michaelpb

I've been using PenPot[1] in lieu of Figma all this year, which is an free/libre Figma-clone. For my particular usage it's been great, I prefer it to the others I've tried recently. However, it's still in heavy development, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are missing features compared to more mature offerings.

[1] https://penpot.app/

Yeah, though unfortunately some companies are big enough now to change the laws they violate [1]

[1] https://abc7.com/22-california-prop-2020-ca-what-is/7585005/

Yeah, I think people have a very binary view of "criminal enterprises" vs "corporations", like they can only be people who dress in pin-stripe suits and carry tommy guns and say "lookee here, see" a lot, but a tech company can be a criminal enterprise just as much as anything else. Any company that makes money by violating the law, or encouraging it's habitual violation, is a criminal enterprise by definition (at least by the colloquial definition), even if a top boss keeps his "nose clean". Just like with any other criminal enterprise, going after the top is going to be the most effective. I hope with more research like this, maybe attitudes will change.

Right all these comments are just baffling me. This is premature optimization on steroids. For a random analogy, I really hope these people aren't in meetings arguing about how to design a DB schema to last for 50000000 years, when the meeting topic was how to fix slow queries on an unindexed field.

The US life expectancy dropped one of the largest drops ever (1.5 years) and instead of facing the actual real-life disasters happening, "science enthusiasts" are quoting TV shows about science fiction disasters that might happen in 50000000 years... while the scene outside the window literally looks like this: https://abc7news.com/why-is-the-sky-orange-sf-yellow-califor...

I think you answered yourself with your choice of West Wing quotes:

> And we crossed the ocean, and we pioneered the West

You really, REALLY aren't selling this the way you think you are by calling it the natural continuation to Europeans "pioneering" the Native Americans, especially given current events [1]. Let me put it this way, selling Mars exploration as a repeat of one of the world's most famous genocides (a blueprint for the holocaust no less [2][3]), really doesn't resonate with me lmao

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57592243

[2] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/03/nazi-germanys-am...

[3] https://time.com/4703586/nazis-america-race-law/

Huh, cool history, but I was mostly just poking fun at the idea of calling the Everglades "just a swamp" which is a great way to upset Everglades-enthusiasts hahah

When Boss says "my idea is gonna be HUGE, so make this go fast", you can either spend 4 hours optimize some DB queries, or you can spend 40+ hours in a broadly scoped "conversion" project and have a new thing to add to your resume, and then spend 4 hours optimizing some DB queries...

> No one [...] is using Kubernetes to run a simple LAMP stack.

Au contraire! This is very common. Probably some combo of resume-driven devops and "new shiny" excitement.

> It turned Florida from a useless swamp into Miami.

...I love poking at fun at the state of Florida as much as the next guy, but come on, "a useless swamp"? You really are asking for downvotes with that one lmao

https://forest-monitor.com/en/Everglades-Is-Not-Swamp/

I brought up copyright as just one example, these platforms have many reasons (not always given) for deleting stuff, ranging from political content or activism to copyright. Most ToS's are quite arbitrary. People have been talking about this for a long time as well -- "Chilling Effects" turns 20 this year! At the risk of being a bit unkind it seems like it's mostly just conservatives who were "living under a rock" until now, and now suddenly have loads of opinions on it.

Huh, I never have tried this, but I'm pretty sure sharing hollywood films on drive has always violated their Terms of Service, although I could see them not being great at enforcement all the time.

If Drive was that permissive, then upload sites that tended to "look the other way", like Rapidshare, MegaUpload, etc, would never have existed.

> How would my being mildly politically active on HN contradict my belief that it is rational for me to encourage the distribution of legal speech, without regard for agreement with the content? [...] I just don’t see what that has to do with the thrust of my objection.

Yeah I'm not really making my point clear here, sorry.

My point is that a "values-neutral" platform doesn't exist, and every attempt to build such a thing is usually only "values-neutral" from the perspective of it's creator. For example, I'd argue there's a contradiction even in the way you phrased it here: "Legal speech" implies you are indeed giving "regard for agreement with the content", since this would imply suppressing content that is not in agreement with some legal framework you have in mind.

