> No one has ever made a purchasing decision based on how good your code is.
As stated by others, this is very false. Most if not all software I use is selected by its disk/memory footprint and performance. Having a small disk/memory footprint and having good performance at the same time is a good indicator of a good code quality.
Moreover, after using computers for more than three decades, you get a feeling about the performance of a particular software suite. So an inefficient piece of code makes itself known in a loud way if you look the right way.
One of my favorite applications, Obsidian, is generally performs well, but when you hit it just the right way (e.g. add a couple of PDFs and enable previewing), you can feel how sluggish it becomes.
Having a suite of well written applications which have high performance/footprint ratio also allows me to do more with less resources and in less time. So, good code quality matters. It also almost guarantees the software suite will be maintained in a longer time.
Incidentally, I'm also in camp #2, and write my code with the same attention to detail. I have also written code which squeezed all performance from systems, approaching theoretical IPC limits of the processor the code is running on.
I've built dozens of services and applications for companies.
ZERO times has anyone even mentioned disk/memory footprint. Performance maaybe, but no hard limits were defined in any contracts. And even those were "these things have to be processed within 24 hours because the law says so", not microsecond precision.
Even Obsidian is 440MB. It's a markdown editor with a built-in javascript scripting system. There's no reason for it to be almost half a gigabyte. Zero people have checked the directory size and went "nah, too big, won't use it".
> Zero people have checked the directory size and went "nah, too big, won't use it".
Nope, at least one. I refused to install software just because it's too big. I resisted using Obsidian exactly of these reasons until I failed to find a credible alternative.
Well, there's ZimWiki, but it wasn't working on macOS well enough to use that daily.
> Most if not all software I use is selected by its disk/memory footprint and performance.
If that would be true, electron apps would not exists and everything would be a native software. But alas, most modern products, even before vibe-coding are horrible performance-wise.
Of course it depends on the context, but consumer facing products have been awful in terms of performance for a while now.
I have a hunch that space race is not for "peaceful technological progress of human race at large", or "let's see how this behaves in 0G, it might be useful for some global problems" anymore.
Well, I highly doubt that the kind of rockets they are developing for Lunar and Mars missions will be mich better, if any better at all, than current ballistic missiles armies around the world already have. Those space rockets are huge and meant to more or less safely carry people over a long distance in space. Warheads are meant to carry explosives while also being hard to detect or stop. I'm no rocket scientist, but I believe that huge space rockets would defeat the purpose, as they would consume a lot of fuel for nothing, while also being much easier to spot and stopped by shooting something at them.
So I think the opposite: we are way past the point of space exploration being directly useful for weapons.
The point now isn’t having better rockets for (ballistic) missiles, since satellites became a thing the game has been infrastructure. Future (hypothetical) missions to the moon and mars might not be for military research purposes directly, but the infrastructure that both needs to be and now can be set up to support those missions will absolutely be co-opted for military purposes.
The race is now to bootstrap your nation’s permanent presence in space, because at the moment there is a first mover opportunity for what is slowly but surely becoming just another frontier for economics, geopolitics, etc. to play out over (granted this is already happening, I suppose I’m talking about a step change in scale).
I mean, we can probably predict what will happen based on existing data.
"I've seen things up there that are huge, absolutely huge. And let me tell you, astronauts, they came up to me, they were crying, big men crying. Earth, it's a good name, but it's not big enough, not grand enough. So, I'm thinking we rename it. How about 'The Trump Sphere'? It's got a nice ring to it, doesn't it? And let me tell you, nobody would argue with that name!"
James May of Top Gear has flown with a U2 spy plane once [0][1]. When they reached to the edge of space, May said "If everybody could do that once, it would completely change the face of global politics, religion, education, everything".
I can't agree more.
Another thing I believe needs to be watched periodically is Pale Blue Dot [2].
I think you overestimate the effect that would have on the kind of people that most need that sort of humility.
Look at what happened with William Shatner and Jeff Bezos when they came back from space. Shatner started to say something about what an impactful experience it was, but Bezos cut him off and was like “Woo! Partay!” and switched his attention to a magnum of champagne.
I met someone a couple years ago who was a U2 pilot (which are still in active service). He'd flown F-16s until he reached the point in the promotion ladder where flying stopped, then switched to U2s to keep being a pilot. After hitting 20 years, he was taking his retirement and training to fly Grumman S-2Ts with CAL FIRE.
Very down-to-earth guy who knew what he wanted and made his choices. Didn't at all seem like the sort to find edge-of-the-atmosphere flying a mystical experience.
Jeff went up two flights earlier, in July 2021 on NS-16. Shatner was on NS-18 in October.
I don't know if it's a thing that wears off, if Bezos was just in business-mode the entire time, or just didn't want someone monologuing right after getting back.
For cheap yet snappy cards, I have been using Kingston Canvas Go Plus with great success. When used in a Raspberry Pi 5, I personally don't feel any lag. A couple of them are serving 7/24/365 in my RPi5 systems without any problems for more than 2 years.
I don't hammer them with I/O though. For heavy writes, I'd consider Sandisk's higher tier cards (esp. Extreme Pro), which I use in my cameras and never managed to break one.
No, but I just feel like calling something by a word that is designed to offend doesn't reflect particularly well on the person saying it, no matter if the target has the ability to comprehend it?
Yeah, that's a good point. I feel the same about the person who talks that way, too.
