divan

> What are we talking about exactly?

About your claim that ownership as a concept is black and white, and no middle ground should be allowed.

> I don't understand what's so complicated about this, or why anyone would argue against this.

It's hard to understand the world if you see things through a binary lens - no ownership vs full ownership, or total support vs outright rejection. A more useful framework is to see what people support, reject, and tolerate.

For example, I totally support open-source hardware and software, and would love to see more of it. But I also tolerate proprietary hardware and software stacks, for many reasons. I'm definitely not rejecting the concept of private companies making hardware that runs their proprietary software and taking control over decisions about what software should run on their hardware.

From your comments, I see that you also support what I support, but you're totally rejecting the idea of hardware that runs proprietary software or not allowing you to run your own. So these calls for the government to step in and force private companies to disallow that concept are something I definitely can't support.

Oh, so no specialized hardware? Just a general-purpose components for general computation tasks?

> a smartphone is ... a general computation device

Right, just a motherboard with CPU and memory put into small case, like in old good garage days.

Ownership is rarely absolute. It can be partial, segmented and with different degrees of control.

Think about music rights ownership - there are mechanical rights, performance rights, sync rights, derivative rights, etc. I'm not defending music industry ownership system, but it shows clearly that binary view of ownership is far from reality.

You own the flat, but you can't remove the wall. You may own the house, but you can't build a factory there due to zoning regulations. You can own electric car, but you can't put diesel fuel there.

I see that main disagreement here is whether phones are "general purpose computers" or not. I have no idea why anyone would call these ultra-packed cameras on steroids a "general purpose computer". Framed like this, this is a debate about OP demanding private companies to transform their product into something very different and urging governments to step in. And the thing is those products exists – Libreum 5, Ubuntu Phone or PinePhone phones, or already mentioned Maemo/MeeGo phones (N900/N9/N950). If they were a better product on the market, we would have them everywhere, but industry and market decided otherwise (PinePhone was discontinued just couple of weeks ago, sadly).

> There should be no middle ground.

Why?

Your smartwatch is probably more powerful than some of your past computers too. Same with your DSLR camera. Even your smart fridge. These are specialized hardware+software gadgets designed to a particular purpose, which is very different from being a development platform. Same with a phone.

> It should be possible to run Android on an iPhone and manufacturers should be required by law to provide enough technical support and documentation to make the development of new operating systems possible

As someone who enjoyed Linux phones like the Nokia N900/950 and would love to see those hacker-spirited devices again, statements like this sound more than naïve to me. I can acknowledge my own interests here (having control over how exactly the device I own runs), but I can also see the interests of phone manufacturers — protecting revenue streams, managing liability and regulatory risks, optimizing hardware–software integration, and so on. I don't see how my own interests here outweigh collective interests here.

I also don’t see Apple or Google as merely companies that assemble parts and selling us "hardware". The decades when hardware and software were two disconnected worlds are gone.

Reading technical documentation on things like secure enclaves, UWB chips, computational photography stack, HRTF tuning, unified memory, TrueDepth cameras, AWDL, etc., it feels very wrong to support claims like the OP makes. “Hardware I own” sounds like you bought a pan and demand the right to cook any food you want. But we’re not buying pans anymore — we’re buying airplanes that also happen to serve food.

Relevant (2016): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12477190

Ah, I didn't know that claude code has headless mode...

So any process on my computer could just start using Claude Code for their own purposes or what? o_O

Finally good captcha solving plugin.

That's cool, thanks for sharing! In my perfect finding I would see some primitives for infographic/charts/etc. This library is great for pendulums :) (currently watching your video on non-chaotic double pendulums and it's awesome!)

Will WTFPL work too?

https://choosealicense.com/licenses/wtfpl/

I used the "map is not a territory" to describe this context in the article about visual programming [0]. Code is a map, territory is the mental model of the problem domain the code is supposed to be solving.

But, as other commentators mentioned, LLMs are so much better on reading large codebases, that it even invalidates the whole idea of this post (visualizing codebase in 3D in a fashion similar how I would do it in my head). Which kinda changes the game – if "comprehending" complex codebase becomes an easy task, maybe we won't need to keep developers' mental models and the code in constant sync. (it's an open question)

[0] https://divan.dev/posts/visual_programming_go/

That might be true for large dev teams with an established culture. But a lot of development is happening in different settings - solo projects, small teams, weekend side-projects, personal tools crafting, quick POC coding, etc. Not all software is a complex product that needs to be sold and maintained. One thing that I always loved about being a developer is that you can create any custom piece of software you need for yourself – even if it's for a single-time task - and don't care about releasing/supporting corner cases/other users.

