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jasode

34,956 karma · joined February 28, 2014

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jasode··on The Mojo language (by Modular, now Qualcomm) is now open-source
>to avoid people depending on it before it was ready, why had I been hearing about it for so long before this?

There's always been a history of various projects in beta/preview pre-1.0 versions that nevertheless don't wait for the official 1.0 release to generate buzz, attract mindshare, evangelize, etc. Typescript and Rust language did that. And today, Zig is still pre-1.0 and yet has similar active "marketing" via blogs, HN posts, opinion pieces, etc.

The point of the deep link is to show that for Swift, Chris did actually try your suggested idea of just releasing the early version and fix whatever mistakes are in it out in the open regardless of criticism. He didn't like how the that stressed out the team.

Yes, you advised "just ignore it" but he's human and it seems reasonable to accept his answer at face value that he didn't want to redo that stressful timeline all over again for Mojo. But for some reason, his answer is unacceptable to you and prefer to think the delayed open sourcing Mojo is caused by some other hidden agenda.

I think it's as simple as comparing the the community dynamics of 2 different timelines:

- stressful to deal with angry people : iterate and fix language mistakes in 1.0 --> 2.0 --> 4.0

- calmer because of managed expectations : iterate in alpha/beta/preview 0.x --> 0.x+1 --> 1.0

Things can still break in beta .... but then again, that's the expectation around pre-1.0 versions.

jasode··on The Mojo language (by Modular, now Qualcomm) is now open-source
>I don't understand what open source has to do with this. People being able to see your source code doesn't somehow prevent you from changing it however you want. Yes, they can voice their opinion on it, but you can also just ignore it.

Deep link to Chris Lattner interview where he says he learned lessons from Swift being rapidly released as open source meant that early design decisions that were suboptimal caused quick revisions. This caused a lot of complaints when later revisions to Swift caused breakages. This caused a lot of stress for Chris & the Swift team so he says he didn't want to repeat that for Mojo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdJQ8iVTwj8&t=2h22m05s

Sure, one can simple redo the exact same playbook with Mojo and iterate out in the open with early versions, and when people complain again about their code breaking, he can "just ignore it" but he didn't like that experience with Swift.

jasode··on How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)
>connect your phone to your laptop, copy your photos off every month or so, and clear the phone storage. I actually can't believe this isn't the normal way people do things. People pay to let Google keep copies of all their photos?! And I mean, setting up your own self-hosted storage for all your photos is neat and stuff, but seriously, seems like overkill. One folder a year on my laptop / backup drive is sufficient for me.

Your suggested alternative of moving all photos to a laptop doesn't work for the people who prefer having all their photos accessible from their smartphone. That's the usable UI that the constant sync to cloud services gives them. The tradeoff is the cloud storage subsciption costs.

Also, transferring all photos to a laptop creates a single-point-of-failure if the laptop dies. Recovering photos becomes even more complicated when the internal SSD is encrypted with macOS File Vault or Windows BitLocker. Yes, photos in cloud storage isn't really a "true backup" in the 3-2-1 best practices sense but it's still more durable against catastrophic data loss than a single laptop.

The self-hosted Immich photo server is just one way to enable smartphone access to all photos and avoid paying for cloud storage. That's the reward for the "overkill" setup.

jasode··on Tracking down a Zsh history data loss bug
>cat $HOME/zsh/*

It's still inconvenient because the .bash_history and .zsh_history files I was studying were inside of .tar.xz and .zip backup files. I wouldn't want to crack open those archives just to concatenate a hypothetical set of separate history files to single temp files. Instead, the GUI archive browser I used just highlights a single history file and loads it into the editor.

jasode··on Tracking down a Zsh history data loss bug
>why do this "heroic" effort of "cleverly" putting everything in one file from many sessions if we could just write command history of every session into a new separate file in a directory

