81–90 of 146 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until you get to the physics of transistors and logic gates :) Though I suppose in a sense, even subatomic particles are abstractions over quarks. It’s just that those are no longer abstractions we control.
I realized the brilliance of the name Quartz for the graphics framework. It’s what happens to “rendered” silicon.
macOS probably doesn't get enough love from an OS design perspective. Over the years I've had reasons to work pretty closely with the guts of all of Linux, macOS and Windows and macOS is probably my favourite, design wise, although for some tasks you can't beat the flexibility and feature set of Linux. A few highlights that are lesser known: - XPC/Mach is a pretty reasonable IPC system that avoids the huge complexity…
I agree with most of what you've said here, except: - Code signing. It's incredibly frustrating as a developer to try and codesign an application to pass gatekeeper, requiring multiple steps with very little information as to what's _actually_ going on or going wrong in the middle of it, including uploading your entire bundle to Apple and waiting an arbitrary amount of time for them to notarize it. > It's very weak t…
As for the compile times mentioned by the sibling comment, they're pretty tiny for small utility things, especially incremental builds. On more recent hardware (M1, Ryzen 5000, etc) I find they're reasonable even for moderately sized projects… on M1 Pro a complex iOS app with somewhere in the ballpark of 30 different screens can be clean-built in under a minute with incremental builds usually under 3s which seems plenty reasonable to me.
There are also some amusing writings not included here about modern macOS changing things in a way Siracusa dislikes. For example, mandatory file extensions (written in 2001, when the Internet was a thing and file extensions were required for all file exchanges) [0] or the Spatial Finder saga [1] about missing an antiquated way to make a mess on your screen and pretend to be managing folders. [0] https://arstechnica.…
History is such a great way to learn anything. It’s interesting - like a mystery revealed, but also provides the why - why things are the way they are. I was looking into accounting the other day, and you can go back to the first document that mentioned credit and debit and introduced modern accounting. There are so many topics like this that seem confusing and arbitrary but it all began extremely simply and pragmati…
Agreed. This is why often reading a Wikipedia page is the worst way to learn something. The best way is to get a teacher to tell you the relevant history leading up to the thing, and it makes much more sense.
It’s funny how I used to think that operating systems, databases, and cloud systems, as these kind of arcane things that were somehow apart from the rest of software. I could not begin to grasp how they could deal with running programs, access control, or any of these things that once seemed so foreign and mysterious to me. And realising that it’s actually just software, that there’s no black magic to it, just lower-…
It's turtles all the way down. Layers of abstraction stacked on layers of abstraction.
why i kind of like old IBM PC environment. x86 + a few bios calls, dont even need DOS after you load game.exe
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's turtles all the way down. Layers of abstraction stacked on layers of abstraction.
why i like arduino. why i kind of like old IBM PC environment. x86 + a few bios calls, dont even need DOS after you load game.exe
That's great! Now, bonus time: Let's do something like that for SwiftUI.
It’s funny how I used to think that operating systems, databases, and cloud systems, as these kind of arcane things that were somehow apart from the rest of software. I could not begin to grasp how they could deal with running programs, access control, or any of these things that once seemed so foreign and mysterious to me. And realising that it’s actually just software, that there’s no black magic to it, just lower-…
It’s funny how I used to think that operating systems, databases, and cloud systems, as these kind of arcane things that were somehow apart from the rest of software. I could not begin to grasp how they could deal with running programs, access control, or any of these things that once seemed so foreign and mysterious to me. And realising that it’s actually just software, that there’s no black magic to it, just lower-…
The thing that made me realize this was compilers! "Wait, code is just text?" "Always has been" I still have to remind myself of this sometimes when I think "woah, how does this work?" and then I try to step through how it might be built.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> QM is whack Very much so. But I also think it always had to be that way. A universe of infinite classical regression (atoms made of atoms made of atoms...) would be more insane than whack .
If I had to guess, I'd say infinite regression is how the real world works, and quantum mechanics is how our reality's simulator lazily computes interactions.