An app which only requires 50-100MB released by a major software vendor in 2020. I am shocked. It's a bit short on features though. Hopefully, that's not going to break its neck.
> is that an American spent his money how he liked
Caps on campaign spending are there for reasons. A campaign
should contribute to meaningful public discourse. Nothing more.
> the American media is free enough to have reported on it
Private media can be biased. Either explicitly (lying to peoples faces), or implicitly (self-censorship on stuff related to the owner). Surprisingly, in several countries - such as Britain or Czech Republic - state-owned media are the one sticking to higher values.
> American citizens are now well-informed enough to know that some of the folks they talk to online are paid, and the American election will be based on the interactions of a free people
I thought so as well - up until yesterday when I tried desktop version of Microsoft Outlook. Such an awful experience. Just trying to pick an available meeting room was surprisingly more difficult than on the modern web. And I can hardly see how even Microsoft could bring the web experience to desktop in the future without somehow leveraging the existing online version.
Sometimes I have a "how awful would it be to do XY" moments. Usually something brutal. But it always makes me pay even more attention to not doing that very thing even accidentally because I definitely do not want to break stuff or hurt someone. Yet it makes me a bit nervous. What if I actually decided to do that? Fortunately it never happens when I'm under influence. Do I need help?
It's harder to believe that there is _no way to leak information_ than the opposite. There is always a side channel, right? Timing is the most trivial one.
Most of the issues outlined are problems of the web. The HTML+CSS+JS combo is just painfully slow and wasteful by design - it's just way too many levels of flexible abstractions. Which is suboptimal for app development. Moreover it's expensive to maintain two apps - web and native - which share have the exact same UI/UX. Hence the rise of Electron, React Native , ...
The only way out of this is to rethink the web. Which is a hard one to tackle.
> Modern buildings use just enough material to fulfill their function and stay safe under the given conditions. ... Only in software, it’s fine if a program runs at 1% or even 0.01% of the possible performance.
> I can comfortably play games, watch 4K videos, but not scroll web pages? How is that ok?
IMO the comparison should be buildings <-> fine-tuned libraries (i.e. video decoding algorithms), modern applications <-> cities.
Go to any city center in Europe. Urban planning a century ago was much more elegant and elaborate taking into consideration the city as a whole. Nowadays developers and investors often ignore important aspects, such as surrounding buildings, infrastructure, making cities inefficient for the people who actually live there.
Any system which has plenty of resources has to become inefficient. It's just that the Moore's law allows for pretty damn inefficiency.
I'd like to see a thorough performance evaluation. JS/NPM based untyped language together with communication via HTTP/JSON sounds painfully inefficient.
There seems to be a premise that a programming is actually easy and we are slowly realizing it. Who else finds it flawed?
I've seen plenty of open source code, proprietary startup code, corporate code and it is usually shit - full of premature assumptions and legacy mess. It's because writing good lasting code is super difficult even for great engineers. Moreover, running platforms usually need to be constant maintainance which drives up the demand even more.
There were less students at his time. If there was a way to plot "average added value" of a master's theses trough out the last century, I'd expect it to be non zero historically and then to exponentially converge to zero.
Depends on a country and educational system, right? Yet usually there is someone or some committee which decides whether a piece of work is sufficient for a student to get a master's degree. In other words, they set a bar.
The bar can vastly differ among universities and generations. That's why I asked in the first place.