Good to know. However, I’ve got a feeling the majority of chrome users wouldn’t care, even if they read this. Otherwise they wouldn’t be using chrome in the first place anyway
I think the majority of Chrome users are Chrome users because someone told them it’s better than their OS default browser or that they have to use it. They care first about what other people recommend/support or how they’ll be viewed for doing something different (that too is about personal security but not so abstract). The people to reach with this article are those who influence them—workplace IT decision makers, family nerds.
because someone told them it’s better than their OS default browser
Which unfortunately seems pretty much always true in just about everything except privacy matters. (and even there, there’s often less a question of if someone’s fingers are in your pie than just whose.)
Chrome on OS X was always awful when I tried it because it came with its own versions of everything. Passwords were not stored in the keychain, for example. It felt like a Windows app with a grudging port to Mac.
Last time I bought apple hw it still had a ppc… so will have to take your word for that, I don’t see any such benefits if I can only run it in a hackintoshed vm.
I care, and I really want to use Firefox but the truth is its UI is inferior to Chrome’s. Is this a result of smaller development budget or not a problem recognized by Mozilla at all, I don’t know. On mobile OTOH, it’s the opposite, Firefox is good enough to be the primary browser.
I heard of a time when to “make the world a better place”, one had to hide and fight in mountains. I think that, for someone who cares, adapting to a said inferior UI isn’t that much of a trouble in comparison ;) (and I’m sure one adapts quickly) Good luck!
How is it inferior? To me it feels superior. In general the differences between all the browsers aren’t that large but Chrome feels super ugly to me after the flat redesign, and Firefox has only gotten better and better over the years.
Neovim is a modal editor with lots of legacy and complexity (from vim), lite is a simple editor with little to no legacy and low complexity.
It’s hard to compare them to each other as they are fundamentally different. It’s not something inherently good or bad.
I’m very familiar with using vim but I can’t imagine using vim for anything more than minor edits in textfiles on remote systems. For development I’d use something else.
I’m using lite on my work-work machine as a replacement for notepad (as we are a Windows shop). It works great for that, at least this far.
1Password family means my partner and I can reset each other’s keys. (I haven’t read the whitepaper in a while, but iirc everyone in the family’s private keys get stored encrypted by everyone else in the family. 1P themselves still cannot access your data since they don’t have an unencrypted copy of anyone’s keys, and you can’t indiscriminately access others’ data because the 1P server won’t just give it to you.
Keeping the number of accounts I need to keep track of in the first place low so that manual recovery is plausible!
It’s a good question though - I have had the experience of not having to type my master password for only a week or two, then coming back to it and not having a clue what it was. It was only muscle memory that saved me.
If I’m not mistaken and memory serves, 1Password generates a PDF form for your physical vault or safe deposit box that is an emergency backup plan with your master key.
Yeah, I have this. I also use a family plan, so my wife can get in; and, honestly, I wrote the password down and it’s in our secure storage with our passports and such.
Thanks! I was going to remove it and take another picture but then I thought, well why not just show a slice of everyday life? It’s cold and dry where I live in Canada and my skin needs some lotion so I don’t get the alligator complexion.
I was thinking a lot of this excellent Calvin and Hobbes comic when I was taking the picture, should I clean up my desk before I take a picture so I appear to be neat and tidy or just present my life as-is unfiltered?
I often struggle with how messy my desk becomes. My preferred style of note taking to work out a problem is a good pen and pads of paper, so things end up accumulating and I don’t feel like I want people to see my office. Thank you for sharing this picture! I’m right in the middle of reorganizing, or I’d show you how bad mine can get.
It is! It was an accessory that was available with that monitor and from what I recall, a lot of Dell business/professional monitors. Here’s what it looks like off the monitor.
my partner submitted a patch to OpenBSD a few weeks ago, and he had to set up an entirely new mail client which didn’t mangle his email message to HTML-ise or do other things to it, so he could even make that one patch. That’s a barrier to entry that’s pretty high for somebody who may want to be a first-time contributor.
I think it was actually Gmail that was a barrier. And he also couldn’t do it from Apple Mail. It is just that the modern mail client has intentionally moved towards HTML
I am flabbergasted someone is able to send a patch to OpenBSD but is not able to set the web interface of GMail to sent plain-text emails. Or install Thunderbird, which might have been the solution, in that particular case.
I also never used git send-email, but I don’t think it is the barrier to become a kernel maintainer.
Actually, that might work as an efficient sieve to select the ones who want to be active contributors from those who are just superficial or ephemeral contributors.
In my opinion, although Github supposedly decreases the barrier of first-time contribution, it increases the load on the maintainers, which has to interact with a lot of low-quality implementation, reckless hacks and a torrent of issues which might not even be. That is my experience in the repositories I visit or contributed.
On the other hand, if someone knows how to install OpenBSD, use cvs (or git), program in C and navigate the kernel’s souce-code, I supposed they are capable of going to anysearchengine and find the answer on how to send plain-text email via the GMail interface.
GMail mangles your “plain-text” messages with hard-wraps and by playing with your indentation. You’d have to install and configure thunderbird or something.
Note that this is anecdotal hearsay. This person is saying their partner had to set things up… they may have misunderstood their partner or not realized their partner was exaggerating.
Also, one might expect the amount of patience and general debugging skill necessary to transfer rather well to the domain of email configuration.
It’s also possible that guiraldelli is assuming it was an excepted OpenBSD kernel patch, wheras we don’t know if the patch was accepted and we don’t know if it was a userland patch. It doesn’t take much skill to get a userland patch rejected.
I am flabbergasted someone is able to send a patch to OpenBSD but is not able to set the web interface of GMail to sent plain-text emails.
You can’t send patches, or indeed any formatted plain text emails through the gmail web interface. If you set gmail to plain text, gmail will mangle your emails. It will remove tabs and hardwrap the text. It’s hopeless.
Think about impediments in terms of probabilities and ease of access.
You wouldn’t believe how many people stop contributing because of tiny papercuts. There is a non-trivial amount of people who have the skills to make meaningful contributions, but lack the time.
Lobsters requires an invite. That’s a barrier to entry, so those who make it are more likely to make good contributions, and have already extended effort to comply with the social norms.
You may be willing to jump a barrier of entry for entertainment (that is lobsters) but not for free work for the benefit of others (because you have already done that work for yourself).
If the project wants to have contributors in the future it might want to consider using modern, user friendly technologies for contribution.
Linux is considering it, a discussion is started, which is positive (for the future of the project) in my opinion. It is a sign or responsive project management, where its conservatism does not hinder progress, only slows it to not jump for quickly fading fads.
Other communities are closing their microverse on themselves, where it is not enough to format your contribution in N<80 column plain text email without attachments with your contribution added to it via come custom non-standard inline encoding (like pasting the patch to the end of the line), but you may even need to be ceremonially accepted for contribution by the elders. Also some such projects still don’t use CI, or automated QA. These communities will die soon, actually are already dead, especially as they don’t have large corporations backing them, as someone getting paid usually accepts quite a few papercuts a job demands. This is why Linux could actually allow itself to be more retrograde than the BSD projects for example, which I think are even more contributor-unfriendly (especially ergonomically).
