serbuvlad

I think this is hard to understate.

I began my undergraduate in 2020, so it was mostly online and my uni group had a discord server we all used.

I already knew how to program pretty well, so there were plenty of nights where I sat in discord and helped people debug their programs. I wouldn't share answers directly as the professors checked for identical and identical-with-renamed-identifiers. So the incentives were pretty well aligned for a collaboration where the students did learn something themselves.

I was incentivized to teach them stuff instead of just fixing their problems, and they were incentivized to learn too (so as not to be stuck dependent on me and my time), and for the most part they did.

It was also a very easy way for me as a not-very-social-teen to get integrated and accepted into the group. Not in a transactional way: "I helped you so you owe me". But rather in the sense that they had to give me a chance and they spent time with me in an environment where I was comfortable, which made it more natural for them to invite me to social situations where it would have been more difficult for me to go directly without knowing the people in advance.

And just like people came to me for programming advice, we went to another guy who really knew Math and Physics for those subjects, and so on.

That is all gone now. What a shame.

Cute idea, but given that almost all posts I see score in the upvote range of [0,2], with "viral" papers scoring 4 upvotes, I wonder if this isn't yet another recursive token burning black hole.

The fundamental idea of technology such as PGP is that the percentage of stuff worth finding for the authorities needs to be really low. Ie. an incredible amount of "legitimate" innocent traffic needs to be flowing through the technology.

Otherwise, anyone who is using it at all will get court ordered and then, with our current system, you just lose.

Tor solves this by making traffic entirely homogenous such that any "it could be anyone" and by making nodes extraordinarily easy to host (such that any nerd can just leave one running 24/7). Even so there are way too few nodes.

But PGP-over-email is way too metadata leaky, and if you're doing anything that actually has a threat model, you need PGP-over-email to be itself common.

Side story/rant

I recently had to verify my YouTube account with a phone number recently because it requires this in order to set a thumbnail.

Questions right off the bat:

1. Why do I need to verify to post a thumbnail that will take 1MB on their servers but not to post a video that will take 100MB on their servers and be public??

2. Why do I need to verify my phone number on YouTube when it's linked to my Google account which has a verified phone number and 2FA etc.?

In any case, it takes you to a CSS-less page that asks you to choose between getting an SMS or being called to get a code. I choose SMS and it doesn't work. It shows an error message with no description just "something went wrong". I try a few times and it keeps not working.

I then switch to the call, and guess what! I have tried "too many times" and will have to try again later. Call worked the next day, but geez, what a mess.

Huh? I just tested it now and the App Store reopened on the same page I was on and Safari also opened on this page and it remembered what I had written into the text box.

More generally apps can store whatever info they want when they're going away to be retrieved when coming back transparently.

On the other hand semantics on the Linux desktop are such that the operating system cannot inform an app that it is going away transparently.

An app that is SIGKILL'd cannot save anything (unless it is proactively saving all the time which is terrible for battery life), an app which is SIGSTOP'd must save it's entire memory space and cannot relinquish locks or GPU resources, and an app that is SIGTERM'd can ask the user to save their work etc. (which is not what a transparently closed app should do).

Ok, but this is just a case of some apps not implementing this properly.

For example Adobe Acrobat does remember exact position in the document, so do first party Apple apps and many others.

Some apps don't.

On Linux no app CAN implement this because the protocols do not exist.

Of course some apps implement this better or worse, but for an app that doesn't implement this, booting me to the home page (which is just one tap away from where I was) is still miles better than hogging ram.

I don't want to close apps, I don't want to manage my computer's resources.

It should just work and it should just work well.

It's a problem at the Wayland/Wayland protocols/XDG level.

There is simply not enough rich app activity information for the session manager to do smart management.

Compare it to what iOS and Android apps report about themseleves and the conditions they are forced to run in (such as being arbitrarily killed and restarted).

Obviously the Linux kernel is perfectly able to sit in a stack like this (see: Android), it's the XDG standards which are not well suited for this.

And GPU buffers? And in-flight network requests? And notification handling? And D-Bus presence? And watchdogs? And other held resources like pids and fds?

I currently have 35 apps "open" on my iPhone, most of which are probably React Native or similar.

Other times I'm sure I've hit 60-70.

Because of iOS's app management feature, most of the apps are actually dead, but if I go back and open any of them, they will open and load on the screen on which I left them.

Android does this too.

Desktop Linux cannot.

Can I open 60-70 or even 35 Electron apps simultaneously on 8GB of RAM on Linux?

And no, I do not want to to back to closing apps, that is simply an inferior experience.

iOS and Android have an incredible amount of engineering to make them RAM and battery efficient that desktop Linux simply doesn't have.

And its not a case of simply implementing some feature, since all apps have to written with this stuff in mind: apps can be suspended/killed at any time and should be able to restart gracefully, notifications go through a side channel, etc etc

Do these phones have any of this?

As a total side tangent, but I really like the following flow: focus follows mouse but focus doesn't raise the window, clicking on the top bar, or Win+Click raises it (notice how neither of these 2 results in an interaction).

Unfortunately, of the popular DE's, this is only supported in Xfce (?), and it's not supported in Windows or macOS afaik.

And we need to get rid of those people TOO.

But software devs are a much easier target because we can just out-compete them.

Gov/bureaucrats hold monopoly of force, so they get what they want.

