461–470 of 515 posts
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Yes, but your kids have a technical parent, so chances are they both have significantly above-average intelligence.
I technically have two parents. How far up the smarts pole am I?
My opinion about this is that yes, we lost our way, and the reason is very simple, it is because we could. It was the path of least resistance, so we took it. Software has been freeriding on hardware improvements for a few decades, especially on web and desktop apps. Moore's law has been a blessing and a curse. The software you use today was written by people who learned their craft while this free-ride was still ful…
Now imagine same but with AI killer bot swarms. Slaughterbots. Because we could ! As long as we have COMPETITION as the main principle for all tech development — between countries or corporations etc. — we will not be able to rein in global crises such as climate change, destruction of ecosystems, or killer AI. We need “collaboration” and “cooperation” at the highest levels as an organizing principle, instead. Compet…
My opinion about this is that yes, we lost our way, and the reason is very simple, it is because we could. It was the path of least resistance, so we took it. Software has been freeriding on hardware improvements for a few decades, especially on web and desktop apps. Moore's law has been a blessing and a curse. The software you use today was written by people who learned their craft while this free-ride was still ful…
The thing that makes me crazy is that the thing that we do on computers are basically the same each year, yet software are more and more heavy. For example just in 2010 a Linux distribution with a DE just started did consume 100Mb of RAM, an optimized version 60Mb of RAM. I remember it perfectly. I had 2Gb of RAM and did not have even a swap partition. Now just a decade later, a computer with less than 8Gb of RAM is…
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If you look at the build, yea, it includes everything and kitchen sink. No one cares to parse it down because in most cases, the big GPU servers running this have plenty of hard disk space and since it's a long running container image in most cases, the pull time isn't considered big enough problem for most people to fix. Prime example of "Hardware is cheap and inefficiencies be damned"
If only it was viable to analyze which files get used. Then cut down the image to just what’s needed.
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You don’t have to do any of that for native apps either. What on earth is happening in this comment section?
I think on macOS it's kinda a requirement, even if you ship outside of the AppStore, to be trusted by consumers. Because I think the app needs to be signed by Apple, in order to start the app without a warning and I think in order for Apple to perform the signing, you'd need a developer account. I might be wrong here as I have been focused pretty much only on mobile, so feel free to correct me.
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I find it inexplicable when people respond to a particular problem with a suggestion on which large platform/ecosystem someone should use instead, or avoid. Switching ecosystems is nowhere near that trivial. Ecosystem choices are dependent on content and tool investments, other devices owned, product groups, integrated technologies, network effects between people, between companies, customer relationships, existing p…
I'd go further and state that "ecosystems" are evil as they erode competition. It should be easy to change products independently of each other, e.g. I should be free to choose between Apple iCloud or Google Photos for storing my photo library. Instead I'm forced to experience what you already mentioned: integration preferences on different platforms, network effects and so on. Only direct product properties should d…
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And you'd thinking would reverse again to the common sense baseline when you realize that alternative providers outside of locked systems don't charge 30%
Can you name a provider? I personally use Stripe Tax for my business and while they will calculate the taxes you owe in each municipality it is totally on you to create an account with each country/state's Department of Revenue and fill out a form quarterly to submit your payments. This paperwork is what I believe a marketplace like the App Store or Amazon do for you under their own entity that you have to do yoursel…
Yes because we promote blog posts on “idiomatic ruby” and “premature optimization is the root of all evil”. “Performance is less important than dev time”. We used to have developers who took less time and wrote better code.
I dont agree, there is way more help in terms of writing efficient code today than there was back in time, ive seen horrible code from that time which would not have been produced today.
When I compare apps from 2000 to now it's a general decline in responsiveness and resource utilization.
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Do we really though? Web developers do of course, but I've hardly touched web development myself. Web interfaces etc., are a choice, but I think it's driven by commercial needs-- a desire for subscription revenue instead of one-time sales, etc. Much of the modern cloud-based or half-online world is quite unnatural from a user perspective, and where there is no need for monetisation-- for example with OpenOffice, the…
> Web developers do of course, but I've hardly touched web development myself. Web interfaces etc., are a choice, but I think it's driven by commercial needs-- a desire for subscription revenue instead of one-time sales, etc. This is certainly a big part of it, but it's not the whole story. For one thing, there were ways to achieve those business models with native software too - "web-based=subscription" isn't actual…
Everybody knew that updates weren’t free and they’d buy licenses when it was time to move on. But it’s hard to justify moving on when the software is still running fine even on Windows 10.