Are you a bot?
The value they provide has only increased over time. Do you even know what proton is? They rebooutionized Linux gaming and made it open source. Steam input is a godsend, both for developers and players, and I speak as someone who's both. The steam workshop and community market make it easier than ever to add mod support to your games (and to mod your games, from a player's perspective. Just compare modding The Binding of Isaac before vs after the Repentance DLC), and to have marketplace for in-game items, respectively. That's without mentioning the sheer reach that the steam store gives your games.
They've always been the most pro-consumer company in all of gaming. They're still the only company who still gives full, first-class modding and community server support for their multiplayer games. Not a SINGLE other company does that, and as a player, I highly appreciate that. It's the only thing that keeps me from getting too mad about the way Valve has been treating TF2 in the last decade. Other companies (including Epic!) just let their games become lost media.
They're the biggest for a reason. Players choose them, and developers choose them. I have tons of free games on Epic. I even bought some games on there. But I just never play them. Logging in is a hassle, the app is slow, and it's just not as smooth, especially on Linux. Epic never gave a fuck about me. Valve helped me at times I thought no company possibly would. I managed to refund a game weeks after the deadline, because a Valve employee noticed I hadn't actually played the game until nearly a month after purchase, and they let me get my money back. Would Epic do that? I doubt it.
The PlayStation comment is just so uneducated and ignorant it's not even funny. I won't even take the time to argue with that
I don't think I understand what you're trying to say in this comment, but if by:
>if you actually manage to stonewall that through technological or other means, those will be destroyed
You mean some kind of resistance against tyrannical policies, then those "other means", if I understand what you're saying, are often illegal. True resistance that causes true societal change isn't parading the streets with signs or talking to your local representative. It's sabotage, vandalism, and in extreme cases, violence. True activism. The surveillance state's main goal is disrupting such initiatives before they can even get off the ground.
I disagree.
The definition of "bad actor" constantly changes. Something you do legally today can and will become illegal in the future, and if you don't change your ways, you will be a bad actor, too.
The people pushing for this under the guise of protecting children are the same people who went on The Island, or at least protect those who did. They never cared about children's safety.
The biggest criminals of all are the very same people pushing for these laws, this surveillance, this control. Don't be fooled.
Exactly, this platform has fallen down so incredibly low. Every other post is worthless garbage about LLMs, without a single ounce of actual science being showcased, created, or even talked about. But a whole post about a markdown file is a new low imo. How does anyone who's actually competent at all in their domain think that this is worth sharing?
In Common Lisp, the compiled code and data are both saved as a memory snapshot, kind of like an OS image (think an ISO you can boot into).
This means you can hot-swap the code part, while keeping the data and run-time configuration, on a running system.
A REPL is part of it, but it's not the whole picture.
absolutely this, and I feel the same way about finding it unappealing due to the inconsistency between their "talk" and their "walk". If you preach minimalism but use React or anything similar, you've lost the plot and don't understand what minimalism is at all.
Friendly reminder that not everyone's first language is English, and for a lot of people for whom it isn't, gender-neutral pronouns can be a pretty foreign concept and it's easy to forget about it. We just apply the natural gender that the word has in our language (such as a chair being feminine in both Portugese and French, so a lot of natives of those languages may mistakenly refer to a chair as "her" in English). I wouldn't go so far as assume the person you're replying to is sexist or whatever it is you're thinking just from the fact they referred to an imaginary captain as "he".
I 100% agree, and this isna big reason why I find the current state of education so suboptimal. Everyone just goes on to do webdev, completely ignoring the lower levels and taking it all for granted. The thing is, there's no real innovation to be done that high up the stack. When you're that high you mostly just write glue code to stick parts someone else wrote together. Real innovation comes from quite a few levels down the stack, starting at the native code level downwards.
Like you pointed out, the current stack is heavily unoptimized and has a terrible architecture; it's only the way it is because of happenstance and tides of the market (companies always reaching for faster over better). An actual "nirvana" in computing like the other guy said would require bulldozing a good chunk of our current stack, keeping only kernels and core utilities, if even.
I really wish we had a bigger focus on getting good foundation instead of making yet another JS framework and SaaS, but then again, who's paying developers to actually do something of quality nowadays?
I've genuinely come to believe that we should just burn it all to the ground; have a great reset of the software world. I wholeheartedly believe that 99% of software today could be erased and the world would be the same, if not better. especially when you remember that most of that is web-based slop.
As much as I love the Unixes, I think the only way forward is to either start a Unix-like from scratch without caring about ports or compatibility or cross platform, or just making an entirely new architecture altogether.
It would take a couple years for a team of a few dozen very talented programmers to get a brand new OS off the ground to a semi-usable state, if they're compensated well and work full-time in good conditions and with a clear and solid plan and architecture in mind. This would save the software world in more ways than we can even imagine. But going into this great reset, one of the most important things we should do is gatekeep.
Computer science/engineering is a science like any other, but we haven't held our professionals go even near the same standard as other STEM fields; we've accepted and tolerated mediocrity for way too long. That's the reason we have a macro language to generate scripts to build the browser or whatever the fuck, and why we have React in the terminal and React in Windows and React in fucking everything; why everything is so slow and bloated.
We need to keep finance bros out of tech, keep managers and HR and marketing and anybody else out of tech. Keep web-devs out of tech. Keep vibe coders out of tech. Keep incompetent people out of tech. We're in the digital era now and the current digital world is ruled by slop and incompetence.
i don't think the core problem here has anything to do with trust to be honest. The problem here os developers using so many external packages and code and libraries for their projects; commercial or otherwise.
them just having to ho on trusting everything by default is just one of the many side effects of that.
