smodo

Thanks. Your team has been busy! :)

Putting aside the GPT-vibe I get from this comment.

> Integrated Development System:* Makepad offers a unified environment encompassing a GUI framework, a development system, and an IDE, streamlining the development workflow.

What? There’s an IDE?

Gaaf. I’ve written a piece of software using egui and while it let me iterate fast it has its limitations. There’s also gpui but that’s very Mac centric for now… I’ll give this a go in the near future. I’m a little curious about the DSL though. What is the advantage of a/this DSL over the builder pattern used by gpui? Does the fact that you can insert new code during runtime mean that there is in fact an interpreter between my code and the ui? How do you manage performance/efficiency in that case?

Excel is not even Excel anymore. It’s different on Windows, Mac, web, mobile… And there’s different bugs across all them! My favorite ones have to do with regional defaults.

3) Completely disconnect my printer from the web and live with this small discomfort. HP burned me too many times.

The reason people fret over this war is not because they care for the poor people of Ukraine. They (we, Europeans) care because we have the Huns at the gate. Ukraine happens to be the gate.

The book isn’t free, its contents are published online by the author. Yes, nitpicking. But (1) I like a well formatted epub and (2) the author/publisher still hold copyright.

The Rust Programming Language does a great job imho. It got me up to speed by reading it before bed for a month. I’d never written C/C++ before, just a lot of Python. It starts out really simply by explaining the type system and the borrow checker. Take it from there and do a couple of side projects, I’d say.

The uncertainty is there, for sure. Just look at the index YTD and then consider that the AI hype is in full swing and that Trump promises huge tax cuts to business. Stocks should be soaring but looks like not everyone buys the story.

It’s hard to price in an unknown quantity though. If the war in Europe spreads, who knows what happens? If Trump chokes on some novichok of just gives out from all the hard grifting he’s done all his life, who knows?

It’s still the case in my opinion. Yes, you can fiddle to make it work. You can set sane defaults. The heuristics for applying styles etc apparently are not clever enough because sometimes you still get strange results. Comparing it to the default Kobo reader is like using a Mac vs a Linux DE. As I’ve gotten older I find I no longer enjoy tweaking every possible parameter :)

How do you mean? Who upholds those codified freedoms? Many democratic countries have similar fundamental laws that are explicitly hard to change or bypass. In the end though all rules are either enforced by some authority or they are mere suggestions. The USA doesn’t seem like a special case to me?

Imre Kertesz - Fatelessness

Easy to read but provides a profound understanding of the unique historical situation it describes. A famous and heartbreaking sentence: ‘(…) I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.’

Kagi has been slowly positioning itself as the single point of entry for both search and AI. They offer some LLM integrations and are working on making the whole experience well integrated.

Not a bad idea, just quite hard to pull off when Microsoft starts pushing Bing and Copilot to their enterprise clients more aggressively.

Right. And the vacations are something you ‘give’ your kids too. You won’t lie on your deathbed and think: “I shouldn’t have taken my kids to Vienna that summer. Should’ve put it all in Vanguard ETFs. Man what a bummer.”

If your kids appreciate your money more than your time is when you know you screwed up.

This is the only diagramming language I end up actually using. And even then I usually end up redoing everything in OmniGraffle after I’ve roughed out a draft.

I’m not very well versed in kernel development. But I am a Rust dev and have observed the discussion about Rust in Linux with interest… Having said that, this part of the article has me baffled:

>> implementing these features for a smart-pointer type with a malicious or broken Deref (the trait that lets a programmer dereference a value) implementation could break the guarantees Rust relies on to determine when objects can be moved in memory. (…) [In] keeping with Rust's commitment to ensuring safe code cannot cause memory-safety problems, the RFC also requires programmers to use unsafe (specifically, implementing an unsafe marker trait) as a promise that they've read the relevant documentation and are not going to break Pin.

To the uninformed this seems like crossing the very boundary that you wanted Rust to uphold? Yes it’s only an impl Trait but still… I can hear the C devs now. ‘We pinky promise to clean up after our mallocs too!’

A space sweeper made of diamonds. If only they still wrote James Bond scenarios like that. I love it.

