I've seen it be the concatenated individual git commit messages way too often. Just a full screen scroll of "my hands are writing letters" and "afkifrj". Still better than if we had those commits individually of course, but dear god.
The gold standard is rebased linear unsquashed history with literary commits, but I'll take merged and squashed PR commits with sensible commit messages without complaint.
We could, but most of the 2000s developers are gone. Or, we no longer have developers left with 2000s attitudes and approaches to software development.
I think that is a little bit unfair. I think plenty of developers, myself included wouldn't mind or would like to do native applications. Every time someone does those, a mountain of people ask "why" and "this shoulda/coulda been a web app." And some of that is somewhat reasonable. It's easier to achieve decent-ish cross platform. But also tons of consumers also just don't wanna download and install applications unless it comes from an App Store. And even then, it's iffy. Or most often the case, it's a requirement of the founders/upper management/c-suite. And lets be honest, when tons of jobs ask for reactive experience or vue.js, what motivates developers to learn GTK or Qt or Winforms or WinUI3?
Yep. I graduated in 2017 and jobs were already mostly web. I’d love to work on native applications but nobody is hiring for that and of course because nobody is hiring for that I don’t have a job like that and the Qt I learnt in university is not gonna get any more relevant over time but I don’t have a good reason to keep that skill up to date and if I have to solve a problem I might as well write a TUI or CLI application because that’s easier than Qt or whatever…
Well, some of the "old school" has left the market of natural causes since the 2000s.
That only leaves the rest of 'em. Wer dey go, and what are your top 3 reasons for how the values of the 2000s era failed to transmit to the next generation of developers?
It's also reasonable from a business point of view to say "we can't justify the investment to optimize our software in the current environment." I assume this is what's happening - people are trying to get their products in customers hands as quickly as possible, and everything else is secondary once it's "good enough." I suspect it's less about developers and more about business needs.
Perhaps the math will change if the hardware market stagnates and people are keeping computers and phones for 10 years. Perhaps it will even become a product differentiator again. Perhaps I'm delusional :).
I rarely doge a chance to shit on Microslop and its horrible products, but you don't use a browser? In fact, running all that junk in a single chromium instance is quite a memory saver compared to individual electron applications.
It's not just electron apps or browsers, as I'd argue modern .NET apps are almost as bad.
I have an example.
I use Logos (a Bible study app, library ecosystem, and tools) partially for my own faith and interests, and partially because I now teach an adult Sunday school class. The desktop version has gotten considerably worse over the last 2-3 years in terms of general performance, and I won't even try to run it under Wine. The mobile versions lack many of the features available for desktop, but even there, they've been plagued by weird UI bugs for both Android and iOS that seem to have been exacerbated since Faithlife switched to a subscription model. Perhaps part of it is their push to include AI-driven features, no longer prioritizing long-standing bugs, but I think it's a growing combination of company priorities and framework choices.
Oh, for simpler days, and I'm not sure I'm saying that to be curmudgeonly!
Why would I need a browser to play music? Or to send an email? Or to type code? My browser usage is mostly for accessing stuff on someone else’s computer.
I use a browser at home, but I don't use the heaviest web sites. There are several options for my hourly weather update, some are worse than others (sadly I haven't found any that are light weight - I just need to know if it would be a thunderstorm when I ride my bike home from work thus meaning I shouldn't ride in now)
I'm giving up on weather apps bullshit at this point, and am currently (literally this moment) making myself a Tasker script to feed hourly weather predictions into a calendar so I can see it displayed inline with events on my calendar and most importantly, my watch[0] - i.e. in context it actually matters.
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[0] - Having https://sectograph.com/ as a watch face is 80%+ of value of having a modern smartwatch to me. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother. I really miss Pebble.
fun fact, you can kill all firefox background processes and basically hand-crash every tab and just reload the page in the morning. I do this every evening before bed. `pkill -f contentproc` and my cpu goes from wheezing to idle, as well as releasing ~8gb of memory on busy days.