For "normal" use in the terminal, a unified single history file is easier to deal with. For example, yesterday I was doing some forensics on the existence of mystery files in my backups from years ago and it was nice just loading up a single history file in the editor ... page up and page down repeatedly to eventually reconstruct the sequence of commands that explained the mystery files. The alternate idea of separate history files is less ergonomic for that. I'd have to open each history file (potentially hundreds) one by one in the editor. Trying to treat separate history files as "virtual single file" by using grep on the whole batch wouldn't work because I didn't know ahead of time what string to grep for. It required manually eyeballing the commands to consider which ones were the culprit. (Yes, if history files were separate, I could also concatenate "cat" them all to a temp file and load that into an editor ... but a history file that's already unified means I don't have to bother with that step and delete that temp file after I'm done.)

>HISTFILE="$HOME/zsh/$(date '+%y:%m%d:%H%M')-$$"

However, for "not normal" usage of a shell in a coding editor, I do create separate history files with a timestamp like your suggestion. In dev environments, I tend to create lots of dirty throwaway shell commands and I don't want them polluting the "normal" shell history.

jasode··on Hello, me. It's been a while
>its good to have the brain be bored and doing nothing. While you are being curious you aren’t thinking or contemplating or creating or imagining, just consuming that dopamine sink.

Those 2 sentences are based on 2 misconceptions/assumptions that need to be clarified.

1) That being bored is better than ingesting information. There seems to be a bias that self-dialogue and introspection is "superior" to external information. That depends on the person and so it's not always true. For some, when left to their own thoughts, they get into negative loops replaying past mistakes, or anguish about upcoming dilemmas ("Should I quit my job?", "Should I put mom in a nursing home?" etc) to which they don't have answers for. This is what some call "getting stuck in a rut" or "beating yourself up". It's inflicting self-harm. You can try to tell people "just don't think of negative thoughts and just sit there thinking of nothing". That doesn't work because it's like the joke of instructing people, "Don't think of an elephant!" -- which causes people to immediately think of an elephant. Instead of destructive loops, maybe a steady diet of external voices can help reframe things or just give the mind other ideas that are more productive and healthier to think about. To improve the quality of introspection, maybe look for quality external ideas.

2) My comment gave the impression I do nothing else but listen to podcasts and have no silent contemplative time. That's not what happens. For the first ~8 hours after I wake up, that's when my mind is most alert and mentally sharp. I do not "waste" this energy on listening to podcasts at all. That's when I do my contemplations, coding, etc. However, after the morning when my mind starts to drag... that's when it's ok to listen to audiobooks. Since I have to go outside to spread several cubic yards of mulch (mindless unpleasant housework), I queue up several podcasts to feed the mind while the work gets done. At that later point in the day, the brain is too fried to have deep introspection but it can still handle a lightweight podcast talking about trends in AI. Hopefully pick up some new ideas to bounce around the next morning's contemplative session. It's optimizing the schedule of activities to match the ups and downs in mental energy throughout the day. For neighbors who observe me, they just see that "he has headphones on all the time". Yes, because they don't shadow me at my desk in the morning when I don't.

I think there are some in this thread that assume the audiobooks/podcasts are "junk food" and the silent introspection is the "good and pure nourishment". That's not necessarily true. The opposite may be the case.

jasode··on Hello, me. It's been a while
>multitasking for a long time is not a free lunch

The multitasking I was talking about was combining a mindless repetitive task that has low cognitive demands such as walking on a treadmill, yardwork raking leaves, driving on non-descript boring roads ... with listening to a podcast about whatever topics are interesting. The mind is engaged while the hands and feet doing the work are on autopilot. In those cases, it can be a "free lunch" in the sense that the curiosity-seeking mind got fed while whatever physical task that needed to get done also got done with less procrastination and dread.

I wasn't talking about trying to edit a Excel spreadsheet while listening and concentrating on a podcast about the politics and protests of datacenter buildouts.

jasode··on Hello, me. It's been a while
>most people today have headphones on all the time. I don't understand it. I'm not sure, but it would seem people hate their own voice?

