261–270 of 504 posts
An unpopular but effective short-term solution: Developers ought to use five year old hardware for development and testing tasks. FWIW, my work laptop and mobile phone are both 2015 models and I feel they're completely adequate for running all the software I've written.
I still manage to crank some terrible solutions, though. :P
He seems to make a contradictory point... he complains: > iOS 11 dropped support for 32-bit apps. That means if the developer isn’t around at the time of the iOS 11 release or isn’t willing to go back and update a once-perfectly-fine app, chances are you won’t be seeing their app ever again. but then he also says: > To have a healthy ecosystem you need to go back and revisit. You need to occasionally throw stuff away…
When I was in school and first leaning about programming I assumed that code written in C or Java would eventually be ported to hand tuned assembler once enough people were using it. Then I got in to the industry and realized that we just keep adding layer after layer until we end up at the point this article talks about. I remember once reading that IBM was going to implement an XML parser in assembler and people we…
Imagine how bad it would be if not!
> How is that ok? Probably because a browser like FF has the goal to load and display arbitrary dynamic content in realtime like a reddit infinite scroll with various 4k videos and ad bullshit, whereas the game has the goal to render a known, tested number of pre-downloaded assets in realtime. Also on shitty pages the goal is different-- load a bunch of arbitrary adware programs and content that the user doesn't want…
Browsers are fine. It's the websites that are slow. It's not the fault of Firefox that Reddit's new UI is pathetically slow. It's the Reddit's implementation of their UI itself which is total garbage. And given that people do write fast, complex, real-time games in JavaScript for the browser, gamedev absolutely becomes a valid reference point for the possible performance of any individual page.
Why should Firefox or any other dynamic software have the ability to be slow for what it archives? If compilers should be fast, Web engines should be equally as fast. The Web should have never been designed such that a slow website (relative to the task) could be achieved. In the same way that you can only express memory safe code in rust and type safe code in haskell why not being only able to express "fast for what is interactive"?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember a story about an electronic musician who preferred to mix his songs with earbuds/headphones instead of with a high-end megabucks studio sound system. His reasoning was basically, “that’s how my fans will listen to my music, so I need to make sure it sounds good to them.” I can’t remember who it was, but the idea always stuck with me. Anyway, I agree that we should test our applications with the same hardwa…
That’s funny; I’m always debating my brother, talking about how earbuds sound much better than even high-end monitors, largely because of the surrounding environment (or lack thereof, when earbuds are in). When I make music I have to do the opposite; take my earbuds out and listen to the music over my car stereo or via my MacBook Pro speakers, to make sure it doesn’t sound good only through earbuds.
I like them, but I've found that they make a bit too conscious about the sound, so I have to be extra careful. The isolation emphasizes noise and frequencies that the monitors don't, and that will be masked in the full mix. It used to lead me to a rabbit hole of noise-gating and EQs.
> Linux kills random processes by design. And yet it’s the most popular server-side OS There's no reference for this in the article, and it caught my attention - anyone have any idea what the author is talking about here? Never heard of this before
It could be referring to the out of memory (OOM) killer https://www.kernel.org/doc/gorman/html/understand/understand...
> Customizing victim selection: impact on the badness of processes via matching their names, cgroups, exe realpathes, environs, cmdlines and euids with specified regular expressions;
a) Lack of fundamental understanding of how computers work
b) Abstraction away from the bits, flops, shifts and pops
c) Quick sort
d) Electron.js
e) Ruby hipsters
f) Magical cloud computing
g) Software companies that know the cost of everything and the value of nothing
h) All of the above
Energy (or more accurately power) is a scarce resource. If it's not being spent to keep the organization or individual going, then it could be argued that the energy is wasted. As it requires functioning organizations to acquire more energy and so on. All systems - biological, physical, meta-physical are built on layers that once deep enough are pretty well cemented in. Hindsight is 20/20 and though we know if the fo…
On the other hand, life is extremely frugal with energy. The foundations of biological systems are ridiculously efficient, and all the complex life forms are pretty good too. Despite being designed by a biased random process, they have at least this going on for them: the fitness function favors energy-efficient systems. Unlike our markets.
But they don't waste much material.
Something no one has said which probably should be mentioned is that programmers today are just not as good as programmers of yesteryear.
Perhaps it's more that most (not all) of the many programmers today are not as good as the (relatively fortunate) few who had access to computers in the past. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest there are more good programmers about today then there were in the past. Though having said that, percentage-wise I'd say the profession is definitely being deskilled (good thing if you're a manager, bad thing if you're a go…
FTFY