inDigiNeous

That was a fun read. Kudos to the writer. This is software development life.

Well, back in the day you had 4 megs of ram, MS-DOS and other OSes that are simple as they come, and full access to the hardware.

These days if you want to support macOS, Windows, Linux: I say good luck to you, Electron can save you there.

Electron is not crap, but many javascript developers are crap. You can make fast and memory efficient apps in Electron, if you know how to code.

(Note: Slack or Discord developers don't have that skill)

Thank you for this!

Could possibly just hotpatch my existing app, add this to the packed in javascript .asar resource file and not having to make a new build with updated Electron version.

Reminds me of the performance optimization somebody discovered in Super Mario World for SNES, where displaying the player score in was very inefficient, taking about 1/6 of the frametime allocated.

"SMW is incredibly inefficient when it displays the player score in the status bar. In the worst case (playing as Luigi, both players with max score), it can take about a full 1/6 of the entire frame to do so, lowering the threshold for slowdown. Normally, the actual amount of processing time is roughly proportional to the sum of the digits in Mario's score when playing as Mario, and the to the sum of the digits in both players' scores when playing as Luigi. This patch optimizes the way the score is stored and displayed to make it roughly constant, slightly faster than even in the best case without."

https://www.smwcentral.net/?p=section&a=details&id=35746

I remember dropping parallel hashmap into my C++ app after years of using the standard library containers, and being honestly positively surprised my app got significantly faster after that.

So thanks for the developer of this!

You can just search for HDR videos in Youtube.

Sure, but a lot of extra work for something like that. Also, Apple Walled Garden..

Metal allows Apple to squeeze that extra performance out of their devices. They have full control over, and can implement whatever they need to deliver Apple Vision Pro for example.

With Vulkan, they would have to wait for a committee to approve required changes, and still they could not probably optimize it to match their GPU an CPU hardware profiles in such an efficient way.

And not least at all, to optimize the developer experience and tools. Apple GPU debugging tools are probably the best tools you get for graphics development debugging, and you get that only on macOS.

IMO Metal is a nicer API than Vulkan. At the same time, you can ask, why should Microsoft get to keep DirectX, and not just write a Vulkan driver ?

I love mate. It has probably saved my life as a software developer, not tolerating the strong effect of coffee on my sleep, but yerba mate, and especially freshly stored in vacuum bags, slightly dried but not smoked is my favorite.

Meta Mate (https://metamate.cc/) makes a total bomb of a mate product, can highly recommend if you are in Europe and want to try out their refreshing Meta Mate 23.

Have to order another batch from them now, I've tested many mates but theirs just tastes and works the best for me.

Was introduced to mate by a fellow software developer back in the day, happy that he did, would not have figure out it otherwise.

Hehe spot on. 58% faster ad delivery, in 58% more random places than you would have expected!

The hardware looks and sounds great. Too bad it's running Windows 11.

Long and dark winter probably. Nothing to do but sit inside, and study the dark arts of computers.

Good article on the basic nature of software projects, they never seem to end unless you decide them to end. When to do that ? Who the hell knows, it took me about 10 years for my own project to reach a state where I could say "This is done now, I am satisfied with the goals I set to reach 10 years ago".. And even that came through because I was exhausted working on the project, spending so much time on it.

I think you have to decide at some point: "This is done."

Maybe it requires stripping out some parts, or major parts, of the software you had in mind to reach that, but I feel it has to be done at some point, the feature creep will settle in otherwise and you will never be done.

Had to log in just to upvote this comment, brought back nostalgia from the Slashdot days of yore.

It is a cause that cannot be discussed here, without getting downvoted to oblivion.

Bram was a a legend. So many people dying right now. Hopefully it was not the same cause that so many other people relatively young are dying from right now. Seems he was 62, not so old yet. Wondering what happened to him ?

RIP, I've spent more time in Vim than any other software for sure, still use it to edit my journals and editing single files when needed.

Hopefully they really put effort into the web part of the product, I mean really writing text on a phone or even a tablet is not so easy.

But I'm guessing they wont do that, as Meta wants lock in and registration, and following all your data.

At least current version of instagram on the web is pretty lame, if you don't install some browser extensions.

Twitter is a hard platform to get into I think, I used to think for a long time that what good is this thing for. Then it kinda clicked, at least for me it's not about tweeting stuff, but it's more about finding the people who are interesting and participating in discussions.

It takes time to find people to follow who share information that you are interested in. It also takes constant teaching and hiding the info you don't want to see, but once you build a good following of people (for me personally sw dev and tech and so on), the value you can find out from just seeing what people are working on and sharing their findings, can be very valuable and entertaining.

Yeah, must be a damn big task trying to fix a codebase that is already over 10 years old.

Don't know about that, but before Musk the shadowbans were just a theory and I remember Jack Dorsey even denying existence of them.

