I've programmed in every native Windows GUI starting with MFC. Used Delphi too. I've even created MS-DOS TUI apps using Turbo Vision.
Compared to the web stack and Electron, native GUI APIs are complete shit. Both for the programmer, but also for the user.
Reactive UI (in the sense of React, Vue, ...), the greatest innovation in UI programming ever, was made popular by web-people.
Unless you write some ultra-high performance app like a Browser, a CAD app, a music production app, it doesn't make any sense to use native GUIs. Takes longer to program, the result is uglier and with less features. And for those ultra high performance apps you don't use the native UI toolkit anyway, you program your own widgets since the native ones are dog shit and slow.
Reactive UIs may have been made popular on the web, where they're an absolute nightmare, but native code does them better still.
Best time I ever had in a job was writing WPF applications in C# using ReactiveUI. Once we really understood the underlying model we were plugging stuff together so easily. It is a really good model, but I can't see how React is a good example of it.
Of course I had lots to complain about then, WPF had bugs, C# has a number of big problems, but it was, overall, very nice.
Don't forget about all the embedded UIs (kiosks, appliances, car infotainment, industrial equipment, ...), those computers are weaker and it makes a ton of sense to use native toolkits there.
They tried to replace our Qt GUI at work in this space with a react based one, the new UI ran like utter shit comparatively, even after a lot of effort was spent on optimisation.
Also, most of the world don't use high end developer laptops. Most of the world is the developing world, where phone apps on low end Android phones reign supreme.
> but after Brockman had donated 25M to Trump’s PAC
> In capitalism, the market decides.
> In oligarchy, connections and donations decide.
Author is confused about what Capitalism is. It worked exactly as expected, Capital used itself to advance it's own needs - maximizing (own) growth.
Capitalism is not about markets, it's about Capital.
There is a reason why lobbying is an accepted practice in one of the most Capitalistic countries in the world, and generally forbidden in Socialist EU.
I've been working with UK/EU lobbying data in recent months, so that's the one I felt competent to pick on. I thought I'd leave the nature of capitalism to someone else.
The above comment comes across as a snarky gotcha, and it is not a one-off. Could you please ask in a different way that promotes curious conversation? We would appreciate it.
This style tends to increase the likelihood of others responding in kind. The end result is often a less substantive conversation.
Someone came up with the "invisible hand of the free market" theory and become quite famous so I'd say we can add our own crackpot theories on top, apparently they don't have to be very well researched to stick around
License is a big deal, and not just for cost and openness, but also for practical use in pages like docker, ci/cd pipeline, cloud deployments, or other places licenses need to be dynamic.
Due to distance planes need to take off many hours before the bombs drop.
You can get an edge here by moving your ass somewhere where you can see the planes take off, maybe a team with people at multiple locations - boats near the aircraft carrier, near military bases in Israel, ...
Sure, AI has developed quickly, but let's see it take on a real engineering challenge, rather than regurgitating boilerplate code.
Writing device drivers from incomplete specs is much harder than "writing a whole application" where the specs are clearly defined and there's a lot more example code to reference. If you believe in AI so much, and believe that it's unreasonable for postmarketOS to not want to use it, put it to the test, prove the doubters wrong, what have you got to lose?
What does a developer who writes a driver from incomplete specs do? Writes some values in some registers, sees how the device behaves, updates the spec. Rinse and repeat. Sounds exactly the kind of stuff coding agents thrive at - a verifiable loop. And they can do it 24x7 until done.
Haha, are you trying to suggest you'll have lost much by putting an AI tool to the test? You seem to think it's powerful enough to do the work of porting Alpine Linux (or equivalent) to new hardware without human intervention (beyond the initial prompt), what exactly are you losing by trying this out? It's not your time, as you would have spent less time on giving a simple instruction to an AI tool than you spent in talking to me.
Perhaps the reality is that you know AI needs more hand-holding than this, and the tools aren't up to the task you're thinking of setting them.
You are also strangely fixated on today's capabilities, completely missing the exponential we are on.
In a few months will have posts here from device driver writers explaining how they hooked up a phone to an Arduino and a video camera and how the AI is automatically writing device drivers.
> You are also strangely fixated on today's capabilities
I am talking about today's capabilities because this comment thread started with the suggestion that the benefits of AI for coding was no longer avoidable after the launch of Codex 5.3.
> In a few months will have posts here from device driver writers explaining how they hooked up a phone to an Arduino and a video camera and how the AI is automatically writing device drivers.
A few months? Almost zero chance. If it happens in the next 5 years I'd be less surprised, but I suspect it'll take longer.
If you did that, comments would be "it's just a bit shuffle of the encodings, of course it can manage that, but how about we do totally random encodings..."
That's true, but I still think it'd be an interesting experiment to see how much it actually follows the specification vs how much it hallucinates by plagiarising from existing code.
Probably bonus points for telling it that you're emulating the well known ZX Spectrum and then describe something entire different and see whether it just treats that name as an arbitrary label, or whether it significantly influences its code generation.
But you're right of course, instruction decoding is a relatively small portion of a CPU that the differences would be quite limited if all the other details remained the same. That's why a completely hypothetical system is better.
Compared to the web stack and Electron, native GUI APIs are complete shit. Both for the programmer, but also for the user.
Reactive UI (in the sense of React, Vue, ...), the greatest innovation in UI programming ever, was made popular by web-people.
Unless you write some ultra-high performance app like a Browser, a CAD app, a music production app, it doesn't make any sense to use native GUIs. Takes longer to program, the result is uglier and with less features. And for those ultra high performance apps you don't use the native UI toolkit anyway, you program your own widgets since the native ones are dog shit and slow.
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