I personally refrain from offending people on purpose, but not being a native English speaker sometimes betrays me in judging how offensive a word is perceived by the natives.
From what I've seen, the natives don't generally perceive the word as offensive, as it was originally used in star wars (I believe) against fictional robots, and it has since been used against LLMs and such like. But it just seems a bit distasteful, like using a word for someone to try and offend someone, when they dont understand that word in their native language
Personally I'm a huge Linux supporter and user. I try my best to not to use any non-free software, and while I prefer macOS laptops, I always have an exit strategy if I decide to ditch the platform.
Recently, I decided to start making music again after a decade of hiatus. I got a nice audio interface and some hardware which can do nifty things. The catch?
None of the supporting software for my hardware runs on Linux. I either need to run a VM to configure these things, or use the macOS versions of the software. I chose the latter because it's not meaningful to passthrough all the devices to change some parameters and give device back to Linux. I also don't use Wine. I don't want to install something that big into my daily driver.
While Linux is great for many, many things, there are some things still sorely lacking in the ecosystem. Why can't I adjust monitoring/routing in a class-compliant audio device? Why my effect processors' USB protocol is not open so I can't play with it parameters from Linux?
And I think it is fair to acknowledge that Linux doesn't fit the needs of all people. The thing is, the flip side is also true. While I can pick up my (admittedly technical) hobbies under Windows, it is more convenient under Linux. Without the FLOSS ecosystem, I could not afford to do so at all.
That's true. I run almost everything under Linux. All my daily driver and work-related desktop systems are Linux for more than two decades now. Heck, we don't have any Windows machines used for work in the datacenter. However, I wanted to highlight that Linux is not "there" yet, and telling "just use Linux, duh" doesn't solve all the problems a user has.
For photography and graphic arts, Linux can handle many if not most of the work (I use Digikam and Darktable with great success, for example), yet when it comes to audio for example, it falls short due to a thousand papercuts.
I'm not a professional photographer though. I'm also not a professional musician, either.
Yet, Darktable allows me to process my RAWs to a point which I like. Similarly, my audio equipment allows me to create some music which I like, too.
I didn't push Darktable to professional levels, but I believe it can match bigger tools for what I want to do with it. I don't do photo manipulation, for example. Just process RAWs. I expect the same from my audio equipment for my music endeavors.
That's the thing, not everyone is a professional photographer. Open source tools are fine for many of us. They are also great to get a taste of a field, to learn the basics, without a massive investment.
You don't have to be everything to everyone. You just have to satisfy a need.
Not to address/counter your comment, but because it might be helpful: if that's a Focusrite interface, the company itself points to an open source project in its support documentation.
I haven't actually tested it, but it seems like it works for people, and it's solid enough to have the kernel component in the kernel. I found it while researching a possible move with my Vocaster One.
I have Scarlett 2i2G4. I may look into it. On the other hand, I have way more advanced stuff from ESI and Audient, which allows much more customization when compared to Scarlett, and they have no Linux support AFAIK.
If it's one of those and class compliant, you might be able to access all of it through alsamixer or one of the many frontends (maybe too many, maybe one for you): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsamixer
The Audient situation appears to be a proper nightmare realm with non-class compliant stuff, but there is a tool with a list of caveats longer than you might want to deal with: https://github.com/TheOnlyJoey/MixiD
It's more best case scenario as an escape hatch and less problem solved, but it's something.
Well I'll test it when I have some time. ESI has a lot of routing flexibility on board, and I don't know how ALSA will present it to me, but I may report it here.
That's kind of my experience dabbling into Linux as well. You're effectively turning your laptop into a fancy tablet, which is okay only if you're not doing some professional work in specific niches that are mostly seamless with macOS/Windows. Niche hardware usually is out of the question.
Programming works fine on linux, better even than Windows unless you're developing for Windows. Most gaming (other than some online games with uncooperative anti-cheat) is as easy as on Windows, where games are also likely to need a bit of tinkering. Web browsing is obviously fine, and that's most of what most people do (and so most people would be fine with "effectively a fancy tablet"). 3d modeling is fine. The foss equivalents to most Adobe software suck, but that's not really specific to linux.
Recently someone did the incredible work of getting Photoshop to run perfectly in Wine, but it looks like the original reddit post detailing it got removed for legal reasons (which is nonsense, it doesn't make piracy any easier). Adobe seems to actively work against any efforts to run their software on Linux.
I still use Eclipse CDT and its static analysis is running in real time, as you type code, which is killer. Combined with Valgrind integration, I don't see myself moving on anytime soon.
Is Eclipse CDT still good these days? Wow did not hear of it for a while. I thought C++ support was not maintained anymore.
I use CLion mostly but I never stop coming back to Emacs+LSP.
And yes, the analysis is quite competitive tbh. People often talk about this weird thing or the other in C++ but the experience is quite better than what the ISO standard strictly has to offer.
Eclipse is getting stable releases four times a year (i.e. every three months). C/C++ support is also being actively maintained and is pretty fast these days.
Eclipse is one of the rare software suites which didn't get slower as the tech evolves. Yes, it's probably heavier when compared to 20 years ago, but it starts pretty quickly and works snappily. I'm a happy camper.
If only the Go tools didn't get discontinued, but alas. KATE/BBEdit + Gopls is a pretty nifty combo on Linux/macOS.
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