I don't know about these days, but at some point neither Debian or Ubuntu Server shipped with Git. You can still find tutorials that start with apt-get update and apt-get install git-core
A lot of important information is on Twitter. Being able to access it without giving them your personal information and without jumping through hoops is a good thing.
What the people defacto running the world's most powerful economy are saying seems quite important to get from a primary source. It's so easy to take a few screenshots of a few tweets and write many completely contradictory stories.
I can assure you, you don’t need to access Twitter to get that information, they are relayed everywhere. Which is really unfortunate because they don’t deserve the attention they receive. Try for yourself, stop using the platform for like a month, you won’t miss anything of value
You don't have to talk to me like a twitter-addicted baby, I was never on it and I probably open a twitter like three times per year.
If you're happy getting your information second-hand, I guess that's your choice, but not everyone is. If I read a news article that cites a tweet as a source, I'd like to see the rest of the tweet thread for context. It might not be what it seems.
Google: scans all books, people can search for them, find little snippets, see the title and author, buy the book to read it
AI: scans all art, people can ask it to produce art they're searching for, no reference to the original or its author, people no longer pay artists/designers/...
I think there's a very obvious distinction there. The whole purpose of copyright is ensuring the financial viability of creating works. AI slop is a direct market substitute for the originals it ate up for training, so it goes directly against that. Meanwhile, search actually improves the reach of works and, well, snippets and summaries are somewhere in between...
Makes it that much more absurd that tooling on modern platforms isn't anywhere near this level of discoverability and developer-friendliness.
I'm not sure if that's the right term, but by discoverability I basically mean having things like pallettes, property editors, visual builders, codegen... Basically that I can look at the pallete of widgets, drag a button onto the screen, click on it, see and rich-edit all the possible properties about the button, one-click codegen an event handler for any possible event of the button... No documentation, no guessing the names of properties of events, everything is just there right in front of me. I miss that from VB.
VB6 sure looks nice, but I promise it was a hostile mess for anything besides simple GUI apps.
Also, trust me, the VB6 interface hits a lot different (which is to say: worse) on a cramped 800x600 or 1024x1768 monitor than whatever spacious thing you're probably viewing it on. =)
Makes it that much more absurd that tooling on modern
platforms isn't anywhere near this level of discoverability
and developer-friendliness.
I can think of a few concrete reasons why.
1. The VB6 UI element palettes work well because there's essentially a 1:1 correlation between the icon and the thing it produces when you drop it onto the canvas. That works well for visual elements but less well for things that don't have visual analogs.
2. Toolbars/palettes don't scale well past a few dozen items, whereas a VSCode-style command palette or text command autocomplete can scale nearly infinitely.
3. The way HTML works is a totally different paradigm than VB6's fixed grids. Obviously (as this demo shows) you can do that in HTML, as long as you're willing to ship stuff that kind of works like a VB6 app.
Also it was fun to have the "invisible" timers placed near the control they worked with. Timer that updates the listbox with serial ports? It's over by the listbox and where is the code for that timer? it's in the timer, double click it!
Yeah, I used it back then. A lot of VBScript on the server and a couple of years Visual Basic on the desktop.
VB/VBScript is almost like writing shell scripts, in one sense. You can write really maintainable, even elegant stuff. It's just that nobody else is, and the language is almost pathologically constructed to discourage it.
(Although, at least shell scripting was never really intended for big apps, so, it has an excuse)
I made a utility, only partly done, to convert Avalonia files to HTML. It was intended to make cross-platform, Python/Tkinkter GUI's with HTML/Flask being a pit stop. Also, run them on QPython on Android. I got too busy to improve it past a few, form controls.
So, I think there's still potential to throw together an interface even if it can't do all of it. We do need a placeholder box that can be labeled for the controls we add manually but use its sizing info. Also, a converter that autoscales them in HTML or Qt to maintain the ratios that were in the VB6 app. For the placeholder, I was temporarily using that one control that's like a giant frame or box meant to contain others.
One reason I abandoned the idea is the AI's are so good now that we can probably just generate better GUI's from scratch or a basic, VB6 sketch. I couldn't justify the work until I try an AI with such projects. To avoid hallucinations or garbagr designs, might make sense to do the original program but AI-generate the transpiler.
VB6 the language was a hostile mess. The form builder approach was also in Delphi, and it was equally great there while having a far better language behind it.
Form builders don’t work for responsive design. That’s it, that’s the entire reason they got dropped by industry.
My recollection (NE USA) was that crappy monitors were common.
