He didn’t ask for it, as far as I can tell. It looks like a Rovio customer asked how they treat downstream partners. I think that’s allowed under capitalism.
Be that as it may, plenty of engineers don’t understand the full ramifications of their open source license choice. Undoubtedly some, if not many, regret it afterwards. Companies change the terms or revoke licenses all the time. But, the dumb, naive engineer that gave their work away didn’t pay a lawyer to advise how to best give their work away, so screw ‘em.
If I made a boatload of money on the back of someone else’s work, I’d reward them. You wouldn’t. Neither one of us is legally required to. I’m not fond of taking advantage of people that don’t realize their worth. And I think the whole open source thing works best giving and taking, whether that’s code, money, or time.
But, this cutthroat approach to open source also hasn’t always been the societal norm. IBM and others made sizable donations to groups like the Apache Software Foundation back in the 90s and 00s and were more or less expected to do so. It seemed to me more a case of both sides agreeing a bunch of money could be spent on lawyers to iron out whatever terms or we could keep the licensing simple and have a gentlemen’s agreement on how to conduct ourselves. I’ve never heard of the Box2D guy so I hope that fame was worth something. It sounds a lot like being paid in exposure.
To your point, I don’t know how to codify a “leave a penny, take a penny” approach to open source and really don’t have the inclination to spend either the time or the money on a lawyer to figure that out. So, nowadays I just don’t release open source code anymore or, if I do, it’s AGPL just so I can protect my interests. I don’t think I’m alone in this. The camaraderie aspect of it has been supplanted by maximum value extraction and I don’t think that’s really sustainable. But between LLMs and an endless source of naive optimists, maybe this is fine.
You can’t export save files on PS5. You can’t transfer licenses, so you’ll have to repurchase any games you want to continue playing. For trophy/achievement hunters, those are going to be locked away. And a lot of the online game accounts are locked to the platform so you’ll have to start any progress/reputation/level over.
Yeah, you can walk away, but let’s not pretend it’s the same thing as buying orange juice at a new grocer because your regular one only sells it with pulp now. People aren’t being irrational in being annoyed by this.
Part of the point the article makes is that most other popular languages have a comprehensive standard library. JS has an astonishingly small on. Rather than have one vetted set of libraries that ship with the language, applications either need to roll it themselves or pull from a 3rd party package repository. We've drilled NIH into people, so they tend to reach for packages. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it often means they're pulling in more code than they need. The JS ecosystem has also favored smaller modules, so you need many of them. And everyone builds on top of that, leading to massive growth in dependency graphs. It's a huge surface area for things to go wrong, intentionally or not.
With many other languages, you have a lot of functionality out of the box. Certainly, there have been bugs and security issues, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to what you see in the JS ecosystem. With other languages, you have a much smaller external dependency graph and the core functionality is coming from a trusted 3rd party.
The lack of a comprehensive standard library for JavaScript also results in projects pulling many more third party dependencies than you would with most other modern environments. It’s just a bigger attack surface. And if you can compromise a module used for basic functionality that you’d get out of the box elsewhere, the blast radius will be enormous.
They’re definitely playing catch up, but the IDE integration makes interactive development really nice. Claude is good for one-shotting things, but I find JetBrains AI integration really useful for working with large codebases where I may be unfamiliar with things.
I think they’ve been caught in a bad spot. They’re a profitable company, but nowhere on the scale of Microsoft. And they don’t have billions of VC to effectively price dump. Other tools that can focus on one thing and burn cash are advancing quickly and some of them don’t really need an IDE at all.
The semi-recent introduction of ACP integration in the JetBrains IDEs has been a nice bridge. But now it’s confusing how everything comes together. I really hope they can survive.
Based on another reply I can’t tell if there’s a clever window-based pun that I’m missing. If not, I think you want “shudder” and not “shutter” here. I’m sorry if I just ruined the joke.
CheapCharts is really nice. I find discovery in the Apple TV store pretty bad otherwise. They earn their affiliate revenue.
I do wish we had DRM-free purchases like we have with MP3s. But this is a big step up over streaming services. The Movies Anywhere integration is handy as well.
