778 karma · joined October 23, 2015
The accumulated brand trust of Apple, and the negative brand trust of Microsoft outweighs the numbers.
Even many technically savvy people believe Apple can deliver a higher quality computing experience with 8GB of RAM than Microsoft can with 16GB, and they're often correct.
The company treats good design almost like a marketing expense only worth doing if it creates short term brand perception changes. Throughout its history it's had moments of great design when a particular leader creates a culture that promotes it, but inevitably someone higher up rotates out that leader and the culture resets.
That has been the pattern with Windows, Zune / Windows Phone, Xbox, Surface, and many other consumer facing products.
For Americans and international researchers it's easy to get visas there quickly. It's not far at all for Americans to relocate to or visit. Electricity is cheap and clean. Canada has the most college educated adults per capita. The country's commitment to liberalism, and free markets, is also seeming more steadfast than the US at this point in time.
Canada faces obstacles with its much smaller VC ecosystem, its smaller domestic market, and the threat of US economic aggression. Canada's recent trade deals are likely to help there.
I say this all as an American who is loyal to American values first and foremost. If the US wants to move away from its core values I hope other countries, like Canada or the EU, can carry on as successful examples for the US to eventually return to.
Obama and Biden both led to meaningful policy improvements and they were far more stable than the current admin.
They've already fined X heavily for lacking transparency, like not providing a database of advertisers or allowing researchers to access internal data to evaluate misinformation concerns. The EU has threatened that if they need to they may ban or limit X.
Musk and conservatives view X as a critical tool to spread their preferred ideology, and Musk has shown he's not beyond algorithmic and UX manipulation to achieve desired outcomes.
The result is underneath any tweet that gets traction you will see countless blue checkmark users either saying something trolling for their side or engagement-baiting.
The people who are more ideologically neutral or not aligned with Musk are completely drowned out below the hundreds of bulk replies of blue checkmarks.
It used to be that if you saw someone, like a tech CEO, take an interesting position you'd have a varied and interesting discussion in the replies. The algorithm would show you replies in particular from people you follow, and often you'd see some productive exchange that actually mattered. Now it's like entirely drivel and you have to scroll through rage bait and engagement slop before getting to the crumbs of meaningful exchange.
It has had a chilling effect on productive intellectual conversation while also accelerating the polarization of the platform by scaring away many people who care about measured conversation.
My concern is more over time if the federal government takes a more active role in trying to guide corporate behavior to align with moral or political goals. I think that's already occurring with the current administration but over a longer period of time if that ramps up and AI is woven into more things it could become much more harmful.
Like where Gemini or Claude will look up the info I'm citing and weigh the arguments made ChatGPT will actually sometimes omit parts of or modify my statement if it wants to advocate for a more "neutral" understanding of reality. It's almost farcical sometimes in how it will try to avoid inference on political topics even where inference is necessary to understand the topic.
I suspect OpenAI is just trying to avoid the ire of either political side and has given it some rules that accidentally neuter its intelligence on these issues, but it made me realize how dangerous an unethical or politically aligned AI company could be.
Just as we've seen in the car industry we'll wind up less innovative, less productive, and less economical.
It was an unusually high degree of trust, and now it's unusually low. Even if the US reverses its policies it will take a very long time to rebuild trust, and even then the historical warning marker of the Trump admin will be studied as a reason to never return to the prior level of trust.
Without total trust software products are a natural target for any country that's thinking more about how to defend its own sovereignty. Policies and subsidies for locally built software that previously would have seemed frivolous or wasteful now seem prudent and badly needed.
WebGPU is supported on Chrome and on the latest version of Safari. On Linux with all browsers WebGPU is only supported via an experimental flag.
For many of the smaller players I think there's unfortunately a lot of people who realized there's significant money to be made in grifting. Many of the largest crypto proponents have pivoted into endeavors, whether crypto or otherwise, that profit off of being rewarded for being part of the 'correct' tribe.
