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on_and_off

3,296 karma · joined July 5, 2014

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on_and_off··on Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?
"to just show text" is such a tell that you know nothing about UI. Displaying text is extremely complex. This is only 8000 lines because skiaa does the brunt of the job. Also, who gives a shit about TextView? Just use BasicText, we aren't in 2017 anymore.
on_and_off··on Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating
stopping using youtube altogether I would actually understand
on_and_off··on Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating
meh, still feel very hypocritical.

You have found a way not to pay for something, good for you, but brandishing it as some kind of "perfectly fine solution" is just laughable.

on_and_off··on Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating
and you also don't contribute to the creators incomes.

I can understand people vouching for using youtube premium or nebula instead, but not this.

on_and_off··on Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating
or just paying for youtube premium ...
on_and_off··on FAA issuing new rules to allow drones to fly over people and at night
I am always stunned that many (most/all) of these high tech gadgets lack a LOT of safety features.

I would pay extra for a drone with such safeguards. just the prospect of less chances of ruining it would be enough.

Similarly, eskates often have a regenerative battery charging while braking which is a great idea. but it also cannot handle charging while already full. So if you go down a slope while the board is full, it can decide to shut down and let you bomb down that hill. Which sounds like an insane pitfall.

Or what happens if the board loses its connection to the remote ? I would hope that it brakes progressively but similarly it just does nothing .. so up to you to find a way to stop.

It is such a weird blind spot to have. I don't think a car manufacturer would ship a product with this kind of blind spot, is that a culture thing ? regulation ?

Anyway, fingers crossed that somebody seizes these opportunities.

on_and_off··on The Future of RTS
interesting, I will have to give it a look at one of these days ?

I heard about it but haven't played it. Looks like it was made from the same team as Ground Control, so this would be a tactics game (maybe a bit of a pedantic point to make though .. the 2 genres are closely related) ?

Indeed, it was not what I had in mind but removing the strategic layer would also serve as making these games more focused and hopefully less frantic.

on_and_off··on The Future of RTS
They had some sweet ideas.

I just watched a retrospective on 20 years of Double Fine. Tim had some interesting comments in there about how BL came to be. They were avoiding very hard to make or market the game as an RTS because the genre already had a big stigma at the time.

It might kinda explain the weird state of the game. It was definitely a fun and interesting experience but it was also flawed .. way too many games packed into one for its own good.

on_and_off··on The Future of RTS
happy to hear that this is still going on !

I lost interest in FA around the time when FAF was in its first betas.

Planetary Annihilation is more or less a successor but I could not get into it.

I like its idea but in practice the micro was insane in order to keep an eye on several different planets.

on_and_off··on The Future of RTS
oups indeed I meant micro not macro

RTS without macro would make no sense

on_and_off··on The Future of RTS
my hot take on RTS : I like the genre (or rather used to like, the last one I loved was SupCom) but I wish somebody would make an RTS with no/minimal macro. Controlling the builder/peons units is a chore at best and I would love to see it streamlined a lot. For example just ask for a building to be built instead of finding/assigning builders to the task and micromanaging what they will do next.

Dungeon Keeper comes to mind as a game that starts to go in that direction but it can be argued it is more a (very) fun management game than an RTS.

Probably not doable, we would lose a lot of expressivity in such a change. However, if there is a new RTS coming, I personally would love to see an innovative take on the genre, closer to Brutal Legends 2 / Sacrifice 2 (or as another commented posted, something emulating logistics would be another interesting avenue) than to the inevitable Warcraft 4 (for ios ;)).

on_and_off··on Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy
I live without a car in SF, partly because I used to do the same in European cities :

- it is amazing to be able to walk / use public transport to go everywhere you need to

- I just don't like driving in cities. It is just a chore monopolizing my attention.

Still this is way harder to pull of here than it is e.g. in Paris. No subway system serving all the city here.

I am using an eskate to pick up the slack. If the market street project was already completed and we did the same for some other key streets, it would be 100% viable but in the city's current state :

- many roads are in a pitiful state. I haven't hurt myself seriously yet but I saw or know of many people who did.

- car drivers are extremely dangerous

100% on acceptance, culture scene and let's add food scene as well.

on_and_off··on Android is a truly terrible software development platform
ah the old "I don't know anything about this implementation and why things are made this way but I would have made it 10 times better with half the resources".

give me a break

on_and_off··on Apple's 15% Deflection Tactic
Honestly it is almost funny how Google has been mostly unable to successfully launch new products while they have the capacity to promote them to virtually all of the global north.

In particular with Play Music .. not going to complain, I don't think that this market needs another FAANG product but wow, failing to promote that service is one epic blunder.

on_and_off··on Apple's 15% Deflection Tactic
that's a bit of a false dichotomy though.

it is not like these 2 products were identical except for sideloading.

They don't have the same hardware, Apple has an unlimited ad budget, if you want to chat with somebody using iMessages, you are pretty much limited to iOS, you can't transfer app purchases between platforms, etc

on_and_off··on RIP Google Music
It does not look like you can edit your uploads unlike with Play Music. Admittedly that's very probably a feature used by few people (although I know that for all of the people that use it, it is because of some very obscure track they are very attached to and can only listen to if they upload it, making it a must have feature).