I tend to agree, however that discussion was started by someone with a very striking conflict of interest and therefore their opinion should be questioned and considered to be insincere at best and maleficent at worst.
That doesn’t matter, the discussion can be done despite that. I think a forge-style solution is the key.
Despite Microsoft having 2 “forge” type solutions in its offering (both quite usable in my experience, github being a de-facto standard) I still cannot see a conflict of interest in this topic. There are other software forges available. The current process is simply outdated.A custom solution could also be developed, if deemed necessary, as it was the case with git.
Pay attention my comment talks about maintainers, active contributors and superficial or ephemeral contributors.
From the article:
a problem recently raised by Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds, that “it’s really hard to find maintainers.” Maintainers are the gatekeepers who determine what code ends up in the widely used open-source kernel, and who ensure its quality. It is part of a wider discussion about who will oversee Linux when the current team moves on.
And later on…
“We need to set up a better or a different or an additional way to view tools and the work that’s being done in the Linux project as we’re trying to bring in new contributors and maintain and sustain Linux in the future,” she told us.
Picking her words carefully, she said work is being done towards “moving from a more text-based, email-based, or not even moving from, but having a text-based, email-based patch system that can then also be represented in a way that developers who have grown up in the last five or ten years are more familiar with.
“Having that ability and that perspective into Linux is one of the ways we hope we can help bring newer developers into the kernel track.”
So I understood Sarah Novotny is addressing the problem of new contributors, not the one Linus Torvalds see, of new maintainers.
So, your comment that
how many people stop contributing because of tiny papercuts. There is a non-trivial amount of people who have the skills to make meaningful contributions, but lack the time
is not the problem the Linux Foundation has, but the one that Microsoft’s Sarah Novotny wants to solve. Those are two different problems, with two different solutions. On the surface, they might seem the same, but they are not. They might be correlated, but the solution for one problem does not necessarily mean it is the solution for the other.
Therefore, my argument still stands:
[having a plain-text email list as central communication and collaboration to the Linux’s kernel] might work as an efficient sieve to select the ones who want to be active contributors [i.e., maintainers] from those who are just superficial or ephemeral contributors.
If we are going to address, though, that it might hinder new contributors, then I tend to agree with you. :)
This is just my opinion but I think that while she’s totally missing the mark on finding Linux kernel module maintainers having anything at all to do with plain text email patch submission systems, the general issue she’s speaking to is one that has generated a lot of discussion recently and should probably not be ignored.
Also, in the spirit of the open source meritocracy, I’d prefer to let people’s actions and track records speak more loudly than which company they happen to work for, but then, lots of people consider my employer to be the new evil empire, so my objectivity in this matter could be suspect :)
So I understood Sarah Novotny is addressing the problem of new contributors, not the one Linus Torvalds see, of new maintainers.
Bingo!
My first thought after reading this was “Does this person ACTUALLY think that having to use plaintext E-mail is even statistically relevant to the problem of finding module maintainers for the Linux kernel?”
In a general sense I believe that the open source community’s reliance on venerable tools that are widely rejected by younger potential contributors is a huge problem.
Martin Wimpress of Ubuntu Desktop fame has spoken about this a lot recently, and has been advocating a new perspective for open source to increase engagement by embracing the communications technologies where the people are not where we would like them to be.
So he streams his project sessions on Youtube and runs a Discord, despite the fact that these platforms are inherently proprietary, and has reported substantial success at attracting an entirely new audience that would otherwise never have engaged.
is not the problem the Linux Foundation has, but the one that Microsoft’s Sarah Novotny wants to solve. Those are two different problems, with two different solutions. On the surface, they might seem the same, but they are not. They might be correlated, but the solution for one problem does not necessarily mean it is the solution for the other.
GKH even said that there are more than enough contributors in his last ama, so having contributors is “a priori” not a problem right now.
Also better tooling would be beneficial for everyone.
That is not necessarily true: the introduction of a tool requires a change of mindset and workflow of every single person already involved in the current process, as well as update of the current instructions and creation of new references.
I saw projects that took months to change simply a continuous integration tool (I have GHC in mind, except the ones in the companies I worked for). Here, we are talking about the workflow of many (hundreds for sure, but I estimate even thousands) maintainers and contributors.
If the problem is retrievability of the manual or specific information, than I think that should be addressed first. But that topic is not brought up in the article.
I am able to deal with email patches, but I hate doing it. I would not enjoying maintaining a project which accepts only email patches.
Actually, that might work as an efficient sieve to select the ones who want to be active contributors from those who are just superficial or ephemeral contributors.
Ephemeral contributors evolve to maintainers, but if that initial step is never made this doesn’t happen. I don’t know if this will increase the number of maintainers by 1%, 10%, or more, but I’m reasonably sure there will be some increase down the line.
Finding reliable maintainers is always hard by the way, for pretty much any project. I did some git author stats on various popular large open source projects, and almost all of them have quite a small group of regular maintainers and a long tail of ephemeral contributors. There’s nothing wrong with that as such, but if you’re really strapped for maintainers I think it’s a good idea to treat every contributor as a potential maintainer.
But like I said, just because you can deal with email patches doesn’t mean you like it.
GMail, even in plain-text mode, tends to mangle inline patches since it has no way of only auto-wrapping some lines and not others.
Not a major issue as you can attach a diff, but from a review-perspective I’ve personally found folks more inclined to even look at my patches if they’re small enough to be inlined into the message. I say this as someone having both submitted patches to OpenBSD for userland components in base as well as having had those patches reviewed and accepted.
I personally gave up fighting the oddities of GMail and shifted to using Emacs for sending/receiving to the OpenBSD lists. I agree with Novotny’s statement that “GMail [is] the barrier.” The whole point of inlining patches like this is the email body or eml file or whatever can be direct input to patch(1)…if GMail wraps lines of the diff, it’s broken the patch. Text mode or not.
Obviously, this doesn’t mean if the Linux kernel maintainers want to change their process that I don’t think they shouldn’t. (Especially if they take a lot of funding from the Foundation…and as a result, Microsoft/GitHub.) OpenBSD is probably always going to take the stance that contributions need to be accessible to those using just the base system…which means even users of mail(1) in my interpretation.
Good point…so basically GMail (the client) doesn’t really work with an email-only contribution system. It’s Gmail SMTP via mutt/emacs/thunderbird/etc. or bust.
I have found several Linux subtle kernel bugs related to PCIe/sysfs/vfio/NVMe hotplug. I fixed them locally in our builds, which will ultimately get published somewhere. I don’t know where, but it’s unlikely to ever get pushed out to the real maintainers.
The reason I don’t try to push them out properly? The damn email process.