> I think it’s only censorship because of how HN fades the comment towards illegibility.

It's not just that. Upvotes promotes one position over the other, so when one considers statistical properties of how far people scroll down, or how likely people are to expand low-voted comments or go to another page (for platforms like Reddit, HN, etc), the effect can be the same.

It's interesting to see that as online platforms gradually replace "traditional" journalism for how people get information, we're rehashing a some of the same old arguments about what is "objective" journalism. Publishing ANYTHING, whether physical documents (eg newspapers) or HTML documents (eg HN, Facebook), will always promote some worldview and censor another based on what is included in the publication, and the ordering of the topics.

Sometimes this censorship is explicit (eg nixing a story, Google taking down a search result), other times it's done statistically (eg putting stuff "below the fold", a search result being on page 10), but our informational world is perpetually being shaped like this. Pretending that's it's even logically possible have unbiased platforms "without regard for agreement with the content" --- as an example, not you, but elsewhere here it was claimed 2010-2016 was mostly censorship-free --- is starting off on a wrong premise. If we start on a wrong premise, any further discussion is meaningless at best, and actively manipulative at worse (Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan comes to mind)

> (FWIW, I did not downvote you, and I do so rarely.)

Thanks, I avoid this also!

I'm not trying to equivocate here (or be combative, I hope this is an interesting discussion for both of us!). I'm being serious: I consider downvoting to be "opposing distribution" of a statement by definition, since it limits the distribution, although perhaps not very effective if done by yourself.

> regardless of whether it has the same intent or potential effect.

I disagree, and I think I'm in the majority to have more outcomes-based ethics [1]

What I'm trying to get across is that you are "politically active", whether you think you are or not. "Activism" can literally involve just a bunch of friends on an online platform upvoting and downvoting. Even just a small group of people doing this can even be effective censorship in certain contexts, such as local elections. Sure, Google may have more cost-effective means of censorship --- larger political campaigns have to pay firms LOADS to bury stories or control online discourse without access to the power Google has --- but it's still the same result, just a matter of who calls the shots and cost-efficacy.

You might argue that controlling discourse like this is not censorship or unethical based on your definition, but as you said it can have the same intent and has the same potential effect, so to another perspective, perhaps one that places less value on the USA constitution, it most certainly is.

[1] About 90%, in the case of a survey question about the trolley problem - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem#Survey_data

The thing is you are "promoting distribution of what you think is right" literally right now. Like, with this very comment right here, you are being politically active!

So, assuming you are acting rationally, you are right now promoting what you think is "right" ("anything legal", "1st amendment" eg the United States's Constitution), while countering what you think is "wrong".

If you didn't believe in the promotion of what you think is right, then you wouldn't be posting to argue against what you think is wrong! You would never upvote (bias) or downvote (censorship) and so on. Sure, you could argue that your style of promotion (comments on HN), or that promoting your worldview in general is better for certain outcomes, but ultimately your still just arguing for "freedom" in your particular definition of "freedom" (still promoting or opposing distribution of right/wrong)

> Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open.

Were they really though? I'm pretty sure there were plenty of things, especially things deemed to be "Intellectual Property violating", which were strictly banned on all these platforms far before 2010. One example is that Google has been removing search results for as long as I can remember.

In other words, what was in your perspective "free and open" was very restrictive and politically pro-corporate from my perspective --- hardly an "objective stance" but instead a very political stance on what was permitted and what was forbidden.

That is rational, yes. I think pretty much everyone thinks this way, with differing definitions of both "promote" and "oppose", and "wrong" and "right".

Though I may be misunderstanding what you are getting to here.

The biggest mistake of the ML field is its metaphorical naming. So many people seem to be taking Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Neural Networks etc literally. They don't do this for other concepts in coding (eg for an absurd example, no one is arguing we ride a CPU "bus" to work), but with ML algos its a free-for-all. Grandiose naming conventions might be good for extracting VC money but it's also seriously confusing people.

