gyulai

So, the advantages of physical media are much touted these days, but all the actual physical media we have are yesteryear's technology, and each come with their own unique problems, plus there is the problem of waste. Why isn't a new physical format taking hold?

Something like Bandcamp-style downloads, which you put on a micro SD card. You put the card in a 3d-printable piece of plastic, resembling a cassette case. When you buy the download, the band sends you a printed piece of paper (the inlay for the cassette case thing) saying “limited edition run #1, Sequence Number 465/2000; thanks for your support”. If you want to get fancy, maybe record the transaction in some kind of ledger; perhaps put the buyer's name on the band webpage as a patron.

For the software, perhaps there could be something open source based on hardware like the anbernic rg355xxsp and similar devices (multipurpose, portable, hackable by design, …)

It would take very little to get it established: A critical mass of bands in some genre getting together, their fans getting on board, and things spreading from there.

> Here's someone trying [...] don't complain when someone tries doing exactly that.

From this site, we have no indication that any actual person is putting any kind of good-faith effort towards trying any actual thing.

All we know is that a bunch of marketers are trying to find out: Given a certain amount of marketing effort, how many people can we sign up to a mailing list, and how many people can we get to pay a $99 reservation fee, if the product proposition is: You'll get a slick-looking "Developer-Terminal" (specifics to be determined) for $1.999. -- Based on that, they will decide whether they will lift a finger to figure out what the product should actually be, let alone put any resources towards developing it.

That's where the negativity comes from. They are eroding people's good will. Good will that is sorely needed when actual companies make actual products and need actual consumers to pay attention to actual product launches.

I think, the lesson learned from › Python v. R ‹ is that people prefer doing data science in a general purpose language that is also okay-ish for data science over a language that's purpose-built for data science but suffers from diseconomies. Specifically: Imagine a new database or something like that has just come out. Now, the audience that wants to wire it into applications and the audience that wants to tap it to extract data for analytics put their weight together to create the demand for the Python library. The economies for that work out better than if you had to create two different libraries in two different languages to satisfy those two groups of demand.

Reminds me of a comment I wrote just recently:

» I think that anyone who is technically sufficiently well-versed, is going to avoid that hellscape like the plague. So then, who is the actual audience for this stuff? My guess would be: the old folks' home around the corner, which, sooner or later, will be forced to upgrade those TVs to smart-TVs. And once those old folks put in their credit card numbers or log in with their Amazon accounts, there goes a lot of people's inheritance.

My own elderly father is wise to the scam, but not confident in his ability to navigate the dark patterns. So now, he is afraid to input his credit card information into anything digital, essentially excluding him from cultural participation in the digital age. « [1]

With that frame (the target audience for smart TVs is old people), "needing glasses" is not all that far-fetched.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45462816

Thanks!

I was very much the kind of student who didn't perform well under exam-taking pressure. For marked work that I did outside of school, it was straight-As for me. For written exams performed under time pressure and oral examinations (administered without advance notice), it was very much hit-and-miss.

If my son should grow up to run into the same kinds of cognitive limitations, I really don't know what I will tell him and do about it. I just wish there was a university in a Faraday cage somewhere where I could send him, so that he can have the same opportunities I had.

Fun fact on the side: Cambridge (UK) getting a railway station was a hugely controversial event at the time. The corrupting influence of London being only a short journey away was a major put-off.

The thing where Void really stands out in my opinion is "hackability" and providing an inviting on-ramp for making certain kinds of customizations that would be intimidating in terms of their complexity in other distros. -- I don't use it as a daily-driver desktop.

For example, I have a chroot'able tarball providing all dependencies for all software I write that runs on a server. I build that tarball myself from source in an airgapped environment. (I had been doing something like this, minus the airgapping, with Gentoo from about 2012 until 2024). I looked for a replacement for Gentoo in 2024 and landed on Void. Most of the time when I do a build, I just pull the latest commit from the repo, and it "just works", even though Void is not even advertising itself as a source-based distro. Sometimes it breaks because of the distro itself (just like Gentoo used to). But, with Void it has always been so much easier to diagnose and fix issues, and the project is also quite inviting to merging such fixes. With Gentoo, it had always been quite painful to deal with the layers of complexity pertaining to Gentoo itself, rather than any package that has decided to break. Void, on the other hand, has managed to avoid such extra complexity.