I did jump through the hoops many years ago to configure everything. I tried it with gmail, and eventually got some Linux email program working well enough that I was able to complete some tutorial. It took me some non-negligible amount of time and frustration. But that was on an older system and I don’t have things set up properly anymore.
I don’t want to go through that again. I have too many things on my plate to figure out how to reconfigure everything and relearn the process. And then I won’t use it again for several months to a year and I’ll have to go through it all again. Sometimes I can get a coworker to push things out for me - and those have been accepted into the kernel successfully. But that means getting him to jump through the hoops for me and takes time away from what he should be doing.
So for now, the patches/fixes get pulled along with our local branch until they’re no longer needed.
I have no idea how dense they need to be to not be able to send text-only email from Apple Mail. It must be anecdotal, because I cannot believe that someone is smart enough to code anything, but dumb enough to be able to click Format > Change to text in the menu bar.
Mechanical keyswitches aren’t about ergonomics.. it’s all about the feel. They just feel really good to type on! And there’s the aesthetic of fancy keycap sets, yeah. But speaking of ergonomics, this summer I have switched from a basic non-split Leopold to a split keyboard from aliexpress. It’s not tented and the case is made of acrylic layers, so I’m thinking about designing and 3D printing a bottom layer that would make it tented.
I have a vertical mouse.. in a drawer somewhere, was planning to use it in the office :) I only use my G603 at home because I’m not going to play Counter-Strike with a vertical mouse and switching between different mice for work and games is just too much.
I was thinking the same thing—he doesn’t understand mechanical keyboards, or maybe just doesn’t like the way they feel. But you’re right, they are not primarily about ergonomics. Rather, ergonomics are a side benefit to mechanical keyboards. With Cherry MX Blue or Clear switches, I can easily approach 150 wpm (depending on how much sleep and coffee I’ve had) because I’ve become accustomed to feeling where the tactile “bump” is in the switch and that means I don’t bottom out the keys when typing which will prevent RSI and other injuries from long-term use.
If you’re still in an office or a shared space at home and concerned about noise, I recommend the Cherry MX Brown switches. Still great for typing and coding, but not as loud so you can reasonably do things like take notes during a Zoom conference.
I had a couple tent/wedge things 3D printed for my ergodox and have been very satisfied. I found something online and just fired it off to someone on thingiverse.
Mail-in-a-Box does everything for me or tells me what I need to do.
I’d been annoyed at my emails ending up in spam but chalked it up to the perils of self-hosting. A couple weeks ago I decided to look into it and found in the admin panel, all the params I needed to add to my DNS records for DKIM, SPF, and more.
I want to figure out how to create a similar package for JMAP.
This might not be a popular opinion but as someone who spends most of their day on the phone, I strongly dislike mechanical keyboards and the culture that has recently sprung up around them. I’m a consultant and my normal interactions with customers is over the phone. I can usually tell within 24 hours on a project who I have to mute by default on any new project. Especially with remote meeting software that emphasizes “call using my computer”. The sound of someone taking notes with a loud mechanical keyboard has disrupted my meetings so often that I can’t even count the occurrences. For clients I know very well, I’ll usually start the call saying “Hey [name], if you have something to say, make sure you unmute yourself” because I start the call with that person muted.
I know there are mechanical keyboards that are quieter, but there are also a lot that are so loud no one can hear the conversation over the sound of the person taking notes on the call. Please be aware of the sound of your keyboard if you’re on a conference call.
I find it incredibly odd that “push-to-talk” isn’t the cultural default almost anywhere. It’s so much nicer for every participant at so little cost to the individual.
Yeah this is more of a broken software than anything else. I wish more systems were like mumble. Super low latency, crystal clear, push to talk. Instead we’re trying to cram 30 pointless video streams onto everyone’s screen.
Your comment could just as well have been written by myself. Not only are these 30 pointless video streams crammed onto everyone’s screen – they’re also choking everyone’s network connection, causing further latencies in the audio, meaning conversations require explicit handoff to other people.
I really wish I could convince my company to switch to something like Mumble. The low latency, crystal clear audio would make conversations flow so much more naturally and feel less forced. But no. We have to look at each others badly lit outlines of faces. That’s worth so much more than fluent communication.
It’s madness. In the pandemic it has shown itself to be a deeply irritating technology. In 99% of cases the sole purpose of the video feed is to see what people’s houses look like.
Mumble cracked the ‘how to we do natural conversation’ issue 15 years ago. Everything I have used since then feels like a step backwards.
Mumble is especially good with RNNoise, that seems to “learn” filtering out sounds such as keyboard or clicking noises, improving over time. I have a not-so-quiet keyboard and a friend of mine has a more-loud-than-not mechanical keyboard and unless you’re typing and speaking, nobody notices either of us.
Sadly it has to be enabled, as it’s not turned on by default.
Back when folks were in the office, I didn’t mind using my mechanical keyboard around others. If they get to talk loudly on the phone, wandering around with wireless headsets, often times about topics that aren’t even vaguely work-related, then they get to listen to my clacking. Seems fair.
If everyone thought like that then there would be no peace in the world. Well, maybe there isn’t… but still, I don’t think others acting poorly means you should too.
I’m a fan of mechanical keyboards, my first one was a Sun UNIX style buckling spring model with the command and caps lock key functions swapped (so that CTRL is on the home row where it should be for programmers). Still, I think you’re undoubtedly right that they are best for people who work in private offices and non-collaborative work environments instead of open plan offices and people who do a lot of conferencing.
Not to be facetious. But that sounds like a problem for management.
If you want to stick me in an open office and then complain that my work is too loud; that’s on you. (Yeah, I know keyboards are a preference but so is working in an open landscape)
(Note: writing this comment turned out more aggressive than it ought to be. Rest assured that I have no quarrel with you, I just hate open plans, to the point I’d consider turning down offers over them.)
private offices and non-collaborative work environments instead of open plan offices
I’m not sure I agree with the implication that anything “not open plan” is not collaborative. Like many people here I suddenly started to work remotely this last few months, and the amount of practical collaboration within my own team doesn’t seem to have significantly decreased, despite the higher friction of instant messaging with microphones compared to our shared office. I’ve also worked in an actual open plan office, with over 50 people on the same completely floor. We collaborated all right, but boy, the noise.
Let’s not kid ourselves, what is so often sold as a way to increase collaboration is mostly cost cutting, surveillance, and showing off. Discovered that last one pretty recently: open plan offices are great at showing the sheer mass of people buzzing & working together to executives and clients. Lots of people at their desk doing whatever hermetic magic technical people do, a couple group here and there on a Scrum meeting, or just discussing obscure schematics on a whiteboard, honestly it’s beautiful.
Me, I yearn for a cubicle. I don’t even require a full wall, I just want less noise, less visual distraction, and a wall behind my back. Seriously, leaving your back open to a room full of people you barely know, some of which you may even dislike a little? Nobody wants that. Why do you think the higher ups end up near the corners of the open floor? Why do you think the last hire, juniors, or interns, end up with the one office with their back to the door?