I.T. was just less well funded in general back then, I think, and hardware was relatively more expensive.
There was also just much less understanding of "hey, developers need somewhat beefy setups"
I remember at my first professional job, I had a 100mhz or 120mhz Pentium I. The receptionist had a 133mhz Pentium I with, I think, more RAM as well. (I remember because it pissed me off...)
There were also a lot more in-house development jobs. Some small non-tech company would grow to the point that the underfunded IT guy was writing all these little scripts and VB apps. And then he'd finally fight and fight and the company would hire a second person as programmer, so the IT guy could focus on fixing people's printers and reinstalling Windows, and management would not understand why they'd need to spend an extra $2000 buying a nice desktop and monitor for the $40K/year programmer they just begrudgingly hired for their company where the average salary was $27K/year.
Shit, even in the late 2010s, in a lot of places would still look at you like your hair was on fire if you asked for a second monitor... there was a stretch there where I'd just bring one of my own... also I remember I had a job where I had a second company-provided monitor and they took it away because they were hiring more engineers and it wasn't "fair" for me to have 2 because they didn't have the budget to give everybody 2 lmao
Being able to drag a control onto the form and then double click it to get to the event code is just magical. I remember very well clicking around and building things for several hours before reaching for a docs back in the day.
Drag-and-drop visual design is the best possible approach until you add the constraint that the window has to be resizable. Then it turns into endlessly messing with the anchoring and resizing settings for each individual widget, and whenever you add/remove a widget or change the form layout you have to mess with everything again. The best experience I've had with UI development is on Palm OS, simply because all devices have the same 160x160 logical resolution and all software runs in fullscreen. You never have to worry about resizing anything so drag-and-drop design with everything just placed on absolute coordinates becomes feasible.
>relying on supply and demand leads to unfair outcomes
And I don't think anyone here is unaware of this either. Peoples abilities (actual or potential) will forever be variable and fall on some sort of standard distribution.
This is not about abilities at all though, compensation shouldn't be tied to just "ability" either. My point is that it should to some extent depend on the risk a person takes on as well.
No matter how many people are are able and willing to do some "low-skill high-risk" work, their salary should reflect the fact they are taking on a risk. Taking that risk should be valued and rewarded by society.
This is not about equal outcomes, it's about fair compensation. If someone risks their life and damages their body in a mine every day, it's absurd and insulting that I make more than them sitting in an air-conditioned desk typing on a keyboard.
What’s the point of this? Talking about fairness or how things should be doesn’t do anything. How do you actually accomplish it? Without some notion of what could be done, it’s akin to complaining about the weather.
Well recognizing the problem is the first step, no? If you scroll up you'll see that this is what this was about. There are plenty of people who haven't even gotten that far and think supply and demand is the perfectly fine and the only option.
But sure, if you want, there are plenty of ways. Mandatory bonuses for higher-risk or generally physical labour would be one easy start, although it likely wouldn't be as effective in practice as one would like it to be. Restructuring the way people are paid as a whole is a more effective solution, which could cover other aspects too, although it would obviously be less popular with The Shareholders™ and therefore more difficult to pass. It's all a matter of legislation - every sane country has a law that says what the salary may or may not be based on, various limits (e.g. minimum wage), bonuses and modifiers... Maybe take inspiration from some countries' public sectors and make salaries fully standardized with a big lookup table and a bunch of modifiers based on objective or at least measurable parameters?
I don’t see anyone not acknowledging the problem. Some don’t see a good solution.
You propose a legal requirement to pay these people more. That will indeed solve the problem of unfairly low pay for these jobs. It will also create a problem of reduced hiring for those jobs and reduced output, possibly substantially reduced depending on how much more they have to be paid.
In short, you can mandate that lumber mill workers must be paid more, but you have to accept that less lumber gets produced and fewer people get paid to work there.
Less lumber gets produced, luber prices get higher or lumber productions profits get smaller, yes. Ideally it's a mix of the three.
But this isn't nearly as bad as you're making it sound. Lots of things used to be done by extremely low-wage workers or even slaves, and haven't gone away now that workers have to be paid better (or at all). Obviously many of those people are still paid very poorly and there's lots of work left to do there, but we improved things to a noticable extent and we didn't really suffer any bad effects. We can go further.
A lot of that was automation rather than legislation. You could use this as an automation push. That could work well. My main point is that this should be something like “legislation should mandate higher wages for riskier jobs and push for automation to control costs and reduce risk” rather than “it’s unfair.”