Lately, I've started to play around with Void's tool for creating the live installer ISO. It's quite malleable and can easily be repurposed for building minimalist live/stateless environments for pretty much any purpose. I'm using that to create VM guests to isolate some contexts for security-purposes like a "poor man's Qubes OS" kind of thing.

I'm a huge fan of Void as well. Surprised it didn't get a mention in the article. I didn't even realize that runit had an existence outside of Void.

There's no need to welcome me to war. I'm not in one, despite the fact that the powers that be are hellbent on getting me (and everyone else) into one.

> sustain conflict

...this turn of phrase in relation to goal-setting really makes you think twice.

Profits as a measurement of success, at this point, seems like a meme from yesteryear.

The left is perfectly happy to burn money to save the environment, feed the poor, educate the stupid, whatever. The right has joined the money-burning party, pushing for deglobalization, propping up dying companies and industries, re-establishing industries that haven't been viable in a long time. Who still cares about profits? Surely investors do? No, not really, certainly not in tech. Investors will happily throw money at tech companies who never make a dime, as long as they are vaguely saying the right kinds of things, being attached to the right kinds of hypes, and fitting in with the right kinds of herd dynamics.

Generating or destroying money is not going to help or hurt anyone's career these days. Being on the currently-career-promoting side of the "woke" issue. Now there is something to take seriously.

> What's better?

I've semi-recently gone down the TV platforms rabbit hole again, and my overall impression is that they're all horrible.

I ended up grabbing a 6-year-old mini PC I had lying around in the basement and a >10-year-old TV that my father-in-law was going to throw away, as well as a Logitech y-10 air mouse [1] that I am lucky enough to have bought way back in the day.

I put desktop Linux on the PC with KDE plasma (avoiding Kodi, which, somehow, consistently attracts me but then annoys and frustrates me whenever I actually use it) and Brave.

I cranked up the scaling factor in KDE, and made a tiny tweak so KDE won't ask for superuser passwords and passwords on wallet access.

The browser is the only app I ever use on that thing, although it also has a DVD drive and VLC, and I copied my film collection onto the local disk of that thing.

I logged into all the media platforms I pay for (and the free ones I frequently use) and made an HTML file that links to all of them, using a huge font size, and setting it as home in the browser.

It cost me $0 (considering all the recycling), and it's a better experience than anything that money will buy.

I actually like TVs as a hardware concept, and am a happy paying customer of several VOD platforms, so I would seem to be the perfect customer for all these sticks and mini boxes and smart TV thingamajigs. But the UX is just so horrible. Everything about them screams, “We hate our customers”.

Last time I tried, I found that the VOD platforms I care about have their respective best implementations in their Desktop/Web-versions. Android Apps were not always available, and to the extent that they were, half of them were on Amazon/Fire, half of them on Android TV/Google Play. I remember, in one case (Masterclass), they used the Android App to upsell me on their "Premium" subscription (or maybe it was the download-feature on the Android App).

So I would have had to pay more, switch between multiple HDMI sources to switch to the platform with the app I wanted to consume, and would still have had to use my desktop PC for some of the content I was paying for.

And then, I could never get the apps I actually cared about to occupy most of the screen real estate (or at least be suitably prominently placed). Most of the real estate was dedicated to dark patterns trying to get me to pay for stuff I didn't want to pay for, even though I was already a happy paying customer for more than enough stuff and there wasn't a “give it a rest, already” setting anywhere to be found.

I think that anyone who is technically sufficiently well-versed, is going to avoid that hellscape like the plague. So then, who is the actual audience for this stuff? My guess would be: the old folks' home around the corner, which, sooner or later, will be forced to upgrade those TVs to smart-TVs. And once those old folks put in their credit card numbers or log in with their Amazon accounts, there goes a lot of people's inheritance.