Cubicles however are horrible to show. Everyone looks isolated. You don’t hear as much buzzing activity, the floor is now closer to an oppressive maze than a green field, you don’t see as many faces…
I tried to put up walls on my desk. 90cm tall, some foam to dampen the sound, all around my desk (80cm deep, 180cm wide). Very effective at attenuating the sound, much less distractions. Despite prior authorization to try it out by ones of the higher ups, the first higher up to actually see it instantly vetoed it. And here’s the thing: one thing they worried about was that everyone would do something similar, and the whole office would start looking like a slum. So they knew on some level that many people might want this. But they were reluctant to give it to them because it wouldn’t look nearly as good.
Lesson learned: outwards appearances are more important than internal well being.
DuckDuckGo still uses Perl, and often advocates for modern Perl. I assume that’s because they know how powerful it can be when it comes to string manipulations. It offers very powerful string matching techniques. http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2014/
Doing 37 (simply rm -fr && git checkout) is tempting, but then you never learn. I’ve probably wasted a bunch of time doing so, but I can count the number of times I’ve done that on one hand and it’s a good exercise getting yourself out of that sort of hole (and improving your ability to identify exactly the sort of hole you’re in)
Yeah, nobody’s ever gonna learn Git that way. People think they can get away with it forever and then somebody’s checkin bites them in the ass and they’re like “Welp, guess I better read the documentation and understand how this abstracts everything.”
Knowing git is inescapable (as the standard SCM), whereas build systems are diverse and wrongly configured. git clean -dfx ftw.
Sure, git’s nomenclature is alienating. Case in point, that command should be git clone, as that’s what git calls checkout, because checkout means reset, and reset means something else… But as compulsory knowledge, the learning curve makes no difference in the end.
This is helpful, especially for normies who often don’t understand the difference. A practical example is one he uses here—the idea that using a VPN when on public wifi provides bulletproof end-to-end security.
So far they’ve only said they’ll build tighter GitHub integration into VS Code. I really see why they had to buy GitHub in order to build that integration; I think that’s just them virtue-signalling by placing emphasis on one of many QoL improvements they could’ve added to their editor.
I’ve been working remotely from the Philippines. 4-day work weeks. So far, it’s been great but there are tradeoffs that devs need to be aware of. Generally speaking, I’m a lot more productive and I don’t feel disconnected from the team I’m part of back in the States. You have to jealously guard your work time and I’ve found it’s best to have a dedicated place to work that is free of distraction (for me that’s a spare bedroom I’ve converted into my office).
Some of what I thought would be downsides are actually advantages. Down here in the Philippines I mostly work in the evenings and early mornings when the tropical heat cools down; midday is “siesta time”, so I adjust to the culture and this also puts me closer to US workday overlap where my evening is morning in the States.
One real downside is the quality of internet connectivity if you want to work like this from the developing world. I have the best fiber optic internet money can buy but peak times here can still be a bit slow when committing or cloning repositories, and the tech infrastructure here is notoriously bad. I change my DNS servers to Google’s or OpenDNS and I can also pretty easily work around peak time lags. So no worries.
One real downside is the quality of internet connectivity if you want to work like this from the developing world.
I guess it varies quite widely by country, because when I lived in Thailand the broadband was just as fast as what I had in the US and half the price. I wasn’t even in a big metropolitan area; it was a city of 120,000. It was similar when I visited my parents in Malaysia, though they had some weird restrictions like having medium.com blocked for hosting content that exposed corruption in their government.
Yes, I’d say there are only pockets of SE Asia where this is the case, like the Philippines. In places with much more modern infrastructure (I have Singapore in mind), you can expect fast internet and absolutely no issues doing heavy downloading or uploading of work and cloud computing.
I also used Google Wave and agree; I saw the potential right away. It’s a shame it was underappreciated and the project wasn’t a priority and given more resources.
As a developer who moved from Linux to the macOS platform, this made me think about how many non-native apps I use as replacements for the Apple version. The obvious ones I’m thinking of:
Alfred instead of Spotlight
iTerm2 instead of Terminal
Dropbox instead of iCloud
Chrome instead of Safari
Gmail instead of Mail
Google Maps instead of Maps
VLC instead of iMovie
Spotify instead of iTunes
Signal instead of Messages
&c. This surely isn’t a good trend for Apple to allow to continue.
That’s not what’s meant by “native” in this case. Alfred, iTerm, Dropbox, Chrome, and VLC are native. Spotify is Electron, and I’m not sure about Signal. I’m guessing it’s probably a native app that does most of its UI in a WebView.
As it might be useful to describe what is meant by native, it means something on a spectrum between “using the platform-supplied libraries and UI widgets”, i.e. Cocoa and “not a wrapped browser or Electron app”, so it’s not clear whether an application using the Qt framework would be considered “native”. It could be delivered through the App Store and subject to the sandbox restrictions, so fits the bill for a “native” app in the original post, but it would also not be using the native platform features which are presumably seen as Apple’s competitive advantage for the purpose of the same post.
It may be native, but it’s not Mac-native in the sense Gruber was talking about. You will find that all three uses of “native” in his article appear as “native Cocoa apps” or “native Mac apps”. He is talking about a quite specific sense of native: apps that integrate seamlessly with all of the MacOS UI conventions (services, system-wide text substitutions, native emoji picker, drag & drop behaviours, proxy icons, and a myriad more). Qt apps do not.
Apps with good experiences that aren’t available on other platforms keep users around. Third-party iOS apps do a better job of moving iPhones than anything else Apple does, because people who already have a pile of iOS apps they use generally buy new iPhones.
Electron is just the latest in a long series of cross-platform app toolkits, and it has the same problems that every other one has had: look & feel, perceived inefficiency, and for the OS vendor, doesn’t provide a moat.
Counterpoint, their apps have always been limited and really for people who weren’t willing to learn and use more robust tooling. I mean how many professionals use iMovie.
It’s good for the end user but not a good trend for their business model, part of which is to have best-in-class apps. Don’t get me wrong, I like having choice and I think they shouldn’t force you into their own app ecosystem.
Good to know. However, I’ve got a feeling the majority of chrome users wouldn’t care, even if they read this. Otherwise they wouldn’t be using chrome in the first place anyway
I think the majority of Chrome users are Chrome users because someone told them it’s better than their OS default browser or that they have to use it. They care first about what other people recommend/support or how they’ll be viewed for doing something different (that too is about personal security but not so abstract). The people to reach with this article are those who influence them—workplace IT decision makers, family nerds.
Which unfortunately seems pretty much always true in just about everything except privacy matters. (and even there, there’s often less a question of if someone’s fingers are in your pie than just whose.)
Battery life is a big one; coming back to Safari is great for that.
Chrome on OS X was always awful when I tried it because it came with its own versions of everything. Passwords were not stored in the keychain, for example. It felt like a Windows app with a grudging port to Mac.
