> I wanted is to bring Notepad++ to mac and allow people to find Mac version of Notepad++ quickly and use it.
Seems he’s ignorant of the ecosystem too (or possibly disingenuous, or maybe doesn’t realise he’s done something wrong or why). Notepad++ runs perfectly on macOS under Wine. I’ve been using it that way for two or three years now. Wasn’t a struggle to set up either: I simply ran the installer as if I was running Windows and then it #justworked.
Indeed, and in general. Popular, well supported open source project around for decades not available in POSIX, somehow?
In Linux, the only things I don't have with Wine are whatever the other clipboard is that highlighting text gets filled with and access to network shares. Such nothingburgers that I've never spent real time to figure out if there's a solution.
I've never managed to get MS Office running successfully on Wine, at least not any recent version of it anyway. That might work fine on Linux but it doesn't get past the first handful of pages of the installer on macOS.
It's not the end of the world, but the Windows version of Excel is streets ahead of the macOS version, which is why I was keen to make it work.
Otherwise, everything I really care about from Windows - the odd utility, along with retro computing emulators - seems to run fine on Wine. I haven't got into more modern games so can't speak to how well they tend to run.
When someone has an issue getting something like Notepad++ running with Wine, they have the option to inform the Notepad++ project or if they possess the skills, submit a change so that Notepad++ will run smoothly on Wine. Or, inform Wine and they may figure out how to fix the issue within Wine.
I haven't bothered getting Office running on Linux in a very long time. The only thing I miss is a convenient way to print envelopes, as LibreOffice is incapable of doing this. However, I mail far less than I used to so I just hand write the addresses.
I think the only real way to run Office is on Windows in VirtualBox, which I still haven't had any need to bother with.
> I think the only real way to run Office is on Windows in VirtualBox
I think you’re right, but I just don’t want to run full Windows because it’s such a resource hog. It’s always chewing CPU for some background task or other, and so it drains the battery noticeably quicker.
I have the Mac version of Office, which is fine for most things, and LibreOffice fills the gap for a small handful of non-Excel tasks, but I do love Windows Excel for more complex spreadsheet tasks.
I tend to think of it as like two pilots as on commercial airliners: you always have one pilot flying and one pilot monitoring.
You can debate with agentic coding who is monitoring and who is flying but, if we assume the user is monitoring what that means, in practice, for me is that I'm reading and making sure I understand all the changes the agent is proposing to make, as well as providing instruction, guidance, correction, etc. That includes reading and understanding all the code changes.
> look like l33t h4xx0rs even though we're just pressing continue 15 times
I feel seen.
I also think there’s a certain element of reacting against absolutely everything becoming a bloated electron app.
I have no doubt - if it hasn’t already happened - that some apps will unironically embrace the most ridiculous option by shipping as electron apps that implement a TUI layer as their front-end.
> I have no doubt - if it hasn’t already happened - that some apps will unironically embrace the most ridiculous option by shipping as electron apps that implement a TUI layer as their front-end.
Considering the insane memory consumption of claude code running in my terminal, electron was never really the problem, bad software was the culprit all along.
The culprit is using web technologies where they don't belong, which Electron is also guilty of. Claude Code is 400k lines of JavaScript for a TUI where a sane implementation in C would be two orders of magnitude less code.
Except most of the TUIs I’m seeing are god awful with horrible input latency because they’ve reimplemented everything from scratch in python or whatever. Multiple hundreds of ms per keystroke: it sucks.
That’s not really true: it just didn’t win on the merits you care about. But it did have other merits: backwards and forwards compatibility, excellent developer documentation, and no need for expensive workstation grade hardware.
I don’t disagree on the skullduggery, but it’s worth bearing in mind that Sun, Oracle, IBM, and all the other big vendors of that period engaged in similar skullduggery. Microsoft was simply better at it, had better timing/luck, and therefore more resources and reach to play those games.
But one of those companies was always destined to become a scumbag monopoly: if it hadn’t been Microsoft, it would have been one of the others.
And the war to kick them back into line through OSS would have played out similarly, I suspect.
> I wanted to give an update on GitHub’s availability in light of two recent incidents.
[Emphasis mine]
Vlad, you are living in a very different world to me.
GitHub has suffered dozens and dozens of outages since the beginning of the year. It is notably less available and reliable than it was even as recently as last year. People have created dashboards and heatmaps showing how bad GitHub has become. At least one of those has made it to the front page of Hacker News. In fact its unreliability and persistent availability issues have become a frequent topic of conversation across sites and communities frequented its users - of which HN and Reddit are two obvious examples. At this point GitHub's unreliability risks becoming a meme, if it hasn't already done so.
