wsve

You're slightly missing the point. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter to me, the end user, whose fault it is that my OS doesn't have codecs.

The problem is that when doing an extremely basic operation that works on every system I've used before, it doesn't work, and the most readily available advice on how to resolve the issue tells me to run commands. Regardless of the reasons why it is that way, it just simply isn't user friendly.

I tried to make this shift, but managed to somehow brick Linux Mint, so now I'm back on Windows for now...

I was already not very impressed when I attempted to okay a video file, and VLC told me I didn't have the right codec installed, and I had to run a shell command to get the codec... I have to open a shell to watch a common video file?

But then while attempting to install some packages to install Steam (which I also needed shell commands for...), I updated some kernel package, as instructed, rebooted my machine, and now Mint just sits there doing nothing right after I get through the bootloader. Can't seem to run any commands to recover either.

Bricking Mint is annoying, but I was much more astonished that I saw so many people hold up Mint as this beacon of user friendly Linux distros, but to do even the most basic things, I had to start running commands on the shell. That is NOT user friendly. I'll probably try again soon, but I'm pretty disappointed in my first experience.

It was that small in 2020, it's more in the 5-10 range these days

> Rather than implicitly importing a library when the variable is first used, why don't you just explicitly do it?

I think it's on you to explain why that's a better approach for everyone's use cases instead of this language feature

The author is talking about owning a domain and how having that domain gives you ownership over your data... But I can't but think that, at least in the US, domain names are rented from private Internet service providers. There is no ownership involved. One way or another, we are still paying a company.

The assumption of the article is that ISPs are stable and net neutral enough that one would not worry about the ISP going under or seeking some personal vendetta against you and booting your domain. A separate entity may no longer be hosting our data, but a private entity is the gatekeeper of whether anyone is able to see your data.

All that to say, if we want true ownership of domains, ISPs need to be a nationalized, democratized service.

I was hoping to get some commentary about the project and what lessons you learned from it. You wrote an OS in 1000 lines of Zig, but... So what? What should I take away from this? Are you posting this to encourage people to use the OS, or learn from the project? How was Zig helpful or a hindrance for this? Why limit to 1000 lines? Why did you post this?

This seems harsh to the point of being untrue...

Sometimes I look at the way C macros are used to simulate generics and wonder to myself... Why don't y'all just put templates into the standard? If the way you're writing C code is by badly imitating C++, then just imitate C++! There's no shame in it!

Do you plan to branch out to new coin lines?

That seems unlikely, the code to do that would be part of the OS or maybe even part of the hardware, not really trivial things to hack.

Plus, what could a hacker really do with voice recordings that they couldn't do more easily with keylogging? It's not exactly common for people to say their credit card info or passwords aloud, much more common to type it

I work at Microsoft, so I'm biased, but C# may be my favorite language I've worked with compared to C++, Python, Type/JavaScript, Java, C, etc.

I see/hear jokes often that it's Microsoft Java, and yeah definitely granted that it comes from the same origins, but it's got some of the greatest tools I've worked with, best documentation, and best support I've seen. Anytime I've asked myself "Can I do this with C#?", the only times the answer has been "no" is when looking for a C++ constexpr equivalent (closest you get is build-time code-gen, which ain't half bad), or discriminated unions (inexplicably).

I'm convinced that anyone who complains about C# has never used it.

This is exactly right. DOGE deserves no praise. Their goal is not to cut spending to bring money back to the people. Their goal is to gut the government itself and make it ineffective in improving people's lives. They don't actually care whether these departments are "wasteful", and anyone who thinks they do has bought and drunk the snake oil.

This is much more of a manpower and money problem than it is a technical one. Of course it's possible to fork Linux and rewrite it in Rust. But who would spend all that time and energy doing that without the Linux foundations funds and expertise? You'd probably burn out within a few years before ever substantially converting the code base

I'm absolutely not bullish on LLMs, but I think this is kinda judging a fish on its ability to climb a tree.

LLMs are looking at typical constructions of text, not an understanding of what it means. If you ask it what color the sky is, it'll find what text usually follows a sentence like that, and tries to construct a response from it.

If you ask it the answer to a math question, the only way it could reliably figure it out is if it has in its database an exact copy of that math question. Asking it to choose things from a list is kinda like that, but one could imagine that the designers would try to supplement that manually with a different technique from pure LLM.

Not familiar with "boosting", but I'm definitely a fan of concepts and reflection.

Reflection is absolutely gonna feel completely alien to people for a while, but there's a lot of areas in our codebase where I wish I could simply describe a data layout and have the efficient code generated for me instead of writing tons of boilerplate. Take JSON serialization for example. Currently, you have to write your (de)serialization by hand, but with the new reflection stuff one could do it based on a struct's members, and with less error. It'll be wonderful for writing new libraries that will make our lives easier.

