Is Mozilla really relevant anymore ? When they cut the devtools and rust/servo teams I view them as fragmenting the browser market and not driving web forward.
I switch between both every few years, on iPhone 14 ATM.
Honestly Android does a lot of things better - there's so many stupid "because Apple" things on iOS. For example it's impossible to tell the charging speed/estimated charge time, I have a lot of charging bricks between places and I can't tell if I picked an iPhone compatible fast charger/cable or not ? Or when I have Chrome/Firefox installed, highlight text and tap search the web - it takes me to Safari ? A lot of small annoyances like these where you can't do anything about it because the OS is so closed down.
Android is way more customisable, easier to side load stuff (like running GBA emulator on iPhone). Also a lot more exciting phones in the Android ecosystem (eg. Samsung flip phones)
I like the ecosystem integration with my Mac but I wouldn't say one is clearly better than the other.
Both ecosystems have their own pros and cons but I wouldn't trade my Pixel for an iPhone ever.
In fact, I recently got a refurbished iPhone 13 just to check the ecosystem out (as a mobile dev) and get a feel for things but honestly I prefer my Pixel more. There are so many things that Android does well like notifications and typing (these two stood out to me on Apple - horrible implementations really, especially the latter) that it will always remain my primary driver.
But yeah, if someone thinks that Android is not for them and Apple's walled garden is worth entering then or vice versa then whatever floats your boat, I guess.
It’s not the touch screen that’s the issue. It’s the autocorrect. And it’s not an imaginary comparison I used to have “t9” on my phone 20 years ago that was better than what maybe any phone now has. I’m pretty certain iphone was better once too. I remember being able to touch type on my iphone (yes on a touch screen it was that good)
If there’s one thing that infuriates me about the current crop of phones, it’s this. I’ve actually mostly switched to voice dictation because my iPhone touch screen sucks so much. Bring back physical keyboards!
I was a devout Android user in the early days, I've launched Android based consumer products and I still use an iPhone.
I always joke that when Android can handle a screen rotation without blanking the screen, I'll switch back: It's not about the actual blanking of course, it'll just mean they finally ripped out a design tradeoff they made for a device with 256MB of RAM and just... never fixed.
Android is full of decisions like that, like the horrible storage framework churn that randomly made a generation of devices dog slow as various terrible FUSE implementations.
Decisions that are technical, but just end up affecting user experience every day you use the device.
Every single phone in existence running Android blanks the screen.
It can be hidden by frankly disgusting animations where they do things like squish a screenshot of your current screen to hide it, but the literal UI is being tore down on every rotation.
As you can imagine that's a pain in the ass to deal with on the app side, and until relatively recently the framework did a poor job providing support for handling it all. It's a very common cause of app crashes too.
(To really get technical, apps can opt out of this... but doing so means you'd need to reimplement the entire view stack and rotation yourself, which doesn't happen for anything but video games)
I know what you're referring to but Apple made this experience worse by disabling rotation in iOS on the home screen altogether.
Of course most people don't notice because they unlock the phone with Face ID and usually don't stay on the home screen for too long, but still - if you push the home button when in horizontal mode you're presented to a rotated screen.
As for RAM: I was surprised to note that my phone has in fact 4GB of it (always thought it was 2GB), because apps get suspended all the time. It appears that at least on Android that was a sound design decision.
My several years old Samsung doesn't blank the screen.
Android indeed does tear down the activity and creates a new one with different rotation and size; but activity is not the framebuffer currently displaying. Recreating the activity does not imply blanking screen.
Some people like to play games with semantics, but I say you lose the right if you can't get the basic details right...
You're saying "activity is not the framebuffer currently displaying", which is a completely nonsensical statement. The framebuffer does not change: the Surface Flinger is bound the the framebuffer and that's not changing during a rotation.
Tearing down the activity and creating a new one is literally blanking the screen as far as the activity is concerned: removing all views on the activity surface and adding brand new ones.
If you were to look at the activity in a view debugger frame by frame you'd get... a blank screen.
You could poll the WindowManager and there's... no views.
_
There's all sorts of ugly hacks to hide that fact, but at the end of the day supporting seamless transitions across rotations is something that dates back to iOS 3.