I can't generalize for everyone and maybe some of those people you observe are just listening to music all day long.

In my circle, we have earphones all the time because we're listening to podcasts of news, tech industry commentary, macroeconomics and finance, etc. If one is working in an area where you're professionally rewarded by being curious about the changing world and being "plugged in", having "headphones on all the time" can help with staying up-to-date. Even with all that headphone time, there are still many hours in the day in personal silence. Laying in bed consolidating various thoughts before falling asleep. Standing in the shower. Reading blogs, etc. Before podcasts, we'd have to "waste time" sitting in front of the computer to catch up on the same material. Podcasts help us multitask.

Of course, not everybody needs (or wants) to have headphones on all the time. The mathematician Andrew Wiles pursued Fermat's Last Theorem for 30 years before finally solving it. He doesn't need a random podcast that talks about the Iran war and its downstream economic effects on manufacturing computer chips. That type of "useless" news would probably bore him.

>, even driving. In fact, I think my problem is the opposite: I just can't do two things at once. If I'm listening to something, then I can't be doing anything else.

It just depends on the threshold of mindless activity. If I'm driving in an unknown city with confusing one-way streets, I don't want a podcast voice yapping in my ear while I'm concentrating on reading the traffic signs. On the other hand, driving through 100 miles of monotonous corn fields on a highway means I can catch up on a backlog of podcasts.

jasode··on AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
>, but lines-of-business supported by CRUD apps are rarely simple from an engineering perspective.

You misread my comment as some dig at CRUD LOB enterprise coders. I used to work on enterprise ERP code with 20000+ tables. Yes, I agree it definitely wasn't simple.

Instead, I was responding to a very specific observation the gp made: he saw that both senior and junior devs were interchangeable when randomly assigning the next JIRA ticket.

That can only happen in a situation where the JIRA tickets are similar enough in complexity that the difference in skills between your senior and junior devs are irrelevant when the work is assigned.

Maybe some enterprise software teams can work like that. However, none of the engineering-heavy type of codebases can treat seniors and juniors interchangeably.

jasode··on AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
>This is the theory, but I’ve never worked anywhere (and I’ve worked at a lot of places over 20 years) that actually did it like that in practice.

>What tends to happen is that the EMs and PMs look at who’s free and give that person the task.

The gp you replied to qualified it with "enterprise software" (LOB, CRUD, etc aka "cost center") so your observations where senior -vs- junior engineers being more fungible can be true.

However, in "engineering" type of software products (game engines, RDBMS engines, operating systems, etc) where the software is more often a "product" that's sold (aka profit center) ... there are definitely different layers of complexity where senior and junior engineers are not fungible at all.

One way to describe the differences of complexity and criticality in various parts of the source tree is the "core" parts vs the "leaf" parts. E.g. in a game engine or Linux kernel, the deep parts of the engine or os process scheduler where the tight loops are located are the "core" parts. They most likely would be worked on by the most senior people.

But the game engine may have some less complex code for handling text width on a menu for different foreign languages. Or the os needs a new menu option on the installer to ask for the users age. Those would be more "leaf" functionality in the source tree. A junior could get assigned to those parts with less risk. After a few years of experience, he might be trusted enough to work on the deep "core" logic without screwing things up in catastrophic ways for a million customers.

A product with several million lines of source code will invariably have both the "hard parts" and "easy parts" so the new hires and juniors will work on the easier stuff first.

There's also a spectrum of hard-to-easy in enterprise software but it's much more narrow than engineering code bases.

jasode··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
>GPL was a great idealistic dream that led to less-restrictive open-source licences such as MIT

The less restrictive ~1984 MIT early version of the software license was several years before ~1989 GPL v1.

jasode··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
The other half of the one-liner is "Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything."