Whenever trust is massively breached, and I believe much of the EU feels strongly that the US has breached trust, the natural action is to regroup and then gradually begin figuring out how to not be vulnerable to the same risk again.
If the US continues escalating the Greenland situation I expect that process will speed up massively.
I remember some of the uproar from tech folks getting criticism in that era. They were mad at things like articles coming out about toxic workplace culture at startups, or reports on pseudo-fraudulent behavior at startups. Many of those people said stuff like "defend founders". Years later those same people who whined about consequences were some of the first to also buy into crypto scams and use their power to try to pressure people into hyping up and not criticizing crypto.
That behavior made me very cynical about a lot of the VC world and much of tech in general. In general I wish those people had more reputational damage for using their public presence to push tribalism in pursuit of power or scamming people of their money.
In some cases yes I'll synthesize that myself into something more coherent. In other cases an LLM can offer a summary of certain themes I'm coming back to, or offer a pseudo-outsider's take on what the core themes being explored are.
If something is important to me I'll spend the time to understand it well enough to frame my own coherent argument, but if I'm doing extremely explorative thinking I'm OK with having a rapid process with an LLM in the loop.
I've found LLMs work reasonably well to just copy-paste that blob of thoughts into to have them summarize the key points back to me in a more coherent form.
They basically couldn't stick to a strategy and alienated every potential audience one by one. I was trying to make a Windows Phone app back then and for developers they forced them to go through an extremely difficult series of migrations where some APIs were supported on some versions and others on other versions and they were extremely unhelpful in the process.
They had a great opportunity with low-end phones because Nokia managed to make a very good ~$50 Windows Phone. Microsoft decided there was no money in that after they bought Nokia they immediately wanted to hard pivot to compete head-to-head with Apple with Apple-like prices. They then proceeded to churn through 'flagships' that suffered updates that broke and undermined those flagships shortly after they released thus alienating high end users as well.
Having worked at Microsoft I think the greatest problem with the culture there is that everyone is trying to appeal to a higher up rather than customers, and higher ups don't care because they're doing the same. I think that works out OK when defending incumbency but when battling in a competitive landscape Microsoft has no follow through because most shot callers are focused on their career trajectory over a <5 year time frame.
My own personal work was interesting enough to others that the right people shared it and I ended up with some major executives and founders in tech following my small account just because they found my work interesting. I also got many job offers just through sharing my work and having positive discussions with people.
Now so much of that is destroyed. The algorithm rarely surfaces novel and interesting things from people you don't yet follow, it instead surfaces blue-check accounts trying to be full time influencers. If a large account posts something you can't add insight to the conversation because your comment will be far below blue check accounts responding with arbitrary nonsense for engagement farming.
Many of the most interesting people on the platform have bailed out because there's just so much toxicity and distracting stress tolerated on the platform now, and no way to self-moderate it beyond ineffectually banning individual accounts.
Twitter was imperfect before Musk, but still extremely valuable in my circle. Now I feel Musk views the platform primarily as a way to manipulate social and political outcomes rather than a place that enriches its users.
Often when I wanted to research a niche technical topic I would search for it on Twitter, or tweet about it and see who in my network knew more. Often I would see individuals with niche followings say incredibly insightful or valuable stuff years before other people were saying it. I also had a bunch of professional connections form on Twitter along with many job opportunities I could have pursued.
Now I view X as having destroyed nearly all of that. The system is so setup to reward rage-bait and slop that even if I try to curate my experience for it the meaningful individuals get drowned out. The algorithm and all the actions taken on the website seem more about creating a social manipulation machine for Musk than enriching its users, and as a result many of the most thoughtful and valuable people have scattered away from the platform.
I'm all for diversity of thought, but X under Musk is about non-transparent algorithmic manipulation of speech and manipulating emergent behavior to achieve political goals. It is one thing to unban people, but it's another thing to intentionally break all tools (like ban lists) that enable people to self moderate. Musk's X amplifies certain speech and then disempowers people who try to attain higher quality more productive discourse.