It's an artifact of the literal first Android phone that ended up causing pain for developers and instability for end users in perpetuity. Google simply is not product driven in a way that will ever allow them to match Apple. No UX obsessed company would have allowed that mess to go on as long as it has.
While I agree, I must say that GBA emulation is a bad example here.
It’s one of the few things you can "easily" sideload on an iPhone without jailbreaking using AltStore (the emulator is named Delta, btw and it is excellent).
I will not say that AltStore is really practical to use but GBA and GameCube emulators are basically the only things you can sideload without a lot of pain (along with UTM, a virtual machine runner.
I haven't tried this for a while, but just for comparison I actually got a GBA emulator on my Samsung via play store. It's very much an Apple thing again.
I think the point is having stable recurring revenue. Giving you unlimited usage means on average you'll be paying more than you use, but, unless you're seriously abusing it, you can technically cost them more than you pay.
Just like you can go to the gym every day - if everyone with the membership did that they would not be able to function. But it doesn't mean you can't.
Unlimited isn’t real, especially for something like search where it’s not like I need unlimited searches.
The best gyms are pay per session. Gyms are also special because people who buy memberships and never use them subsidize real gym goers who would have to pay more for 20 sessions per month.
The best gyms aren’t pay per session in my experience - and I’ve been to a lot of gyms around the world.
Sure, most gyms let you buy a day pass but compared to the monthly membership it’s very expensive.
My current gym is £40 a month which gives you access to every gym in the country as well) or £10 for a day pass just for that single gym for that single day.
The fanciest gym I’ve ever been to was the equivalent of £30 for a day pass and like £300 for a monthly membership.
Also you example of gyms being special isn’t specific to gyms, that’s also how insurance works, spread the cost out over a lot of people and everyone pays less.
I agree Unlimited PTO is a con though, just give everyone an allocation and let them choose how much they use (most will use the maximum)
C# in 2006 was a joke, probably worse than Rails in performance. This was the webforms era and old EF - meant for enterprise customers with a couple of hundred active users max... ASP.NET being a competitive/performant framework is a very recent development (since core basically which became usable past 2.0)
Haskell, OCaml and D are niche languages, probably aren't mature enough now to use for a production system that needs to scale (in terms of org growth and building complex systems).
Java web frameworks were also terrible in 2006 (this is the Java era that gave Java it's reputation) and the only thing worse for productivity I can think of is C++ hahaha ...
All of them were faster and used less resources than a very slow interpreted language, by having JIT and AOT compilers, state of the art GC and great IDE offerings, even the niche ones had better tooling (Leksah and Merlin, versus nothing).
Nobody cares about performance if you build a business application with a couple of users, a common use-case in 2005. The reason a lot of Java people jumped on the Rails bandwagon, was that an application that would take a month to build in Java with Spring/Hibernate, would take a day in Rails.
See also: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/beyond-java/0596100949/
Some Java people did, there is a reason why Ruby is hardly used outside Rails, while Java rules most of the backend workloads, a mobile OS, and plenty of embedded workloads.
There's also a reason Kotlin has become the language of choice for the Android development industry, Scala became a thing, and ThoughtWorks recommended against using JavaServerFaces.
Because Android team had some Kotlin shills that pushed for it with management blessing, and they are in bed with JetBrains for the Android IDE, that is why, and even them had to accept updating Java support, otherwise Android/Kotlin would lose the ecosystem of Java written libraries, hence Java 11 LTS last year, and Java 17 LTS this year going, back to Android 12 with APEX archives.
Scala became a thing indeed, where it is now besides Spark?
ThoughWorks is a consultancy that recomends whatever brings new projects.
No they weren't - ASP.NET webforms and old EF was such a pile of shit it didn't matter how fast C# was (and back then it really wasn't, granted order of magnitude better than ruby/python, but way behind JVM). The applications built with it were dog slow and buggy - they couldn't even scale in enterprise setting.
Haskell, OCaml, D with great IDE support in 2006 ? Do they have that even today ?
I mean you're suggesting people use C++ for writing web apps (and c++98/03 no less !) - that's got to be facetious.
The real contender back then was PHP and Java, RoR really addressed a lot of issues from both. They both adopted the improvements brought by it since, but it took years.
Stackoverflow and plenty of Microsoft shops are enterprise enough.