What is the current best/most optimal means of blocking ads in Safari? I don’t currently use Safari, but I might be interested in switching.
Last time I bought apple hw it still had a ppc… so will have to take your word for that, I don’t see any such benefits if I can only run it in a hackintoshed vm.
I care, and I really want to use Firefox but the truth is its UI is inferior to Chrome’s. Is this a result of smaller development budget or not a problem recognized by Mozilla at all, I don’t know. On mobile OTOH, it’s the opposite, Firefox is good enough to be the primary browser.
I heard of a time when to “make the world a better place”, one had to hide and fight in mountains. I think that, for someone who cares, adapting to a said inferior UI isn’t that much of a trouble in comparison ;) (and I’m sure one adapts quickly) Good luck!
Touché! ;)
How is it inferior? To me it feels superior. In general the differences between all the browsers aren’t that large but Chrome feels super ugly to me after the flat redesign, and Firefox has only gotten better and better over the years.
Yeah, going back to a browser that doesn’t have reader mode would feel like a huge regression to me.
Why does it keep telling me my login is invalid?
you have to use your username, not your email address; this hit me too, a few times.
Thanks!
I use the simple
passutility on the command line.Why would a developer choose to use this editor over something like, say, NeoVim?
Neovim is a modal editor with lots of legacy and complexity (from vim), lite is a simple editor with little to no legacy and low complexity.
It’s hard to compare them to each other as they are fundamentally different. It’s not something inherently good or bad.
I’m very familiar with using vim but I can’t imagine using vim for anything more than minor edits in textfiles on remote systems. For development I’d use something else.
I’m using lite on my work-work machine as a replacement for notepad (as we are a Windows shop). It works great for that, at least this far.
I think now it’s just a fun little project for doing things the other way.
Related question: What’s your backup plan if you forget your master password, for example after an accident leaving you with a temporary memory loss?
1Password family means my partner and I can reset each other’s keys. (I haven’t read the whitepaper in a while, but iirc everyone in the family’s private keys get stored encrypted by everyone else in the family. 1P themselves still cannot access your data since they don’t have an unencrypted copy of anyone’s keys, and you can’t indiscriminately access others’ data because the 1P server won’t just give it to you.
Keeping the number of accounts I need to keep track of in the first place low so that manual recovery is plausible!
It’s a good question though - I have had the experience of not having to type my master password for only a week or two, then coming back to it and not having a clue what it was. It was only muscle memory that saved me.
If I’m not mistaken and memory serves, 1Password generates a PDF form for your physical vault or safe deposit box that is an emergency backup plan with your master key.
Yeah, I have this. I also use a family plan, so my wife can get in; and, honestly, I wrote the password down and it’s in our secure storage with our passports and such.
Obligatory please don’t tell anyone how I live, here is my very messy desk:
OS: Arch Linux
CPU: Intel i5-6600 @ 3.30 GHz
RAM: 16 GB DDR4
WM: i3
MB: Gigabyte Q170M-D3H
KB: IBM Model M
GPU: Nah
Cat: Orange and White Maine Coon, “Salsa” aka “Salsa T. Cat Esq.”
Cat treats: Chicken
Water: Tap
Coffee: Black
Whisky: Neat
I enjoyed this image very, very much. Thank you for your honesty! I particularly enjoyed the pump bottle of vaseline.
Thanks! I was going to remove it and take another picture but then I thought, well why not just show a slice of everyday life? It’s cold and dry where I live in Canada and my skin needs some lotion so I don’t get the alligator complexion.
I was thinking a lot of this excellent Calvin and Hobbes comic when I was taking the picture, should I clean up my desk before I take a picture so I appear to be neat and tidy or just present my life as-is unfiltered?
This feels like home. I don’t know if you can actually compare two messes but our areas feel equal in messiness.
I see the base for the soldering iron. I’m scared to ask where in here the actual iron is.
Haha, it’s off to the left, on the window sill.
Fantastic! As well as Arch, I’m a huge Kubrick fan—where did you get your desktop background?
Awesome, glad you liked it. I’ve had that one for a long time, I did a search on the filename and there is a copy here: https://www.colipera.com/you-deserve-nothing/vector-2001_00359644/
I often struggle with how messy my desk becomes. My preferred style of note taking to work out a problem is a good pen and pads of paper, so things end up accumulating and I don’t feel like I want people to see my office. Thank you for sharing this picture! I’m right in the middle of reorganizing, or I’d show you how bad mine can get.
is that a speaker strapped to the bottom of the left monitor? If yes, why?
It is! It was an accessory that was available with that monitor and from what I recall, a lot of Dell business/professional monitors. Here’s what it looks like off the monitor.
I am flabbergasted someone is able to send a patch to OpenBSD but is not able to set the web interface of GMail to sent plain-text emails. Or install Thunderbird, which might have been the solution, in that particular case.
I also never used
git send-email, but I don’t think it is the barrier to become a kernel maintainer.Actually, that might work as an efficient sieve to select the ones who want to be active contributors from those who are just superficial or ephemeral contributors.
In my opinion, although Github supposedly decreases the barrier of first-time contribution, it increases the load on the maintainers, which has to interact with a lot of low-quality implementation, reckless hacks and a torrent of issues which might not even be. That is my experience in the repositories I visit or contributed.
Patching some component or other of OpenBSD is not a skill that transfers well to making some random application do what you want.
I agree with you.
On the other hand, if someone knows how to install OpenBSD, use
cvs(orgit), program in C and navigate the kernel’s souce-code, I supposed they are capable of going to any search engine and find the answer on how to send plain-text email via the GMail interface.GMail mangles your “plain-text” messages with hard-wraps and by playing with your indentation. You’d have to install and configure thunderbird or something.
One of the many reasons why I use Mutt.
Note that this is anecdotal hearsay. This person is saying their partner had to set things up… they may have misunderstood their partner or not realized their partner was exaggerating.
Also, one might expect the amount of patience and general debugging skill necessary to transfer rather well to the domain of email configuration.
It’s also possible that guiraldelli is assuming it was an excepted OpenBSD kernel patch, wheras we don’t know if the patch was accepted and we don’t know if it was a userland patch. It doesn’t take much skill to get a userland patch rejected.
You can’t send patches, or indeed any formatted plain text emails through the gmail web interface. If you set gmail to plain text, gmail will mangle your emails. It will remove tabs and hardwrap the text. It’s hopeless.
Think about impediments in terms of probabilities and ease of access.
You wouldn’t believe how many people stop contributing because of tiny papercuts. There is a non-trivial amount of people who have the skills to make meaningful contributions, but lack the time.
Lobsters requires an invite. That’s a barrier to entry, so those who make it are more likely to make good contributions, and have already extended effort to comply with the social norms.
You may be willing to jump a barrier of entry for entertainment (that is lobsters) but not for free work for the benefit of others (because you have already done that work for yourself).
If you want to save yourself compiling and patching your kernel every time there’s an update, you might want to submit it to the project maintainer.