My point is that I'm not sure even how I would "address" these issues that you are insisting Linux Desktop evangelist "stop excusing". That is, 1) I'm not getting paid to work on Linux DEs or have the time (right now) to volunteer, and 2) I don't think you could get 10 people in a room to agree how a DE should behave. Like, what would I change to what? I've consumed plenty of blog posts complaining about UI inconsistencies on Windows, macOS, or Linux, but these all still seem like preferences with no single "correct" answer as to how a GUI should be.

Even taking the one concrete example you provided in this thread, Apple's App Store is incredibly popular -- in fact in the US it has a 56% marketshare [1] -- so why would a Linux OS moving toward what you prefer would increase adaption? I really see no actual evidence of this; as in the example you give is literally the most popular way to do it. That said, I don't even think it matters either way. I've grown cynical enough by now to realize that humans are a lot more complicated, markets more monopolistic, and purchasing habits are better explained by market researchers than developers (or even HCI researchers!)

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta...

True, but if the goal is to no longer languish in a distant 3rd place, then the power-user features that we find lacking on Lin/Win are a red-herring, since we constitute a tiny fraction of computer users. From my experience, I don't think Lin/Win DEs are actually so bad so as to affect mass adaption. I've introduced dozens of new students to Linux, and have had largely positive results, and also generally found the Windows -> Ubuntu switch easier than Windows -> macOS (assuming all are pre-installed)

And that last assumption is truly the hard part. There is no software meritocracy. There is no "if you build it, they will come". It's sales all the way down. Until this changes, whatever is outputted from FAANG/MS market research firms will be what's popular, end of story.

I believe you, but you also have to understand this is largely a preference thing. Which is okay: It's all just whatever gets the job done in the end!

I'd say I have the opposite experience: I've had to use the Windows Desktop for extended periods before, and found it, as you put it, "completely backwards way of doing just about everything I want to do with a computer". I even went through all sorts of lengths to "fix" it with alternative WMs, launchers, etc, but as no matter how much I tinkered with it, I couldn't even get fairly "vanilla" features (eg multidesktop support) sufficiently working without constant papercuts and limitations. Of course, things may have improved since I last used it, so I'm sure Windows Desktop circa 2020 has much improved, but a few years back it seemed very broken.

Ultimately, it's just preference, and what workflows you grow used to.

> Do I understand you correctly?

Nope, the original question was if we should "abolish the idea", not the thing itself.

I'm saying that the idea is a myth in the same way that "unbiased news" is a myth. Both sound like a nice idea on the surface, but with both eventually it all boils down to humans making decisions that elevate one viewpoint (bias) over another, and this holds true whether we are publishing newspapers or publishing HTML documents.

Adding another step (e.g. "human writes code; code publishes HTML document") unfortunately doesn't fix this either.

> Should we just abolish the idea of a free market of ideas?

Yes, please! This has never existed in the past, and continues to not exist in the present, and seems to me logically impossible to ever exist in the future.

Just like many would not consider Fox News to be "fair and balanced", but instead consider this slogan to be a dishonest attempt to obscure Fox News' bias, the sooner we give up on the "free market of ideas"-style sloganeering the sooner we can approach problems like those discussed here with any sort of honesty.

Not OP, but I like it! The piano roll interface is it's biggest weakness, but everything else is great IMO. My favorite feature is the mixer panel and effects stack interface. The mixer panel is a happy medium between powerful ("I want to experiment with some ridiculous side-chaining setup") and the simple / immediate ("I just want to soften up the sound with some reverb"), and can do both well in my opinion.

If you're thinking of using it on Linux, I'd recommend using something like KXStudio. (Sadly the distro version of that is no longer maintained, otherwise I'd recommend that.)

Sure, perhaps they won't use it for training, but the fear is they would use it for corporate espionage, market research, etc. Compared to training, this would be both more useful and much easier to keep deniable / under wraps.

I've had previous employers that were highly concerned about far more innocuous data leaking to competitors, e.g. autocomplete search terms. This means that a Copilot installation at any company that competes (or might compete) with MS should be considered a security breach, IMO. Given Microsoft's presence in so many markets, in general I think it would be foolish to risk this at any company.

