HN user
EDIT: Just to be very sincere and transparent. The content of this post has been removed to avoid further discussion. I do not think my kind of views are welcome in this community.
For those who migt've missed the reference: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o0Wvn-9BXVc
He doesn't force anybody to use the Epic Store. Unless you want to play Fortinite (which is made and published by Epic Games) or games that have an exclusivity contract with the Epic Store.
So you're not forced, except when you are... I think the GP meant people is forced to use their store to play certain games. Games not developed by Epic, which were meant to be released in other stores and operating systems. You can choose not to play those games. Many people do in fact just that. But that was not the point.
Of course Tim Sweeney does not force random people at gunpoint to use their store. That's never going to be the case because there's laws forbidding him!
Specter is always on my clojure toolbox. Not only it makes transforming arbitrarily nested data painless, it also is usually more efficient than the average hand-rolled code!
A great example of why macros in Lisp are powerful, and how they empower you as a user even if you never write one.
Worth mentioning that, apparently, this is the programming language that will power DFINITY, an ethereum-like network for distributed computing.
I find the name of the NPS_0487a3ac_throttle cookie suspicious enough, but the article does not comment on it. Is this a common practice? Throttling the website for users who uninstalled your application?
Genuinely curious. You insist a VCS is not how the industry operates. But then how do those AAA devs manage synchronizing changes across a team of several hundreds of people? I imagine there must be some equivalent to VCS that better fits the gamedev indurstry. Or are people just throwing flash drives around the office?
To be fair, S-expressions are not a made up format and in fact predate most other formats you mention.
What should they do? Static analysis would be nice, but it's probably too complex to adopt in that kind of codebase.
In the end, the only viable option is to forbid this behaviour, and document a rationale so nobody will enable it back again.
Perhaps they could make this warning bigger, but other than that...
I stand corrected. I did not know numba and assumed it was similar to numpy and others, which do wrap C.
I still stand by my comment, though. We need to discuss technology by its own merits. Of course I'd also choose Python for an ML project any time of the day! But that's because Python won the popularity contest a long time ago. When discussing technology I think it's worth trying to see past that.
Exposing a C FFI may be flexible in the ways you mention (i.e. You can call the function from many languages). But I think we miss a lot on explorability. Let me elaborate a bit more with an example: Most people is not reallistically able to drill down on some implementation details when using neural network libraries like TensorFlow (which is not the whole field of AI, just an example!). At some point, if a feature is missing, you have to leave Python, learn a new language, and get a whole dev environment setup started. At that point, you're not using Python anymore, so I don't think it should count as a Python merit that you can do it.
That being said, I don't know Nim enough to validate whether using it for this would be a good idea.
The "python is performant because you call into C" argument implies that whenever any fundamentally new algorithm is developed you need to do it in C. This is actually gatekeeping things like machine learning to the few that can build and maintain the C code for libraries like TensorFlow.
Python is the ultimate glue code scripting language, but you can't build a performant algorithm without an efficient C implementation underneath. With languages like Nim taking performance seriously, people could build a complete implementation of such algorithms from the ground up.
This doesn't just mean the core implementation would be easier to maintain. There's a huge gap between people who use the python libraries and people who build the efficient code that runs underneath. This clear division between those two worlds is what makes it difficult from people to jump from one side to the other, and that's why I'm calling this gatekeeping.
Not necessarily Nim, but using a performant, simple high level language for this sort of tasks would blur this divide. In practice, this means AI researchers in universities could dive into the code that's actually doing the work, not just play with the toy buttons and levers Google and Amazon left for them to play with.
I, for one, think the HTML API (as in, the interface presented to the programmer, not talking about any other API meaning here) couldn't be worse.
How many attributes do you need to enable to place two pictures side by side in vanilla CSS? Is that composable, would the same set of flags work for two paragraphs? What about two tables?
HTML/CSS was never designed for the web we have ended up with, and I don't see how flexbox and any newer standard is making developers lives anything but miserable.
Since when are linux users "famously considered cheapstakes"? I was under the impression it's quite the opposite!
Of course, all generalizations are just that. But if anything, the linux gaming community has many passionate people more than willing to pay for games on their platform.
Most game developers don't port/build for linux due to the lower market share. A way simpler explanation that obeys basic market rules.
OTOH I know more than a fair share of people who exclusive pirate all the games they play on Windows. I also don't know many people who bought a license to windows itsellf.
Yes, auto-updates are built into snap. Also, the "solutions" to disable it are pretty much workarounds [1]. All this looks like just what made me stop using windows 10.
[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/930593/how-to-disable-autore...
(Answering a bit late, sorry I missed your reply!)
I still don't get it... How do you know when to activate the trap handler if you're not checking every time? It's not enough to wait for an error condition (e.g. an invalid pointer). If it's an array of integers, and I sneak in a string in there, what's stopping the JITed version from treating that pointer as an integer?
But DeepSpeech has already been trained with millions of data samples!
I'd feel way better about it if they went for a slightly worse DeepSpeech based implementation, but kept it working in the free software spirit they have been known about for many years.
Also, for desktop devices inference on DeepSpeech is cheap enough, so they could even go the extra mile and work on some Wasm magic to get offline recognition.
