waltpad

I think I misunderstood the original idea: I thought that the person still having the source would have released it with some possible modifications, but I didn't realize these mods would only be to hide the code origins, and keep it otherwise fully compatible.

you probably know about GeoWorks Ensemble?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoWorks

also:

http://toastytech.com/guis/bbe.html

Wouldn't MS also have to prove that the code is not a derivative of some other PC desktop solution of that era?

Perhaps a few precisions:

I don't claim to be capable of producing the software that is discussed, I'm merely stating my opinion on the topic. Most likely my view on this is skewed and not deep enough to be qualified as insightful. I feel that the work done on all these applications are already quite a feat, but I also remember seeing hard critics about Siri, Cortana and these solutions when they are quite difficult to get to the level they've reached. Yet, I also think that there is still a long way until they really become good assistants. The other way I discussed - which is these super apps - in my opinion require quite a bit of customizability to get out of the dashboard trench, but since I don't believe to have an accurate view of what they are capable of these days, you probably want to take all of that with a large grain of salt.

My understanding is that people want integration: being able to use their favorite platforms so that it's easy to share and connect data between them, and what the user already has on their device(s).

As I understand it, nowadays OS shells do provide something like that, by having a smart indexing and search tool available. A "super app" seems to be another way to provide that consolidation, but is there more to it than indexing?

A user is basically having a chat with their device. The UI is the language available for the user to form queries. The more flexible the language, the more the user may express complex queries. But users don't really want to learn a complex language, they want something either "intuitive" or matching their interests from the beginning (ie, opening up the search possibilities, or narrowing down to a usable set of targets). Because intuition is only made from analogies of accumulated knowledge, the former can only be constructed by having the app capable of understanding (possibly a subset of) the user language, which leads to Siri and the like. The later by reducing the scope of the super app to a template of interests, which could either fixed (mainstream topics), or determined from a set of existing models by having the user go through a questionnaire at app install to narrow down their interests to a manageable subset.

I think that for now the key factors are:

(1) consolidation of information, because the user doesn't want to jump through each of their accounts or data sources to find what their looking for.

(2) automatic connection of different services (banking, online markets, and perhaps many other use cases); this is only relevant for services which are not equipped with a protocol to deal with a given form of connectivity. Perhaps this is a generalization of (1).

(3) social interaction and controlled sharing of data

(4) security

Ultimately, the UI would have to become some sort of programming language to really be able to fulfill all of the users wishes, but natural languages are a poor fit for this task, and because of this the feature set of these apps will always be limited, unless somehow Siri and al learn to ask the user to be more precise when there are ambiguities (not unlike the dialogue that exists between a programmer and a compiler). Also, speaking to your app is not really a secure way of interacting with it, unless you're alone when doing it, and you never leave your device.

> Crowds, for example, behave similarly even if you shuffle around who is in the crowd.

Indeed, but the issue is that the Wikipedia editors are not a crowd, it's a crowd of crowds. What's the behaviour of that? And can we compare this context with those used for whichever experiment was used to come to that claim I'm citing above.

> You seem to be operating under the assumption that if we only threw more manpower at Wikipedia we could incrementally improve it to perfection. That seems implausible to me for various reasons.

My idea actually was that overtime, editors would improve in their way of doing that task. However, admittedly, they would have to hang around long enough for this to happen. Maybe that's what "Hyper-Libertarians" have in mind as well? That by default humans are trying to get better at what they do, and thus the system can only improve?

> It is also an expression of personality.

That's a point I disagree with: I don't believe that an encyclopedia article should show personality, but quite the contrary. For me, an encyclopedia is something like a dictionary with a more in depth treatment of the topics. It is first and foremost a compilation of informations.

> Something doesn't need to be a 'well defined entity' to speak about it meaningfully.

True, what I meant is that the writer accuses Wikipedia of some sort of agenda, but it's not just one group of people, but many factions with opposite goals, including the one described in the meta pages. Although not being a well defined entity doesn't preclude discussing it, there are things that cannot be said about it because of that.

Another thing that the writer says is that Wikipedia failed, as if it reached an irrevocable state, but Wikipedia is all but in a well defined state (unless you count this as a well defined state, but then we might end up in a Russel paradox), it's content is constantly fluctuating, even if slowly so. When you speak of emergent tendencies, I find the idea compelling, but I wonder if this compatible with a constantly changing set of editors. And even if it is, perhaps this trend is like a disease, and at some point (like in evolutionary algorithms), a cure will emerge?

> That 'fact' and 'opinion' aren't clean categories.

Indeed, perhaps I was guilty of the same mistake as the writer? However, it is possible to find many pages with annotations criticizing the page content for lack of references or sources. I see that as an attempt to implement fact checking.

