I personally found the text hard to read (both because of the typeface and the small size), the animations distracting during scrolling (while I'm trying to skim the content), and the background colors too dark for dark text on them with jarring full white (#FFF) colored text.
I understand they're trying to go for a whimsical and fun feeling, but imo as implemented it is far from "really well made".
I just found reading it fun, but I didn't skim it so I can imagine its a bit much when skimming, I am not much of a designer. I like the style of whimsy, but I think its just a matter of preference.
I speak Russian and some Bulgarian as third/forth languages, and while I agree that Russian is more difficult, I wouldn't say Bulgarian is "extremely easy" in comparison. It's maybe ~20% easier at best.
I think Bulgarian is considered the easiest Slavic language in terms of grammar because it has a simplified case system similar to how English dropped its cases over time.
Several of my colleagues were laid off. We all worked on the same project. I reviewed their code and was in meetings with them daily, so I know what their performance was like. They were absolutely not poor performers and it was ridiculous that they were laid off and labeled as poor performers. The project was a success too.
I like the vulnerability displayed by the author. I'll share a moment myself:
A few years ago I was the TL on a FAANG Android project, where for a few months I was doing more spreadsheet/TPM work than usual, and didn't have much time for coding. Once we had a meeting where I ended up coding in Kotlin live in front of a dozen younger devs to discuss the implementation of some feature. My work background is Android and Java/Kotlin, but at the time I was mostly coding in C on the side, and in the moment my brain just forgot what the syntax in Kotlin is for a "switch-case" statement, so I wrote "switch", "match", etc, struggling like a first year student, while everyone watched me fumble, until I just gave up and said: "oh my god, I'm forgetting Kotlin. What the hell is the switch keyword in Kotlin called?". Then someone said: "it's when".
I felt old and a little embarrassed, but mostly I was surprised at how quickly I could forget a programming language I used daily.
I had a boss ask me to prepare $thing he would later copy into the appropriate place. Called me over to his desk, couldn't copypaste it into the textarea. Keystrokes weren't pasting. Whatever he was doing was definitely not Ctrl+V. "Try right-click > paste.. there you go". There was no question he was technical. I guess we can't be at peak performance 100% of the time can we? Just tonight I asked my partner who was going to shower with our toddler as he sat in the bath in front of me..
I only hope that our field becomes heavier in the upper age category. Then maybe people will be more sympathetic towards my fumbles around languages I use frequently. ... I feel like I am always looking something up.
I feel this is similar to how my brain works. If I am not using a skill close to every day/week then it can atrophy fairly quickly. On the plus side, it also comes back quickly (usually) if I start using it with greater regularity again.
I notice that general concepts usually stick better in my brain than specific things like your example with ‘when’. Even those are pruned down a bit after long enough though.
I write switch statements rarely enough that I probably have to look up the syntax every second or third time I use one. There is no shame in forgetting something used rarely enough that it doesn't stick. Especially when you can quickly look it up.
The author had a shower thought. It was poorly explored, poorly argued and deliberately packaged in complex language to hide the lack of substance. The bibtex reference at the end is the cherry on top.
Hey, I have my share of poorly-explored showethought posts, but at least I don't try to ornament them in sesquipedalian locution that purposely obfuscates the rudimentariness of the notion.
We had a Lada Samara. It was considered a good car in the 90s. I have "fond" memories of helping my dad push the car to the nearest gas station whenever we ran out of gas - which was a few times a week, because we usually didn't have enough money to fill up the tank. Sometimes he'd drive me most of the way to school, the car would run out of gas, and then I'd walk the rest of the way. He'd then figure out a way to get just enough gas to drive the car back home.
My uncle had a Lada 2101 ("Kopeyka", i.e. "1 cent") and that was a rust bucket, but he also drove it on unpaved country hills for decades. He was growing watermelons and he used his Lada to transport the watermelons to the farmer's market. You would be amazed to see how many watermelons fit in that small car.
Both of these were better than my grandfather's Moskvich. I actually liked the rugged feel of the Moskvich, but it had a known design fault with the handbrake causing it to malfunction, so for uphill parking purposes, we always had to carry a brick or two in the trunk.
I wanted to cross a mountain in Uzbekistan by bike. As I found myself pushing my bike up a dry riverbed full of large stones, I thought, “Who the hell mapped this as a vehicle track on OpenStreetMap? No one could drive this”. And then I was twice passed by locals in some ancient Soviet-era vehicles that coped with the terrain just fine. I had to respect that tech, which could probably be repaired with simple tools.
Not sure what they were, though. LuAZ-1302? Liva Nivas? Simple Lada models (whether praise or mockery) are part of folklore in several countries outside the former USSR, but I feel like Soviet 4WD vehicles are talked about less internationally.
Spaniard here. My dad owned a Lada Samara too; but infinitely tweaked in order to fit the standards on security from Spain in the 90's. It couldn't compete with most of the cars made form the West in the 90's (especially on acceleration and top speeds) but it worked without many issues over 20 years.
Yes, upon entering the cars of my friends' relatives it often was like entering an F16 because of how smoothly their hit 100 kph on highways,
but I'm sure most of these modern cars with ABS and whatnot had had repairing/fixing issues in the upcoming years (and not cheap to fix).