If the project wants to have contributors in the future it might want to consider using modern, user friendly technologies for contribution.
Linux is considering it, a discussion is started, which is positive (for the future of the project) in my opinion. It is a sign or responsive project management, where its conservatism does not hinder progress, only slows it to not jump for quickly fading fads.
Other communities are closing their microverse on themselves, where it is not enough to format your contribution in N<80 column plain text email without attachments with your contribution added to it via come custom non-standard inline encoding (like pasting the patch to the end of the line), but you may even need to be ceremonially accepted for contribution by the elders. Also some such projects still don’t use CI, or automated QA. These communities will die soon, actually are already dead, especially as they don’t have large corporations backing them, as someone getting paid usually accepts quite a few papercuts a job demands. This is why Linux could actually allow itself to be more retrograde than the BSD projects for example, which I think are even more contributor-unfriendly (especially ergonomically).
I tend to agree, however that discussion was started by someone with a very striking conflict of interest and therefore their opinion should be questioned and considered to be insincere at best and maleficent at worst.
That doesn’t matter, the discussion can be done despite that. I think a forge-style solution is the key.
Despite Microsoft having 2 “forge” type solutions in its offering (both quite usable in my experience, github being a de-facto standard) I still cannot see a conflict of interest in this topic. There are other software forges available. The current process is simply outdated.A custom solution could also be developed, if deemed necessary, as it was the case with git.
Pay attention my comment talks about maintainers, active contributors and superficial or ephemeral contributors.
From the article:
And later on…
So I understood Sarah Novotny is addressing the problem of new contributors, not the one Linus Torvalds see, of new maintainers.
So, your comment that
is not the problem the Linux Foundation has, but the one that Microsoft’s Sarah Novotny wants to solve. Those are two different problems, with two different solutions. On the surface, they might seem the same, but they are not. They might be correlated, but the solution for one problem does not necessarily mean it is the solution for the other.
Therefore, my argument still stands:
If we are going to address, though, that it might hinder new contributors, then I tend to agree with you. :)
Let’s not let Microsoft decide how Linux is developed.
The waning popularity of their own, proprietary kernel is no excuse for telling other projects how they need to be run.
This is just my opinion but I think that while she’s totally missing the mark on finding Linux kernel module maintainers having anything at all to do with plain text email patch submission systems, the general issue she’s speaking to is one that has generated a lot of discussion recently and should probably not be ignored.
Also, in the spirit of the open source meritocracy, I’d prefer to let people’s actions and track records speak more loudly than which company they happen to work for, but then, lots of people consider my employer to be the new evil empire, so my objectivity in this matter could be suspect :)
Bingo!
My first thought after reading this was “Does this person ACTUALLY think that having to use plaintext E-mail is even statistically relevant to the problem of finding module maintainers for the Linux kernel?”
In a general sense I believe that the open source community’s reliance on venerable tools that are widely rejected by younger potential contributors is a huge problem.
Martin Wimpress of Ubuntu Desktop fame has spoken about this a lot recently, and has been advocating a new perspective for open source to increase engagement by embracing the communications technologies where the people are not where we would like them to be.
So he streams his project sessions on Youtube and runs a Discord, despite the fact that these platforms are inherently proprietary, and has reported substantial success at attracting an entirely new audience that would otherwise never have engaged.
GKH even said that there are more than enough contributors in his last ama, so having contributors is “a priori” not a problem right now.
Every maintainer was a new contributor at a point! Also better tooling would be beneficial for everyone.
That is true, but it is not the current problem: see /u/rmpr’s reply and his link to the Reddit’s AMA to verify that.
That is not necessarily true: the introduction of a tool requires a change of mindset and workflow of every single person already involved in the current process, as well as update of the current instructions and creation of new references.
I saw projects that took months to change simply a continuous integration tool (I have GHC in mind, except the ones in the companies I worked for). Here, we are talking about the workflow of many (hundreds for sure, but I estimate even thousands) maintainers and contributors.
As I already told before, RTFM [1] [2] does not take long for a single individual that wants to become a new contributor; in [1], there is even a session specially about the GMail’s Web GUI problem.
If the problem is retrievability of the manual or specific information, than I think that should be addressed first. But that topic is not brought up in the article.
I am able to deal with email patches, but I hate doing it. I would not enjoying maintaining a project which accepts only email patches.
Ephemeral contributors evolve to maintainers, but if that initial step is never made this doesn’t happen. I don’t know if this will increase the number of maintainers by 1%, 10%, or more, but I’m reasonably sure there will be some increase down the line.
Finding reliable maintainers is always hard by the way, for pretty much any project. I did some git author stats on various popular large open source projects, and almost all of them have quite a small group of regular maintainers and a long tail of ephemeral contributors. There’s nothing wrong with that as such, but if you’re really strapped for maintainers I think it’s a good idea to treat every contributor as a potential maintainer.
But like I said, just because you can deal with email patches doesn’t mean you like it.
GMail, even in plain-text mode, tends to mangle inline patches since it has no way of only auto-wrapping some lines and not others.
Not a major issue as you can attach a diff, but from a review-perspective I’ve personally found folks more inclined to even look at my patches if they’re small enough to be inlined into the message. I say this as someone having both submitted patches to OpenBSD for userland components in base as well as having had those patches reviewed and accepted.
I personally gave up fighting the oddities of GMail and shifted to using Emacs for sending/receiving to the OpenBSD lists. I agree with Novotny’s statement that “GMail [is] the barrier.” The whole point of inlining patches like this is the email body or eml file or whatever can be direct input to
patch(1)…if GMail wraps lines of the diff, it’s broken the patch. Text mode or not.Obviously, this doesn’t mean if the Linux kernel maintainers want to change their process that I don’t think they shouldn’t. (Especially if they take a lot of funding from the Foundation…and as a result, Microsoft/GitHub.) OpenBSD is probably always going to take the stance that contributions need to be accessible to those using just the base system…which means even users of
mail(1)in my interpretation.You can’t attach a diff – nearly all mailing lists remove attachments!
Heh, if you add
arcto the base system, you can adopt Phabricator without violating that principle :)Good point…so basically GMail (the client) doesn’t really work with an email-only contribution system. It’s Gmail SMTP via mutt/emacs/thunderbird/etc. or bust.
I have found several Linux subtle kernel bugs related to PCIe/sysfs/vfio/NVMe hotplug. I fixed them locally in our builds, which will ultimately get published somewhere. I don’t know where, but it’s unlikely to ever get pushed out to the real maintainers.
The reason I don’t try to push them out properly? The damn email process.
I did jump through the hoops many years ago to configure everything. I tried it with gmail, and eventually got some Linux email program working well enough that I was able to complete some tutorial. It took me some non-negligible amount of time and frustration. But that was on an older system and I don’t have things set up properly anymore.
