deergomoo

I find it remarkable that despite the massive improvements to CSS and JS in the last 15-ish years, additions to HTML are glacial. I mean we only just got popovers for christ's sake.

It's like JS and CSS are fully on board with being an app platform and HTML is digging its heels in insisting that everything be a document. There is maybe something to be said for that argument, but if I'm gonna have to interact with web apps I'd rather the list of stuff every developer needs to hand-roll in varying-quality JS be a lot smaller than it currently is.

The web is the best application distribution mechanism the world has ever seen. Even though things have improved enormously in the last decade and a half, the ceiling is still miles below native (though the floor is far more accessible). None of that matters though, because all someone needs to do to get your app in front of their eyeballs is type a URL.

They also removed subpixel antialiasing several years ago. Since then, “1x” screens (i.e. ~110ppi or lower) have looked like shit on macOS compared to the same display driven by Windows or Linux.

> Starmer

The UK recently announced plans to go big on AI even before the Trump meeting. Much to my dismay, as we've actually done a really good job of grid decarbonisation so far and there's no way building a ton of GPU-filled data centres is going to aid that or our spiralling energy costs.

> evolving their skills from there

What skills? If you are just asking a computer for what you want you're not developing any skills, apart from maybe how to describe your requirements better†.

If you take the code the LLM outputs and use that as a basis to be able to write your own code I would call that "learning to program" and I applaud it whether you learn from adapting LLM code or by reading K&R cover-to-cover before you even touch a keyboard. But that's not what this article describes—what this article describes is the very deliberate act of not learning anything.

†Technically just describing your requirements in a way the particular LLM you're using responds best to, which is not necessarily "better" in an objective sense.

> It sounds like ordering all pencils be made illegal because they can be used to write threats

My country enacting overreaching and ill defined laws concerning technology? Colour me surprised…

Porting GTA3 to the Dreamcast has been the most recent example I’ve seen: https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2024-the-new-grand-...

I’m with you, my blog is a static site with no JS hosted on GitHub pages. Unless I ever see anyone discussing it or linking to it I have no way of even knowing if it’s being read or not. I write for me, mostly.

Overall I think Xen was much better in Black Mesa than HL1, but why they felt the need to make it so long is a mystery to me. Half to two-thirds of the play time could have been cut and it would have only improved things.

There's still a lot of value in playing the original, but what the Black Mesa team achieved with what is effectively a fan project is incredible. And in a world where Take Two goes after people doing cool stuff with 20 year old GTA games, it's great that it got the official blessing from Valve.

It mentions parking which is a similar category of annoyance, but I think the multitude of mutually incompatible apps for EV charging pose a real barrier to adoption too. Maybe not in a way people are explicitly aware of, but it certainly makes up part of the stories about difficulty and inconvenience with public charging.

I can pay for petrol with any card or, if I'm feeling really old school, by going into a building and handing a person cash. Someone like my mum, who still likes to draw the cash she'll need for the week and spend that, wouldn't even entertain the idea of having to download and maintain a suite of apps for every brand of charger.

Apps are a good convenience option for those that want them, but they shouldn't be the only option, especially not for something as essential as fuelling your car. I would welcome regulation on these, even a baby step of "all chargers must accept contactless payment". I'd like to see manned charging stations and cash options too—and I say that as someone who pays for everything by card—but I fear in the short term that might hamper infrastructure rollout.

I guess it was to be expected, but I struggle to imagine there's many people out there excited about this. The Vision Pro is an incredibly niche product to begin with, and many of the early adopters are going to be the sort of folks who are very aware of how poor a product Apple Intelligence is.

At this point there’s only really one thing I want from an iPhone and that’s an option for a 12/13 mini sized device again. Surely those phones didn’t sell so few that it’s not worth doing at all?

The no-adjective MacBook hasn’t been sold for years. It’s just Air and Pro again now.

Always with the prices.

There is more to a functioning society than the cost of goods and services.

There’s an interesting middle ground also. I live in a city where you still need to be a licensed taxi driver to drive for Uber and the cars must be marked (in the UK; it doesn’t seem to be that uncommon here). I don’t in all honesty know how much regulation that actually involves, but certainly more than “some random person with a car”. So there is a least a little bit of accountability.

From idle chit chat with the drivers that used to drive for a traditional firm, many have told me they prefer it. They’re very keen on their ability to vet passengers first via ratings, and that people can’t hop out and run away without paying, which apparently is/was not uncommon on Friday and Saturday nights. As a passenger, I like that I can’t be fobbed off with “he’s just round the corner mate” for 30+ minutes and I don’t have to worry about getting cash.

