piekvorst

For real??

I believe that while centralized computing excels at specific tasks like consumer storage, it cannot compete with the unmatched diversity and unique intrinsic benefits of personal computing. Kindle cannot replace all e-readers. Even Apple’s closed ecosystem cannot permit it to replace macOS with iPadOS. These are not preferences but constraints of reality.

The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate one side or the other, but to bridge the gap separating them. Let vscode.dev handle the most common cases, but preserve vscode.exe for the uncommon yet critical ones.

Why should we believe in another apocalypse prediction?

It’s very common for dictators to call people stupid as an excuse for their power abuse.

Nice article, never seen that.

I’ve always thought it’s good practice for a system to declare its limits upfront. That feels more honest than promising ”infinity” but then failing to scale in practice. Prematurely designing for infinity can also cause over-engineering—like using quicksort on an array of four elements.

Scale isn’t a binary choice between “off” and “infinity.” It’s a continuum we navigate with small, deliberate, and often painful steps—not a single, massive, upfront investment.

That said, I agree the ZOI is a valuable guideline for abstraction, though less so for implementation.

I think the land of “freedom” knows that “Those who would give up Essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

What’s wrong with zero values? They free the developer from guessing hidden allocations. IMO this benefit outweighs cast riddles by orders of magnitude.

Glad to see that Sam is not dead.

Mouse warping does not work in XWayland. Thus, I still use X11.

David (UI details) beats Goliath.

> I’m not saying it’s wrong to have a preference for smaller languages, I just haven’t seen anything in my career to indicate that smaller languages outperform when it comes to faster delivery or less bugs.

I can imagine myself grappling with a language feature unobvious to me and eventually getting distracted. Sure, there is a lot of things unobvious to me but Go is not one of them and it influenced the whole environment.

Or, when choosing the right language feature, I could end up with weighing up excessively many choices and still failing to get it right, from the language correctness perspective (to make code scalable, look nice, uniform, play well with other features, etc).

An example not related to Go: bash and rc [1]. Understanding 16 pages of Duff’s rc manual was enough for me to start writing scripts faster than I did in bash. It did push me to ease my concerns about program correctness, though, which I welcomed. The whole process became more enjoyable without bashisms getting in the way.

Maybe it’s hard to measure the exact benefit but it should exist.

1: https://9p.io/sys/doc/rc.html

You can’t defend any rights by reference to legal authority. As long as it’s a legal domain, any exceptions are permitted, even on the “human” rights level. Rights can only be defended on moral grounds, like rights to freedom or self-defense.

That’s the point. They could initiate any massive production but it wasn’t maintainable at the scale they intended.

I like the ambiguity of bin and dev. Unix is full of such puns: cat, man, more/less, etc.

Etc is strange, yeah.

I don’t get why should programming fonts be necessarily monospaced.

The later the disclaimer, the funnier.

I meant property rights violations generally. The consumer agreed to something which they didn’t provide. If the consumer simply wasn’t served better than he could have, that may violate some non-objective law, but not the consumer’s property rights.

Their violations is the same kind of persecution that minority group face, such as with gay marriages. The laws are written specifically to target them.

Influencing the law can be quite different. Lobbying is legal, other kinds of peddling are not. If they exceeded their legal limits (or whatever, I’m not into it) and, in fact, took the role of an aggressor, that would be a problem and the government would have to sue them. Even in this case, destroying them should be the very last resort, not the norm.

You mean being both pro-consumer and pro-producer? Sure it can be both, provided we establish the principle uniting the two. Property rights is one. Altruism is another. The two would lead to totally different outcomes.

Speaking of property rights, creating new smaller monopolies is in no way “pro-producer.” Nobody truly benefits by robbing the other, it’s as shortsighted “benefit” as it can be. We need long-term predictable policies that don’t criminalize what is, in fact, not criminal.

Otherwise it can be both anti-producer and anti-consumer, too.

What about anti-producer government practices?

Why did I read this comment in Russian?