You're mixing up two parts of the discussion. This is unfair, THEREFORE we should ____. You need to agree on what the problem is, why it's a problem and what the outcome should be, then you can get to the methods.
And no, not that much. Automation is of course a factor, but it came at different times for different things and don't forget that it often made things worse for workers, at least where or when they didn't have institutional support.
Having institutional support for workers (unions and a pro-labour government) is what ultimately matters. Even if some prices go up and some jobs are lost, such institutions help smooth out the transition and put pressure on businesses which would otherwise jump at the opportunity to also increase their margins.
Pretty much everyone will agree that, all else being equal, it would be good for riskier jobs to pay more. Higher pay is pretty much always better than lower pay if that's the only difference. Where it breaks down is that all else is very much not equal. Whatever method you use to increase pay is going to have other consequences and people disagree about what those will be and whether they're worth it.
My problem is that "it's unfair" turns it into a value judgment. Then when someone is skeptical that it can be improved without making things worse overall, or worse when someone is skeptical of a particular proposed solution, that gets turned into a moral failing.
If you perceive disagreement over the fairness of paying people badly for risky jobs, I think it's because it's so basic that people just skip over that. A small child can identify unfairness. The interesting and difficult part is what to do about it.
You'd be surprised. People regularly say that this is completely fair because the higher-paid people worked harder to get their education/skills/whatever, or that they literally just paid more for their education and that investment should be returned. I've head many other roundabout ways of basically saying "it's a fair system, people just need to work garder/smarter/whatever" and they actually believe it.
Equality in outcome doesn't need to be the goal. I much prefer the idea that someone who puts in (40|30|20) [0] hours a week of actual work gets some sense of dignity and purpose from that work along with a reasonable standard of living, no matter what the work involves.
[0] actual number would vary by culture, nation and technological time period
If by "supply and demand" you mean all supplies have positive and reasonably sized elasticity, and all demands have negative and reasonably sized elasticity, through all reasonable price ranges...
Some niche cases include any kind of labor, anything that comes out of a factory with economies of scale, and anything that involves land or extraction of natural resources.
No?? I'm sorry but that's an insane comparison. We live in countries that have laws. Those laws are what applies the "law" of supply and demand to wages. We could alternatively have laws that say all human labor is paid equally per hour worked, or have a master table of types of work to monetary amounts, or some complex formula that takes various measurable factors into account.
I'm not saying any of those specific examples would be better than the current, but they're definitely options that exist and they're just words on a page passed by parliament, just like the current system is.
Hell, some of those things already exist in the public sector [0]. My base salary is calculated based on my job title and level of education, automatically adjusted with cost-of-living inflation, with modifiers for years of experience, job performance, being on-call, mentoring, working non-standard hours or weekends, dangerous conditions...
[0] I'm only familiar with some EU countries, not sure how this is done in the US or wherever else
This whole discussion is about the fact that it isn't paid well but it should be paid well.
But yeah, if "as far as you're concerned", what defines value is only the price under an unconstrained suppy-demand system, then this discussion won't go anywhere.
I read a book called "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea" by Barbara Demick, about North Koreans in the 1990s that escaped into China and told their story. One of the interesting parts of it is about the planned economy, and all the control the government exerts over the economy in NK.
There was a massive famine I didn't know about in the mid-to-late 1990s in NK, and millions died. During this period, an underground capitalism took over, where people were producing food in various ways, often grown in their own gardens, and then buying and selling from each other, with barter rates / prices determined by availability.
While I agree with you that countries can make rules that fix prices (or do whatever they want), there is an underlying set of mechanisms to supply and demand that are not derived from law, but logic. If I have 5 cupcakes, and there are 100 people that want them, unless someone points a gun at me and says "Sell them each for 5 cents" (while the 100 people all fight over who gets to pay), the natural incentive structure would essentially be an auction to figure out who is willing to pay the most, and then sell it to them. That's not some legal theory or set of laws, but rather the human condition.
Of course, it doesn't play out this way in reality. In reality, it all comes down to power, and those with power take whatever they want, but my point here is that supply and demand exist outside of a legal structure, and if there's only one electrician, and there's enough work for 10 electricians, that one electrician can server the richest 1/10 of those in need (and charge accordingly to select that 1/10), and it is rational to do so independent of any laws made. So much so, in fact, that laws are advisory, but the fundamental incentives are inherent.
This is why I like incentives more than rules: they're less brittle.
