I’ve migrated to swift for some nontrivial projects that were formerly C++. Quite happy so far, and didn’t find rust nearly as pleasant when I tried the same thing there. I don’t want explicit memory management very often, so ARC works great for me. Haven’t had any issues with portability either, although I don’t test often on windows so I’m not confident there but Linux and Mac have been great.
Exactly. All of these things that ship data off to cloud services are basically data breaches waiting to happen. The fact that devices like this not only put the owner at risk, but others who didn’t consent to having their conversations recorded and shipped to a third party is even worse.
> all of those small composable units, that were once developed by random people, were turned into a meta-package at some point
No they weren’t. Every UNIX I used in the 80s and 90s shipped with those little composable building blocks as part of the OS, and GNU bundled them in things like coreutils forever. It’s not like there was some past time when there were independent little things like cat and wc and so on written by random people on the internet that somehow got bundled into a meta-package after they existed. That didn’t happen.
The UNIX philosophy is being a bit abused for this argument. Most systems that fall under the UNIX category are more or less like a large batteries-included standard library: lots of little composable units that ship together. UNIX in practice is not about getting a bare system and randomly downloading things from a bunch of disjointed places like tee and cat and head and so on, and then gluing them together and perpetually having to keep them updated independently.
I’ve worked on multiple compilers in industry that are written in Ocaml. A number of industrial static analyzers are written in Ocaml too (eg, Infer from Facebook/Meta). Yes, LLVM and GCC are the big ones written in the C/C++ family but they don’t represent everything.
I think we sort of knew this was the goal for some of these RTO orders: making the workplace unpleasant is a way to do a reduction in workforce without having a scary layoff. Management just shifts the decision to employees. Scummy, but not exactly a new strategy for trying to shed people without generating a ton of bad PR.
I understand why advertising and marketing exists. What I wish for were people in that world who took an approach that was more respectful of users: both their privacy and experience as a user. I expect that most people (“regular” users, not tech savvy ones) use ad blockers to make the internet tolerable. Is it really that big of an ask to respect the people who you ultimately want to sell to? (Ok, that’s a dumb question: 30 years of watching the internet evolve, I think I know the answer sadly..)
> I know that I could beg our @dang to act as intermediary and contact the user in question on my behalf, but he's too busy and valuable to turn into a glorified phone operator :-)
Oh my god no. I intentionally am uncontactable on here and I’m sure that’s true for many others. I don’t want HN people to connect with me, open doors, etc. It may surprise some folks, but some of us don’t give a shit about networking, hustling, etc. via online message boards.
For all the high quality tech people on here, there seems to be a similar number of hucksters, get-rich-quick people, life-optimization-influencers, technical dilettantes, and other types I actively would like to avoid ever being contacted by. If the admins ever facilitate piercing that anonymity that would kill this site forever for me.
This surprises me. On most platforms it’s just a package download and install. On Mac, it’s macTeX. On Linux, it’s whatever your distro calls texlive via the package manager. On windows it’s mikTeX. That’s not exactly complex or requiring any sort of latex expertise. Linux can be the one that requires the most thinking if they don’t have one package that pulls in all of what you need, but I can’t remember it being more than a couple minutes of effort last time I did it on Ubuntu or fedora.
I’m not sure Microsoft will ever achieve the level of trust they’d need to make things like this feature ever be acceptable. I’m sure in parts of the company they care about user trust quite a bit, but those people will never be able to counter the actions that the “maximize revenue at all costs” people take that undermine trust left and right. I don’t see them putting “build and maintain user trust” as a corporate goal that they ACTUALLY try to achieve (not just use as a corporate feel good statement), since “maximize shareholder value and revenue” will always win.
Uhm… The boom in AI with LLMs wouldn’t have happened without about a decade of major focus on images (both generative models and DNN models that blew traditional image processing out of the water), and planning/optimization type problems (alpha go, chess, etc.). Seems incorrect to claim that chat starts every cycle.
I always assume the stack people choose is based on what they know. Given that we’ve seen a huge number of people learn web tech over that last decade or so, it’s sort of unsurprising to see so many people go that direction. I’d assume a secondary factor is portability, although given that you can achieve portability with other stacks too, I generally think it’s tech familiarity that drives it more than anything else.
Wow - this is very cool and gives me strong nostalgia for Commodore-64/128 demos and old-school BBS's. I remember spending hours on my Commodore 64 doing this sort of thing by hand for the little BBS that I ran out of my bedroom.
Basing something around a Google OS isn’t really an alternative to big tech. Given the reaction I’d expect if a Microsoft Open Source project was the basis of an “alternative to big tech”, I don’t see why something with a Google pedigree should be treated differently.
“musicat is moving away from WebAudio towards native playback in Rust”
According to the linked document, this is based on Symphonia + cpal. Why not just say that - stating what programming language it’s in is pointless, but the backing software is meaningful. Why make it harder to find what the actual libraries being used are than the language they’re written in? I don’t get why people can’t resist pointing out rust when rust appears somewhere even if that choice is irrelevant from a user perspective.
Unfortunately, most of the PDF work I do involves things I’m not uploading to a service - ever. I don’t care if they’re “deleted immediately after processing” - they left my control. This sort of software would be great if it were 100% offline.
This isn’t just a niche issue either: this is a very real consideration for any corporate user. More companies are taking data loss and security issues seriously, which often means restricting what cloud services they are willing to use.
Ada is assumed to be dead by most US-centric programmers, but is alive and used outside the US. Seems most of the action these days in Ada-land is in Europe.