> Haskell, OCaml, D with great IDE support in 2006 ? Do they have that even today ?
I mentioned Lekshat and Merlin for a reason, way better than Ruby with TextMate and Sublime.
Yes plenty of people were using C++ for Web applications in 2000 - 2006, via Apache, ngix and IIS plugins. Microsoft had ATLServer, Borland/Embarcadero still ship their webserver to this day.
I can assert that plenty of Nokia Networks WebUIs, were powered by C++/CORBA and Perl back in 2006. Transition to Java started in 2005.
As did several CRM systems, like the original Altitude Software application server.
RoR is for people that don't care about performance to start with.
There's a lot of practical/contextual knowledge that isn't documented, and what's documented isn't guaranteed to be correct or can be misleading (terminology changes, standards change, some things are implied because they are obvious at the time, etc.)
Though knowledge of experience is sometimes wrong as well. Sure it works - unlike print where mistakes (sometimes intentional to hide a secret) can tell you something that cannot work, but that doesn't mean it is a good way to do things.
Give some examples? That kind of 'undocumented' knowledge is lost because better tech has completely replaced it. I'm talking about inventions like the Spinning Mule or the steam engine. We have superseded them with electric motors and logic boards.
First thing that comes to mind is friends father was hitting retirement age after working at a petrochemical/plastics facility for ~20 years, was in charge of maintenance of some section. I think he told me the owner had to call him twice to help diagnose problems that were causing product outages.
These things don't get built on a whim - there's risks, regulations, documentation, procedures, experts, etc. At the end of the day you have people doing the work for decades, with an intuition about how things work.
Given infinite time you can recreate anything - but by the time you're done putting the puzzle together you're out of business.
>At the end of the day you have people doing the work for decades, with an intuition about how things work.
That's exactly my point. This intuition is undocumented however it becomes superseded by new tech. Nobody can (successfully) run a plastics plant with decades of old hardware knowledge and expect to be in business another 20 years.
"In 1991, Aldo retired and Ed took over day-to-day management of the company. First Plastics began the initiative to replace and update its molding equipment with new large capacity presses in 1995. This initiative has placed First Plastics as one of the most technologically advanced injection molders in the Northeast. Today it continues to add the latest technology while increasing its manufacturing capacity."
If it's anything like LLM for code review then I'd say it's not very potent.
No doubt it's good at paraphrasing code, deobfuscation sound like a good usecase. Other than that I've seen it mostly come up with bullshit :
- random opinions stated as fact (x makes code readable, y makes code simpler to understand, yada yada) - it's like a review from a mid level dev that finished reading Uncle Bob or some crap like that and suddenly there's 8 functions where there should be 2
- suggests changes that make the code subtly incorrect - like rewriting code with a different container type and messing up result ordering
- state false information like suggesting that a dictionary will be faster than array search (for fixed size/small array), or that some approach is faster because it doesn't allocate (but original didn't allocate either and the new approach actually does, it just hides it in a container), etc.
- can't catch complex logic bugs for shit, even with leading follow-up questions (once I figured out the problem and went back to see how long it would take GPT to figure it out)
> Like all engineering projects there are still physical constrains of course but there is no limit on the technology allowed
Except having to work from a legacy codebase via incremental changes. No way for evolution to explore silicon based life when it kicked off with carbon.
I think they probably finetuned that because it used to be the other way around and it was pretty bad UX to wait 1 min to apply a function change to a class or stuff like that.
Are you using the API, or just the ChatGPT UI? Do custom instructions/system messages help at all?
Saving resources like this seems okay(ish) for general-purpose ChatGPT, as they'd know there's a human who can interpret the abridged output. But for API-driven requests this would be pretty terrible, and makes it far harder to develop with.
> I’ve implemented “buy” for various systems where the work to integrate was essentially the work to build
I've felt this way before, but I didn't realize that I haven't factored in the risks of actually building it. I was comparing real world integration effort with an estimate, influenced by my experience of integrating with a working product.
Common sense applies, but in general I'm terrible at giving estimates unless I've done something very similar before.
From what I've seen Bethesda tried to get Nvidia support in optimizing for release but the game division at Nvidia is not getting resources because server/AI market is where the money is at and they only have so much experts available.
I wouldn't be surprised if this became a common theme with Nvidia in the future.