After getting scammed on Facebook Marketplace, I look at the profiles of sellers, particularly if they don’t have much in way of reviews. That seems more prudent than creepy to me. I’m not stalking anyone and I’m not looking to be their friend.
Is there a better way to do seller verification? It does seem like an information leak to me. Craigslist and eBay don’t share my identification as a potential buyer. I don’t love the marketplace being tied to a social network, but it’s what many people are using these days.
In case anyone's wondering, the TruffleRuby project is still going strong. It undoubtedly would be going stronger were Chris still with us. But, some of us that worked with Chris in the early days of the project and others that joined later are still pushing the project forward.
If you're interested in the project, please give it a try. Or, if you just want to chat Ruby compilers, feel free to drop into one of our community channels (Slack or GitHub Discussions).
I'd imagine you don't want to look like you're self-promoting, but I'd really love to read more about the JPEG project. I think it could be quite good for the community. As a whole, I believe Rubyists need to stop reaching for native extensions so quickly. Whether on YJIT, ZJIT, JRuby, or TruffleRuby, all of them will benefit from having more code in Ruby. Incidentally, Chris's final conference talk¹ made the case for moving to a Ruby-based implementation for the Ruby core library.
For those cases where you're writing a native extension to primary bridge over to a native library, you may find either FFI or Fiddle handle your use case quite well.
Just in case you were unaware, there is and was a 100% open source variant of the GraalVM referred to as the "Community Edition (CE)"¹. RedHat built their own distribution based on that source tree called Mandrel². The closed source version is faster in many cases, but the CE release in very capable.
What makes plasma the obvious worse choice? I have a 50” plasma that still looks better than just about any non-OLED TV I’ve seen. I understand price was a concern, but OLED TVs sit in that price category now.
The only real downside with the TV is that uses more power than I’d like and, consequently, throws off more heat than I’d like. Otherwise, it’s been very reliable and looks fantastic. I’m curious what I’m missing.
My experience with small police departments in the US is that they either don’t have the time or the inclination to deal with small property claims. If you’re a business they’ll be there in 10 minutes, but individuals aren’t afforded the same courtesy. Eventually, citizens realize it’s just not worth the cost or the hassle to report a crime unless it helps with an insurance claim.
It doesn’t have to be like X11. Presumably, it’d be something you could disable if you’d like.
It’d be very handy if we had a performant remote desktop option for Linux. I could resume desktop sessions on my workstation from my laptop and I could pair program with remote colleagues more effectively.
In the past I’d boot into Windows and then boot my Linux system as a raw disk VM just so I could use Windows’s Remote Desktop. Combined with VMware Workstation’s support for multiple monitors, I had a surprisingly smooth remote session. But, it was a lot of ceremony.
Repeatedly, you've been dismissive and insulting. It's not conducive to productive conversation. Your characterization of what I do or how I work is wrong. You latched on to some small part you thought would let you "win" and ran with it. If you actually care, I do a lot of open source work so you can find exactly how I work. Naturally, you can't see what I do in private, but I assure you it's not significantly different.
I aim to ship reasonably complete functionality. The "V" in "MVP" means it needs to be viable, not just minimal. Shipping some part that doesn't work standalone isn't useful to anyone. Yes, the PR is smaller, but now the context for that work is split over multiple PRs, which may not be reviewed by the same people. No one really has the full picture beyond me, which I guess is a good way to get my PRs rapidly approved, but a terrible way to get feedback on the overall design.
I don't work with you so I don't particularly care how you work. Again, I was offering up other solutions than running "git commit" every 15 minutes. If you want to manually simulate filesystem snapshots, that's your prerogative. But, you're incorrect that any model other than the one you employ is niche an not how software is written. Elsewhere you dismissed the examples of large, open source projects as being unique. But, you'll find substantially smaller ones also employ a model closer to what I've described.
When the news hit that the entry model was being retired I thought it might not be so bad because there’s probably a deluge of used models available, either because the owner doesn’t really use it or because they upgraded to the OLED. I was astounded by how many blatant scam postings there are on Facebook Marketplace. I can’t imagine that Meta can’t detect these since every post title ends in some random four character alphanumeric string. I’m concerned now that we’re going to see an uptick in people being scammed because they want a Steam Deck but can’t afford the OLED models.
