jlarocco

That's not really true. Even in the 90s there were large libraries of 3rd party widgets available for Windows that could be drag-and-dropped into VB, Delphi, and even the Visual C++ UI editor. For tasks running the gamut from 3D graphics to interfacing with custom hardware.

The web was a big step backwards for UI design. It was a 30 year detour whose results still suck compared to pre-web UIs.

People are annoyed because the rollout of AI has been very intrusive. It's being added to everything even when it doesn't make sense. It's this generations version of having an app for every website. Does Calibre really need its own AI chatbox when I can ask the same question to ChatGPT in a browser?

I've considered switching to land surveying, machining or fabricating.

I just hate the direction the software industry has gone (and is going), and once I buy a house and get some savings I want to get out.

I'd be really interested to see a comparison between LLM spam scoring and a traditional spam scoring algorithm because an LLM is essentially a spam generator. Can that be used to make a better spam detector?

It's disappointing to see people here use language like "perceived" for an LLM.

> To put it in HN terms, this is what people here like to use to shit on Mozilla for how much they pay their executives while having zero insight into how much Firefox's for-profit competitors pay their executives.

It's dubious to say Google "competes" with Mozilla, because they pay Mozilla to develop Firefox to avoid antitrust issues, but it's easy enough to find CEO compensation for public companies.

https://www.sec.gov/answers/execcomp.htm

Of course people have published the numbers for well known companies:

https://www.jagranjosh.com/general-knowledge/highest-paid-ce...

Also, "Other companies pay their CEOs ridiculous amounts, so we're going to," is a poor justification, and just shows Mozilla execs are there to enrich themselves, and don't really care about the browser or community. But I guess they can't spend all of the money on Pocket and AI.

Surely whether Google indexes a page or not is Google's decision?

I don't like Windows, but I've always thought COM was pretty cool. It's a nightmare using it directly from low level languages like C++ and Rust, though. It's a perfect place to use code generation or metaprogramming.

In Python, Ruby and the Microsoft languages COM objects integrate seamlessly into the language as instances of the built-in class types.

Also, there's a fairly straightfoward conversion from C# to C++ signatures, which becomes apparent after you see a few of them. It might be explicitly spelled out in the docs somewhere.

But I think in the cities Kroger grocery stores serve as the fulfilment centers, so they don't need robotic ones.

There's probably still room for automation, but it might have to be different than warehouse automation.

It's a mistake to think corporations above a certain size care about anything other than getting more money for themselves and sharedholers.

If pushing diversity makes their goal easier then they'll do it, and if pushing diversity makes it more difficult then they'll back off of those initiatives.

The only thing they actually care about is what's best for their bottom line.

So you're saying it's some kind of mental handicap causing people to cheat the system to get benefits, therefore people who fake a handicap to get benefits actually deserve those benefits?

It's not just BMW, it's basically all car manufacturers. There are several car maintenance YouTubers who complain about it for many brands. For example "The Car Care Nut" complains about Toyotas being badly designed for maintenance, questionable material choices, etc..

The problem is that $2 here and there adds up, and at the level of the whole car it can add hundreds, or thousands of dollars of extra cost for reliability that the user can't experience directly. For some percentage of owners the plastic part works fine for the whole time they have the car. On the other hand sturdier parts add expense in the case of an accident or replacing parts during routine maintenance.

That's technically true, but I was using it to prove my point that there's more to think about than company profits.

Maybe I should have used dumping waste in a river and paying workers below minimum wage as examples. Profits could go up, but most people would agree it should still be illegal.

The logical extreme there is legalizing murder for hire, human trafficking, and a bunch of other crazy stuff.

Privacy is in a different category altogether, but there's more to think about than just how much things cost companies.

As a cyclist and pedestrian, these new headlights and the cars with the "auto brights" are just terrible.

When you're in another car their car's sensors might detect your headlights and dim a little bit. But as a pedestrian? You basically just get blinded - from low light right to 10000 lumens straight in your eyes. It's overpowering.

Can't make them illegal fast enough, IMO.

Gees, I forgot about their move to Arm. Almost certainly wouldn't work out of the box any more.

FWIW, the pywin32 Python package and win32ole Ruby package have streamlined COM integration for Python and Ruby. Not quite as easy as VB6, but it's pretty close. I was even able to tab complete COM names in the Emacs Python REPL, but I remember it being a little buggy.