The only thing your post makes clear is that your priorities ARE NOT clear.
> Our priorities are clear: availability first, then capacity, then new features.
WRONG!
Your priorities are:
1. Availability
2. Availability
3. Availability
You have NO OTHER PRIORITIES.
If you want other priorities, focus on AVAILABILITY for 6 months and then come back and we can all have a serious conversation about something else.
In the meantime, you need to understand that GitHub's reliability over months and months - not just in April - has been completely unacceptable.
I've recently built a script that periodically (every 25 minutes) fetches the latest merged PRs to check for some potential rule violations. I'm not an admin and couldn't get the events API working, so I just resorted to polling.
On an average ~8 hour working day, there's at least one failed request. In fact, looking over the logs, I can't spot a single day that did not have a failed request.
Now, I can't guarantee that these are all caused by GitHub (as opposed to my connection), but it is pretty funny.
I would credit my relative success (compared with many complaints I’ve read) at building software using AI as a helper to the fact that I’ve already solved the problem in my mind before I prompt the AI, and I tell it how I want the problem to be solved. Generally it’s possible to do that in English much more tersely than it is in code.
So what I’ve done is the hard (in the sense of problem difficulty) work and simply got the AI to do all the typing for me because I just can’t be arsed any more. The typing isn’t the hard part of software development: just the part that, historically, has taken up a massive chunk of my time in the domains I’ve worked it.
I’m not saying this works for everyone in every situation but, as far as I’m concerned, bring it on.
>Generally it’s possible to do that in English much more tersely than it is in code.
I really doubt this is the case for any decent amount of complexity. English is ambiguous. Programming languages exist because we don't want this ambiguity from natural languages. A sufficiently descriptive spec written in English is barely indistinguishable from just code. We've come full circle.
A lot of the value of these domains stems from the popularity of sites they may have been attached to in the past, or search terms that relate to them.
So these people are literally making money off of the back of others’ work whilst providing no benefit themselves, probably not that much even to their advertisers.
Such squatting sites are, at best, an annoyance to web users as well.
You could dual license as well, so it’s GPL or AGPL for personal, OSS, or academic use, but requires a paid for commercial license for commercial use.
I suggest GPL or AGPL because their copyleft clauses make them hostile towards platform providers who might otherwise seek to profit from your work without paying.
Yeah, but the copyleft makes anything they build around it a derivative work that they also have to release sources for - especially with AGPL. Most don’t want to do that because that’s where their IP lives.
Not all open source licenses are copyleft licenses (e.g., MIT very much isn’t), but at the very least copyleft licenses make it much harder to exploit open source code commercially without giving back in some way, whether that’s code, or cash for a commercial license.
Not perfect, by any means, but definitely an improvement over more permissive licenses.
I am aware of how much I’m starting to sound a bit like RMS in my old age.
I wholeheartedly agree. Licensing is a complex topic of which I've read a good deal, and even within the Open Source communities there are usually a lot of misconceptions, so I like chiming in with less commonly pointed but very practical effects of it all, in case it helps someone to learn a tiny bit that day.
In this case the provider would of course have to comply with the AGPL and release their modifications as you mention, but it's important to note that No FOSS license protects at all against, for example, just offering the code as a service. It's the exact reason why Mongodb changed licenses and then a stream of commercial products started to change into "Source-Available" licenses in the recent past.
It would be dual license effectively... the base version AGPL and the Commercial version with additional functionality. Though I'd considered BSL and alternatives... and as mentioned, just closed/commercial only.
I believe use of Electron is known as premature deoptimisation and if it had been a thing when Knuth coined the original phrase I'm sure he would have come up with that term too. Use of Electron to deliver software is popular and works but that doesn't make it any less of an abomination.
I'm actually considering, for the first time since 2013/14 when I worked on a Visual Studio extension, creating a piece of desktop software - and a piece of cross-platform desktop software at that. Given that Microsoft's desktop story has descended into a chaotic mishmash of somewhat conflicting stories, and given it will be a cold day in hell before I choose Electron as the solution to any problem I might have, most likely I will roll with Qt + Rust, or at least Qt + something.
20-odd years ago I might have opted for Java + Swing because I'd done a lot of it and, in fairness to Swing, it's not a bad UI toolkit and widget set. These days I simply prefer the svelte footprint and lower resource reuqirements of a native binary - ideally statically linked too, but I'll live with the dynamic linking Qt's licensing necessitates.
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