logimame

Recently hackintoshed a XPS 15 9550, and holy shit it became the best laptop I’ve used so far. Everything (including bluetooth and wifi) works, no butterfly keyboard shenanigans, still decent performance, lots of ports (including hdmi and usb 3), the touchpad works perfectly (with all multitouch gestures).

Sadly, the current neoliberal reality that most people are living in is too cruel and mundane, to the point that the majority have run off to the virtual world to replace the real. The rise of the purely "fantasy" genre in all forms of entertainment, whether it be books, movies, or video games, connected with magical, medieval, and mystical themes that have no relation to the current capitalist world, can be explained by this. Connections such as family members and coworkers, which were previously regarded as "real", is now just a formality, as capitalism dismantles it piece by piece. Interactions with family members becomes a luxury when your job is unstable and continuously worrying about sustaining your household; nowadays this even happens for people in the middle-class. Actually, creating families seem so burdensome, that some even started not thinking about it (hence lower birth rates). And when your coworkers become competitors instead of cooperators set by the fears of job security, the idea of being "close" with your coworkers become a formalism solely existing to maintain your job status. In this depressing setting, some ran out to the new land of virtuality which is the Internet, and tried to create new relationships and interactions there. Hey, they even made their own social structures, cultural habits, and even art, which couldn't have been made in the previous fabric of reality before! (Think of the online forums of the past, gaming communities, web comics, fan art, fanfics, etc...) Are the worlds they live in "fake" and the world they were trying to escape from "real"? For them, the real is as fake as the paradoxes modern society entails, and the virtual world more close to them than the real. I've heard the Japanese is experiencing the rest of the world 10 years faster than then rest of us, and seeing the social phenomenons in the country (rise of subcultures and the hikikomori), our realities are probably fated for a similar path.

The real has become virtual, and the virtual has become real. The "full human experience" that you are urging people to seek, which was previously modernism in the Western civilization, is currently undertaking cracks and erosions. The central modern narrative, which was at first managed by the media and the state, are now being dismantled, decentralized, and replaced by other realities, resulting in a more turbulent cultural climate. (One could view this as a reason why the political climate of the US is so strange nowadays)

There's also the trait system, which although isn't unique in Rust, has many advantages over the inheritance-based class system that languages such as C++/Nim/etc uses. Rust's trait system can be both used for static and dynamic polymorphism seamlessly (basically, impl T vs. dyn T). But in C++, you need different systems for doing so: templates (via hacks such as CRTP/SFINAE, or concepts in C++20) vs. virtual/override. Note that Go has interfaces which is the closest thing to traits, but only allows for dynamic polymorphism (because Go doesn't have generics yet... it seems like it's going down a similar path to C++20's concepts)

From my five years of learning and using C++, I still have no clear picture how move semantics and rvalue references work. (I “kinda” get it, but am not confident about it). It seemed more and more convoluted every time I tried to study about it. The complexity created by implicit and explicit copy/move constructors is just insanity for me...

I use Thunderbird - The only desktop client which has both Windows/Linux versions (with identical UIs), doesn't use Electron, and doesn't need you to make an online account for it. (I'm looking at you, MailSpring!) And the experience is... not that great for me. There doesn't seem to be a way to view email conversations cleanly, and the whole app seems a bit bloated. I really wish someone made a cross-platform email client that just simply works - I would gladly pay money for it.

I think this is inherently a sociological problem than a technological one. When there are enough people in an organically grown group, the community will become unsustainable and then 1) it disintegrates into multiple groups until it becomes stable again or 2) it transforms into a hierarchial, authoritative society where a small group of people makes most of the decisions.

Also, I think Mastodon’s design deliberately steers instances away from becoming large ones; it rather tries to be a nurturer for various small communities and subcultures. It doesn’t view size as a good thing, and that’s totally okay. Nowadays, I think we need less monoculture and more diversity/creativity in our society.

This is why I think the Mastodon-like federated networks are better for these kinds of things. The majority of Mastodon users are Japanese because lolicon isn't permitted in Twitter, but you can still safely ignore those users because of Mastodon's federated nature.

They aren't your typical average Twitter users, they're artists (although not the industry-professional kind; one is making small indie games, and the other is drawing fanart). Those small-scale artists (who are earning barely enough money for their skills) are probably gonna look down pretty harshly at the investors who seem to look at dollar signs as the ultimate goal... I guess the language is a bit harsh but I could understand.

(Maybe HN isn't that sympathetic to those type of people, so I might get downvoted to oblivion - but you still can't generalize them as average Twitter users...)

I always think C/C++ is not a good first language to teach, because you need to understand some general concepts about computer systems before diving in. Probably more than half of the beginners in their first C class give up when handling pointers/arrays - it's not because the concept is hard, but because they have no idea what the "memory" in the computer actually is and how it works. You're left with a naive analogy of home addresses and phone numbers, but it really doesn't give pointers justice (especially when dealing with arrays and dynamic memory!) Every student learning C should have a basic idea about the stack and the heap, how function calls work, and how assembly code is executed, in order to get the full picture.

Anyways, the problem C++ has for beginners is that the language tries to obscure the already hard to understand low-level behavior with high-level concepts (to be fair, that is the language's ultimate goal: to provide a high-level abstraction for low-level code.) So maybe good for your second/third language, but definitely not your first.

Although LuaJIT is crazy fast, it can't be used on iOS, so we first need to compare this with the unJITted version of Lua.

Lua is pretty simple and elegant, but has its woes on being too flexible and wonky (especially with nil and global variables). It also doesn't support OOP syntax directly, so everyone started to create their own wonky class system, which broke easily because of Lua's wonkiness. Gravity seems like a good embedding language packaging a nice OOP syntax with a lot of syntactic sugar (such as properties and access specifiers), so I think some UI/game developers would choose this over Lua.