I wonder if Microsoft FrontPage was still a thing HTML/CSS websites might be a little more common?
Those were the days...
760 karma · joined June 12, 2023
Those were the days...
I am really not a fan of this. Artificially changing graphics to make them 'look better' is similar to my feelings around the (awful) Halo Anniversary remaster.
Summed up nicely by Noodle - https://youtu.be/MyeCb99cb2Q (starts from 2:28)
Also that there's the 'Esri' way of doing things, and the 'platform independent' (more-or-less) way of doing things which do not play well with 'Esri-isms'.
Esri does have some really nice enterprise components though; I haven't yet found a remotely user-friendly open-source equivalent to Workflow Manager Server or Data Interop., or an as-polished ArcGIS Portal yet, though I constantly keep a look out.
QField is getting better and better, too. I wish I knew C++ well enough to help develop it further.
Until the bills _really_ start skyrocketing...
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-app...
The jist is that Apple don't want to prevent you from running your own bootable code on a Mac (which isn't true for iPhone and iPad, sadly), as long as you don't compromise the security of Apple's bootloader, code, etc.
One wonders whether the xz backdoor would have been discovered if slightly less obfuscation was used.
The whole xz incident is a pretty strong argument to:
a) change practice from including binary (opaque) test files themselves to human-readable scripts and tooling that build test files on-demand,
b) raise suspicion of any binaries included in open source projects, and
c) create much more scrutiny around dependencies of 'highly scrutinised' packages like OpenSSH.
It's a shame that there isn't a foundation (that I'm aware of) that can donate time and effort of vetted developers to foundational open source projects like xz.
> The authors of the paper have filed several patents relating to the subject matter contained in this paper in the name of Microsoft Corporation.
Page 12 of the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10042-w.pdf
It's whether Microsoft will be fair and flexible licensing their patents to third-parties.
Otherwise I'd suggest that if they keep it all to themselves and charge like a wounded bull, uptake would be quite limited.
At least until the original patents expires, which might be the better strategic move for third-parties in light of a hostile Microsoft given how long this archival format is expected to last.
Your app interesting, but the tracking data and linked data required is an absolute non-starter for me. Privacy is key, especially for those who are really sensitive about revealing their ADHD diagnosis or symptoms. I know of people who have been discriminated against because of their ADHD diagnosis.
> No amount of notifications and prodding will work to solve overwhelm and distraction.
+1000. Depending on the 'flavour' of ADHD one suffers, an app that requires data to drive graphs only creates more noise, which is a killer for ADHD brains, especially those with the 'hyperactive' traits of the disorder.
Less bells and whistles. Not more.
For a statistical word salad generator that is _generally_ coherent, sure it's proven.
But for other claims, such as replacing all customer service roles[1], to the lament of customers[2], and now that a number of companies are re-hiring staff they sacked because 'AI would make them redundant'[3] still make me strongly assert that Generative AI isn't the trillion dollar industry it is trying to market itself as.
Sure it has a few tricks, and helps in a number of cases, therefore is useful in those cases, but it isn't an 'earth-shattering mass-human-redundancy' technology, that colossally stupid amounts of circular investments are being poured into it which, I argue, makes fabs mostly, if not solely, dedicating themselves to AI are now in a precarious position when the AI bubble collapses.
[1] https://www.cxtoday.com/contact-center/openai-ceo-sam-altman...
[2] https://www.thestreet.com/technology/salesforce-ai-faces-bac...
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/companies-quietly-rehiring-wo...
Worringly for Nvidia, Apple is producing products people want and are provenly useful, thus a vast majority of its value is solid, so revenue streams for fabs Apple uses is solid.
Nvidia on the other hand, is producing tangible things of value, GPUs, but which are now largely used in unproven technologies (when stacked against lofty claims) that barely more than a few seem to want, so Nvidia's revenue stream seems flimsy at best in the AI boom.
The only proven revenue stream Nvidia has (had?) is GPUs for display and visualisation (gaming, graphics, and non-AI non-crypto compute, etc.)
Random acts of kindness are only meaningful if they come from a human who had the heart, forethought, and willingness to go out of their way to do something kind for someone else. 'Random acts of kindness' originating from an AI is just spam, plain and simple.
The human race is screwed if connection - the one key thing that makes humans, human - is outsourced partially or wholly to robots who absolutely have no ability to connect, let alone understand, the human experience.
A couple of quotes from the article above:
"WebView2-based Microsoft Teams consistently uses 1-2GB of RAM while doing nothing. Microsoft likely doesn’t know how to make these web apps use fewer resources, so it’s instead moving Teams calling to a separate process to reduce crashes."
"But Teams is not the only web app causing trouble when RAM prices are about to soar, as we also have WhatsApp. When WhatsApp debuted on Windows, it was an Electron app. However, Meta later upgraded it to WinUI/XAML (also known as native code on Windows), and WhatsApp eventually became one of the best apps [... using] less than 200MB of RAM and had smoother animations and faster load times."
It seems that most developers these days focus on web-exclusive technologies and try to force desktop and system level programs into this paradigm.
C, C++, and C# programmers seem to be as rare as hens teeth today?
Are colleges and universities not teaching these languages anymore? Is this a symptom of 'cloud-first' strategies where its easier to 'just use JavaScript' for everything, perhaps developer laziness/reluctance to learn another 'lower level' language?
