spronkey

Ain't no SD card slot on the 2018 Air.

To me, iMessage on the Mac is almost a sad indictment of just how little progress has been made in computing in the last 2 decades.

It's a feature that was obvious back when we were all using Nokia 3310s. Connect phone and computer as one thing. Call and message from either. Heck, calling from your computer was an obvious feature-to-be back in the monochrome screen days!

It's ridiculous that a) Apple is the only company that has this right now, and b) it took them so long to get there in the first place.

What the hell is everyone doing!?

IMO this is why Chromebooks are taking over education.

Not a chance IMO. One major reason why native apps work is platform integration - both from an HCI perspective as well as a technology one. PWA and WASM will never be able to achieve these things.

I'd wager that Lightning is a substantially more durable port than MicroUSB in terms of insertion cycles...

It's not quite that simple though, because plenty of high profile apps have gone through large rewrites from native to Electron. Skype is probably the biggest offender here, taking an app that was actually quite good and turning it into a steaming pile of crap.

Alternatively, we've got closed systems like Slack that are slowly and pervasively getting rid of open systems like IRC.

I'm really not sure that there's an engineering time advantage in taking a reasonably solid existing piece of software and rewriting it in Electron. Is the technical debt really that large?

Really, I think the problems we have are political, and not technical. I include things like NIH syndrome in that group.

Fuck Apple. Just another snippet to add to the "Apple hates consumers" pile.

You have to live somewhere though, and in NZ cities rents are high enough that they prevent many renters from saving any money at all.

So, no, supply and demand theory kinda doesn't stack up when it comes to housing.

What they're actually doing is increasing the difficulty for local buyers by increasing demand and pushing up prices, and taking money away from them while simultaneously lining the pockets of existing property owners.

Foreign owners are likely to move at least a portion of this money overseas, which takes it out of the local economy, reduces the ability of residents to innovate by taking financial risks etc etc.

In addition to the issues around lack of industry familiar wtih apartments, many native NZers don't want to live in apartments as it doesn't fit their culture or way of life.

Yes let's all blame Intel for producing the fastest and most powerful 45W TDP processor ever, that has literally no rivals.

How dare they.

Depending on how heavily coupled the legacy codebase is, "Simple refactoring" really may not cut it.

I mean, you can write a bunch of pinning tests, then try to prise out various bits and pieces, sure.

But what if all the stuff you're trying to prise out can now be accomplished with a few open source libraries that didn't exist way back, with a very simple rewrite of your business logic on the top?

That's a situation I've encountered quite a few times - a lot of legacy code that's largely boilerplate, with business logic drizzled over the lot, oozing into the little cracks.

You're completely right. I was on the fence as to whether it was sarcasm or not, decided not based on "I agree.".

Well done, internet intention interpreter dolessdrugs.

I agree that there is a bit of a cyclical nature to the homogeneity of music, but the homogenisation we've seen in the last 15 years has been unprecedented in modern times. It's not just the genres, it's also the people involved in the industry. The number of top flight producers is much smaller now than it was 20 years ago, and those producers are involved in almost all the mainstream chart music. The number of writers is smaller, and the music gets produced in a similar way, lessening the importance of musical ability by the artist.

My personal theory is that the movement away from 'record stores' has really killed discoverability of new music and genres, and most of the new platforms just feed you more of the same music you already listen to.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the next decade, you may be absolutely right about a backlash against the ultra-commercialised nature of some of our modern toys.

I get the same rush if I fire up older hardware. Installing some random old OS onto real hardware is still as thrilling as it ever was.

Far more thrilling than having Windows 10 invade itself onto some modern soulless fucking lounge bar. I mean hardware.

I can't stand Medium or understand at all how it has become so popular.

Facebook is constantly trying to outgrow what it should be, and the more it does this the less nice it becomes.

Twitter I have little issue with though, amazingly.

This times many.

Sports, activity interest groups fill the void a little.

But there's so little downtime as an adult these days it's a chore.

Protip: stop caring. Just post it and own it.

Everyone makes mistakes, and the sooner people realise that in this modern, lose your job because of a twitter post society, the better.

