PreInternet01

As they say on Wikipedia: [Citation needed]

Where can I get this 'full fat' ARM build of VS? I'll settle for a Win64-ARM release, but I'll personally provision a botnet to upvote you to Mars in case you point me to an Apple-Silicon-on-MacOS DMG...

> the Windows/Arm64 build of Visual Studio

There is no such thing. "Visual Studio for Mac" is a re-spin of MonoDevelop, and doesn't compare to the actual VS in any way, shape or form.

The closest you can get to VS-on-ARM-Mac right now is using a JetBrains IDE, but, as useful as these are, it's really no competition...

This is pretty cool: basically, recent ARM extensions make emulation of just about anything a lot easier.

Which got me to wonder: what if Apple were able to introduce a "MacOS subsystem for Windows", which could run most x64 binaries for the latter platform?

The only app that keeps me from switching to my M3 MacBook full-time is Visual Studio (and Mikrotik WinBox, to some extent, but that runs just fine under Wine).

If I could run VS without tanking battery life, that would be sort-of huge...

I'm located in the EU, where Claude is unavailable: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-ai-locations.

So, since I have access to some IPs in Nigeria, I used those to (brazenly, possibly illegally!) evaluate their services (and no, the recent sea cable cuts don't help, but don't seem to affect my African upstreams too badly).

So, I absolutely love htmx, and this new version offers some incremental improvements that make things even better (unless you were using WebSockets or server-sent events, I guess, but the plug-in model doesn't look too bad?).

Unlike all-or-nothing approaches like React, htmx allows you to add just the right amount of partial updates to your web app, using just the technologies that were already there to begin with. I realize that this approach doesn't appeal to everyone, but being able to map simple requests to simple responses was an absolute life-saver for my projects many times over.

Migrating to a truly-truly minimalist approach (see: https://www.stefanjudis.com/notes/htmz-a-176-bytes-htmx-alte...) is still on my to-do list, but for now, I'm quite happy with the htmx status quo.

For coding? Claude Opus.

For me, GPT-4-Turbo is significantly worse than even GPT-3.5: the former is much better at providing context for its answers (even erring on the too-verbose side), but then comes up with a pointless solution that it can't be dissuaded to change, even if its predecessor gets it right-ish.

Compared to both these GPT versions, Claude 3 (even though I have to use a proxy to pretend I'm in Nigeria...) is much more 'to the point' and seems more 'willing' to amend answers that don't go in the right direction, as opposed to simply backtracking and proposing a completely new solution.

But having to pare down the context of a question significantly remains a huge issue for all models, and I think this is their Achilles heel. Until you can feed a model your entire project, including any dependencies, and it can answer any questions in the that full context, the work required to retrofit useful answers is just too much to justify the expense.

I'm... truly not sure that Rust offers a compelling alternative for most C# developers.

If you come from C/C++, the memory safety and (limited) concurrency quality-of-life improvements may be worth it.

But compared to (already memory-safe-unless-overridden) C#, the relative poverty of the Rust standard library and the exponential complexity-cum-compile-times are going to be a hard sell outside of environments that truly cannot live with the constraints of garbage collection (which since .NET going open source have been relaxed a lot already).

They universally suck, and I always forget to take them. Same for LTE-to-WiFi hotspots.

(Edited to add: one of the great things about a MacBook [Air] is supposed to be that you just throw them in your backpack, and you can be productive, like, anywhere, without having to worry about battery life, or anything. Still, 'lack of connectivity' kinda kills that dream, which means I still carry my ThinkPad T14 gen3 (despite its power management flaws) or Surface Go2 (Potato Inside<tm>), where I would rather take my MacBook)

iPads are available with WWAN -- not sure if home-grown or not, but still...

Well, apart from the lack of LTE connectivity. Please, anyone@apple.com, deliver me from the temptation to get another ThinkPad, just because they ship WWAN...

So, this is the second time a "run your Android apps on Windows" initiative fizzles out: before WSA (which was Amazon-centric), there was a late-2020 "Your Phone" feature that (briefly) allowed Samsung apps on Windows desktops.

Not sure if this means anything other than "phone apps run best on, well, a phone", especially since I can't think of anything from my phone that I would truly like on my desktop, other than instant messages, which are already available in various ways?

Previously, on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39583349. A single comment, and not listed on https://news.ycombinator.com/invited

Because consumer electronics manufacturers have long, long understood the need to (mostly) obfuscate pricing and (as a bonus) make comparisons/reviews impossible.

The thing you bought at big-box retailer A sporting brand B and carrying model number C? The exact same thing is sold by retailer D under brand E and as model F.

ChatGPT is an excellent sparring partner, for new, experienced and senior/ninja-elite developers alike.

