406 karma · joined October 16, 2019
Ugh, trillion dollar market value doesn't mean they are incapable of making a basic android app. Check their move to ios app if you have any doubts.
we went from v1 -> v2 -> "free" + subscription, where "free" is unsustainable in the current economic climate and they WILL have to pull shady stuff once all the AI bubble money disappears.
you know what would fix this? releasing a v3. that was the whole sell with affinity suite. that i could buy the new v3 for whatever price they set, it will contain all the new features. and i will own v3 for whatever that product lifecycle is.
THAT is why people invested in affinity. money is almost immaterial but that's why i spent time learning the thing and making it a part of my workflow.
affinity/canva can release free software all they want, but the whole reason affinity was popular was that people could pay 160 or whatever dollars for it to not nag, never nag. that has disappeared under the misdirection of "hey look its free for everyone now"
I can't read it any way other than "throw your paid-for v2, download this fremium thing, make account: to get access to image trace which is the one thing everyone has requested ever since affinity was a thing"
I could be wrong ofc, but this just looks like classic misdirection where they're pointing to the free thing but in reality it's not really free and just a distraction.
thing is, functionality wise, the affinity software suite wasn't unique in the first place. there's a million different tools, many free and some open source, that you can use to create and edit and view.
I think many people bought it because it stood for something more than what it's frankly mediocre feature-set might have implied. We bought it because we refuse pop-ups and ads on principle (specially on a paid, professional software system), and thought that feeling itself was worth the money paid.
still fine, really. I've seen people use the original pagemaker 9 on an internet-disconnected XP machine to hand-make circuit masks (ok it is just this one awesome old person who still etches his circuits with FeCl3, but I digress).
It's just that I paid for a first class, "this is the best we offer, for a price you're gonna pay upfront" software 6 months ago, and now that feeling gone.
nothing really tangible was lost, but seriously, if the entirety of the Affinity suite was deleted, nothing would be lost anyway. You could still use figma, photopea and the like to get all your work done just like before. just not with the same cohesion and confidence and security maybe, and that's what serif had sold before this.
There are many many free and amazing software tools in this space I could have made a workflow out of. I explicitly BOUGHT this thing because it promised to be simple and "the best experience we can offer" software.
I think that distinction matters.
also remember, v2 is now NOT getting all the features people have been requesting for years like image trace. it seems basically calculated to get people to make an account and get the "free" thing instead of sticking with the "perpetual" v2
- they're completely stopping all updates to v2; even image trace won't be coming to it. You might have paid for perpetual access to it 2 months ago, but it has completely stopped. As the world moves on (new chips, new OS features, just general software movement) this will increasingly feel like a second-class experience.
- the new "free" software is a sales funnel into the paid subscription, and will also increasingly have that "second-class" feeling as new pro-only things are added to it. it is also practically guaranteed to feed your work into AI unless you buy pro sometime in the next 5 years
In short, something secure, top class, the "best the company offers" product doesn't exist anymore. What was once there isn't.
I used graphviz to generate graphs for code structures, and that worked out great.
https://niravko.com/blog/visualize-cpp-data-structures#resul...
I have struggled with code to diagram tools for a while [mermaid and graphviz], and usually return to figjam when I need the readabilty and aesthetics.
graph-viz is MASSIVE and a binary. mermaid requires the browser's svg rendering system to work. I just need something that builds diagrams from description easily ...
The Indian subcontinent eat long-grain Basmati or similar rice which fluff up into individual grains on the plate. It doesn't make sense to individually pick out single leftover grains.
In nearly every culture is the idea of "Annapurna" or the god of food, and wasting food is generally frowned upon and considered bad table manners. I've been scolded plenty of times as a child for not cleaning up my plate in Nepal.
I wouldn't attribute it to small bowls at least. The Japanese instilling good virtues into their children almost institutionally perhaps plays some part in it, but also some of it is just physics.
PS fancy seeing you here!
- "if social media won't follow our laws, we should ban them" - "I am affiliated to this party so this is ok" - "social media bad, hence ban good"
of course the deeper issue was that the social media was banned because it helped backlash against the powerful spread. and backlash mostly well-deserved because of the objectively pro-corruption anti-press anti-people laws being proposed and passed.
In many ways, this protest and this massacre was probably step n and n+1 in the process rather than an accident:
lazily pasting one of my comments from yesterday
"So after sacking the wildly (and deservingly) popular Chairman of the National Electricity Authority, after allowing ministers to set arbitrary and uncapped salaries for themselves and their workers, after obstructing and undermining the wildly (and deservingly) popular mayor of the Capital, and after doing like 15 of these really major, objectively anti-nation things, and getting called out for it in Social Media by the commoners, the 73 year old Prime Minister (in many ways a Trump-like figure; immune to shame or criticism) moves to ban social media in the country. "
some killed were still in their school uniforms, at least one was 16.