> We republicans may not do these things because we're worried about global warming or climate change (…)

Hilarious every way I turn it. The consequences of global warming are ever more clear, but for the time being cooler cars prevail. I’m not trying to moralize here, just pointing out that the reasoning here is very funny. If I ever catch you recycling plastic I’ll be sure it’s only because it involves cool technology.

PowerBI with an actually decent DAX IDE or language server. Writing DAX in a single line like an excel formula is bonkers. The language itself is pretty interesting but MS apparently can’t be arsed to help me write it.

My ink supplier actually provides refunds on their own ink whenever HP pushes another OTA update. They just keep doing it, the industry is aware. And when my next toner runs out I’m buying Brother and never touching HP again.

Love the YouTube clip.

I’m reminded in turn of Foucaults concept of heterotopia (‘other place’ or ‘place of otherness’) where things are different by design. The otherness of such spaces is one of their goals: they are there to provide an outlet for something or to hide or shield certain activities or thoughts (separating discourse).

As a child I was taken out of school for a while because I couldn’t cope and caused trouble. I was sent to a place for gifted children and met a lot of neurodivergent kids. It wasn’t a DnD gameroom but it was so explicitly outside the norm that I could put myself back together and reenter society on my own terms. I’ve been attracted to such places ever since, even running my own community center for a couple of years.

So uh, totally agree with what you said and all of the above is just to add that there’s a lot more heterotopias than one might think.

This may demonstrate the intricacy of the type system but isn’t a very intuitive example… I feel like the Rust Book does a good job of explaining the different types in std. For one thing it shows these types in their most idiomatic use cases. Rust is my first real low level language and I learned a lot by reading the book.

And by reading it I mean I actually read the thing front to back before touching a keyboard. Then I started to experiment with some simple code and after a couple of months I had some actually programs that I use often. Obviously I rewrote them after a year but hey ho, it’s all a learning experience.

To add to this point. A couple of plastic recyclers in my country just went out of business because oil has been made so cheap recently that they are simply priced out of the plastics market. According to interviews with the founders, in the oil and plastics game there is a sense of having to freeze out these new entrants to the market for a little while.

D2 is open, they just have an optional proprietary layout algo. Of course one might contend that the rest is ‘just’ tooling but I find D2 provides a very quick and easy way to rough out diagrams without touching a mouse. The open source algorithms are good enough for me.

Really makes you wonder how we put up with ReiserFS for so long.

Looks like the author has decided to sell his book by looking at political dimensions of programming. Nothing inherently wrong with that but among programmers it hardly feels like a novel or interesting idea.

>> What if there was something about the way we compute that was at odds with the way humans are? I’d never heard anyone suggest such a possibility (…)

What? That’s the premise of almost all techno-dystopias, a slew of horror movies etc.

It definitely resonates. I am afraid of there being an upper bound to the amount of management work I can do without burning out. And yet I still get promoted every year and continue up the ladder… interestingly I have the exact same rationale for this: that I need to be untouchable by the time I’m 50. So your article is a nice reminder that all that is something I made up and keep telling myself.

I think this talk [0] by Jodie Burchell explains the problem pretty well. In short: you are right that for a given task, only the outcome matters. However, as Burchell shows, AI is sold as being able to generalize. I understand this as the ability to transfer concepts between dissimilar problem spaces. Clearly, if the problem space and or concepts need to be defined beforehand in order for the task to be performed by AI, there’s little generalization going on.

[0] https://youtu.be/Pv0cfsastFs?si=WLoMrT0S6Oe-f1OJ

A bit of cart-horse-y reasoning…. An expressive type system helps me to model the nuances that are actually present in the business logic. If I simplify or restructure my model more than real life allows for I would say that causes much more trouble than actually modeling what’s happening on the ground.

Yes, when I’m behind my desk I always find ways to make the business logic better and simpler and more fitting. But those damn humans never follow my rules.

This is one of the key understandings regarding negotiations. They are not adversarial by nature. They can devolve into a tug of war but only if the scope is extremely limited. Expanding the scope by openly considering multiple benefits and outcomes is usually a good idea. Also, it’s good to know where you want things to go after the deal. If you foresee more opportunities in the future, you can set those up now.