It does not, however, provide any solutions all by itself:

1. A significant amount of code it suggests uses external APIs that, while it would be nice if they existed, are purely imaginary.

2. Even when suggesting sensible code using existing APIs, it will happily provide coding snippets that have nothing in common, style-wise, with the code base you asked questions about, even if you provided sufficient context.

3. Some code will be, even if you push back, wholesale lifted from sources whose license you simply can't comply with.

4. Even the most basic coding questions, like "give me a C# function to fold SMTP headers according to the RFC" are flat-out wrong, or, best-case, woefully inefficient.

So, whenever I use ChatGPT, it's entirely to see if there's a perspective that I missed. 80% of the cases, it's just babbling nonsense, and I happily disregard those results. The remaining 20% is quite valuable, though, even if separating the wheat from the chaff definitely involves my human judgement...

Shipping populated server racks in crates and carting them into place in a data center happens everywhere, everyday.

You might enjoy https://www.phswest.com/product/4000sxhd-motorized-server-ra...

Not sure if you tried the installer or the portable version, but for me, running the latter required me to put it in a location where it had permissions to create the 'lapce-data' sub-folder. (And no, there was no sensible error message when that inevitably failed).

Having said that, there doesn't seem to be very much "there" there, right now. I managed to open a C# project using the 'csharp-ls' language server, but, other than suggesting some refactorings that I couldn't successfully apply, there wasn't much that indicated that this actually worked. Debugging certainly didn't.

It did load very fast, though, so that might make it worth checking out again in, oh, a year or so...

Yes, I'm aware of the .nl situation in particular, and... it only underscores my point?

If those .nl domains dropped off the Internet tomorrow, that (while of course very inconvenient for lots of people) wouldn't cause more than a tiny dip in global traffic. The benchmark here is how much of, say .com and .net combined, is signed. And that's around 4% (4.5M signed zones out of a total 170M, give or take).

Because of a well-intended mandate, most .nl domains are signed by their registrar, which generates and holds the private keys. So: the very same entity responsible for enabling domain delegation also secures that delegation. Virtually nobody generates and supplies their own DNSSEC keys when registering their .nl domain. So, a government looking for someone to lean on to modify a delegation, doesn't need to do that much extra work for such 'secure' zones, do they now?

From a consumer perspective, visiting digid.nl (signed, probably with their own keys, kept in a nice HSM somewhere!) vs. ah.nl (not signed) offers no meaningful extra privacy or security: when not using DoH, their ISP and anyone else in the middle will still have a pretty good idea what they're up to, and can strip off the 'hey, tell me about your signature' bits in any requests, leaving the client unable to tell the difference in the first place in most situations.

In case of a DNS hijack, the consumer security implications are exactly the same for both login (digid.nl) and shopping (ah.nl): their browser or app will refuse to connect, because DNS is already a negligible factor there, and it's the TLS certificate that makes the difference. That, combined with the very real danger that turning on DNSSEC makes a zone unresolvable for hours or even days on end, makes most people a bit wary about doing do. And they're absolutely right.

Good point. I guess that any technology with a huge built-in "ah, yes, that one simple mistake you made, now means you'll have to completely rename your endpoint before anyone will be able to talk to it again" foot-gun requires a bit of a re-think prior to general availability.

> DNSSEC is highly useful tho

Not as it's deployed today. Since over 80% (conservative guesstimate) of the zones that most people care about are not signed, it's pretty much useless.

The 'evil ISP or IT MITMs my DNS traffic' scenario is much more effectively addressed with DoH (since it only requires clients and some resolvers to coordinate, not the entire Internet, and it looks like regular HTTPS, which implementers already understand how to deal with, as a bonus).

And the 'evil government redirects some or all zones' play is still very much possible even with DNSSEC, since, guess who ultimately controls the keys.

Even if you think that making the latter scenario more difficult to implement is worth it, getting more people to sign their zones is a losing battle, since they're very much likely to self-DoS themselves in the process, significantly reducing their enthusiasm...

No, but admit it, you felt a certain glee in submitting it... (which is not to say you're wrong about that, and I write that as someone who once penned a public standard mandating DNSSEC -- which just goes to show we all make mistakes...)

At this point, someone should just file a high severity / high impact CVE against DNSSEC in its entirety, and ensure the box-tickers all across the world mandate its eradication.

While I'm sure (even stronger: I know) that at some point DNSSEC was a good idea, it's just a liability-slash-infrastructure-tax these days (a footgun at best, an additional DoS vector in most cases), and it's time for it to go.

99% of DNSSEC deployments come down to "I trust the entity I have outsourced my DNS management to with my private key management as well", which makes no sense whatsoever, and the reasoning behind the remaining 1% doesn't inspire much confidence either.

