> I don’t see any evidence of this happening, but if somebody wants to make this argument, they should be clear about why this time is different
It does seem to be happening - at least in mobile app stores.
There's some recent analysis that demonstrates how, despite a huge updraft in the quantity of apps released, the aggregate count of reviews and downloads remains static.
In other words, there are now many more apps. But not many (or really any?) more users
> they should be clear about why this time is different to the entire history of the computer industry so far
I can't prove the pie is fixed, but nor can you prove the pie is infinite.
Maybe this comes close to sounding patronising, but I think the key thing people miss, when talking about economic growth of software is, money has to come from somewhere. Someone has to give it to you. So it you want to keep growing, you need someone who isn't paying for software, to start. Who are these people, how much money do they have, and what other costs are you competing against?
You are arguing I should be fine losing $500 so Elon can cash out? Because - and I hope this doesn't seem uncharitable - some sci-fi fantasy about space colonies?
Without doxxing yourself or your clients, can you share more about how this plays out?
When clients come to you, is that because they always intended to get help taking their system to production? Or is it a last resort after all the AI approaches fail?
Is there a general way that these projects break down? Or are the failures usually subtle?
I'm glad to hear someone else calling out Bregman.
His work is very flimsy, and I have been a hater for close to 10 years [1].
I think Bregman skirts close to the "Effective Altruism" movement and his work has similar problems of choosing flashy, exciting, elitist projects over boring, uncomfortable, policy changes.
His enamourment with "AI!!!" (exclamations mandatory) is par for the course. Basically a fantasy that if AI leads to enough layoffs, the rest of society will accept a transition to UBI (against their own interests)
Bregman has been going on about UBI for decades and I've never seen him do the actual maths. In Utopia for Realists he argued the budget deficit can be completely made up by the cost savings of having fewer benefit systems. It's fantasy
The PSX BIOS code sounds like a disaster. Everything I read about the software part of the stack, makes me amazed the console even boots
The faulty malloc. A bunch of random qsort implementations. Reiji Asakura wrote an account of how the BIOS and kernel were developed, and it sounds so amateurish
Then there's the way the JP console checks for faulty ECCs on sectors 0..15, not as a clever anti piracy check, but because the CDU-920 broke CD-XA authoring...
This is also how the memory card bootloader works.
There is a faulty array iterator in the BIOS code that can copy arbitrary data to locations higher up in the memory map than the base pointer. Normally that wouldn't let you overwrite any executable code because the base pointer is very high up (might be a stack pointer?). But because of the memory aliasing, if you set the right value the write "wraps around" and lets you clobber the BIOS.
This means you can boot a custom BIOS, effectively, by just going into the memory card screen. From there you can execute a PSX.EXE without going through the mechacon checks, bypassing copy protection
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I wouldn't mind learning more about the MGS port. Do you remember much about it?
It uses TCL for most of the scripting, IIRC. In fact I think MGS 1-4 use the same lineage of scripting languages.
MGS2 source code was leaked recently, but my guess would be that was a complete rewrite and shared very little from the PSX codebase.
> I think the accessibility consultants like this state of affairs: they can threaten more lawsuits and extract more in consulting fees.
I think there is truth in this. A lot of the assistive technology (AT) vendors, also sell consultancy.
Go to the Vispero career pages (who develop JAWS for Windows) and a big chunk of the jobs are remote consultancy roles advising clients on accessibility errors and selling for billable hours.
What makes a web page accessible? Why, it has to work with JAWS, of course!
Vispero makes a lot of money from this; the consultants are all in India, the clients are all in the West, so they can hoover up the difference. I get the impression most AT vendors are extremely cheap, which may explain why it takes decades for them to improve things
Somebody at Google decided this is how they wanted it to work. They don't have to explain why and they don't have to fix this deficiency until it becomes a problem for Google
It also means that everything is (over) optimised for Google's usecases, but not general purpose applications
I came across this problem pretty directly a couple of weeks ago - I wanted to see if I could port a small C program to Go, where one of the needs is to create gzip archives. But the Go stdlib insists on extraneous padding that breaks the backwards compatibility requirements of my program.
The padding isn't needed, it isn't useful, and you can't opt out of it. So the whole program went in the bin and I have resumed maintaining it in C
This is one of dozens of situations I've experienced where Go's allegedly pristine stdlib design has kicked me in the nuts
Axel thinks that scrapers have aggregated his content, and now, potential readers doing searches or queries on AI assisted systems, see the scraped content rather than his website.
The structure of your CSS, and the structure of your divs, do not affect AT experience. This is misinformation.
As mentioned below:
A <div> itself is treated as a generic, transparent box. It doesn't get keyboard focus, and it isn't added to the screen reader's elements list (like headings, links, or landmarks).
It does seem to be happening - at least in mobile app stores.
There's some recent analysis that demonstrates how, despite a huge updraft in the quantity of apps released, the aggregate count of reviews and downloads remains static.
In other words, there are now many more apps. But not many (or really any?) more users
Take a look at p40 / figure 12 of "WRITING CODE VS. SHIPPING CODE: PRODUCTIVITY EFFECTS ACROSS GENERATIONS OF AI CODING TOOLS" (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35275/w352...)
Their analysis is on pg42-43
> they should be clear about why this time is different to the entire history of the computer industry so far
I can't prove the pie is fixed, but nor can you prove the pie is infinite.
Maybe this comes close to sounding patronising, but I think the key thing people miss, when talking about economic growth of software is, money has to come from somewhere. Someone has to give it to you. So it you want to keep growing, you need someone who isn't paying for software, to start. Who are these people, how much money do they have, and what other costs are you competing against?