pen2l

It comes down to difficulties of getting a team together that can implement cross-platform software. Shipping native implementations is more than quadruple the work and cost as compared to shipping with Electron, which is reliably cross-platform and doesn't need you to gather programmers who can pull off native work, not to mention the complications in communication and management that arise after headcount of a group gets larger. There are now alternatives to Electron (Tauri/Rust and Wails/Go) and some Electron projects are starting to transfer over (like 1Password -- you can really feel difference) but it'll take time for the ecosystem to mature and become more attractive than Electron for the average project.

But right now, Electron remains a solid choice if you want to ship cross-platform desktop software without overextending on budget and time. Moreover, it's possible to make Electron apps that aren't terrible if they're optimized enough (Discord, VSCode, etc.).

PDF software is a different ball game as PDF is a behemoth of a specification. Did you know you could envelope 3d models within PDF files? Obviously a stripped down implementation (which you should use, if you don't require the fancier parts of PDF) will be snappier.

Your commitment to open standards is inspiring and I wish you all the success for the role you play in it.

Is a desktop app in the cards to enable offline use, with https://tauri.app maybe (instead of Electron, for improved performance)?

It's running Discourse forums, a YC-funded thing, also OSS, authored with Ruby on Rails.

I find it fascinating that people are praising their skin of Discourse, because I think it's got a little too much white space! With those needlessly huge button-banners, for folks with small-to-medium sized screens, the content of interest is almost a full screenful-scroll away.

The folks behind Penpot also make a kanban management tool, kind of like Trello, called Taiga: http://taiga.io/ It's also OSS (Django/Angular), self-hostable, and very pleasant to use.

I'm rooting for both of these, and now that they have some funding I hope they'll dedicate effort on polishing the rough edges (and do something about the gratuitous amount of white space that permeates all of their web presence, and maybe reconsider their color palette to be less muted and more saturated, heavier, and decisive). They seem to be actively working on Figma imports, auto layouts, multi-user edits and more at this moment so they're on the right track.

For both of them, even if the VCs pull the rug from underneath to race for an exit, it being OSS is good insurance. A fork would mean that we don't have to spend time learning yet another tool. The good will fostered by it being OSS is what encourages some of us to look into their offerings, and in this way what we see is something that seems like a sustainable model for OSS projects.

If you have a VPS handy you can port your org files there and use Prompt to ssh into it and use your configured emacs there. If you use a terminal multiplexer like tmux which you can attach / deattach as needed there's the added benefit of never losing state.

The only annoyance is the inability to use non-terminal emacs, which is what I prefer. I'm sure there's a way around this (running a local non-terminal emacs and accessing files that exist remotely) but I'll attempt that on a day when I have the will and time. :)

I'm a recent convert as of this year! However, (and I don't know if this will surprise people, I suspect not) I actually use it primarily for org-mode, for note-taking, to-do-lists, documenting and thinking through small bits of code that require careful thought.

It's also my version of powerpoint, e.g. recently I was sharing my thoughts with someone and made use of folding to guide the ideas I wanted to communicate to them. I use VSCode for code.

Wonderful. For folks wanting to look into emacs I actually just direct them to doom-emacs (and maybe with the suggestion to turn off evil-mode to make it a liiiittle simpler). It looking easy on the eyes goes a long way in making the user-experience a little less weighty, especially if starting out.

Interesting, I'm a non-native French speaker, the original French piece struck me as being entirely normal (but maybe it was just the perfect French accent that swayed me). Can you please point out what he said which wasn't idiomatic or naturally-worded French?

Neat, https://github.com/openai/whisper - they have open-sourced it, even the model weights, so they are living up to their name in this instance.

The 4 examples are stunningly good (the examples have speakers with heavy accents, speaking in foreign language, speaking with dynamic background noise, etc.), this is far and away better than anything else I've seen. Will be super curious to see other folks trying it out and seeing if it's as robust as it seems, including when confronted with audio speech with natural tics and uhhh's and uhmm's and everything in-between.

I think it's fair to say that AI-transcription accuracy is now decidedly superior to the average human's, what the implications of this are I'm not sure.

They are in a truly capricious position though.

I'm a pretty advanced-level Photoshop user and I'm almost fine with Photopea except for the speed and general annoyance of it being a web-app -- if it were a desktop app I'd probably be fine with it.

Which is to say, I'd be fine with a $10 product vs. a $1000 one. In the same way that some professional 3d designers I know switched from Maya/c4d to the free Blender and are fine with it (except for the renderer, we still don't have a really good industry-grade GPU-accelerated renderer).

Point being that a compelling alternative can be made by a small, focused team in this day and age and offered at a pricepoint that big companies cannot compete with. I fully expect Penpot to take over Figma very soon, AfterEffects will be interesting because really what makes AE what it is is not necessarily AE itself but the killer RedGiant&VideoCopilot plugins so it is equally as vulnerable. There's really no telling where Adobe will be in another 5 years. I would not be surprised if it's 1/10th its current size; in fact I think it is the likely possibility..

A lot of designers are up in arms over this acquisition and have signaled they'll move on to the next non-adobe alternative, so it raises the interesting question: by way of some anchoring effect, will Penpot or other competitors now be revalued at a much higher amount almost regardless of what their revenue numbers are like?

Quant-UX is worth a look for prototyping needs, it's OSS as well and can generate end HTML/CSS code: https://quant-ux.com/

Lunacy supports multi-player in the way Figma users are used to: https://icons8.com/lunacy

Frame / Plasmic generates code, the latter focusing on React: https://www.framer.com / https://www.plasmic.app/

But yes it does appear that Penpot for now is the most obvious de facto Figma alternative.