- E.g. an idea is "Everybody should have cheap housing! Or an even better idea, everybody should have free housing."

- Ok, how exactly in concrete terms do we actually do that? (The very expensive Execution of the idea.)

- "Uh, well, I leave that as an exercise to the reader."

Ideas are easy and execution is hard. That's what jaded people mean when they say "ideas are a dime a dozen".

jasode··on As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program
>as a Mac user it is surreal to click Next Next Next to install a program on Windows.

macOS has similar multi-step prompts for some programs such as Microsoft Office, Python, FUSE-T, VeraCrypt, etc:

click [Continue] [Continue] [Agree] [Continue] [Install] enter password [Install Software] [Close]

Then deal with the various popups in the upper right portion of the screen relating to Login Items & Extensions Background tasks. Dismiss them by clicking [x] several times or drill into them to adjust App Background Activity sliders etc.

I also never understood why some apps put the x.pkg inside of a x.dmg which makes people perform another click. Seems redundant to do that. I can only guess is they just want the customized background image of the .dmg instead of the plain skeuomorphic cardbord box icon of the .pkg.

jasode··on New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
>A corporation will shift the capital loss to a tax write off like any other firm.

The payment of fines for penalties from breaking civil or criminal laws is not deductible according to IRS tax rules : https://www.irs.gov/publications/p529#en_US_202012_publink10...

jasode··on “Gravity is worth asking about”
The article has a link to a previous Gruber article that mentions things falling to the ground because of "gravity" as an analogy for asking about seemingly basic questions about "why things happen".

It's an article that inadvertently confuses readers with too many layers of indirection and requires reading another article to get the prerequisite "Insider Baseball" knowledge to connect all the metaphors together.

So... asking "why not Intel stickers on MacBooks?" ... analogous to asking about gravity. And "too many confusing options on GUIs" ... lines of code to enable extra options has a gravity.

jasode··on Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal
>Enshittification as it was described by Cory Doctorow, who invented the term,

Cory Docotor didn't invent the term. He just made it more popular. Others used it at least 9 years before he did to describe "web design", and 3 years prior to describe the U.K. : https://www.oed.com/dictionary/enshittification_n?tab=meanin...

>Enshittification is a novel and illuminating concept, so we need to be careful not to let it turn into

The gp I replied to already used "enshittification" in a more general way to describe "almost all software". Most software out there is not the platforms that have the 2 factors you listed. I was just going going along with the conversation.

As far as policing the usage of "enshittification", you've got an uphill battle because people like the way it sounds and tend to use it as a spicy word to talk about anything getting worse. They're not going to research what Cory Doctorow was talking about and doublecheck to see if matches exactly what he was trying to describe. E.g. See it used to complain about "public libraries", "policing", "tech jobs", etc: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=enshittification

jasode··on Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal
In my case, the new HVAC owner is just another local resident that had an existing local area HVAC shop. Nothing to do with any private equity rollup.
jasode··on Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal
>This goes for almost all software. 'entshittification' in software

It's really every category of commercial activity. Restaurants food quality, cable tv channels, movie sequels, home appliances, airline travel, theme parks, etc.

For years, I had a particular local HVAC company do my twice-a-year maintenance on my air conditioner and furnace. I liked the owner and he had a crew of older experienced guys that knew what they were doing. He then sold the business to another owner and he completely changed out the crew to kids that barely look 18 years old. The young inexperienced techs didn't have the skills to diagnose anything on their own. They always had to phone the home office and use their smartphones to send video/photos of what they're looking at to the more knowledgeable technician at the office. That way, the senior guy sitting at the desk can walk them through what to do next. That's when I realized the financial game the new owner was playing: hire new kids that just completed their 3-month HVAC tech certificate for cheap wages but still charge the same high prices that the old owner was charging for experienced techs. And only pay for one expensive senior tech back at the office to be a "shared resource" for all the clueless techs out in the field. That type of "enshittification" didn't require venture capital, or private equity, or ads. The common pattern of degrading a product or service has the same thing in common ... humans.

