Live data from Hacker News

Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

datagubbe.se

121–130 of 219 posts

Re: Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

#121
IMHO part of the problem stems from teaching without carefully stating the nature of what is explained. A teacher should check that the audience reasonably knows what 'convention' means, how it differs from 'abstraction', 'truth', 'theory', 'measured fact'...

Bonus: explicitly recognizing that many terms (along with other conventions) aren't adequate. According to the knowledge of those who coined them they appeared adequate at the time, and replacing them may induce confusions, would condemn existing knowledge and writings, and isn't perfectly effective as the new convention may even prove inadequate later. I used to say that we may consider them as tributes to the the wonderful people who coined them.

Re: Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

#122
post #53
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept of files and file systems is useful to regular computer users, even when they have no interest in knowing how things work under the hood. The issue is with mobile OSs, and that software companies like their apps to be a walled garden for your data as much as possible, and therefore resist exposing your data as files living in a normal shared file system. Even if you already work with files, they have you…

Which is a better security model in these days of untrusted apps vs the desktop "my screensaver can read my chrome passwords file" model.

Your screensaver should be running as an unprivileged user.

Re: Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

#123
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept of files and file systems is useful to regular computer users, even when they have no interest in knowing how things work under the hood. The issue is with mobile OSs, and that software companies like their apps to be a walled garden for your data as much as possible, and therefore resist exposing your data as files living in a normal shared file system. Even if you already work with files, they have you…

In the name of low effort, tangential, golden era HN comments: the decision to hide file format extensions on windows (and maybe other OSs) sucks soooo much. The point about mobile devices breaking the desktop metaphor and file system norms is really interesting. Higher quality discussion question: Files, buffers,file systems, file explorers, and window managers seem like useful abstractions to me for the human compu…

The structure of the files an app uses internally is undocumented and not intended to be a user-facing API. Who wants to be responsible for handling every insane thing the users decide to do to those files?

Re: Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

#124

I think this post is related: We are destroying software ( https://antirez.com/news/145 ) I don't disagree that software engineering is not as rigorous as it was. But software has also spread into much wider area, allowing many more people to participate as programmers, all thanks to abstractions. I'm drawn to the romantic/pure/spartan aspect of low level programming too but I also need to make a living by solving pr…

> I don't disagree that software engineering is not as rigorous as it was.

Such an utter BS. Modern run-of-the-mill software would run stadiums around the software of 80-s or 90-s.

Version tracking, continuous integration, and even _bug_ tracking was not at all common in 90-s.

Testing? That's so far ahead of the state-of-the-art of even 2000-s that it's not even funny. Even the basic unit testing was a huge step ahead in 2000-s. And fuzz testing, ubiquitous sanitizers, time-travel debugging are all novel to the mainstream development.

And that's not all. We're now not just talking about formal methods, but applying them in practice (see: WUFFS). And we now have safety-oriented low-level languages like Rust (that's just basically 10 years old).

Re: Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

#125

I think JavaScript on the server and React and these things has really made the web a mess of software development compared to how little stuff it actually does. I know for a fact a bunch of kids now do not even know that HTML is what gets rendered in the browser. They think that React is itself what browsers render. Not to mention the absolute idiot of a CEO of Vercel who thinks React is the Linux kernel of developm…

What an odd claim to make, but he did.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42824720

I have been around for long enough to remember the vanilla js, jQuery, Knockout, and Angular 1 days and it always came with a baseline mess.

React (sometimes just JSX) can be used sensibly.

Instead, I blame VC-backed tooling like Vercel, Next, Apollo, Prisma, and all the other rubbish Webdevfluencers are paid to fill the web with.

Come to think of it, every part of building software is bloated. From Notion boards to questionable DB choices.

Re: Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bad - only 3 years. The fastest Samsung is around iPhone 12 and iPhone 13. https://browser.geekbench.com/mobile-benchmarks MediaTek is definitely not releasing high end chips. For desktop ARM, the only ones that come close are Qualcomm’s chip

TMSC realizes the designs. They only aren't designing because they choose not to. Basically everything you see around you Asia does better. I think the last thing we have is military technology and passenger planes. As for software, we're only slightly better than asia.

