Monthly Archives: December 2021

Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

Posted on 2021-12-11 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This is an optimistic take on the whole log4j mess and its many antecedents. It would be _wonderful_ to have a culture where companies routinely paid for (or, you know, even contributed development effort back to) the open source they rely upon rather than viewing it as manna or "nerds I can exploit without even paying a salary." It also seems deeply implausible, and hard to realize without releasing a massive plague of grifters on people building open-source software (fake or high-fee middlemen, 'taking over maintenance' of projects for money, etc..
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Ask HN: Is there a minimal browser like uzbl that is up-to-date?

Posted on 2021-12-11 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The lack of lightweight browsers is because Web tech is a Grey's Law “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” situation. Is it just shortsighted complexity fetishists shitting their nest? Is it a concerted effort by google to make the standards so wretched no one else can implement them? Is it a horrible industry-wide conspiracy to sell hardware even though nothing about how we use computers has improved meaningfully in over a decade? I'd love to see a massive reel-back on web tech. Less-to-no client side code. More separate-content-and-presentation so we aren't all getting fucked around by 'design' like the original dream. At least CPU time limits for background code.
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A Dune strategy game is coming to PC in 2022

Posted on 2021-12-09 by pappp

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Everything old is new again. Dune (1992). Dune 2 (1992). Dune 2000 (1998, I played a _lot_ of this one). Emperor: Battle for Dune (2001). Let's just ignore that other one based on the TV series that everyone hated. It is a great premise for an RTS/Strategy game, maybe it'll be fun.
Dune: Spice Wars will be available in early access next year. | Image: Funcom

Dune: Spice Wars is a new real-time strategy game for PC set in the Dune universe. It will be available in early access in 2022.

Spice Wars, which was announced at The Game Awards on Thursday, is described by developer Shiro Games and publisher Funcom as a strategy game “with 4X elements.” There will be multiple playable factions and multiple ways to win a game, which could mean a lot of replayability.

Control the spice, control the universe. Choose your faction, explore Arrakis, expand your forces, exploit the spice and exterminate your enemies in #DuneSpiceWars. From @ShiroGames and @Funcom.

Coming to Early Access in 2022 - https://t.co/J8eSFQ2VIi pic.twitter.com/ZkOp6Euk0S

— Dune: Spice Wars (@DuneSpiceWars) December 10, 2021

W...

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The [Rust] Core Team Is Toxic

Posted on 2021-12-09 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: So, I'm willing to believe the rust core team are being pompous myoptic assholes, or at least in over their heads, but there's another pattern that is also worrying. Every time this bubbles up, it seems like the rust core team is making choices putting the health and viability of the technology over sociopolitical purity like cooperating with monied interests who use and financially support the tech regardless of their politics and behavior - you know, the sort of thing a governance team whose charter is to ensure the health and survival of the tech _should_ be doing - and the identity radicals are mad about it and insinuating against them, but very carefully not being specific because if they were they'd get laughed out. At least when it's copyleft radicals vs. pragmatists, the sociopolitical arguments are fundamentally technological and not just about the identities of whoever happens to have their hands on it right now. VERY historical Marxist circular firing squad, come back for the identity-as-the-only-lens folks as it plagued the class-as-the-only-lens folks in the 20th century. Someone in the HN comments seems to be noticing the same thing.
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Coding for non-programmers: Why we need better GUI automation tools

Posted on 2021-12-04 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I harp on this a lot. Simple, user-empowering languages (shell scripts, batch files, excel abuse, etc.) are absolutely essential to computers empowering users instead of coercing them. Part of the delight of command lines is that the manual and automated interface modes are homomorphic. There's barely a model for _how_ to do something like that in a GUI, and outside of a handful of Smalltalk and Lisp environments that at least have the ability to view and edit source of running GUI systems, there aren't many serious efforts. As the article notes, Apple has made a few increasingly-limited efforts that all slowly faded, plus there was ARExx for the Amiga and some marginally abusive uses of VB. In most environments it's pretty effort-intensive for programmers/designers to expose GUI controls in a programmatic way (as opposed to trying to automate direct manipulation, eg. xdotool), and the commercial incentives are mostly _against_ doing it; you can't force the user to use your thing in the way you would prefer with algorithmic coercion and ads if they can programmatically alter it. You can't rentseek off of automation features if they're baked in. Etc.
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FTC sues to block Nvidia acquiring ARM

Posted on 2021-12-02 by pappp

Source: OSNews

Article note: This is probably a good thing. Nvidia seems ...unlikely... to be a good, neutral steward.

The Federal Trade Commission today sued to block U.S. chip supplier Nvidia Corp.’s $40 billion acquisition of U.K. chip design provider Arm Ltd. Semiconductor chips power the computers and technologies that are essential to our modern economy and society. The proposed vertical deal would give one of the largest chip companies control over the computing technology and designs that rival firms rely on to develop their own competing chips. The FTC’s complaint alleges that the combined firm would have the means and incentive to stifle innovative next-generation technologies, including those used to run datacenters and driver-assistance systems in cars.

It seems increasingly unlikely that this acquisition will go through. I think that’s a good thing – while I’d rather Nvidia purchase ARM than Apple, Google, Microsoft, or Amazon, an even better outcome would be a profitable, independent ARM.

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Ask HN: Why doesn’t anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005-Google?

Posted on 2021-12-02 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Because everyone learned how to generate SEO poison bullshit. Because lots of content has been sucked into the facebook/discord roach motels instead of the open 'net where it's index-able. Because search engines (like most things on the 'net) pay for themselves by selling sociopaths access to users.
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Testing Phone-Sized Faraday Bags

Posted on 2021-12-02 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Oh neat. I kind of assumed those products were largely bogus on the basis that no one would test them, but that's proper test equipment, and it seems like a lot of them work pretty well.
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3D Printing Community Mourns The Loss of Sanjay Mortimer Of E3D

Posted on 2021-12-01 by pappp

Source: Make: Online

Article note: Oh shit. He was doing good, influential work and he was _young_.

The 3D printing community is morning today the loss of one of our greatest voices, Sanjay Mortimer, Co-Founder and Director of E3D. Under Sanjay’s guidance, E3D rose to be the leading supplier of hotends to the industry with their devices being put to use in printers from Prusa Research, Lulzbot, BCN3D, IMade3D, and more. To many of us though, Sanjay was far more than just […]

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