> It feels like this has been completely lost, even on platforms like mac where consistency used to be important.
There are two kinds of consistency: across apps within a platform and across platforms within the same app. As someone who uses multiple platforms regularly, I have forever been annoyed when eg keyboard shortcuts change when I switch to a different computer, especially when I’m using the same app.
Apps like Discord, Spotify and VSCode are consistently the most pleasurable to use because they are largely the same.
For a unique piece of hardware like the old iPod, it made more sense to do your special custom UX as a unified product. But we’re talking about general purpose computers. The ”platform” shouldn’t be special imo, it should simply be predictable and stay out of the way. They mostly provide the same thing, like copy paste and maximizing a window, yet have different controls. This differentiation adds no value, at least to me.
You forget you’re a minority. Most users use one platform, or at most one work one private (probably with different software). So most software should be optimized for the platform, not consistency across them.
The people I know who go through the trouble of pirating and downloading vast libraries of music are all musicians themselves, or at the very least total music nerds. They don’t want to lose access to their stuff, plus if they ever need to import audio into a DAW, DRM is a no-go. They are the same people who spend large amounts of money on vinyls, and support smaller independent artists through concerts, merch and (back in the day) CDs.
It used to be more mixed, but today, piracy is often the only option to ”own” any media at all.
> piracy is often the only option to ”own” any media at all.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something here, but I find that nowadays the process of buying high-quality, DRM-free MP3 music is as simple and straightforward as it can be: you purchase the files (on Bandcamp, Amazon, Apple Music, etc.), download them legally, and then physically own them forever.
By the way, when purchasing through Bandcamp, 80+% goes to the artist (https://bandcamp.com/fair_trade_music_policy). So not only do you own the music, but you also make sure the artist is properly paid for their work.
Nope, you are just more informed than me, thanks for the correction. I was extrapolating based on general trends in all forms of media (like games and movies too). It would be interesting to know what ratio of music can be acquired DRM free today.
It's both. Musicians and music nerds buy CDs and LPs and tapes and Bandcamp files and they "pirate" music both because they care about ownership and quality and rare or substantially different editions of records that aren't available legally, and because they've seen the sausage factory from the inside and know that "stealing" $0.02 from an artist who's starving like them anyway isn't really that far up on the list of heinous crimes. Buy the shirt, download the album. No one cares.
> it is prudent to not depend on those who have a fundamentally different and incompatible world view.
Like Saudi Arabia and formerly the Saddam regime (when he sold oil in USD)?
While compatible world view is used as an argument against diplomatic and economic relations, in reality it’s just a bonus, not a requirement. What’s important is plain old cost benefit and national interests. The US is still a better ally for EU than China, but it’s gotten drastically worse fast. And while China has territorial ambitions, they are nowhere near EU. The US is the good old status quo ”devil you know”, but it’s abundantly evident now that nobody really knew them, including many of their own political elites domestically.
On diplomacy timescales, ignoring China because of human rights concerns is exceptionally short-sighted, both for EU if US continues current path, and for global stability in case conflicts escalate between China and US. There is no choice that guarantees EU will have a strong ”human rights” ally in 10 years.
> Eufy would be better if they'd fix their roller brush design and didn't lean so heavily into making you buy their replacement components. It's designed around buying Eufy refills.
FWIW there are 3p replacements that are super cheap for roller brush, side brush, filters, bags etc. As for detergent for the mop, I first thought I was smart to buy 3p detergents meant for robot vacuums because they were cheaper. Turns out they clogged the tubes which was tricky to fix, but I did it. After that I bought Eufys original, and lo and behold, it was much more concentrated, which meant it was actually significantly cheaper than the 3p ones (and smells better).
Navigation is spot on. Obstacle avoidance sucks though (to be fair my floor is patterned stone - hard to see anything) and cat toys sometimes get stuck in the roller brush.
> Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.
Yes but keep in mind that’s not an individual problem that is solved by switching browsers. If a browser engine dies, the walls get closer and the room smaller. With only Chromium and WebKit left, we may soon have a corporate owned browsers pulling in whatever direction Google and Apple wants. I can think of many things that are good for them but bad for us. For instance, ”Web Integrity” and other DRM.
We need a protocol, not an implementation, so language is a minor detail nobody should need to care about. It should be easy to use implement by lib developers in various languages, and easy to use for app developers. It should be designed to work on all OSs, even if not all platforms will support it yet.
We may need both actually: solid protocol and great reference implementation.
Wayland was advertised as protocol mostly. After almost 20 years, it still has not promised to be a full replacement to xorg and probably never will, where wayland developers say "this is not our goal". Took people quite some time to realise that; it's been more recently become obvious, but say, 12 years ago few understood this.
I still have not been able to find working replacements to all that works on xorg, for instance; specifically imagemagick is different on wayland. I may try again at a later point in time, but my old workings there did not work, and replacements seem dead or ineffective or incomplete - that is quite frustrating for something that was aggressively advertised as "this is now the future".