Actually, I did that, numerous times, although it was mostly to do spelling correction or in one case linking to external pages trying to leverage Wikipedia's SEO(?) value (ie. the external pages were discussing the topic in the wiki page in order to promote their own business, which wasn't related at all), which shows that it's clearly easy to get Wikipedia to fulfill its purpose.

So all in all what I did was minor editing, perhaps it doesn't count as what you would mean as an edit immediately reverted by other editors. I have no doubt that there are factions monitoring pages of strategic value, it makes sense for a website of that importance culturally. But it also means that the Wikipedia core community must always remain vigilant about these unfortunate slides.

Why should I have to disprove your claim?

I find it strange that the writer presents Wikipedia as a well defined entity: it is possible for anyone (including the writer) to amend a Wikipedia article. This may even be done anonymously.

The writer goes on to describe various issues about various articles, which could be brought up directly in the discussion sections of these articles, as well as possible solutions for these issues.

However, the first few lines point out something really interesting: Wikipedia doesn't seem to look for facts, but rather to describe point of views. If you are familiar with stackoverflow, the main policy there is to only provide factual information. Any opinion-based question or answer are at the least frowned upon, and usually rejected (though it may also depends on a sub-topic local behaviour). However, I believe that this policy wasn't devised from the beginning, but rather refined over time, considering that the entries at the dawn of the site were much less restricted on that ground. Wikipedia seems to be much more open to opinions, in a "neutral" way, which they explain by giving each opinion as much coverage has it is popular (and thus accepted). So, does it mean that if the "flat Earth" theory (which is given as an example in the Wikipedia page) was much more popular, it would be prevalent in the article about Earth?

So mainstream ideas will be described in much more details than so-called alternate views. For me, this seems somewhat counter-intuitive. I would want to have an encyclopedia which compiles facts, rather than opinions. Am I missing something?

What do you mean by "empirical"? Are you saying that eastern medicine is not based on empirical evidence, ie. observation and experimentation, but on some other approach?

How was it energy-wise?

You didn't motivate your claim. Could you elaborate?

I'm not sure what you mean by "highlight", but I remember reading somewhere that Japanese people are usually very nostalgic of their school years, though I don't remember if there was an explanation given for it.

My personal opinion is that the Japanese society is very demanding for adults, and people recall these years as less burdensome. Perhaps this is the same everywhere?

Oh, I see. Wouldn't that make sense that each surface would be associated with its closest light source? It's still a rough approximation, but I guess it's better than one global light source?

It seems to me that this game doesn't actually take in account all the seemingly existing light sources when computing the shadows: see for instance at around 7:45, there is an obvious light source in the bottom right region (actually a bunch of synchronized pulsating lights on some sort of cylinders) which clearly should affect the surfaces close to it, but it doesn't in either mode! In the next comparison, there's a fire burning close to a wall, and likewise the fire doesn't seem to emit any light on the wall. Actually, the commentators do mention that there isn't that much dynamic lights handled in the game, limiting the effect of RTX.

I don't know how that RTX tech is working, but from what I've seen of the port of Quake2, it looked much more convincing - did you see it before making that judgement?

...and old web navigators. Protocols evolve, security requires old encryption schemes to go away, thus the OS you use has to keep up as well, and if you try to use a reasonably old live bootable DVD, you might have some surprise.

They should train an AI to do that.

This message said:

> prefer being fired/layed off through a text message [...]

where I suggest that a text message could be forged. From that point, either you don't pay attention to that possibility, and take the risk of being fired for real, or you request a confirmation through some other mean of communication, something that can be verified, and thus render the original message moot.

Or did that person imply that somehow message of that sort would be signed off cryptographically? I didn't think about that option, but I wonder how many companies deploy PKIs for emails between employees. Maybe this is more common than I think?

Until you discover that this message was forged, and when you show up one week later, then they really fire you for not showing up at work for a week.

I don't understand your first argument. My feeling is that you got side-tracked by the use of the word "engineer" because it shouldn't be used in its literal meaning, but was it the intent of GP?

There are scientific papers, BTW, which engineer solutions by evolutionary algorithms. Is that evolution or engineering? Clearly there's an engineering setup, made of all the constraints you speak about for the evolution process to take place, and that evolution process is also defined artificially, yet just like the real stuff, it follows a set of rules, so where's the divide? Why nature couldn't be engineering life with evolution, but humans could?

Your last point OTOH is quite relevant.

I suppose that you mean that it should be "checking types dynamically", rather than "checking dynamic types"?

> I think it also is due to the fact that PHP is a fairly easy language for a non-coder to pick up little-by-little. One can easily start using it for doing simple things, like injecting dynamic data into a web page. From there one can learn to scale up to full web apps.

