> I believe that "single source of truth" is a principle that should always be followed
Theoretically and conceptually I agree. But in practice there are a lot of programming languages aren’t as expressive. People prefer codebases with duplications rather than visitor patterns everywhere. In essence, visitor pattern is a tool to solve multi-dimensional abstraction problems, just like type classes in Haskell or CLOS in Common Lisp. But it’s so verbose and non-straightforward so more often than not it’s not worth it even conceptually it’s a legit case for “single source of truth”.
It doesn't really make sense to me. I've been using Emacs and Vim for decades, and have been using Claude Code for months, but I moved to Codex GUI and the VSCode Claude Code plugin eventually. The biggest problem is that monospaced fonts are not really the best for reading, and with coding agents, people should be reading text most of the time.
The current implementation isn't command-line, but a re-implemented GUI in disguise, awkward and even more buggy. Why should I use that over a GUI? I would prefer Electron over those TUI unless I have to SSH.
I know it's too sharp for many people, but I've also heard a lot of people say they really enjoy touching the sharp corners of MacBooks repeatedly during boring meetings...
It really is silly. The other day I decided to try this openclaw thing out but concerned about the security stuff, so I took VM for a spin only to find out the iCloud and the App Store were restricted.
I worked with an excellent QA once, and that changed my perspective completely as a dev.
A great QA can understand the features of a product quickly, turn those concepts into some sort of grid or matrix in their mind, then pull a bunch of paths and scenarios with estimated priorities and probabilities at a fast and efficient pace, all with great coverage. They can also identify features contradicting each other more quickly than product people.
I think a good QA is capable of being a great vibe coder nowadays, too. If you can write great test suites (write names only), agents nowadays are able to turn those specs into decent codebases. Comparatively, I know a lot of decent dev having not very good taste in testing, who often write overlapping tests or missing important paths.
This hasn't been my experience either. I personally find the max plan is very generous for day-to-day usage. And I don't even use compact manually.
However, when I tried out the SuperPower skill and had multiple agents working on several projects at the same time, it did hit the 5-hour usage limit. But SuperPower hasn't been very useful for me and wastes a lot of tokens. When you want to trade longer running time for high token consumption, you only get a marginal increase in performance.
So people, if you are finding yourself using up tokens too quickly, you probably want to check your skills or MCPs etc.
> If tones were completely irrelevant regarding understandably then they would have disappeared long ago.
Probably because it's a legacy and disappearing slowly? Modern Mandarin only has four tones left and has already lost tone patterns.
Do you know there's a "robot tone" in Chinese? It's simply swap every character to the flat or the first tone. Though it's under the stereotypical false assumption that robots have troubles with tones, kids in the late last century often communicated in that tone for fun without issues.
At the end of the day, vocal Chinese is always ambiguous with or without tones and in practice heavily relies on context. It requires written language to truly fix that.
It's essentially asking application developers to wipe ass for OS developers like Microsoft. It's applaudible when you do it, understandable when you don't.
Even though OpenAI has a lot of cash to burn, they're not in a good position now and getting butchered by Anthropic and possibly Gemini later.
If any major player in this AI field has the power to do it's probably Google. But again, they've done the Flutter part, and the result is somewhat mixed.
At the end of the day, it's only HN people and a fraction of Redditors who care. Electron is tolerated by the silent majority. Nice native or local-first alternatives are often separate, niche value propositions when developers can squeeze themselves in over-saturated markets. There's a long way before the AI stuff loses novelty and becomes saturated.
The situation for Desktop development is nasty. Microsoft had so many halfassed frameworks and nobody knows which one to use. It’s probably the de facto platform on Windows IS Electron, and Microsoft use them often, too.
On MacOS is much better. But most of the team either ended up with locked in Mac-only or go cross platform with Electron.
