hresvelgr

I see a lot of people trying to capitalize on GitHub's recent failings, and I feel like everyone trying to shoot their shot in this space is missing one key aspect: Git is a terrible TERRIBLE piece of software.

I have spent a considerable amount of time learning git, not because I wanted to, but because someone else in my team didn't and inevitably t-boned our repository with a proverbial freight train running commands they didn't understand. It is absolutely unacceptable for a program designed EXACTLY for the purpose of maintaining a history and backup of the evolution of a program to be so unwieldy and occasionally dangerous to use. We can absolutely do better than Git.

The new Toyota Prius looks better than this. I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but if Ferrari is being outdone on design by a common commuter vehicle it looks terrible.

This is a similar argument to "Dropbox is a feature, not a product" and it definitely rings true in this instance too. I remember the litany of applications that only supported sync through Dropbox. It had no ecosystem, it's saving grace was that no one yet was operating a service similar at that scale.

All the major AI companies are trying to manufacture their own ecosystems to become less disposable. They'll get away with it for a while, but only insofar as hardware prevents advanced use. Once we get that hardware[1] there will only be two types of AI companies: hardware manufacturers, and labs. Just like sync became trivial and ancillary, so will AI inference.

[1] https://taalas.com/the-path-to-ubiquitous-ai/

Am I the only one who thinks Obsidian is perfect without plugins? Half the reason I switched to it from Anytype was that it was rather spartan in its offerings. If they announced tomorrow they would ban plugins, I would not care.

I would encourage everyone remotely interested in Zig to have a look at Odin[1]. If like me, you read that article and found yourself muttering "what the hell," then you might appreciate Odin's simplicity and design consistency.

I am definitely in the minority here, but I am not a fan of the kind of meta-programming that Zig and Rust offer, with Rust being especially atrocious. In the two decades I've been programming I can count on one hand the number of times meta-programming was an appropriate solution to a problem I had. Every time I reached for it, I got bit. There's a reason "when in doubt, use brute force" is sage advice, it may not be fast and glamorous, but it'll be a hell of a lot less opaque.

[1] https://odin-lang.org/

I think the magic is still mostly in raylib in that it's a well designed API with high composability. It feels like playing and building. Odin is special in its own right.

There's no particular feature of Odin that really stands out, but where Odin outclasses every language available is that every single feature has been very thoughtfully considered and designed to have the least amount of issues. Once you work with it for a few months, it becomes obvious very quickly its vision is remarkably consistent, leading to a smooth and outright delightful development experience.

I will caution, if you are the type of developer who likes to pull in lots of packages and dependencies to start a project, it's not for you. There's no package manager, and rightly so[1]. You'll have to build most high-level systems yourself. But when you realise that most frameworks and dependencies are trivial to implement by hand, this won't be a bother.

If you're the kind of developer who loves building systems and doing everything yourself, you'll feel right at home.

[1] https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2025/09/08/package-manage...

You have better specs than I do and I'm running the same model almost twice as fast through GGUF on llama cpp. I'd try some different harnesses.

Anytype is a well-made product, but its data format is somewhat opaque and like Notion suffers from significant complexity. I switched to Obsidian last year, which while proprietary at least gives me the option to move my data somewhere else if I should need to. Anytype doesn't make it easy to get your data off its platform.

> A fast, native markdown viewer for macOS built with Tauri v2, React, and markdown-it.

Since when is JavaScript native? Tauri may be using the system's web view but it's still a web view. False advertising.

> a constant for every invention is my lifetime is "everyone else is only interested in puerile sex and entertainment, $LATEST_MEDIA is ruining us, 1984"

Every damaging invention in isolation isn't a big deal. The big deal is setting precedent and the accumulation.

> not puerile consumption.

I agree, it's more akin to seeing how much sawdust one can put in a rice crispy before someone notices. No one wants to eat sawdust, nor is there a mindless desire to.

SDL3 doesn't support bindless resources and the plans to do so in the future are very loose[1].

[1] https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/issues/11148#issuecomment-...

While I agree that my view is narrow, the "best solution" in question is what we used to do, and it was fine. There are still many places that manually manage dependencies. Fundamentally automatic software versioning is an under-developed area in need of attention, and technologies like semantic versioning which are ubiquitous are closer to suggestions, and not true indicators of breaking changes. My personal view is that fully automatic dependency version management is an ongoing experiment and should be treated as such.

> Package managers are now basically a requirement for language adoption. Doing it manually is not a solution, in an automated world.