My own elderly father is wise to the scam, but not confident in his ability to navigate the dark patterns. So now, he is afraid to input his credit card information into anything digital, essentially excluding him from cultural participation in the digital age.

It's just such a sad and sorry state of affairs. How did we get here?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_W1dqRuljI

Kind of funny, these mutually escalating accusations of being a member of an out-of-touch elite.

All it takes for BYOD to become difficult is having to handle personally identifiable information under the rules of the GDPR, or having some kind of professional indemnity insurance with cybersecurity provisions, perhaps having quality management certification, being in certain highly-regulated professions like law or medicine, being in the public sector, working government contracts, etc. etc. (the list goes on and on) -- I'm just finding it hard to believe that this list doesn't capture most companies.

But then again, maybe, I am a member of an out-of-touch elite.

You mention IDEs besides VS Code, Linux, and ricing as “green flags”. Those are not proxies for “being a good programmer” and they are not proxies for “being enthusiastic about programming”. They're just selecting for programmers who share your subjective preferences on matters that are the equivalent of “vi vs. emacs”.

The only workplaces that realistically allow people to use Linux desktops are academia and top-5%-sexiness-factor startups. The other 95% of us have to use what our boss tells us to use (and he got told by the insurance company that scammed him into cybersecurity insurance). Those of us who have families, don't spend our leisure time staring into yet another desktop computer that isn't our work machine, so how, on earth, would we be using Linux desktops?

Conversely: Imagine someone has spent an 8-hour-workday setting up their tiling window manager, so they can “improve their productivity” because now they don't need to spend 2 minutes painting all their windows into the right positions in the morning. That's an investment of time that takes (8*60)/2 = 240 days, so roughly one work-year, to amortize. What does that tell you about the time management skills of that person?

I don't say that to knock tiling window managers: If you're into it, be my guest. It's perfectly fine for reasonable people to reasonably disagree on those kinds of subjective preferences. That's what subjectivity is all about. And that's why it's valuable to hire a diverse range of people who have different viewpoints on these kinds of things.

EDIT: ...and that's what I mean by "diversity": To include both family-people and people without families. Young and old. People with an academic background and people without one. Vi-people and emacs-people. Please don't strawman me by bringing up disabled people and work permits and whatnot.

That seems pretty opinionated, and by building a monoculture, persons with high openness to experience likely won't be drawn to your workplace, and you're also leaving on the table the potential that comes from diversity (a loaded term these days, but substantively still a valid point).

Depending on the kind of work you do and your customers, this may not matter to you, but in a lot of industries, you need the diversity to be able to properly represent and empathise with your customer base, who might be from a very different social cohort than your developers. And Linux desktops, which your customers almost certainly won't be using, may also make that difficult.

People who spend a ton of time ricing their Linux desktops may be bad at setting priorities. If you expect them to continue their ricing, but not do it "on the clock", you're implicitly age-discriminating and discriminating against people with families and/or hobbies and/or "a life".

Also keep in mind that your company is likely only one of a dozen or so workplaces that these people apply to in a given month, sometimes for many months before they land a job, and they probably haven't set up their computer specifically to impress you, but rather to fit the lowest common denominator among the requirements they face from all their application processes and educational activities, and some of that will require Windows.

If I correctly catch the drift of your argument, you're saying “engineering is objective”, so there is such a thing as a right and wrong choice in any given situation. ...well, to the extent that that's true, the word “taste” is a poor choice of words then. Actually, I think that's the case for this article. I think the article is fine, but the title and “taste” as a choice of word is not great. The article is more about intellectual humility and subordinating your individual priorities underneath the requirements of the project, which is all perfectly fine.

There are some domains where the word “taste” can still properly be applied, for example “vi vs emacs” comes down to individual taste. But then, “emacs people have poor taste” is something that only a narcissist would say. (The “narcissism of small differences” is a well-studied phenomenon).