The silver lining of this whole debacle has been that it's brought to surface a lot of other alternatives that folks would not have otherwise considered or looked into, which are actually quite decent I'm finding out.

I like this list, I like that Sketch is #2, and #1 is an OSS self-hostable solution, https://penpot.app/ -- https://github.com/penpot so we can't quite get burned like we did with Figma.

From some cursory review, it seems pretty good! And there's now effort underway to be able to import Figma files.

edit: okay, I've gotten signed up with penpot, made rudimentary sketches, it seems solid and promising. I'm now a fan and I think this seals the deal for me, I'm glad that it was an easy decision. And I will give them the benefit of the doubt when it's not exactly up to par because 1) they seem to be new and characterize themselves as still being in beta and 2) it's self-hostable OSS and the inherent security of this offering is something I value deeply.

There appear to be some ex-Stripe people, some from Visa and some from other fintech places.

Zelle takes a considerable percentage cut for non-personal transactions.

Do you make use of Payoneer API for payouts? How do you find it?

That, Payoneer (which has a sufficiently extensive API), and I think Stripe can also handle payouts: https://stripe.com/connect/marketplaces

(possibly I'm misreading Stripe marketplaces' offerings, please correct me if I am)

Oh hey, I'm a big fan!

I think while others have commented on how beautiful your creations are, I rather admire you for the care and detail you put on UI. Beautiful things are not always easy to use, and things that are well-laid-out and easy-to-use are not always beautiful. You have somehow arrived at the magical place where you've got them both down.

Their lead UI guy was previously the UI lead at Stripe. I think of him as someone who appreciates and understands the importance of well-thought-out UI so I'm looking forward to how Increase pans out for that reason in particular.

It's an interesting exercise to think about:

suppose you're in the meeting room and you're the product guy and you'll make this case. Indeed let us not optimize for the presently advantageous local maxima lest it come back to swallow and end us. How is this communicated? And what does it take to convincingly persuade people, or investors of this -- to even bear through a temporary downward period with the understanding that fundamentals must be respected?

s/the, the big buys at big chops/them, the big guys at the big shops/

Increasing differentiability (within reason and identifiability) is the point of fonts that are trying to increase legibility. g has the potential of being confused with 9, y, 0, etc. for folks with non-optimal sight.

Belated correction (sorry, wrote it on a smartphone!):

s/belief/disbelief/

Ah yes, sorry. I think MonaLisa actually fits the bill: https://www.monolisa.dev/

Pardon me, where do I find the monospace variant?

You can contain your native react creations in electron if you really don't want to go the native GUI kits route.

For all the shit that Electron gets, it is reliably cross-platform with relatively little effort.

Relatedly, I’ve come full circle on my feelings when it comes to Indian movies. I grew up with Bollywood/lollywood movies, and pretty much stopped watching all of this silly stuff upon arriving to America and thought the breaking out in a song in the middle of things was absurd.

I don’t know what changed but now I’m not just down with it I’m actually a big fan. I’m there to be entertained - give me Gesamtkunstwerk; I’ll suspend belief for those few brief moments, give me wonderful melodies and over-the-top sights. All types of art each have their place! I mean, we put up with soliloquys in Shakespeare plays, we cherish fanciful wordplay, why not give me songs!

I saw it in imax at the insistence of an acquaintance. While watching I kept thinking: "ok, so this is the results when you have a massive budget, access to lots of designers and top-of-the-line tools".

I'm totally thunderstruck to learn it was all done in Blender pipeline. Bravo for making this possible.

I liked it. It’s like if you mix Snatch with Inglorious Bastards and then made it over-the-top cheesy.

But on the topic — I think this changes everything. Blender is now literally a viable alternative against behemoth setups that easily go in 5-digits (and 6 digits if you have hundreds of designers as some shops do). It’s now crossed that magical threshold where competent firms will choose it for their projects and any weaknesses that surface then, it will now be the, the big buys at big chops like the Mill or what-have-you, who will be contributing fixes and pushing Blender to new directions. Full alembic support, better volume-related features, some more UI touch-up, and we're almost all there.

I’m nothing short of stunned at the pace with which Blender is moving forward and it’s clear that come another 5 years, it’ll be a force to reckon with and a worthy competitor to dethrone Houdini.

I came to appreciate and realize the importance of note-taking, finally this year, with org-mode. Folding and easy-labeling features jive well with me (and for when sharing my notes and thoughts with others), babel and linking is pretty cool too.

I use orgmode for to-do lists too, but it's a little weak there. I think an effective to-do list management implementation is tightly coupled with calendars...

It was such a welcome surprise to me that when I got the M2 Macbook air, Apple calendar synced to my google calendar so easily... now my to-do list/calendar schedule is never too far away from me. The apple watch makes a vibration ding for events in my calendar... as does the iphone, and I can CRUD calendar entries on any of these interfaces. I would have _loved_ to be able to have org-mode as one other place where my calendar/todo list is staring at me in the face, as I now use emacs for everything, but sadly that's iffy. Yes, solutions purportedly exist (e.g. https://github.com/kidd/org-gcal.el9 ) but none work reliably and require too much finagling. Linked solution doesn't work as Google deprecated the ability to retrieve OAuth 2.0 tokens.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but aren't non-profit organizations obligated to have much of this public? Because if they aren't, then the non-profit organization is incredibly ripe for fraud and I wonder how many have already chosen the NPO structure for ill intents.

The line, in some ways, is thin between a non-profit and a for-profit organization, when executives e.g. Mitchell Baker of Mozilla foundation, can command such large salaries and irresponsible spending. If abuse is as rife in non-profit structured organizations as it appears, IRS had better burnish its hammer and commit to resolutory action.