The committee twitter had before was in close collaboration with FBI. Currently twitter is one of the only of the bigger social medias, where you can even discuss controversial topics and see discussion around those.

All this talk about demise of twitter, and why ?

For me at least personally, the experience is better. No more cult of personalities with "verified" badges and wondering who gets it and who does not.

No more censorship of certain people and shadow banning, which is one of the main issues Elon even bought Twitter I think, was to create a censorship free platform for discussion.

The feeds are better, I see less stupid likes like I did for example 1 year ago, when my feed would be full of likes from people I dont care about.

Also, there is the feature of community leaving feedback on the tweet, which can show immediately that okay, this tweet is just wrong.

10 years ago was a different time socially and politically, you cannot go back to that. Also ten years ago twitter had probably much less bots and users also.

Interesting story. Wonder what caused his downfall into insanity. Was Zappos getting a sudden influx of money, giving him too much sense of power and importance ?

It's also sad that he felt he had to overachieve, our current system values achievements and work, and many times that goes really out of balance, people trying to become the next multibillionare no matter what, risking their personal health and even leaving them insane in the process like with Tony apparently.

This "biohacking your way to 10x" is unfortunately very prevalent in certain circles, and I understand it, but I think as a society and especially in Silicon Valley and in the software development circles we should remember the importance of resting and taking time off. Your body and especially brain can only take so much.

It is actually kind of stupid how little is talked about the importance of resting. Thinking all the time takes an immense amount of energy, trying to push that year over year, even for decades, can lead to some really unpleasant states, where you try to start self medicating and finding ways to circumvent the need for rest.

I wish there was more talk about taking time off and just being, I bet it would save a lot of people from peer pressure to 10x perform all the time.

I think constantly trying to overachieve is one of the sicknesses in our industry, which is not talked nearly enough about.

I did not mean Nazis. Have you even followed the censorship in Twitter for example and the situation that is unraveling now ?

We already ban certain views, but yet, pornography: no. It's not important enough, and as seen here by the downvotes, many people are addicted to it and cannot understand what I tried to message.

Well, I dont do that.

But what are you going to do about the majority of people doing this ? And children looking at their phones. I've heard of tales of second graders looking at porn together while on recess, that is the world we now live in.

There should be some good defaults. I agree with you totally, it makes no sense to give under 10 year olds smart phones.

Yeah the hypocrisy is really silly. You can kill, murder, maim people, but oh no better censor that butt crack showing!

And yet at the same time, most of the porn industry is in the US.

By this logic we should not try to even protect our kids from anything.

What about the predatory nature of the industry ? 18 year olds being hunted down to "act" in these pieces, mostly by older men who are just using these women for their own pleasure and financial benefits.

Is this okay ?

I understand the censorship argument also, and to be honest expecting also people defending their right to watch porn, the addiction is real.

Porn is like a thought virus, if you watch it enough you will start to think about all these things you see visually about the women in your life and people around you. Many people might not want to admit this, and will just spew out silly comments defending porn, maybe they are addicted to it and like to watch it.

Then go ahead, I'm not saying you should not be able to watch porn. I'm saying _by default_, things like porn should be more harder to find and access.

I'm not saying it should be the governments responsibility.

And governments are already heavily censoring and trying to kill child pornography, religion and certain political views, so why would this be so different ?

It should be our responsibility as humans and parents to protect our children. If we are not thinking about our children and protecting them from content that could be potentially life changing and addictive for the rest of their lives, why are we not stepping up to the plate and doing that ?

Well, censoring porn is one of the things I would happy to be censoring.

Although this leads down a steep road easily to censor other content also, yet for a long time I have wondered why is it so easy to find porn, and why is nobody doing anything about it ?

Porn is probably one of the major addictive behavioural and thought changing things in this world currently. It takes under 3 seconds to find porn if you want it, probably from any device from anywhere around the world. Is this what humanity wants to optimize for ?

Porn causes distortions in how you think about women, how you sexualize over them and what kind of thoughts you have about women generally. It is very addictive, and leaves you with an empty feeling afterwards.

It can be violent, disturbing, abusive to the people involved and can cause mass scale feelings of not being enough, not being good enough to compared to the people showing you how "sex" should be had.

And yet almost everybody just silently accepts that porn is okay, and nothing should be done about it.

We give 5 year olds smartphones which can lead to the most disturbing porn scenes by just googling a couple of words, within a minute you could be watching somebody just abusing young women violently, and yet this is accepted.

I am all for free speech and that, but I think we have a blind spot here. Probably it is because we are addicted to this as a nation, as a species.

I wish the big players would decide to ban porn, or at least make it substantially harder to find it. It's just a freaking stupid idea that we give our children these devices at very young ages, and almost nobody is doing anything about filtering or limiting what kind of content is available to them in this manner.

Don't you agree ?