51–60 of 515 posts
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whenever I do native (native as in, compiled without going through some bytecode / VM / interpreter ...) apps for mac / windows / linux I don't have to do any of this, I just use Qt
But then you have to use c++ or Python, and figure out a good way to ship 10 dlls
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…
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. Competition causes many huge negative externalities to the rest of the planet.
So when my doctor sends me a one page checklist of how to prepare for a procedure, I have to open it in a powerful word processor and since it's I'm not using MS Word, the fonts and formatting aren't as expected.
I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.
You can't use Qt?
[1] Yes, one can use Qt for commercial software without buying a license (as long as it is dynamically linked), but their marketing does everything it can to hide that fact. Also, the newer additions to Qt do not fall in this category – for those, you have to pay.
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Our docker file for running some ML code at work is 6GiB. That does not include the model files. What the fuck, Nvidia? Am I downloading thousands of permutations of generated code for things I’ll never use?
*Docker image, not Dockerfile
Substack is a good example as well. Literally cannot render simple text and image articles without visible and annoying lags. If there are several hundred comments it can take tens of seconds to finish rendering. With functionality that was figured out in early 90s...
This is flagship product of one of the largest companies, and even they cannot get UI performance right...
I think about this a lot, and the conclusion I've come to is that the market (simply meaning the popularity) rewards features and intuitive UI above everything else. I think we've been on this trajectory for some time: getting users with less and less actual computer literacy to do more and more with computers.
In the early 90s, I believe MS Word came on a few floppy disks and the main executable was 2MB. It ran fine on a 16Mhz 386 with a total of 2MB RAM (let that sink in!) It did pretty much everything it does now, only lacked a grammar checker. (WordPerfect had one.) Now we measure things in GB units. 1000X bigger, but what was gained? We not only lost the way, we don’t even know the destination any more.
> Now we measure things in GB units. 1000X bigger, but what was gained? Functionality and graphics. For instance 'dict.words' alone on Linux is 4.8MB. Arial Unicode is a 20MB-ish font. The icon for an application I work on is 400K. The Google Crashpad handler for handling crashes is somewhere around several MB. A 4K true color display is 138 times larger than 640x480x16 colors.
> Functionality and graphics.
And massive amounts of telemetry.
But now functionality is moving to the cloud, we'll just be stuck with gigabytes for graphics and telemetry.
I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.
I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.
"Barely any reason"... except they created and maintain the entire plarform and tooling that you're building on. And in Apple's case they give it away for free with any mac. I'm old enough to remember when buying development tooling for DOS or Windows was $$$$$$
Today Apple is taking percentage of every dollar made from application developers who participate in their App store and they are making it increasingly difficult to avoid this with every release. IMHO, they are making far more dollars today than they ever did selling development hardware and SDK licenses.