BiteCode_dev

You will be even more horrified to learn that installing the entire list of deps of a project that would take a few seconds on my home laptop may take up to 20 minutes at some clients because many FS calls do a network round-trip.

We are not talking about exceptions either. This is pretty standard stuff when you work outside of the IT-literate companies.

At one client, they provided me with a part time tester, they neglected to give him the permissions to install git. Took 3 weeks to fix.

The same client makes us dev on Windows machine but deploy on Linux pods. We can't directly test on the linux, nor connect to them, only deploy on it. In fact, we don't even have the specs of the pods, I had to create a whole API endpoint in the project just to be able to fetch them.

Other things I got to enjoy:

- CTO storing the passwords of all the servers in an libre office file

- lead testing in prod, as root, by copying files through ftp. No version control.

- sysadmin that had an interesting way of managing his servers: he remote controlled one particular windows machine using team viewer which ones the only one that could connect through ssh to them.

The list is quite long.

This makes you see the entire world with a whole new perspective.

I always thought that all devs should spend a year doing tech support for a variety of companies so that they get a reality check on what most humans actually have to deal with when working on a computer.

If you are on HN, you are the 1%.

I daily drive linux, but I hop from clients to clients and I have probably served about 200 different structures so far.

Most corporate machines are Windows boxes with ps and cmd.exe heavily restricted, no admin, and anti malware software surveilling I/O like a hawk.

You might get a git bash if you are lucky, but it's usually so slow it's completely unusable.

In one client I once tried to sneak in Clink. Flagged instantly by security and reported to HR.

It's easy to forget that life outside the HN bubble is still stuck there.

You can't in most corporate env machines.

You may be able to download ripgrep, and execute it (!), but god forbid you can create an alias in your shell in a persistant manner.

Pretty much.

But again, it's a CLI tool. There is a limit to how they can mess it up.

And it's not in their best interest to do so. They are neither fools nor incompetent.

They'll make much more money by making it even better, and then offering to pay for integration with their ecosystem for stuff like creating installers, deploying in production, etc.

They don't want to add prompting in uv and make a few bucks per token. They want apps on demand. They want to own a platform. They want to be the next layer.

uv is just an implementation details to make that good, and so that's why I think it will stay so.

Jailoading is quite catchy, although it does have a "Micro$oft" and "Microslop" feel. Like more an insult than a word made to be used daily.

Telling that to normies would usually give me blanks stares and "nothing to hide" or "don't care" arguments.

My "but your situation my change" and "gov can turn bad" arguments never hit. People are terrible at projecting themselves. That's why climate change is so hard to fight. It's too far and abstract.

Humans need to feel concrete and awful pain to realize their mistake and learn.

But I'm hoping the Trump situation is going to cause that. Now that the US is at the brink of dictatorship (some might argue it's already there), maybe American citizens will realize that putting their entire life on a centralized platform, having non encrypted communications and spying devices everywhere is a terrible idea.

I'm not very optimistic though.

And even if they do, in 3 generations, they will have forgotten. I have no idea how to fix this.

And bugs, and DRM, and mass surveillance, and giving the power to the state to abuse even more of the tech, and giving police super powers, and giving bad actors (terrorists, assassins) the abilities to kill you with a virus, and the general concentration of power that this implies.

This is a terrible idea, and that's why I have mixed feelings about the robo taxi. On one hand, it's a great resource-sharing tech. On the other hand, all of the above.

There will be not Python 4, and 3.X policy requires forward compat, so we are already there.

It's a great point. As a geek I used to think those details don't matter, but it turns out language shapes society and how humans think way more than I understood.

We need to catch up on this because the people who know how to use language for propagandizing don't have the best intentions in mind.

But using the original term is not enough. We need to combat their word-twisting by upping them. We need a way to convey "their way of installing stuff by default is inferior and an attack on liberty".

Something like:

- direct install: installing as we always did

- caged install: installing through a locked store.

Maybe somebody better at marketing can find a good way to do this. In fact, we should have a whole site and community to organize together and shift the narrative on all nerdy things: formats, open web, DRM, patents, etc.