I often feel that when C++ posts come up, the majority of commenters are people who haven't deeply worked with C++, and there's several things people always miss when talking about it:

- If you're working in a large C++ code base, you are stuck working with C++. There is no migrating to something like Rust. The overhead of training your engineers in a new language, getting familiar with a new tool chain, working with a new library ecosystem, somehow finding a way to transition your code so it works with existing C++ code and isn't buggy and adapts to the new paradigms is all extremely expensive. It will grind your product's development to a buggy halt. It's a bad idea.

- Every time a new set of features (e.g. reflection, concepts, modules, etc.) is released, people bemoan how complicated C++ continues getting. But the committee isn't adding features for the sake of adding features, they're adding features because people are asking for them, they're spending years of their lives writing papers for the committee trying to improve the language so everyone can write better code. What you find horrifying new syntax, I find a great way of fixing a problem I've been dealing with for years.

- Yes, it's a gross homunculus of a language. If I could switch our team to Rust without issues, I would in a heartbeat. But this is the beast we married. It has many warts, but it's still an incredible tool, with an amazingly hard working community, and I'm proud of that.

That sounds like a good thing to me. I would prefer the people who hold power in our society be the ones democratically elected, not the ones who lucked into a leviathan amount of money and can now buy Twitter for fun.

Where is that line for you? Is occasionally checking for security updates strictly necessary? Is reporting a crash to the devs so they can fix it necessary? What about sending system & usage telemetry so they can prevent future bugs?

I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but I feel like I'm the only one who doesn't get why opt-out telemetry is such a big deal.

Sure, if it's a software library, I don't want it doing random network calls during my runtime. That's just rude.

But if it's a user application (including a compiler), I don't see what the fuss is about. Of all the myriad of ways our data is harvested every single day, telemetry seems very unhelpful to advertisers and hackers, but very helpful to the people whose job it is to make the software you use better. I'd love to help them make the software I use better

OP is obviously talking about people whose area of research/development/product would involve web scraping... This feels like being purposefully obtuse

"face scan" doesn't imply "3d face scan", it just implies additional data beyond a regular photograph. Isn't a 3d scan just a bunch of 2d scans lumped together? How many photos need to be taken before it's okay to call it a "scan"?

Isn't this literally a gag in The Office...? Which would unfortunately make this author Michael Scott in this situation...

Win+. opens an emoji keyboard??? How the hell have I not heard about this

I would agree with all of this, _except_ maybe the first bullet. Async can be fine so long as there's a mechanism for flushing all buffers before crashing. Otherwise, there's a high risk that you're gonna miss logging an important event that helps pinpoint why the crash occurred

Something that would have been really helpful to me: If the big pitch is "how easy it is" and "the mental model", get to that part sooner! Put up some pictures of what I'm supposed to visualize when I'm dealing with merge conflicts, and the simple commands mapping easily to that mental model.

I also read a ton of paragraphs excited about an easier Git, but I just couldn't understand what you were talking about and how it make my life easier. What does it mean to make merge conflicts first class?

"Season 9" is a spin off. I don't care if they still had a few of the OG cast pop in, when you have a whole new main cast and a whole new premise, that's a different series

"Kernel C" is the name given to the subset of C (read, Linux's flavor of C) that was formed by deciding which language features/compiler extensions they would/wouldn't use. Hardly a new or unsolvable problem.

Benefits of C++ over Rust: - Far easier and nicer to integrate with an enormous existing C codebase - C semantics are much more similar to C++ than to Rust, so no need to do huge pattern redesigns - No need to suddenly fight a borrow checker and prove lifetimes for a code base that isn't aware of them at all - Interfacing with existing C code will require unsafe interop, which greatly reduces the benefit of Rust's primary selling point - Transitions to C++ code will counterintuitively almost certainly introduce less bugs than rewriting in Rust, because you can do it in a much more piecemeal manner, and only do so in very disciplined way

Why should they rewrite it in Rust?

Now that we've seen this pattern emerge multiple times in the past (people losing a large chunk of their games due to the shutdown of the online catalog), I think it begs for a killer feature in the future: the ability to burn the games you've purchased from the online catalog onto write-once blank cartridges.

Distributing games via physical copies is already a profit loss compared to distributing them via an online store, and distributing different cartridges per-game means even more supply issues for that specific game. Allowing players to do a one-time burn of the game they purchased to a blank cartridge would mean game companies could sell the game at full price digitally, make an extra sale on the cartridge, and gamers get the security of knowing that if servers were going to be shut down, they'd have the ability to burn the games they care about to physical media and be able to keep playing them. Win win for everyone.

Well, historically yes, but this has stopped being true for the past ~80 years

Does that make it not an improvement? There's definitely issues with C++'s syntax...