DoH satisfies the DNS privacy/security requirements of most Internet users just fine, and with or without DNSSEC, the management of the underlying infrastructure remains the same as it was before, i.e. "trust us"...

What about "[...] centering an element within its parent was a surprisingly tricky thing to do. [now...] more tools we can use to solve this", and the subsequent complete lack of a list of these tools that work cross-browser did I miss?

The lead-in to said article:

"For a long time, centering an element within its parent was a surprisingly tricky thing to do. As CSS has evolved, we've been granted more and more tools we can use to solve this problem."

...yeah, but still none of these tools like, actually work?

The method in the paper definitely seems flawed: if, for example, PostgreSQL would not exist, that doesn't mean every software company would be developing their own RDBMS -- the much more likely effect would be more mega-yachts for Larry Ellison...

I'm not even sure there is a sensible method to quantify the economic impact of Open Source, since it's pretty much an "alternate universe" situation. Without OSS, Linux would most likely not exist, meaning that... everyone would be paying for Unixware per-seat licenses? Which would probably make AWS a nonstarter, etc. etc. On the other hand, there would most likely be a lot more profitable small software companies, but not enough to make up the difference.

So, "Open Source is a good thing, economically" might be a defensible statement, but putting an actual Dollar value on that will always be more fiction than science.

The cost of egress traffic is a very good reason for many organizations to not fully migrate to a cloud provider anytime soon. And since, unlike with storage costs, there doesn't seem to be an actual reason (other than: it makes migrating to competitors cost-prohibitive in a subset of cases), that seems kind of... weird?

Small example: an actual company I do some work for is in the business of delivering creative assets to distributors. This results in an egress of around 180TB per month, which is, on average just, around 500Mb/s.

So, this company currently operates 2 racks in commercial data centers, linked via 10Gb/s Ethernet-over-DWDM, with 2x512Mb/s and 1x1Gb/s Internet uplinks per DC. Each rack has 2 generic-OEM servers with ~64 AMD Zen cores, 1/2TB RAM, ~8TB NVMe and ~100TB SAS RAID6 storage per node.

Just the cost-savings over egress on AWS is enough to justify that setup, including the cost of an engineer to keep it all up and running (even though the effort required for that turns out to be minimal).

So, are cloud providers ignoring a significant market here, or is the markup on their current customers lucrative enough?

I would love it if I, as a lifelong Windows fanboy, could offer anything but a snarky reply to the author of a new OS feature. Yet, good luck with that and don't look at the headstones of those who came before you is all I can muster.

Well, sudo for Windows has been a thing for, like, a few years now?... https://github.com/gerardog/gsudo

Not sure if this is the same thing, but this definitely should have shipped with the very first implementation of "oh, sure, you're an Administrator, but not really, since we're ignoring that bit" a.k.a. User Account Control.

That would have saved about a metric ton of misguided "here's how to turn off UAC" tutorials, but, ehm, yeah, anything to inject some life into the moribund Windows Insiders Program (the one where https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/ proudly headlines "What’s coming for the Windows Insider Program in 2023"), right?

OK, all the upbeat Vision Pro articles have one theme in common: "Like the original iPod or iPhone, you will first ridicule it, then realize you can't compete with it, then put one [in your pocket]."

Which... is reasonable, I guess? But it does ignore two quite significant elephants in the room:

1. No, I will not put that on my face, nor accept anyone in my proximity to do so without [social] repercussions (see: Google Glass)

2. No, it does not do anything I actually want. My 4K, soon 5K, soon 8K monitor displays my movies, code, or whatever, just fine, and the fact that I can get custom overlays or whatever, while making me nauseous, just isn't that appealing? (see: anything Oculus/Meta, Microsoft, HTC, etc. have achieved so far: some subset of fans will lap their product up, but broad marketplace acceptance is... nowhere to be found?)

It's quite possible that VR/AR will take over the world at some point, but right now, it more seems like 3D TV/cinema: a supply-side fad that lacks consumer acceptance.

For those curious about what the original Spectrum ROM looked like: https://skoolkit.ca/disassemblies/rom/maps/all.html

(The tool used to generate this, https://github.com/skoolkid/skoolkit, is absolutely amazing and still sees regular updates)

Sorry to be that guy, but the monospace font stack used for e.g. logs is... not optimal for Windows:

    IBM Plex Mono,Menlo,DejaVu Sans Mono,Bitstream Vera Sans Mono,Courier,monospace

...will end up being "Courier" and that's not good in any way, shape or form. Consolas, Cascadia Code|Mono, even Lucida [Sans] Console are much nicer, and would spruce up the Safari experience for some segment of your audience.

Plus, not sure why timestamps use font-light (this is Tailwind, right?), it just makes these less readable, while not taking up less space or anything.