778 karma · joined October 23, 2015
I wrote a game for a gamejam using Rust, Wasm, and WebGL without any engine: https://kettlecorn.itch.io/wonder
It makes use of ‘glow’, a Rust library that lets you write regular OpenGL code that runs across desktop, mobile, and web: https://github.com/grovesNL/glow
Every project that grows large suffers the same inevitable descent into complexity. Things become so complex that it becomes hard to try out new ideas, which leads to stagnation. Eventually a better and leaner successor upsets the incumbent and the cycle restarts.
The key to creating great ecosystems is speed up that cycle. Design a system that encourages rapid growth and failure.
The 'web' should become a minimal hardware abstraction layer that offers safe access to graphics, audio, filesystem, and basic networking. Everything else could be built on top of that.
If someone has a new great idea for HTML or CSS just build it on top of the abstractions and hope others become interested. If someone wants to build a new browser they only have to implement the more manageable core.
Generally I've written off arguing on the internet, but sometimes (like today) I slip up when it's too tempting to respond.
> Rest assured the engineers of Mozilla are doing their best to make the product superior, independent of the principles difference.
Even if it's obvious it is always nice to hear that an organization cares about doing the best job they can. I'm very appreciative of the work Mozilla is doing even if here I'm defending the critics of their work.
I also recognize your name from the massive contributions you're making to the Rust ecosystem. Thanks!
The point of my comment is a lot of people have various real issues with Firefox that make them prefer Chrome and those people should be listened to rather than dismissed. The tone of Firefox advocates responding to critics is often aggressive and dismissive.
Even my comment, which says "Don't dismiss the critics!" is presently in the negative.
The person who takes the time to complain isn't an enemy, they're making an effort to bring something to attention for the community. You want more complainers instead of people silently rejecting your community and product.
The 'argue against the messenger' first reaction of many projects creates insular communities and insular communities create worse products.
Advocates for Firefox often say "Firefox is better, just try switching!" yet when people point out reasons it's not better the response is "Oh those don't matter, you're just being nitpicky!"
But it's not a very gentle push back, it's forceful.
In this thread someone says "I don't like how much ram Firefox uses" and the response is
> I don't know why people choose their browser based on resource usage.
and
> Exactly. Come on, we're engineers we understand basic tradeoffs.
Firefox, as a product, has many issues when compared to Chrome. Why does everyone spend so much of their breath arguing against the real concerns and problems people have with it? Chrome has been getting worse in lots of major ways, Firefox has a chance to be the better product for a wider audience.
But Firefox won't become better with a culture of downvoting and arguing against criticism rather than trying to understand it. This is not the culture of Mozilla as far as I know, but it's the culture of many Firefox advocates all across the internet.
Two finger pinch zooming on a Macbook stutters enormously in Firefox and is much smoother on Chrome.
I use this feature all the time and it's made switching to Firefox difficult.
Another example:
I'm not a fan at all of how Firefox handles displaying huge amounts of tabs. Tiny arrows to scroll your tabs left and right is really a disorienting nuisance and I much prefer Chrome's system of making tabs smaller. I'm sure there's a way to change this, but I'd rather stay on the default path that they're actively iterating on and improving.
At my university's career fair I did multiple interview screenings on campus as the result of the career fair. One interview (with an engineer, not a recruiter) led to an internship at a major tech company which led to a full time job there.
Many of my peers had similar experiences.
The method I described with an AR headset makes it something that anyone could do with extremely minimal training.
In an AR headset the final desired design is overlayed within the hedge, and you trim the parts outside. Now try to imagine how you might accomplish something similar without an AR headset. It would be very difficult.
I believe that diff tools could be better if they operate on some format that represents the meaning of the code, not the details of how it's written. New tools would have to be written, so it's largely a matter of pragmatism and momentum that prevents such a thing.
FYI I googled "WebMethods Flow merge tools" and one of the more useful discussions actually featured you from 3 years ago expressing similar sentiment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12106945
I will do that now, thank you for reminding me of it again!
It could theoretically be easier for the tools to identify exactly what changed and present that information rather than superfluous stuff like whitespace changes.
* Moving towards representing code on disk as an abstract syntax tree, and anyone can edit with whatever syntax they prefer. Syntax becomes virtually irrelevant.
* The above point opens the possibility to represent code as visual graphs (even to code within virtual reality). Graphs and visual programming are useful, but to be able to toggle between textual and graph representation gives you the best of both worlds.
* Smarter compilers. For example: easy to use compile time constraints. Think about the ability to specifiy something like the minimum value an integer can be set to. This could allow the compiler to produce compile time errors for things like index out of bound errors, with zero runtime overhead. More complex constraints could be user defined. The mindset of programming could move to thinking about how you can do as much as possible at compile time.
* The ability to embed documentation alongside code. For most codebases the ability to understand the code is part of value of the code. Comments don't go far enough, particularly when working with visual concepts. Being able to embed readily accessible documention within the code could help dramatically.