The vast majority of enshittification is not caused by private equity or ads.

jasode··on How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
>Well, yes, but avoiding taxes is not the point of "Hollywood Accounting", rather avoiding paying actors.

I wasn't saying avoiding taxes was the purpose. Instead, I'm saying whatever "bogus" or "inflated" expenses that the production company LLC is charging to the movie LLC still has to be somewhat plausible. A simplistic example of what they can't do:

- Tom Cruise TC Productions LLC sends an invoice to MissionImpossible8 movie LLC with a single line item that says "script advisory service for $1 billion dollars" which then conveniently causes the movie's balance sheet to be negative $1 billion dollars and thus never make a profit.

The point is the production LLC, the distributor entities, etc all charging the movie LLC so that it shows zero profits ... still need to play their financial accounting games with more sophistication than that. Yes, go ahead and fabricate various costs to avoid paying actors on "net profit points" but it still needs a veneer of plausibility. Otherwise, the IRS comeback will be, "Is the $1 billion fee the real market rate for script advisory services? Do you have evidence of that amount ever being paid? etc etc"

jasode··on How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
>This works because a movie is not a separate accounting entity.

Each movie is set up as a separate legal business entity (LLC). That's the SPV (special purpose vehicle). https://www.google.com/search?q=each+hollywood+movie+is+a+se...

There's also a separate LLC for the parent production company. The production company LLC can also send invoices to the individual movie LLC for services. People can get creative with production companies "overcharging" for various expenses back to the movie's LLC but whatever creative accounting they want to do still needs to ultimately satisfy IRS scrutiny if there's an audit. There are entertainment attorneys that specialize in movie LLCs.

jasode··on Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified
>Home server is a perfectly fine term for that.

I agree! Maybe my comment is misunderstood. I'm not saying "NAS" is the better term. Instead, I'm saying "NAS" is a common word that people have settled on in the home consumer market. The word "NAS" is literally imprinted on the outside of the box from Synology, QNAP, UGREEN etc even though they also run apps unrelated to pure NAS functionality.

>NAS brands show up on Google/Amazon searches because they're cross-advertising,

Right... but NAS still shows up in unpaid results even when using the specific term "home server". E.g. for Google query : https://www.google.com/search?q=%22home+server%22+for+jellyf...

... the #1 search result at the top is this unsponsored thread from reddit mentioning "NAS" repeatedly from various commenters : https://old.reddit.com/r/JellyfinCommunity/comments/1n48cc7/...

So... asking about running on jellyfin on a "home server", inevitably leads to responders talking about "NAS" ... but wait a sec... if it's a NAS running the Jellyfin music server, it's not really a NAS anymore and the "home server" should be perfectly fine terminology for that! But the replies keep using that word "NAS"! (See how people can keep going around in circles?) The original poster asking the question then adds a reply saying "From the others comments it also seems i should look into getting this NAS thing". Now he becomes one of them and starts using the word "NAS" on the way to having a "home server running jellyfin". The cycle is complete.

From that thread and observing how people naturally talk about this in the home consumer market, the word "NAS" just overwhelms "home server". Keeping the purity of the word "NAS" is not possible anymore.

Likewise, people use the word "phone" to describe the slab in their pocket even though it also has a camera, GPS navigator, calendar, etc. But we don't call it a more general term such as "multifunction pocket computer" or "PDA Personal Digital Assistant". Instead, everybody settled on the word "phone". Most people don't even use it as a phone but rather as a 2-way pager for text chats. Nevertheless, "phone" is the word we use even though it's inconsistent with all the features the device has and how we actually use it every day.

I think synedoche is relevant to how we use both "NAS" and "phone" in seemingly inconsistent ways : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche

jasode··on Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified
>That isn't a NAS, then. It's a home server.

It's just 2 different usages of "NAS" for different contexts.