That's the kind of work I'd expect from Mozilla! Not wiring up your data collection to the Google Cloud APIs and call it a day! I'm genuinely disappointed with them...
Wow, that's extremely accurate! Disabling the tab bar has also went this exact route (when you use a tiling wm with tabs, some people like to disable browser and terminal tabs as it's redundant)
I managed to do it with a combination of two extensions, some about:config flags and userChrome.css some years ago, but it may already be broken by now.
Mozilla keeps trying to get to the mainstream market while ignoring its dedicated users... The only times I got people to switch over to firefox was because things like ublock support on android. Nobody I've talked to has ever been interested in their side products (Pocket, that file transfer thing...), and something tells me this new voice engine is going to go the same route.
OTOH it's nice Mozilla is working on improving their voice dataset (which powers the DeepSpeech model, iirc). And again kind of sad they use Google Cloud while they could have their own version...
Genuine curiosity: How can it check the types at the call side quickly? Let's say I have a function that averages an array of floats. Does the JIT have to check each of the array's inputs to have the right type? That looks like it could become a serious overhead.
But the opposite could be argued as well? Taking on a new disruptive problem is a huge risk, and big corps are generally risk averse...
Not trying to take merit away from VSCode, but emacs and tramp mode also do that. And not just with remote machines over ssh, docker containers work as well. Also docker containers over an ssh connection (or whatever crazy combination you may need).
You get latency-free editing because the file is edited locally and sent to the server on save. Simple implementation but highly effective.
Your 15/30ms is close to the timings of 30 vs a 60fps videogames. While testing for a single frame you'd probably get very mixed results, most people can distinguish the pattern of when the framerate drops from one to the other. That looks more close to me to the audio example, since it's a constant stream of visual information.
To be fair, there's a great use case for migrating COBOL to python. But I don't think banks would trust an automatic conversion done using ML...
This was very apparent when reading the generated stories [1].
Especially the shoggoth cat dialogue, I found that one really creepy. The fragment below comes straight out from the uncanny valley:
Human: Those memes sound funny. But you didn’t include any puns. So tell me, what is your favorite cat pun?
AI: Well, the best pun for me was the one he searched for the third time: “You didn’t eat all my fish, did you?” You see, the word “fish” can be replaced with the word “cats” to make the sentence read “Did you eat all my cats?”
As a spec user in production, I must say it's very nice usability-wise and can help alleviate most of the issues coming from a lack of a type system.
But god it's slow... Some static analysis support would also be hugely appreciated. Not being able to check everything doesn't meen you shouldn't attempt to check something! Many specs are type predicates anyway.
I've had a reviewer in a (scientific) journal tell me some paper is relevant, and thus I need to cite it, because it "appears on their top google results".
People should be educated on the huge bias introduced by personalized services like google.
I used FreeOffice for a while, but strangely enough, I saw it struggle with medium-size documents. At some point, there were several seconds of input lag.
Apart from that issue, their goal is MS Office compatibility, and they deliver quite well. Even more obscure features like review mode and highlighting of changes worked without issues, and I was able to exchange documents with MS Office users.
Sometimes the views you see here are extremely biased. It's normal, we use computers all day, we are experts. We learn and adapt.
For some people, a computer is just another tool they've been recently forced to use in order to live in society (in many countries, you cannot longer reallistically do your taxes without a computer for instance).
As programmers, and especially those who work in UI/UX design, we owe some respect to those people, because those who take the extra effort to learn a radically new technology at an elderly age, are completely, utterly confused when companies decide to move stuff around just for the sake of it (or as a result of A/B testing?).
And yes, sometimes the only way I've been able to teach people how to operate a computer is by literally describing the UI and the icons. In my experience, finding a good way to teach via fundamentals to someome who doesn't care is extremely difficult. And believe me that I've tried it many times.
OTOH, note that none of my points apply to early education (school). In that case, I completely agree we need to teach the fundamentals, not UI.
No offense intended, but isn't the real work you do in MS Office creating documents? Software is never about manipulating menus and buttons per-se.
I think this problem is not at all exclusive to propietary software. Take blender, for example. I spent quite a bit of time learning all the bits of the interface 5+ years ago. When I tried to go back, the software UI had changed so much that basically most of my knowledge and muscle memory is now worthless, having to google how to do every tiny operation. And this is not yhe first "huge overhaul" of the UI and keybindings they've made.
And it's not like you can easily get an old version of blender and make it work just because it's free software. Leaving aside the fact that I'd be missing out on newer features, system libraries get updated and at some point the old version stops working with a random crash. Then you need to start compiling from source and basically maintaining your own fork.
IMO this is what happens with large enough pieces of software where the devs care more about increasing adoption in spite of any happy existing users.
Sorry for the blender micro-rant, they are doing a great job. But still I felt it was the perfect example of microsoft-y behaviour in free software land
Note that the "it's just cosmetics" argument is flawed. Loot boxes are still exploiting the human psyche to earn enormous amounts of money from a small amount of customers (or whales, as they put it, ugh...), regardless of the perceived value they actually offer.
There's actually the toxic culture revolving around cosmetic upgrades in games, where using the default skins is considered a sign of poverty, and leads to discrimination among groups of young people. Fortnite is one of the games where this issue is more prominent.