+1. My team still favors batteries-included style systems, even if it means missing out on the latest thing all the cool kids on the internet are talking about. For languages, this usually means sticking with the standard library that ships with it along with one or two libraries that augment it (e.g., BOOST for C++). It's not like "batteries included" eliminates the problem - a bad actor can wander in there and cause trouble. It's just a much more controlled environment that often has a process for contributing. I'm not a fan of the move of languages away from rich standard libraries to the "Random Interconnected Pile Of Internet Stuff".
Unfortunately people like me are in the minority it seems, and the "move fast and break stuff" mentality seems to still dominate the open source world even if that phrase has fallen out of favor - the attitude still seems to exist.
> I always thought part of the point of open source is that the code is auditable
Yes, it's theoretically true but doesn't actually occur in practice - largely because open source rarely sits still long enough for people to actually have the capacity to audit. From my vantage point, that capacity is consumed by addressing known bugs and issues, and the never ending feature adding and adaptation to changing whims of the developer community.
For example, the most recent high profile event w/ xz wasn't due to an audit but a lucky event of someone noticing something weird that caused an audit AFTER the weirdness was noticed. Had nobody noticed the weirdness, it's not likely any auditing would have occurred to notice it.
There is certainly a benefit to open source from transparency that allows such scrutiny when something weird happens. Had that code been closed source, it's very likely nobody would have been able to figure out what was going on nearly as fast.
I’d guess it’s because the size of the community that gets angry is trivially small relative to the overall customer base of Nintendo. I’d also guess that the average person whose gaming doesn’t stray much further than casually playing Animal Crossing, Zelda, or Mario doesn’t care nor notice when Nintendo does this sort of thing.
JS is both the best and worst thing to have happened to computing in the last decades. Great creations based on it, but I constantly feel that dev community comes from a completely different planet than me when it comes to thinking about quality, resources, and priorities. I often feel that the greater JS community does more harm than good when it comes to what can be built atop that ecosystem.
I’m eager to see these. I bought a regular windows machine for the first time in decades to see how WSL works for my development work and have been pleased. My only gripe is the power efficiency compared to my Apple Silicon machine. If they can come anywhere near the Apple silicon devices in that dimension, I’m likely to switch over (which feels really weird after 26 years in Apple-land, but I’ve lost my patience with them over the last few MacOS versions).
This would explain why a couple perfectly stable applications that I’ve run for years have suddenly decided to randomly crash repeatedly since updating. It’s been a while since Apple has released a version that has this many easily triggered bugs. :-(
I like how most people blame bosses or scary big companies. No developers appear willing to admit that there is a large cohort of not that great web programmers who don’t know much (and appear to not WANT to know much) about efficiency. They’re just as to blame for the sad world of web software as the big boss or corporate overlord that forced someone to make bad software.
Having been on the hiring end over the last few years, it’s not surprising. Other than there being a glut of applicants, there is also a HUGE variation in what people consider to be “experienced”. The signal to noise ratio is pretty bad when sifting through applicants, so I can certainly see how it’s hard for qualified people to make it through. Especially since there are a lot of people who oversell their capabilities and experience, so it’s even harder to distinguish an actually-experienced, actually-qualified applicant from a skilled bullshitter. It doesn’t help that the industry has totally destroyed the meaning of terms like “senior”, so it’s hard to even use someone’s past history to make an educated guess at their actual experience level. As a result, experienced and qualified people get lost in the sea of suboptimal applicants. At this point the best hires I’ve made over that last few years are ones that came via networking / trusted references.
I was a big fan of my RM2, but found the move to the subscription service a couple years ago to be off putting. Sure, I can turn off WiFi, or just use the network to ssh into it, but it felt less than great. I recently got a Supernote to replace it and so far love it. The company seems a bit more open and less likely to try to push me to some kind of subscription/cloud thing. They promote the “works great offline, no subscriptions” stuff right up front. Plus their pens are great - the one I got feels like a real pen.
I just explain it as something that captures the idea of things being related to each other somehow. The things are the dots, and whatever relation you care about (“friends with”, “next to”, “has flight between”, “pairs well with for dinner”) are the lines between the dots. People usually get it when I explain it with things they’re familiar with, which often isn’t tech related.
I think Bandcamp does a great job bringing artists closer to the audience without any of those things like interviews, curation, IRL presence. Honestly, those things always rubbed me the wrong way since they felt like the kind of marketing that we get through traditional means (e.g., Rolling Stone articles), except with an indie flavor: some music nerd picked a winner and put them forward, and artists who didn't make the cut by the Bandcamp tastemakers take more effort to find.
I think the absence of that sort of "pick-a-winner-and-interview-them" does a lot for making things flat and fair for all. The primary people who get grumpy about getting rid of that are the people whose job it is to be curator/interviewer/etc. I'm not terribly sad if they go away.
Glad I’m not alone. I’m a relatively senior developer who’s worked 30+ years on a ton of different systems, and every time I wade into the Apple ecosystem in the last 10 years or so to build a native application for macOS I feel like an idiot since it’s much harder to find what I need to know to accomplish something. I always assumed it was because I wasn’t their target demographic: I don’t do iOS apps, and the things I want to write are often not just a matter of throwing together a bunch of widgets and a data model and calling it good. I guess their terrible documentation isn’t a me problem, but an Apple problem.
Add to that the annoying use of videos: I hate finding out that something I’m interested in is buried in a WWDC video instead of written up. I don’t have time or the desire to watch videos as reference material: please stop.