> once you get bored of mindless work/consumption cycle, go ahead and get to the good part!
The good part is spawning another entity which has to slog through mindless work and consumption cycle, (experience the misery of aging, wither and die) - just so you can feel good about yourself?
You acknowledge the stats about mental health and loneliness and how prevalent that is, and yet you will roll a dice on (other persons behalf) with glee - with high odds of subjecting your child to it.
Natural selection truly is a sight to behold, where peoples brains get disabled and they lose their ability to think when it comes to procreation, because those that do think get selected out of the gene pool.
> The good part is spawning another entity which has to slog through mindless work and consumption cycle, (experience the misery of aging, wither and die) - just so you can feel good about yourself?
The future belongs to those who show up. I do wonder what percentage of antinatalism is simply mate/fertility suppression. The rest being "mad at God for the crime of being", of course.
> Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
Parents have never truly cared whether or not their children will have "good lives", certainly not in any - "i'll sit down and analyze carefully if my offspring will have a good time" type of way.
Child mortality rate used to be something like 50% in past.
People still have insane fertility rates in complete - objectively shitholes - like Bangladesh, etc.
That's simply not how the world works, that's not how natural selection works.
The problem is that you (and most people frankly) look at the "fertility problem" within their very limited 1-human lifespan. However, if you zoom out a bit, the fertility problem disappears, not only does it disappear completely - the problem will disappear regardless if circumstances get better or if they get way worse.
The mothers (and fathers) that don't have children because they think the "world as it is right now is a bad place", will simply get selected out.
Caring about whether your children will have "a good life" to a point of not having any is simply maladaptive from natural selection POV and it will sort it out very quickly. It's just a 1-gen outlier.
i think those stats show the opposite. They had higher fertility rate when things were worse, but women mostly didnt have a choice. Now they're better but still bad, and women do have a choice - so they are choosing not to, judging by the collapsed birth rate.
Just my experience but I have never found the medical industry useful for health. I have found they mostly tinker with feedback loops to give the illusion of health.
Eating right, exercise, supplementation of the things I am missing from my diet, clean air, avoiding chronic stressful situations and people are the only things I have found to benefit me. But that's just my own anecdotal experience. (n=1)
At minimum medical industry is good for providing various measurements regarding the state of your health and environment. This can get quite pricey quite fast.
Depending on MCU, you can chain DMA transfers together, so you can have many small writes without extra CPU involvement per DMA transfer. DMA channels are a limited resource however.
There's quite a few ways to do this, you can do a DMA transfer per horizontal/vertical screen line (not enough memory for a fullscreen buffer, but usually enough memory for 2 fullscreen lines), with an interrupt which fills in the next line to be transfered, etc.
> displays are rarely more than 8 bit
Backing memory in these color TFT SPI displays is often 18bits per pixel, often transfered as RGB565 (2bytes) per pixel.
For SSD1306 its 1bit per pixel, and even the weakest MCUs usually have enough memory for a second buffer.
All this is completely ass-backwards thinking though.
The crucial question is - does the end-user/customer want to see smooth lines or prefers "hacker-man" TUI aesthetics.
I'd say you generally speaking users want normal smooth lines graph instead of hackerman aesthetics.
So preferring implementation simplicity (TUI) might be another case where substandard programmers prioritize their convenience over the end-user needs/preferences.
The same isn't true for modern embedded devices, they don't have tile rendering hardware.
If you connect a i2c/SPI screen (SSD1306, ST7735), you write all the pixels on the screen (or pixels to some subregion of the screen), these screens do have a backing memory in them.
So in order to draw a line, you will - objectively - have to copy/move more bytes if you approximate line with character symbols.
This isn't a big deal, but crazy efficient it is not.
All the efficiency when drawing on those screens mostly relies on how well you chain together DMA transfers to portions of the screen you want stuff to be drawn to, so that SPI transfers aren't blocking the CPU (that's assuming you don't have memory for a second full-screen buffer).
SSD1306 is a bit in the middle. It's technically a 128x64 monochrome bitmapped display, but it's organized as eight 128x8 "rows", with each byte representing a single 1x8 group of pixels. That organization really favors being treated as either four or eight lines of text - trying to use it as a generic bitmap display gets awkward, because it's only addressable at the level of those 1x8 groups.
ST7735 is more of a standard (color) bitmap display.
SSD1306 is just 1KByte for a second buffer, so even a rather low-end MCU likely can spare that. And you'd absolutely just draw normal lines if you use a display like that.
It's very easy to use it as a generic bitmap display, there's nothing awkward about packing 8pixels into 1 byte, and you can set the addressing mode (horizontal/vertial) to whatever you want, etc.
> none of this is going to improve people's lives.
I have some old borderline senile relatives writting apps (asking LLMs to write for it them) for their own personal use. Stuff they surely haven't done on their own (or had the energy to do). Their extent of programming background - shitty VBScript macros for excel.
It also helps people to pick up programming and helps with the initial push of getting started. Getting over the initial hump, getting something on the screen so to speak.
Most things people want from their computers are simple shit that LLMs usually manage quite well.
