mangecoeur

I have written software that saves files and saves to standard geopackage formats.

Microsoft is known to have a lot of inconsistencies between its spec and reality. One important part of adoption open standards formats is that when you have real interoperability and competition between consumers of the format, the spec needs to actually work. HTML and the welcome demise of Internet Explorer specific markup through real competition in the browser space is a case in point

This is not true.

In my company I decided we would not depend on Microsoft products. We use kSuite that offers everything MS does, ~90% cheaper. The one real problem we run into is PowerPoint decks that look different or get corrupted when used across different Office suites, including ones that are focused on Microsoft compatibility like OnlyOffice.

Proprietary formats are a clear lock-in tool, because the cost of dealing with incompatibility is higher than the cost of paying the piper. (Although me being stubborn I made claude rewrite the OOXML to behave, but that's an absurd thing to need to do!)

If open formats were the standard and could be reliably exchanged, it would remove a big reason to ever use Office products.

You know it's an India focused device when the top selling point is "Check the cricket results" ;)

Ksuite is literally a google workspace competitor nothing unfocused about that. My company uses them for everything works well.

The idea that science progresses by lone wolf geniuses disrupting the status quo is simply false. It makes a good story for low budget documentaries, but it is basically never true.

Many of the dumb ideas being hyped in this AI bubble make sense viewed through this lens.

Data centres stirring up opposition? Sell a sci-fi vision that you will move them to Space! And reassure your over-extended investors that the data centre buildout rush you’re committing to isn’t going to get bogged down in protests and lawsuits.

The people hyping this stuff are not stupid, just their real goal (make as much money as possible as quickly as possible) has only a vague relationship to what they claim to be doing.

The problem in practice is that quickly one merges into the other. You start with a markdown readme, then you have markdown documentation for a small project. But then one day you need full documentation for your project with cross links, translations, accessibility. With Markdown you end up bolting these things on and each flavor does it a bit differently.

Perhaps some of the blame can be laid with the poor UX of technically superior systems. restructuredtext (apart from the terrible name) built with Spinx can do impressive things but becomes a huge pain to configure. All the XML-based tools like DocBook are very complete but try to get started actually building something - apart from having to author them in XML (which is already a kind of punishment), then you have to figure out XSLT stylesheets, 2000s-era design Java tools for processing them. And just look at the DocBook landing page! AsciiDoc has improved their onboarding recently but does have the issue of feeling like a markdown-ish alternative that's just a bit different for no clear reason.

Sqlite is a great bit of technology but sometimes I read articles like this and think, maybe they should have used postgres. I you don’t specifically need the “one file portability” aspect of sqlite, or its not embedded (in which case you shouldn’t have concurrency issues), Postgres is easy to get running and solves these problems.

Thats the very definition of “anecdata”. (Anecdotes you mistake for representative data)

As European it really struck me how poor the second hand ev market must be in the US. For the “cheap second hand car to do short distances” we have a lot of options really cheap - older gen Renault Zoe and Peugeot e208s, leafs, even the old hyundai Ioniq which is a bit of a cult favourite for its efficiency

The lengths people go to not to make walkable cities (and insulated buildings, fast trains.. you know, all the stuff that actually exists and works)

"The future is..." well it might be until the next fashion change comes about.

This will happen for sure. Designs are fashions that come and go, like jeans that go from skinny to baggy and back again. I don't think anything is absolute, tastes change and people get used to just about anything, and will mainly gripe when anything changes.

Did my phd around that time and did a project “scaling” my work on a spark cluster. Huge pita and no better than my local setup which was an MBP15 with pandas a postgres (actually I wrote+contributed a big chunk of pandas read_sql at that time to make is postgres compatible using sqlalchemy)

Finance bro decides tweets are better evidence than physics… nothing to see here

Hardly surprising that an administration that built its brand on “post truth” has no interest in the good functioning of academic research

Seems like a lot of effort to go to rather than just use Firefox or Safari...

When the industry is all about the myth of the trendy tech founder, of course the ones who succeed are the con-men and fabulists. All jobs and no woz indeed

there is also not that much money in the state run that the majority of people education follow. Teacher salaries are already squeezed. Its ironic, everyone says get a good education, old grumps complain the kids don’t know anything, but when it comes to actually paying for it its crickets. Software could help make teaching more efficient but requires up front investment that no one wants to make. State run software projects tend to suck because they are based on minimising cost. Maybe if the act and job if teaching had the same social status as doctors and lawyers it would be different.

