jezek2

I haven't got 1k karma even after few years of usage. Perhaps you gained it too fast or in a suspicious way.

Have you followed rules of each subreddit carefully? There also was/is some issue when not all rules were visible in old vs new reddit so you could miss important information if you used the "wrong" reddit.

For a long time I had to ask the moderators to whitelist my posts due to low karma. But hadn't had problems, other than I'm apparently blacklisted from upvoting anything for some reason (it just doesn't apply when logged out or when asked other users).

Nowadays I don't visit Reddit too often because there is simply not much of interesting content, all the subreddits I visit introduced strict anti-AI policies, which is mostly good to me but the result is that there is very little posts overally.

I think it could be solved by either using float values for the coordinates (probably not desirable), having some extra native properties in the event or by passing the coordinates based on the mid point while dragging (but not for the initial press so clicking is not affected).

There is nothing wrong with it, it's just people not trusting anything that they're not familiar with (whether they're right or wrong). Game streaming services are using PWAs by consumers just fine.

The trust problem is a general one, it even involves trusting yet another app (not just the installation method). This can be solved by providing a good value and good references / marketing.

For developers it is most likely a FOMO by thinking about anything other than App Store as "a lesser". But just being in the App Store doesn't achieve much as you're one among the millions, you have to market your app yourself anyway.

Some users have this weird association where web apps are considered as not secure while native apps are safe while in reality it's the exact opposite, web apps are nicely sandboxed and native apps siphoons out private information in bulk.

I don't think there is a genuine barrier if you have a really good app that adds enough value to the user. For example GeForce NOW (and other game streaming services) with millions of users use PWAs on iOS/iPad with success.

The installation process can be presented as a simple guide to the users (on Android it's even easier as you can just click a button directly). Of course a portion of users won't be able or be unwilling to follow it. On the other hand you'll get a higher quality users who can follow guides and you retain a direct relationship with them.

There are some annoyances, mostly by Apple when they sometimes add or change some feature that interferes with the web apps, but workarounds are quickly to be found. I would say it's not occurring that often, and native apps needs to adapt to Apple changes too.

It's also a good idea to not use the term PWA, but rather terms like "installable web app" / "add to home screen" or something similar. Almost nobody knows the PWA term (including the developers).

PWAs don't have all capabilities that the native apps have, but most apps don't need these. PWAs certainly can work offline, have push notificatins and other stuff. Some demos are here: https://whatpwacando.today/

Page up/down, home/end doesn't work. Page scrolling (by pressing/holding above/below the handle in scrollbar) is not working. No button up/down in scrollbar (and ability to just hold them to continue scrolling) - I guess this is optional for "cleanliness". Pressing space key doesn't scroll one page down. Scroll speed when using scroll wheel is too slow.

Scrolling while selecting text (by moving mouse above or below where page is on screen) doesn't work. In the past I managed to get mouse events outside of the page area by attaching the mouse handler to "window" instead of "document" (at least in Firefox at the time, not sure about Chrome).

Text selection should highlight a character when the mouse is beyond mid point and not after the whole character. Double clicking should highlight a word, triple clicking should highlight a paragraph. When clicking more times it should cycle. It should also support dragging after double/triple click to continue selection of more words/paragraphs.

URLs are not shown when hovering over links. Ideally some invisible overlay that is actually a real link would be preferrable. This way all the ways to open links would work.

The color scheme button is almost invisible.

Consider the alternative where a bigger number of modded boards with dubious RAM gets into circulation, which is no problem for Chinese companies to do. It would quickly result in a distrust of all RPi products and everyone would suffer.

It also has nothing to do with going public, it is consistent with what they were always doing: it never was fully open, in fact quite the opposite and they were always protective about their HW, you can't even order the SoC as a separate chip, only as a part of premade/customized board.

How come that MacPorts supports macOS versions all the way back to 10.5 Leopard in the latest version?

Yes, it's not a new idea. See Microsoft Singularity research OS for a more recent example.

You would still have slower than native execution speed, security problems with Spectre attacks (in HW process isolation it's avoided by not having other memory mapped at all, other mitigations exist but they cost a lot of performance).