In a business/enterprise environment, "NAS" is a more constrained definition of a single-purpose rack that only does storage duties.

However, in a home environment, "NAS" is a fuzzier definition to also include running "apps" like Home Assistant, Plex/Jellyfish media, or webcam video analysis. Either in containers or vms. Both the vendors Synology/QNAP/UGREEN and the consumers use "NAS" in this looser definition. If you go out on Google search or Amazon to search for a "home server" to buy, you will get "NAS appliances" as the results. This happens because a NAS in a home usage has plenty of idle CPU leftover to run extra apps that's not strictly just storage. Buying a 2nd computer to run apps just to satisfy the NAS to remain as a "pure" NAS is a waste of money.

Similar situation to "routers". Business/enterprise routers are single purpose. But home routers from the ISP are fuzzier definitions. They also include a DHCP service, a firewall, and a Wi-Fi access point. Maybe the home versions are not "true pure routers" in the official OSI 7-layer sense. Ok, but home users still call them "routers".

jasode··on Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified
>using an old PC I had and it works great. Don't know why people are so crazy about buying prebuilt NASes.

The problem is the "old pc" is typically a desktop-class cpu which is very power hungry. (~100 watts). And to make things worse, the older cpu has slower performance that doesn't justify the extra watts it consumes.

For 17+ years, I used a 2008 era Intel DX58SO motherboard + Core i7 920 in a full size Silverstone tower case as my NAS. It originally started with 1.5 TB drives and I just kept upgrading the drives all the way up to 16 TB. It worked ok and was reliable so I was never interested in turnkey NAS appliance like Synology, etc. I also wanted to install my own os, plus recycle/reuse/repurpose philosophy, and not be shackled by a proprietary NAS ... yada yada yada. The big problem with re-using my old PC is that at idle, it consumed 125 watts.

Electricity isn't 11 cents per kWh like it was 17 years ago. It's now 21c/kWh -- and will keep going up because of AI, oil prices, etc.

Last month, I did a lot of research to reduce the power usage and ended up buying a UGREEN DXP4800 Pro NAS appliance. UGREEN lets you install your own os and it uses a laptop-class cpu (much better performance specs than Synology) which is much more power efficient. At idle, it consumes just 25 watts. Also, the Intel i3-1315U in the UGREEN has a Geekbench score of 2124 which beats the i7 920 of 450. So 4x the performance while using 1/5th the power usage!

I briefly considered "upgrading" my DX58SO/i7-920 to another old pc (2014 era) X99/i7-5820K. That's slightly more power efficient of ~80 watts idle. However, running ffmpeg to convert videos makes it jump to ~180w! The UGREEN can do the same ffmpeg conversion with better performance and yet it only increases to ~45 watts.

Another unexpected bonus of lower power usage is that my server room temperature is noticeably less warm, and the lower power UGREEN gets 3x the runtime on the APC battery backup when there's a power outage. The UGREEN did cost $700 but the savings on the electricity bill will recover that in about 4 years.

I also like the UGREEN toolless hard drive sleds. The old Silverstone tower hd sleds required screws. I also like the smaller footprint. The NAS appliance was a total quality-of-life improvement.

The only thing I "lost" from the old tower setup was the CD/DVD drive bay. But I don't rip discs anymore so I that doesn't matter. If I really really wanted to, I can hook up a DVD drive to the UGREEN via a SATA-to-USB adapter but I hope to never buy physical media again so I don't expect that will happen.

There's an allure to re-using a "free" old PC as a NAS and there's also the pride of a DIY storage solution. However, that mindset also makes one overlook the negatives of that setup. Sometimes, "free" items actually cost more money.

jasode··on No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
>What is your use case, if you don't mind sharing?

I have custom utilities that detects moved/renamed files by analyzing heuristics of filesize, modification times, and creation times. It can work with files' timestamps without any fractional seconds (nanoseconds) but the most reliable and confident heuristics takes advantage of nanoseconds to build the most accurate hashtable of files.