We have been weak on these points for so long because we care much more about solving tech problems than selling them. But openness is being eaten away under our noses. Has been for years.

Let's A/B test the linux kernel, for shits and giggles.

Doesn't explain how you get to the frontpage with less than 20 upvotes magically.

Likely they have whitelisted domaine names that go straight to the home page. Would make sense to put all Y combinator ex and new startup sites.

Marketting is a major goal of HN after all.

What we need is a netflix/spotify model, but for the news.

I never pay for the news, because it's mostly disappointing.

But I would pay 20 euros a month if I could have access to all the news, and just let me filter little by little what I think suits me.

No, firefox was first called phoenix (because it was seen as a rebirth of the netscaoe ethos) then firebird.

Netscape got killed by ie 5.5 and firefox competed mostly with ie 6 on Market and opera on innovation.

And yep, i think 2008 was first chrome ad on google search. It hurts but we are a quarter century in now.

Firefox was always a geek thing, I've been using it since it was called phoenix and at its peak, it was mostly nerds installing that at schools, convincing their mums, etc, thanks to the adblock.

The only reason we are not all using edge is because google spend billions marketing Chrome in early 2000. They got the normies with brute forcing, because they could make money with it, not for making the world better.

Heck, they promoted google on the HOME PAGE of google search, an ad spot you can't even buy from google, with a pseudo notification, a format google uses for nothing else in ads.

They went full throttle.

But nobody is going to spend millions to promote decentralization. Because it's about concentrating less power.

HN has always been terrible at undertanding that, because while they argue about what browser to use, the average user can barely make the difference between an app and a website anyway.

Not against us. Against some of the nerds will. The rest cheered. That's why it worked.

Humans hate friction, they don't want to pay for maintenance and have short term thinking.

Even on HN there are plenty of voices saying they won't even bother using firefox because it inconvenience them.

Can we blame then the normies for choosing integrated easy systems to use?

You are one PRISM type request and one gag order from a silent update changinf that.

In fact, it could have been the case already and you would not have known ir.

Under the EU’s GDPR, any processing of personal data (name, contact, identifiers, etc.) generally requires a legal basis (e.g., consent, legitimate interest, contractual necessity), clear purpose, minimal data, and appropriate protection. Doing so without a lawful basis is unlawful.

It is not a cookie banner law. The american seems to keep forgetting that it's about personal data, consent, and the ability to take it down. The sharing of said data is particularly restricted.

And of course, this applies to black list, including for fraud.

Regulators have enforced this in practice. For example in the Netherlands, the tax authority was fined for operating a “fraud blacklist” without a statutory basis, i.e., illegal processing under GDPR: https://www.autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/en/current/tax-adm...

The fact is many such lists exist without being punished. Your landlord list for example. That doesn't make it legal, just no shutdown yet.

Because there is no legal basis for it, unless people have committed, again, an illegal act (such as destroying the pub property). Also it's quite difficult to have people accept to be on a black list. And once they are, they can ask for their data to be taken down, which you cannot refuse.

Illegal in europe. You are bot allowed to keep a black list of people with the exception of some criminal situations or addiction.

Also, name, address and phone numbers let you do so many scams.

A friend of mine received a very well-crafted physical letter at his home about resetting his cryto ledger.

He is now very stressed because there are news about people with crypto getting abducted.

And with the ledger leak they have:

- his name and address

- how much money he has on his ledger

Looked up NatSocToday on Substack, and they do have the swastika as a banner; they don't even hide or be subtle about it. Full on nazi, in plain sight.

And plot twist, they are anti-Trump.

I'm overwhelmed.

+1 on this, they had an amazing presence in the French community for 20 years and many of us own them our passion for FOSS.

- Young people to innovate and grow

- Old people to stabilise and ensure sustainability

Fire one group and you get problems on the long run.

The hard part is to keep the balance between each group's influence. They don't have the same needs, desires, agendas, and flaws.

Can't wait for competitors destroying the other guys installation because just like international waters, there is no police or border there.

Even worse than most people realize: https://www.bitecode.dev/p/the-eu-can-be-shut-down-with-a-fe...

