I don’t know what you’re referring to. Unsafe seems pretty well defined for 99% of use cases. Unsafe blocks allow you to dereference raw pointers and call unsafe functions. Thats about it. Remarkably, even in codebases which need a lot of unsafe (eg the kernel), almost all code is safe code.
I disagree. Rich text editors on the web are already a massive hack, because there aren’t any built in input elements which support rich text. There’s just contentEditable and textarea (plain text). There’s no such thing as “doing it properly” when it comes to rich text. Editors have to hack around what the browser provides via a million event handlers. And - surprise! Mobile browsers don’t expose the same events as desktop browsers.
The right fix is for browsers to have a real rich text element of some sort. Then editors wouldn’t need all their hacks. And mobile browsers would be able to behave correctly when you tap on some editable rich text.
Whenever I travel, I bring a CO2 meter with me. It’s amazing how often the air is bad. Often in unexpected places. My meter hit 3100 in an uber once. I didn’t even notice until I got to my hotel room and looked at the data log. It was a fresh, hot day outside. The uber had windows closed and AC on. I bet he had no idea - but he was driving with significant cognitive impairment. Takeoff and landing in planes are always the worst. If you get sleepy as the plane is taking off, it’s not you. The plane’s ventilation doesn’t work properly when the plane is stationary. So before a plane is in the air, they often hit 2500.
Yeah I did a review of web based rich text editors a couple years ago. They all seemed fine on desktop, but on mobile every one I tried was junk. I couldn’t select. Autocorrect was broken. Tapping text didn’t move the cursor. Typing would stop working. The keyboard wouldn’t disappear when the element lost focus. And so on.
There have been several efforts over the last couple decades to add a proper rich text element to the web. I don’t know why they have all failed - I guess it’s a large, complex and thankless task. It’s a pity. Proper native rich text support is one of the web’s big blind spots. It’s a problem native platforms have solved decades ago.
I had an 11” 2011 air. An incredible machine, one of the best I’ve ever owned. I stupidly replaced it with the 2016 retina touchbar MacBook Pro - which is hands down the worst Mac I’ve ever owned bar none. My modern M1 is fine. But that little air was somehow more fun.
> Where are the dozens of European tech winners? Seriously. They have the best education system in the world, strong social safety nets, cheap healthcare, and great lifestyles. Why have they not created innovative technologies that turn into worldbeating companies?
This is a great question. I'm Australian, and I ask myself the same question constantly here in Aus. The engineers I graduated with in Sydney are easily as good as the engineers I worked with in the Bay Area. But where are all the startups?
Having worked in Aus and SF, I think the two big elements are culture and finance. We don't have a culture in Aus of risktaking and entrepreneurship. People just seem less interested here in changing the world by starting a tech company. If you do start a business, you're kind of on your own. There isn't a community of people who've done it before who can guide you. And there isn't the same sort of venture capital here. Lenders only want to make sure bets. There's money for low risk, low yield lending. But there are barely any funds for high risk, high yield. The successful tech startups I know in australia bootstrapped themselves (Fastmail, Atlassian).
As far as I can tell, Europe has the same problems. Europe has capital, but I don't think that capital it looking to make angel investments.
But maybe cutting ties with the US tech scene would help change that? So long as Google Docs works well, nobody is clamouring to make or fund a competitor. But take google docs away, and suddenly there's a clear need and a chance to make a lot of money. That could spur innovation.
> If the EU takes the DPA 'independence' seriously, they will end up marginalized in the tech space.
If NVIDIA can't sell GPUs to China, will that marginalise chinese technology? Or will it help supercharge a local industry? It might do both - hobbling chinese AI in the short term, but helping chinese competitors emerge in the medium to long term. US tariffs are the same. They might "marginalise" the US economy. But maybe they'll revitalise the US manufacturing industry too? We'll see!
The EU has a tremendous number of smart software engineers. They're more than capable of recreating the US technology stack locally. Especially with the benefit of hindsight, and with access to opensource software. In the long run, I wouldn't be surprised if Europe ended up richer by building their own tech stack "in house" instead of outsourcing to US hyperscalers.
Me too. It’s output was fabulous. And it acted like a senior engineer - actually coding up hypotheses, testing them, finding problems and presenting good, usable recommendations backed by solid evidence and wisdom. It can probably do most of my job, which gave me a bit of an existential crisis.
I’ve paused my Claude subscription until they bring it back. Opus makes mistakes constantly, on every level of abstraction. Every time I look closely at its work I find problems.
FOSS doesn't mean you give up all rights to your work. In this case, the software is AGPL licensed, which imposes huge list of requirements on copies - including attribution and sharing back changes.
Yes, I agree. But not all technical writing is README files. For books and long form articles, markdown simply isn't powerful enough. And for stuff like this, nobody cares whether or not the source is readable as plain text.
But you can't abstract. I can't make a custom template for an image + caption, and use it throughout my markdown document.
You can do some pretty wild stuff with html. But if you do, you get an unreadable jumble of markdown and HTML. It loses the single advantage of markdown - which is that its human readable as a text file.
> it is plain you want typst or latex and not a markdown or any other so called lightweight markup
Yes, I've been quite clear on that point. Markdown isn't powerful enough for some of the writing I do.
Upthread you wrote this:
> Ordinary markdowns have had /everything/ you mention for close to 20 years
If this were true, I would have used markdown. If this were true, you would be able to cite a good markdown based tool which had the features I need. You have not.
> you were lying about footnotes, figures, numbered sections, and depending what you meant, a number of other things.
What a strange thing to say. Why would I lie? My needs are quite simple. I want a tool to let me write and publish beautiful essays. (And documentation and the like). Like this:
But markdown isn't powerful enough. For example, I want my diagrams to have captions. And I want to be able to reference to my diagrams from the body - eg "In Diagram 3, ...." and have the diagram in a little box which says "Diagram 3" at the top. And if you click a diagram, it should open a lightbox. I tried a bunch of markdown tooling, but none of it did what I wanted. The bare-bones styling of that webpage is a result of me getting fed up fighting markdown. And I just hit publish.
> It completely violates the concept that you are doing 'custom styling', typography ... you might as well add launching missiles
Bruh what? I want a good authoring tool. Something that lets me write words and render them as a beautiful webpage. Markdown is great for project readmes and things like that. But markdown is a bad tool for the rich, long form essays I want to write. The fact you don't know that isn't evidence that I'm lying. It's just evidence that you're ignorant about the tools I - and others - need to do our jobs.
If you're confused about my tool choice, some curiosity and humility would serve you better than vitriol.
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