I really don't understand the appeal of web-centric languages like JavaScript and TypeScript in the desktop and systems realm when they lack a standard library (which genuinely scares me: supply chain attacks...), likely contributing to the RAM consumption issue as developers just keep piling packages on for one specific function missing in another imported library, and aren't natively compilable to small binaries that aren't dependent on a runtime or bulky embedded interpreter.
Yes, C# technically falls afoul of this (in .NET), but C# at least has a standard library that is comprehensive and is supported by an enterprise (Microsoft, for all its faults), not random developers on the internet.
Microsoft allowing key components of Windows 11 to be rewritten in web-wrappers is only going to drive people further into Linux, as the RAM affordability crisis continues.
Even though I don't use it, and have disabled as much Copilot functionality as Microsoft will let me.
I can't wait for this AI bubble to burst.
If/when the AI bubble bursts, and the worlds economies crash, we might have a chance then.
Please, for the love of all things almighty, re-invest in your core IDEs. That's what you're known for, and that's what professional developers want.
I don't want a glorified text editor that does a few cheap tricks, and is 'AI first'. I know I'm going to piss off a few people here rubbishing VS Code, however people are blown away when I show them how much more powerful PyCharm is when debugging complex code.
Its embarrassing that there are many popular, numerously starred, issues across JetBrains' YouTrack that have been open for nearly a decade, that are already well integrated features in other, free, IDEs.
However all is not lost - you have a great suite of products that need much more tender love and care. They'll see you through.
You already have AI in the AI Assistant plugin. Make your core fleet of IDEs worth the investment, for new and existing JetBrains customers alike. AI, agentic or not, will only get programmers so far before it's time to toss the kids toys then break out the real tools that require human intuition, domain knowledge, and reasoning.
To pick up on one of the points in the article:
> Combining them in a single tool results in a disjointed experience, so the Fleet team chose to stop competing with IDEs and code editors and instead build a product focused on agentic workflows. This led to a pivot to a new product: an agentic development environment.
You don't need to develop an entire IDE/environment for this. Develop plugins/enhance the existing AI Assistant plugin for these workflows that integrate with your existing IDEs, 'the real tools' I was talking about above.
I feel like this new "agentic development environment" is making the Fleet mistake all over again, when you could be value-adding to your already great suite of IDEs directly by way of plugins, and also continue to refactor and improve your IDEs along the way.
A key part of secure systems is availability...
It really looks like vibe-coding.
That also meets the specifications of a clean room, and is actively maintained as one?
If OpenAI bought 40% of the annual capacity of finished memory, with the goal of using it in their server farms ASAP, that's one thing.
But unfinished wafers that still need to be protected to finish the manufacturing process, that OpenAI itself does not have any capability to do?
That to me looks like a preemptive strike against competitors, which also affects any other industry that requires RAM, in an attempt to develop a monopolistic position.
I can't see how this isn't a massive national security issue for any country that needs devices requiring RAM for new systems and maintenance of existing ones (pretty much all of them...) to manage critical infrastructure, national defence, public and social services, and so on.
Make the anti-cheat follow one of the key tenets of cybersecurity: never trust user input.
Should work reasonably well for first-person shooters.
You're ranked based on the game's inner metrics, calculated on the server, rather than player-visible ones:
- time from observation to target contact with crosshairs (inc. standard deviation, standard error)
- % of time successfully striking specific hit boxes
and so on (depending on the game).
These rankings don't affect your public rankings but do affect who you're match-made with, or games that don't have private server options. Eventually you'll only be match-made with other cheaters, or players so good they give cheaters a genuine run for their money.
For games that do have private server options it could be configurable to:
- flag the player to admins as 'suspicious' for investigation
- Start ignoring hits that would've otherwise been successful for statistical outlier behaviours (where the statistical analysis indicates a significant disparity between observed and known-human-like reaction times and behaviours).
Even if cheats were used on the server, their
Probably:
- a couple of tower servers, running Linux or FreeBSD, backed up by a UPS and an auto-run generator with 24 hours worth of diesel (depending on where you are, and the local areas propensity for natural disasters - maybe 72 hours),
- Caddy for a reverse proxy, Apache for the web server, PostgreSQL for the database;
- behind a router with sensible security settings, that also can load-balance between the two servers (for availability rather than scaling);
- on static WAN IPs,
- with dual redundant (different ISPs/network provider) WAN connections,
- a regular and strictly followed patch and hardware maintenance cycle,
- located in an area resistant to wildfire, civil unrest, and riverine or coastal flooding.
I'd say that'd get you close to five 9s (no more than ~5 minutes downtime per year), though I'd pretty much guarantee five 9s (maybe even six 9s - no more than 32 seconds downtime per year) if the two machines were physically separated from each other by a few hundred kilometres, each with their own supporting infrastructure above, sans the load balancing (see below), through two separate network routes.
Load balancing would become human-driven in this 'physically separate' example (cheaper, less complex): if your-site-1.com fails, simply re-point your browser to your-site-2.com which routes to the other redundant server on a different network.
The hard part now will be picking network providers that don't use the same pipes/cables, i.e. they both use Cloudflare, or AWS...
Keep the WAN IPs written down in case DNS fails.
PostgreSQL can do master-master replication, but it's a pain to set up I understand.
> We are continuing to work towards restoring other services. > Posted 12 minutes ago. Nov 18, 2025 - 13:13 UTC
Now I'm really suspicious that they were attacked...
Is Cloudflare being attacked...?
* Note: Due to design limitations in both libpq and PostgreSQL's
- * streaming behavior available with MySQL and Oracle.
+ * architecture, this implementation does not support the superior
+ * memory-bounded streaming behavior we use with MySQL and Oracle.