oceansprint.org
A week of Nix hacking near the ocean
Board
Kots.io
Edition 18: Do you have a capex or an opex mindset?
Now, these are financial concepts, typically not applied to talent. But some people do
daedalOS
Desktop environment in the browser
WebAssembly in my Browser Desktop Environment
For over a year now I've been working on daedalOS, my desktop environment in the browser. At the...
So we view the browser as one distribution channel among many. We want Ambient t... | Hacker News
ImBIOS/next-pwa: Zero config PWA plugin for Next.js, with workbox 🧰 with appDir support
Zero config PWA plugin for Next.js, with workbox 🧰 with appDir support
Obsession Times Voice
★ The Grave Insult of Being Sent the Proper Tools to Perform a Complicated Task
If you could properly replace an iPhone battery with a couple of simple tools, Apple would surely just send you the simple tools. But if that were the case there’d be no need for this program.
Facebook’s Problems
Zuck wants a platform.
Daring Fireball: RSS Feed Sponsor Archive
The Flimsiness of ‘Business vs. Consumer’ as a Justification for Apple’s Rejection of Hey From the App Store for Not Using In-App Purchases
I’m not trying to be coy, but what is the iPhone itself? A business device or a consumer product? Using *or* instead of *and* as the conjunction there is clearly laughable.
Annotating Apple’s Anti-Sideloading White Paper
I remain convinced Apple wouldn’t be facing these regulatory pressures today if they’d walked away from a strategy of maximizing App Store profits years ago, and I also think they could largely dissipate these pressures today by doing it now — better late than never.
A Thought Regarding the Old Apple-v.-Microsoft ‘Look and Feel’ Lawsuit
Good ideas are meant to spread.
Design Plagiarism
There’s a difference between copying an idea and copying an implementation of that idea.
That’s why I like the phrase “design plagiarism”. Maybe you think Amadeo’s examples do constitute “copying”. But they’re not plagiarism. If you write an article, and then I write my own article about the same topic, that just means you were first. But if I copy your article and just change a few words, that’s plagiarism. There’s a big difference.1
New on Daring Fireball: Display Ads
What I finally decided was the most obvious replacement possible: selling Deck-like ads on my own, directly to advertisers, much like I do with the weekly feed sponsorships.
Sketch, and the Joy of Mac-App Mac Apps
Whatever we call them, they’re worth embracing and celebrating, and Sketch sure as hell is one of them.
Facebook: Free as in Bullshit
This whole ad reads more like an ad *for* Apple’s privacy initiatives than against.
The New York Times: ‘Sundar Pichai Faces Internal Criticism at Google’
One person’s overcaution is another’s focus.
Life as a Facebook Moderator
There is something fundamentally wrong with a platform that — while operating exactly as designed — requires thousands of employees to crush their own souls.
If You Guys Are Really Us, What Number Are We Thinking Of?
Sometimes a cigar is just an integer math conversion glitch.
Langchain Is Pointless | Hacker News
Embrace the Kinda
A blog by sunfishcode
1aae3bc9
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Customer Obsession is the Only Winning Strategy
Customer obsession is the only winning strategy. Pretending to be customer obsessed is easy when the times are good. It’s easy to lose track of customer obsession when there’s plenty of funding, when you have decades-long network effects, or when you operate a monopoly. A few examples:
Where AI Fits in Engineering Organizations
Suspend disbelief and assume there will be an “AI Engineer” in the future. Where does this role fit in? What organization does it become part of? R&D (Competition centers on training the best or biggest model.) Traditionally this is where AI has been in the organization. Labs experimenting with foundational model research. Examples are Google Brain/DeepMind and some of the earlier foundational model companies — OpenAI and Anthropic. Of course, the number of qualified PhDs in this position is small (but growing).
Myths About ORMs
Object-relational mapping (ORM) libraries are scattered about millions of code repositories. They promise to bridge the gap between a relational database and an object-oriented programming language. Instead of writing a SQL query like `SELECT * from users where id = 1`, you would define a User type with some special annotations and then write something like `user = users.select().where(“id = ?”, id)`. Some other features they might provide: type safety, connection management, or a migration framework.
Story: Redis and its creator antirez
繁體中文版請按這裡This article is translated from the original Chinese edition. In the world of databases, Redis stands out as unique. Instead of the usual tables or documents that are the central focus of most databases, with Redis, you interact directly wi...
When creating Redis, antirez was an amateur in the database field. But perhaps it was this lack of experience that allowed him to bring fresh ideas to the industry.
As he grew older, antirez continued programming. However, by the age of 14, typical teenage interests like motorcycles and girls began to take over, and programming took a back seat. It wasn't until he was 18 or 19 that he rediscovered his passion for computers, playing with 3D modeling and games, and writing simple programs.
They aimed to create a tool for bloggers that would allow them to monitor their visitors' real-time behavior. For example, a visitor clicks on an article from Google, returns to the homepage, and then navigates to a specific page. This information could help bloggers improve the design and navigation of their websites. This tool was called LLOOGG, and its home page contained a few lines that highlighted how it differed from Google Analytics
Another startup, Instagram, began to get in touch with antirez in 2010. In those emails, one of its co-founders, Mike Krieger, discussed how to use Redis to build Instagram. Both Instagram and Redis were just getting started, and Mike and antirez didn't know each other. Instagram was entirely built on Redis in its early years, so without Redis, Instagram might not have existed, or at least would have been delayed.
For antirez, programming was a way to express himself, a form of art. Every character and line break had to be meticulously crafted, akin to the art form of writing. Software development was like writing a book — it had to be beautiful, elegant, and easy to comprehend. If that software happened to be useful to others, that was just a side effect.
Programming and Writing - antirez
I believe programming, in this regard, can learn something from writing: when writing the first core of a new system, when the original creator is still alone, isolated, able to do anything, she should pretend that this first core is her only bullet. During the genesis of the system she should rewrite this primitive kernel again and again, in order to find the best possible design. My hypothesis is that this initial design will greatly inform what will happen later: growing organically something that has a good initial structure will result in a better system, even after years of distance from the original creation, and even if the original core was just a tiny faction of the future mass the system would eventually assume.
Redis is not "open core" - antirez
The simplification this time does not work if it is in your interest to capture the truth of what is happening here. An open core technology requires two things. One is that the system is modular, and the other is that parts of such system are made proprietary in order to create a product around an otherwise free software. For example providing a single node of a database into the open source, and then having the clustering logic and mechanism implemented in a different non-free layer, is an open core technology. Similarly is open core if I write a relational database with a modular storage system, but the only storage that is able to provide strong guarantees is non free. In an open core business model around an open source system it is *fundamental* that you take something useful out of the free software part.