration, chat history) are still in the “draft” stage and not supported by libera.chat. Features from the 2000’s (eg mobile notifications) aren’t even being drafted?

If interoperable protocols really drove progress, Discord wouldn’t have attracted more users in 6 months than IRC did in 30 years :P

> if we had interoperability we would have had competition and after 30 years we’d see 30 years of progress

Counterpoint: IRC

I’ve been using it for a while, primarily to get all the benefits of the mercurial UX while still using github as a backend, but yes it also makes the stacked-diff workflow[0] really nice thanks to features like “absorb” which will smartly amend changes to a branch (eg if your branch contains one commit to add a server and another commit to add a client, you make changes to both files, then run “absorb”, your server changes will be amended to the server commit and client changes are amended to the client commit) :)

[0] Rather than a PR containing three commits “Add server” -> “Add client” -> “fix server”, it is encouraged to submit a PR of “Add server (v2)” -> “Add client” (with the original buggy “Add server (v1)” still visible in the code-review tool, so that you can see what changed in v1 vs v2, while what gets merged into the master branch is only the final bug-free v2)

That’s one of the things Matter is supposed to help with - part of the spec is that all devices need to have a local-only / no-cloud / no proprietary app option

> That seems all wrong, but maybe it makes sense

<spoilers>It is wrong by the original story, but Remake doesn’t follow the original story - it is more along the lines of “what if sepiroth projected himself back in time to mess with the timeline and ensure that his original plan succeeds?”. Most of Part 1 features weird ghost things which block any attempt to stray from the original timeline, but they die at the end of Part 1, so I’m expecting Part 2 to go far further off the rails</spoilers>

Around 2008 I was indeed running my own XMPP server for a while. I didn’t give up on it because Google was temporarily-xmpp-compatible-and-then-not though - I gave up on it because all of the apps were terrible :P

If you’re only thinking about it for long enough to come up with a single hypothesis, and then confidently declaring that you have the correct answer, I’d suggest maybe thinking about it for longer than a moment :)

If I change a function signature, then my code is fine - but all the other files which import and use my function will break