In a browser environment it's much easier to sandbox Wasm successfully than to sandbox JS.
Figma for example used QuickJS, the prior version of the library this post is about, to sandbox user authored Javascript plugins: https://www.figma.com/blog/an-update-on-plugin-security/
It's pretty handy for things like untrusted user authored JS scripts that run on a user's client.
On the first point the simplest thing is I used to report people who use overt slurs or anti-semitic language. When Musk took over it started taking months for them to follow up and the response was simply to lock the account until they deleted the offending tweet. Eventually when I would report those people X just switched to saying they weren't breaking the rules. Now the replies of tons of seemingly normal posts that get lots of visibility are full of vile people trying to derail conversation with racism or anti-semitism.
Another big problem is the way that blue-check accounts are boosted has incentivized every account to act like click-bait all the time. Whenever a post gets semi-viral the blue-check replies are artificially lifted to the top and most of them are totally worthless because the commenters are just trying to 'grab space' so people click their profile and follow them. It used to be that if big accounts posted something interesting you might see a bunch of interesting follow up replies. Now it's spammers at the top and then racists / crazies mixed in with more thoughtful replies if you scroll down a few pages past the blue-checks. It used to be that the algorithmic feed would surface me all sorts of interesting and novel work from people across the tech world but now there's a whole category of people trying to make every single Tweet viral enough to get payouts.
And then there's Musk himself. He's ordered the algorithm to be manipulated to boost himself more. He's clearly expressed discontent when the algorithm doesn't work the way he wants, he's meddled heavily in the platform's AI bot to make it say things Musk prefers, and he's been rather unscrupulous chasing his political goals. I think it's not unlikely he'd use the platform to guide public opinion, perhaps even using AI to do it discretely and intelligently. I view that as a significant risk.
So the platform has gone from something that's highly useful to me, and a place I greatly enjoyed, to something that more often than not wastes my time and exposes me to people that disturb me. And on top of all that I think contributing to the platform may empower someone who I deeply distrust to manipulate public opinion towards their political goals.
Any project has to reason about what sort of errors can be tolerated gracefully and which cannot. Unwrap is reasonable in scenarios you expect to never be reached, because otherwise your code will be full of all sorts of possible permutations and paths that are harder to reason about and may cascade into extremely nuanced or subtle errors.
Rust also has a version of unwrap called "expect" where you provide a string that logs why the unwrap occurred. It's similar, but for pieces of code that are crucial it could be a good idea to require all 'unwraps' to instead be 'expects' so that people at least are forced to write down a reason why they believe the unwrap can never be reached.
By adding random noise to the screen it makes bands of color with harsh transitions imperceptible, and the dithering itself also isn't perceptible.
I'm sure there are better approaches nowadays but in some of my game projects I've used the screen space dither approach used in Portal 2 that was detailed in this talk: https://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/2015/Alex_Vlachos_...
It's only a 3 line function but the jump in visual quality in dark scenes was dramatic. It always makes me sad when I see streamed content or games with bad banding, because the fix is so simple and cheap!
One thing that's important to note is that it's a bit tricky to make dithering on / off comparisons because resizing a screenshot of a scene with dithering makes the dithering no longer work unless one pixel in the image ends up exactly corresponding to one pixel on your screen
Zed's dialogue just says "Delete file.txt?" so if you're used to VSCode it's very easy to skip through that dialogue reflexively.
After years of deleting files in VSCode I have a muscle memory for that behavior and I just skip through the dialogue. I didn't realize Zed's 'Delete' worked differently until I lost work, so I was just reflexively skipping through its confirm screen as well.
"Delete" is the last option in the right click menu for both and when you select it both show a very similar dialogue box asking you to confirm.
VSCode's 'Delete' by default moves the file to the trash and can be undone with Ctrl + Z. Zed's 'Delete' skips the trash and can't be undone with Ctrl + Z.
I should have mentioned the confirmation box but after years of use I've begun clicking through that box so quick I didn't realize the behavior was different in Zed.