Not like I need it for coding but technically or graphically I like the idea of fonts that have double with for CJK characters and it all tiles nicely.
To go further there is a difference between “Zionism” and the way they go about it. I have no problem with the state of Israel per se, and I even think they have the right to defend themselves, but I think the way they treat the Palestinians is terrible.
Similar molecules have been found in meteors for a long time so it is not a surprise. There is no proof life started off planet but it is also possible.
At risk of being labeled a "blast-haver" I'd say it was always a blast to go to Funspot in the 1980s. It had the latest cabinets, it was the first where I saw Star Wars and Dragon's Lair
As a semi-pro photographer I look at the $295 pricing and think that is a very reasonable price for something that could help my photos look like my photos. I bought DxO PhotoLab for $235 and color grade with it all the time. Right now I use LUTs that other people made and have been thinking I’d like to learn to be more systematic and make my own.
I don’t really do video but I have in the past so a video editor coming in a box sweetens the deal in the same sense that Adobe CC comes with, say, Premiere, which I use just occasionally. I can totally shoot video with my Sony and there is definitely a lot of demand for it on the internet these days. I also know Divinchi resolve is a product that many people in film/video are enthusiastic for and that counts too.
I'm also a semi-pro (technically I'm a pro but it's just a side gig) photographer who uses DxO. I really like DxO for color & exposure, as well as denoise, but I've gotten supremely frustrated at it's lack of more sophisticated editing functionality. I'm increasingly considering an Adobe subscription just to have something with more effective AI masking -- DxO stinks for this -- not to mention small things like generative fill to simplify stuff like powerline removal.
The amazing thing about Resolve is that the free version is almost certainly enough for > 95% of use cases. The features that are locked behind the Studio upgrade are truly pro features - in that you won’t need them at all unless you are delivering for a proper studio or professional project. The amount of firepower you get from the free version is easily at parity with any comparable product from Adobe/Apple - and in many cases blows them out of the water… for free.
IIRC, it only officially supports CentOS or some other baroque thing, doesn’t support importing or exporting mp4 when free, and also (unrelated to the product itself) Linux hw accel of video is flakey.
Also people keep insisting on using unsafe languages like C.
It depends on exactly what you are doing but there are many languages which are efficient to develop in if less efficient to execute like Java and Javascript and Python which are better in many respects and other languages which are less efficient to develop in but more efficient to run like Rust. So at the very least it is a trilemma and not a dilemma.
C is about the safest language you can choose, between cbmc, frama-c and coccinelle there is hardly another language with comparable tooling for writing actually safe software, that you can actually securely run on single-core hardened systems. I would be really interested to hear the alternatives, though!
JVM is fast for certain use cases but not for all use cases. It loads slowly, takes a while to warm up, generally needs a lot of memory and the runtime is large and idiosyncratic. You don't see lots of shared libraries, terminal applications or embedded programs written in Java, even though they are all technically possible.
The JVM has been extremely fast for a long long time now. Even Javascript is really fast, and if you really need performance there’s also others in the same performance class like C#, Rust, Go.
Hot take, but: Performance hasn’t been a major factor in choosing C or C++ for almost two decades now.
I think it is the perception of performance instead of the actual performance, also that C/C++ encroaches on “close to the metal” assembly for many applications. (E.g. when I think how much C moves the stack pointer around meaninglessly in my AVR-8 programs it drives me nuts but AVR-8 has a hard limit and C programs are portable to the much faster ESP32 and ARM.
A while back when my son was playing Chess I wrote a chess engine in Python and then tried to make a better one in Java which could respect time control, it was not hard to make the main search routine work without allocating memory but I tried to do transposition tables with Java objects it made the engine slower, not faster. I could have implemented them with off-heap memory but around that time my son switched from Chess to guitar so I started thinks about audio processing instead.
The Rust vs Java comparison is also pointed. I was excited about Rust the same way I was excited about cyclone when it came out but seeing people struggle with async is painful for me to watch and makes it look like the whole idea doesn’t really work when you get away from what you can do with stack allocation. People think they can’t live with Java’s GC pauses.
The language plays a role, but I think the best example of software with very few bugs is something like qmail and that's written in C. qmail did have bugs, but impressively few.
Write code that carefully however is really not something you just do, it would require a massive improvement of skills overall. The majority of developers simply aren't skilled enough to write something anywhere near the quality of qmail.
Most software also doesn't need to be that good, but then we need to be more careful with deployments. The fact that someone just installs Wordpress (which itself is pretty good in terms of quality) and starts installing plugins from un-trusted developers indicates that many still doesn't have a security mindset. You really should review the code you deploy, but I understand why many don't.
I was qmail fanbois back in the day and loved how djb wrote his own string handling library. I built things with qmail that were much more than an email server (think cgi-bin for web servers) and knew the people who ran the largest email installation in the world (not sure how good they were about opt-in…)
Djb didn’t allow forking and repackaging so quail did not keep up with an increasingly hostile environment where it got so bad that when the love letter virus came out it was insufficient to add content filtering to qmail and I had to write scripts that blocked senders at the firewall. Security was no longer a 0 and 1 problem, it was certainly possible to patch up and extend qmail to survive in that environment but there was something to say for having it all in one nice package…. And once the deliverability crisis started, I gave up on running email servers entirely.
qmail was a lot of fun, so was djbdns and daemontools, but you're right it failed to keep up and DJBs attitude didn't help.
We built a weird solution where two systems would sync data via email. Upstream would do a dump from an Oracle database, pipe it to us via SMTP and a hook in qmail would pick up the email, get the attachment and update our systems. I remember getting a call one or two years after leaving the organisation, the new systems administrator wanted to know how their database was always kept up to date. It worked brilliantly, but they felt unsafe not knowing how. I really should have documented that part better.
I mean, you might say your wages were stolen and you might be right but to do something about it there has to be some due process to confirm that and isn't that expensive and complicated?
Today I used AI to help code a feature and it worked pretty well. I am not doing any of this gaslight town stuff, and I went back about 4-5 times with it to make sure we had a mutual understanding -- it's a nice clean patch.
As of the end of the day there was still a bug left, there probably would have been a bug left if I did it myself. Tomorrow i will fix the bug, maybe with some help, and I am on to another ticket.
I treat Junie as a coding buddy (think pair programming) and I don't delude myself that 20 slaves are going to create the Great American Javascript while I sleep. AI coding makes my life better.
I haven’t tried Junie, but I’m using Jetbrains. First time I tried it it didn’t work lol (right at alpha).
I also see how AI makes my life better and I’m very grateful for everything that I could learn way faster through AI. Languages, systems, patterns etc..
My main experience is Claude Code and its suggested code changes..
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