jamalaramala

How designers see the icons / how I see the icons

https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/0*X5Zz-PxT8087KG2...

Oh my god, this is ugly as fuck.

It reminds me a study about the perception of beauty among students of arts.

Before they start their studies, their perception of beauty is similar to everyone's.

But as they go through their course, their perception starts to shift. What they see as "beautiful" doesn't match the perception of others.

They learn what "skeuomorphism" is, and suddenly everything must be flat and undifferentiated.

* Step 1: Ask for $100,000 to fund the start-up

* Step 2: Open source project

* Step 3: Find other streams of revenue (donations, grants, subscriptions, sponsorships)

Yes, $100K was a relatively small sum -- but the company that owned the rights was going bankrupt, and Blender was going to die.

For a lucrative game, a reasonable value would be 2 to 4 years of earnings.

For example: if the product makes $10K/month:

    $10k × 36 (a mid-range multiple) = $360,000

With this amount, the author would have at least 3 years of headway, with a much larger open source community.

Blender had moderate success when it was closed source, but not enough to pay its development, so it was going to die.

After its creator raised €100,000 to release it under the GPL, Blender became the leading open-source 3D tool it is today.

And they make enough money from recurring donations, service subscriptions, merchandise, conferences and trainings.

You'll probably love [TIC-80](https://tic80.com/).

Looks like a really nice and polished project!

A note to the author -- if you ever considered going open source, you could use the same strategy used by Ton Roosendaal to open source Blender:

In July 2002, Ton launched a campaign called "Free Blender" to raise money (100,000 EUR) directly from the community. To everyone's surprise and delight the campaign reached the goal in only seven short weeks.

In October 2002, Blender was released under the GNU GPL. Roosendaal created the Blender Foundation to manage development, and the project kept growing from there. Today, Blender is one of the most popular 3D creation tools, used by professionals, hobbyists, and even studios.

Being free and open source allowed Blender to power countless creative projects, including the 2025 Oscar-winning film Flow.

This would've been much harder if the tool had stayed behind a paywall.

They were essential for branching with GOTO and GOSUB.

Example:

    10 PRINT "HELLO ";
    20 GOTO 10

This would create an infinite loop that you could break with Ctrl+C.

You could then type:

    15 PRINT "WORLD ";

And when you listed the source code (with the command LIST) you would see:

    10 PRINT "HELLO ";
    15 PRINT "WORLD ";
    20 GOTO 10

Chinese EV makers are very popular in Europe and Asia.

There was an interesting text, by Isaac Asimov, where he explained in a very clear way the historical importance of logarithms -- they allowed Kepler to finalize his work by replacing tables of multiplications (which were difficult and error-prone) with sums.

The election of Donald Trump shows that the world needs to become independent from the U.S.

This is a video about Digital Sovereignty in Europe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWS8J2Zs7KQ

It probably depends on the benchmark you choose; according to Chatbot Arena, Deepseek-R1 ranks similarly to o1-2024-12-17; and Grok3 is just 3% above these models in "Arena Score" points.

This Youtube channel has amazing explanations, starting with:

How Transistors Run Code?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjneAhCy2N4

> Even more concerning was Devin’s tendency to press forward with tasks that weren’t actually possible. (...)

> Devin spent over a day attempting various approaches and hallucinating features that didn’t exist.

One of the big problems of GenAI is its inability to know what they don't know.

Because of that, they don't ask clarifying questions.

Humans, in the same situation, would spend a lot of time learning before they could be truly productive.

Not all bugs are crashes. It could be a copy text or price calculation.

It definitely is; but this bureaucracy can be useful when the company has thousands of developers.

> The question is: Why companies moved from monolithic to microservices? What do they try to avoid?

One of the main reasons why companies move from monoliths to microservices is to promote ownership and accountability in large codebases.

In a monolith where everyone owns the code, developers can break each other's code.

With microservices, each team becomes responsible for one part, and (as long as they keep their SLAs) they can't break each other's code.

When something fails it's easier to identify who needs to fix what.

Microservices don't make much sense for small teams if they don't need or don't have the headcount to split responsibilities.

According to the article, Section 702 sunset on December 31, 2017.

Why would one encrypt dates? They are public domain!!!

Curiously, the easiest Google product to move away from is "google" (search):

I have been using DuckDuckGo for years, both for searching and browsing. I love the ability to burn the cookies after each session!

But I haven't been able to replace Gmail, Calendar and Maps (which are quite good products IMO).

It's quite ironic that "google" (search) has become one of Google's worst products.

> I guess it’s hard to imagine new features or even incremental quality updates as a viable business idea.

There is market for privacy; but the missing piece, after so many years, is how to synchronize calendars in a seamless way.

From the article:

> 1. GPT1, GPT2, GPT3, Codex, InstructGPT, GPT4 papers. Self explanatory. (...)

> 2. Claude 3 and Gemini 1 papers to understand the competition. (...)

> 3. LLaMA 1, Llama 2, Llama 3 papers to understand the leading open models. (...)

I agree that you should have read most of these papers at the time, when they were released, but I wonder if it would be that useful to read them now.

Perhaps it would be better to highlight one or two important papers from this section?

You should use this as a sign that people don't understand "creating an account" as part of the game.

Kudos to the author for the amazing idea!

The only problem I see is that projects don't fit so nicely in the division between languages (Pythonia, Javaland, Clojuria, etc) and applications (Gamedonia, AILandia, etc). There's a lot of intersection between them.

But the visualization is super-cool nonetheless. :)

Sometimes, before you merge your changes into master, you may want to re-organize your commits in logical chunks.

For example, if you are working in two different files -- you can reorder the commits so they appear together, and then combine them if that makes sense.

I think it is a good practice to clean up your branch before you merge it into master.

So instead of:

   * Change 1
   * Fix typo
   * Change 2
   * Another typo
   * Change 3
   * That didn't work
   * Ops, I did it again
   * Revert Change 3
   * Change 3 (final)

You'll merge:

   * Change 1
   * Change 2
   * Change 3

Which is much better, particularly if you have hundreds of developers working on the same codebase.

And it is very easy to do that using `git rebase -i`.

(I don't see the need for a GUI)

Great idea for a little app. <3

I don't see a problem with in-app purchases, but have you considered offering the unlocked app for free under Google Play Pass?

Good thing that Europe can buy arms and oil from the US!

It took 30 years for computers go from entire rooms to desktops, and another 30 years to go from desktops to our pockets.

I don't know if we can extrapolate, but I can imagine AI inference on our desktops for $500 in a few years...

> I never fully understood why this programming paradigm died off.

First and foremost -- the world wide web.

Suddenly, we had a much more flexible way to deliver applications.

If I remember it correctly, Visual Basic couldn't write to STDOUT -- so it couldn't be used as a scripting language for the web.

Microsoft tried to push VBScript as an alternative, but it was linked to their expensive ecosystem, while LAMP (Linux Apache, MySQL Perl and PHP) was free.