100% this is a jump-the-shark moment.

I sort of think what they’re releasing will stay free for a long time. That’s not my concern.

My concern is that since they’ve been acquired by Canva you can tell how Canva is thinking about Affinity; it’s a pure subscription driver towards Canva.

So given this is what Canva wants to do with Affinity, I have no doubt that Affinity will focus on shipping features that drive towards Canva subscriptions. That means other features will atrophy and that the future of affinity is one where you’re increasingly finding it diffficult to use, if you’re aiming to use it as an alternative to Adobe, without a subscription.

So this is subscription software by another name - it just creeping subscription, slowly boiling the frog in hope we won’t all jump out. Make no mistake, the fire has been lit and it won’t be long before the water gets warm.

Enshittification here we come.

Triggered much?

This endless separation into “managers” and “not managers” is so unproductive. Everyone manages something. That’s why you’re employed.

This is actually worse. It’s copy/paste with an AI “correcting” any view that doesn’t conform to Elon’s view.

Vigilant team of right wing AI bots correcting any “libtard bias” as soon as it occurs.

This really solidifies the US’ splitting into two. Now there are two versions of “truth”. It breaks the heart.

I think people, and this paper, misses a few elements.

4K encoded content often has significantly higher bitrate (well, duh, there’s more content) and often higher than the simple increase in pixel density would suggest. So content with heavy moment (flocks of birds, water, crowds etc) still looks better than 1080p, not because of the increase in pixel density, but because of the decrease of compression artefacts.

Second, high dynamic range yo! On a still picture on my TV it’s hard to see difference between 1080p and 4K but it isn’t hard to see the difference between SDR and HDR.

So I still vastly prefer 4K content, but not because of the resolution.

And in the darkness bind them?

Like we’re dumb!

Not like we’re smart!

By the way?

Always tinkered with Linux, since eeeearly Red Hat days, but took the first full move when I set up my home lab and needed to host some docker containers with hardware pass-through.

Turned out my hardware was a bit too new for the kernel I had to install so ended up teaching myself a lot in terms trying to get everything to work.

Because of that I got quite comfortable on the terminal and from then, the UI suddenly made sense, because I understood better the concepts underneath.

Run three boxes with various versions of Linux now, a couple more if you count dual booting, a couple more if you count Mac as some kind of Frankenstein UNIX.

Of course. But that wasn’t the complaint/satire of the satirist whose article we’re discussing.

Some topics are just complicated. If I write you a tutorial in fast Fourier transforms I can’t start the tutorial at 1+1=2.

So maybe the tutorial the satirist was satirising just wasn’t quite aimed at the satirist.

Help me understand what the author is trying to say, please. It could be I’m missing something. It just reads to me like the author feels everybody else has a responsibility to somehow make complicated topics easy.

Oh do grow up, frankly.

When I taught myself to program, there was no internet. You went and bought an enormous, 800 page book (usually written by Charles Petzold) and you hoped to Darwin something, anything would be understandable and lead you to move forward just a little bit.

If it’s worthwhile doing it’s hard.

Yeah, it’s a mess:

Ok, it’s a phone.

Alright, it seems to run Linux.

<EOF>

Eh, ok.

The CEO also looks underage, graduated last year after an internship with Microsoft. I can’t find any record of investment in the company or even any record of incorporation (to be fair I didn’t look very hard). The CEO and his whizz-kid AI coder may be the two smartest people on the planet - stranger things have happened - but statistically, and going by available data only, listening very much to a teenager (or thereabouts) hawking the skill of another teenager (confirmed) is a bit like watching two drunk kids in town thumping their chests.

For sure younger people will grow up to replace older people - such is the way of the world - and a salty coder is usually undertaken by fresh talent coming in with new skill sets (been on both sides of that), but right now, there’s nothing demanding attention here.

You must work in tech support with that attitude to the problem 🤣

The user has a problem. Do you want to be right or do you want a satisfied user? I can tell you which path popular operating systems choose.

And I say this 5 different OSes at home, 3 of which are Linux distros.

Once we were at zero warnings, we enabled warnings as errors, despite the protestation of the grognards on the team.

Depends on the age of the codebase, the age of the compiler and the culture of the team.

I’ve arrived into a team with 1000+ warnings, no const correctness (code had been ported from a C codebase) and nothing but C style casts. Within 6 months, we had it all cleaned up but my least favourite memory from that time was “I’ll just make this const correct; ah, right, and then this; and now I have to do this” etc etc. A right pain.