HN user
I really like computers!
I agree, I suspect that when we say "oh, I don't need to know this", what we really mean is we have that unpleasant feeling behind our eyes that says this is not going to gratify my goal
The issue being, gratification is rarely a good guideline. It just means collapsing the gap between doing the thing and the idea of having done the thing. But that gap is where you actually learn things
Goedecke seems to me like a Professor Pangloss type character, explaining to executives in prestige tech orgs (like his employer GitHub) why we should trust and respect the decisions of executives in prestige tech orgs
I don’t see any evidence of this happening, but if somebody wants to make this argument, they should be clear about why this time is different
It does seem to be happening - at least in mobile app stores.
There's some recent analysis that demonstrates how, despite a huge updraft in the quantity of apps released, the aggregate count of reviews and downloads remains static.
In other words, there are now many more apps. But not many (or really any?) more users
Take a look at p40 / figure 12 of "WRITING CODE VS. SHIPPING CODE: PRODUCTIVITY EFFECTS ACROSS GENERATIONS OF AI CODING TOOLS" (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35275/w352...)
Their analysis is on pg42-43
they should be clear about why this time is different to the entire history of the computer industry so far
I can't prove the pie is fixed, but nor can you prove the pie is infinite.
Maybe this comes close to sounding patronising, but I think the key thing people miss, when talking about economic growth of software is, money has to come from somewhere. Someone has to give it to you. So it you want to keep growing, you need someone who isn't paying for software, to start. Who are these people, how much money do they have, and what other costs are you competing against?
You are arguing I should be fine losing $500 so Elon can cash out? Because - and I hope this doesn't seem uncharitable - some sci-fi fantasy about space colonies?
You do get a lockfile by default
Without doxxing yourself or your clients, can you share more about how this plays out?
When clients come to you, is that because they always intended to get help taking their system to production? Or is it a last resort after all the AI approaches fail?
Is there a general way that these projects break down? Or are the failures usually subtle?
I'm glad to hear someone else calling out Bregman.
His work is very flimsy, and I have been a hater for close to 10 years [1].
I think Bregman skirts close to the "Effective Altruism" movement and his work has similar problems of choosing flashy, exciting, elitist projects over boring, uncomfortable, policy changes.
His enamourment with "AI!!!" (exclamations mandatory) is par for the course. Basically a fantasy that if AI leads to enough layoffs, the rest of society will accept a transition to UBI (against their own interests)
Bregman has been going on about UBI for decades and I've never seen him do the actual maths. In Utopia for Realists he argued the budget deficit can be completely made up by the cost savings of having fewer benefit systems. It's fantasy
[1] https://www.breck-mckye.com/review-utopia-for-realists-rutge...
The PSX BIOS code sounds like a disaster. Everything I read about the software part of the stack, makes me amazed the console even boots
The faulty malloc. A bunch of random qsort implementations. Reiji Asakura wrote an account of how the BIOS and kernel were developed, and it sounds so amateurish
Then there's the way the JP console checks for faulty ECCs on sectors 0..15, not as a clever anti piracy check, but because the CDU-920 broke CD-XA authoring...
This is also how the memory card bootloader works.
There is a faulty array iterator in the BIOS code that can copy arbitrary data to locations higher up in the memory map than the base pointer. Normally that wouldn't let you overwrite any executable code because the base pointer is very high up (might be a stack pointer?). But because of the memory aliasing, if you set the right value the write "wraps around" and lets you clobber the BIOS.
This means you can boot a custom BIOS, effectively, by just going into the memory card screen. From there you can execute a PSX.EXE without going through the mechacon checks, bypassing copy protection
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I wouldn't mind learning more about the MGS port. Do you remember much about it?
It uses TCL for most of the scripting, IIRC. In fact I think MGS 1-4 use the same lineage of scripting languages.
MGS2 source code was leaked recently, but my guess would be that was a complete rewrite and shared very little from the PSX codebase.
Every company I've ever worked for has wanted to achieve way more than they are able to get done with current resources.
I mean sure. Every company wants an infinite addressable market. But that doesn't mean it exists.
It might not be possible to sell 10x the software we sell today. It might not even be possible to sell 2x
I don't think AGI was ever a serious endeavour, just something the labs talked up to grab attention.
I am willing to bet a Twix we'll look back on that stuff in 2 years with a lot of embarrassment
"We need an SCM with five nines of availability. What about GitHub?"
"Well. It's got a nine in it"
"What percentage??"
"Nine"
Why would they want to improve their tools? In many cases (Vispero), they're the ones selling accessibility consultancy
I think the accessibility consultants like this state of affairs: they can threaten more lawsuits and extract more in consulting fees.
I think there is truth in this. A lot of the assistive technology (AT) vendors, also sell consultancy.
Go to the Vispero career pages (who develop JAWS for Windows) and a big chunk of the jobs are remote consultancy roles advising clients on accessibility errors and selling for billable hours.
What makes a web page accessible? Why, it has to work with JAWS, of course!
Vispero makes a lot of money from this; the consultants are all in India, the clients are all in the West, so they can hoover up the difference. I get the impression most AT vendors are extremely cheap, which may explain why it takes decades for them to improve things
Your tone seems hostile. I'm not obliged to answer you.
