nukem222

I was a big fan of glider pro, having been born long after apple ][s: http://macintoshgarden.org/games/glider-pro

I would download it, but I wanted to be productive today.

Right. Good luck finding people who want to maintain that. It just seems incredibly short-sighted unless the current batch of maintainers intend to live forever.

Notably, they forgot to improve on readability and maintability, both of which are markedly worse with perl.

Look I get people use the tools they use and perl is fine, i guess, it does its job, but if you use it you can safely expect to be mocked for prioritizing string operations or whatever perl offers over writing code anyone born after 1980 can read, let alone is willing to modify.

For such a social enterprise, open source orgs can be surprisingly daft when it comes to the social side of tool selection.

Would this tool be harder to write in python? Probably. Is it a smart idea to use it regardless? Absolutely. The aesthetics of perl are an absolute dumpster fire. Larry Wall deserves persecution for his crimes.

Eh, finger pointing does nobody any good, emphatically including this comment. Finger pointing towards someone who actually found a vulnerability is just bleak. I would not willingly associate with anyone who engaged in such behavior.

Maintaining software is hard, but this does not imply a right to be babied. People should simply lower their expectations of security to match reality. Vulnerabilities happen and only extremely rarely do they indicate personal flaws that should be held against the person who introduced it. But it's your job to fix them. Stop complaining.

I agree with all of this. I want to offer a tiny bit more hope, though:

There have been a lot of bold promises (and genuine advances), but I don't see a world in the next 5 years where AI writes useful software by itself.

I actually think the opposite: that within five years, we will be seeing AI one-shot software, not because LLMs will experience some kind of revolution in auditing output, but because we will move the goalposts to ensure the rough spots of AI are massaged out. Is this cheating? Kind of, but any effort to do this will also ease humans accomplishing the same thing.

It's entirely possible, in other words, that LLMs will force engineers to be honest about the ease of tasks they ask developers to tackle, resulting in more easily composable software stacks.

I also believe that use of LLMs will force better naming of things. Much of the difficulty of complex projects comes from simply tracking the existence and status of all the moving parts and the wires that connect them. It wouldn't surprise me at all if LLMs struggle to manage without a clear shared ontology (that we naturally create and internalize ourselves).

Readers should note that it's super buggy. Occasionally your music will be unavailable, even though it can match it to tracks that ARE available on apple music (it just says "not available in your region" and is greyed out). Sometimes it also "matches" to the clean version of the music (may god damn people who think that censoring music is a good idea) and there's no way to correct it. I've lost an impressive amount of music just forgetting what's mine and accidentally deleting it when trying to figure out why it's not playing.

It was half-baked when they shipped it and it still has the same launch bugs. Still, it's better than spotify.

Even a relatively minor hit on the radio is valued more than a super-popular song in clubs because it is guaranteed to have a higher play count.

Well that just seems broken.

Eh i've also used since the beginning. People love to complain. I put zero weight on this hypothesis.

Other interfaces at the time were just as bad if not worse.

They've turned it around

Eh, the same complaints are the same as always. Expectations have improved, tho! I think that's what we're seeing here.

Yea but this only matters if you're considering fatness as a factor. This factor disappeared long before the headphone jack did. I have never in my life heard "i won't use that phone cuz it's too fat". Apple just irrationally hates wires. God forbid someone ask for a button!

Excel needs to default its export to this. Unfortunately excel is proprietary software and therefore fucked.

An incredible amount of effort and ingenuity has gone into CSV parsing because of its ubiquity.

Yea and it's still a partially-parseable shit show with guessed values. But we can and could have and should have done better by simply defining a format to use.

Yes, that is a single spec with correspondingly-small importance. Generally parsing html remains extremely difficult.

Schemaless can be accomplished with well-formed formats like json, xml, yaml, toml, etc. from the producer side these are roughly equivalent interfaces. There's zero upside to using CSVs except to comfort your customer. Or maybe you have centered importing of CSVs into your actual business, in which case you should probably not exist.