Absolute nonsense. What does automated world even mean? Even if one could infer reasonably, it's no justification. Appealing to "the real world" in lieu of any further consideration is exactly the kind of mindlessness that has led to the present state of affairs.

Automation of dependency versions was never something we needed it was always a convenience, and even that's a stretch given that dependency hell is abundant in all of these systems, and now we have supply chain attacks. While everyone is welcome to do as they please, I'm going to stick to vendoring my dependencies, statically compiling, and not blindly trusting code I haven't seen before.

Focusing on protocol and decentralisation is putting the cart before the horse. The reason why Twitter, and Reddit in particular work so well is because of sub-communities that form organically. More importantly, discovery was part of the value in using it. It's why every Mastodon community specific to one niche/subject is not very interesting, people are not one single interest, we follow someone we like for one reason, maybe it's they make cool art, then we find out they also make music too, then bam, you discover a new genre of music and the community around it. Decentralisation actively introduces friction into the most rewarding loop of the entire thing. Centralisation isn't the problem, it's just comorbid with shitty governance.

Startup punditry is a business niche being capitalised on and it's being regarded in this article like a commune of knowledge. It's mildly insightful entertainment literature, with customers. On a philosophical level it's absolute value is tainted by its existence in the market. Most things are, but it living in the context of entrepreneurial endeavours, it taints it substantially more than most.

I'm quite partial to Zed. Very snappy, and you can turn off all the AI features globally if you like.

> It is much closer to proper engineering.

I would not equate software engineering to "proper" engineering insofar as being uttered in the same sentence as mechanical, chemical, or electrical engineering.

The cost of code is collapsing because web development is not broadly rigorous, robust software was never a priority, and everyone knows it. The people complaining that AI isn't good enough yet don't grasp that neither are many who are in the profession currently.

Something that isn't touched on as much is that in the time between old-school native apps and Electron apps is design systems and brand language have become much more prevalent, and implementing native UI often results in compromising design, and brand elements. Most applications used to look more or less the same, nowadays two apps on the same computer can look completely different. No one wants to compromise on design.

This mentality creates a worse experience for end users because all applications have their own conventions and no one wants to be dictated to what good UX is. The best UX in every single instance I've encountered is consistency. Sure, some old UIs were obtuse (90% weren't) but they were obtuse in predictable ways that someone could reasonably navigate. The argument here is between platform consistency and application consistency. Should all apps on the platform look the same, or should the app look the same on all platforms?

edit: grammar

It's only creepy if you are a creep.

This reminds me of the bio-neural gel packs from Star Trek: Voyager. Wild to think that this could become a reality.

> If anything it’s maybe a bit on-the-nose.

This is what I was driving at. I should have been more specific to say not particularly meaningful or evocative to me. From the previews I've seen it's all based around shattering and breaking. Where I will give credit, there's one: "Transformation" where natural light is reflected at the shattered glass to portray a face which I find to be fascinating. The rest feel kitschy, it's not quite to my tastes.

I might agree with you as a knee jerk, but I believe "the medium is the message"[1] and I don't think there's anything particularly meaningful or evocative about shattered glass as opposed to any other planar medium.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

> "What if our AI bullishness continues to be right...and what if that’s actually bearish" - what if pee pee was poo poo

Despite the vulgarity, it is exceptionally illuminating to how much some of these slop pieces are just a mere pretension of rhetoric. I see this pretty consistently with a lot of the material I come across on the job that's gone through the LLM meat-grinder.

Also, the comment made me giggle like a little kid.

If you're okay with the work being done poorly and without review, then sure. Otherwise, it'll take the same amount of time and be done worse. I would not trust solely 1 person to review 5 people's work let alone 100.

That's the point? Even though they are complex, the improved roads all use circular arcs which guarantee a baseline of good drivability.

It's my belief that the author has almost entirely used an LLM to put this together. Tailor engagement accordingly.

I suspect that was in the initial prompt that was used to generate this and the LLM decided Rust syntax was preferable.

Very few companies producing physical goods make the kind of money that companies producing meta-physical goods do. They produce more money at a fraction of the cost. Value is always an issue of culture and the west in particular values money above all, so all inefficient labor relative to the task of making money is devalued. It's easy enough to point the finger and say "wall st bad" but we enshrined it collectively as a culture.

This is really cool, but begs the question: is the ideal IDE actually just a window manager with strong component coupling?

ChatGPT copypasta isn't helpful, or interesting. If I wanted a ChatGPT explanation, I would have gone to ChatGPT.