• 5 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • They are quite literally taking the “if you don’t like it, fork it yourself” approach. Who said they aren’t going to make changes/improvements on top of it?

    I don’t see anyone else mentioning it but this is also probably because brave browser is published under the MPL license so the licenses are actually compatible between projects. They don’t want to implement completely from scratch because there is a compatible existing implementation that they can build on top of instead of starting from scratch.



  • That’s the thing though. Even if the code is good, the plans are good, the outputs are good, etc, it still devolves into chaos after some time.

    If you use AI to generate a bunch of code you then don’t internalize it as if you wrote it. You miss out on reuse patterns and implementation details which are harder to catch in review than they are in implementation. Additionally, you don’t have anyone who knows the code like the back of their hand because (even if supervised) a person didn’t write the code, they just looked over it for correctness, and maybe modified it a little bit.

    It’s the same reason why sometimes handwritten notes can be better for learning than typed notes. Yeah one is faster, but the intentionality of slowing down and paying attention to little details goes a long way making code last longer.

    There’s maybe something to be said about using LLMs as a sort of sanity check code reviewer to catch minor mistakes before passing it on to a real human for actual review, but I definitely see it as harmful for anything actually “generative”



  • As someone who has worked with a pretty large C# codebase and several smaller ones, I’ve found it to be one of the least efficient languages to program in. This is maybe not a technical fault of the language, but the way Microsoft encourages developing C# means that once you get past a certain point even simple MRs will have 10-20 files changed. There is sooooooooo much boilerplate caused by .NET that even things like Java Spring Boot just don’t have (and even then I’d consider Java to be a pretty bloated language in terms of boilerplate).

    That’s ignoring the fact that the ecosystem surrounding .NET is a lot more enterprise-y, meaning a good portion of libraries require paid licenses to use.



  • I’m comparing hardware to hardware, not artificial Apple software restrictions.

    That’s great but hardware doesn’t exist in a vacuum. With an ecosystem as locked-down as an iPad’s you can’t just ignore the software. It’s not like you’ll ever be able to uninstall it because it’s intentionally locked down, unlike a macbook which allows installing apps and even modifying the bootloader to boot into a different OS.

    Edit: Forgot to mention the fact even for people that might not care about that, iOS will automatically kill any app that uses more than a certain amount of RAM (I think it was 4GB? I don’t remember the exact number) so in a lot of scenarios you can’t even take advantage of the hardware in an iPad because of the locked down software


  • Ok but if you want to do actual work on it then these things absolutely do not cancel each other out because you have to spend $270 on a keyboard/trackpad regardless, and now have to use a clunky touchscreen on your 13 inch tablet half the time.

    Yes, the M4 is much faster and it is probably only stupid product segmentation keeping it on the iPad. But the reality is, iOS/iPadOS puts OS-level limits on how much you can even take advantage of that hardware even if there is an iOS app for the thing you want to do

    TLDR: If you really want a MacBook just get a refurbished M1/M2 MacBook and call it a day, bonus points for putting Asahi on it



  • How many times do I have to give him the benefit of the doubt though?

    First it was the “using they in documentation is political ideology” Github issue, then he publicly defended DHH when people called him out for being a white supremacist, he implied tech companies are discriminating against white people with diversity policies, and he tweeted that he hopes young people will carry on Charlie Kirk’s legacy.

    If one or two of these things happened in isolation, I could maybe understand giving him the benefit of the doubt as a non-American (for that last one) non-native English speaker. But all of these things taken together? I personally don’t think I can look past that.


  • All things considered the way they’re approaching the migration is fine enough - they’re only moving specific portions at a time, they’re not stopping C++ development, and they’re making sure it doesn’t introduce regressions. Adopting a memory-safe language for something like a browser makes sense because it completely eliminates that class of vulnerabilities.

    The problem is the way they’re approaching the code itself. From their wording, it sounds like they’re relying on AI heavily for both writing and reviewing the code. Rust has a steeper learning curve than most languages and is very different from C++. They even mention in the blog that their current Rust code looks like C++ code ported over. If they don’t take the time to actually learn Rust before adopting it, it’ll just lead to security logic issues that their AI couldn’t catch because C++ and Rust don’t always behave the same way. And that’s completely ignoring all of the other ethical/technical issues with AI



  • Worth noting that Linux Mint Debian Edition exists and is based directly on Debian instead of Ubuntu. They starting publishing it specifically because the Linux Mint team doesn’t like the direction Ubuntu is heading in with snaps. Not sure how good it is as I haven’t tried it in a while (and don’t really use regular mint either).








  • To be fair, Linux isn’t developed on GitHub (it’s developed on the Linux Kernel Mailing List and kernel.org) and most of the spammers knew that going into it. The PRs on that repo were mostly just people trolling any bystanders that took it seriously until the internet did what they do best and took the joke too far.

    In this specific example they didn’t waste anyone’s time or resources because it was never being used or monitored in the first place.

    Edit for more additional context: Linus (who created git in the first place) mentioned not liking centralized git servers so he’s specifically said for multiple years that he never considered actually moving development over to something like GitHub