>Google, Facebook, Apple clearly care deeply about the quality of their code.
Yea, idk about that one.
They definitely did care in the past. They had to if they wanted to get users. But they've stopped caring a good while ago. Especially Microsoft. The costs that bad code would bring them is lower than the cost of developping good code, because they can mostly rely on monopolies and anti-competitive practices for user retention. Their users are more like hostages than anything else.
Not much yet, that's pretty much what I do, although I run void linux and arch on my machines.
But even Linux isn't safe; what if other countries adopt the OS-level age-verification laws that california is pursuing? very few distros will be safe.
And then all they need to do (and you can bet that's exactly what they'd do) is keep squeezing, taking away freedom gradually until most linux distros require you to submit a digital ID on install. And chances are, the few distros and maintainers that go against that would be completely cut off from the mainstream tech ecosystem (which would make them barely usable in this day and age, at least as long as you live in a city with a job and rent and all).
This may sound like a slippery slope fallacy and it may indeed be that, but I can't think of any other possibility if we just let stuff like this keep happening.
It may seem like we're just giving an inch now but in 5 years you'll suddenly realize they've taken a mile.
I'm not sure about op, but as someone who agrees with their comment, yes, I absolutely am. I despise 99% of all digital """services""" that exist. Whether it's cloud, music/movies/series/whatever streaming, subscriptions of almost any kind... They're all extremely dystopian and anti-human. I sail the high seas for almost everything I consume digitally. When I want to support a creator I enjoy, I pay them directly (buy their merch, buy a physical copy of their album, purchase their game and dlcs, or simply directly donate).
In my opinion, corporations being allowed free reign and control over the internet and digital world in general without guardrails was *THE* biggest legislative mistake (although I believe it was done on purpose )in the past century, considering how the internet will most definitely be the defining factor of the era we're currently living in in future textbooks; if we make it that far at least.
I don't think most people understand the sheer magnitude of the damage that corporate slop, control, anti-competitiveness and pursuit of infinite growth at all costs has done to our technological capabilities and advancement.
Hardware is the only area of tech that continually gets better, whilst software continually regresses and gets worse. 90% of "new" code is web-based slop (and now AI generated web slop) that hogs memory and cpu usage, completely undermining all advances in hardware just because companies weren't willing to pay the extra buck to program a native solution that wouldn't force its users to purchase new machines.
If it wasn't for corporate (and many programmers') lazyness, computers from over a decade ago would still be fully functional, fully usable machines that could do the most bleeding-edge of tasks, safe for maybe the most graphically-demanding games and rendering.
And then maybe programmers could focus on actually advancing the science that is writing code, instead of building yet another fucking REST API and React UI. And don't forget to package it all in electron to fuck your users as much as possible, and dodge any need for real engineering.
Companies can just keep offloading costs unto the user, making users buy machines 10x as powerful as the ones they had 5 years ago, just to do the exact same tasks, but 20x slower. But at least they have a nice looking UI right?
because there isn't really that much to change that high up the stack. It's all the same. True innovation happens at the low levels of programming and hardware.
It didn't though.
Not good software at least.
AI (which is what I'm guessing you're referring to here) is simply incapable of writing such mission -critical low-level code, especially for a niche and/or brand new ISA. It simply can't. It has nothing to plagiarize from, contrary to the billions of lines of JavaScript and python it has access to.
This kind of work can most definitely be AI-assisted, but my estimate is that the time gained would be minimal.
An LLM is able to write some functional arduino code, maybe even some semi-functional bare-metal esp32 code, but nothing deeper than that.
Yes it does, especially when you remember the fact that developers are also consumers. But even if they (we) weren't, it would still impact consumers. I, android user who's completely ignorant when it comes to android development or even mobile in general, would be heavily impacted by this.
My custom youtube clients would never be approved by google. My (free) apps for watching anime and reading manga would never get approved by Google.
And something that's approved today could stop being approved tomorrow. it's up to Google / Microsoft / Apple to decide after all, they're the ones in control of our devices. If they stop liking my open-source ad-free minesweeper game, then I can't play it anymore. I'll have to download their bloated proprietary version with ads and a subscription to keep playing.
I don't see how people are against this. Especially tech-savvy people who browse HN. It really seems to me like everyone here who's on Google's side is just a bot in a botfarm somewhere. they can't possibly be real
They've always been the most pro-consumer company in all of gaming. They're still the only company who still gives full, first-class modding and community server support for their multiplayer games. Not a SINGLE other company does that, and as a player, I highly appreciate that. It's the only thing that keeps me from getting too mad about the way Valve has been treating TF2 in the last decade. Other companies (including Epic!) just let their games become lost media.
They're the biggest for a reason. Players choose them, and developers choose them. I have tons of free games on Epic. I even bought some games on there. But I just never play them. Logging in is a hassle, the app is slow, and it's just not as smooth, especially on Linux. Epic never gave a fuck about me. Valve helped me at times I thought no company possibly would. I managed to refund a game weeks after the deadline, because a Valve employee noticed I hadn't actually played the game until nearly a month after purchase, and they let me get my money back. Would Epic do that? I doubt it.
The PlayStation comment is just so uneducated and ignorant it's not even funny. I won't even take the time to argue with that