Somebody at Google decided this is how they wanted it to work. They don't have to explain why and they don't have to fix this deficiency until it becomes a problem for Google
It also means that everything is (over) optimised for Google's usecases, but not general purpose applications
I came across this problem pretty directly a couple of weeks ago - I wanted to see if I could port a small C program to Go, where one of the needs is to create gzip archives. But the Go stdlib insists on extraneous padding that breaks the backwards compatibility requirements of my program.
The padding isn't needed, it isn't useful, and you can't opt out of it. So the whole program went in the bin and I have resumed maintaining it in C
This is one of dozens of situations I've experienced where Go's allegedly pristine stdlib design has kicked me in the nuts
Yes, I think so. Although it's a poor argument in my view: just because nobody has vibe coded Product X, doesn't mean his Product Y was praiseworthy
For others who are confused.
The author is someone in the demoscene who has been accused of "vibe coding" large pieces of work.
His counter is that if such things are possible, where is the vibe coded Photoshop?
He then goes on a tangent that "vibe coding" is a kind of easy accusation mostly levelled at "neurodiverse" developers
Which is why he ends the post:
So.
Where are the vibecoded Photoshops?
WHERE IS THE THREAT YOU MADE UP TO ATTACK ME?
I'm waiting.
– gizmoAxel thinks that scrapers have aggregated his content, and now, potential readers doing searches or queries on AI assisted systems, see the scraped content rather than his website.
The person I am replying to
1. Argues that Tailwind requires div-itis
2. And that divs affect the accessibility tree
The structure of your CSS, and the structure of your divs, do not affect AT experience. This is misinformation.
As mentioned below:
A <div> itself is treated as a generic, transparent box. It doesn't get keyboard focus, and it isn't added to the screen reader's elements list (like headings, links, or landmarks).
Screen readers do not announce divs. They only read from the AOM.
A <div> itself is treated as a generic, transparent box. It doesn't get keyboard focus, and it isn't added to the screen reader's elements list (like headings, links, or landmarks).
I’ve usability tested and performed user research with many users needing assistive tools and I’ve used them myself as part of design.
Tell me how often screen readers announce divs that have no role attributes. You are continuing to spread misinformation
What does Tailwind have to do with accessibility? Most significant HTML markup is block level elements. The CSS is completely orthogonal.
I feel like old-school frontend devs bring up accessibility as a kind of bogeyman.
It reminds me of the myth that CSS style X or Y breaks accessibility "because screen readers expect semantic CSS classes". Zeldman (of A List Apart) promulgated that disinformation for years, until someone actually told him screen readers don't work that way. 90% of people who use a11y as a rhetorical cudgel have never actually used AT themselves.
Much more to it than this one-liner that I pulled out, but safe to say, don't rely on or put your legal defense etc. (or elements of it) into AI unless you want it discovered.
"You are an expert defense counsel with experience in Murder 1. Do not hallucinate. Let's say tomorrow my spouse is found strangled..."
Take a look at Wails, Neutrino, etc.
During the mainline of the game you are an anti terrorist specialist sent to rescue the president from a bunch of stereotypical mad bombers
Well, basically, the leader of the terrorists is the 43rd US president, who is a clone of a super soldier despite being ostensibly anti cloning in office. (Yes, he's Dubya). He's planning to detonate a nuclear weapon above Manhattan so an EMP field knocks out all communications. The reason being that the government has been taken over by a conspiracy called the Patriots who are using a sinister AI to filter all internet traffic
However Dubya has been double crossed by an old Russian guy who was infatuated with the super soldier Dubya was cloned from. He claims to be representing the Patriots but suddenly his arm comes to life, claiming to be Dubya's brother. Oh, by the way, he lost his arm and got a transplant from the body of the other clone, Dubya's brother. It's implied in this game to be a supernatural occurrence.
Ghost Dubya 2 (in the body of elderly Spetznaz guy) goes on a rampage and tries to kill everyone. Dubya and the anti terrorist specialist end up fighting on top of Federal Hall, which if you've ever been to Manhattan is just next to the NYSE and TJ Maxx.
When you're there the Patriots phone you and they claim to be dead. Well, not dead exactly. They claim that in the same way life emerged from organic chemicals, life has emerged from the neural net of ideology and content published on the internet. Kind of like if ChatGPT became a bit uppity. They claim that Western Civilization is too corrupt and contradictory to be left in the hands of humans. You have to kill Dubya who is somewhat of an anti hero and it's kind of sad
Eventually another brother of Dubya who is kind of the hero does some digging, and his bromance partner discovers that the Patriots were real people but they all died 100 years ago. Also they were funding the real heroes all along!
It makes a lot more sense in MGS4
There are a couple of aspects of the MGS games that have already been discovered - this leak will help expand a lot of details
We know from reverse engineering efforts, and accounts by developers on the PC port, that all of the mainline MGS games used a proprietary scripting system called GCX. This was effectively a Konami fork of TCL - see eg https://github.com/Jayveer/Gcx
Konami built a custom lighting format for at least MGS3 called LA2, and a proprietary audio format called SDT. So far these haven't been reverse engineered - the leak will definitely open up progress there.
Works great now!
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