shaan7

Probably just the webserver having a moment of silence on the Figma news xD

You can make local software with collaboration support. It is possible to make Figma so that you can do your design locally even if your Internet is kaput.

Valve's approach to the Steam Deck has been a refreshing approach in all this. It is a well-built product and replacement parts are a few clicks away https://www.ifixit.com/Parts/Steam_Deck People keep asking me why I don't like Apple products. I actually like most of their actual products, but their attitude as a company is frustrating. I don't want to pay a premium to feel limited.

Whoa Glicol is cool! I don't know anything about making music but I had fun tweaking the code on the homepage and listen to the music change :D

Yeah the dock thing sucks. My workaround is to permanently disable the dock (and the webcam's) mic device.

True. I keep it at "System default microphone" but its not 100% reliable. BUT, that is also the case with every other conferencing tool as well (Meet, Teams etc). At least in Zoom its easier to quickly override it when things go south.

Yup. The thing I absolutely love about Zoom is how easy it is to switch between mics and output device. Every other conferencing tool needs you to go to Settings > Voice and then change it. With Zoom, just click the arrow next to the mute button, select device and voila!

And not much point after you data has _already_ been shared.

Yeah its only "sort of" authoritarian, in most regions you can live quite a free life.

The cases where it becomes authoritarian is when it comes to religion and criticism of the government. This is the reason that the majority of the population does not even believe in issues that exist (social, political, ecological or otherwise).

I am really curious but do not have the time to check this myself: is the vscode telemetry part of the open core bit? The reason I ask this is because I agree with your points and I usually allow telemetry for FOSS programs (for example [1]).

If the telemetry code is open and people can verify that there isn't any identifiable data that is being collected, I don't see any issue with leaving it on in vscode too.

[1] https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/what-we-can-learn-fro...

> The existence of infinite accessible libraries of content

If only that were true, I'd be actually be happy to subscribe to them. I've realized that streaming services are only useful if your problem is "I need entertainment, find me something nice to watch", but mostly useless if you have a specific title to watch. Majority of the time there is no streaming service that offers the titles I want to watch.

Funnily enough, for the ~5 years I used macOS, the Window Manager was the most frustrating aspect for me. I could not maximize apps (there was only a weird fullscreen/focus mode), I would accidentally end up dragging a window very often etc. All this gave ended up creating this feeling in my brain that the windows are just "floating" on the screen instead of being tightly bound to an arrangement.

Yes, it is sad, but I wouldn't go as far as OP to claim that Linux desktop "is failing". That would be the case only if the goal of desktop Linux was to "get a considerably large market share". When I am contributing to FOSS, what I care about is that I improve it for whoever is using it now - maybe it is just 5 people in the whole world, that is fine. Sure I would _like_ if it was 5 thousand, and I will try my best to ensure that, but that is an extra, not the end goal.

I dread the day when iTunes stops letting you buy DRM-free music. I don't know anywhere else I can do that easily (and is the only Apple service I use).

I already knew about this before I visited HN today, thanks to Firefox Monitor ( https://monitor.firefox.com/ ) :D

It also depends on your social circle, I know some young people who do use `youtube-dl --extract-audio` for downloading some songs from YT.

My choice is usually to just reboot to Windows, fire up iTunes, buy the songs I want and listen to them DRM free. The only Apple product that I use xD

Yep, just like "Oh you are downloading via torrent? Why do you do illegal stuff like that?"

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> Any piece of code that is not your own and that your app depends on adds to the technical debt of your app.

I find this ^ strange. There is a difference between using a library and technical debt. We use libraries so that we do not have to solve a problem that someone already has. Tech debt is a "shortcut" that you took when implementing a system because $deadlines/$budget/etc. An example might be calling a binary to do something for a PoC because interacting with a library will be more effort.

Using libraries is a good thing, it would be sad* if all of us keep solving the same problems over and over again. Tech debt, on the other hand, is debt, something you want to avoid as much as you can.

* personally I find having to re-solve solved problems one of the most frustrating things when programming, it takes away all the joy

In India there is National Skills Registry (NSR) by NASSCOM. Member companies require potential candidates to register and provide the registration number. This is then used by HR at member companies to track you around.

The best part is that in this case, it is the employees that pay for this, and that too as an yearly subscription! https://nationalskillsregistry.com/free-structure.htm

Finally, one of the cofounders of NASSCOM is Nandan Nilekani, the same guy who's the mastermind behind India's bio-metric surveillance program (my words) - Aadhar. Not surprising at all.

What I meant was it is not limited to safety-related operations (hazard lights, for example). Even for relatively non-essential features (AC in this case), it helps to have physical buttons that you can recognize with your fingers.

You don't even have to go to safety. I did a test drive couple of years of Honda Jazz (known as Honda Fit in some markets) where the AC controls are touch-only. It was almost impossible to adjust it without taking your eyes off the road. Deal breaker.

Can attest to this. Well not me, talking from experience from a friend. She keeps telling me about engineers from the startup that "they" acquired. Her team is already overloaded by requests from a bunch of other teams that they try their best to prioritize and deliver - it is hard work.

Even after that they get comments like OP "This is a simple change, why will it take a week?", "I can just finish this in few hours and submit a patch". I guess it takes a while for people to learn that writing code is only 5% of the effort, the rest of it is review, testing, QA, E2E, compliance and what not. There sometimes is unnecessary bureaucracy as well, but that doesn't mean that the actual engineering processes are useless.

Yep. VSCode's Rest Client extension is amazing, I can just have plain text files with everything I need to my cloud drive (and maybe even git repo to share with team).

Yeah sometimes I dread the day gmail blocks access for some reason and I never hear back. Pretty much everything is connected to one's primary email address.

I used to be excited about building websites ~10 years ago when it was about building web pages (you know, the thing HTML and friends were designed for). I "rage quit" after people started (ab)using web development to build approximations of apps. The reality that in the end the majority of people don't care about "use the right tool for the job" hit me hard. I would have never imagined that big companies with good enough budgets would still build applications with HTML just because "everyone knows JavaScript". It is all so demotivating -.-

These days I just try to find niches where people still care about using the right tool for the job and writing efficient GUI software. Lets see how long these continue to exist.

Exactly. Badly written libraries are just bad libraries, it doesn't mean that its a bad idea to build reusable components.

Best is a strong word. Just because something is popular does not mean it is the best. It is the cheapest/easiest (for developers), I have to agree.

Pretty much all "desktop" apps that I see people using these days are built on Electron so yeah it is quite popular. Slack, Discord, Teams, Spotify, VSCode, the list is too long, unfortunately.

Yep, I can relate to why you find it curious, I do too, from the other end of the spectrum.

I, for one, feel _very_ unproductive with a laptop. Personally for me I think the reason is lack of a mouse. For a long time people told me its because I was not using a MacBook (and hence its touchpad), but I tried that for ~5 years too and it didn't make much of a difference.

I guess at the end when I'm using a laptop it feels like I'm "converging" or "constraining" my body (eyes, hand coordination) into the laptop. In contrast, connecting to a dock with a full size keyboard, mouse and monitor (1) makes my body feel more stretched and relaxed. While doing this, I rarely use my laptop (I might even just close the lid, if I weren't lazy).

This is to the point where I will decline to work if I am not allowed to use a monitor+keyboard+mouse setup.

> Pros and cons

Exactly. Which is why I don't get the "static linking is the best solution for deploying applications". You need to be able to do both. For example when building a C/C++ application you can decide if you want shared libs or static builds.