How do you recommend vetting brands? This is simply not a problem wired technology ever had. I can't imagine ever trusting a brand to get things right without my fixing their mistakes.

It's simple

My experience has indicated the exact opposite. CSVs are the only "structured" format nobody can claim to parse 100% (ok probably not true thinking about html etc, just take this as hyperbole.) Just use a well-specified format and save your brain-cells.

Occasionally, we must work with people who can only export to csv. This does not imply csv is a reasonable way to represent data compared to other options.

I run with wired headphones. I also don't need to chase after them when they fall out of my ears.

I can't say I claim to have heard of ANC before, but the rest of these reasons to purchase apple headphones are true of the $20 chinese knockoffs I bought on amazon. And they come in a cute orange/salmon color rather than blanched.

The only perceptual difference is that apple special-cases airpod management to ease switching of devices. They trash their own product by making such consumer-hostile ux obvious.

Ok, but don't they want my money? Why not cater to my money? The tech scam only works if people actually think the tech is better. What's so hard about offering a jack? Especially in any situation outside of phones. You could market it with "this will actually last" or "we ship headphones".

I just pray we are not stuck with current versions of bluetooth in perpetuity. What a nightmare.

I suggest not wiring with tissue paper if this is a serious issue for you.

Anyway, you can simply not run into stuff with a wire. There's nothing you can do about bluetooth glitching out randomly for five seconds. Not to mention playing the "what device is playing into my headphones" game. Wireless is for people who don't care.

The industry realized this and honestly for most people a water resistant phone is worth losing the 1/8” jack and they win with fewer components and thinner phones

This would make sense if people didn't turn around and spend more than is saved on wireless headphones. I don't understand what people see in airpods (they work sufficiently but they're bleached and molded plastic; vomit, way too expensive for any possible use-case), but they're enormously successful and more than validated the removal of the jack. By like multiple orders of magnitude.

Anyway, I've definitely had waterproof phones with a headphone jack. I'm guessing they removed it just to save on space. I wish I gave a shit about the shape of the phone, but the primary difference is I view my phone as more of a toy than a tool.

Then how come they are offering lossless audio on Apple Music, and even (actuall physically!) imperceptible "Hi-Res Lossless"?

Overkill makes good marketing. People largely just want to feel like they're getting the best.

It's hard to imagine a wireless technology that can improve on the experience of debugging a wire. You can always adjust the length of the wire or splice in a new one.

I don't understand why the industry forced a move to wireless before the technology was up to it. The only company that's figured this out is Apple and they refuse to give up this market advantage. Until device management improves i'll stick with wired.

The ipad also has an icon above its keyboard. Whatever lack of obvious interaction is available on the phone seems intentional.

Cynically, I think you'd just look like even more of a fool shaking an ipad and this is the only reason they approved such a button.

It's impossible to take their fears seriously—literally any kind of social obligation is going to be scary for an entity with no desire to do anything but feed its owners.

Wait until you see what kind of reaction 40% gets! Existential threats will be the only things that work.

If a fine isn't an existential threat what's the point of it? Hoping next time they'll care more? tf?

the EU needs to tack another 0 to these percentages if they want to see movement.

Damn, why didn't they prosecute that instead? Probably would have won some public support. Declarations of a desire to commit violence are an entirely different beast than purchasing plutonium, and far more worth prosecuting.

Surely there's some sort of safeguard in the Australian government preventing this sort of embarrassment. The second anyone hears how much was involved they're gonna know this prosecution makes a mockery of their own laws.

There's no benefit to Google when a Chinese company takes Android, guts the Google parts, and shoves it on a cheap ass phone for a market with a few billion people.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery! This might give them more credibility.

Anyway, I think we're a half decade past where android source has been worth stealing: China now has strong domestic competition.

They don't publish the really interesting sources anyway, this doesn't really change anything.