chaosharmonic

Can you load custom OS images onto them, or is this the same situation as with bootloaders on most Android devices?

Not that I'd want it actively connecting to the Internet either way, but if I could run something more stripped-down than an OEM stock image it would... almost make a smart TV attractive?

The bigger market in this instance is "mobile devices," of which iOS accounts for nearly 60% of users in the US.

It's not nearly as aggressive of a split as MS/everyone else, but being the larger side of a duopoly a lot of vendors don't really have the choice to just ignore them, and meanwhile their users are subjected to this.

The comparison also starts looking a lot closer when you consider the way it impacts web development as a profession that the same ~60% can't choose a browser other than Safari in any sense that has practical meaning.

It's really just that network effect is a feature, especially on a communication platform.

Personally, somewhere on my project backlog is a plan to set up a personal Matrix server for this exact reason, as most of the public ones I've found stop just short of actually supporting bridging for any Meta platforms yet.

(And even if they did, E2E bridging is still WIP at the spec level anyway if memory serves, which would mean still having to roll my own for the time being... Because naturally, if I'm concerned enough about my dependence on other people's cloud services, or their harvesting of my data, to consider going to lengths like these, then I'm obviously not just going to just wantonly funnel a collection of DMs spanning about half my lifetime through a third party's servers.)

Yeah, Meta will probably die like AOL, which is fitting since (at least in a rhetorical sense) it's also mostly lived like AOL.

Can you expand a bit on the perspective shift before and after picking up Rails? Asking as a full-stack JavaScript dev who recently started branching down this path myself.

One thing in particular that it's still really hard to get used to is keeping track of a whole discrete set of framework conventions while also making a first meaningful dive into Ruby to begin with. It's nice not having to, say, implement logins myself, but it's still a little mystifying how indistinguishable from magic that approach makes things looking at it from the outside. (But then again I guess when I first picked up JavaScript I wasn't also concurrently learning React or Express...)

Deno uses SWC under the hood, so a large chunk of its TypeScript support is already coming from upstream.

This is tangential (and just an observation on poking around their homepage to find out what fwb.help is), but if landing pages are going to swing back toward having 90s-styled tickers, then is there a reason we don't just bring back the <marquee> tag in some form? (Or standardize a modern equivalent, like <ticker> or something?)

Asking as someone who actually used these in my nascent dabblings in HTML and is really confused that modern webdev has moved to replacing them all with non-semantic (and manually-styled) <div> tags. I'm sure there's a reason that I missed sometime between my junior high message board days and when I actually picked this up as a profession, but whenever I get an immediate glance at one it's always kind of seemed like kind of a regression. (At the least, having a dedicated standard for this again would allow for element-specific CSS options, like what <li> has for instance.)

Except, their model is also to ship an AUR helper out of the box, despite the fact that holding back distro packages compared to upstream actively breaks AUR ones that depend on those in the core Arch repo.

If they bothered to do the same thing with the AUR that they're doing with the upstream Arch packages, it'd be one thing. But as is, basically they're claiming that their design keeps the experience "stable" despite the fact that this same decision directly causes other parts of the experience to become unstable.

That's also a feedback loop though, that exists in part specifically because of how easy and common patent trolling has been. They have to have patents over stupid trivial things because if they don't register these someone else will, and then suddenly it's an even bigger waste of time and money for everyone involved.

There's a reason orgs like the Alliance for Open Media -- a Google-led initiative -- use licensing that explicitly grants you use of the patents owned by member orgs, but also explicitly revoke those if you sue any of them over a patent claim.

If it makes you feel any better about it, that tweet thread is from 2020, and the actual creator of the protocol itself hasn't worked there in a day to day capacity since 2017.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen

A 6 figure sum did hold up in actual court though -- it initially landed there a few months before he died, and was finalized a few months after. So from the perspective of someone watching this at the time, it's still really not that ridiculous of a worry.

> Again, though: the 2 million dollar figure is highly implausible. Prosecutors could have argued for it (they can argue anything they want), but it's hard to see them getting it for a non-remunerative crime that involved publishing academic journal articles.

Actually this ran in parallel with the tail end of the Jammie Thomas-Rasset lawsuit, in which the various damage figures thrown around for sharing two albums' worth of stale, degraded-quality top-40 songs did include one in the seven-figure range.