I personally started using PHP because, at the time, the free hosting servers only had support for it. Otherwise, I could probably have picked python, ruby (or even perl). I wasn't a non-coder, but I think that these languages may be self-taught with the same ease as PHP (well, maybe not perl).

> In my 20 years of writing code (starting with PHP) I have learned the lesson over and over again that while writing code commercially the fact that the language has feature X or that it forces certain patterns means almost nothing. Sure, your developers might feel better about themselves but that is about it.

But, isn't that the whole point of using PHP 7.4 over, say, PHP 3 (besides evaluation speed)? Would you code in PHP 3 today, if PHP had not evolved at all?

My guess is that:

1) the quicksort algorithm which was used was a recursive version, and relied on local variables to do its job.

2) in the discussed BASIC implementation, local variables are translated to global variables (probably with some form of prefixing based on the function using it to avoid name clashes). This means that functions in that language are never fully reentrant, and that somehow an explicit variable stack has to be implemented to recover the ability to recurse without overwriting variable prematurely.

Note: I initially had a doubt wrt reentrancy, as I had knowledge of this concept in the context of multithreading (I think it actually came up originally in that context), and indeed having concurrent uses of the same function relying on some global variable is problematic, but here there isn't any kind of concurrency. However, global variables can be a problem in the situation outlined above. Another possible issue, although not present here, is when a function F uses a global variable, and accept a function pointer. If that pointer is pointing to a function making a call to F somehow, then lack of reentrancy could also be a problem.

To refresh my memory, I must admit that I had a quick glance at stackoverflow (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3052393/reentrancy-and-r...).

My guess would be that they don't want to have that email accidentally used, but they would have a check in the codepath anyway, because no-one wants to see its logs spammed with myriads DNS errors when this can be avoided. And in fact, if a DNS error shows up in the logs, devs would know that somehow their code path is not completely safe, so that change on the email is perhaps a way for them to ensure that the disabled account is indeed seen as disabled by their code in every situation.

A lot of people are complaining about NYT approach, but perhaps their only fault - if one consider that not deleting for good an account is not an issue, and it seems to be a common practice in the industry - is to not use a transaction when disabling user accounts (disable email -> disable account), which is perhaps difficult with NoSQL setups?

Which means that removing them (when removing snapd) doesn't matter much.

Well, tbh, that sounds a bit far fetched. I meant that we should cut them some slack (English is not my first language).

That being said, it's not as bright as I thought it was - see my other comment.

Now, this is embarassing, here the list of reverse dependencies on snapd:

  python3-ubuntu-image
  xubuntu-desktop
  xubuntu-core
  vanilla-gnome-desktop
  ubuntustudio-desktop-core
  ubuntustudio-desktop
  ubuntukylin-desktop
  ubuntu-unity-desktop
  ubuntu-snappy-cli
  ubuntu-snappy
  ubuntu-mate-desktop
  ubuntu-mate-core
  ubuntu-core-launcher
  ubuntu-budgie-desktop
  snapd-xdg-open
  snapcraft
  snap-confine
  qml-module-snapd
  plasma-discover-backend-snap
  lxd
  lubuntu-desktop
  libsnapd-qt1
  kubuntu-desktop
  ember
  cyphesis-cpp
  chromium-browser
  ubuntu-server
  ubuntu-desktop-minimal
  ubuntu-desktop
  ubuntu-core-snapd-units
  livecd-rootfs
  maas
  apparmor
  libsnapd-glib1
  gnome-software-plugin-snap
  command-not-found

Any of these packages is going to pull snapd in if installed. Soon after writing the above comment, I decided to install chromium, and ... snapd got installed as well as a result. I guess I should double check each claim I am about to make, BEFORE making it.

sigh...

Edit: Please note that many of these are "leaf" packages, by which I mean that no other packages depend on them.

You had to install snap on a production server?

I don't know how must be installed on your version, but on 19.10, snap can be completely removed: the only draw back is that pulseaudio depends on it, but I guess that for a server it's not that much of a problem.

> I strongly recommend anyone similarly frustrated to check out debian, which is a fantastic distro.

It is true that the Debian people are doing a great job.

> [...] if you're using Ubuntu and disabling snap, you're fighting against the current and I have to imagine it's going to be increasingly difficult with subsequent releases.

Actually, snap was harder to remove in the previous release: you had to rebuild certain packages (actually, just pulseaudio, so it only matters for desktops) to get rid of the dependency, but it seems now that it's just a couple of apt commands, so you have to give Canonical credits for making it easier.

> Especially when you consider code generation.

That's a very good point you are making here.

However, as I said elsewhere, I don't see the use of being able to either write

typedef int ...

or

int typedef ...

and I don't think that proper code generation would require it.