"Building fast programs, with Go/Rust" Sure, bud.
In contrast to building fast root escalation exploits which perform useful functionality on the side, which is what we get with less safe memory models.
Things that used to be hard and are now easy
11–20 of 316 posts
Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy
#12> Building cross-platform GUIs, with Electron How about no. I so want this abomination of a technology uninvented.
But it's the only reason Discord, Slack, VS Code, and other apps exist on operating systems other than Windows/MacOS.
Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy
#13"Building fast programs, with Go/Rust" Sure, bud.
No post body was provided.
Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy
#14> Building cross-platform GUIs, with Electron How about no. I so want this abomination of a technology uninvented.
But it's the only reason Discord, Slack, VS Code, and other apps exist on operating systems other than Windows/MacOS.
Tbh the world would've been better off if these apps didn't exist. Especially VS Code.
Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy
#15> Building cross-platform GUIs, with Electron How about no. I so want this abomination of a technology uninvented.
But it's the only reason Discord, Slack, VS Code, and other apps exist on operating systems other than Windows/MacOS.
Those are built by large teams with a lot of backing, and still suffer from many issues (mainly performance; Slack crawls very badly, VSCode and Discord not so much); I think it's gotten easier but still wouldn't call it "easy".
Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy
#16As someone who leans frontend, I find firebase and serverless (somebody else’s server) solutions really powerful for prototyping an idea or building a proof of concept. You can get something in front of your users tomorrow. I would second guess SaaS startups that start by building the infra/data models unless they’re going for a highly technical play (aerospace, hardware, etc) or already have a ton of market knowledg…
What is there even to migrate??
Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy
#17> Building cross-platform GUIs, with Electron How about no. I so want this abomination of a technology uninvented.
I really don’t care at all about the resource usage or speed of Electron apps in 2022.
Any semi-modern PC has no problem running Electron apps. Download sizes aren’t an issue with modern internet speeds. It doesn’t make sense to try to optimize for people with the slowest systems when everything is only getting faster.
Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy
#18> Building cross-platform GUIs, with Electron How about no. I so want this abomination of a technology uninvented.
Then create an open source cross-platform GUI framework/toolkit that's technologically superior to Electron and also at least as easy and convenient to use and deploy, and people will dump Electron in droves.
I mean, please do! I would be delighted about an efficient, cross-platform, cross-language, convenient GUI toolkit. But I'm not holding my breath, and I'm tired of people complaining about Electron without offering an alternative that's superior along all relevant axes.
Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy
#19Would be interested in also seeing a "things that used to be easy but are now hard list". Feels like basic stuff is harder now:
* Privacy online
* Google search for niche or exact matches
* Browsing without captchas and blockers, especially if you don't adhere to big tech's rules for the internet
* Sending emails without worrying about spam filters being way too aggressive
* SEO before it got hacked to hell
* Barrier to entry for creatives to build things on the web (for all the flaws flash had, it bridged the gap)
* Finding real discussion and information. The growth of bots posting, misinformation, blogspam, and toxic echo chamber partisan discussion online (maybe it was always like this, i.e, eternal September?)
* MacBooks being easier to upgrade before when things weren't soldered on
* In general anti right to repair hardware
* Not having to worry about dongles, i.e. connecting USB devices to your machine
* Ransomware wasn't a thing. Nothing like a non-technical user needing to learn BTC or XMR to maybe get their data back
* Being able to buy software once vs a subscription, e.g., photoshop
* Work was easier to disambiguate from life before chat apps like Slack made employees always reachable
* CGNAT not being as common
* OAuth is still annoying to implement
* Blocking ads was easier
* Getting a job was easier for a lot of people prior to whiteboarding, leetcode tests, assignments, multi-day interviews and trials, etc. becoming more common
* GDPR making infra+dev work harder because big tech companies don't understand consent and couldn't behave, also leading to performative/annoying cookie banners we see everywhere
* Needing an internet connection for software+tools that used to be able to run locally on your OS
* Website responsiveness was easier before all the devices and monitors with different viewports
* Archival (or scraping) was easier before the majority of human generated content was placed behind login walls (fb) and rendered content needing headless browsers
Edit: Call me cynical if you want—yeah some of those programmer things listed are easier now, but improvements on the core regressions I listed would help programmers (and non-programmers!) all across the world and in developing countries more than some niche highly paid SV engineers using terraform to orchestrate infra on GCP.
Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it's the only reason Discord, Slack, VS Code, and other apps exist on operating systems other than Windows/MacOS.
Those are built by large teams with a lot of backing, and still suffer from many issues (mainly performance; Slack crawls very badly, VSCode and Discord not so much); I think it's gotten easier but still wouldn't call it "easy".
Yeah. Slack and Discord sure have enough resources to build three dedicated native apps for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Slack has been through several full rewrites yet still works terrible. At this point it must be nothing but stubbornness. It's definitely not an informed engineering decision.