Well, as a northern guy, I do find myself able to understand Mandarin even from Yunnan easily without prior learning. The harder ones for me, like the Hefei dialect, are because the pronunciation is very different, not the tone. Nanjing dialect, on the otherhand, is also from the same Jianghuai Mandarin group as Hefei, which is perfect intelligentable for me.
Even for non-Mandarin/Guanhua, such as the Shanxi dialect, I can understand them because the pronunciation is much closer to mine, just the tones are completely novel.
Impressive work! The idea and the UI is very intuitive.
Though, as a guy who speaks perfect mandarin from Beijing, I’m struggle even to pass the easy ones… So it can definitely used some improvements. The example 你好吃饭了吗 returns hào → hǎo, fān → fàn, le → liǎo. The first two are the model listen my tone mistakenly, and the last one should be le instead of liǎo in this context.
Also I see in the comment section people are worry about tones. I can guarantee tones are not particularly useful and you can communicate with native speakers with all the tones messed up and that’s perfectly fine. Because as soon as you leave Beijing, you’ll find all the tones are shuffled because of every region has their own dialect and accents, which doesn’t stop people from communicate at all. So don’t let tone stuff slow your learning process down.
> Hussein was a brutal dictator and, at least initially, Americans were welcomed as liberators
If the US attack Belarus with an unjustified casus belli like in the Iraq war, it would still be a huge deal just like the current war in Ukraine - despite everybody knowing Lukashenko is also a dictator.
The elephant in the room & the key difference between Iraq and Ukraine: There are substantially more people in the West who consider Ukrainian people are "one of us civilized people" compared to the Iraqi people.
Haha, this is so true. Good observation! With that said, I live in China so most of the books are translated versions so:
1. They're substantially cheaper, the total of those books should be around $100 while the monitor mounts me more than $140
2. Those classical tech books are usually translated by the same publication so the design and size are satisfyingly the same.
It is one of the small things I feel grateful for. Books in China generally cost like $6 ~ $18. The first time I see the price tag of English books it was just jaw-dropping.
I've been improving my desk accessories since the COVID breakout.
Aeron Chair + IKEA IDÅSEN electric standing desk. With perfect height combination finally, I don't feel shoulder pain when typing. Unlike most standing desks, IDÅSEN is not wobbly at all.
A double-decker book stand. I sometimes get distracted when I use the computer so I started to spend more time on paper-based workflow. I have serious back pain when I am writing, and taking notes from textbooks is not pleasant because books are not only too far but tend to close themselves from time to time. The double-decker book stands[0] solved both problems perfectly.
Mac Pro. I used to have a PC and Macbook Pro and switch back and forth because I want Windows to play video games and macOS for the rest of the tasks. It was a mess. I also tried Hackintosh it was not good. With Mac Pro, I can reboot to Bootcamp pretty fast. TBH it's not a good deal but it did reduce the hassle so there's no regret. M1 is good and all but there's no Bootcamp and the GPU is not as powerful.
What didn't meet the expectation are the monitor mounts. Not only they didn't add any value for me, but also the maximum height is too low for me. Eventually, I go back to the old solution: Just put several thick textbooks under the monitors. (my personal choice: CLRS + CSAPP + HTDP + Computer Networking + Algorithms 4th :))
> Work is just work and unless you're curing cancer
This sounds bad. But it is so true that people ignore it all the time. Big companies like Google asked their employees to do measurable contributions to the projects in order to be promoted in the performance review, while most projects don't have any measurable/non-measurable contribution to society. Some of the projects are even neither benefit to the society nor not profitable, they are completely pointless, and just wait to be abandoned years later.
Theoretically and conceptually I agree. But in practice there are a lot of programming languages aren’t as expressive. People prefer codebases with duplications rather than visitor patterns everywhere. In essence, visitor pattern is a tool to solve multi-dimensional abstraction problems, just like type classes in Haskell or CLOS in Common Lisp. But it’s so verbose and non-straightforward so more often than not it’s not worth it even conceptually it’s a legit case for “single source of truth”.