If that were the case, why wouldn’t they do that?

Does Foxconn also “realize the design” of the iPhone?

Re: Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I only spoke Arabic or Russian or Chinese, could I write words in my language on those ancient developer tools? For relevant cases, YES! NT4 was fully Unicode and supported multiple languages simultaneously, including in the dev tools. Windows and all associated Microsoft software (including VS) has had surprisingly good support for this even back in the late 1990s, possibly earlier. I remember seeing in 2001 an…

Your comment indicates a pretty poor understanding of why multilingual text rendering is a lot harder than it was in the early 90s. Back then, to display some text on the screen, the steps were: for each character (=byte), use the index to select a small bitmap from a dense array, copy that bitmap to the appropriate position on the screen, advance. But modern font rendering is: for a span of bytes, first look up whic…

Having personally implemented a Unicode text renderer in both DirectX and OpenGL back in 2002 for the Japanese game market, I dare say that chances are that I know a heck of a lot more than you about high performance multilingual text rendering. Don't presume.

You just made the exact same argument that Casey Muratori absolutely demolished very publicly.

The Windows Console dev team swore up and down that it was somehow "impossible" to render a fixed-width text console at more than 2 fps on a modern GPU when there are "many colors" used! This is so absurd on its face that it's difficult to even argue against, because you have to do the equivalent of establishing a common scientific language with someone that thinks the Earth is flat.

Back in the 1980s, fully four decades ago, I saw (and implemented!) colorful ANSI text art animations with a higher framerate on a 33 MHz 486 PC! That is such a miniscule amount of computer power that my iPhone charger cable has more than that built into the plug to help negotiate charging wattage. It's an order of magnitude less than the computer power a single CPU core can gain (or lose) simply from a 1 C degree change in the temperature of my room!

You can't believe how absurdly out-of-whack it is to state that a modern high-end PC would somehow "struggle" with text rendering of any sort!

Here is the developers at Microsoft stating that 2 fps is normal, and it's "too hard" to fix it. "I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation as “extremely simple” somewhat combatively" from: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomm...

Here is Casey banging out a more Unicode compliant terminal that looks more correct in two weekends that can sink text at over 1 GB/s and render at 9,000 fps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99dKzubvpKE

PS: This has come up here on HN several times before, and there is always an endless parade of flabbergasted developers -- who have likely never in their lives seriously thought about the performance of their code -- confidently stating that Casey is some kind of game developer wizard who applied some "black art of low-level optimisation". He used a cache. That's it. A glyph cache. Just... don't render the vector art more than you have to. That's the dark art he applied. Now you know the secret too. Use it wisely.

Re: Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TMSC realizes the designs. They only aren't designing because they choose not to. Basically everything you see around you Asia does better. I think the last thing we have is military technology and passenger planes. As for software, we're only slightly better than asia.

If that were the case, why wouldn’t they do that? Does Foxconn also “realize the design” of the iPhone?

Because their business model is to focus on manufacturing so that they don’t compete with their customers. This gives them access to Nvidia and amd with no conflict of interest. This is not something I’m just speculating about and writing about here as a counter point. This is literally a well known and specific strategic business decision made by tsmc.

Foxconn I’m less familiar with them so I can’t comment on that. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a similar strategy. Would apple really outsource to them if they were making their own competing phones? Fuck no.

That being said you know that all phone technology comes from abroad right? Like most design and manufacturing come from Asia. It is impossible for America alone to support the full stack of this technology. But Asia can.

Re: Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What malware has Facebook hidden in React?

I think they were referring to spyware hidden in Facebook's JavaScript, which uses React

Yes. Particularly it's those little badges that let you share some content or other on the social media site of your choice. I'm under the impression that whether you click them or not, they are phoning home to Facebook about your behavior.

So it's not hidden in react itself but rather in the constructed-on-page-load-and-hard-to-disable-just-parts-of space which react creates.

I'll confess to not having merely read about this skulduggery and not analyzed it myself. But it certainly explains why Facebook open sourced react and also why those things are everywhere. Is there a better explanation?

Post reply on HN