Their ability to exploit lock-in, to market well, to build an ecosystem have all derived from that original strength.
> But they have a lot of people thinking about ecosystems, lock-in, marketing and other "MBA" concepts.
People need to think about creating something of value that people want to use before they worry about locking them into an ecosystem.
Maybe it's true people matching some of my info watch are likely to watch Shapiro videos, but by optimizing for engagement they basically are trying to herd similar people towards whatever version of that person watches the most YouTube videos.
Indirectly YouTube wants everyone to be a right-wing fanatic, because the algorithm has determined that that sort of person watches a lot of videos.
YouTube shows videos that are likely to get clicks, but fanatics are more likely to click and watch videos. So things fanatics care about are promoted. YouTube seems to take this stance that it's just natural social dynamics at play, excusing themselves from addressing what they're enabling.
I just did an experiment where I clicked one of these and clicked "next" a bunch going through their recommended videos. It immediately dove into alt-right stuff, and eventually led to videos of antifa protestors getting beaten up.
This is normal on YouTube.
I cannot imagine that a company with a healthy culture could allow such a boneheaded policy to persist.
There are some good ideas, and this article does a fine job of calling out problems, but I also can't help but feel the end result is unpolished looking and would perform very poorly when it comes to usability.
* The end result feels unstructured, like elements were just tossed on the page, due the lack of strong grids either from background colors or implied by layout.
* The left and right alignments of elements is basically non-existant, contributing to a messy feeling.
* The "statistics" category will be entirely useless on small repositories, or personal ones, just taking up a huge amount of space for no reason.
* Removing the icons makes it more difficult to develop "muscle-memory" on websites you use a lot. Icons, even if irrelevant, help us pick the item we want off of the page more quickly.
They realized that when people carry their tech with them all the time it becomes fashion. That’s why they bought Beats, because it became a huge tech-fashion brand that threatened Apple.
And with fashion people are willing to pay much higher prices.
Reach out to me at my personal email: ian.kettlewell@gmail.com
That goes for anyone else reading this as well. If anyone is working in this space or wants to chat about VR design tools I am interested in talking to you.
Tools like Gravity Sketch, and the tool I’m making, are great for conceptualization and communication.
In seconds to minutes you can take an idea from your head and show it to someone else. You can have an idea for a product ready to show your peers and in moments they can offer feedback and make changes.
Tools like this aren’t replacing the final engineering yet, but they’re making the planning and communication stage dramatically more efficient.
If you offer a few dollars it feels not worth it, but if you ask them to do it because it’s kind or the right thing to do they realize it’s another sort of worth.
A handful of people love it, most think it's a bug. It's particularly bad if you're using a trackpad.
I would theorize that it's not a well known complaint because most people move on quickly and just assume their computer is buggy.
There’s a talk about this approach in the game Destiny: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022164/Multithreading-the-Ent...
And also in the Uncharted engine: http://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/gdc2015/presentations/G...
They go a step further by allowing threads to pause and resume their state by changing the stack pointer.
These sort of systems are useful in games where you basically want to be using all of the cpu all of the time and there’s no reason to ever give control back to the operating system’s scheduler (with mutexes).
What are the effects on a kid’s development if they have to change schools and friend groups because their family is displaced due to rising rent? What if people have to move away from family because they can’t afford to stay? How does it impact businesses if their long term employees are suddenly moving away?
Rapidly removing people from communities causes damage to the social fabric of a community, it’s not just about economic effects.
“Nobody is entitled to live in a certain area for a certain price.” isn’t really true if they were there first and have established a family or a community.
Maintaining a functioning free market is not inherently a moral goal, although many seem to think it is.
You seem to describe something as "hard" or "easy" relative to other things.
If your job is lifting rocks and all of them are really heavy, but one weighs slightly less, you might describe the less heavy one as "easy" to lift. Someone else might describe them all as "hard" to lift.
A lot of people in the tech industry, yourself included, seem to be in the first mindset. That mindset can be dangerous as it invites complacency.
This language matters a lot, because who wants to improve something that's already "easy"? Refusing to call something "hard" because it doesn't apply to what you view as the average or ideal user is picking a small semantic point in a way that avoids improvement.
Perhaps this is not you, but I've seen many people use language like yours("idealistic", "naive", "one size will never fit all") to dismiss turning a critical eye towards tech design. The argument seems to be that modern design is actually really good and that efforts to improve it are just a futile quest fueled by people who are unnecessarily critical.
Maybe that argument is right, but I don't think so. Whenever I get a chance to peek outside my bubble in the tech world and I talk with a less tech savvy user it becomes clear their relationship with technology is basically adversarial.
The iPhone can be "great", "easy", "hard", and "terrible" all at the same time. Refusing to accept calling it "hard" and describing someone who would do so as "obtuse, dishonest, or willfully naive" is a constrained and inaccurate mindset.