The latest rsync 3.4.4 will copy creation times but it didn't copy over the nanoseconds. It does copy the nanoseconds for file modification times but not the creation/birth times.

Command line file sync tools like rsync or robocopy can't detect file moves which means they will blindly delete files from the old spot and re-copy them to the new spot. Imagine a directory that's 2 terabytes full of files that were just renamed. Those utilities will delete 2 terabytes then recopy another 2 terabytes. It's a risk of losing 2 tb of files if there's a interruption and needless SSD wear & tear.

I may send my changes up to the rsync github repo. I just don't have an active account at the moment.

jasode··on The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010)
>It seems pretty unambiguous to me.

It's ambiguous and a contradiction because I think it's just an example of Steve Jobs saying one thing but his actual actions say something else.

In his "full persuasion mode" (as Derek puts it), he says he "wants all their music" to make the indies feel good ... but forcing them do the physical CD ripping and entering metadata is really the final authority on what he really wanted at the time.

He didn't make the big labels jump through hoops like that. He signed Sony just a few weeks before the iTunes Store went live in April 2003 with 200,000 songs. Sony and all the previous big labels just did digital uploads of their catalog instead of ripping CDs like cavemen. For the 2nd-phase rollout of iTunes Store in October 2003 with 400,000 songs, Apple could have had CD Baby and other small indies use the same effortless transfer process as the Big Labels but for whatever reason, Steve Jobs treated them differently.

So... "If Steve supposedly wants _all_ our music, why is he making us manually load CDs?!?" ... well... maybe you can't take everything Steve says at face value? Likewise, charging $40-entrance-to-iTunes breaks another "unwritten rule" that Steve disapproved of. Same as the "unwritten NDA" Steve never had anyone sign or agree to.

jasode··on The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010)
>A month later, Steve Jobs did a special worldwide simulcast keynote speech about iTunes. People had been criticizing iTunes for having less music than the competition. They had 400,000 songs while Rhapsody and Napster had over 2 million songs. (Over 500,000 of those were from CD Baby.)

>Four minutes in, he said something that made my pounding heart sink to my burning stomach:

>“This number could have easily been much higher, if we wanted to let in every song. But we realize that record companies do a great service. They edit! Did you know that if you and I record a song, for $40 we can pay a few of the services to get it on their site, through some intermediaries? We can be on Rhapsody and all these other guys for $40? Well we don’t want to let that stuff on our site! So we’ve had to edit it. And these are 400,000 quality songs.”

In 2003, there were 2 special events with Steve Jobs keynotes about iTunes and he's referring to the 2nd one on October 16, 2003 (deep link to that quote) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvCJ613HORA&t=9m00s

(For trivia reference, the first one was April 28, 2003 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF9o46zK5Jo)

>Whoa! Wow. Steve Jobs just dissed me hard! I’m the only one charging $40. That was me he’s referring to!

The author Derek Sivers left a lot of details out but here's how I interpret the situation ...

As prerequisite background, you can categorize "record labels" into 2 groups:

(1) the record label pays the artist for music via "advances", paying upfront recording costs, marketing etc. These are the traditional record labels like Warner, Universal, Sony, Motown, etc that "develop" the artist by making financial bets and losing money on most of the signed roster but making a profit a tiny number.

(2) the artists pay the "record label" -- where these entities are mostly used as a "distribution" intermediary. CD Baby and Tunecore would be typical examples.

Now look at the convoluted process with physical CDs that Apple forced CDBaby and other independents to use:

>The Apple guys said, “Sorry, you need to use this software; there is no other way.”

>Ugh. That means we have to pull each one of those CDs off of the shelf again, stick it in a Mac, then cut-and-paste every song title into that Mac software. But so be it. If that’s what Apple needs, OK.