Syscall speedups affect only specific programs or stupidly written SW like some games that are checking current time many many times per frame.

To me AI seems to be similar to drugs. It can be used responsibly (eg. medical use), some users are total junkies. There are huge social/economical impacts. It has similar anti stances, even proposing legislative bans (should we relive the prohibition again?). It's interesting to observe it in this context.

I agree, the policy should be to not allow low quality submissions and have clear copyright status. There are some nuances that needs to be addressed though.

With LLMs it's too easy to replicate implementation of algorithm that is copyrighted, with manual coding it's more deliberate. Sometimes you can't really separate the algorithm from the implementation. So a maintainer needs to check the origin of any algorithm used.

The copyright status for non-algorithm code is quite straightforward and it's often a non-copyrightable code anyway (boilerplate, configuration, obvious steps, etc.). The generated code by LLM has no human author therefore it is public domain, there is no problem of incorporating of public domain code. Any copyrigtable modifications are made by the user of the LLM.

The biggest problem is the amount of low effort contributions caused by AI usage. But one could just reject it on being of low effort.

There is no need to specifically target AI in the policy, with one exception that is unique to LLM contributions: people not understanding anything about the produced code at all. One couldn't trust anything from such contributor.

Such speedup is not plausible at all. It had to be a flawed benchmark relying on some API being very slow in userspace (probably on purpose, not using it the right way). The raw execution speed of WASM can't change much just because it is in a kernel.

Good, now you can cut your bill again by 94% by renting a normal VPS with unlimited traffic.

The traffic is about 100x more expensive on "the cloud" and it killed all the ideas I had for cloud usage. Clouds are not worth it, even for scaling you can always rent more VPSes (or dedicated servers for heavy projects).

Great article, WebAssembly is such a good technology when you have use case for it.

I've just finished creating a WASM 1.0 implementation (simple JIT on x86 and x86_64) for plugin usage and I'm looking on how to support more languages beyond C (for which I have "micro-libc" to create really small binaries). In particular C++ and Rust so the article contains useful info for that. C++ that would be more problematic I think, would have to resort to full Emscripten or something... I've tried to compile standalone C++ stdlib but wasn't much sucessful yet.

BTW, I see in the screenshots you also test Firefox, I think it would make sense to test the latest two ESR versions (these are often used by Linux distributions).

It can be also a temporary obstacle until they get rid of Linux kernel and replace it with kernel from Fuchsia or something.

It stopped working for me years ago. The homepage loaded but couldn't see the archived pages or submit anything. Some kind of "protection" or something. So I moved on and never used the service again.

It's clear to me: the request is about sending a particular version of the source code. No other versions, so no history.

This is not true. Glibc supports symbol versioning. You can use it to select old versions of used symbols. The result is a binary that can work on 20 year old distros the same as on the latest, compiled with latest compiler and Glibc.

You can also compile using old distro and old Glibc to get similar effect. Though you would miss the advances of the newer compilers.

Except it won't show for signed+notarized apps. It's just a minor obstacle to deliver malware. Even stuff on App Store has malware in it.

If security was a concern, these hoops would be for all apps, not just unsigned. It just shows the only function it serves is gatekeeping by Apple.

And here is a reaction by an actual nuclear engineer. He has many good reactions to other videos as well, not limited to just nuclear stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vncf70UBsr4

I don't know, here in the real world, so far the EU's regulations of Apple has shown Google that it can safely make Android a closed platform. Before there was uncertainty that Google didn't want to test. This is possible because EU don't care about "sideloading" and accept the security argument to allow gatekeeping by the device/OS makers.

Meanwhile Apple is having fun how to creatively pass the EU regulations while defeating every point of it in practical terms.

Maybe in a decade or two there will be something useful from this, but in the meantime it will be worse.

I don't, it's hard to read with the 'T' between date/time and has too many variants.

How do you think Google is able to track users? It's in part because of fools like you who puts their tracking script into the website. You're actively aiding this.

You're not required to do so, not for indexing in search engines and not for having visitor statistics (you can install some open source software instead).