I don’t want to go through that again. I have too many things on my plate to figure out how to reconfigure everything and relearn the process. And then I won’t use it again for several months to a year and I’ll have to go through it all again. Sometimes I can get a coworker to push things out for me - and those have been accepted into the kernel successfully. But that means getting him to jump through the hoops for me and takes time away from what he should be doing.
So for now, the patches/fixes get pulled along with our local branch until they’re no longer needed.
I have no idea how dense they need to be to not be able to send text-only email from Apple Mail. It must be anecdotal, because I cannot believe that someone is smart enough to code anything, but dumb enough to be able to click
Format > Change to textin the menu bar.Mechanical keyswitches aren’t about ergonomics.. it’s all about the feel. They just feel really good to type on! And there’s the aesthetic of fancy keycap sets, yeah. But speaking of ergonomics, this summer I have switched from a basic non-split Leopold to a split keyboard from aliexpress. It’s not tented and the case is made of acrylic layers, so I’m thinking about designing and 3D printing a bottom layer that would make it tented.
I have a vertical mouse.. in a drawer somewhere, was planning to use it in the office :) I only use my G603 at home because I’m not going to play Counter-Strike with a vertical mouse and switching between different mice for work and games is just too much.
I was thinking the same thing—he doesn’t understand mechanical keyboards, or maybe just doesn’t like the way they feel. But you’re right, they are not primarily about ergonomics. Rather, ergonomics are a side benefit to mechanical keyboards. With Cherry MX Blue or Clear switches, I can easily approach 150 wpm (depending on how much sleep and coffee I’ve had) because I’ve become accustomed to feeling where the tactile “bump” is in the switch and that means I don’t bottom out the keys when typing which will prevent RSI and other injuries from long-term use.
If you’re still in an office or a shared space at home and concerned about noise, I recommend the Cherry MX Brown switches. Still great for typing and coding, but not as loud so you can reasonably do things like take notes during a Zoom conference.
I had a couple tent/wedge things 3D printed for my ergodox and have been very satisfied. I found something online and just fired it off to someone on thingiverse.
Mail-in-a-Box does everything for me or tells me what I need to do.
I’d been annoyed at my emails ending up in spam but chalked it up to the perils of self-hosting. A couple weeks ago I decided to look into it and found in the admin panel, all the params I needed to add to my DNS records for DKIM, SPF, and more.
I want to figure out how to create a similar package for JMAP.
Mail-in-a-Box, for those who haven’t checked it out yet: https://mailinabox.email/
Another “batteries included” solution that holds your hand is Mailcow: https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized/
This might not be a popular opinion but as someone who spends most of their day on the phone, I strongly dislike mechanical keyboards and the culture that has recently sprung up around them. I’m a consultant and my normal interactions with customers is over the phone. I can usually tell within 24 hours on a project who I have to mute by default on any new project. Especially with remote meeting software that emphasizes “call using my computer”. The sound of someone taking notes with a loud mechanical keyboard has disrupted my meetings so often that I can’t even count the occurrences. For clients I know very well, I’ll usually start the call saying “Hey [name], if you have something to say, make sure you unmute yourself” because I start the call with that person muted.
I know there are mechanical keyboards that are quieter, but there are also a lot that are so loud no one can hear the conversation over the sound of the person taking notes on the call. Please be aware of the sound of your keyboard if you’re on a conference call.
I find it incredibly odd that “push-to-talk” isn’t the cultural default almost anywhere. It’s so much nicer for every participant at so little cost to the individual.
Yeah this is more of a broken software than anything else. I wish more systems were like mumble. Super low latency, crystal clear, push to talk. Instead we’re trying to cram 30 pointless video streams onto everyone’s screen.
Your comment could just as well have been written by myself. Not only are these 30 pointless video streams crammed onto everyone’s screen – they’re also choking everyone’s network connection, causing further latencies in the audio, meaning conversations require explicit handoff to other people.
I really wish I could convince my company to switch to something like Mumble. The low latency, crystal clear audio would make conversations flow so much more naturally and feel less forced. But no. We have to look at each others badly lit outlines of faces. That’s worth so much more than fluent communication.
It’s madness. In the pandemic it has shown itself to be a deeply irritating technology. In 99% of cases the sole purpose of the video feed is to see what people’s houses look like.
Mumble cracked the ‘how to we do natural conversation’ issue 15 years ago. Everything I have used since then feels like a step backwards.
Mumble is especially good with RNNoise, that seems to “learn” filtering out sounds such as keyboard or clicking noises, improving over time. I have a not-so-quiet keyboard and a friend of mine has a more-loud-than-not mechanical keyboard and unless you’re typing and speaking, nobody notices either of us.
Sadly it has to be enabled, as it’s not turned on by default.
Wow, that was really cool!
Back when folks were in the office, I didn’t mind using my mechanical keyboard around others. If they get to talk loudly on the phone, wandering around with wireless headsets, often times about topics that aren’t even vaguely work-related, then they get to listen to my clacking. Seems fair.
If everyone thought like that then there would be no peace in the world. Well, maybe there isn’t… but still, I don’t think others acting poorly means you should too.
MX Blues might be an exception but I can hear people typing on our work-supplied Logitech keyboards just as well on a mechanical one.
I think it’s more the people who refuse to use headsets but use their laptop mic that grabs every sound in the room…
I’m a fan of mechanical keyboards, my first one was a Sun UNIX style buckling spring model with the command and caps lock key functions swapped (so that CTRL is on the home row where it should be for programmers). Still, I think you’re undoubtedly right that they are best for people who work in private offices and non-collaborative work environments instead of open plan offices and people who do a lot of conferencing.
Not to be facetious. But that sounds like a problem for management.
If you want to stick me in an open office and then complain that my work is too loud; that’s on you. (Yeah, I know keyboards are a preference but so is working in an open landscape)
(Note: writing this comment turned out more aggressive than it ought to be. Rest assured that I have no quarrel with you, I just hate open plans, to the point I’d consider turning down offers over them.)
I’m not sure I agree with the implication that anything “not open plan” is not collaborative. Like many people here I suddenly started to work remotely this last few months, and the amount of practical collaboration within my own team doesn’t seem to have significantly decreased, despite the higher friction of instant messaging with microphones compared to our shared office. I’ve also worked in an actual open plan office, with over 50 people on the same completely floor. We collaborated all right, but boy, the noise.
Let’s not kid ourselves, what is so often sold as a way to increase collaboration is mostly cost cutting, surveillance, and showing off. Discovered that last one pretty recently: open plan offices are great at showing the sheer mass of people buzzing & working together to executives and clients. Lots of people at their desk doing whatever hermetic magic technical people do, a couple group here and there on a Scrum meeting, or just discussing obscure schematics on a whiteboard, honestly it’s beautiful.
Me, I yearn for a cubicle. I don’t even require a full wall, I just want less noise, less visual distraction, and a wall behind my back. Seriously, leaving your back open to a room full of people you barely know, some of which you may even dislike a little? Nobody wants that. Why do you think the higher ups end up near the corners of the open floor? Why do you think the last hire, juniors, or interns, end up with the one office with their back to the door?
