Yeah, I was shocked that a keyboard replacement of my company issued X1 is basically a full teardown. When it was time to replace my private laptop a year later, I opted for the L-series, which is much better in that regard and also much cheaper. Keyboard replacements are a pretty standard thing for me, because I don't like my local layout and if you limit yourself to buying with the layout you want, you can only go to Apple or Framework nowadays.
I don't like betting on newcomers. While they may have some good ideas that improve the industry overall, there is a lot of long-term learning that newcomers can't yet benefit from. That usually leads to silly mistakes and quality problems. The useful aspect of newcomers is the credible threat they pose to the old guard of taking a portion of the pie away if they don't innovate. But I don't feel like spending my own money on that.
Interestingly banning a far right party in Germany failed at the constitutional court a few years back with one of the arguments being too many party members were actually paid informants of the authorities and thus it wasn't reliably possible to distinguish what the party did on its own vs what the authorities caused. I think many people concluded that the party finances were mostly kept stable by these informants, so the easiest way to get rid of them would be to drastically reduce that.
I find it likely that we are still missing a few major efficiency tricks with LLMs. But I would also not underestimate the amount of implicit knowledge and skill an LLM is expected to carry on a meta level.
I never thought that it would be a promising approach to build entire web apps using wasm. You don't just have to make it possible to interact with the DOM. You also have to have the right high level language to do this kind of DOM interaction and application logic. JS isn't bad for that purpose and it would probably take a lot to find something that is much better (which compiles to WASM instead of js, like ts and svelte do).
The only real avenue for js-free web applications would be to completely abandon the browser rendering path and have everything render into a canvas. There are experiments to use UI toolkits designed for the desktop. But even that I see more of a niche solution and unlikely to become very widely used. HTML/css/js have become the lingua franca of UI development and they are taking over desktop applications as well. Why should that trend reverse?
> completely abandon the browser rendering path and have everything render into a canvas
Yeah, go ahead and trash the little bit of accessibility we still have. <canvas> by itself already asks webdevs to shit on people with visual disabilities. But getting rid of the DOM (for vague reasons) would really nail the coffin of these pesky blind users. After all, why should they be able to use anything on the internet?
This, and AI making webdevs consider to obfuscate things for scraping reasons, and Microsoft Recall making devs play with the idea of obfuscating OS-level access to their (privacy-sensitive) apps, which in essence would also trash accessibility, are the new nightmares that will haunt me for the next few years.
Maybe that's not the dominant mindset anymore, but I for one would love to use a language that's actually built for functional/reactive programming instead of inventing half-baked JavaScript dialects for that purpose. Elm was a language in that spirit, but it never felt complete.
Makes me sad that PureScript doesn't have more adoption, not that I'm surprised. It's orders of magnitude better than Elm and even improves upon Haskell in some meaningful ways (row polymorphism).
Sorry, I am turned off by the CRDT in there. It immediately smells of overengineering to me. Not that I believe git is a better database. But why not just SQL?
I would argue LWW is the opposite of a merge. It is better to immediately know at the time of writing that there is a conflict. CRDTs either solve or (in this case) don't solve a problem that doesn't really exist, especially for package managers.
Git solves that problem and it definitely exists. Speaking of package managers, it really depends. Like, can we use one SQLite file for that? So easy, why no one is doing that?
idk, debian for example uses plain text files. I have to imagine it would bring some advantages to move that over to an sqlite to improve performance, but then it seems package management designers fall into the two categories of either under-engineering or over-engineering the solution. There is little glory in evolving something incrementally, everyone wants to do green field stuff.
I think this is speaking in the absense of sufficient protections like laws. Because how does it help that a hypothetical law protects you if that law doesn't exist?
I am surprised that Taiwan and China are not mentioned in the article or in these comments. Given the threat that China will get to Taiwan and capture control over the unrivaled TSMC, investing into silicon while we can is pure and simple de-risking in a de-globalizing world.
The meaning of the term "opt-in" is that it is off by default and has to be manually enabled. "opt-out" means it is on by default and you have to manually turn it off. "opt-in-by-default" or "opted in by default" are needlessly confusing.
True, yes. Totally agree with you on the fundamental definition of opt-in vs opt-out.
You can also have a checkbox that says "I consent to having my data used for training", which would look like "opting in", and it could be true by default.
Or you can have a checkbox that says "Leave my data out of your training set", which would look like "opting out", and which could be unchecked default.
Technically, they're both "opt-out", but I've seen enough examples (intentionally confusing and arguably "dark patterns") that I personally don't really consider "it's opt-in" to be a complete statement anymore.
Edit: I'll add that, in the comment I was replying to, it very much looked like you had to go to a settings page in order to opt-out, which I think is entirely reasonably described as having been opted-in by default. Here's what they had written:
> All you have to do is flip a single switch in the options to turn it off
And I actually think "opted-in by default" is valid and calls out cases where it looks like you consent, but that decision was made for you. Although in this case I think I've seen other comments that describe the UX differently, but my comment was more of a general comment than about this particular flow.
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