It can be a mutually beneficial thing, it just can’t be an unregulated free-for-all which it sounds like many implementations are.

I would happily pay through the nose for their language and refactoring features as some sort of LSP or plugin for other editors.

I use their products because that aspect is best-in-class for many languages, but the actual applications themselves leave a lot of be desired. Core text editing is pretty good, but so many Byzantine nested menus and odd Java fully-modal locks-out-the-background dialogs.

In production almost every

`foo, err := callSomeFn()`

is followed by

``` if err != nil { return err } ```

too; it’s the ones that get missed that are the problem because convention will do nothing to prevent silly mistakes.

Like many things in Go, there are steps the language could take but chooses not to. For example, Swift implements copy-on-write for variable-length arrays. I’m not qualified to comment on whether the Go team is right or wrong in their decisions, but these aren’t unsolved problems.

Maybe I'm just a billy no-mates, but even with perfect accuracy the kind and volume of notifications I get on my phone just wouldn't really benefit from summarisation. Maybe for a group chat I haven't checked in a while, but outside that it's not like I've got people sending me essay-length messages.

The inability to say no is the pattern I loathe the most in modern software. Fuck you, this is still my computer, stop removing my agency.

I have thought about this actually. Federighi seems to have a positive sentiment for having a sense of humour about himself and managing to deliver presentations sounding the least like C-3PO in human clothes out of all the execs. But I guess the buck does stop with him on this.

Prior to it being force opted-into I never enabled it and I was worried that disabling it wouldn't free up the space taken up by the models. Glad to hear it does. I don't even need the space, I'm just loath to lose multiple gigabytes to something I don't consider to be a good set of features.

> Apple used to be better than this

Unfortunately I find this to be true for their software in general these days, even outside of the AI junk.

I'll continue to roll my eyes at the "Jobs would have never allowed this" trope because it's often trite, but the fact is Tim Cook is not and has never been a product guy and the polish seems to have long since worn off. Software-wise at least anyway; I'd argue the hardware has never been better.

I'm firmly of the belief that most software would benefit immensely from us all slowing the hell down and putting more thought into what we build. But it would appear stability and a focus on core strengths doesn't sell nearly as well as endless new features for the marketing sheet added as quickly as possible.

> I.e. in cases you know what code you want to write, but it's tedious, LLMs can do for you

I feel like I'm living on another planet when I see this point. I have almost never in my career encountered the situation where actually typing out the code is the time consuming part. The time consuming part is knowing what code you want to write, running it in a variety of circumstances to gain confidence that it's correct, and iterating when it isn't.

Please don't think I'm saying you're wrong by the way—if anything this just shows how diverse programming can be as a career. But I see this point raised a lot and it doesn't match my experience at all.

Apple are setting a good example for sure, I use them a lot for rentals if it's something I don't know if I want to physically yet, or otherwise just want to watch there and then.

Their original content on TV+ looks and sounds incredible, and while you do sometimes come across licensed stuff on iTunes that is only 1080p SDR, I don't recall any time I've bought or rented a movie from there and been reminded of the 700MB DVD rips I used to download as a teenager. I'm sure there are some stinkers, but it seems far less prevalent.

So is all the stuff I pirate because I have no reasonable path to get it elsewhere

Hm, I’m curious too now. One could quite easily, though not cheaply, put this to the test with a RetroTink 4K which has excellent CRT emulation options.

I suspect it would look pretty cool, and probably better in some way than a plain upscale that a TV might do.

The big difference is that old games were often designed around the characteristics of a CRT, whereas films were (obviously) targeting film and cinema first and foremost. CRTs were the best those games ever looked, whereas at the time a tube TV was the worst way to watch a movie—albeit it the only one accessible at home.

I think the effect would be quite impressive for old TV shows shot on tape though!

I have started building a UHD Blu-ray collection too now the price of discs has come down a little vs regular Blu-ray. They’re fantastic.

I have a new annoyance though: many new movies are offered in Dolby Vision on streaming services, but the UHD BD release is only HDR10. I saw a comment on Reddit from someone involved in the industry who said that the additional work in getting the different metadata in line on discs is often just skipped. On streaming they can just serve different files for all combinations of resolution and HDR offered.

It’s annoying because if I’m paying a premium to get the best-of-the-best option, I want it to actually be the best.

DVDs I would rip and donate personally, purely because if you care about image quality they are just not going to look very good on modern TVs. Maybe if you have any special editions, cool box sets, or stuff with sentimental value then hold onto just those?

I am kind of amazed that DVDs are still on sale. I guess they still sell enough to warrant it and enough people don’t care how bad they look on even cheaper TVs, but given how little the average person cares at all about physical media these days, I wonder who is actually buying them in 2025.