They mention validation in software which suggests a hardware implementation is a way off with a lot of practical issues that might crop up on the way. So best of luck to them but i wouldn’t expect to see hit the market for quite a while - saying they are “on the edge of euv chip making” is very optimistic.

It's surprising how many people seem to be happy to eat these kinds of charges just to avoid having to actually understand the infrastructure they run on.

Even AWS can be pretty expensive compared to other hosts, when most of the services are just amazon versions of readily available tools like Postgres or RabbitMQ that you could install on any cheap linux VPS and save a chunk of change. You just might have to learn a bit of linux sysadmin instead of stacking a teetering jenga tower of "abstraction".

The basic problem is GPL tries to use copyright as a way to drive a “fair sharing and resharing” approach to code. AI generated code sold for profit violates the spirit of this approach, but not the letter of the law behind copyright. Fundamentally copyright has limitations and exceptions for good reason and is probably not the best legal method to enforce this sharing idea, but other methods would be complicated and expensive (eg writing and enforcing contracts). On the contrary, it would probably be better for open source if it was decided that ai generated code cannot be copyrighted and therefore any ai generated code would be in the public domain automatically.

Company: Planeto (early stage cleantech startup)

Planeto develops next generation software for design and operation of clean district heating and cooling networks, to accelerate adoption of renewable energies for zero emissions cities.

Hiring a Senior Software Engineer, REMOTE (EU/UK/CH, head office in Geneva, Switzerland)

https://cord.co/u/planeto-/jobs/125274-senior-software-engin...

two reasons: 1 is im very familiar with the field and 2 i think it’s both common enough not to be dismissible as a weird edge case (you’ll find at least one architect in most towns and the construction industry as a whole is massive) and demanding enough to set a meaningfully high bar for productivity.

But you could swap in many of other industries

I’ve seen this repeated and it’s just not true. Very non-expert users can use it just because its reasonably stable and they just don’t do that many things, as long as they have a working web browser they are fine (thats the premise of a chromebook). But anyone getting work done will quickly run into things they can’t do.

I’ve come to think a better benchmark for linux having “got there” is, can i run an architects office on ubuntu ?

Architects:

- need access to industry standard, graphics and processing heavy software

- need to exchange files with many other companies, so need inter compatibility

- need things to just work, they are not interested in fiddling with the guts of their os just to make things work

- work in contexts where cost of software is a drop in the ocean in the budget of a project, so the add value of running on linux has to be more than “you get some software for free”

Thinking about reaching a state where you could run an architecture office on ubuntu raises the bar a lot on what still needs to be improved

This is a very narrow minded take. Notebooks are used mostly by scientists who are just using code as a research tool. Being able to explore to learn is incredibly useful. Using them in production is a perfect bridge between different disciplines. And if you get distracted because “your browser has tabs” that’s really not the notebooks fault.

From a purely engineering standpoint maybe, but that’s also not fully the point of these programs. Look at the suppliers and you will see money going to every state, spread across many regions. This is as much a public money stimulus program as anything else. You want to create skilled jobs, and also print money without devaluing it, what better than a huge billion dollar high tech program.

Steam deck must have booster the numbers a lot

I might have missed the memo where Gnuplot has a better api than matplot ;)

Seriously though, there have been many attempts to make a "better matplotlib" and yet it's still going strong - mostly because when you really get into scientific plotting and need print quality plots or embed plots in an GUI with very specific parameters it's hard to beat. Sometimes you just need to place a label in a specific spot and that's where a lot of alternatives fall down. That and the multiple very mature backends and library integrations.

P.S. I also highly recommend using the object base API. There's a lot of learning material around the web that still uses the old MatLab inspired plotting api which has a plot of gotchas, the object based one is pretty clean.

Philosophically the question is not much different than “do we only exist in the mind of a deity”. It’s impossible to determine (since any search for “proof” would rely on assumptions about this external reality that are impossible to demonstrate), has no impact on our reality, mostly makes for some amusing procrastination.