There are many inherent incentives that we correct for with laws. The incentive for people to shoplift is high, but we counter it with the threat of fines or jail. Similarly, the incentive is to raise prices / undercut wages / do arbitrage... and we can counter that with similar punishments.
I'm not saying I have the magic formula for how to codify such crimes and what punishment would be appropriate, but it took us hundreds of years to figure out how to effectively deal with even very basic crimes (and some countries still struggle with those).
Why does a kid in kindergarten that hoards all the crayons for himself get told off, but buying all the masks during a pandemic to sell at an insane profit was considered valid economic activity? We have arbitrarily decided that various tiers of "being an asshole" are somewhere between ssocially unacceptable and criminal, but if you're making money, being an asshole is fine. We can change that.
The fact that this article even exists supports the fact that they have to look like they're waiting for a warrant in order for the evidence to be admissible, so they've found a clever trick.
If the software hacks the phone first, but only releases the information later, while marketing itself as simply "preserving the device state", they can point at that marketing and say "we're just preserving evidence while waiting for a warrant", despite the fact they've actually already broken into your phone.
Yes, I have. They hate all this red tape (warrants), they hate that everything is encrypted, they're annoyed they don't have the budget for more seat licenses of the latest version of Cellebrite so they could crack more phones and faster. For most cops, wanting to cut red tape and "just do whatever it takes" is in their blood.
I don't know what you're not seeing here. Even the most honest and fair cop would love to "preserve evidence" while they wait for a warrant - they already turn on airplane mode and put devices in a Faraday cage, sometimes they even put them to charge so they stay AFU until they get a warrant. To them, such software is just a natural extension of that, after some manufacturers added auto reboots.
And from the software vendor's perspectice, it nakes perfect sense to take advantage of AFU, hack the phone, dump it or install a backdoor to "preserve AFU" and then pretend to hack it once the cops click "I have a warrant now". It's a great business model - it solves a real problem, it gives you a competitive advantage, you aren't even technically lying, just not telling the whole truth.
What I'm not seeing is the problem. I'm thankful that the police did everything in their power to put the man who abducted me behind bars. He did things to me that are too awful to talk about here, you should be thankful you've never been through anything like that. If you had I think you would see things very differently.
Your logic is that cops do good things (put bad criminals in prison) therefore we should let them do whatever they want. Talk to anyone who's been the victim of police brutality, falsely accused, falsely imprisoned... and you'll see why this doesn't work.
I've been hearing about the US searching phones for many years, but not a single time for any other (non-dictatorship) country. The advice for travelling to the US in my circles is "wipe your device, install some believable bullshit, restore from backup when you're through". Not for any other "normal" country.
So you don't miss ads, you miss a scheduled break. You literally said you walk away when they happened, so you didn't even see them.
That's fine and there are tools to get that scheduled break back - even the official YouTube app has options to remind you to take a break every X min of watchtime and there are some very advanced general screentime limiting apps out there.
As you say YouTube ads aren't scheduled well and they're too short and unpredictable to even go to the bathroom during. Integrated ad reads are even worse in that regard.
I love sponsorblock, it feels like adblock felt the first time I installed it.
Every time I see a creator I like do a "smooth transition" from content to ad, it makes me feel betrayed. Not only are they about to read words someone else wrote for them and which they don't really believe, they spent an extra 15 seconds pretending it was part of the video in order to keep my full attention when they throw the sponsor name in my face. It's scummy behaviour.
Creators need sponsors to pay the bills, just as they do ads, I get it. I don't fault them for the industry basically forcing them into these kinds of "integrated ad reads", as well as the fact basically all the sponsors have huge ethical problems. But I will not subject myself or the people who watch videos with me or on my devices to this brain rot.
That's why I try to support them in other ways (YouTube Premium, Patreon, etc.) and run adblock and sponsorblock on everything. By my napkin math, they make more this way anyways.
And does it even work? I feel like the only person on YouTube who has a clue about sponsorship is LTT. Their spots are like 10 seconds which is short enough that sometimes I'll be too lazy to skip it. In contrast to those 2 minute segments where I 100% skip every time.
Unless the goal of the spot is literally just "Our name exists!!" which tbf it probably is for all those VPN ads, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.
It literally is "our name exists". It sticks in your subconscious and can influence you in the future.
A great example of this is Raid Shadow Legends. They were sponsoring what felt like every channel, to the point where it became a meme. But at some point, someone is going to go through the app store looking for an app to help with their boredom and is going to see Raid, at which point their subconscious says "I know that name. I should check it out."
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