100% agree, I should have phrased it less black and white. In theory a spec is all you need but in practice solid reference implementations can iron out ambiguity plus it can uncover issues in the spec.
> Then you have a schema layer that could change in backwards compatible ways. Every new addition is optional.
Also known as the rest of the fucking owl. I am entirely in factual agreement with you, but the number of people who are even aware they maintain an API surface with backwards compatibility as a goal, let alone can actually do it well, are tiny in practice. Especially for internal services, where nobody will even notice violations until it’s urgent, and at such a time, your definitions won’t save you from blame. Maybe it should, though. The best way to stop a bad idea is to follow it rigorously and see where it leads.
I’m very much a skeptic of microservices, because of this added responsibility. Only when the cost of that extra maintenance is outweighed by overwhelming benefits elsewhere, would I consider it. For the same reason I wouldn’t want a toilet with a seatbelt.
Background support for non-Apple apps is best-effort at best, and explicitly discouraged in the docs. The rate of silent push notifications and other background mechanisms are intentionally not documented and you’re explicitly instructed you not to rely on any current behavior. They make some exceptions to support money makers like Uber and fitness tracking but generally they don’t like you using anything in the background.
Android is more relaxed but the vendors (like Samsung etc) will go around that and implement their own aggressive background killing bots. Sometimes, this causes alarm apps to stop and not wake you up etc.
The main reason is battery life. Tragically, this makes sense due to the cesspool of spam apps that plague their ”curated” app stores. If you’re an app developer who want to use it responsibly you’re in for a world of trouble. I know because I am one of them (well, I consider myself responsible at least).
The Nextcloud app has been running and syncing in the background on 3 iPhones for like 6 months, so they managed to make that work relatively well.
My issue is other bugs that make it painful, including the fact that I cannot trust that Nextcloud will eventually upload the whole photo gallery (it seems like some files regularly get "locked" w.r.t. "webdav", for some reason, and this never resolves).
I don’t know the details but reading the article they got this right. It’s been my main gripe with Rust which imo totally botched it. Or rather, they botched the ergonomics. Rust still allows low level control just fine… (but so does a plain old explicit event loop). Go did much better, succeeding at ergonomics but failing at low level control (failed successfully that is, it was never a goal).
The trick to retaining ergonomics and low level control is precisely to create a second layer, a ”runtime” layer, which is responsible for scheduling higher level tasks, IO and IPC. This isn’t easy, but it’s the only way. Otherwise you get an interoperability problem that the coloring and ecosystem fragmentation in Rust reflects.
> The vibe coded aspect of this article seems quite irrelevant to me.
IMO not really, because of your own point:
> Vibe-coded garbage perhaps has increased the volume of terrible stuff to wade through
This is not a hypothetical, nor an incremental difference. People are drowning in garbage, and if they don’t use garbage generation themselves, they get pushed out because they have to review a ton of garbage and they have to bump their stats (CLOC, PRs etc).
> but is secondary to a familiar story of dumb leaders making dumb decisions.
Well, sure. Both can be true. The social lessons will take a long time. MBA style leadership doctrines typically last for a decade or more, until overwhelming anecdotal evidence pushes them into the next hype. In the meantime, we’re definitely in for a ride.
> This is not a hypothetical, nor an incremental difference. People are drowning in garbage, and if they don’t use garbage generation themselves, they get pushed out
I think of special notice is that even Apple and Disney are doing this. Two companies who have traditionally been far more cautious and extremely protective of their image. When entities like these are caving, I think it's safe to say we're well into Bizaro land.
Disney is the best example here. Iger recently suggested Disney+ users could make short form personalized content using Disney characters. This is very surprising to hear from a company who is extremely protective of those characters and the image of those characters. We do not yet have control over these image and video generation such that we can absolutely prevent certain classes of generation from happening. If they go through with it I'll give it a week (a month tops) before someone is able to generate porn with it. But hey, maybe the hit in stock will not be greater than the rise from the hype. But maybe that's part of the problem. Though they also don't appear to be getting any of that hype money either...
"hype". People spend a shitton of money to go to a Disney resort so their daughters can see a Disney princess up close and personal and have her say their name and ask them how they're doing. $299.99 for a TikTok where your daughters favorite princess asks her how's she's doing and tells her she's the best? Iger's gonna be buying the bank!
At what cost? Investors typically only care about returns in the quarter or the year. But shouldn't the company be ensuring its continued survival? These groups should be at odds but aren't, and that's concerning
There are two kinds of consistency: across apps within a platform and across platforms within the same app. As someone who uses multiple platforms regularly, I have forever been annoyed when eg keyboard shortcuts change when I switch to a different computer, especially when I’m using the same app.
Apps like Discord, Spotify and VSCode are consistently the most pleasurable to use because they are largely the same.
For a unique piece of hardware like the old iPod, it made more sense to do your special custom UX as a unified product. But we’re talking about general purpose computers. The ”platform” shouldn’t be special imo, it should simply be predictable and stay out of the way. They mostly provide the same thing, like copy paste and maximizing a window, yet have different controls. This differentiation adds no value, at least to me.