I don't think it's wise to use it for anything. Even when chatting with an LLM you would have to check everything yourself which nobody would truly do. The generated code can't be really trusted (and nobody will review everything, quite the opposite). It can also have copyright issues.

People are allergic to articles and documentation generated/processed by LLM.

You're switching from an active role to a passive one, meaning your skill will suffer over the time. There is a huge difference between doing the things and thinking you know what it's doing. It's harder to review bad generated code because how polished it looks, compared to code made by humans where the difference is much more obvious.

Code assistants seem to work great when dealing with boilerplate, but wouldn't be better to get rid of the need for the boilerplate in the first place?

Thanks, it might be useful for macOS support of non-native widgets in my GUI library. I did some parsing but got stuck at some point.

Seems a better choice to just parse the files than using private APIs as I couldn't see much of the documentation for them (or rather reversed APIs in various projects) + image handling is weirdly complicated in macOS generally so I want to avoid that.

Currently I've experimented by just recreating the graphics from scratch using vector rendering but it's quite cumbersome.

Other libraries, such as Qt, try to draw the native widgets into offscreen image but it's extremely hacky way prone to GUI breaking with any OS update. Java has their own Apple blessed way, but seems quite limited to me and don't want to depend on that either.

Interestingly I've never used Visual Studio on Windows (only for a brief time for ARM based PDAs where I could experience the infamous MFC which was okay to me despite the hate).

I've used Borland C++ and Watcom C/C++ back in the day and MinGW after that. Also COM was invented for interoperation between languages/compilers.

Being a good citizen means to not use the inherently unstable C++ ABI directly. You can use C API or even COM for that. Relying on it is cute but it's accidental and it will break in the future. Microsoft can't guarantee that it will stay stable because C++ is always evolving, forcing to break the compatibility.

Open source projects shouldn't depend on proprietary compilers (they can support them, but not as the only option). It just undermines the purpose of it.

The reasons I use MinGW is because it produces better compatible binaries on Windows, allowing me to support all Windows versions from Windows 2000 to latest with a single binary (and sometimes 64bit if there is a need/advantage) and it doesn't require me to bundle dozens of DLLs (or worse, installing them system-wide) and artifically limit the compatibility for no reason.

Breaking the compatibility is hostile to the users who can't or want to always use the latest Windows.

I think the issues you're referring to are related to C++ ABI which is inherently incompatible between different compilers (and sometimes versions). This can be sometimes issue for plugins, though sane programs always use C wrappers.

I never had issues with C ABI, calling into other DLLs, creating DLLs, COM objects, or whatever. I fail to see what is fundamentally incompatible here.

But that's the point, I don't want the same style executable as Visual Studio. Having to distribute bunch of DLLs and having worse compatibility is pretty bad.

A major part of the incompatibility with older versions of Windows is just because newer VS runtimes cut the support artifically. That's it. Many programs would otherwise work as-is or with just a little help.

I wish open source projects would support MingW or at least not actively blocking it's usage. It's a good compiler that provides an excellent compatibility without the need of any extra runtime DLLs.

I don't understand how open source projects can insist on requiring a proprietary compiler.

I use MingW without any extra libs (no msys), it just uses the ancient msvcrt.dll that is present in all Windows versions, so my programs work even on Windows 2000.

Additionally the cross-compiler on Linux also produces binaries with no extra runtime requirements.

Clearing of the secrets is a separate issue from memory allocation mechanism. It must be done all the way from the encryption layer to the program to avoid the leaks.

This is typically not done, only certain parts such as handling of the crypto keys. That's because it's pervasive and requires reworking everything with that in mind (TLS library, web framework, application).

On the other hand the centralization and global usage of GC in the process allows to modify it to always zero out the memory that it deallocated and to do GC at regular intervals so it can have advantage here (it's very easy to inadvertly leak the secrets to some string).

You can do it with HW accelerated emulation like Apple did with M1 CPUs. They implemented x86 compatible behavior in HW so the emulation has very good performance.

Another approach was Transmeta where the target ISA was microcoded, therefore done in "software".