("Why don't you just close firefox?" No thanks, I've lost tab state too many times on restart to ever trust its sessionstore. In-memory is much safer.)
Yeah, I found this out the other day when my laptop was toasting. In hindsight, probably related to archive.today or some Firefox extension.
You have to close Firefox every now and then for updates though. The issue you describe seems better dealt with on filesystem level with a CoW filesystem such as ZFS. That way, versioning and snapshots are a breeze, and your whole homedir could benefit.
I kind of hate how the www has become this lowest common denominator software SDK. Web applications are almost always inferior to what you could get if you had an actual native application built just for your platform. But we end up with web apps because web is more convenient for software developers and it's easier to distribute. Everything is about developer convenience. We're also quickly running out of software developers who even know how to develop and distribute native apps.
And when, for whatever reason, having a "desktop application" becomes a priority to developers, what do they do? Write it in Electron and ship a browser engine with their app. Yuuuuuuck!
Yeah it's awful. Web apps are slower, they don't integrate well with the system, they are inaccessible if the network is down. A native app has to be truly abysmal to be worse than a web app. But far too many developers simply do not care about making something good any more. There's no pride in one's work, just "web is easier for the developer". And of course the businesses producing software are all about that, because they are run by people with a business ethic of "make the product as cheaply as possible, ignore quality". It's a very sad state of affairs.
It's unexpected. When trying to understand a system it's beneficial if it adheres to expectations, as it means we're not forced to consider the entire possibility space of what a program can be. Utilizing the entire possibility space is usually the domain of malware, which tries to be surprising.
If you include PHEVs along with pure EVs the total is around 12% total sales for 2025, and 4% total on the road. I'm not sure when PHEVs became available overseas but they haven't been an option here for that long. Heaps of hybrids are being sold but for now still mostly of the traditional non-plug-in type.
As alliao says, this is partly because of the way road user charges (RUC) currently work, though that is slated to change in the future.
Hybrids and PHEVs are more complicated given that they are both ICEs and EVs. A pure EV is much cheaper, and many places in the developing world don't have easy access to oil anyways.
Even in the US, our overpriced EVs are cheaper than comparable ICE.
They’re mostly big, and compete with 20mpg models. At $4/gallon, you’ll spend $40K on gasoline to drive a new ICE car 200K miles. The EV premium is typically $10-20K. These are all luxury cars, so a trimline upgrade is often $10K.
EVs have particularly poor resale value (the technology improves rapidly), so if you’re price sensitive you can get a much better deal by buying something a few years old.
In places where competition is allowed, EVs are much cheaper than ICE. That’ll eventually be true in most places. If NZ lets the Chinese models in, I’d expect them to take over immediately.
Model 3s are Honda Accord class, so compacts, not sub-compacts. I haven't seen many sub-compact EVs in the states beyond the Leaf and the Bolt. I’m kind of excited about the new BmW i3, which will be a more normal 3 series size and shape vs the old i3. I won’t buy it of course, I’ve decided I’m not replacing my i4 before a real self driving car is available.
I can't imagine why NZ doesn't allow Chinese EVs in already like Australia has. I would guess it isn’t really about restriction but rather the smaller size of the market.
Isn't the solution to a rare task being painful to make the task frequent? What if we required daily/weekly fiscal reporting? Would that even be feasible? I guess it would force complete automation, which might make it much more difficult to change things and reduce company agility. Would be fun to hear the opinion of someone actually involved with the process.
Some adults try a bit harder to live up to the ideals of being an adult than others. They are toddlers inside like anyone else, but there's a layer of restraint on top that evidently not everyone has.
Nothing can really save you from architecture astronauts, except possibly Go, but I hear there are people templating Go with preprocessors, so who knows. This is a human problem. On the other hand I hear you. The moment Rust gets proper async traits an entire world of hexagonal pain will open up for the victims of the astronauts. So it will get even worse, basically. I think if we could solve the problem of bored smart people sabotaging projects it'd be amazing.
The gold standard is rebased linear unsquashed history with literary commits, but I'll take merged and squashed PR commits with sensible commit messages without complaint.
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