Good question whether or not this (outsourcing their thinking) actually just accelerates their senility or not.
As someone who likes to solve hard or interesting technical problems, I've long before LLMs often been disappointed that most of the time what people want from programmers is simple stupid shit (ie. stuff i dont find interesting to work on).
>OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
I honestly think that has way less to do with Microsoft, more of a representation of "software engineering" practices these days.
For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc.
I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both),
you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.
Most technical decisions aren't really driven by what makes a better end-user experience or a better product, it's mostly defined by convenience and familiarity of substandard software developers - with mostly and primarily web-slop background.
Cosmic (from the PopOS folks) is getting rid of the crappy javascript from GNOME Shell. And the CSS in GTK+ themes is just for the sake of syntactic convenience.
Cosmic is quite nice. There's some polishing left to do, but it's already pretty solid. The app store is a bit of a turd, but I bet that's just because it's by nature connected to the internet. More could surely be done with caching and pre-loading, but not sure if I want my computer to pre-load app store content all the time just in case I open it.
Compared to Windows it's of course absolutely unreal.
But the difference is that none of the CSS or Javascript usage in gnome is tied to a webview. They are all binding in some way to GTK and much simpler rendering routines.
> I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.
KDE Plasma, which is in my opinion the most advanced desktop environment is written in Qt QML which is JavaScript. There are advantages to that over C++, namely your session won't simply crash.
(While you can use some JavaScript from QML, the application still have a C++ core. QML applications can still crash. There is no DOM with QML, no browser overhead)
QML is absolutely not JavaScript. It's a markup language to describe user interfaces, spiced with JS for certain interactions. All heavy lifting behind the scenes is done in C++ - the QML runtime as well as the application logic and data models.
The software industry has always had more juniors than seniors so this issue of juniors calling the shots is not a new one but it does feel like it's been getting worse and worse... Now it's basically AI slop vibe coders calling the shots about coding best-practices.
When I read comments like this, I honestly think that people are only complaining about this because the "bad people" are doing this (in this case Microsoft/Gnome Team).
Neglecting the fact that almost everyone else is doing similar things.
> For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc.
What GTK is doing isn't really any different than how many UI framework work and have done so for quite a while now.
Almost every desktop UI toolkit/library/framework in the past 15-20 years has the following:
- Markup interface for defining the layout. If they don't have that they have a declarative way of defining the UI.
- Some sort of bindings for popular scripting language that hook into native code.
- Some of styling language that isn't that different from CSS.
This has been the norm for quite some time now. It works reasonably well.
Futhermore there isn't much difference between what desktop developers are doing and what web developers are doing.
> I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.
Why? I find Gnome works really well on Linux. I have a pretty nice desktop environment after adding two extensions (Dash To Dock and App Indicators). Gnome runs well on relatively ancient hardware I own (2011 Dell E6410) with a garbage GPU (it isn't OpenGL 3.3 compliant). It actually performs a lot better than some other DEs that are 100% native.
JavaScript is indeed a slow language. However in Gnome that isn't the bottleneck. People have been making UIs with JScript (basically JavaScript) using WSH back in the 90s on Windows 98.
> Most technical decisions aren't really driven by what makes a better end-user experience or a better product, it's mostly defined by convenience and familiarity of substandard software developers - with mostly and primarily web-slop background.
What makes a better end user experience has nothing to do with any of this. There has to be an incentive to create a good end user experience and there simply isn't in the vast majority of cases.
In many cases it doesn't matter really what the tech behind something is. Most popular programmings and associated frameworks all work reasonably well on machines that are over a decade old. I am running Discord on a 15 year machine dual core laptop processor and it works "ok".
So this sort of complaining about "modern devs" I've been hearing about for almost 20 years now. The issues I've faced with doing quality work has been almost always to do with how projects are (mis)-managed.
>But the checker can smile at me. Or whine with me about the weather.
It's some poor miserable soul sitting at that checkout line 9-to-5 brainlessly scanning products, that's their whole existence.
And you don't want this miserable drudgery to be put to end - to be automated away,
because you mistake some sad soul being cordial and eeking out a smile (part of their job really) - as some sort of "human connection"
that you so sorely lack.
Sounds like you only care about yourself more than anything.
There is zero empathy and there is NOTHING humanist about your world-view.
Non-automated checkout lines are deeply depressing, these people slave away their lifes for basically nothing.
You think those people won't need to enslave themselves somewhere else if the checkout line is automated? Asking for your job to be automated in a capitalist economy is putting the cart before the horse.
I don't know. You are correct that the Japanese/Korea has this mentality to spend time at work just to spend time but there is a noticeable delta in effective results between those countries and modern China.
The good part is spawning another entity which has to slog through mindless work and consumption cycle, (experience the misery of aging, wither and die) - just so you can feel good about yourself?
You acknowledge the stats about mental health and loneliness and how prevalent that is, and yet you will roll a dice on (other persons behalf) with glee - with high odds of subjecting your child to it.
Natural selection truly is a sight to behold, where peoples brains get disabled and they lose their ability to think when it comes to procreation, because those that do think get selected out of the gene pool.
It truly is beautiful.
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