^ further, there's the fact that distributions (and the various parts therein) frequently duplicate one another's work in the name of taking different approaches at the same problem, and usually the solutions that become more mainstream are the ones that several of them have collectively settled on.

Android has a similar, if more centralized feedback loop: AOSP drops, device makers build out customizations on top of it, Google adopts some of these features upstream (whether by building new implementations or merging contributions from vendors), and then those vendors go on to building the next differentiating thing now that they don't have to dedicate those resources to individually maintaining stylus support/multiwindow/notification badges/whatever.

> Hinge, OKCupid, POF, Match

All of these are owned by Match Group, the same parent company as Tinder.

Tbf it's a tangibly more meaningful problem with people who are actually Senators, aren't up for reelection every 2 years, and are in a chamber that's disproportionately weighted toward backwaters by design (and not just as a function of the redistricting process).

Pelosi is a Representative, so none of those things are true here.

I've been salivating at the thought of something like this too, but the whole module system being built around USB4 would be kind of a problem.

Really I'm just waiting for host support to trickle out to chipsets other than those by the vendors who wrote the Thunderbolt spec it was built around.

But on a similar note, personally I'd be even more interested in a board that's just a USB4 hub instead of even having its own internals. Given the moddable-on-purpose nature of them, it would enable a whole new range of capabilities if they could also extend other devices, especially if (I hope when?) they branch out to other form factors.

P.S. I'm typing this comment on one right now -- Batch 5 ^.^

Eh. Sometimes there are legitimate technical wins even for things that are otherwise problematic.

The TMo/Sprint merger has had issues, for instance, and I personally have been less favorable to it as time went on, but it didn't mean I wasn't excited at the time to see one more death knell for CDMA.

Also Nvidia has been pretty open-source friendly with their ARM platforms in addition to their being pretty powerful in their own right, and that doesn't have to be mutually exclusive with the concerns it would raise if they controlled the whole ecosystem of ARM platforms.

If you don't mind waiting until near-future for support for devices to actually support these, the group that's building out the Matter spec just confirmed yesterday[0] they're also working on casting functionality, and for audio in particular the Bluetooth ecosystem is slowly inching toward LE Audio.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/9/22824559/matter-tv-stream...

> (perhaps not legally)

Do you have a source on that? The individual details might vary, but generally speaking the Google Fonts repo is made up of permissively-licensed fonts. [0]

[0] https://github.com/google/fonts#license

During the Napster era Courtney Love made a similar argument that record labels are the real pirates. [0]

https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

The website also has no screenshots and is advertising a private beta, so we have no idea how they've butchered Winamp either.

As a developer with an arts background (studied music, happened into tech work after college through years of mostly self-taught hobbyist tendencies) I'd agree that the design of these tests themselves is a factor that's thoroughly understated.

Timed algo challenges encompass a slew of antipatterns in terms of how good code is actually written and shipped. To begin with, pitting someone against a clock and hidden test cases (and a foreign editor) is actively optimizing against solutions that are readable to other human beings -- or to the person writing them, a year from now. The nature of running them in a browser means that it can't evaluate a person's capacity to actually use tools outside of core language functionality. Never mind that building the entire exercise around predetermined test cases precludes any way to gauge whether the person taking it has an understanding of writing tests.

And that's assuming your test environment doesn't add obnoxious and arbitrary restrictions of its own. Like telling you that using documentation is cheating. (Btw imagine listening for ctrl+t here, but not ctrl+n.) Or offering you "the language of your choice," but then throwing API call exercises at you while limiting your choice of JavaScript runtimes to a bare installation of Node -- the only one still in active development, out of a list that also includes every browser you would use to actually access the test -- that doesn't support Fetch.

See also: "you don't have enough experience," one which I most recently heard myself after four interviews and a technical assessment, in which my (passing) solution included a bugfix to the test itself.

It's also great for scaffolding CRUD sites. I used it a while ago on a MERN stack project in order to loop over a directory of game files -- Stepmania simfiles if anyone's wondering -- cleaning them up, parsing their metadata, and then POSTing it to my Express server. While I didn't avail myself of its CSV/YAML/etc parsing (JSON was a builtin and is now a third-party library), the stdlib's walk function made this generally painless.

And to top it off there's yet another bonus to this approach: having Fetch included out of the box enabled me to mock out what eventually became my frontend requests, by running them headlessly and worrying about the form logic later.