I'm sure you can still use Objective-C, but MacRuby stopped being updated around 2011, and I don't know how well it'd support newer versions of OSX.

I dropped OSX long ago, so can't even try it out any more.

I wonder how much of the LLVM bits could be reused? I'm sure LLVM's changed a bunch in the last 15 years, too.

I don't think it was too similar, TBH. Apple never took MacRuby as seriously as Microsoft took VB6, and it hadn't even had a 1.0 release when the single developer left Apple to work on RubyMotion.

I do agree it'd be interesting to have a GUI designer for Ruby. Does QML paired with QtRuby work?

In the distant past I had a book about FXRuby, but never used it much, and don't think it had a UI designer - it was just bindings to Fox Toolkit, which is lightweight, but not as well maintained as Qt or Gtk.

IIRC MacRuby used to compile to native code on OSX using LLVM, and was supposed to support native OSX APIs and Objective-C frameworks. It always seemed like a neat idea, and a slick integration, but I guess Apple moved to Swift instead.

I'll have to pick up a copy of this "Ruby Under a Microscope" book when the new version comes out. I've always liked Ruby, I just haven't had much chance to use it.

> It's more like how to put a modern day car dash over an F16 fighter jet.

Yeah, that's probably a better analogy.

> If only it weren't a full time job just maintaining a basic emacs config.

I've heard that before, and I don't get it. I might spend 20 minutes a month updating my config, but it's really a set it and forget it thing for me. What are people doing that requires so much work?

Next up, how to make your Ferrari into a Fiero clone.

Seriously, though, this seems kind of counterproductive. The power of Org mode and some of the other tools in Emacs comes from being integrated into the rest of Emacs and the synergies from Emacs idioms and concepts working everywhere in Emacs.

Just my opinion, but the time spent learning this front end would be better spent just learning the Emacs UI. It's really not that difficult, and pretending you can't learn it just makes it more difficult in the long run.

I don't know. I use the Linux and Windows clients, and to me they feel the same. They're not great, but I wouldn't say one is worse.

In fact, I'd say all of the modern chat apps are pretty much equally terrible. They're all proprietary, bloated, web apps with terrible clients that people only use because they have to for work. Chat apps peaked in the early 2000s when the protocols were more open and you could use 3rd party apps like Trillian and Pidgin instead of the official clients.

IMO the real fraud was against the investors.

If I invest in your AI startup and find out it's really people doing the work, I'm going to be pissed.

I meant they've always had a reputation for being ruthless business people. Charging license fees based on the amount of memory in the host machine instead of the VM running Oracle, and things like that. They nickle and dime everything.

https://investor.oracle.com/investor-news/news-details/2025/...

They don't break it out into products in the results, but it looks like hardware, software, cloud, and support were all profitable.

It kills me that they leave out features desired by more or less everybody (like ad-block), while they add completely superfluous features like AI and Pocket to the core of Firefox.

It's a joke. If ad-block has to be a plugin, AI should be a plugin. Let people decide for themselves if they want to AI in their browser.

On the other hand, if Oracle can't squeeze a profit out of AI, I'm skeptical anybody else can.

> Unfortunately, in my experience, there's often a lot of barriers within companies to upstream. Reasons can be everything from compliance, processes, you name it... It's unfortunate.

I sympathize and understand those issues for small companies, but after a certain size those excuses stop being convincing.

Especially for a software company like Google who runs dozens of open source projects, employs an army of lawyers to monitor compliance, and surely has to deal with those issues on a daily basis anyway.

At some point there needs to be pushback. Companies get a huge amount of value from hobbiest open source projects, and eventually they need to start helping out or be told to go away.

You might get less pushback if you called it a 3D modeler and not CAD software.

It looks like an okay CSG modeler, but it's missing a thousand features that it would need to be CAD software. There's no PMI, no views, no simulation, no unit handling, no material properties (like material, density, etc.), no product structure, no measurement and dimensioning, ...

100 pounds of bike plus 150 pounds of person hitting a pedestrian at 30+ mph is still going to do cause serious injuries to both of them.

But it's really a moot point because there are essentially zero motorocycles travelling on sidewalks, bikepaths, and trails where pedestrians are going to be concentrated, while it's a free for all for e-bikes.

In general, motorcycle/pedestrian accidents are pretty rare. Statistically, motorcyclists are most likely to injure or kill themselves rather than bystanders.