So after sacking the wildly (and deservingly) popular Chairman of the National Electricity Authority, after allowing ministers to set arbitrary and uncapped salaries for themselves and their workers, after obstructing and undermining the wildly (and deservingly) popular mayor of the Capital, and after doing like 15 of these really major, objectively anti-nation things, and getting called out for it in Social Media by the commoners, the 73 year old Prime Minister (in many ways a Trump-like figure; immune to shame or criticism) moves to ban social media in the country. Obviously a bad thing.
At the same time, a 2 year old law that still hasn't convinced the companies with valuations higher than my countries GDP to throw like $10k to set up an office here and maintain it with less than $5k a month to keep their services running. It doesn't feel right to fight to keep them around either.
PS: The previous paragraphs might have portrayed the current government in a (deservingly) negative light. I wonder if I'll have to start browsing hackernews with a VPN in the future.
The government is corrupt and has taken a lot of incredibly unpopular and objectively anti-people moves in the last 2-3 years. Taming social media would allow them to do more of that with less of the backlash.
It is clear they aren't even remotely concerned about the actual bad effects of social media. They didn't ban TikTok, of all things.
If the DNS change solution ever works, because they are half-assing it for whatever reason. And this time they apparently aren't.
And in any case, this is a really bad way to look at this situation. Your response to the government taking the next step in what looks like a very well planned power grab and move towards authoritarianism shouldn't be "well the ISPs suck here".
The efforts to consolidate power, control the media, repeal stricter corruption-related laws, and allow more power and wealth to the political elite have been crazy high in the last few years in Nepal. This much has been obvious to anyone paying attention.
This Social Media Ban is a pretty clear cut next logical step in that process. This could very well be a dampener, or a distraction, done in preparation for the next step.
So, in theory, in the hands of a reliable government, I'd be totally for a ban. I don't want any "mainstream" social media to be above the local laws.
But as it is, this is scary and will probably be looked at as an important event in history.
1. I laid down what I perceived as the state of things. The generalizations I drew from observing the system that is Linux development. Nowhere have I prescribed that kent "follow" my ideas. Simply that he can use these to try to understand the unfairness he feels.
2. Your anarcho-individualistic development ideas sound good in theory, but if they ever worked in practice we might have seen it be more widespread than it is today in team sizes > 3.
You should also note that if the oring is labelled experimental and there's an expectation of failure, it's development and testing will not stop the launch. The shuttle leaves when it leaves, it won't wait for the experimental oring to be done to your liking.
Best by users in the long term is predictable processes. "RC = pure bug fixes" is a battle tested, dependable rule, absence of which causes chaos.
> Critical file system bugs are worth blocking the release
"Experimental" label EXACTLY to prevent this stuff from blocking release. Do you not know that bcachefs is experimental? This is an example of another rule which helps predictability.
1. Regardless of whether correct or not, it's Linus that decides what's a feature and what's not in Linux. Like he has for the last however many decades. Repair code is a feature if Linus says it is a feature.
2. Being correct comes second to being agreeable in human-human interactions. For example, dunking on x file system does not work as a defense when the person opposite you is a x file system maintainer.
3. rules are rules, and generally don't have to be "correct" to be enforced in an organization
I think your perceived "unfairness" might make sense if you just thought of these things as un-workaroundable constraints, Just like the fact that SSDs wear out over time.
`doxx document.docs | doxxAI`
Even without any of the bad vibes around AI, it is just much more aesthetic and wonderful if the core doxx util was a single purpose command.
Also, it is open source so if it's sufficiently useful, someone will spin off a AI stripped down version anyways, and that'll probably gain more users/goodwill in the kind of CLI SSH dev niche market this tool is trying to fit in.
Nope. This has been done for many "dead" games. Servers have been reverse engineered from nothing. Private servers are a common thing.
> This software is not guaranteed beyond 0 Unix time.
Imagine Apple says that about iOS. Wouldn't you want consumer protection so Apple doesn't do that? Why should anything else be any different?
Either release the server binary or code or publish the bare minimum API spec so others can build a server from scratch. Strip away any proprietary stuff. And don't sue when other people have server up and playing your game.
Or allow the community to build and host reverse engineered servers after your game is dead. Don't go out of your way to sue and destroy community efforts.
You realize that APIs can be reverse-engineered and new clean-room servers created? It has been done for a bunch of old games.
It is as easy as saying, "this game you're buying won't run after 2030"
Or publishing the bare minimum APIs you'd need to simulate to get the game to function. We have great people in the community that will make stuff work on their own, no instructions required.
Just don't go out of your way to destroy your game.