Or perhaps one uses this choice of words because one feels some sympathy for people who say this in other domains, like “This room, filled with IKEA furniture and film memorabilia, was decorated in poor taste”

… either way, the red flag seems to stick.

The reason it's worth mentioning is that the notion seems to be catching on, and I've seen it applied, for example, in hiring decisions, where I think it's quite dangerous and counterproductive. It lends itself to rationalizing hiring only like-minded people, even where there is no objective ground for preferring one candidate to another.

Lecturing on "good taste" is a huge red flag for narcissism. "Taste" implies subjectivity. Pairing it with "good" is presupposing something along the lines of "my subjective evaluation of things is superior to yours", or "my subjective choices are superior to yours".

So, there I was in 2016. It had been 13 years since I had last entertained the desire to learn a new programming language (I had landed on Python, back then). The serious contenders were Go, Nim, and Rust. I landed on Nim back then, thinking to myself: Man, this language really has a future. I did my next side project in Nim, and loved it like I've loved no other language over the course of my (as of now, in 2025) 28 years of programming. But no actual job ever materialized to make me into a professional Nim programmer that would actually pay the bills. I stuck it out with Python, with growing discontentment. I took a Perl job in 2018, which lasted until 2022, which I never should have taken in the first place. I was relatively free in my choice of language from that point forward, and decided to switch from Python to Lua after a short period of disorientation where I kind of liked Haxe. Right now, I'm learning Rust, crying tears over that future for Nim that never materialized.

I disagree on the "taste" aspect: I don't think it's valuable to take that into account in the slightest.

A lot of the time, technical interviews and take-home exercises turn into 100 iterations of "Do you prefer vanilla ice cream or chocolate?" or "Do you prefer vi or emacs?"

A good employee will figure out the subjective tastes, biases, and cultural quirks of a workplace, and fit in. A senior engineer will have done it perhaps half a dozen times in their career. -- And yet, companies insist on putting interviewees in a situation of having to basically mind-read those subjective tastes and biases to try to tell interviewers what they want to hear, because they'll reject a candidate on the false premise that a vi guy will never fit into an emacs shop.

"How do you feel about unit tests?" I really don't have any feelings about them whatsoever. Just tell me, if you want me to write them or not. Instead you're asking me to mind-read and trigger some hidden trauma in you. I just don't know whether the trauma is that codebase that required breaking production every single day, because there was no way to test it. Or whether the trauma is that one guy that you hired who never got any work done because he obsessed over refactoring the codebase for optimal testability instead.

...the amout of code we've been writing has increased with the progress of technology, just comparing what it was like to write desktop UIs with Delphi in the 90s versus the amount of code it takes for an equivalent app in 2025. Low-code and vibecoded software from the 2020s are going to be the unemployment insurance for all those greybeards who will still know how to code in the 2030s :-)

> Qt and VCL/FireMonkey are pretty much alive, as 3rd party .NET like Avalonia and Uno.

Last time I looked into Uno, it seemed to me more like a mobile-first play (similar to Flutter), but maybe I missed something there.

Qt is still joined at the hips with C++, and I'm finding it hard to imagine that the next generation of developers will go in for C++ over alternatives like Rust. There is a QML/JavaScript story. But why, on earth, would you go there, if history hasn't forced your hand, as it did with the Web.

I hear good things about Avalonia, but: Why throw out the baby with the bathwater and build something "open" within a monopolist's walled garden.

> Apple is also doing just fine.

But "lack of investment" is still not entirely improper as a characterization of how they prioritize desktop versus mobile.

> Have there been any other signals of waning investment into Windows?

Wasn't there a story some while back about them crawling the web for PWAs and putting them on the Microsoft Store (or is it Windows store?) to make it into less of a ghost town? And if you go to their official website, browsing vaguely in the direction of UI development, you will see them advertising PWAs as first-class citizens of the Windows ecosystem. I also vaguely remember that Windows+Edge offers special APIs to PWAs for things like file system access and so forth that are unparalleled on other platforms.