Well said. The thing I miss the most about the early 00s is the IM networks. I still have a few close friends that I chat with regularly, but so many have just ditched the idea of chatting altogether.

Sitting down after dinner and having a few deep, interesting conversations with friends and random strangers was enlightening, and so rare these days.

Pretty sure plenty of things are objectively worse than they were before. Being able to afford a house in most western cities, for one.

Music is, in the last 15 years, demonstrably homogenising though (in regards to what could be considered mainstream).

So at least in that regard it's arguably much worse than it was 15 years ago when many different genres were alive and well.

Is it just me or are the conclusion recommendations in this article all completely reaching?

I would hate stores to implement half of the recommendations. Swiping my smartphone on entry?!

I'd prefer to shop at the distributor's warehouse.

I agree around the desired outcomes regarding readability and side effects, but it's not like other languages can't be used in this manner. If you're an OO-ist and you design good interfaces with good contracts, the 'million ways involving half a dozen loops' can be very quickly limited in scope to a couple of methods in a small class.

That's not to say that it always happens, and certainly some less, uh, experienced developers will write terrible code. But they'll write terrible code in Haskell as well (or no working code at all, which has been my experience at least once).

I'd consider myself very comfortable with maps, folds, filters and zips. I wouldn't consider myself super fluent with their use in Haskell, which definitely contributes to my own struggles with the language.

But for something like the canonical quicksort example in Haskell, it takes me quite a while to figure out whether it's actually implementing quicksort by the book, or whether it's implementing something that sounds like quicksort but isn't. This is because I have to map the declaration to the underlying implementation when it matters. Probably more often than not it doesn't matter at all as long as the code works and isn't causing problems (which is where the functional primitives are fantastic), but I do find that digging deeper into a more complex functional algorithm can be a difficult task.

This is because you have to think about how every part might work behind the scenes. Am I doing something stupid like mapping my whole data set with a computationally intensive function? Is one of the innocent-looking predicates in my list comprehension actually some super intensive function that's had an operator overload? Am I going to be applying this predicate to the entirety of a massive list where in an imperative context I would have a really obvious switch case or set of ifs, a clear non-symbol invocation of reallyExpensiveFunction, and exited my loop early?

It's a little difficult to describe I guess, but for me reading [what I believe to be] idiomatic Haskell code at a high level is reasonably straightforward, if somewhat slow due to the compactness, but actually understanding what that code is doing can be incredibly difficult.

In some ways it's the same type of issue I have against liberal use of recursion. It might be reasonably easy to describe a recursive algorithm, but to really get in and understand it requires a much deeper understanding that's often easily more difficult than understanding its imperative cousin. There are real reasons why comp sci students struggle with it.

I hope that it's only a matter of time before people start turning their pitchforks at Apple, Microsoft, maybe Google et al who are the perpetrators of the majority of this platform fiddling that stops software from working.

[To play devil's advocate:] which were often cracked and released as warez...

They're not stuck supporting it. The original purchase can come with an amount of support. If the user needs more, they can pay for more.

This is how software worked for multiple decades before subscriptions came about.

Yes. This.

But don't forget compatibility updates. Underlying platforms change all the time, it makes sense for users to have to pay for these updates outside a certain time period.

You're absolutely right. I use over 400 tools. I'd be completely broke if I had to subscribe to them all.

So, you have a perpetual license to use the latest version of the software that you paid for?

Perfect.

... But JetBrains attempted to explain why this doesn't work with the subscription model. And failed IMO, but regardless.

Ugh, this trend of 'cloud sync' is highly annoying. Let me put an encrypted file on something that resembles a filesystem. If I want cloud sync, I'll put that file on Dropbox/OneDrive/GDrive/Whatever else.

It's only become a big thing after iOS and it's lack-of-a-filesystem and lack of inter-app data flows locked users out of their own devices.

Quite often I don't want many of the "new features". For me, bug fixes and security fixes are the main thing, followed by compatibility updates. I'm quite happy to pay for the latter when it was me that caused the issue by updating my OS/hardware in the first place. I'd quite like some amount of the former to be included in the original cost.