That includes:

Dependency on US-hosted digital services (emails, chat, calendars, ticket systems, online editors, file hosting, sync services, payment providers) — e.g., Gmail, Google Docs.

Dependency on third-party authentication providers — e.g., login via Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, and iCloud on iPhones.

Dependency on US cloud infrastructure providers — e.g., companies relying on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

Dependency through supply chain partners who rely on US tech — e.g., digitization partners using AWS/Azure impacting invoice processing.

Dependency on US-based business IT software and data services — e.g., banks using Microsoft LDAP, accountants using Dropbox, telecoms storing data in Oracle data lakes.

Dependency on US-controlled operating systems on user devices — e.g., Windows, macOS, iOS, Android.

Dependency on US-designed chips in most devices — e.g., Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Apple chip hardware.

You got me good with this one.

But seriously, this is my main answer to people telling me AI is not reliable: "guess what, most humans are not either, but at least I can tell AI to correct course and it's ego won't get in the way of fixing the problem".

In fact, while AI is not nearly as a good as a senior dev for non trivial tasks yet, it is definitely more reliable than most junior devs at following instructions.

No, I use them but loading and unloading the app in the tab still happens when the browser flushes the app from memory because the OS killed it or the browser eviction policy hits.

This loading is not nearly as seamless as a regular app starting back up.

For a regular app, you have the app loading, and the os cache helping with it. If you do your job half correctly, it loads as a block almost instantly.

For a web app you have the web browser loading, the the display of the white viewport in a flash, then the app loading in the browser (with zero os cache to help with so it's slower). It needs then to render. Then restoring the scroll (which is a mess with a browser) and the state as much as you can but you are limited with persistence size so most content must be reloaded which means the layout is moving around. Not to mention JS in a browser is not nearly as performant as a regular app, so as your app grows, it gets worse.

Apple makes sure it's not practical.

You still can't have a "share to" target that is a web app on iOS. And the data your can store in local storage on safari is a joke.

Of course, forget about background tasks and integrated notifications.

In fact, even on Android you miss features with web apps, like widgets for quick actions, mapping actions to buttons and so on.

And no matter how good you cache things, the mobile browser will unload the app, and you will always get this friction when you load the web app on the new render you don't have on regular apps.

Pretty sure it destroys something in you as well. So many context changes with no relation whatsoever and regular hooks that give you a pinch.

We haven't evolved for that. Our brain is trying to figure out a narrative between two things following each other. It needs time to process stuff. And there is so much shock it can absorb at once. So many "?!" and open loops in a day.

I made a TikTok account to at least know what people were talking about. After 3 months, I got it.

And I deleted it.

I felt noticeably worse when using it, in a way that nothing bad for me, including the news, refined sugar and pron, ever made me feel. The destruction was more intense, more structural. I could feel it gnarling.

In a way, such fast feedback is good, because it makes it easy to stop, while I'm still eating tons of refined sugar.

As usual, if both sides exist, it's because they both provide benefits. The guessers' benefits are just not obvious at first glance.

Taleb has a nice bit on that, explaining that if something exists for long, it must have enduring beneficial properties, and if you think it's stupid, you are the one having a blind spot.

Dawkins led to the same conclusion: stuff that works stays and multiplies. You may not like it, but nature doesn't care what you think.

It's true for entities, systems, traits, concepts...

Everyone mocks Karens, until your flight is delayed and that insufferable lady tires up the staff so much that everyone gets compensation.

I dislike lying but it works, and our entire society is based on it (but we call it advertising).

Don't like mysandry? Don't understand why nature didn't select out ugly people? Think circumcision is dumb?

All those things give some advantages in some context, to such an extend it still prospers today.

In fact, several things can be true. Something can be alienating, and yet give enough benefits that it stays around.

A huge number of things are immoral, create suffering, confusion, destruction, even to the practitioner themselves, and yet are still here because they bring something to the table that is just sufficient to justify their existence.

See your friend making yet again a terrible love choice, getting pregnant, and stuck with a baby and no father? From a natural selection standpoint, it could very well be a super successful strategy for both parties. The universe doesn't optimize for our happiness or morality.