In almost all these cases, development process is a mix of coding & discovering, updating the mental model of the code on the go. It almost never starts with docs, spec or tests. Some projects are good for TDD, but some don't even need it.

And even for these use-cases, using AI coding agents changes the game here. Now it does really matter to first describe the idea, put it into spec, and verbalize everything in your head that you think will matter for the project.

Nowadays, the hottest programming language is English, indeed.

I'm searching badly for a similar tool (code-based animation renderer) but not focused on math, but rather on general-purpose infographic/charts/motion graphics. The traditional approach for that, of course, is to use After Effects/Davinci Fusion/Blender/Cavalry/etc., but since I've first tried PovRay back in the early 2000s and then tools like Manim, I can't stop thinking about a code/text-based motion graphics tool. It would shine in use with LLMs, of course, and while I see some new "ChatGPT-wrappers for Motion Graphics" pop up now and then, I don't need yet another chat to send me cloud-rendered videos in the Electron app. I want a templated code/language for the graphics and style I'll settle on to use with different data and be able to render it locally (or event automate) as much as I want.

In my recent tests I found it quite smart at analyzing bigger picture (i.e. "hey, test failing not because of that, but because of whole assumption has changed and let me rewrite this test from scratch". But it also got stuck few times "I can't edit file, I'm stuck, let me try completely differently". But the biggest difference so far is the communication style - it's a bit.. snarky? I.e. comments like "yeah, tests are failing - as I suspected". Why the f it suspected failing test on the project it sees for the first time? :D

> An imperfect language for imperfect developers

There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.

In 2015 I wrote an article "How to complain about Go" to mock this type of articles that completely miss the big picture and the real world impact of "imperfect" language. Glad it's still relevant :)

As many other people commented on similar projects, one of the issues of trying to use voice dictation instead of typing is the lack of real-time visual indication. When we write, we immediately see the text, which helps to keep the thought (especially in longer sentences/paragraphs). But with dictation, it either comes with a delay or only when dictation is over, and it doesn't feel as comfortable as writing. Tangentially, many people "think as they write" and dictation doesn't offer that experience.

I wonder if it changes with time for people who use dictation often.

Is Obsidian desktop app still an electron app?

Excited to see this step in the Flutter future. My biggest issue with using Flutter was deep dependence on Material or Cupertino widgets. In a way, it's cool to have all those widgets out of the box, but as soon as you want to create your own design system, it's a pain. Especially given, that Material/Cupertino is overly focused on mobile experience, and Flutter nowadays often used for desktop and web apps (with wasm being soon default renderer <3). There are only few well-maintained custom design systems for Flutter, and that's a shame.

This documents explains well the history of the choices made at the beginning and the current vision of the Flutter team.

I like that it's not mutually exclusive with normal Claude Code usage in terminal.

Question about Dashboard - I'm on subscription plan, and Dashboard shows - "Total Cost: $XX.YY". Is it somehow representitive towards how much credit I used in my plan, or it's just showing a costs it would take if I was using API instead?

sorry to be that person in the comments, but is there any video of how exactly it is expressive? the photo of the messy table doesn't really conveys the idea or explains how exactly this lamp on the robotic arm behaves.

Yes. What I was trying to say that people who live within those rules (and keep propagating/making them!) can't just live in the constant congitive dissonance state. They rationalize this state of the world, they tell stories (to themselves and to each other) to make sense of these rules, so it doesn't feel insane.

No, letter S in MCP is reserved for "Security")

I think all mainstream models are good at this. What is lacking is just a tooling to use projects/voice/llm to work on the simple text documents.

Important to understand that these are "absurdities" only when viewed from the angle of market economy and democratic society. For people living in Soviet Union this was just a "state of the world".

Communist values (or lack of values) shaped the political and social systems in which people were born and raised.

First we shape systems, then systems shape us.

I just want it to be able to read/edit text files. Coding agents can edit code, but for writing we're limited to copy-pasting dance.

I use projects for research purposes for articles/scripts/etc, and I would love to use chatgpt in voice mode to talk about the article I'm writing. Like "hey, read last paragraph from the article... let's elaborate on topic X... here what I would love to write - x,y,z - please improve the style and read it back to me... nice, add it as a next paragraph."

Flutter is amazing exactly because it was a response to the problem of creating modern cross-platform apps for the modern zoo of hardware. The text typesetting engine from the 80s is clearly not a good foundation for it.

It's probably safe to say that the majority of the dev workforce in the last 2 decades started their career with learning HTML/JS/CSS stack, and it's understandable why they like it. It doesn't make this stack any better for creating apps, no matter how many abstractions on top we place.