I haven't actually gotten to using TypeScript with it personally (it's among a few things built into Deno that I've been meaning to try now that I can run them with zero config), but when writing JS I've found myself reaching for it in some of the same scenarios I (anecdotally) see people point to for Python -- bulk file manipulation, scraping, programmatic requests, etc.

I personally used to use Tetris for distraction -- or at least try to, until eventually realizing that I could do lines on autopilot without actually clearing my head in the first place.

Given that timeline and their years of existing production history with Thunderbolt, Intel could also feasibly beat both of them to shipping USB4 on a graphics card.

This is kind of an aside, but can mods edit links the way they can post titles?

This is routing to a plain HTTP URL for some reason despite a valid HTTPS one existing.

I'm also going to throw my own gripe here: applicant tracking platforms that require you to set up logins in order to apply for a job.

There's a lot about typical application processes that's just... kind of obnoxious. Making people manually correct the bad parsing your tracker does on uploading your resume? That's clunky and annoying, and a failure to respect your applicants' time. Making people beg for a job by writing up a 500 word essay about what excites you about them specifically, along with their opinions about puppies just so that you know it was personally crafted? (And yes, I've seen that specifically.) That's kind of demeaning, and a failure to respect your applicants' time.

But requiring that they create a discrete user account, for something they're effectively going to interact with once, that in all likelihood is using a recycled login and going to be forgotten in a week? That's on a completely separate level -- it's a failure to respect your applicants' security, by pointlessly adding to the risk that their user credentials are going to show up on Have I Been Pwned someday, and it's just irresponsible.

Nintendo is arguably a weird example though -- in that they're a stellar game studio, a decent hardware vendor, and an awful business.

They can survive on less powerful consoles, and historically have especially in the era before indies blew up, in large part because they sell them pretty much entirely off first-party titles anyway. Even as of this year (Wikipedia's stats on this were last updated 3/31), the top-selling third-party release for Switch is ranked 15 overall. [0] That game, Monster Hunter Rise, sold less than a remake of Pokemon Yellow, ports of multiple Wii U titles -- namely New Super Mario Bros. U and Mario Kart 8 (which is incidentally at the top of the list), Ring Fit Adventure -- a game that's only available via physical copies because it requires specialized hardware and has still repeatedly sold out, and whatever the hell you want to call the travesty that was Super Mario 3D All-Stars. (I'll get back to that one.)

As a hardware company, they're all over the place. They experiment a lot, particularly with control schemes, but some (Wii, DS) execute better than others (Wii U) and not all of them are the best quality. The Switch is a marvel, conceptually, but the Joy-Cons have well-documented drift issues, and the Pro Controller has the worst D-Pad I've ever used despite being from the company that invented those. Its heyday included a pad that seemed to be built for comic book characters (6-arm Spider-Man and Professor X both come to mind), and while the GameCube pad is one of their better-designed ones overall, I started to understand Smash players' hand issues the moment I tried using it for Tetris. Meanwhile it took a literal plague for them to stop being the only vendor since Microsoft, with the original X-Box, not to include Ethernet.

Which brings me to Nintendo as a company. The kind whose stated solution for online when demoing Smash Ultimate was "lol hope you've bought our $30 wired adapter!" (And let's note, refusing to ship with this has made their already-dodgy online worse, at scale.) The one that would shut down Smash tournaments for using emulators on a 20-year-old game to enable online play during a plague, as if that same crowd wouldn't 100% just buy Super Smash Bros. Melee for the Nintendo GameCube again if they just gave it an actual re-release on a modern console. The company that, when it does port older titles, typically just ships lightly-retooled versions of them and proceeds to charge the full price of a modern AAA. The publisher that took Super Mario 64, one of the most iconic games it's ever released, for its 25th anniversary, and not only shipped a barebones port (of this and two other titles), but actively enabled scalpers by giving it a release so limited that they de-listed the digital version after six months.

As someone who enjoys a number of their games I totally see what you mean, but getting legitimate access to those titles involves a bunch of compromises I wouldn't generally have to make with other platforms and/or studios. As much as I don't exactly wish for consoles to become a duopoly again, a part of me really wonders what it would be like if Nintendo had gone the way of Sega.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Nintendo_...

Hey there -- do you have English-language versions of these job posts?