2,295 karma · joined February 14, 2020
Compare this to the Remarkable who probably does not violate the GPL but whose software platform does not allow me to simply add more functionality.
Good example of “practically open” to “technically in the GNU sense ... bla bla bla”.
I always regarded e-ink as a soon-to-be (or already) obsolete technology and while that might still be true, I absolutely love it for reading and writing. There is currently nothing better.
The general idea of colonization of other planets is in general much farther away than your average tech billionaire wants us to think :)
Also that does not make every idea imaginable also achievable.
And conversely a lot of technological predictions were considered pretty seriously which are pretty far away from today (look at all the future predictions of the early 20th century. Flying cars and humanoid robots and all).
Your comparison with existing cars replacing horses at that time is pretty out of whack with our abilities right now and the task of terraforming Mars, even the question IF making it habitable is even possible. We cannot even redirect asteroids...
It is not technically OO but close enough. For me as someone who learned programming with Java (and some SML) and mostly worked with OOPLs after, I never had problems whatsoever. You don’t have inheritance but traits (and importantly trait objects).
The ways to model in Rust with Enums, Structs and Traits are amazing and somehow really fit my mental model.
It is easier to use the programs which are already available on the desktop due to the fact that GNOME (and probably KDE) already support touch screens. The usage of a tablet only slightly shifts from using a desktop. So it is a more gradual change.
So by rolling out tablets first, development time could be spent on smoothing out hardware acceleration, supporting cameras, responsive UI, optimizing touch, etc. And then we could tackle phones.
For me as a PinePhone owner, the biggest problem is not apps but overall speed. The OS feels very sluggish. And although I know that it is really old hardware, doing basic things should be much faster. This holds me back from really using it. The other big problem is battery consumption. Any distro I tried drains the battery so fast that I always have to shut off the phone when I am not using it. Even if I don't do anything. On a fresh Manjaro+KDE, I can see the battery drop by 10% after picking it up and using the browser for a few minutes.
And wrt to linux tablets: The PineTab[0] is sadly having really bad resolution (one thing that is excellent on the PinePhone btw.) and it is too heavy. It is a far less attractive package compared to the PinePhone which has "pretty ok" specs througout. So I am really excited for things like the cutiepie[1] or the jingos tablet[2] (if it is not a scam). Although the latter will come with a custom linux kernel which kinda makes the advantage of a (mainline) linux tablet worthless since one still depends on some people maintaining some old linux fork.
[0]: https://www.pine64.org/pinetab/ [1]: https://cutiepi.io/ [2]: https://en.jingos.com/jingpad-a1/
But only if it is well documented. And that is really the problem with Julia. Besides some video tutorials, which I don't find helpful, you only have the manual which is not that good.
I said this before here but if you look at Rust which has unique characteristics like the borrow checker and is often described as having a steep learning curve: I was never overwhelmed by it or even felt it was difficult because there is much high-quality material to help you: The amazing book, rust by example and a lot of great third party resources like cheats.rs or the "rust in simple language".
The other day I was trying to look for julia books. Most of them were outdated and people advised against buying them (or the publisher pulled them already).
And all this was just blown up, they did not have to cram in a lot of infos they just increased the size of every UI element, made fonts bigger and bolt. It was really poor design, it felt like a phone for the elderly. Also one feature was gone that the old Music app had which would've helped here: hold down on a song to get the overlay of the whole name...
In general classical music is really poorly supported by many music services and apps but this was such a huge annoyance that I had to switch to a third party app and delete that shitty Music app.
Does it hold up to their claims and is it playing nice with American ISPs like charter?
You gotta love the whataboutism of the nuclear folks ranting about recycling issues of current renewable energy tech when nuclear leaves behind toxic material that has to be kept in a safe place for a long time surviving changes in government, potential revolutions, terrorist attacks, incompetence, greed, etc.
So you are saying:
“As someone who has never really used A or B I agree with the comparison of A and B.”
Pretty much sums up some of the comments here. People who don’t spent much (or any) time with Rust make (or support) wild statements like this.
Rust is what you can learn in a few weeks, C++ takes a lifetime and then you are dead.
You can. I use PhotoSync to upload my photos in the background to my Nextcloud server via WebDav. Nextcloud and Dropbox have their own special functionality to automatically upload photos in the background.
This but also: what signal does this send to the consumer to whom Google abandoning services is already a running joke. Would anyone knowing about this now buy a game on Stadia that they can only play on that very shaky platform?
So this year I wanted to replace my default scripting language (Python) with Julia and potentially use it for my simulations or ML in the future. But every time I take a stab at Julia - last time around the release of version 1 - it never really stops feeling foreign. Everything is slightly unintuitive and weird. Also, learning Julia made me realize how amazing Rust's learning resources are. Besides the official book and the API docs (with an amazing template), there are a lot of great third party and actively maintained resources likes cheats.rs. I never felt Rust was unituitive or hard to learn. Even if some concepts are unique, the resources do a great job of introducing them to you. While Julia's learning website lists an exercism course, its manual and a bunch of video lectures.
I think selling Julia as a Python competitor raises wrong expectations. Julia may look easy or Python-like but is far more difficult to use IMHO. They may be similar in terms of applications but at least in how they feel to use, they are very different.
I still haven't given up but whereas I speak very highly and enthusiastically of Rust and recommend it everywhere (yes I am one of those people), I cannot see myself doing the same for Julia in the future.
Ps.: I wish there was a book club-like way of learning programming languages and discussing progress with friends. That would make learning even more fun.
The fear of operation should not be put forward as the one problematic thing of nuclear energy.
Another big problem is how we deal with the toxic waste for the next millennia? Especially looking at the volatility of sensible politics in the US, how can you be sure that the next Trump will not just suppress information about leaking nuclear waste and straight up not deal with it because it is “fake news”?
The problem with nuclear power plants is that: You have to deal with very dangerous material and guarantee that this waste, which could very well outlive humanity, will not hurt your population. How can you guarantee that? Don’t use the straw-man argument of “Oh ya’ll are just against nuclear because of safety in operation”.