I don’t have any data to support this, but I suspect a sizable segment of PC gamers aren’t going to view this as the impetus they needed to splurge on the OLED. I doubt very many of those people see this as a double-edged sword. It doesn’t particularly matter to them what Valve’s confidence in the product is if they can’t afford to buy one. While some may buy the step-up model, many won’t. Valve loses out on the sale of the hardware and on the sale of the software to run on it. And I’d be concerned that ceding the lower end of the market is going to poison the well like video game consoles in the early 80s.
With that said, Valve almost certainly has the data and would know better than me. It seems like a gamble to me. Maybe the post is correct and this is all about price anchoring for the new Steam Machine and Frame.
I clean up commits locally as well. But, I really only commit when I think I have something working and then collapse any lint or code formatting commits from there. Sometimes I need to check another branch and am too lazy to set up worktrees, so I may create a checkpoint commit and name it a way that reminds me to do a `git reset HEAD^` and resume working from there.
But, if you're really worried about losing 15 minutes of work, I think we have better tools at our disposal, including those that will clean up after themselves over time. Now that I've been using ZFS with automatic snapshots, I feel hamstrung working on any Linux system just using ext4 without LVM. I'm aware this isn't a common setup, but I wish it were. It's amazing how liberating it is to edit code, update a config file, install a new package, etc. are when you know you can roll back the entire system with one simple command (or, restore a single file if you need that granularity). And it works for files you haven't yet added to the git repo.
I guess my point is: I think we have better tools than git for automatic backups and I believe there's a lot of opportunity in developer tooling to help guard against common failure scenarios.
> But this would require hand curation? No development proceeds that way, or if it does then I would question whether the person is spending 80% of their day curating PRs unnecessarily.
It's not really hand curation if you're deliberate about it from the get-go. It's certainly not eating up 80% of anyone's time.
Structuring code and writing useful commits a skill to develop, just like writing meaningful tests. As a first step, use `git add -p` instead of `git add .` or `git commit -a`. As an analog, many junior devs will just test everything, even stuff that doesn't make a lot of sense, and then jumble them all together. It takes practice to learn how to better structure that stuff and it isn't done by writing a ton of tests and then curating them after the fact.
> I think you must be kind of senior and you can get away with just insisting that other people be less efficient and work in a weird way so you can feel more comfortable?
Your personal productivity should only be one consideration. The long-term health of the project (i.e., maintenance) and the impact on other people's efficiency also must be considered. And efficiency isn't limited to how quickly features ship. Someone who ships fast but makes it much harder to debug issues isn't a top performer. At least, in my experience. I'd imagine it's team, company, and segment-dependent. For OSS projects with many part-time contributors, that history becomes really important because you may not have the future ability to ask someone why they did something a particular way.
Be that as it may, plenty of engineers don’t understand the full ramifications of their open source license choice. Undoubtedly some, if not many, regret it afterwards. Companies change the terms or revoke licenses all the time. But, the dumb, naive engineer that gave their work away didn’t pay a lawyer to advise how to best give their work away, so screw ‘em.
If I made a boatload of money on the back of someone else’s work, I’d reward them. You wouldn’t. Neither one of us is legally required to. I’m not fond of taking advantage of people that don’t realize their worth. And I think the whole open source thing works best giving and taking, whether that’s code, money, or time.
But, this cutthroat approach to open source also hasn’t always been the societal norm. IBM and others made sizable donations to groups like the Apache Software Foundation back in the 90s and 00s and were more or less expected to do so. It seemed to me more a case of both sides agreeing a bunch of money could be spent on lawyers to iron out whatever terms or we could keep the licensing simple and have a gentlemen’s agreement on how to conduct ourselves. I’ve never heard of the Box2D guy so I hope that fame was worth something. It sounds a lot like being paid in exposure.
To your point, I don’t know how to codify a “leave a penny, take a penny” approach to open source and really don’t have the inclination to spend either the time or the money on a lawyer to figure that out. So, nowadays I just don’t release open source code anymore or, if I do, it’s AGPL just so I can protect my interests. I don’t think I’m alone in this. The camaraderie aspect of it has been supplanted by maximum value extraction and I don’t think that’s really sustainable. But between LLMs and an endless source of naive optimists, maybe this is fine.