I take this push for PWAs (combined with their own lack of dogfooding -- Office is not written with Win UI) as them basically throwing in the towel on Windows-native desktop software (outside of games, maybe).

But, to be fair, native desktop development has seen a lack of investment on all desktop platforms. JavaFX is a ghost town too.

All of that could change, depending on what happens next with Chrome, Bing, and Mozilla. -- The future of each of those seems to be hanging in the balance at the moment.

The web could become a mere implementation detail of the Google monopoly, rather than the open thing it is today. Couple that with a government-level push for digital sovereignty in the E.U. and other places (certainly China). Then, maybe, you will see renewed interest in desktop GUI apps.

On a side note: I think it's amazing what has happened in the open-source space with Rust-based UI frameworks (iced, egui, slint) and COSMIC. The future for cross-platform desktop UI development hasn't looked so bright, maybe since the introduction of Java Swing (was that in the early 00s?)

It usually doesn't have this charitable "no user left behind" character, though. Their shenanigans include "Let's inject advertising in between people's e-mails and turn everyone's OS into a billboard. Will it be hard for people to get any work done this way? Of course it will. But who is going to stop us? Surely not those suckers whose money we take." What is the appropriate reaction to that? Surely not "Thank you, thank you, Microsoft, for putting me into a digital world that is so perfectly matched to the stupidity, laziness, and digital helplessness of me and my brethren".

It's a very dangerous path to walk down, to think to yourself "I'm smart and powerful, but most of my customers are stupid and helpless, so it's not the needs of my peers that I need to cater to, but rather the needs of the [stupid] many". The contrapositive of that is: Most of my customers aren't truly my peers. Well that's the first step on a slippery slope towards: These people aren't really deserving of being treated in a moral/ethical way, the way I would treat my peers and the way I would expect my peers to treat me.

Microsoft's choices can easily be understood under the following frame: They essentially think of everyone they (supposedly) serve as stupid. Thinking that the need to learn a bunch of keywords in a foreign language is a serious stumbling block to the adoption of their programming language is just one case in point. Having a good laugh at their expense about it feels like karmic justice, because it's bad enough that they keep getting away with it as much as they do.

What makes it really funny is that the joke was lost on Microsoft in the mid 90s when you might program macros for MS Office in a version of BASIC that actually did get its keywords translated.

> .. lets me use the computer.

...except when it's decided to shove an update down your throat, in which case it won't even let you log in until it's done.

> My question is how does it get to that point?

Putting salespeople in between engineers and clients, and giving them perverse incentives to say "yes" to everything the client asks, and no incentive at all to try to understand what it takes to actually get any of that stuff accomplished. It produces clients that live in fantasyland.

Sorry about that. I saw the title, didn't know what CRDT meant, and clicked through to the document specifically to find out, not particularly wanting to read the article. I was then scan-reading and missed it. I must say in my defense, though, that the convention is to define an acronym when it's first used, excluding the title, and the definition is only at the fourth use excluding the title and first section heading.

Just a nitpick / editorial suggestion: The acronym "CRDT" is not extremely common, and never defined in the document. Such things trigger my obsessive personality streak hard and maybe others' too. Thankfully, Wikipedia gave me the answer, assuming this is about conflict-free replicated data types.

I do not at all think that, if government wasn't in the business of setting those standards, the standards would turn out lower.

Reputation would follow the institutions, and graduating from an institution that set lows standards wouldn't have any signalling power to prospective employers, so students wouldn't want to enroll there.

What you actually see in countries that have both a private and public education system is that the private institutions compete on the grounds of who sets the highest standards, not on who offers the most riskless opportunity to students to get the degree, irrespective of how low an effort they put in or how incapable they are.

If you're talking of a huge number of small institutions in combination with high mobility, then maybe reputation at the level of the individual institution wouldn't do the trick, but you would probably see certification and quality assurance agencies pop up to establish brands and enforce standards around them.