If avoiding copyright violations was simply "I remembered it", then I don't think things like clean-room reverse engineering would be ever legally necessary [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

Hey all, a coworker made a very cool desktop app to "gamify" (is that still a thing?) strengthening our students' debugging skills, which I had the fun of helping to test.

- It is intended for anyone learning to code for the first time, or more advanced coders who want practice to spot errors in large or unfamiliar code bases.

- It's behavior is simple: It randomly introduces an error (such as removing a character) into a code file in a given code base or repo

- It's like a game to hunt down errors. It provides generic and specific clues, and (fun) encouragement

- If you are familiar with fuzz testing, think of this as a little like fuzz testing for the source code itself as a learning technique -- in a way, fuzz testing the coder!

Any questions about this or how it was to work with Tauri and why we chose it over Electron (hint: look at the binary sizes), feel free to ask!

Full disclosure: While this project is free/open and was made independently, the article is posted on our company blog.

I dunno, I think I disagree. I have much higher expectations of software. I have these expectations simply because most of what we do these days we could do decades ago, and using orders of magnitude fewer CPU cycles than the "state of the art" now (e.g. your example of VS Code). Most software falls far, far short of these expectations, which, IMO, is an ongoing embarrassment for the entire field.

Even your example of 2 whole seconds seems wayyy too slow to me. I don't even tolerate that sort of delay when working on my 10+ year old commodity hardware --- I've already tweaked my tools to be totally instantaneous so I can continue typing as soon as I release the short-cut key.

As a history buff, my understanding is there were no "White" or "Black" people then, since these races hadn't been invented yet. Black British actors would have been fine as well, since neither race existed. Creation of these distinct races in such a cosmopolitan society as existed in many eras of the Roman Empire, where ethnic groups frequently move shockingly long distances, would require a system of racial segregation that has no historical evidence. That's not to say there was no ethnicity-based prejudice -- quite the opposite, it was an era defined by it -- but it wasn't focused on skin color.

I happened to read a relevant passage on this a few weeks ago by Erik Jensen in his book Barbarians in the Greek and Roman World. In explaining how ethnicity worked in the ancient world, he gives the example of how the Greek historian Herodutus argued that the Colchians of the Black Sea were of the same "ethnicity" as Egyptians. Whether or not there was a connection is a different question, but how it was argued is more interesting, since it reveals the mentality of the time. He dismisses arguments made based on skin-tone as a red-herring since people can have all different appearances and be part of different cultures, but instead focuses on language and cultural customs (notably circumcision). If we believe his account, then if Colchians were to time-travel to modern times, most of them might be considered "Black", despite that most people living in that region today would be considered "White" -- but they were considered neither at the time, they were just "Colchians" that (according to Herodotus) had moved from Egypt

> It's the same disgust and denial at being biological animals that all religions foster.

Huh, I didn't think of it that way! Good point!

I love history and a few weeks ago I read passage in a history book on a period in the early 19th century dominated by "American radicalism" (a liberal movement) and "transcendentalism" [1], when many hucksters and itinerant pastors profited off of the hype of industrialization. It immediately reminded me of the modern crypto / AI hype. In both cases, it actually is simply more smoke-and-mirrors to remove culpable human elements from a changing system --- by replacing it with "AI" and "crypto" (today), or the "invisible hand" and "radical self-reliance" (the 1820s-1830s US).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism - and history "rhymed" 100 years later - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/135050842091057... and I would argue that it "rhymes" once again today with Musk following in Ford's footsteps, although with perhaps less intent than Ford

Perhaps religious cult territory too. "The Algorithm" [1] is already being used to tell fortunes -- which if it just stays as a few people having fun with horoscopes I don't really care, it seems harmless. But I could also totally picture some cryptocoin charlatan getting revelations about The Spiritual Algorithm or something and starts selling AI for getting into heaven.

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[1] By "The Algorithm" I just mean the public colloquially reference to trending formulas used on TikTok etc, which I'm sure probably uses machine learning somewhere