Honestly, open source software should come with a price. I think the "starving artist" approach is detrimental long-term.
Sure, there is great value in having a free (in both senses) operating system, but at the same time the year of Linux desktop is a running joke.
To be blunt, money motivates people to do the work they otherwise would not do. It's soul crushing to run the 400th manual test. It's not sexy to work on a lot of the bugs that affect real users, so, when there's no money in it, the work tends to focus in areas of passion and feature development.
Maybe if we all sent $1 to open source projects we use, there'd be enough funding to hire QA people and engineers to fix things like Ubuntu's suspend/resume on my Lenovo laptop, you know?
While I love the idea of a better deal for free and open source software developers, I don't think a sales/transactional model will actually solve the problem at scale.
For one thing, it will eat away at the reasons you like open solutions in the first place.
If it became normal/expected to pay for open source software, businesses would control a lot more open source software.
> when there's no money in it, the work tends to focus in areas of passion and feature development.
But when there is money in it, the work tends to focus on quarterly revenue.
> funding to hire QA people and engineers to fix things like Ubuntu's suspend/resume on my Lenovo laptop, you know?
Surely the money you gave to Lenovo would cover that? Like there must be $1 in each laptop they sell that could have gone towards even documenting the hardware so some nice developer can implement a working driver/whatever. Really, it's not the Ubuntu or Linux people that need to be paid to solve that problem, Lenovo is free to submit a patch whenever the hell they want to, they just don't want to.
> businesses would control a lot more open source software
Only because individuals would presumably open LLCs
> But when there is money in it, the work tends to focus on quarterly revenue.
I don't think the choice is between "John works on this project 11pm - 1am on the days he feels like it" and "John wants to IPO his company". I'm advocating for "John works on this project 3 days of the week because people pay him a small fee for using his project".
> Surely the money you gave to Lenovo would cover that?
The money I gave to Lenovo went to Microsoft for an OEM license to the pre-installed Windows OS. When I download Ubuntu and install that on my laptop, Lenovo couldn't be bothered to see if closing the lid suspends the laptop or not.
Should Lenovo write drivers for my custom kernel as well? As a business, why should Lenovo bother to implement resume capabilities for an OS that is a rounding error for their consumer line of laptops?
> Sucks that Lenovo doesn't think supporting Linux on your laptop is important.
This is the downside of not owning both software and hardware. The integration is lacking. I already gave money to Lenovo when I bought my laptop, and clearly they're not going to support Ubuntu. Maybe if I gave money to Ubuntu, they would support this hardware. It's worth a try, because leaving it at "sucks" is not acceptable.
Yeah life isn't great over here in Ubuntu on Asus Land. It's ok, but my laptop is dead when i pick it up way more than it should be.
Linux and laptops have always been a develops combo ime. Honestly at many issues as i have with my Asus, it's the best Linux laptop experience I've had yet
Personally, I give to projects I use (and ones that need most help), and I'm happy that say my younger self or people with no conditions can still use it without paying. I think there should probably be better coordinated efforts in this direction, from say companies to governments. But meanwhile individual donations are already pretty powerful if even a small % of people that can donate do.
In particular, governments traditionally already allocate resources for the common benefit (their main function really), in public research and public science, public infrastructure, etc.. I think this is just another very significant extension of that.
Also companies benefit greatly from OS/(and OSHW in the future?), and frequently maintain private tools at significant costs. Open source can be seen as a coordination mechanism where everybody can (or rather, should) cooperate to lower costs and benefit everyone (basically, their whole industry or rather society gets more efficient) :)
Our experiences do not match. I used Borland Delphi to build business apps 20 years ago just using the UI builder. I've been using Android Studio to build apps at FAANGs for 10 years now and I cannot remember the last time the Design tab was useful - it was always faster and more reliable to just edit the XML file.
Yes, Delphi didn't do resizing windows and crashed half the time, but I was pretty happy with the WYSIWYG / UI building functionality for production apps.
Android Studio's UI builder is nowhere near that level of usefulness. I have a hard time believing anyone is using the UI builder in Android Studio for anything other than tutorials or entry level Android apps. It doesn't render the layout properly 90% of the time, or just renders some placeholders with no content and calls it a day.
For a modern IDE, Android Studio is somewhere between just OK and bad, mostly because it has features the other IDEs didn't at the time, but the dev experience is behind Turbo Pascal in the 90s on MS DOS. The editor is laggy. The debugger is slow and hangs often. The list goes on, but I'll stop the rant here.
Android Studio had the exact WYSIWYG experience other toolkits used to have, it was just hidden behind an <AbsoluteLayout> because designing mobile applications the way desktop applications used to be designed is an awful idea.
Drop an AbsoluteLayout into a design and you can drag, drop, and resize buttons to your hearts' content. You'd have the same problem with VB6 where your buttons would fall off the screen if someone ran your application at a lower resolution than you designed it for, but that was never a problem for the desktop designer.
For the same reason dumping buttons on an arbitrary coordinate and resizing by eye is no longer acceptable on desktop, that same ease of design died out in Android for any serious application developer. It stuck around a while longer on desktop, unfortunately, but modern frameworks pretty much all use declarative layouts these days.
I understand they're trying to go for a whimsical and fun feeling, but imo as implemented it is far from "really well made".
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