And more generally, while I don't necessarily mind a rebrand (although I have to admit that this being Google, I have my suspicions that this will be handled the same way they handle all their messaging services) and I can be forgiving for a v1, this is still so far below play music that I don't really see myself using it.

on_and_off··on RIP Google Music
Well, I guess it is back to local storage for me. I tried youtube music but it is not for me.

You can leave it to google to fuck up the same product under 10 different names.

At some point, they had a great service with Play Music. That was ... 5 or 6 years ago ?

Then they basically abandoned it, with maybe one small update every year and it slowly dove into irrelevance :/

on_and_off··on On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation
I wonder how much of an advantage it is practice ? It is one such toolkit among others, like React or Compose. It is different from making the whole OS open source.

I guess that since the benefit would be to make third party devs job easier, the incentive is not that great for apple .. devs will write mobile apps even if they have to write them in assembly.

on_and_off··on On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation
stupid question : but is there any specific reason why swiftui is not open source ?

I am working with jetpack compose these days and it is both open source and documented. I am not sure how I would work with it without that, it is quite a big departure from the legacy ui api.

on_and_off··on Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.
I distinctly remember a tweet from 4 years ago, "this presidency will be a test of our institutions and counter powers".

Well, this did not go _well_.

I wish a lot of luck to the Biden administration, there is a lot to rebuild. I might disagree on tons of policy topics with him but at the very least I can completely agree that he lives up to what should be the bare minimum for any president : respect the rule of law, be the president of all americans, not just the ones who voted for you, etc

on_and_off··on California Voters Exempt Uber, Lyft, DoorDash from Having to Reclassify Drivers
wow, it went from almost impossible to just improbable, everything is great then.
on_and_off··on Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
unpopular opinion it seems : in personals 1:1 calls, I love seeing the UI disappear and just have a full screen video of my SO/family member.
on_and_off··on Chaos Ink
let's be honest, the fact that allowing flash would also allow webapps not controlled by apple to go on the platform was a huge factor.
on_and_off··on Google’s Search Preference Menu Eliminates DuckDuckGo
I mean : why are they allowed to make it an auction ? If the goal is to break their stronghold on Android, it sounds like it should be mandated as free ?
on_and_off··on Hacking Grindr Accounts with Copy and Paste
I wonder why you are getting downvoted so much. I don't know how common bi-men are (probably more than bi erasure makes us believe) but it feels like a least a portion of them are not ready to come out as bi.
on_and_off··on Say goodbye to hold music
It took me 3 reads to dismiss the idea this was about Google Music (which is getting the axe anyway :(. Somebody should get fired over failing to build an audience for this great service)
on_and_off··on Chromecast with Google TV
Google is also very bad at making its different divisions work together.

Which is pretty neat when you work on a competing product (and way better than having them use their dominant position to help prop up a new product).

I worked on a music streaming service for a long time. We had a stellar relationship with Google.

It felt a bit weird that they did not push Play Music more .. in my opinion it was at one time a great music service. Still, we did not complain.

Apple on the other end sees everything iTunes related as mission critical and working with them was a nightmare.

So, not surprised to see AndroidTV (which afaik has no relationship with youtube people) partnering with netflix.

on_and_off··on Google’s Search Preference Menu Eliminates DuckDuckGo
Is there some context explaining why this is based on an auction ?

If the goal is to prevent Google from using its Android dominance to also dominate search engines, a random sort of the most popular search engines in a given country sounds like a better option.

on_and_off··on X-COM
I really need to try open-xcom.

I know that there are also some total conversion like Piratez XCOM.

I tried to love the firaxis XCOMs. They kind of scratch the same itch and I appreciate not to have to manage bullets in the inventory but some of the simplified mechanics just don't work that well.

Clusters of enemies in particular seems like very poor design to me. It has caused tons of issues in their 2 games, from encouraging turtling as a the main dominant strategy to forcing firaxis to add timers to try to force players out of the play style their game made dominant.

on_and_off··on Can TikTok be banned from US based Android devices?
Site doesn't open.

I wonder how this would work ? Google can for sure remove an app from the play store and maybe even remove it from play services enabled phones.

If I am European and travel (in some hypothetic future where it is possible) to the USA, does tiktok get removed from my phone ?

Edit : I can open now. Some notes re : different apks for sideloading. I don't know if the author is being malicious here but they are inventing problems that don't exist. Yeah, there can be multiple apks for a given app (that's the main idea behind app bundles). However if you distribute your app yourself you either

- provide an universal apk that will install on all devices. It will be way larger since it needs to incorporate all the different possible configurations, but is trivial to make for a dev.

- detect the user device config and provide a download link tailored to that device. I guess tiktok is popular enough to go that route, but that's just a minor engineering point.

Also wow, very classy to insult people who use an app. Of course if you don't like a service people who do have to be dumb.

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