That is basically a form of "proof-of-work". Apple didn't necessarily want everything from CD Baby. Instead, they just wanted the stuff CD Baby thought was worthwhile enough to expend time & effort to mess around with physical CDs.

The big labels didn't have to do that because they already did a form of "proof-of-work" via paying in advance for artists.

The issue is that Derek didn't "read between the lines" to understand what Steve Jobs and the convoluted upload process was trying to accomplish. I suppose business people could just speak plainly so they don't get mixed messages but sometimes they don't.

jasode··on Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain
>This is much, much simpler than you think it is. Passkeys are just passwords that require a password manager.

The issue isn't what passkeys _are_ (e.g. explaining they are like public/private "ssh keys" and hoping that type of explanation ends the confusion).

Instead, it's the workflow around passkeys. The websites show very confusing dialog popups and choices that a lot of normal people will not understand. This is a good article with screenshots showing the confusion: https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/12/passkey-technology-...

I have senior citizens asking me about passkeys because their bank and medical websites keep reminding them about switching to passkeys every time they login into their accounts. My recommendation to them is not to do it unless they have a simplistic single vendor setup such as only Apple iPhone and MacBook with iCloud Passwords app. If instead they have a mixed Windows + Apple setup with 3rd-party password manager, they could accidentally put a new passkey into the os or browser instead of their external password manager and not realize what has happened. This happens because the different parties implementing passkeys all have different agendas that suits their interests and that's what makes the workflow confusing for normal people.

jasode··on Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now
>Literally who cares what language a JS toolset is written in?

Maybe you're being coy by asking a rhetorical question you already know the answer to but I'll answer as if you asked sincerely...

There are 2 different groups interacting with software products:

(1) end-users : this is where the "Who cares what language it's written in?!?" is usually applicable. E.g. The finance guys using MS Excel don't care whether it's written in assembly, BASIC, or C Language.

(2) code contributors and/or programming language enthusiasts who see other projects as "validation" of the whatever language they've invested in: these people definitely care.

For all the decades that computer languages have been debated, Group (2) will always discuss projects language choices. E.g. reddit.com switching from Lisp to Python, the Linux kernel fiercely debating future Rust contributions , the Typescript compiler switching from Javascript to Go, Bun switching from Zig to Rust, etc.

People try to lecture others in Group 2 about "don't make a programming language your identity" ... but people are human and they can't look at all the above language choices as totally detached observers. They like to talk about it!

If one is a Zig coder that contributed to the previous Bun Zig codebase, we can't expect them to be neutral observers.

jasode··on Show HN: IKEA Complexity Index
>assembly driver

>Way too easy to strip out the threads.

An "assembly driver" or "installation driver" is meant to describe low-torque powered screwdrivers. They don't strip threads especially when used on the lowest torque settings that can barely turn a screw before the clutch-release mechanism clicks. On the other hand, the high-torque powered screwdrivers that can turn drywall and deck screws and the impact drivers that can spin the lugs on car wheels are a different beast.

The bigger risk with IKEA furniture is hammering in the metal dowel pins (that interlock with the rotating cams) at a perpendicular angle to the flat board. You have to gently tap them with a hammer because it's too easy to puncture through the particle board.

Actually, the majority of "screws" to turn in a lot of IKEA furniture (e.g. bookshelves) are the cams instead of typical threaded screws. The cams only rotate 180 degrees so there's no time savings in trying to use a powered screwdriver.

jasode··on Apple targets dozens of OpenAI employees with legal letters
>Does Apple actually have a winnable case

Based on the previous thread, Apple seems to have damning evidence of wrongdoing by the (ex)employees before-and-after they left their positions at Apple: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48865019

Seems very similar to Google/Waymo winning its case against Uber (ex-Googler Anthony Levandowski) stealing corporate data.

Apple has the employees' emails history, the server access logs, etc. Really don't see Apple pursuing this unless they had a mountain of evidence against them.

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