lallysingh

You're getting downvoted because your argument is cosmetic, egotistical, and useless. Can you give an objective separation between design flaws and engineering details? One that has zero ambiguity: if I give 100 engineers your criteria and then ask them to categorize 100 different points against it, would give exactly the same results? And would that distinction actually correlate to a historical analysis of programming languages' effects on software project success metrics?

No, because the entire distinction falls apart pretty quickly into "shit I like to discuss and care about" and "shit I don't care about and don't want to talk about."

Systems programming lives and dies by the details you want to ignore. The economics of large software production are mildly affected by language design. But weaknesses there are easily overcome with engineering practices and additional tooling. Almost every complaint about C++ safety I've ever heard hasn't been a problem for me for decades, because I know what libraries, practices, and tools solve those problems. But I've yet to work with another language - and I've programmed in a shit-ton of languages - that gets out of the way as well as C++ when I want to systems-program. Even C. C is strictly lower level, but its lack of abstraction facilities gets in the way more than some of the modern numerical-type-safety stuff of C++ does.

I've tried it, and no. Honestly C++ gets so many complaints partially because so many people use it. It deserves a lot of it.

I just finished my work on a 2.5 yr rust project that was very low-level. The problems I had with it were that the language and library designs will always be behind the current state of the art in performance. Hardware and systems APIs change quickly, and they can shift the optimal design decisions easily for different workloads. E.g. chiplets on your CPUs can change where you want to put your io_urings, their workers, and any relevant sq_poll threads. Your NIC's DMA/TLS facilities can change your memory pool policies - do you want zero-copy APIs, or is the copy required anyways because of all the CPU-local work you have to do? Do you preallocate and feed giant buffers to register with the io_uring, or do you need to share your memory pool with the rest of the application? Do you use a single mutex for the pool, a hierarchy between thread-local and global? Do you also use a chiplet-local allocator?

What's nice about C++ is that your fight isn't against the language and runtime. They don't care what your situation is. They'll work. You do have to assemble it, and other languages make some assemblies a lot easier to do.

Yes Rust and its libraries are getting better. But so's C++.

Unless you spend 5min googling and see that you can do zero retention via AWS Bedrock.

In a competitive environment, it's precisely that. An improvement in product A takes customers from B and C.

Apple and Steam have been successfully applying pressure for years. Who's willfully staying behind at this point?

All the development action went to the web. Dolphin's still pretty awesome.

This was a teenager. Then again, there's a whole line of bluetooth speakers called "SoundBomb." And lots and lots more products named "Boom" (still, yes) in some way. There isn't any need for this to be anything more than a reasonable name for a speaker.

Should've called the new one Freenet 2 or Freenet NT.

This is just chromeos+Gemini

I use AI regularly to consider new looks. Just have it render someone like me in different outfits. Super useful.

I think this has all suddenly shifted with high-quality programming AIs available. How difficult is this to implement with Claude?

Windows isn't a useful base of comparison anymore. They really stopped trying years ago.

It's been working great for me. I haven't seen any changes.

Did we have the same PC?!

Didn't MS also do OS/2 early on? Didn't they bill IBM by line of code?

I can't say much about Solaris, I used it - much later - on sparc and amd64.

I can say that I was writing 16 bit windows apps in '95, including drivers and VxDs, and Win 3.1 was a piece of garbage inside and out.

I don't know why you'd believe they've ever been capable of putting out quality software.

A bug in the software is a bug in the process, and the process is the job of leadership. They've never cared about software quality. They'll put out lots of books about it, lots of talks, lots of claims. But they won't actually put out quality software. It's not in their DNA, never was.

It's not their size nor their age that makes this hard for them. Plenty of larger, older companies put out better product ever day. It's just them. Someone in each size class is the best, and someone else is the worst. MS has been the worst the entire time.

I had to restore my son's desktop PC last night from a USB stick. It didn't even have drivers for graphics over 800x600 or the wifi card. I was flabbergasted. It's windows 11, 2026, a 6-month old PC. I genuinely don't know how someone could sell something this awful with a straight face.

Windows was only ever better than DOS, by the same vendor. It's been awful compared to any competitor it's ever had. Really. I don't see a non-gaslighting argument for Windows anywhere.

Yeah, I mean I'm looking at frameworks/thinkpads on one side and chromebooks on the other. Not charging up to $440 (!) for a keyboard isn't a great act of engineering or generosity. This has been ridiculous for a very, very long time. Being less ridiculous isn't worth celebrating. The goal markers have moved so damned much.

Compare to a thinkpad keyboard FRU. They have fluid drains and still cost $99 for a top-end laptop. My daughter's chromebook keyboard replacement at school was $16.

I think we'll have to start configuring our client tools (e.g. browser, email client, etc) to render domain names with annotations for different character classes. E.g. our native character set is a standard color (blue/black) and then other character sets would have to stand out (purple background?).

This entire page is a sales pitch, but it doesn't really cover how things are hidden or how much that costs.

How does it compare to tor hidden services?

GM didn't sell EVs for years after releasing the EV1. They didn't get any market advantage from the EV1 because they left the market after, for a long time.

If a robot can do basic cleaning, laundry, and dishes, that's worth a lot to a lot of people. Dual-professional households have the money, and not having to do this housework could save some marriages.

The EV1 gave GM no advantage.

I was still thinking of CS :/

On the bright side, an LLM can really help set up a reproduction environment.

Perhaps repro should become the basis of peer review?

How well did you terminate the scsi chain?

My first guess was debouncing. They assume that the switches are worn out, deeply weathered, and cheaply made. Each press will cause the signal to oscillate and they're taking their sweet time to register it.

When the device is new this is an absurd amount of time to wait. As the device degrades over 10, 20 years, that programming will keep it working the same. Awful the entire time, yes, but the same as the day it was new.

Yeah. Just like another engineer. When you tell another engineer to build you a feature, it's improbable they'll do it they way that you consider "right."

This sounds a lot like the old arguments around using compilers vs hand-writing asm. But now you can tell the LLM how you want to implement the changes you want. This will become more and more relevant as we try to maintain the code it generates.

But, for right now, another thing Claude's great at is answering questions about the codebase. It'll do the analysis and bring up reports for you. You can use that information to guide the instructions for changes, or just to help you be more productive.

I don't understand this comparison. An EV's battery cooling system is a cooling system. Regen braking isn't more complicated than an alternator.

The rest, yeah. The chemical stacks in the batteries are expensive, and dealer markup was a problem (now they're 47-56k new). But the energy costs! $7-12 for a fill-up on home power overnight instead of $75-85 at the gas station.

And maintenance. So little maintenance. For local non-towing fleets these would save a lot.

Yet the largest codebases I know of are either C, Fortran, or C++. Who's doing anything really big (in terms of LOC) in another language?