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Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

frankchimero.com

261–269 of 269 posts

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#261

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I would love to to use Linix as my daily driver, but keep needing to go back to Windows for Ableton and gaming.

I switched to Bitwig, which has a native version for Linux. The workflow is very similar to Ableton Live, with a little bit of extra configuration. As for gaming, it's a case-by-case situation, but Valve Proton is good enough for 80% of the games I like.

Yeah I've heard that Bitwig could be a good solution, and is made by the original developers of Ableton.

But what about 3rd party plugins? As far as I understand, most of these won't work on Linux either.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#262

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I wish wish wish I could move over to Linux but its font rendering situation is terrible [1] I've tried Manjaro and Ubuntu to no avail. I have no idea what causes it or if people on Linux are not as sensitive to it or its a specific hardware setup which causes terrible fonts but once you read Windows fonts stuff looks so much better to me. Apparently its a hot debated topic but its so obvious to some it seems. [1] ht…

Hah: I am very particular about fonts myself but what bugs me most isn't sub-pixel hinting (which is "good enough" with the latest freetype IMHO) it's the size of fonts. Windows is so far off the mark on 99% of computers and it drives me crazy! Repeat after me: 72pt is one inch tall! 72pt is one inch tall! 72pt is one inch tall! The "point" scale of fonts is actually a precise, real-world measurement like inches, mil…

On top of that mess you describe here lives the web designer pixel mess.

Web designers loved to do their web pages with pixel measurements instead of real lengths in millimeters or points. Which is a horrible idea because of the different DPIes.

DPIes became bigger and bigger over time and browser developers were between two fronts of bullshit. The OS told them a bullshit DPI and web pages gave them a bullshit pixel length design. What did they do? The invented a third layer of bullshit to fix the other two (a little): the fake pixel. "Pixels" in web pages today have not the same length like the screen's real pixels, they are somehow scaled.

This is all broken beyond repair.

I wished that browser developers would have implemented it the right way. A pixel is a pixel and an inch is an inch. Many sites would be broken after that and the web designers would be forced to fix that and to use for example millimeters or points for lengths. And in a perfect world the OS would then use the correct DPI to display the rendered result.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#263
post #126

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I agree with you, but the problem, the big problem, is that you're looked down if you propose to use simpler tools. It is horribly difficult to not use these advanced tools for simpler problems. At work my team does just f**ng CRUD forms, and for doing this we have the most overcomplicated stack I've seen in my life. Go backend with React, Redux, Rxjs,custom.webpack craziness, and 32 tons of internal weird libraries…

Rails FTW. I’ve kept checking on other tools, but there’s no stack out there that is even on the same order of magnitude of productivity as Rails for doing simple LOB CRUD apps. Which, it turns out, is a LOT of apps. I think the problem is that there’s a common type of person drawn to programming which HATES being “told what to do” with Rails’ convention-over-configuration approach. Whatever. While they’re still writ…

This. So much this. I miss rails after joining a huge company.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#264

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Linux is also stable. The binary interface isn't going to change. It's possible to write Linux software that you can boot directly into and it will never stop working or do anything you don't want it to do.

Because there's a BDFL at the top. Linus understands that the whole point of a kernel is having a stable binary interface to run programs on, anytime somebody wants to break userspace he goes on a rant and rejects the idea, rightfully so. Many other projects do not follow this way of thinking or don't have a BDFL. They break API's because... someone felt like it? Every once in a while I dig into the changelogs or mig…

Yeah. I suppose without Linus's leadership Linux just wouldn't be the same project anymore. The world has come to trust him because he makes good decisions. We depend on his core values such as "don't break userspace". I wonder what it's gonna be like in the future...

> They break API's because... someone felt like it?

I empathize with them. Designing software is essentially philosophy. The interfaces reflect the developer's current understanding of the world. When this understanding improves, people are tempted to update software because they feel like the software is wrong and unelegant when it doesn't match what's in their minds.

It takes a really good engineer to reject this impulse and take responsibility for interfaces people came up with in the 90s.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#265
post #260

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I'd argue that golang's application is even less than what you mentioned. CLI app perhaps, and some simple use case here and there. Databases and infrastructure services need more expressive languages. I agree with you otherwise.

By database I mean the actual database servers. Like postgresql or the actual thing storing data to disk, those things are usually implemented in C/C++. By infrastructure services I mean things as DNS servers, network queues, etc.

> By database I mean the actual database servers.

Yes I understand :) golang is still a terrible language for them though. Rust, Java, and C# are strictly superior alternatives.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#266
post #23

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And this is exactly why any of my hobby projects that involve JS are done with plain JS, with as few libraries as possible. I might pull in specific libraries, but I don't want to pull in a giant framework that will be outdated the next time I decide to work on that particular project.

Another thing I find weird is how bloated static typical site generator tools are. The delivery medium of static HTML is timeless. But the odds that a static site generator with dozens of dependencies will still work N years from now? Grim.

agreed, but for me the appeal of static site generation is that the input is typically just markdown and some templates so even if a particular generator ceases to be supported it should be trivial to drop in a replacement in whatever the currently fashionable language is.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#267

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I'm not a web developer, but at work I run a couple small app servers for internal tools. They have business logic specific to our product, and owned by the company, so although I'm doing a lot of pointless "plug together HTML" work for my learning, I'm also doing stuff that, AFAICT, has to be original code written by me. Did I manage to successfully duck out the entire web trend already? When I was a kid, the web ba…

I’d pay close attention to it. We don’t talk about the death of website development as a career because app development was available for everyone to transition to, so it mostly got ignored. But it happened, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. It’s a dirty little secret that if we honestly told new people switching to web dev ‘hey, yeah, just so you know, our jobs as we knew it kind of vanished once’, the…

Wordpress

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#268

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It’s non existent. It’s weird how people were obsessed with coal miners losing their jobs, but right here in tech we literally saw a profession vanish. There is no ‘website developer’ anymore, not really. It just ... went away. That group had to shift overnight (in relative terms) to app development. This might be more foreboding than people realize. Aside from those who need to write complex queries stitching big da…

TIL, I don’t have a job? Guess it’s an Office Space situation. Better get my own stapler.

Can you move your desk to the basement ? And while you're there....

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#269
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind linking any of your work?

This is my profile at Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18339067.Marian_Kechli... Everything I write is in Czech, though. Automatic translation from Czech to English sucks.

Thank you! And don't worry I'm Czech :)
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