Cubicles however are horrible to show. Everyone looks isolated. You don’t hear as much buzzing activity, the floor is now closer to an oppressive maze than a green field, you don’t see as many faces…
I tried to put up walls on my desk. 90cm tall, some foam to dampen the sound, all around my desk (80cm deep, 180cm wide). Very effective at attenuating the sound, much less distractions. Despite prior authorization to try it out by ones of the higher ups, the first higher up to actually see it instantly vetoed it. And here’s the thing: one thing they worried about was that everyone would do something similar, and the whole office would start looking like a slum. So they knew on some level that many people might want this. But they were reluctant to give it to them because it wouldn’t look nearly as good.
Lesson learned: outwards appearances are more important than internal well being.
DuckDuckGo still uses Perl, and often advocates for modern Perl. I assume that’s because they know how powerful it can be when it comes to string manipulations. It offers very powerful string matching techniques. http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2014/
Booking.com is still written in Perl, they hire 100s of Perl developers in Amsterdam.
This is tangential, but thanks for the warning about the fan. I wonder if the last few generations of NUCs all have a fan that loud.
I wonder if it’s possible to replace the stock fan with something more quiet? Or maybe an enclosure like this one: http://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=product/product.detail.tpl&no=181&type=Fanless%20Chassis&type_sub=Fanless%20NUC&model=A-NUC45-M1B
That same site has this case for the 10th gen:
http://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=product/product.detail.tpl&model=A-NUC52-M1B
Doing 37 (
simply rm -fr && git checkout) is tempting, but then you never learn. I’ve probably wasted a bunch of time doing so, but I can count the number of times I’ve done that on one hand and it’s a good exercise getting yourself out of that sort of hole (and improving your ability to identify exactly the sort of hole you’re in)Yeah, nobody’s ever gonna learn Git that way. People think they can get away with it forever and then somebody’s checkin bites them in the ass and they’re like “Welp, guess I better read the documentation and understand how this abstracts everything.”
I agree, git doesn’t fuck up. Build systems do.
Knowing git is inescapable (as the standard SCM), whereas build systems are diverse and wrongly configured.
git clean -dfxftw.Sure, git’s nomenclature is alienating. Case in point, that command should be
git clone, as that’s what git calls checkout, because checkout means reset, and reset means something else… But as compulsory knowledge, the learning curve makes no difference in the end.This is helpful, especially for normies who often don’t understand the difference. A practical example is one he uses here—the idea that using a VPN when on public wifi provides bulletproof end-to-end security.
How do you all think this development is going to affect the Atom vs VS Code editor space?
So far they’ve only said they’ll build tighter GitHub integration into VS Code. I really see why they had to buy GitHub in order to build that integration; I think that’s just them virtue-signalling by placing emphasis on one of many QoL improvements they could’ve added to their editor.
*don’t
I’ve been working remotely from the Philippines. 4-day work weeks. So far, it’s been great but there are tradeoffs that devs need to be aware of. Generally speaking, I’m a lot more productive and I don’t feel disconnected from the team I’m part of back in the States. You have to jealously guard your work time and I’ve found it’s best to have a dedicated place to work that is free of distraction (for me that’s a spare bedroom I’ve converted into my office).
Some of what I thought would be downsides are actually advantages. Down here in the Philippines I mostly work in the evenings and early mornings when the tropical heat cools down; midday is “siesta time”, so I adjust to the culture and this also puts me closer to US workday overlap where my evening is morning in the States.
One real downside is the quality of internet connectivity if you want to work like this from the developing world. I have the best fiber optic internet money can buy but peak times here can still be a bit slow when committing or cloning repositories, and the tech infrastructure here is notoriously bad. I change my DNS servers to Google’s or OpenDNS and I can also pretty easily work around peak time lags. So no worries.
I guess it varies quite widely by country, because when I lived in Thailand the broadband was just as fast as what I had in the US and half the price. I wasn’t even in a big metropolitan area; it was a city of 120,000. It was similar when I visited my parents in Malaysia, though they had some weird restrictions like having medium.com blocked for hosting content that exposed corruption in their government.
Yes, I’d say there are only pockets of SE Asia where this is the case, like the Philippines. In places with much more modern infrastructure (I have Singapore in mind), you can expect fast internet and absolutely no issues doing heavy downloading or uploading of work and cloud computing.
I used Google Wave briefly to plan a trip with some friends. It had a lot of potential, actually.
I also used Google Wave and agree; I saw the potential right away. It’s a shame it was underappreciated and the project wasn’t a priority and given more resources.
I’ve used iOS notes and it makes edits instantly visible. I’m sure there are other collaborative tools available.
As a developer who moved from Linux to the macOS platform, this made me think about how many non-native apps I use as replacements for the Apple version. The obvious ones I’m thinking of:
&c. This surely isn’t a good trend for Apple to allow to continue.
That’s not what’s meant by “native” in this case. Alfred, iTerm, Dropbox, Chrome, and VLC are native. Spotify is Electron, and I’m not sure about Signal. I’m guessing it’s probably a native app that does most of its UI in a WebView.
Signal for Desktops is Electron.
As it might be useful to describe what is meant by native, it means something on a spectrum between “using the platform-supplied libraries and UI widgets”, i.e. Cocoa and “not a wrapped browser or Electron app”, so it’s not clear whether an application using the Qt framework would be considered “native”. It could be delivered through the App Store and subject to the sandbox restrictions, so fits the bill for a “native” app in the original post, but it would also not be using the native platform features which are presumably seen as Apple’s competitive advantage for the purpose of the same post.
I’d call QT native. It doesn’t use the native widgets, but then neither do most applications that are available on multiple platforms.
It may be native, but it’s not Mac-native in the sense Gruber was talking about. You will find that all three uses of “native” in his article appear as “native Cocoa apps” or “native Mac apps”. He is talking about a quite specific sense of native: apps that integrate seamlessly with all of the MacOS UI conventions (services, system-wide text substitutions, native emoji picker, drag & drop behaviours, proxy icons, and a myriad more). Qt apps do not.
Why is it not a good trend? You are still using a Mac .. they sold you the hardware. Should they care about what apps you run?
Apps with good experiences that aren’t available on other platforms keep users around. Third-party iOS apps do a better job of moving iPhones than anything else Apple does, because people who already have a pile of iOS apps they use generally buy new iPhones.
Electron is just the latest in a long series of cross-platform app toolkits, and it has the same problems that every other one has had: look & feel, perceived inefficiency, and for the OS vendor, doesn’t provide a moat.
Counterpoint, their apps have always been limited and really for people who weren’t willing to learn and use more robust tooling. I mean how many professionals use iMovie.
iMovie is a good example. I’m guessing a lot of us prefer VLC.
It’s good for the end user but not a good trend for their business model, part of which is to have best-in-class apps. Don’t get me wrong, I like having choice and I think they shouldn’t force you into their own app ecosystem.