Cleaners and construction workers are obviously useful and necessary.

First of all we live in buildings and second of all, we cannot afford to clean most public or shared or business spaces ourselves.

These jobs may be automated too one day, they are certainly partially automated now, but the necessity of the job is obvious.

Notaries and most software dev is completely work-for-work's sake and should not have ever existed.

It is a testament to this fact how streamlined bookkeeping is and always has been on the free market (and even then a large part of private bookkeeping is due to the need to comply with government taxes and regulations; in eg. criminal enterprise, bookkeeping is even more streamlined).

However, software devs have made such a mess of it all, that not even the free market was able to streamline it, creating millions of low-utility software bookkeeper jobs (that are finally starting to go away).

Let's be honest about it: this has been a long time coming. If you think of it in terms of the wider civilization, way too much human captial was tied up in software dev.

And the jobs therin are mostly very mundane and of a liniar-translation nature. (translate this Adobe XD design in CSS/React; translate these REST calls to SQL). And 80% of the time was spent chasing trivial mistakes.

Humans can do more for civilization than arranging react components.

Obesity is trending back down and will continue to do so.

Machines have removed our need to work, this stunts our body, and the solution is synthetic work (gym).

AI removes our need to work with our minds (at least partly), this stunts our mind, and the solution is synthetic mind-work.

Sure it will take some time to get used to. But we will get used to it.

If you look in history this is perfectly normal.

Nothing new under the sun.

You are missing my point so much...

1. I am sure there are historical reasons for the way things are.

2. Qt is not a platform. XDG/Wayland/Vulkan/PipeWire/D-Bus is the platform. Qt is a library. The platform is (relatively) lean. And the library is more complex. Whether an app is written in Qt or GTK or anything else it should be transparent for the end user. Whether an app is an executable or a website is not transparent, hence different platforms.

3. Rendering in terms of HTML/CSS is certainly valuable, but it can be reduced to a small subset of what it is + libraries.

4. This reduction would be very useful.

5. In this counter-factual reduction, one can just invent a better method for library deliverables, although I suspect a long TTL chached GET from a cannonical source would be much more than sufficient.

> That's a luxury not afforded to browsers.

That's a luxury not afforded to platforms. You cannot remove core Wayland protocols or core Vulkan functions or Linux syscalls.

This generally isn't an issue if you don't bloat them in the first place with things that don't belong in a platform and that belong in a library.

I'm not arguing against Jev. Jev is very cool.

I'm arguing against the idea that Jev fixes a fundamental deficiency in LLMs by showing it's confidence.

It doesn't.

Jev can do a strict subset of what LLMs can do, but incredibly quickly and incredibly cheaply, which is certainly valuable.

This feels more like mythology though.

Claude and GPT tell me all the time what they are confident and what they're not confident in. This is partially useful, but it's not a guarantee of anything, since they can be confidently wrong or unsure and correct.

Same with Jav.

Arguing that Jav in some way more useful than current LLMs because it includes a confidence score smells of someone who hasn't updated their priors since GPT-4/4o and it's particular issues.

Jav is cool because it's very fast, very cheap, and "good enough". That's it.

How would a GET that hits cache 99% of the time track users?

Sure, but I meant more in the sense of asking about the current status of the page.

One can just add APIs to the Linux kernel, and this would be a pretty straightforward one. (though it might be a little more difficult to avoid a syscall here)

I'm sure an agent can work on this and get some numbers with a day's worth of tokens.

> Further (and this one is entirely on you) the real comparision isn't "unixes" it's a graphical env. So compare the complexity and attitude to win32 dialog apis, QT, etc...

Yes these entirely fit the platform/library hard distinction model.

The platform is the small API to create windows, recieve input events and get an OpenGL/Vulkan/DirectX/Metal surface to draw to, as well as the graphics library itself, which is similarly based on primitives.

Everything above that is a library.

> Because the users of those systems don't really want a canvas they have to render everything on... rendering is hard.

Qt isn't a "system". libQt5 Core + Gui + Widgets + Qml is roughly 20MB on a Linux system I can readily check. This is way more than lean enough to ship with every app and even to download-on-first-use and cache for a web app (assuming it was ubiquitous and many websites would want to pull it from cache).

What the system gives is exactly a canvas to render stuff on.

If you know anything about non-technical people, "how an app looks", is by far the most important thing about it.

The web is uniquely capable (aside from raw OpenGL et. al) at rendering any UX designer's vision.

Almost all alternatives to the web that I've seen make aesthetic impositions, and are therefore non-starters.

Almost every website I visit has massive pop-ups I have to dismiss. Clearly a cached fat library GET would be less annoying than what I already put up with.

The browser wars are long gone, and there is no technical reason why the standards each browser added had to be complex per-use-case builtins instead of composable primitives.

In any case, that is what happened.

And now new projects like Ladybird take a decade to arrive, even with AI, because of the immense amount of stuff in the platform.

> standard that's the product of feature competition between pre-existing nonstandardized behaviors is doomed to be huge.

None of the Unixes are this bloated.

You are the one misunderstanding my point.

There ARE ONLY THREE implementations of the client platform.

I would like for there to be a hundred, and there would be if the platform was simpler, but its not, so there won't.

Yeah exactly. So does native. So what? Why is this a bad thing?

But libraries can be GET'ed from common URLs and cached!